The Prison Slave as Hegemony's

(Silent) Scandal

Frank B. Wilderson, III
FRANK B. WILDERSON, IILis 2 longtime activist and organizer against racism and
the priso

industrial complex. He spent five and one-half years in South Africa in
underground structures and as an elected official

the African National Congess
(ANC). He presently teaches at University of California at Irvine

“The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent)
Vol. 30, No. 2 (2003)

dal” fest appeared in Social Justice

Laout by 11l Will Edicions, June 2015

illwill-editions.cumblr.com
illvill@riseup.net
The Prison Slave As Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal

Frank B. Wilderson, 11
The Black experience in this country has been
a phenomenon without analog.
—Eugene Genovese
There is something organic to the black positionality that makes it essential to the
destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this state-
ment, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: there is
something organic to civil society that makes if essential to the destruction of the
black body. Blackness is a positionality of “absolute dereliction” (Fanon), aban-
donment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be
established, through hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of
civil society's many junior partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation,
are oxymorons.

In light of this, coalitions and social movements, even radical social movements
like the prison abolition movement, bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so
as to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of civl society, ultimately accom-
modate only the satiable demands and finite antagonisms of civil society’s junior
partners (i.c., immigrants, white women, and the working class), but foreclose
upon the insatiable demands and endless antagonisms of the prison slave and the
prison-slave-in-waiting. In short, whereas such coalitions and social movements
cannot be called the outright handmaidens of white supremacy, their thetorical
structures and political desire are underwritten by a supplemental anti-Blackness

In her autobiography, Assata Shakur's comments vacillate between being inter-
esting and insightful to painfully programmatic and *responsible.” The exposicory
method of conveyance accounts for this air of responsibility. However, toward the
end of the book, she accounts for coalition work by way of extended narrative as
opposed to exposition. We accompany her on one of Zayd Shakur's many Panther
projects with outside groups, work *dealing with white support groups who were
involved in raising bail for the Panther 21 members in jail” (Shakur, 1987: 224).
With no more than three words, her recollection becomes matter of fact and un-
filtered. She writes, I hated it.”

At the time, 1 felt that anything below 110th street was another country. All my activi-
ties were centered in Harlem and i almost never lefeit. Doing defense committee work
was defiicely not up my alley... i hated standing around while all these white people

asked me to explain myself, my cxistence, | became a master of the one-liner.
Her hatred of this work is bound up in her anticipation, fully realized, of all the
zonal violations to come when a white woman asks her if Zayd is her “panther
you know, is he your black cat?” and then runs her fingers through Assata’s hair to
cop a kinky feel. Her narrative anticipates these violations-to-come at the level of
the street, as well as at the level of the body.

Here is the moment in her life as a prison-slave-in-waiting, which is to say, a

moment as an ordinary Black person, when she finds herself among “friends’
abolitionists, at least partners in purpose, and yet she fels it necessary to adopt
the same muscular constriction, the same coiled anticipation, the same combative
“one-liners” that she will need to adopt just one year later to steel herself against
the encroachment of prison guards. The verisimilitude between Assatas well-
known police encounters, and her experiences in civil society's most nurturing
nook, the radical coalition, raises disturbing questions about political desire, Black
positionality, and hegemony as a modality of struggle

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon makes two moves with respect to civil society.
First, he locates its genuine manifestation in Europe — the motherland. Then,
with respect to the colony, he locates it only in the zone of the settler. This second
move is vital for our understanding of Black positionality in America and for un-
derstanding the, at bes, limitations of radical social movements in America. For
if we are to follow Fanon's analy

s, and the gestures toward this understanding
in some of the work of imprisoned intellectuals, then we have to come to grips
with the fact that, for Black people, civil society itself— rather than its abuses or
shortcomings — is a state of emergency:

