"Social truth" and imprisoned radical intellectuals.
Rodriguez, Dylan
I. The Counterhegemonic Captive Bloc
IMPRISONED RADICAL INTELLECTUALS AND THEIR FORMERLY INCARCERATED PEERS have inhabited and shaped the formation of the United States
prison regime since the rise of the Goldwater-Nixon "law and order
state. Although such internationally prominent figures as Mumia
Abu-Jamal, Angela Y. Davis, Marilyn Buck, Leonard Peltier, Alicia
Rodriguez, Ray Luc Levasseur, Jalil Muntaqim, and George Jackson testify
to the depth and reach of imprisonment as a structure of political
repression and social (dis- and re-) organization, their collective
historical specificity as a counterhegemonic bloc of social theorists
and political philosophers has generally remained under-theorized. A
consequence of this arrested engagement with contemporary prison
intellectuals has been an evident fetishization of the celebrity and the
"literary," a form of intellectual disciplining that narrows
the substance of, and popular access to, this critical organic
intellectual discourse.
Thus, the recent attention paid by teachers, activists, scholars,
community organizers, and other free-world intellectuals to captive
political thinkers has overwhelmingly focused on the work of published
writers, political prisoners, and recognized prisoners of war. Further,
the treatment of this work has often been limited to literary exposition
and criticism, a valuable and necessary exercise that is nonetheless
insufficient for the interdisciplinary political analysis and
elaboration that I am interested in here. What, then, might a paradigm
shift in the examination and compilation of the intellectual work
(written, published, and otherwise) by imprisoned radical intellectuals
yield for social and literary theorists, political philosophers, ethnic
studies scholars, and activists of all kinds? Why is it so urgent and
necessary to offer a new modality for the study of, and political
engagement with, this counterhegemonic "prison praxis"
(Rodriguez, 2001), a category of activity that encompasses and exceeds
the disciplinary structures of "academic" and
"activist" discourses alike?
The cultural productions of these captives of the state, while
rarely surfacing on the discursive radar of either academic discourses
or popular culture at large, represent a decentered, imminent political
possibility of departure from the essentially conservative ordering of
both. In an extraordinary mirroring and rearticulation of the dystopic
structure of imprisonment--a regime founded on the symbiosis between the
logics of displacement and degradation--this prison praxis constitutes a
multilayered field of alternate vernaculars, including the construction
of new languages of agency, politics, freedom, identity, and
self-actualization. These meanings, which are often generated for
consumption by free world audiences (including loved ones, children,
political allies, and attorneys), nonetheless constantly exceed and slip
from the grasp of conventional modes of political discourse. It is
profoundly endangering and discomfiting for any "free person"
to attempt engagement with this praxis, precisely because it casts civil
society's--the putatively free world's--condition of existence
as the troubled production of mass-based unfreedom.
This essay offers a few points of departure for the theorization of
prison praxis as a field of radical social theory. First, I argue that
the emergence and rapid growth of a qualitative "carceral"
formation since the early 1970s, outside and symbiotic to the hegemonic
social formation, has produced its own historical bloc of
counterhegemonic radical intellectuals. A situated reading of work by
contemporary imprisoned radical intellectuals provokes new ways of
comprehending, critiquing, and antagonizing the new carceral formation,
and especially reveals the limitations of conventional ways of
conceptualizing and theorizing political "praxis." Second, I
revisit the epochal moment of the Middle Passage to elaborate the social
logic of the new prison regime, which is similarly premised on mass
incarceration, immobilization, and immanent extermination. Third, I look
to the work of Frantz Fanon--specifically, his conception of
"social truth"--in an attempt to generate a new modality for
the critical, interdisciplinary study of (and political engagement with)
the work of imprisoned radical intellectuals.
