Thursday 25 July 2013

Contract Man - Homo Sacer Investigations III


1. Methodologies
2. The Supreme Court of Cocaine
3. Uncounted Time


1.  Methodologies

Pearson writes that ‘contracts’ were circulating on Newton since the early seventies – that would mean – shortly after his release from prison – when he had felt that odd urge that everything ‘start all over again’.   The most obvious question would be why were there contracts taken out against him?  And why just after the triumph of the Free Huey Newton Campaign – when he was unexpectedly freed?

Perhaps he was expressing nostalgia not for his judiciary ordeal, but for a previous relationship to the ‘law’ and consequently to the Party.  He claims in his autobiography that when he emerged from prison he found the Party in a “shambles”.  He set about re-organizing the party according to new ideas – perhaps developed whilst in prison – his ‘survival programs’.  Those involved with the party from that time saw his initiatives in another light – they say that he changed after prison. Bobby Seale speaks about the FBI’s COINTELPRO (counter intelligence program) working tirelessly to undermine the party.  J Edgar Hoover had identified the Black Panther Party as a most serious threat to national security.
COINTELPRO used various methods – psychological warfare, chemical warfare (encouraging drug consumption and trade among the blacks) – but with Newton, says Seale, they duped him into a methodological change.  “Huey got duped in on a small scale level to methodologically ruin the party.”  Seale doesn’t specify what this new methodology was – although he was certainly engaged in it himself for a while – when he ran for mayor of Oakland at the same time as Elaine Brown ran for city council.  He leaves no doubt though that this ‘methodological change’ was the work of “that woman” – Elaine Brown.  Cherchez la femme! He has decided to reveal this information – ‘not to destroy Huey’s character’ – but that people should know “the whole story”, because “half the story is the biggest lie”.  Bobby Seale, looking avuncular and wearing a baseball cap with a Panther logo, is one of many of Newton’s fellow party members shedding light on this “whole story”, appearing in the film All Power to the People! The Black Panther Party and Beyond…  The filmmaker Lee Lew-Lee is also a former Black Panther Party member – his film first aired in 1996.  Bobby Seale as co-founder was often approached with confidential reports from the rank and file.  “So many party members”, he says, “have literally told me they believe this that this woman was connected in some kind of way and got step by step piece by piece and got Huey hooked over into some notion that he could get more money behind the scenes if he step by step methodologically demised the Black Panther Party.”   The film cuts to a black and white clip of Huey Newton speaking in a private room of a generic kind, a map on one of the walls, a wood panelled built in desk and a half empty bookshelf behind him.  He seems to be outlining a party program of some sort – “We always wanted to represent the will of the people.  They are not interested in socialism at this time.  They think they can get their just deserts in this capitalist system. One day when the people democratically want to change the system to a socialist system – then the Party will be the first to have solidarity.”  Behind his carefully chosen words - one senses how he was deftly moving the party ‘piece by piece’ away from those revolutionary demands and attitudes, so intolerable for the authorities, towards the good causes/charity image of their ‘survival programs’ still adorned with the caveat ‘pending revolution’.  The necessary ‘purges’ of the party served his ambitions to be the ‘supreme servant of the people’ while any irregularities could always be blamed on COINTELPRO’s ‘war’ against the Black Panther Party.  Many members had the uneasy impression that he had already enlisted on the other side. 

When Newton travelled to China in 1971 accompanied by Elaine Brown and Robert Bay – his desire was to visit a people who had “triumphed in their own revolution” (Chairman Mao, Little Red Book, quoted in Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, New York, 2009, p. 348)  His experiences in China, as he wrote in his autobiography, “(…) reinforced my understanding of the revolutionary process (…)” (ibid., p. 353).  Quoting Mao again – he adds “if you want to know theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution”. (ibid.)  Had he already begun then the gradual incremental shifts away from the decidedly revolutionary original intentions and rhetoric of the Black Panther Party?

