#george jackson

"This is a huge nation dominated by the most reactionary and violent ruling class in the history of the world, where the majority of the people just simply cannot understand that they are existing on the misery and discomfort of the world. They have been hypnotized into believing that criticism of the expansionist policies of imperialism is really isolationist or injurious to both the U.S.A. and the world!"

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.