Complexity

by THE EDITORS

There is a desire for things to be made simple for the sake of being "accessible." To reduce every thing to its most common denominator. The assumptions that guide such desires are ultimately declarations that the underlying thought or idea is in fact simple. The prevailing attitude asserts that a failure to dilute a complexity and to deny the cry for easy digestibility encumbers the majority of our people, whom the intelligentsia believe cannot be troubled with the esoteric because "the masses" are presumably incapable of complex thought. But what if the idea is not simply simple? How do we develop the capacity to think with and against the complex?

This "intelligent elite" often decries complexity to prevent or contain certain understandings of an evil that is not quite simple. If not elitist, then have we become victims of the standardization of instantly digestible half-truths? What of the undoing? Oversimplification of our reality conceals, perhaps purposely, that Blackness is complex for every Black body—even in its simplicity. And we cannot afford fiberless or tempered understandings.

We—more than most people—need to develop methods of receiving knowledge, ways of convening and cultivating intellectual spaces that allow us to resist easy answers. For our predicament is not easy or simple. The ways of this world require us to seek a more complex wisdom. And such gathering and unraveling will not be easy. We need curved lines. We need broken spaces. We need longer memories. We need open-endedness. To dive into complexity is how we arrive at clarity. To question and examine the complexities of our time is neither to exclude the many nor to privilege the few. It is to affirm that we all can know, that we all have the capacity to think. It is to accept, finally, that what we must know is far beyond what is easy to know. After all, we do not seek complexity as much as we acknowledge that it is already our lot. This is the objective. This is the path to our world.

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