His flight to Cuba though in 1974 was sheer expediency – to avoid two trials – one for murder, the other for assault.  All the while the clandestine rackets were blossoming.  Bobby Seale exclaims – “When Huey told me in 1974 he wanted to take over the drug trade in Oakland – I said Huey the Party’s over!” (All Power to the People!, ibid.)  1974 was a significant year in illegal drug history - crack cocaine was born in the Bay Area.  In another extended interview from 1996 (online) with TVO – Bobby Seale once again dissects the ‘demising’ of the party. Elaine Brown was by nature an intriguant, a feminine Iago – in the fall of ‘73 she would whisper little lies in Huey’s ears – Servant, so and so has been talking about you disrespectfully.  Newton, who had begun to snort cocaine, pounced on a rank and file member and ‘beat the hell out of him’ – a whole herd of a hundred or so rank and file party members just left and so on…  By that time most of the chapters across the country had broken down.  The party had contracted back to its place of birth – Oakland, where Newton and his consort Elaine Brown reigned over the sole remaining branch and chapter.  The east coast chapters had already ‘defected’ from Newton’s ‘survival program’ concept of the Party – when it split between the Newton and Eldridge Cleaver faction – they had chosen to follow Cleaver.
But the “final demise” in 1973-1974, according to Bobby Seale, went “beyond COINTELPRO” – and he adds as an ironic aside “unless Huey Newton and Elaine Brown were working for COINTELPRO.”

Huey Newton’s favourite film was The Godfather – he ordered party members to watch it too.  He even started to dress in the style of the film – wearing a cape and a fedora and a three-piece suit.  When 36 years later CBS journalist Katie Kouric asks the presidential candidate Barack Obama “what is your favourite movie of all time?”  Obama answers: “Oh, I think it would have to be The Godfather. One and two.  Three not so much.  So--so--but that—that saga I love that movie.” (CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, September 23, 2008, online)  He especially liked the opening scene when Marlon Brando (the Godfather, the Mafia Don) reprimands someone for being “disrespectful” who now comes seeking a favor from him.  “I mean there’s this combination of old world gentility and you know ritual with this savagery underneath.  It’s all about family.” (ibid.) 

Time seems to stand still.   A mere shared taste in movies reveals a certain historical continuity or timeless node in the force field of political power, history is compressed synoptically.  On the other hand, who doesn’t like The Godfather?  But the clandestine underworld arm of the Black Panther Party was not revolutionary – otherwise any mafia would also have to be considered a revolutionary organization.

Pearson shows that there existed a direct relation between the ascendant pragmatic establishment oriented branch of the Black Panther Party in Oakland – engaging with the community, founding a school in a former church, running for mayor and city council, having black notables on the boards of their school and other committees, sitting themselves on an official urban renewal committee – and the expanding ‘black mafia’ around Newton and his “elite squad of enforcers”.  “Newton’s private army” was this elite squad of enforcers – his “Buddha Samurai” - mostly acting as his bodyguard or carrying out his orders such as brutal or fatal ‘disciplining’ of party members.  Their activities included extortion from the pimp cartel, local businessman (both black and white), own prostitution rackets, planned and spontaneous murders, siphoning off funds flowing into the party from the state of California, the federal government or from rich benefactors such as the Hollywood producer Bert Schneider to pay for an expensive life style or their legal costs. (see Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 248 ff.)  A member of Newton’s enforcer squad, Forbes nicknamed ‘the Fly’, justified his actions years later with the state of war, which had existed between the Black Panthers and the government.

In a conversation with Pearson Forbes reveals how much they identified with the government’s “state of exception” and claimed this prerogative for themselves: “They reasoned that the government engages in criminal acts, particularly outside of U.S. borders, to maintain the nation’s international hegemony.  So he and other members of the Black Panther squad of enforcers used similar reasoning while carrying out their activities, feeling that the Black Panthers were the undisputed vanguard of Black America, justified in carrying out anything that furthered “the cause” even if it had to be carried out against fellow African Americans.” (Pearson, ibid., p. 335)
Forbes had been on the hit-team sent out to eliminate Crystal Gray, a witness in Newton’s trial for the murder of the prostitute Kathleen Smith.  A journalist commented at the time that the unsuccessful assassins had imitated military hit-men in the way they dressed and the weapons they used.

 (One is reminded of Foucault’s early attempts to define ‘biopower’ in “Society must be Defended” – as a perpetual war, not a fixed legally codified sovereignty; the counter history of power is a race struggle, the war underlying society is always a race war.)

The double life or double strategy of Newton and Brown’s Black Panthers: the legit side and the clandestine mafia side are welded to one another (like Siamese twins), in floating distributions. One side feeds on the other, some organs must serve both. This is not an atypical process of how raw political and economic power is accumulated in the US –, it’s almost the American Way.  If you can demonstrate to other power factions that you master such a two-faced or double-bodied enterprise, it shows you are ripe to be accepted into the establishment.  This is not an internal contradiction – it is how power is structured.   A woman possibly from the BLA (Black Liberation Army), a fraction striving for an armed rebellion describes the pincer movement opposing them: “We were between a rock and a hard place.  Huey’s people were out to do us in and the government was out to kill us.” (All Power to the People!, ibid.)