II. Civic Death and Prison Praxis
Radical intellectuals who are captives of the state, insofar as
they are defined and categorized as civically dead and there[ore outside
the realm of civil society and the polity, are literally de-individuated
upon imprisonment. Their presumptive rights to formal recognition as
"individuals" under the juridical and philosophical mores of
American bourgeois liberalism disappear, replaced by a structure of
unmediated subjection to state coercion. Essentially, prisoners lose the
right to exist as political beings. Often, the state punishes and
preempts critical political work by imprisoned people through physical
violence, assassination, forced narcotic sedation, isolation, and
relocation (often to prisons that are hundreds or thousands of miles
away). (1) What, then, is the significance of political praxis for
people whose right to exist politically has been taken away? This is
perhaps the question that underlies the permanently tortured relation
between the free and the unfree, as the possibility of a collaborative
politics begs the question of how "politics" happens in the
carceral underside of the social formation.
The condition of praxis overdetermines its political significance,
especially when carried out by juridically dead people. Prisoners
striking and rebelling for acknowledgement of basic human rights--as in
the famous Attica Rebellion of 1971--represent far more than militant
"reformist" struggles against fascistic and localized regimes
of domination. Assertions of political personhood by the imprisoned
constitute a constrained attempt to decisively delegitimize the carceral
formation's official attempts to eliminate them from the realm of
the "political"--an attempt to generate discursive-material
terrain (2) for political struggle that can be loosely analogized to a
frontal, Gramscian "war of maneuver" against a rigid state
regime that consistently militates and militarizes against any such
possibility. As such, political struggles by imprisoned activists over
seemingly mundane issues (for example, access to health care or legal
materials) are in fact "radical," if by this term we mean
actions addressing the fundamental structuring or "roots" of
social (or in this case carceral) formation. Whereas struggles over
similar issues, when waged in the free world, would likely be considered
to be progressive or liberal reformist campaigns premised on the
actors' articulation of "reasonable and just" demands on
the state, it is more common for the state to dismiss or criminalize any
political demand made by prisoners as categorically unreasonable and, at
worst, subversive. That which is reasonably demanded by the free (e.g.,
increased wages, health care, housing) becomes grounds for punitive
sanction when demanded by the unfree. (3)
The state's self-legitimating accusations of unreasonableness
and subversion, once lodged against its own civically dead captives,
thus shifts the critical theoretical focus away from the quantifiable
content of prisoners' actual "demands" (what are they
asking for?) and onto what might be called the essential audacity of the
political action itself, regardless of its substance (who are they to
ask?). Perhaps the primary axis of radical confrontation with the state
is, for imprisoned intellectuals, politics itself. Preceding and always
accompanying any attempt at praxis is the imprisoned radical
intellectual's confrontation with a form of state violence beyond
the repressive or reactive, shaping her/his condition of political
existence through the preemptive and the categorical. That is to say,
unfreedom denies the possibility of legitimate political subjectivity a
priori, while constructing a discrete border at which
"politics" is presumed subversive sui generis.
Radical prisoners are a sort of embodied contraband. Their
political agency represents a form of incorrigibility that articulates
principled hostility to the state's ideological regime of
correction and rehabilitation--arguably, it is this practiced immunity
to the domesticating overtures of the state that lies at the
definitional core of the category of radical prison intellectual. The
figure of the imprisoned political intellectual represents a knowledge
production that openly flirts with extinction while illuminating the
boundaries and limitations of language, discourse, and politics under
the fascistic structure of mass imprisonment. Casting an ominous pall
over the frequent charades of the contemporary U.S. "Left,"
this captive category of thinkers compels an alternate paradigmatic interpretation of the social formation, such that the forced passage
between the "social" and the "carceral" becomes a
facet of social determination rather than an epiphenomenon or punitive
"supplement" to social formation. The imprisonment regime is,
in other words, fundamental to and productive of the contemporary
hegemony.
A specific, historically focused understanding of the coerced, mass
migration from public space to prison space (and back) reveals the
large-scale mechanization of the coercive and frequently fatal transfer
of human beings from civil society to its punitive carceral underside.
