#david marriott

What is the cell? The cell is where blackness is situated. It is situated there within prejudice leading to error. If the cell obviously refers to the endless circling of watchtowers up above and endlessly brutal exposures to power and violence from below, this is not because the cell cages being, but because black beingness is like living in a cell without a lock. We see, then, that the cell is where black beingness learns to adapt itself to constraints—paradigms, rationales—that decree that black life is, in a very specific way, a wrong that is almost categorial, whose principal aim is to offend or to commit offense (to the moral law, the state, and to God). It is not surprising, therefore, that the cell is where blackness finds itself obligated, where it is forced to adapt itself to rules, penalties, and conventions. The cell is where black beingness adapts itself to the carceral and where hands and feet, eyes and ears, buttocks and genitals are bound, as are affects and emotions. But in the most unlikely way—that is, without precedent—the cell is where black life also never stops: never stops experiencing itself as incarcerated and never stops testing the locks. The cell is where biopolitical life is no longer manifest in existence, but falls away entirely. [George] Jackson speaks here of a time that is without temporality, but a time that is also, quite explicitly, purely immanent, without words, world, or universality. It is not by chance that many of his letters struggle to express this without, or that many of the letters necessarily relapse into a ferocious opposition to it. Jackson’s theory of the cell is of a life denied existence, fundamentally under siege, wretched, and where beingness cannot be thought as merely alive, or truly alive, but as an enduring that is unendurable, that is, a life that can no longer endure the schism between its own impotence and the bonds that tie life to itself. Here, the meaning of temporal verbs and adverbs show a causality without effect, and one that expresses pure constriction itself.

What is vital to Fanon is that the myth of the Negro that organizes negrophobic identity appears to be needed: the imposition of a form on the nothingness lying at the seat of anxiety is not sufficient to render that anxiety tangible, or representable, but it is enough to bring into being its possibility as an appearance, whose form can then act as a reflection of the self rather than its radical destitution (witness in this respect Fanon’s emphasis on phobia as an attempt to give the void form as a representational possibility). Let us say that in the colony, negrophobia reveals obsessive ideas displaced along the lines of several associations and split between various Vorstellungen: the nègre is evil, filthy, dirty, cannibalistic, etc. Such would be the reason why the black object is overdetermined.

“Blackness is so fugitive, in other words, that it escapes even the concept that seeks to make sense of it. And as with fact/experience, Fanon pulls out the ontological rug from under the broader optimism/pessimism binary. “Fanonism begins,” Marriott writes, “at the point where both optimism and pessimism become impossible” (216). The question of sovereignty, moreover, gives us a glimpse into what Marriott’s distance from Afropessimism means concretely. Afropessimist critiques of Indigenous theory and struggles, for example, leverage the erroneous idea that sovereignty is reducible to its modern/western form. But as Fanonian scholars are quick to recognize that violence is qualitatively transformed in the hands of the colonized, so too sovereignty, which is not a singular thing, impervious to quality, content, or context. This is why Fanon himself continues to use the word, but also to resignify it as synonymous with the practical dignity of the oppressed (Wretched 139). While Marriott seems to perpetuate this view, we’re concerned less with the word than the thing, and his pivot from disarticulation to rearticulation, from abyss to invention, makes clear that we’re not operating on the terrain of pessimism. Navigating the turbulent straits between optimism and pessimism, Marriott concludes that “blackness can only find its ontological fulfillment by no longer being black—or by entering its own abyssal significance” (Whither Fanon? x). But this “self-oblivion” should not be understood as ceding to the parameters of the antiblack world, since blackness cannot simply melt into whiteness without revealing that the white world stands on feet of clay, utterly reliant on (anti)blackness for its meaning. This is what Fredric Jameson would call the “secret conceptual and even dialectical weakness” of all racial, and more broadly Manichaean, orders, the hidden strength of their apparently weak term (19). To obliterate blackness is to touch on an unpredictable chain reaction that, while not anchored in a solid thing, is always more than pure negativity as well—this is an abyss that remains “penetrated by dark potentialities” (Marriott, Whither Fanon? xix). By refusing the optimism/pessimism binary, and by walking the fine line between the negative and the positive, the abyss and black identity, Marriott thus leaves the reader with a far more dynamic picture than the irretrievably antiblack world of Afropessimism’s ontological straitjacket.”

The languages of extravagance and excess by which the idea of black life is segregated takes on a new emotional power in postbellum America. The idea of profligacy—whether social or subjective—makes of thriftiness a moral duty, in which the very notion of self-restraint is racially determined: the act of reining in, or better still, the act of self-repression, encodes a social hygiene whose sources are racial and, therefore, not natural. Hence, the failure of blacks to acquire the skills necessary for the accumulation of capital or money is the result of a specific kind of civic failure, according to which the bestowal of liberty in postbellum America vanishes beneath another desire that precedes it, and that establishes blackness as the point where “a general looseness of the passions” matches a “propensity to gratify and satiate every thirst.” Where does this discourse of bling bling come from? From various sources, each of which institutes race as a moral value, as ideology: for the white bourgeois and worker, from the nineteenth century to the present, blackness is a degraded form of being that cannot as such conserve itself; or, it is seen as an impoverished way of being that can only be put to work as a supplementary labor (for of course work is niggerdom), which means that it cannot profit from itself as capital. In all these readings, blackness is seen as both exorbitant and impoverished, both decadent and deliriously perverse. Its lack of restraint suggests both the collapse of capitalist values and a threat that puts an end to civic duty: the substitution of private consumption for collective duty is here linked to a more general anxiety about an entity driven to negate the very idea of accumulation—hence the extravagant excess of a being that is seen to come from a nihilistic, menacing, undeserving need to consume everything. So when [Alexis de] Tocqueville spoke of the virtues of thrift as “interest rightly understood,” the word “rightly” denotes the racial recognition of both a frugality that liberates and a black consumption that can only enslave. Desires and passions are “masters which it is necessary to contend with,” he continues, but the slave has “learned only to submit and obey.” Or again: if freedom is “the end [telos] of all just restraint,” excess can never be free, for whatever the cost to ethics and the state, freedom can, paradoxically, only be just when it freely constrains or inhibits itself. In the history of race in America, decadence is not only the effect of bourgeois notions of excess but also the effect of the perceived unconstraints of black being and desire. It is therefore not surprising perhaps that a black counterdiscourse emerges in which blacks are urged to “cultivate honesty, punctuality, propriety of conduct.” If to be rightfully bourgeois means that one must cultivate signs of righteous self-government, which are taken as a natural fact, the belief seems to be that blacks can only earn their rightful place in society by turning en masse to a market-led devotion of thrift: in these counterdiscourses, blackness is thus identified as an active, rather than docile, labor, whose gratification is derived from the subjugation to market values. What is new here is the idea of black utilitarianism, which [Booker T.] Washington and other writers introduced and described. In the field of such rhetorical labor, masculinity, conceived as the productive form, is contrasted to the feminine space of thrift, which is the duty of the one who consumes. Here in the spending of thrifts real black men work; they are not castrated sojourners in the marketplace of capital.

[…] what black poesis therefore promises is an irony that is always mistaken for stupidity or dishonesty. For this is an irony to which one can neither admit nor confess, but that one is, still, forced to bear witness with one’s hands tied and one’s mouth closed—or, indeed, that this soliloquy (to insist on the irony and to make clear the contradiction) occurs when one is not free, not released, and is so surrounded by malignity and contempt that one cannot tell apart what liberates from what condemns. And there is no distance between life and utter wretchedness. And no one who will set you free. And no one who will help you carry the infinite weight on your back.