Senghor's
choice for Tempels' Bantu ontology would not have been gratuitous, but based on
his aesthetic interest; pointing to the reflective capacity of art, just in a
political sense —as ideological— rather than a cultural one. That would not be
gratuitous either, but would respond to his own determination in that sense, as
in Du Bois's error; which is not surprising, if it epistemologically solves the
understanding of reality as nature, in culture.
This
is the innate property of art, in its own formal condition, from the archaic
era to Modernity in the West itself; but it is also a current phenomenon and
common to all culture, in their mythological traditions, as representations of
that reality. Only here would there be a couple of fallacies, for which this is
not fulfilled, although it does point to that intuition; since as a postmodern,
his case has already passed the distortion of Modernity, in its structural
dysfunction.
As a
principle, however, and as formal in its own character, art would retain this
reflective capacity; but for that same reason, not in conceptualism, which make
it dysfunctional, depriving it of that representational capacity. This formal
representation would occur by sympathetic analogy, referring to the structure
of the phenomenon represented; distorted in the convention of the right sense,
presuming the understanding of the phenomenon, due to its rationality.
This
is what delegitimizes postmodern conceptualism, although it understands it in
its desystematization of modernity; which would not be in the formal apotheosis
with which it is fulfilled in the Baroque —as classical—, but in this
contradiction. The problem is then not of art, as a practice of craftsmanship,
but in its displacement through philosophy; with its professional
specialization, in modern intellectualism, which is what establishes it as
such, and not postmodern.
That
is to say, modern art responds to its classical formal nature, but is displaced
in that same modernity; giving rise to the postmodern crisis, which is of its
own modernity, and not of its classical and formal tradition. In fact, and
returning to Senghor, the art he postulated was not the formalist of popular
traditions; but the conceptual one of this intellectualist conventionalisms, as
can be seen in his wonderfully solved poetry.
It
is therefore a poetics or aesthetic philosophy rather than art, with its object
in a political, not aesthetic concept; legitimized in the historical
transcendentalism of its political determination, not in its formal properties.
That is why Senghor has to resort to a conventional ontology, without resting
on the very property of poetry; which is counterproductive, reducing it to the
ideological value that it intended to overcome, as a mere alternative.
This
is the contradiction marked by Sartre in its critical essay (Black Orfeo), and what
defines Negritude as romanticism; highlighting the ambiguity of its object, as
political and not properly aesthetic, and therefore without an existential
function. For this reason, he is not interested in an ontology proper to these
cultures, and which he would find in their popular traditions; with which he
would have avoided the criticism – also excessive – of Franz Fanon, with an
ontological sufficiency of culture.
The
conflict of Negritude is thus resolved, as the very extension of that of the
West, in its internal contradiction; reproducing the same excesses that it
criticizes, and for the same reasons that it criticizes in them, in its
determinism. This limits its scope, since Negritude does not manage to
constitute itself as an alternative postulation; although it still evidences
the insufficiency of this Western tradition, in that modern stage as its
apotheosis.
That
would be the value of Negritude, as of postmodern criticism, not the critique
of the West, but of its modernity; understood as a contraction to the
functional principles of the tradition that culminates in that stage, not its
alternative. Of course, none of this is perceptible from the very parameters of
that contradiction, determined by it; but only from an instance capable of
reconciling its terms, which is precisely the meaning of Transcendental
Realism.
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