A Weapon in Untrained Hands

The Means of English is a course I am developing first and foremost for myself. I will release it in parts as the work develops. This introduction explains why I am undertaking it and outlines what I intend it to cover.

At an early stage of learning, it is a virtue to read “anything you can get your hands on.” But once you have acquired a certain breadth and depth of knowledge, continuing without a more definite course of study can become a hindrance. Questions emerge that require sustained attention, and answering them requires some judgment about what to study next and why.

That direction can come from an institution or a professor whose greater mastery of a subject you acknowledge. You follow the syllabus without necessarily treating it, or the professor, as beyond criticism. We can, and should, also develop our own courses of study, provided we have a sufficient grasp of what we know, what we need to know, and what would be required to test what we think we know. We also need some sense of priority, or a hierarchy of necessity. An invaluable asset in this regard is knowledge of self in terms of the junction at which we ourselves stand. Some questions cannot be adequately approached until we have done the work required to approach others.

The process of conceiving this course took me back through a few different stages of my life even if the immediate occasion was far less deliberate. I was scrolling through reels at around one in the morning and came across a video in which a young woman was discussing Arabic’s root system and how it shaped her experience of speaking and reading the language. The first question that came to mind was: what am I missing out on by not being fluent in other languages?

I have studied Spanish, Hausa, Hebrew, Kiswahili, and Arabic, enough to appreciate some of the flexibility and different possibilities of expression that studying another language opens up. I’ve also studied linguistics itself as an angle from which to analyze human social formations, enough to appreciate how different languages bear on our ways of understanding, seeing, and transforming the world. This has made me attentive to their epistemological and ontological significance: how language enters into what we can know and how we conceive of what exists, and the limitations and openings it offers. Despite this, I keep returning to English because it remains the only language in which I am fluent. Turning the question around in my head for long enough eventually produced its inverse: what am I missing out on by not more fully understanding my own language? And what problems do I encounter as a result?

There is no reason to assume that studying another language will always teach us more than examining our own more deeply. Both can be valuable, and what we gain depends partly on the problems we bring to the study. I began thinking about my own relationship with English, particularly a period in my late teens and early twenties when I was fixated on writing, reading, and memorizing poetry.

I have come to appreciate those periods in my life when, for one reason or another, a particular thing occupies so much of my attention. At the time, I often have little idea what role it will eventually play. Something becomes internalized through the fixation, and only later do I discover what I can do with it under different circumstances. What interests me here is how what I absorbed changes its function as my life changes.

So I started listening again to poems that had stood out to me during that period. Ozymandias. Then the opening of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

“Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherised upon a table.”

And, toward its end:

“I have seen them riding seaward on the waves, combing the white hair of the waves blown back when the wind blows the water white and black.”

Listening again, I was struck by how much I still had to learn about the tool I use to think the world, let alone about the world I am trying to think through it. The sound, the arrangement of words, the movement of an image, all of this was available in the language I use every day, including possibilities I could recognize without yet being able to explain how they worked.

Then another part of the poem came to the forefront of my mind:

“That is not it at all, that is not what I meant, at all.”

I recognized something of my own recent experience in that difficulty of being understood. I had been struggling to articulate political positions, distinguish claims that were being read as interchangeable, and find formulations that would communicate what I meant without leaving so much room for something else to be heard.

Here is where I have to stop waxing poetic, because these difficulties are already having material consequences. People, myself included, care about what is being said, what is being done, and how things are being done. What we understand a claim to mean enters into how we respond to it. We need to be able to determine where a disagreement actually lies. Sometimes a formulation is inadequate. Sometimes the argument itself is wrong. Sometimes people understand one another and still disagree. Learning to distinguish these situations is part of the work.

These problems became especially pressing in writing and discussing my Sex, Class, and the Material Relations of Patriarchy: Prolegomena to a Materialist Theory of the Sex Contradiction. I did not present it as a finished theory. The prolegomena put a provisional framework into public view: a set of distinctions, hypotheses, and questions that could be tested, criticized, corrected, and developed through further research. The next stage requires work across biological anthropology, kinship studies, history, political economy, feminist theory, and competing explanations of the relations I have been trying to describe.

