"First of all, we are speaking here of a ‘common sense’, that is a “mass popular philosophy”, consisting largely of ways of seeing that are ‘traditional’ rather than ‘organic’: people believe it because it is something that people have believed for some time; because people with authority say it is true; because one’s peers have born witness to it; because it makes a certain sense of one’s efforts; because in the past such beliefs have served ‘people like us’ well. Not all of these are bad reasons to believe a thing. Common sense is ideological, and ideologies, as Gramsci said, “‘organize’ human masses, they form the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.”. Common sense has an “imperative character”, producing “norms of conduct”, and is thus formative of the political situations we struggle in. We operate on common sense, some of whose constituents are progressive - “The personality is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over” - as part of our efforts to develop a new ‘good sense’."

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From Richard Seymour’s post entitled, “Class and Common Sense”

Some suggestive thoughts on a term that I find useful and want to pursue further.


Since the dissertation is finite—intellectual growth, thankfully, isn’t—the avenues of commonsense I pursue now interface local knowledge with their international contexts. Since the historical fact of imperialism and its contemporary iterations in global capital undercuts locality in important ways, I want to understand how the interface between body and city, to take one example, stands in relation to nation-state and colony or warring nation-states.

 

For instance, the return of colonial subjects to the metropole in Claude McKay’s Banjo both upholds and subverts apartheid relations held to be, in that historical moment, commonsense. The title character’s wanderlust takes him from Dixie to Marseilles, via a few detours, a dream port city for all kinds of vagabonds. Banjo’s close ties with the black beach bums depends on their mutual exclusion from the city’s white, wealthy neighborhoods and occupations, a series of exclusions they already experienced, and are accustomed to, in the colonies and the ships that brought them to France. They subvert apartheid insofar as they live, drink, make music, translate and mistranslate to fellow diasporics their local experiences of the global color line; they uphold apartheid insofar as they refuse to cross that line but organize behind it, much to the dismay of the Comintern, which McKay visits and mocks in his travelogue, A Long Way From Home. The commonsense I find in Banjo extends beyond a kind of inherited pragmatics to the proximity of black bodies that sense apartheid’s global commonality.

 

Simply, what I come to know as commonsense belongs not only to the native landscape I traverse but the global trade of people, goods and ideas that have made my home what it is. Yawn. Already said. Moving on. 

Tags: commonsense Claude McKay Banjo