The historical formation of this forced passage is precisely what
remains under-theorized in current anti-prison, prisoner support,
political prisoner, and prison reform activism, as well as in the
emerging scholarly discourse of what I provisionally refer to as
"critical prison studies." Far too frequently, activists and
professional intellectuals conceptualize (and treat) prisoners as a
reified category of social stratification--a sort of special and
contained subsector of the "underclass," if you will. Rarely
is serious critical attention paid to the nature and nuance of the
unfree passage itself. This disavowal of the forced passage into
unfreedom facilitates a regressive ontology of imprisonment. Prisoners
and imprisoned intellectuals are conceptualized as if they were always
so, and their raison d'etre emerges directly from their
incarceration, thus reinscribing the logic of the regime itself. In this
sense, the political logic of the state's forcible transfer of
people between the legal-existential categories of freedom and unfreedom
is what haunts the very formation of anti-prison activism and critical
scholarship, and perhaps also serves as the specter that both compels
and troubles this collection of essays and the conference in which it
originated. In the remainder of this essay, I am interested in further
rethinking the relationality and movement between freedom and unfreedom
at a moment when the state is making local and global exhibition of its
expertise in the production of civic, social, and biological death.
III. From Civic Death to Middle Passage
It is at the point of rupture between the social and the carceral,
the free and the unfree, that contemporary, imprisoned radical
intellectuals find a political genesis and transformation of
subjectivity. The prison has increasingly become a place of death,
extending its technologies beyond the appallingly overt rituals of
state-conducted executions and into the more complex realm of the
biopolitical. Negri and Hardt (2000: 17) write,
Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its
interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and
rearticulating it. Power can achieve an effective command over the
entire life of the population only when it becomes an integral,
vital function that every individual embraces and reactivates of
his or her own accord.
Practicing through the biopolitical, imprisonment regimes
accomplish more than the simple "incarceration" of human
beings. This structure of (racist) state violence has become
fundamentally focused on containing, controlling, and punishing the
bodies of those whom Joy James refers to as the
"unassimilables" of a white, heteronormative civil society. A
normalized, proto-extermination policy has organized the growth and
massive proliferation of imprisonment regimes into a form of heavy
handed, widely socialized crisis response.
The site of the prison itself, however, has evolved into a new
crisis form. There is an overwhelming concentration of bodies and
subjects who have become, by juridical definition and force of
condition, irrelevant to and alienated from social life. The carceral
formation is the place of the antisocial, wherein the technologies of
the biopolitical are premised on the simultaneous penetration,
discipline, and forcible reconstitution of the prisoner's body and
subjectivity. At this carceral site of antisociality writ large, the
place where the state's biopolitical power is
unmediated--qualitatively violating and violent--radical prison
intellectuals are crucial interlocutors, theorists, and testifiers.
Beyond simply "bearing witness" to the degradation of bodies
and subjects, these captive thinkers are generating a theoretical corpus
that articulates with resistance and opposition to state violence.
Interviewed in 1970, George Jackson recounted his initial
imprisonment,
The very first time, it was like dying.... Just to exist at all in
the cage calls for some heavy psychic readjustments.... I haven't
adjusted even yet, with half my life already spent in prison....
Capture, imprisonment, is the closest to being dead that one is
likely to experience in his life (Yee, 1973: 121, emphasis added).
Speaking from the experimental "High Security Unit" in
Lexington, Kentucky, some 20 years later, political prisoner Susan
Rosenberg echoes Jackson's language in a manner that reveals an
essential--though rarely elaborated--facet of the prison regime.
Testifying in the award-winning 1989 documentary Through the Wire,
Rosenberg says,
[The High Security Unit is] a prison within a prison.... The High
Security Unit is living death.... I believe that this is an
experiment being conducted by the Justice Department to try and
destroy political prisoners and to justify the most vile abuse of
us as women and as human beings, and [to] justify it because we are
political (Rosenbhim, 1989, emphasis added).
Since the time of Rosenberg's testimony, the technology of the
Lexington High Security Unit has circulated and metamorphosed,
virus-like, through state and federal prisons across the country.
Thousands of women and men are now held in a captivity that approximates
that of Rosenberg and her cohorts Silvia Baraldini and Alejandrina
Torres during the late 1980s, such as in the California State
Prison's "SHU" (Security Housing Units) and other similar
facilities across the country. These relatively new "supermax"
prisons have astronomically multiplied the numbers of social and
political prisoners who are now held captive in conditions of
low-intensity physical and psychological torture. Of course, the term
"torture" is a somewhat misleading nomenclature for this
technology of hyper-incarceration because there is not necessarily any
ulterior motive to the state's infliction of pain on these
prisoners (conventional definitions of torture generally consider the
inflicting of pain to be the means to some end, whether it be
information, a confession, or otherwise).