For Fanon, civil society is predicated on the Manichacism of divided zones, op-
posed to each other *but not in service of a higher unity” (Fanon, 1968:38-39).
This is the basis of his later assertion that the two zones produce two different
“species,” between which *no conciliation is possible” (16id.). The phrase “not in
service of a higher unity” dismisses any kind of dialectical optimism for a future
synthesis.
In “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy,” Martinot and Sexton assert the pri-
macy of Fanon's Manichean zones (without the promise of higher unity), even in
the face of American integration facticity. Fanon's specific colonial context does
not share Martinot and Sexton's historical or national context. Common to both
texts, however, s the settler/native dynamic, the differential zoning, and the gra-
tuity (as opposed to the contingency) of violence that acerues to the blackened
position.
The dichotomy between white ethics [the discourse of civil society] and s irrclevance
to the violence of police profiling is not dialectical the two are incommensurzble
whenever one attempts o speat about the paradigm of policing, one is forced back into
a discussion of particular events—high-profile homicides and their relaed courtroom

batdes, for instance (Martinot and Seston, 2002: 6 emphasis dded).

Tt makes no difference that in the U.S. the “Kasbah” and the “European” zone
are laid one on top of the other. What is being asserted here is an isomorphic
schematic relation-the schematic interchangeability-between Fanon's settler soci-
ety and Martinot and Sexton's policing paradigm. For Fanon, it is the policeman
and soldier (not the discursive, or hegemonic, agents) of colonialism that make
one town white and the other Black. For Martinot and Sexton, this Manichean
delirium manifests itself by way o f the U.S. paradigm o f policing that (re)pro-
duces, repetitively, the inside/outside, the civil society/Black world, by virtue of
the difference between those bodies that do not magnetize bullets and those that
do. “Police impunity serves to distinguish between the racial itself and the else-
where that mandate si... the distinction between those whose human being is put
permanently in question and those for whom it goes without saying” (Ibid.: 8). In
such a paradigm, white people are, ipso facto, deputized in the face of Black peo-
ple, whether they know it (consciously) or not. Whiteness, then, and by extension
civil society, cannot be solely “represented” as some monumentalized coherence of
phallic signifiers, but must first be understood as a social formation of contem-
poraries who do not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of their construction
through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is manifested by the fact
that they are, if only by default, deputized against those who do magnetize bullets.
In short, white people are not simply “protected” by the police, they are—in their
very corporeality—the police
This ipso facto deputization of white people in the face of Black people accounts
for Fanon's materiality, and Martinot and Sexton's Manichean delirium in Amer-
ica. What remains to be addressed, however, is the way in which the political
contestation between civil society’s junior partners (i.e., workers, white women,
and immigrants), on the one hand, and white supremacist institutionality, on the
other hand, is produced by, and reproductive of, a supplemental anti- Blackness.
Put another way: How is the production and accumulation of junior partner social
capital dependent upon on an anti-Black rhetorical structure and a decomposed
Black body?

Any serious musing on the question of antagonistic identity formation - a for-
mation, the mass mobilization of which can precipitate a crisis in the institutions
and assumptive logic that undergird the United State of America — must come
to grips with the contradictions between the political demands of radical social
movements, such as the large prison abolition movement, which seeks to abolish
the prison-industrial complex, and the ideological structure that underwrites its
political desire. 1 contend that the positionality of Black subjectivity is at the heart
of those contradictions and that this unspoken desire is bound up with the politi-
cal limitations of several naturalized and uneritically accepted categories that have
their genesis mainly in the works of Antonio Gramsc, namely, work or labor, the
wage, exploitation, hegemony, and civil society. I wish to theorize the symptoms
of rage and resignation I hear in the words of George Jackson, when he boils
reform down to a single word, “fascism,” or in Assata’s brief declaration, “I hated
i, as well as in the Manichean delirium of Fanon, Martinot, and Sexton. Today,
the failure of radical social movements to embrace symptoms of all three gestures
is tantamount to the reproduction of an anti-Black politics that nonetheless rep-
resents itself as being in the service of the emancipation of the Black prison slave.

By examining the strategy and structure of the Black subject’s absence in, and
incommensurability with, the key categories of Gramscian theory, we come face
o face with three unsettling consequences:

(1) The Black American subject imposes radical incoherence upon the as-
sumptive logic of Gramscian discourse and on today’s coalition politics. In other
words, s/he implies a scandal.