What exactly is the difference between ‘the underworld’ and ‘the underground’?  Certainly they do intersect and overlap at sensitive conjunctures.  Essentially that is how the CIA or FBI operate – they are a clandestine wing of ‘legitimate’ government – accomplishing tasks in a manner not officially sanctioned – or just barely.  They occupy the permanent zone of a ‘state of exception’.   Probably no other group within the black movements of that time – realised this potential of ‘black power’ before the Black Panthers.  Or in other words – Newton’s faction, the pragmatic one, was the manipulated manipulator of this iron law of American power. 

The less pragmatic prison based faction, The Black Guerilla Family, loyal to the martyred George Jackson, eventually filled the contract against the power genius Newton.  

Bobby Seale departed in 1973 from the Party in a most harrowing fashion.  Allegedly after he argued with Newton about a film Newton wanted his Hollywood benefactor Bert Schneider to produce – Newton beat and viciously sodomized Seale with a bullwhip – which seems as if he were acting out an extreme version of the ‘skin search’ – the prison routine when a prisoner is moved from one prison or jail to another. Was Newton playing ‘the warden’?  Seale’s anus had to be surgically repaired (by a doctor loyal to the Party) – after which he went into hiding.  (see Pearson, ibid., p. 264 and Newton, ibid., p. 267)   

Elaine Brown became one of the most prominent figures in the party after Newton returned from prison.  When he fled two pending trials to Cuba –for the murder of the black prostitute Kathleen Smith in 1974 and the pistol-whipping of the black tailor Preston Callins  - he appointed her as chairman.  Another interviewee in the film All Power to the People! – a kind of post mortem of this period of insurgency in the United States – comments: “I had the distinct impression consistently from 1971 that Miss Elaine Brown was a high placed intelligence operative inside the Black Panther Party.”   He is not identified by name but appears to have a detailed knowledge and an analytical understanding of the structure of covert operations – its practices of psychological warfare and “mind control”.  He sits in front of a crowded book shelf wearing a camouflage type battle fatigue jacket, green T shirt underneath, his Afro style hair is parted in the middle and his large hooded slightly blood shot eyes stare into the camera with a weary look from beyond the grave (outre-tombe). His soft-spoken words cut like scalpels.  “She acknowledges in her own words in her book Taste of Power that in fact she had been educated, groomed, taught at the hands of a long time Central Intelligence Agency operative Jay Richard Kennedy, (one sees Kennedy’s portrait on the screen and other documents) who anyone can find out about in David Garrow’s book The FBI and Dr Martin Luther King.” (All Power to the People!, ibid.)    

It is not really classified information (readily available on the internet) – that Elaine Brown’s personal mentor and lover was the FBI/CIA informant Jay Richard Kennedy – before she was born out of the head of Zeus into the executive rank of the party.  Kennedy (born Samuel R. Solomonick) was a white music manager of black musicians in Los Angeles but he also sent memos to the CIA on black ‘subversive’ activity – especially the civil rights movement. He was reluctant to cooperate with the FBI – he considered it too local and domestic, not ‘government’ enough for his level of international concern.  He was vehemently convinced that Martin Luther King should be removed from the leadership of the civil rights movement “from within” (see David Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr, New York, pp. 139-144 and pp. 276-277)   By an odd coincidence Kennedy was the person to also ‘politicize’ and ‘radicalize’ Elaine Brown as she reports in her autobiography A Taste of Power –, teaching her about capitalism, communism and the civil rights movement. Her liaison (‘pivotal relationship’) with Kennedy ended and with the assassination of Martin Luther King acting as a catalyst, Brown joined the Black Panther Party.  

Kennedy is a classical figure of an informant, a ‘triple agent’.  Attracted to the Communist Party in the late thirties, he became circulation manager of the party newspaper The Daily Worker.  Repelled by the Hitler-Stalin pact, he turned into a violent anti-communist. Numerous metamorphoses later, including his name change from Solomonick to Kennedy, he entered the entertainment business – and had no qualms about being actively sympathetic to the civil rights movement and simultaneously informing on the dangers of communist infiltration of the movement to the CIA – especially by ‘Peking communists’.  A good informer must know how to fictionalize and entice his interlocutors – Kennedy drew on firsthand knowledge – the communist influence he probably meant was his former business partner and wife’s first husband the attorney Stanley Levinson, who was a close advisor of Martin Luther King. (Garrow, ibid.) 