The objective of low-intensity torture is, in this case, intrinsic
to the biopolitical technology of the torture itself: that is, in plain
terms, the isolation and semi-permanent immobilization of human beings.
This should force a departure from the analogies frequently drawn
between prisons and slavery. While U.S. chattel slavery was based on a
violent white supremacist expropriation of African bodies and productive
labor, the U.S. prison system, in the final analysis, does not rely on
labor exploitation or expropriation, the persistence of juridical
sanction of "involuntary servitude" for prisoners under the
auspices of the 13th Amendment notwithstanding. Although many activists,
journalists, researchers, scholars, and other critics of the
prison-industrial complex have recently recuperated the language and
semiotics of (North American) plantation slavery to spur political
critique and communicate moral outrage, such a historical analogy is
neither appropriate nor sufficient. Such evocations of racialized labor
expropriation and white supremacist hegemony do resonate with the
contemporary punitive-carceral landscape, but this essay argues for an
extension and revision of slavery's political logic, once applied
to the emergence of the U.S. prison-industrial complex. Rather, the
organizing logic of the prison-industrial complex is echoed in the
language of death spoken by radical captives like Jackson and Rosenberg.
Perhaps the more appropriate--if decentering--historical metaphor for
the contemporary prison is not enslavement, but rather the transatlantic
Middle Passage. Although there is always and necessarily a passage into
the temporality and geography of death, the site and condition of death
may itself constitute a form of passage.
Historians generally agree that 15 to 20 million Africans perished
during the transatlantic transfer. The scale of death during the Middle
Passage alone was astronomical, fulfilling most contemporary and
historical definitions of genocide. Yet, this mass-scale,
transcontinental kidnapping can only be understood in the context of the
coerced transition that it intended. Although many millions of lives
were extinguished en route to the Americas, about one hundred million
(80 to 90% of those originally captured) survived the Middle Passage and
were, in one form or another, enslaved. (4) There thus is a way in which
the Middle Passage may be understood to mark a point of transience
between different states of oppressive violence, despair, and death.
At the height of the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans
(from the 1600s through the late 1800s, peaking during the 18th
century), much of continental Africa was fighting an under-armed
struggle against the slaughter of European colonial conquest. While
continental Africans were being reorganized and displaced onto new
imperial geographies, Africans in North America (as well as the United
States proper) were experiencing a historically unique condition of
mass-based and increasingly racialized chattel slavery. (Although all
systems of enslavement in the Americas were fundamentally violent, not
all were grounded in the notion of slaves as the property of whites.) As
such, the Middle Passage was a liminal spatial and temporal site, a
moment of commodity transfer between European business partners as well
as a profound place of transformation for the human beings that were
mass incarcerated in the bellies of ships. The Passage was, in this
sense, a transition between discrete conditions (from colonial conquest
to a new site of enslavement) and a condition of existence unto itself.
Confined to slave vessels floating in the Atlantic, Africans were--for
their captors--chattel investments in a state of limbo between colonial
conquest, enslavement (commodity and labor value), and physical
extermination. The Middle Passage was a site of profound transformation
for captive Africans, as the sea-borne prison manifested an epochal
rupture.
The long voyage to enslavement was itself the threshold of
geographic, subjective, and bodily displacement for Africans, and for
the European colonizers and slavers, the construction of this mobile,
mass incarceration entailed far more than a simple means of commodity
transfer. Although this human cargo held a lucrative potential profit
for slavers, incumbent on their ability to physically bring their stock
to the market, there was far more at stake in the 300-year
institutionalization of this itinerant transatlantic prison. The Middle
Passage was, in fact, a pedagogical practice that deployed strategies of
unprecedented violence to "teach" and coerce captive Africans
into a new global ordering. The rate of survival for the Middle Passage
(which equaled the survival rates for most non-slave vessels of the era)
is, in this context, a direct reflection of the conquerors'
calculated efficiency to preserve their human cargo, as well as their
more sophisticated, long-term desire to re-map bodies and reconfigure
lands. An abolitionist tract from 1839 reads,
The wretched victims ... were then fastened hand and foot to a slave
ship, a vessel which has been forcibly described as condensing a
greater quantity of human suffering and misery than can any where
else be found in so small a space. Imagine then, five or six hundred
persons linked together, but trying to get rid of each others, and
crammed in a close vessel, in which, by mere pressure, they were
reduced to a state of suffocation (Copley, 1839: 124).