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(2) The Black subject reveals the inability of social movements grounded in
Gramscian discourse to think of white supremacy (rather than capitalism) as the
base and thereby calls into question their claim to elaborate a comprehensive and
decisive antagonism. Stated another way, Gramscian discourse and coalition pol-
itics are indeed able to imagine the subject that transforms itself into a mass of
antagonistic identity formations, formations that can precipitate a crisis in wage
slavery, exploitation, and hegemony; but they are asleep at the wheel when asked
t0 provide enabling antagonisms toward unwaged slavery, despotism, and terror.
(3) W begin to see how Marsism suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety.
There is a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis, a saciety that does away
not with the category of worker, but with the imposition workers suffer under the
approach of variable capital. In other words, the mark of its conceptual ansiety
is in its desire to democratize work and thus help to keep in place and insure the
coherence of Reformation and Enlightenment foundational values of productivity
and progress. This scenario crowds out other postrevolutionary possibilities, i.c.,
idleness

The scandal, with which the Black subject position “threatens” Gramscian and
coalition discourse, is manifest in the Black subject’s incommensurability with, or
disarticulation of, Gramscian categories: work, progress, production, explotation,
hegemony, and historical self-awareness. Through what strategies does the Black
subject destabilize — emerge as the unthought, and thus the scandal of— histori-
cal materialism? How does the Black subject function within the “American desir-

ing machine” differently than the quintessential Gramscian subaltern, the worker?

Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent, a phenomenon that
is central to neither Gramsci nor Marx. According to Barrett (2002), something.
about the Black body in and of itself made it the repository of the violence that
was the slave trade. It would have been far easier and far more profitable to take
the white underclass from along the riverbanks of England and Western Europe
than to travel all the way to Africa for slaves.

The theoretical importance of emphasizing this in the early 21st century is two-
fold. First, capital was kick-started by approaching a particular body (a black
body) with diect relations of force, not by approaching a white body with variable

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capital. Thus, one could say that slavery is closer to capital's primal desire than is
exploitation. Itis a elation of terror as opposed to a relation of hegemony. Second,
today, late capital is imposing a renaissance of this original desire, the direct rela-
tion of force, the despotism of the unwaged relation. This renaissance of slavery,
i.e., the reconfiguration of the prison-industrial complex has, once again, as its
structuring metaphor and primary target the Black body.

The value of reintroducing the unthought category of the slave, by way of noting
the absence of the Black subject, lies in the Black subject’ potential for extending.
the demand placed on state/capital formations because its reintroduction into the
discourse expands the intensity of the antagonism. In other words, the positional-
ity of the slave makes a demand that is in excess of the demand made by the posi-
tionality of the worker. The worker demands that producrivity be fair and demo-
cratic (Gramsci's new hegemony, Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat,in a word,
socialism). In contrast, the slave demands that production stop, without recourse
toits ultimate democratization. Work is not an organic principle for the slave. The
absence of Black subjectivity from the erux of radical discourse is symptomatic of
the text’s inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of cap-
italism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the generative subject
that resolves late capital’s over-accumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body
of the 20th and 21 st centuries, do not reify the basic categories that structure
conflict within civil society; the categories of work and exploitation

Thus, the Black subject position in America represents an antagonism or demand
that cannot be satisfied through a transfer of ownership/organization of existing
rubrics. In contrast, the Gramscian subject, the worker, represents a demand that
can indeed be saisfied by way of a successful war of position, which brings about
the end of exploitation. The worker calls into question the legitimacy of produc-
tive practices, while the slave calls into question the legitimacy of productivity
itself. Thus, the insaiability of the slave demand upon existing structures means
that it cannot find its articulation within the modality of hegemony (influence,
leadership, consent). The Black body cannot give its consent because “generalized
trust,” the precondition for the solicitation of consent, “equals racialized white-
ness” (Barrett, 2002). Furthermore, as Orlando Patterson (1982) points out, slav-

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ery is natal alienation by way of social death, which is to say, a slave has no sym-
bolic currency or material labor power to exchange. A slave does not enter into
transaction of value (however asymmetical), but is subsumed by direct relations
of force. As such, a slave is an articulation of a despotic irrationality, whereas the
worker is an articulation of a symbolic rationality.