While he was Harry Belafonte’s manager Kennedy forwarded aspersions about him to the CIA/FBI – that Belafonte was a double agent also “controlled by the Peking communists”. (see Andrew O’Hehir, “The Amazing American Journey of Harry Belafonte”, review of Sing Your Song, a documentary on Harry Belafonte, 13th January 2013, Salon, online)
Belafonte met Kennedy in the fifties (renowned as an intense era of witch-hunting Americans with communist leanings) through Kennedy’s wife, his therapist at Columbia University.  She recommended that Belafonte hire her husband as his manager.  Belafonte later deduced that both were CIA/FBI operatives – she was always “worming information” from him about Paul Robeson, a known communist.  Somehow informing on your own client seems almost self-destructive from a commercial business point of view – but an informer’s methodology of profits and profitability certainly transcends a simple cut of record sales.

Belafonte became suspicious of his manager, whom he saw at first as his “surrogate dad”.  He asked the left-wing lawyer Charlie Katz to investigate the Kennedys in his turn – Katz presented him with a version of Kennedy’s break with the communists in the thirties, which differs essentially from the political disenchantment described by Garrow. “Charlie’s story was, quite simply, mind-boggling.  The name Jay Richard Kennedy, he explained, was fake.  I was dealing with one Samuel Richard Solomonick, former treasurer for the American Communist party’s Chicago operation.  At some point, (…) Solomonick had absconded with a lot of the party’s money, gone south of the border, invested it, and gotten entangled in some financial fraud.  When the FBI had caught up with him on the fraud charge and learned of his past with the communist party, they’d given him a choice: go to jail or become a spy for the agency.  He’d chosen the latter.” Harry Belafonte, Michael Shnayerson, My Song, A Memoir of Art, Race and Defiance, Ebook, Edinburgh, 2012) 
Whatever version is less false – Kennedy’s run-in with the FBI south of the border could possibly explain why he was so determined to avoid them later when his CIA friend asked him to share his information about the civil rights movement with the FBI.  Or didn’t he want to talk to the FBI because he was already spying for them?  But both stories cannot really be true – the mark of a superior con-man is when at some points in his career his footprints just levitate in the void.     

Was the political education of Elaine Brown – an aspiring singer – Kennedy’s upside down inside out penance for calumniating Harry Belafonte or Martin Luther King?  At least one might surmise that Brown imported some of his worldviews and ‘methodology’ into the Black Panther Party. 

The unidentified ‘Man in Fatigues’: “John Stockwell, former station chief of the CIA in Angola said well I want to say this to you very clear that the Huey P Newton that people see today is a direct result of operations run by the Central Intelligence Agency to insure that he will turn out the way that he is.”  All the while he is speaking - in quick succession – the ‘man in fatigues’ in colour, his voice-over continues but the image is of a silent black and white clip of a white man in a business suit speaking in front of a bookcase, cut to ‘man in fatigues’ again, then an excerpt from the clip of Newton in his den, slowly pushed into the background by a cover page of a journal bearing the title - “CIA Psychological Warfare Operations, Case Studies, Chile, Jamaica” by Fred Landis – Newton’s face shines through the printed letters.  Following this eerie sequence – the clip of Newton resumes – but he is no longer speaking – he is entering a Cadillac limousine with a woman and others in a car park – the woman appears to be Elaine Brown, a huge man stands guard as they enter the car, closes the door after them.  The Cadillac pulls out into traffic. Newton and Brown are sitting in the backseat.  Everything seems to be in slow motion, as if underwater – the mood is funereal – as if they are riding along in their own hearse.  Through the dark tinted windows you see the white flash of disembodied teeth – a spectral image of a Cheshire cat?
The film’s narrator comments:  “Huey P. Newton was never the same. He eventually became Dr Huey Newton PhD.  He eventually became a crackhead.  And eventually he was assassinated in Oakland in 1989.” (All Power to the People!, ibid.)   

The first law of theatre psychology is nothing is true which is not performed for an audience.  The opposite of theatre psychology is secret psychology – or life without an audience.  The greater the secret parts in a life, the less substantial is their existence.  When one’s secrets become a secret even for one’s self – one is on the verge of disappearance.  If though you share your secrets only with a public of fellow conspirators, confederates – or your audience is otherwise too small and non-fluctuating, as in a Sadeian closed society – you wear out your audience.  Again your own existence is in peril.      

One contract taken out on Newton is officially documented.  Not necessarily the one, which reached him finally in his old neighbourhood in the night of August 21st – August 22nd 1989.  But this particular contract is of note – at a press conference explaining why Newton had jumped bail and fled the country to Cuba, his defense attorney Charles Garry played a recording of a phone call in which Oakland police chief Charles Gain warns Newton that a 10,000 dollar contract had been taken out on his life (it sounds almost like a life insurance policy).