Vincent Harding's (1981: 10-11) incisive analysis of the slave
ship further elaborates the symbiosis between the emergent racial
formation and the economy of bodies that characterized the
commodification of Africans:
[T]he ships were even more than prisons. Ultimately they provided
black people with an introduction to the Euro-American state, for
they were mini-states with their own polity, their own laws and
government.... At the core of the mini-states, prisons, and kennels
it was always possible to discover the social, economic, and
political scourges arising out of Europe: racism, capitalism, and the
deep human fears they engender. The tie of the ships to European
capitalism was evident in the decision to call them "slavers," and in
their relationship to the slave "factories," and to the industrial
factories at home which made the goods that they brought to trade
for humans.
On the vessels themselves, new technologies of human containment
were invented and refined. This portable and moving confinement was
invested with an intensive and sophisticated--and profoundly
brutal--technology of incarceration. In the process, bodies were
re-spatialized and space was re-embodied.
The width allowed for each individual was no more than sixteen
inches, and the passage between each of these rows of human packages
was so small that it was impossible for a person walking by, however
carefully, to avoid treading on them. Thus crammed together, like
herrings in a barrel, they contracted putrid and fatal disorders, so
that those who came to inspect them in a morning often had to ...
unchain their dead carcasses from the bodies of their wretched
fellow-sufferers to whom they had been fastened (Copley, 1839: 124).
The contemporary prison appears to reincarnate the organizational
logic of the Middle Passage, and similarly confines bodies that are
conditionally degraded and in limbo between labor value, civic death,
and biological death. Thus, labor exploitation--in short, slavery--is
not the guiding feature of the new imprisonment regime, although it is
certainly an important aspect of the prison structure. Whereas forced
labor was at one time conceived as the tool for rehabilitating
incarcerated white males (Friedman, 1993), the proliferation of mass
incarceration in the current era has simply reinscribed the genocidal
logic of extermination. It has been well argued by others that the
economic displacements of globalization have created massive, and
disproportionately Black and Brown "redundant" or
"unemployable" populations, which have in turn become the
metaphoric "raw material" for the growth of the
prison-industrial complex (Evans and Goldberg, 1998; Goldberg, 2000;
Davis, 1998; Parenti, 2000). It is worth emphasizing here that
imprisonment regimes, too, have been reinvented and that, in a
reconstruction of the Middle Passage's constitutive logic, are
openly articulating and self-valorizing a commitment to efficiency and
effective bodily immobilization in the mass-based containment of human
beings.
Prisons, in the carceral tradition of the Middle Passage, are
rapidly developing new technologies for the re-spatialization of bodies
and the re-embodiment of spaces. The September 2001 issue of
Peacekeeper, the official publication of the California prison guards
union (CCPOA), includes an enthusiastic story entitled "Big Brother
is Watching":
... Imagine the ultimate Big Brother of the prison system--tracking
inmates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Well, guess what? It
exists.... Every inmate wears a wrist-worn transmitter called PASS
unit, which stands for Personal Activated Security Sensor. When an
inmate arrives at the facility, he or she is enrolled into the
system database by the system operator. The information typically
entered consists of the inmates [sic] name, inmate identification
number, housing/bed assignment and meal type.... The transmitter is
installed on the inmate's non-dominant wrist. It is secured with
screws that are tightened with a special torque screwdriver. The
clips can only be removed by breaking them....
Officer A. Felty ... believes the system is a great deterrent. "The
inmates realize they are being constantly monitored and
supervised.... Basically, he knows that escape is not an option, the
removal of the bracelet is not an option because he is being
constantly monitored--whether the officer is watching him or
not" (Gomez, 2001: 39).
