Tribute to Lloyd Best
Playing for Change as Counter Strategy
Winston Riley

“…we’d be hard put to explain our current predicament without reference to what might be described as the Moses conundrum. How does a nation revise the perspectives of the desert so as to form fertile empirical judgments of what is required by the Promised Land? Over and over, I’ve been minded to ask the question in terms of the need for the heritage of culture to find ways of escaping and breaking away from itself.” ~ (Lloyd Best)

Paying tribute to Lloyd is both easy and extremely difficult at the same time. Easy because there is an instantaneous outpouring based on an intense desire to say thanks in celebration of one who has enriched our space with his tireless endeavouring to disclose the possibility of a new world to us. A world which he insists must be created out of our own sweat out of our own blood and out of own tears, a world ‘crucibled’ in our own history and geography.

And yet, within this ease there is a nagging difficulty. A difficulty created by the sheer volume, originality, range and intensity of Lloyd’s works. A difficulty which dwarfs one’s own outpourings of thanks dwarfed even more so, that Lloyd is present to muse over the form and content of our tributes.

To say thanks in Lloyd’s presence thus demands a shift away from that which though important, can become mere entertainment, mere relating of one’s joys and sorrows as we delineate that which is instructive and exemplary in our cycling with Lloyd. One is thus forced to be either poetic or to strive, to effort at disclosure.

To me Lloyd’s central theme resonates in the following quote from his writings.

“For between 40 and 50 years now I’ve been claiming with increasing assertiveness that what lies at the heart of the current Caribbean challenge is an epistemic crisis of immense proportions. …. I’m arguing that we, Caribbean persons, are, for whatever reason, caught in an historic knowledge trap, an epistemic conundrum that prohibits us from de-limiting our own condition within definite coordinates of culture and institutions, meaning our own place. We refuse the Heideggerian imperative of “being there.” ..we’re therefore largely blind to reality. We repudiate the scientific necessity…to speak from the spot in which we’ve been positioned by history.” (Lloyd Best 2003)

Lloyd in coming to terms with this epistemic crisis, this Moses conundrum, saw quite clearly that a different way of being in the world was required. In his words he said-:

“My counter strategy has been to locate myself in our landscape and to play for change..” (Lloyd Best)

Central to Lloyd’s counter strategy is his contribution to the modelling of the economic structures in the Caribbean utilizing histoire raisonnée to delineate and interrogate a moving target - a society and economy in the making. The identifying of ‘the plantation’ as the original and fundamental institution of Caribbean economy disclosed how economic arrangements conditioned the responses of our people and institutions and revealed the basis of our epistemic conundrum.

“The models of the plantation economy were put forward as an aid to discerning the Caribbean predicament as a legacy of history, as a simple tool for grasping complexity and as a partial formulation meant to focus on the whole” (Lloyd Best 1998)

I see the epistemic problem identified by Lloyd as rooted in our Cartesian view of the world, a legacy of our colonial history, with its tendency to look at human experience from the point of view of individual agents generating action and privileging detachment, abstraction and theory as epistemological necessity for disclosing world. What is required is a shift away from the Cartesian view, a shift away from agency, to allow a focus on human practices, shared practices and skills into which we are socialized as ground for producing people, selves and worlds. Without shared practices and skills we encounter things as meaningless -as artefacts. Any visit to a museum could verify such a claim. Shared practices disclose meaningful things; they are the a priori conditions for agency.

“..shared human practices tend to gather together into organizations which we recognize as worlds, people and selves. Once those organisations gain consistency and effectiveness we as people and selves bring them into sharper focus and organisation” (Spinosa, Flores, Dreyfus 1997)

The question then becomes, how can the shared practices of a nation be altered so that people, selves and worlds are disclosed anew, so that the ‘Promised Land’ can be seen more clearly? Since there is no algorithm or set of algorithms by which worlds are disclosed then the first task becomes one of developing sensitivities - not knowledge in the Cartesian sense.

I developed a habit, when attempting to understand a specific domain, of selecting an individual who has critiqued the prevailing knowledge about that domain. In my attempt to understand the West Indian Question I moved from Williams, to James and settled on the ‘Best’. Lloyd’s life has been for me one of pointing the way by nurturing my sensitivities to the gravity of our predicament in the Caribbean. A predicament encapsulated in the words of Wilson Harris in ‘The Infinite Rehearsal’ thus-:

“Is there anybody there? Said the Traveller”,
Knocking on the moonlit door;

“You may knock Tiger and even though I hear I must be silent in order to stress that there are no easy answers to the predicament of a dying age within its most obvious, most telling biases and assumptions.”

And he smote upon the door again a second time;
Is there anybody there? He said