PAUL GILROY

…Weighing the claims of the Past against the problems of the Present…

…Gilroy’s opening proposal about the reason for making a few disagreeable statements I think for the time being reflects what I was talking about in the bottom regarding Cornell West’s idea of ‘knowledge’ as we might understand only—and I mean only on the basis of that clip as it is quite wrong to actually judge a person solely on the basis of a few sentences in isolation from his/her body of works as well and especially making criticism in the absence of a writer or thinker—on what we can extract from the clip. I am talking about this whole notion of assemblage in the sense that ‘knowledge’ might emerge as a manifestation of various elements or pieces even in dissonance. That is, ‘knowledge’ is a product of an ongoing struggle between opposing elements working against each other although not always intentionally. For this, we can see the irrevocable connection between ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’ as two fundamental elements (or entities?) at work always whether implicitly or explicitly in the process of life.

I’ll come back to this…I just came across this clip so I’ll watch it first before I make some statements out of assumptions about what I hope to anticipate on the basis of the opening line…