The contemporary U.S. prison's totalizing logic has been
premised on a peculiar convergence between new technologies of
discipline and surveillance (as Foucault [1977] famously excavated in
his study of the modern prison form) and the normalization of ritualized
and immanent physical violence. Here, the biopoliticality of state power
recomposes as a rearticulation of the state's self-justifying
monopoly on legitimate forms of bodily violence--far from simply
inscribing a more invasive and comprehensive form of
"disciplinary" control over its civically dead subjects,
Calipatria Prison's new "Big Brother" represents a
multiplication of the potential sites and scenarios of physical
punishment. High technology literally re-maps prisoners' bodies
onto a virtual terrain, abstracting their bodily movements and gestures
into a computerized grid of obedience/ disobedience,
submission/violation. Finally, Big Brother re-spatializes the prison
itself, marking the extension and veritable omnipresence of state
domination over inmates. Although this advanced technology of
imprisonment is an epochal leap from that of the Middle Passage, the
logic of its advance is essentially the same. There is a haunting
similarity in the emphasis and institutionalization of effective mass
capture, immobilization, and immanent extinction via the contemporary
prison and 18th-century slave vessel. By means of contrast with the
aforementioned example, Jarvis Jay Masters' account of his initial
entombment in San Quentin's death row reflects a spatial and bodily
encounter with the prison's more classical modes of isolation and
circumscription. His narrative echoes those of imprisoned African
survivors of the transatlantic transfer, while supplementing the
CCPOA's rosy tribute to the onset of the high-technology prison.
I will never forget when the steel cell door slammed behind me. I
stood in the darkness trying to fix my eyes and readjust the
thoughts that were telling me that this was not home--that this
tiny space would not, could not be where I would spend more than a
decade of my life.... I spread my arms and found that the palms of
my hands touched the walls with ease.... The bed was bolted into
the wall like a shelf. It was only two and a half feet wide by six
feet long, and only several feet above the gray concrete floor
(Masters, 1997: 4-5).
Old and new technologies of incarceration have collaborated in the
emergence of a new imprisonment regime. To absorb the geographical
breadth and technological depth of the prison-industrial complex's
expansion is to come to terms with the unprecedented levels of autonomy
granted (and extracted by) the prison system to shape the social (and
carceral) worlds.
The prison has become, like the Middle Passage, more than simply a
means to an end. It is, in objective and in fact, an end in itself. The
logic of imprisonment in the age of the prison-industrial complex
involves a particular kind of social extermination that fundamentally
alters the network of relationships (affective, economic, and otherwise)
in civil society. The prison, like the slave vessel, has become an
important facet in the production of a new social formation, premised on
the structural and ritualized domination of particular target
communities. In this sense, the prison is not simply a repressive
institution, but has actually reconfigured into a socially productive
apparatus, generating and organizing an unprecedented site of mass-based
civic death. Arguably, the imprisonment regime has also constituted a
new form of social death, as prisoners are isolated from loved ones in
the free world and, upon release, often experience substantive emotional
rupture and alienation from family and friends. The limit of this
historical analogy, however, is embedded in the nature of the human
transfer that prisons accomplish. Prisons as mass-based punishment,
conceived as such for the sake of reproducing an epochal law and order,
are less intended to accomplish a transfer of human beings from one
geographic site to another than they are to establish a semi-permanent
state of elimination from civil society altogether.
It is useful to meditate on Jackson and Rosenberg's rhetoric
of death as a signifier of what Frantz Fanon might call the "social
truth" of imprisonment. Fanon's work illuminates the final
theoretical connection I wish to draw between captive radical
intellectuals and the larger political imaginary of prison praxis.
IV. Social Truth and Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals
In the context of a revolutionary nationalist struggle for
decolonization, Fanon was compelled to reject the European Enlightenment
conception of truth as a transcendent philosophical ideal. In The
Wretched of the Earth and Fanon's other writings, truth was no
longer a set of ideas and moral principles abstracted from historical
circumstance, but rather became the embodiment of the native's
desire to be rid of the settler and, by extension, the settler society.
Fanon (1963: 50) writes:
The problem of truth ought also to be considered. In every age,
among the people truth is the property of the national cause. No
absolute verity, no discourse on the purity of the soul, can shake
this position.... Truth is that which hurries on the breakup of the
colonialist regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the
nation; it is all that protects the natives, and ruins the
foreigners. In this colonialist context there is no truthful
behavior: and the good is quite simply that which is evil for "them."