This course sits between the prolegomena and that next stage of research, which is itself another self-imposed course of study that I plan to share openly once this one is complete. Before proceeding where my prolegomena left off, I want to spend time on one of the instruments through which we will have to conduct it: English itself. We need to read formulations closely enough to know what they actually say, separate claims that have been collapsed together, expose premises that have gone unstated, and formulate better questions for the investigation that follows. The empirical work remains necessary; this course is part of preparing to do it.

I also want this process to be more open than a project in which I publish conclusions and everyone else decides whether they are for or against them. I want more people able to enter the investigation itself, including people who will find weaknesses in my own arguments. That means making some of my thinking available while it is still developing, including where I am unsure and what would give me reason to change my mind.

But why would I make my thought publicly visible in an environment in which thinking the wrong thought can make you cancelable? Why expose an unfinished formulation, a question I cannot yet answer, or an argument I may eventually have to abandon, when any of these can be taken as evidence against me?

I feel that pressure myself. It can make the work of finding out what we think difficult to distinguish from the work of deciding what we can afford to say. We begin anticipating what an admission of uncertainty might cost us, or whether revising an argument will be treated as evidence that we should never have attempted it.

Making the process public would be worthwhile if we could use it to develop better conditions for learning together. That requires some thought about how we bring people into politically consequential activity and what opportunities we give them to practice.

This also follows from a revolutionary commitment to the masses as authors of history. We don’t change the world by rallying the masses under one master theorist or another. This course is part of an intervention against the tendency to off-load intellectual labor onto someone we feel knows more than we do. Learning from someone’s greater knowledge should develop our own capacity for judgment. We all need to learn because the success of the movement depends on us grasping revolutionary ideas, including the reasoning and evidence through which they are developed, rather than merely accepting their conclusions.

Another reason for this intervention is to make it safer for more people to engage openly in intellectual struggle. My father once warned me about the danger of playing basketball with people who do not know how to play. There are written rules, but there are also things you learn through practice that allow several bodies to move across the same court with some expectation of safety. You learn where to put your feet, how to control your body, how to make contact, when somebody is moving into your space, and what kinds of movement another player has reason to expect from you. Somebody who has never learned those things can hurt you without intending to. Enthusiasm does not make them less dangerous.

There is always a risk of injury in the game. That is different from injuries produced because somebody was thrown into live play before learning the fundamentals. Before a real scrimmage, let alone a competitive game, there should be instruction, repetition, practice, mistakes, and correction.

I think about this a lot when I look at how we bring people into political struggle.

We hand people the language of revolution, oppression, solidarity, patriarchy, racism, imperialism, liberation, contradiction, class, and reaction. These words carry histories and help us decide what is happening, who we trust, what we oppose, what we defend, and sometimes who/what becomes a target of collective action. An accusation made in this language can break a relationship or an organization. A bad analysis can send people in the wrong direction for years. Yet we often expect people to use these words without first learning how to identify what a claim actually says, distinguish a definition from an explanation, separate evidence from assertion, or determine whether a conclusion follows from its premises.

The more serious comparison is handing somebody a loaded weapon and encouraging them to use it before going over the fundamentals of safety. We would recognize the irresponsibility immediately. Politically consequential language also has to be learned, practiced, and handled with discipline.

When we find ourselves in a game far beyond our level of preparation, we may recognize immediately that we could hurt ourselves or somebody else. Stepping back to learn can be a responsible response. Too few of us bring that humility to the work of changing the world through social revolution and class struggle. I want the course to help more people participate with the preparation and support that make sustained participation possible.

The basketball comparison has a limit. We are already inside social relations while we are learning how to understand them. Political life does not stop until our training is complete. What we can do is create better conditions for practice, make correction ordinary, and become more cautious about acting with certainty where our understanding has not earned it.