A metaphor comes into being through a violence that kills the thing such that the
concept might live. Gramscian discourse and coalition politics come to grips with
Americals structuring rationality

— what it calls capitalism, or political economy
— but not with its structuring irrationality, the anti-production of late capital,
and the hyper-discursive violence that first kills the Black subject, so that the con-
cept may be born. In other words, from the incoherence of Black death, America
generates the coherence of white life. This is important when thinking the Gram-
scian paradigm and their spiritual progenitors in the world of organizing in the
US. today, with their overvaluation of hegemony and civil society. Struggles over
hegemony are seldom, if ever, asignifying. At some point, they require coherence
and categories for the record, meaning they contain the seeds of anti- Blackness.

What does it mean to be positioned not as a positive term in the struggle for anti-
capitalist hegemony, i.e., a worker, but to be positioned in excess of hegemony,
t0 be a catalyst that disarticulates the rubric of hegemony, to be a scandal to its
assumptive, foundational logic, to threaten civil society's discursive integrity? In
White Writing, ]M. Coetzee (1988) examines the literature of Europeans who
encountered the South African Khoisan in the Cape between the 16th and 18th
centuries. The Europeans were faced with an “anthropological scandal”: a being
without (recognizable) customs, religion, medicine, dietary patterns, culinary hab-
its, sexual mores, means of agriculture, and most significantly, without character
(because, according to the literature, they did not work). Other Africans, like
the Xhosa who were agriculturalists, provided European discourse with enough
categories for the record, so that, through various strategies of articulation, they
could be known by textual projects that accompanied the colonial project. But
the Khoisan did not produce the necessary categories for the record, the play of
signifiers that would allow for sustainable semiotics.

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According to Coetzee, the coherence of European discourse depends upon two
structuring axes. A “Historical Axis” consists of codes distributed along the axis
of temporality and events, while the “Anthropological Axis” is an axis of cultural
codes. Tt mattered very little which codes on either axis a particular indigenous
community was perceived to possess, with possession the operative word, for these
codes act as a kind of mutually agreed-upon currency. What matters is that the
community has some play of difference along both axes, sufficient in number
to construct taxonomies that can be investigated, identified, and named by the
discourse. Without this, the discourse cannot go on. It is reinvigorated when an
unknown entity presents itself, but its anxiety reaches crisis proportions when the
entity remains unknown. Something unspeakable occurs. Not to possess a partic-
ular code along the Anthropological or Historical Axis is akin to lacking a gene
for brown hair or green eyes on an X or Y chromosome. Lacking a Historical or
Anthropological Axis is akin to the absence of the chromosome itself. The first
predicament aises the notion: What kind of human? The second predicament
brings into crisis the notion of the human itself.

Without the textual categories of dress, diet, medicine, crafts, physical appear-
ance, and most important, work, the Khoisan stood in refusal of the invitation to
become Anthropological Man. /he was the void in discourse that could only be
designated as idleness. Thus, the Khoisan's status within discourse was not that
of an opponent or an interlocutor, but rather of an unspeakable scandal. His/her
position within the discourse was one of disarticulation, for he/she did little or
nothing to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of the discourse. Just as the
Khoisan presented the discourse of the Cape with an anthropological scandal, so
the Black subject in the Western Hemisphere, the slave, presents Marxism and
American textul practice with a historical scandal

How s our incoherence in the face of the Historical Axis germane to our expe-
rience of being “a phenomenon without analog™ A sample list of codes mapped
out by an American subject’s historical axis might include rights or entitlements;
here even Native Americans provide categories for the record when one thinks of
how the Iroquois constitution, for example, becomes the U.S. constitution. Sover-
eignty is also included, whether a state is one the subject left behind, or as in the

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case of American Indians, one taken by force and dint of broken treaties. White
supremacy has made good use of the Indian subject’s positionality, one that forti-
fies and extends the interlocutory life of America as a coherent (albeit imperial)
idea because treaties are forms of articulation — discussions brokered between
two groups are presumed to possess the same category of historical currency, sov-
ereignty. The code of sovereignty can have a past and future history, if you will
excuse the oxymoron, when one considers that 150 Native American tribes have
applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for sovereign recognition so that they
might qualify for funds harvested from land stolen from them.! Immigration is
another code that maps the subject onto the American Historical Axis, with nar-
ratives of arrival based on collective volition and premeditated desire. Chicano
subject positions can fortify and extend the interlocutory life of America as an
idea because racial conflict can be articulated across the various contestations over
the legitimacy of arrival, immigration. Both whites and Latinos generate data for
this category.