Resonating the collective conversation of imprisoned radical
intellectuals in the last 30 years, Fanon writes several paragraphs
later that the native's struggle against the colonial order is
fundamentally a movement against a societal structure in which the
native is permanently incarcerated--in his words, "a being hemmed
in." This rendering of social truth is premised on the recognition
that the colonial world pivots on the native's peculiar existence
as the largely immobilized object of the settler's exploitation,
violence, and domination--and that, in fact, every settler benefits from
the native's continued abjection. Fanon (1963: 53) thus asserts
that, "confronted with a world ruled by the settler, the native is
always presumed guilty."
The difficult and profound turn in the course of Fanon's
transformation as a radical intellectual arrived on his own recognition
of what it meant to live in a society defined by the categorical
distinction between settlers and natives. Fanon recognized that the
settler-native dichotomy organized the totality of the colonial social
order, and that this categorical binary was premised on the
settler's capacity to wage one-sided warfare against the
native's body and culture, and, more comprehensively, against the
native's psychic and material worlds (similar to the current and
virtually unilateral global "War on Terrorism"). In this
context, Fanon recognized that there was no middle ground between
consent to the colonial order and radical dissent from--and at best,
revolutionary action against--that very same order. For this reason, he
writes in clearly absolutist terms that:
To break up the colonial world does not mean that after the
frontiers have been abolished lines of communication will be set up
between the two zones. The destruction of the colonial world is no
more and no less than the abolition of one zone, its burial in the
depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country (Ibid.: 41).
With Fanon, I would suggest that when Jackson, Rosenberg, and other
imprisoned intellectuals (radical and otherwise) use the vernacular of
death to elaborate their experience of state captivity, they are not
being whimsical or metaphorical. Neither are they using the terms of
death to bring attention to a mysterious something else about the regime
of imprisonment (that one might assume is deeper than their rhetoric
might betray or is altogether inaccessible to language). Perhaps captive
radical intellectuals articulate their incarceration in the terms of
death because death--that is, killing, elimination, and
extermination--is precisely the political and organizational logic of
the prison.
To recognize imprisonment as a regime of death and
extermination--that is, as the social truth conveyed and personified by
radical prison intellectuals--is to rearticulate Fanon's notion of
the fundamental violence at the core of the colonial order. The
categorical distinction between the free and the unfree has become a
primary mode of social organization in the contemporary United States.
As we approach and surpass 2.5 million people (including children and
non-citizens) under some form of state incarceration, it is becoming
clear that the testimonial of imprisoned intellectuals is more than a
harbinger of terrible things to come, but has actually become a seminal
truth-telling of what is here and now. Perhaps in looking toward the
relation between captive and captor, imprisoned
insurgents/revolutionaries and the state, "free" radical
intellectuals and activists might locate a new modality for an
authentic, radical abolitionist political discourse--now to be seized
and translated into a new political vernacular for various
constituencies, including and especially the proto-revolutionary and
otherwise insurrectionary ones. Imprisoned teacher, writer, and activist
Mike Ngo, who as of this writing is facing the possibility of an
indeterminate sentence in the California SHU as punishment for his
political critique of the CDC, encourages embrace of the political
possibility lodged in an overwhelming condition of existence. His are
the thoughts of departure for this essay:
I see my [imprisoned] comrades sometimes ... like everyone.... We
lose hope sometimes, and dwell in despair sometimes. A lot of times.
But I feel you have to be somewhat intimate with your despair. You
have to understand it, because it gives you a lot of strength. Once
I no longer fear what these people can do to me, I no longer worry
about the repression they put against me when I struggle. So, I
don't want to dwell in my despair, but I have to be intimate with
it, because some of my strength comes from this.... If you feel that
the odds are against you, that nothing ever changes, we're fighting
a mountain--always look at that and say, if that's the case, we have
nothing to lose. I'm doing this because of this feeling I have, this
feeling of helplessness. I'm doing this because, man, this is all
I have. This is all I have. Because, I don't want to go out helpless.