This is also where the problem of deficits in general education, particularly in literacy and reading, comes into play. Greater attention to English grammar, conceptual work, speech, dialectics, and related philosophical questions would leave us better equipped for the struggles we are already engaged in.

The temptation to substitute winning support for producing knowledge makes that learning harder. Once people have organized themselves around being for or against a proposition, correction can begin to feel like personal betrayal. Ambiguity becomes useful because different people can hear what they need to hear in the same words. An objection can be answered by shifting definitions instead of resolving the problem.

Making thought public carries responsibilities. An unfinished argument can still do harm, and calling something provisional does not exempt it from criticism. We also need conditions in which people can recognize an error and revise a position without the revision itself becoming another offense. Otherwise, we give people reasons to conceal uncertainty and defend formulations they have begun to doubt. This is a big problem today.

Criticism is indispensable to the research I am proposing. A serious objection can expose in an afternoon what months of reading failed to reveal. An exchange can isolate the actual point of disagreement and tell us what evidence would help resolve it. But that only works if we are willing to represent each other’s arguments accurately, make our premises available for examination, and change our minds when the work requires it. Manipulating an ambiguity or making agreement a condition of political belonging can leave everybody involved less able to understand what they are arguing about.

We cannot build a serious liberation movement that way.

Too many people have dedicated and sacrificed their entire mortal lives to struggle for us to approach it so carelessly. We inherit from our predecessors problems they were trying to solve, arguments they developed, mistakes they made, lessons purchased at enormous cost, and a language through which much of that experience has been passed down to us. We have a responsibility to understand what we are wielding and to appreciate the labor and sacrifices of the ancestors from whom we inherit it.

A friend recently reminded me that there is something akin to stolen valor in adopting the words and bearing of revolutionaries while refusing the discipline that gave those words their weight. That criticism is not aimed at somebody who is new, lacks training, and honestly wants to learn. That is exactly the person this course is supposed to welcome. It is aimed at claiming an inherited revolutionary authority without accepting the obligations that come with the inheritance.

That inheritance also contains a contradiction I feel in my own relationship with English. There is a dialectical pain in speaking it as a New Afrikan subject. That English is my language is a consequence of enslavement and colonization. There is a pull toward rejecting it, toward learning an Afrikan language, any Afrikan language, or, failing that, any language other than the language of my colonizer.

Part of what I inherit from New Afrikan political science, however, is an understanding that a simple return to Afrika is neither possible nor necessarily progressive. Our history has produced a real people in a definite historical position. We have to understand that position and the possibilities of the conjuncture in which we find ourselves.

This is part of what I mean by the means and meridians of NAJMM. We need to establish where we are and examine the instruments available to us from that position. Those instruments carry histories we did not choose. We still have to determine what we can do with them.

For better or worse, English is the most developed tool I have for thinking, reading, and communicating. Its colonial inheritance does not settle what political purposes I can put it to, and using it does not foreclose movement toward liberation. A materialist approach requires working through the conditions that actually exist, including the capacities we have developed within them. Learning another language may enlarge those capacities. So may learning to use English with greater precision.

The commitment to New Afrikan liberation also helps explain why women’s oppression remains the sustained object of this course rather than appearing as one example among many.

In Book Nine of Vita Wa Watu, the New Afrikan theoretical journal founded and edited by Atiba Shanna, also known as James Yaki Sayles, an unsigned essay on the oppression of New Afrikan women argues that the movement cannot realize national liberation unless the struggle against women’s oppression becomes “a cutting edge of all theoretical and practical activity.” The same passage links women’s emancipation, national liberation, and socialism, and insists that the link has to be sought by shifting attention from effects toward causes (Vita Wa Watu, Book Nine, 1986, p. 5).

A few pages later, the essay warns that we cannot proceed as though “all the people are men” and “all the children are boys.” It calls for political work based on the particular needs of women and insists upon autonomous women’s organization, mass-based women’s leadership, and women’s full participation throughout the struggle (Vita Wa Watu, Book Nine, 1986, p. 7).