Slavery is the great leveler of the Black subject’s positionality. The Black Ameri-
can subject does not generate historical categories of entitlement, sovereignty, and
immigration for the record. We are “off the map” with respect to the cartography
that charts civil society's semiotics; we have a past, but not a heritage. To the da-
ta-generating demands of the Historical Axis, we present a virtual blank, much
like that which the Khoisan presented to the Anthropological Axis. This places
us in a structurally impossible position, one that is outside the articulations of
hegemony. However, it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position
because—and this is key—our presence works back upon the grammar of hegemo-
ny and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject—even the most massacred
among them, Indians—is required to have analogs within the nation's structuring.
narrative, and the experience of one subject, upon whom the nation's order of
wealth was buil, is without analog, then that subject’s presence destabilizes all

other analogs.

Fanon (1968: 37) writes, *decolonization, which sets out to change the order of
the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.” If we take him at his
word, then we must accept that no other body functions in the Imaginary, the

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Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the
Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real,
for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous
violence through which civil society is possible: namely, those bodies for which
violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at
the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America generates no categories for
the chromosome of history, and no data for the categories of immigration or sov-
ereignty. It is an experience without analog — a past without a heritage. Blackness
is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for “whoever says
‘rape’ says Black” (Fanon), whoever says “prison” says Black, and whoever says
“AIDS” says Black (Sexton) — the “Negro is a phobogenic object” (Fanon).

Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic object, a past without a heritage,
the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this
realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or
worse, disavowal — not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolution-
ary movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement i to be neither social
democratic nor Marxist, in terms of structure of political desire, then it should
grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we
are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the “Negro” has been inviting.
whites, as well as civil society’s junior partners, to the dance of social death for
hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and
remain today — even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition
movement — invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political
desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black, meaning it will not dance
with death

Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. This
is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism, or
community control of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility
and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a
refusal to affirm, a “program of complete disorder.” One must embrace its disorder,
its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one’s polities are
t0 be underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire

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that underwrites one’s politics, then through what strategy of legitimation is the
word “prison” being linked to the word “abolition”> What are this movement'’s
lines of political accountability?

There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of
disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder
and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself. No one, for example, has ever
been known to say “gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or
maybe not come at all.” Yet few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and
elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness — and the state of po-
litical movements in the U.S. today is marked by this very Negrophobogenesis
“gee-whiz, if only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all.”
Perhaps there is something more terrifying about the joy of Black than there is
in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Nego). Perhaps colitions today
prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society — with hegemony as a
handy prophylactic, just in case. If, through this stasis or paralysis they try to do
the work of prison abolition, that work will fail, for it is always work from a po-
sition of coherence (i.e.,the worker) on fehalf 5fa position of incoherence of the
Black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the Left remain
blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain
coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as revolu-
tionary promises than as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms, simply
feeding our frustration.

Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demanding
a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage)
gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the Black
subject (whether a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the
disconfiguration of civil society. From the coherence of civil society, the Black
subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims Blackness
not as a positive value, but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of “ab-
solute dereliction.” It is a “scandal” that rends civil society asunder. Civil war,
then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. Itis a
Black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied
(via reform or reparation), but must nonetheless be pursued to the death
NOTES

1. White supremacy transmogrifies codes internal to Native American culture
for its own purposes. However, unlike immigrants and white women, the Native
American has no purchase as a junior partner in civil society. Space does not per-
mit us to fully discuss this here. Ward Churchill and others do explain how — un-
like civil society’s junior partners — genocide of the Indian, like the enslavement
of Blacks, is a precondition for the idea of America. It is a condition of possibility
upon which the idea of immigration can be narrat

ized. No web of analogy can
be spun between, on the one hand, the phenomenon of genocide and slavery and,
on the other hand, the phenomenon of access to institutionality and immigration.
Thus, although white supremacy appropriates Native American codes of sover-
eignty,it cannot solve the contradiction that, unlike civl society’s junior partners,
those codes are not imbricated with immigration and access.

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