For the birthday of one of my heroes, Frantz Fanon, I thought I would do a thread on the appropriation of the category 'lived experience' in contemporary political discourse. Tl;dr you’re probably using the term wrong. Or, why it’s important to read the heroes of your heroes.

I remember as a student the language of ‘lived-experience’ became an unbearable weight, narrowing the boundaries of who could speak on what politics based on a set of erroneous assumptions about who had experienced what – identity here was a shorthand for trauma.

I could often be found laughing, asking ‘lived experience, as opposed to what, dead experience?’ That question would return to me as I discovered a mistranslation in the copy of Black Skin, White Masks I had been working with.

One chapter which frequently used in Afro-Pessimist literature is ‘The Fact of Blackness’. In the original French, it is actually titled “L'expérience vécue du Noir” – more accurately translated but oddly masculinized as ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’ by Richard Philcox.

Fanon is indeed speaking of a register of experience, rather than a reality. Why is this distinction significant? There is a heavy reliance on BSWM which in theory which posits (an ethnically or biologically coherent) Blackness.

Indeed, 'The Fact of Blackness' is central indeed to Wilderson’s account of ‘The Ruse of Analogy’. It is assumed that Fanon breaks from this through his experience of the Algerian revolution which reorients him to a materialist, internationalist politics of national liberation

In fact, these themes are already present in BSWM where Fanon seeks to uncover the phenomenon of ‘Race’ as a form of ‘mystification’ which mediates our experience of ‘reality’. Instead of a fact, Fanon is indeed accounting for a register of experience.

His work is not simply to say that ‘Race’ is a social construction, but rather that it acts to obscure a particular set of (economic) relations. He is engaged in ideology critique, asking what sets of social conditions render the mystification of Blackness possible.

He clarifies this aim two years later in Toward the African Revolution: “when I say that the expression "Negro people" is an entity, I thereby indicate that, except for cultural influences, nothing is left.”

If there is no shared essence to these people, what then is he getting at when he talks of such a people’s ‘lived experience’? This is where it’s helpful to read Fanon through Marx, with whom he was engaged both directly and indirectly (through Hegel).

Fanon believed that lived experience itself was not reality, or even subjective reality, but rather the register at which we encounter ideology. Affect in his account of lived experience is therefore a just a first step.

He clarifies this position in TtAR: “The truth is that there is nothing, a priori, to warrant the assumption that such a thing as a Negro people exists … But when someone talks to me about that "Negro people," I try to understand what is meant.”

Reformulated – we experience the world as Black, in order to not experience the world as what? Fanon is clear in his answer to that question:

"questions of race are but a superstructure, a mantle, an obscure ideological emanation concealing an economic reality.” In this, he identifies two mystifying ideological encounters for black people: “after the great white error, is now living in the great black mirage.”

After internalising the dehumanisation of inferiority, negation in the language of a shared black soul is also a mere mystification within the same ideological framework:

“we observe the desperate struggles of a Negro who is driven to discover the meaning of black identity ... what is often called the black soul is a white man’s artefact.”

This has been long so I’ll leave you with this, which has been central to my conviction that Blackness today, the so-called ethnic Blackness taken up by the oppressed, is a work of ideology – a construction which obscures more than it reveals about objective relations of power.

"The complexity of the means of production, the evolution of economic relations inevitably involving the evolution of ideologies, unbalance the system. Vulgar racism in its biological form corresponds to the period of crude exploitation of man's arms and legs...

"The perfecting of the means of production inevitably brings about the camouflage of the techniques by which man is exploited, hence of the forms of racism." Toward the African Revolution, p35