That against the acultural belief system and supracultural fallacy of our present order of knowledge, that the human is a purely natural organism who pre-exists culture-and who can therefore be valued and socially stratified according to degrees of genetic value as ostensibly signified by the aesthetic value of its literary production (Bloom’s Western bourgeois canon) or its alleged IQ (The Bell Curve), a Black Studies hypothesis redefines the human in the following terms: That although being human is implemented by the physiological processes of the body - how else? - being human is not itself a property of these processes. Rather, being human, including our model of being human, Man, in its present Western bourgeois or ethno-class conception, is a property of the narratively instituted governing codes of symbolic life and death or sociogenetic principle enacting of our human forms of life as a third level of hybridly bios and logos existence. Being human can therefore not pre-exist the cultural systems and institutional mechanisms, including the institution of knowledge, by means of which we are socialized to be human. That the elaboration and the guardianship of these governing codes and of their founding narratives are carried out, in all human orders, by the grammarians or intellectuals of each order - from the diviners of Africa, the shamans of Mesoamerica, the priest-scholars of ancient Egypt, the philosophers of Greece, the theologians of the feudal Clergy, to ourselves, the academicians of our present Western bourgeois epistemological order. That therefore, both the “misery of the poor/ and of the homeless in general the ongoing degradation of the lives of people in the inner cities, their everyday dying in the streets, as well as the ongoing degradation of the planetary environment, are only possible because of the lawlikely motivated ensemble of our collective behaviors that are made to seem just and legitimate by our present order of knowledge: by the sense of right and reasons of the economic and the aesthetic that we ourselves elaborate. (So much for our canons, literary and economic!) That our continued complicity with this order of knowledge entails our continued complicity with its truths of power - whether in its mainstream form or in the now proposed "multicultural” sub-variants.