I take that as a political obligation. If ending the oppression of New Afrikan women is supposed to cut through all of our theoretical and practical activity, then it has to cut through political education too: through the questions we teach people to ask, the standards we use to assess an argument, the habits of thought we reward, and the seriousness with which we investigate the relations we claim we intend to abolish.

My responsibility follows from that. I participate in the relations we need to understand and change. I cannot treat my own ignorance as politically innocent. The obligation reaches into my conduct, my organizing, and the assumptions I bring with me into this research.

Returning to English with these responsibilities in mind, I remembered a video someone had sent me years earlier in which a speaker explained why they preferred English to Spanish. What had stayed with me was their discussion of English’s capacity to move between words and registers associated with its Germanic and Romance inheritances. I began thinking about what such shifts were doing in my own writing: how a choice of word could change the tone, apparent abstraction, or accessibility of a claim, even when I initially regarded the available words as synonyms.

That recollection helped give the study a more definite direction. I wanted to examine English as a linguistic system, identify characteristics relevant to the work I was doing, and understand the possibilities and difficulties they presented.

Atiba’s own reading practice gives us another part of the method. In Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Sayles repeatedly returns to passages he had previously read too quickly, stops over particular words, compares parts of the text that are easy to tear apart, and shows how an incomplete reading can produce a distorted understanding of the political work Fanon was demanding. His point is not that the right quotation settles the matter. It is that learning to study changes what we are capable of seeing in a text and, through it, in the world we are trying to understand (Sayles, 2010, pp. 152–155, 185).

The starting point I have in mind is a sentence that gives some indication of the work the course will undertake:

Women are oppressed on the basis of sex.

It looks simple. It is not.

Start with the passive construction: women are oppressed. English lets us identify the people undergoing an action while leaving the agent unspecified. The sentence tells us who is oppressed, but not yet who or what oppresses them. Is the relevant agent individual men, men as a social class, institutions, a structure of social relations, or some combination that still has to be explained? The grammar has not answered that on its own.

Then look at on the basis of. The phrase names a relationship without telling us exactly what kind of relationship it is. Does sex function as a criterion of classification? A cause? A condition? A means by which people are assigned to a structural position? Saying that something happens “on the basis of” something else can conceal precisely the mechanism we need to investigate.

We should bring the same questions to a statement such as “trans women are women,” particularly when it becomes a test through which somebody’s entire politics is judged. What does woman mean in the proposition? What kind of claim is being made? What would count as evidence for it, and which political conclusions follow from that meaning? Asking these questions of one formulation while exempting a favored formulation from examination would defeat the purpose of the exercise. If asking is itself treated as proof of hostility, people learn very quickly to recognize the expected answer and repeat it. They do not necessarily become more capable of explaining what they believe.

The linguistic features we will study need not be unique to English. English happens to be the principal linguistic weapon in the hands of the majority of my people. We need to know what it lets us state cleanly, what it lets us leave vague, where its ordinary words carry several theoretical possibilities at once, and how a small grammatical choice can change what an argument commits us to.

That gives the course three linked objectives. I want more people in the game, with enough practice to participate without causing avoidable harm to one another through carelessness. I want us to sharpen our grasp of English as a distinct instrument for reading, thinking, arguing, and communicating. And I want to use those capacities to move from the provisional formulations of the prolegomena toward a more adequate materialist theory of the sex contradiction, one that can actually be tested against historical and empirical evidence.

Those objectives belong together. If we are serious about New Afrikan liberation, and serious that women’s emancipation has to be part of its theoretical and practical cutting edge, then developing our capacity to understand the relations we intend to transform is part of the work itself.

How I intend the course to work

As I develop and release the lessons, I intend them to build on one another, returning to the starting sentence as we develop better instruments. We should become more capable of saying exactly what it establishes, what it fails to establish, which concepts it requires, and what kind of research would allow us to replace it with a more adequate formulation.

