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  • 标题:"Social truth" and imprisoned radical intellectuals.
  • 作者:Rodriguez, Dylan
  • 期刊名称:Social Justice
  • 印刷版ISSN:1043-1578
  • 出版年度:2003
  • 期号:June
  • 语种:English
  • 出版社:Crime and Social Justice Associates
  • 摘要: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.
  • 关键词:Imprisonment;Prisoners

"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).

REFERENCES

Chandler, Cynthia and Carol Kingery 2000 "Yell Real Loud: HIV-Positive Women Prisoners Challenge Constructions of Justice." Social Justice 27,3:150-157.

Copley, Esther 1839 A History of Slavery, and Its Abolition. London: Houlston and Stoneman.

Davis, Angela Y. 1998 "Race and Criminalization: Black Americans and the Punishment Industry." Joy James (ed.), The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Evans, Linda and Eve Goldberg 1998 The Prison-Industrial Complex and the Global Economy. San Francisco: AK Press.

Fanon, Frantz 1963 The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.

Foucault, Michel 1977 Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon Books.

Friedman, Lawrence 1993 Crime and Punishment in American History. New York: Basic Books.

Goldberg, David Theo 2000 "Surplus Value: The Political Economy of Prisons and Policing." Joy James (ed.), States of Confinement: Policing, Detention and Prisons. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Gomez, Nichol 2001 "Big Brother Is Watching." Peacekeeper (September).

Harding, Vincent 1981 There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. New York: Vintage Books.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 2000 Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Masters, Jarvis Jay 1997 Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row. Junction City: Padma Publishing.

Parenti, Christian 2000 Lockdown America. New York: Verso.

Rodriguez, Dylan 2001 "The 'Question' of Prison Praxis." The Problems of Resistance." Radical Philosophy Today, Vol. 2. Steve Martinot (ed.). Amherst: Humanity Books.

Rosenblum, Nina (director) 1989 Through the Wire. Documentary.

Sabo, Don, Terry A. Kupers, and Willie London (eds.) 2001 Prison Masculinities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Women's Positive Legal Action Network 1998 "Blind Eye to Justice HIV+ Women in California Prisons." Cynthia Leigh (director), produced by Cynthia Chandler.

Yee, Min S. 1973 The Melancholy History of Soledad Prison. New York: Harper's Magazine Press.

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.
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