I don't want to go out lying in my bunk, doing nothing.... Win or
lose, we're doing this because it's the process we need to find some
meaning in our lives. (5)
NOTES
(1.) By way of example, Hugo Yogi Pinell, the only surviving member
of the San Quentin Six still incarcerated, mentions the 1970 shooting of
mentor W.L. Nolen at Soledad Prison as a defining moment in the
political transformation of many Black and Latino social prisoners in
the California system. (In fact, the elimination of Nolen eventually
helped to isolate George Jackson as the focal inmate-antagonist of the
California Department of Corrections.) Interview with Hugo
"Yogi" Pinell, Pelican Bay State Prison (California), May 2001
(conducted with the generous help of California Prison Focus).
(2.) This notion, as argued and articulated by Karen Barad,
critiques and dissolves the false dichotomy between discursive and
material apparatuses, arguing, "to put it bluntly, if not crudely,
the material dimension of regulatory apparatuses, which is indissociable
from its discursive dimension, is to be understood in terms of the
materiality of phenomena." See the full article in Barad,
"Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization
of Reality" (Differences 10,2, 1998: 87-128).
(3.) Consider, for example, the work of rape survivors and openly
queer prisoners under the leadership of former political prisoner Ed
Mead (luring the late 1970s to put an end to state sanctioned
inmate-on-inmate rape at Walla Walla prison (in Washington) (Sabo et
al., 2001); the ongoing struggles of incarcerated women in California
state prisons to generate a political analysis of the contraction and
spread of HIV and AIDS under state captivity, implicating the
state's role in fostering preventable deaths and refusing basic
medical care fox- HIV-positive prisoners (Women's Positive Legal
Action Network, 1998; Chandler and Kingery, 2000); and the summer 2001
hunger strike by prisoners in the Pelican Bay (California) Security
Housing Unit, protesting the California Department of Corrections'
use of "gang affiliation" as a pretense for prescribing
"indeterminate" sentences in the SHU. Under the hypothetical
conditions of civil society, all three of these examples would fall
under the general categories of (in turn) queer antirape/antiviolence
activism, progressive health care retorm, and militant legal reform.
None would likely provoke institutional crisis to the point of
extracting a punitive or violent response from the state. Occurring in
the historical and institutional context of the prison, however, these
examples exceed the political categorization of the demands they posit.
Each of these seemingly "reformist" organizing strategies
nonetheless generated a qualitative political antagonism, institutional
crisis, and state repression that far outweighed the apparent
reasonableness of their "actual" demands (to wit, an end to
rape, access to health care, and rational legal reform). Though a
detailed analysis of these three cases is beyond our scope here, I
invoke them to further illuminate the incommensurability between the
political practices of free and unfree people.
(4.) For a historical overview of the trade in enslaved Africans
and the Middle Passage, see David Eltis and James Walvin (eds 3, The
Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe.
Africa, and the Americas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981);
Henry C. Carey, The Slave Trade: Domestic and Foreign (1853) (New York:
Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1967); George F. Kay, The Shameful Trade
(London: Frederick Muller, Ltd., 1967); Tommy L. Lott (ed.), Subjugation and Bondage: Critical Essays opt Slavery and Social Philosophy (New
York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998); Orlando Patterson,
Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1982); Patrick Manning (ed.), Slave Trades, 1500-1800:
Globalization of Forced Labour(Brookfield: Ashgate Publishing, 1996);
Herbert S. Klein. The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the
Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978);
Esther Copley, History of Slavery, and Its Abolition (London: Houlston
and Stoneman, 1839; Detroit: Negro History Press, republished); Vincent
Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America
(New York: Vintage Books, 1983); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
(1944) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); John W.
Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum
South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Lerone Bennett, Jr.,
Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America (Fifth Edition, New
York: Penguin Books, 1984).
(5.) Mike Ngo phone interview (May 24, 2002).
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DYLAN RODRIGUEZ is an activist currently working as an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of
California, Riverside (Riverside, CA 92521; e-mail:
Dylan.Rodriguez@ucr.edu). He is a founding member of the Critical
Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex organizing committee
and is currently involved in an oral history project on the attempt to
unionize California prison labor.