I am developing the course so that we begin without special training. It will ask readers to read carefully, attempt exercises, and be willing to discover that an answer they were confident about does not survive examination. I intend the lessons to be worked through in sequence, with opportunities to attempt a judgment before reading the accompanying commentary. I will encourage readers to keep earlier versions of their answers so they can see their own thinking change.

The subject is politically consequential, and people will arrive with different experiences and commitments. When you disagree, locate the disagreement as precisely as you can. Say what you think is wrong, why it is wrong, and what would have to change. Do the same thing to arguments you agree with. Familiar language and a desirable conclusion do not exempt an argument from examination.

We will repeatedly separate four activities that are easy to collapse: understanding what a claim says, evaluating the reasoning that supports it, identifying the evidence it would require, and deciding what follows for political practice. They are related, but one does not automatically settle the others.

Provisional course outline

The following is the structure I am working toward. The sequence and emphasis may change as I develop the lessons and discover what needs fuller treatment.

Part One: Learning the instruments

We will begin with English sentences themselves. We will examine subjects and predicates; the different work performed by nouns and verbs; active and passive constructions; relational phrases; modifiers; quantifiers; negation; and modality.

The purpose is not to turn everybody into a grammarian. It is to become more deliberate about what a sentence commits us to. What changes when we say something can happen instead of must happen? What disappears when an agent is removed from a sentence? What has actually been explained when we say something occurs on the basis of something else?

Part Two: Practicing judgment

We will then use those instruments on arguments. We will distinguish definitions from explanations, descriptions from causal claims, examples from evidence, and necessary conditions from sufficient ones. We will reconstruct positions before criticizing them, locate hidden premises, test analogies, and ask what changes when the same term is doing different work in different parts of an argument.

Rather than smooth over disagreements or make them disappear, the aim here is to make them more useful by making the object of disagreements more clear.

Part Three: Reconstructing the sex contradiction

This part will bring the earlier work together. We will examine possible relations among sexual difference, reproductive organization, labor, kinship, property, class position, gender, ideology, and the concrete people in whom several social relations meet at once.

We will keep asking what each formulation explains and what it leaves unresolved. What produces the relation? Through what practices is it reproduced? Which concepts name causes, which name effects, and which merely describe appearances? How do we move from an abstract relation back toward the concrete without pretending that one contradiction exhausts a person’s life?

The purpose here is to produce progressively more adequate provisional formulations of the sex contradiction.

Part Four: Preparing the research

Finally, we will turn the conceptual work back toward investigation. We will identify what evidence our competing explanations require, what biological anthropology can and cannot establish, what kinship and cultural anthropology allow us to compare, what history and political economy can tell us about transformation, and what findings would require us to weaken, revise, or abandon a favored account.

I intend the course to lead into the next phase of research (where my prolegomena left off) with its concepts still open to revision. The point here is to leave us better prepared to do the work that could prove them wrong.

The work I intend the course to lead toward

The concluding exercise I have in mind will ask readers to write their own provisional formulation of the sex contradiction, define its principal terms, identify the relations they think are decisive, and explain how those relations produce and reproduce the phenomena they are trying to account for.

It will also ask them to identify the strongest unresolved difficulty in their own formulation. What evidence would they need next? What finding would make them revise it? What alternative explanation would they have to rule out?

A reasoned disagreement with the course should be able to demonstrate what someone has learned as clearly as agreement. I want the work we do through these lessons to prepare us for further research, criticism, collective discussion, and political practice.

Sources used in this essay →

References

Vita Wa Watu: A New Afrikan Theoretical Journal. Book Nine. Spear & Shield Publications, August 1986. See especially “Notes on the Link Between Oppression of New Afrikan Women and the New Afrikan National Liberation Revolution,” pp. 5–7.

Sayles, James Yaki (Atiba Shanna). Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings. Kersplebedeb and Spear & Shield Publications, 2010.