Eldridge Cleaver and Muhammad Ali Walk into a Postmodernist Bar…
Hardly anyone these days, it seems, reads the Sixties classic, Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver. I’m surprised, notwithstanding that Cleaver is eminently “cancellable,” given his arguable misogyny. There are several classic texts from this fertile period, including iconic anti-colonialist texts ranging from Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed to Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Cleaver deserves emphasis because he writes from what it has become
fashionable to call, “his own lived experience” — which is to say, from within the bowels of the American prison system. Cleaver exemplifies what Foucault calls, the “insurgence of subjugated discourses.” Of particular interest for this essay are his chapters on Muhammad Ali and the Malcolm X-like impact that prison had on his identity. Cleaver highlights the fictionality of the dominating racial discourse that justified whites’ mistreatment and persecution of Blacks. The persecution of Black people was predicated on the pervasive myth of Blacks as subhuman, a myth that was perpetuated to fulfill White-America’s needs. Cleaver’s argument that identity often flows from social function, (slavery, labor, entertainment) has both Marxist and Foucauldian roots. We see a similar point being made by Franz Fanon: “Every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behavior….”
Soul on Ice straddles two tracks: Cleaver’s own archeological dig into himself and a greater societal criticism. Cleaver does not reference these scholars, nor does he use the same rhetoric, but the parallels are clear. Consider Cleaver’s discussion of Muhammad Ali as an emblem of revolution. “But he [Muhammad Ali] is also a ‘free’ man, determined not to be a white man’s puppet even though he fights to entertain them, determined to be autonomous in his private life and a true king of his realm in public, and he is exactly that.”
Cleaver is saying that by freeing oneself from the dominating discourse which imposes an identity on you, in this case the subhuman-ness of Blackness, one can truly be free. Cleaver is expressing Foucauldian resistance to the essentializing force of domination — what I call the noun-ification of the Self. Cleaver’s discussion of the interdependence between the white and Black identity is similar to Edward Said’s binary analysis. Just as the West relies on the Oriental to establish their superiority, so do whites over Blacks. Whites know themselves by presumably knowing who Blacks are.
Some of Cleaver’s most trenchant observations occur when he focuses on the identity crisis that whites face when this constructed binary is ruptured. “[A] very serious slippage takes place in the white man’s self-image — because that by which he defined himself no longer has a recognizable identity. ‘If that black ape is a man,’ the white hunter asks himself, ‘then what am I?’” Muhammad Ali’s significance, Cleaver observes, resides primarily in how his braggadocio undercuts the white psyche. Cleaver is at his most satirical in this regard, making digs at “Whitey”: “But when the ideological Negro seized the heavyweight crown, no front of cool could conceal the ferocious emotional eruption in white America and among the embarrassed Uncle Toms, who were also experiencing an identity crisis. Yes, even old faithful Uncle Tom has a self-image. All men must have one or they start seeing themselves as women, women start seeing them as women, then women lose their own self-image, and soon nobody knows what they are themselves or what anyone else is — that is to say, the world starts looking precisely as it looks today.”
I owe it to Cleaver for giving me the kind of ears to hear something altogether different than what most people hear in Ali’s seeming boast, I am the Greatest! I recall how my heart sank a few years back when I encountered an Apple advertisement making use of Ali’s iconic grandiloquence. I recall how it echoed louder and louder in my head, starting as an egoic celebration and then, upon recalling Cleaver, becoming a clarion call for radical identity-
reinvention. I felt a tinge of shame at “my generation,” at how we put up with the commercialization of something so vital as Ali’s bursting proclamation. How disheartening that Apple had co-opted the proclamation in this advertisement — a slick slideshow of iPhone X selfies rhythmically paced to the tempo of Ali’s rhetorical jabs.
I don’t experience Ali, perhaps because I associate him with Malcolm X, as the kind to ride high on some ego trip, let alone to have his so-called braggadocio used to generate corporate profits. What many in the Sixties saw with each punch, each foot-shuffle, each moment of floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee, what they heard as his bombastic eloquence roared on grainy black-and-white televisions, as it crackled on transistor radios, what they and I, too, experience is his message that greatness can come in the form of blackness.
And so, what I see in this Apple ad is self-empowerment manipulated into a watered-down marketing ploy. What alarms me most in this perilous age of ours is that we live in world of public relations. Today’s poisonous biopolitical rhetoric seeps into a world where public relations and commerce reign, where manipulation masquerades as genuine connection, where political issues
transmuted into technocratic problems are the vines on which democracy withers, where law reifies unjust institutional structures, where the public sphere is mere platform for performance.
Perhaps it’s too soon for us postmodernists to reckon with count one of this indictment: the postmodernist equation of the “self” with “performance” has rendered us mere role-players in this public-relations world. For if we abandon wholesale the Enlightenment’s prioritizing of the “self,” then what else is left but the sound and fury of strutting and fretting our hour upon the
stage, puppets of public relations? What else was it but a public-relations performance when Kavanaugh manipulated America with his grotesque meltdown on the national stage? Sure, bemoan the spectacle, but we cannot evade the mounting evidence that behind the curtain of postmodernism’s liberating potential is its hidden but insidious impact outside the academy’s
walls — namely, the reinforcement of multinational corporate hegemony fueled by a global neoliberalism that created economic conditions for the dangerous ideologies we see flourishing today.