Oakland pimps took out the contract, according to Garry, afraid that Newton was about to stamp out prostitution in Oakland (was that a euphemism for the murder of one prostitute?).  But as Pearson explains, the recording was highly edited - the contract was already a year old at that time (1974) – and it was a reaction to Newton’s own extortion racket.  One wonders why Newton’s old adversary the police chief should have become so protective of Newton’s life – given the history of the Black Panthers in Oakland – not to forget the shooting of Officer Frey.   Newton had been on trial for his murder not so long ago. The recording though proves that Huey Newton would have known that he was a ‘contract man’ as early as 1973 – at the latest.  He was altered in at least one respect – he had changed from a revolutionary ‘streetcorner man’ to a ‘contract man’ –  entre chien et loup.   He would thereafter flicker nervously between the domestic obedience of a bloodhound and the wildness of a hunted wolf-man.








2.  The Supreme Court of Cocaine

In a brief text entitled “The Theme of the Traitor and The Hero” Borges imagines a revolutionary strategy, which must remain forever unnamed.  For to properly name it would be to render it impotent.  It is a strategy that must never appear as such – yet it is perhaps the most collective action of all revolutionary praxis.   And as Balibar writes – how could one call any action, which is not collective – resistance? But on the other hand, says Fanon, amongst the colonised peoples – and Newton originally depicted black people in the US as such an oppressed colony – the secret is also a matter of the collective.  This secret though is founded exclusively on voodoo and magic.  Does that mean that any resistance must also be at least part magic?

The strategy in Borges’ story is the elimination of a leader who has betrayed the revolution, but whose mythical value in posterity must be preserved for the movement.  His death must appear as ‘martyrdom’ or ‘revolutionary suicide’ (Huey Newton), a logical but fatal consequence of a life devoted to the movement, to the people, to the revolution; whilst in actuality (behind their backs) his executioners are carrying out ‘revolutionary justice’ – his death sentence.
He must testify for and against himself at the same time – in death.  Would one also call this sort of strategy, action – ‘thanatopolitics’ of the revolution?  But the execution is remarkable in other ways – the traitor-hero has signed his own execution order; the form of his execution, its details and style, borrows from classical literary sources; it is a spectacle enacted by the whole community.

Borges’ sketch of a plot for a story to be written some day - the mass staging of the execution of the traitor-hero from within made to appear as an assassination from without - possesses a certain 19th century innocence in its dramaturgy.  He was the poet of the traitor – as much or more so than Genet.  Borges wrote about nothing else – in the end the criminal you go to meet is yourself.  Treason weighs so lightly when carried by the hero.  The traitor-hero’s death is both a reprisal for his treason and prologue for the coming legend – craved by the movement he led and betrayed – no legend without its heroic flaws.  And more than that – the traitor-hero assists in his own assassination-execution.    

Nothing is tainted by commerce, not even the traitor’s misdeeds – no opiates seducing with the ‘taste of the infinite’, no excessive sexual appetites, the 20th century extremes of la part maudite are most distant.  The story takes place before the advent of a Baudelairean sensibility – despite Borges’ predilection for a rather stodgy English literature – even Coleridge and de Quincey cannot violate the chastity of these ‘tenacious’ movements of national liberation and their traitor-heros.  The staged murder of the glorious leader is also unusual in its timing – on the eve of a victorious revolution – another moment of unreality for later generations.

Yet despite Newton’s allures and sartorial tastes of a Mafia don, noted by the friend of his later years Robert Trivors,  (or perhaps because of it) a nostalgia for a Sunday School cleanness resembling Borges’ superannuated modesty pervades the orgiastic violence of his reign.  Caligula longing for the purity of Cato…  Perhaps this is the purgative fire at the heart of the drug cocaine itself.  The ‘hell-screen’.

COINTELPRO’s aim was expressly to prevent the rise of a ‘black messiah’ – Was Newton a proverbial ‘false messiah’ – the FBI’s Messiah?  (Although he claimed to reject the role of ‘idol’ he says people had thrust upon him.)  You can’t just prevent the rise of a black messiah by assassinating or causing or provoking the assassination of all the true messiahs like Malcolm X (1965), Martin Luther King (1968), Fred Hampton (1969), George Jackson (1971) – you need an ersatz messiah (or pied piper) – to lead the people away from the revolution – because for blacks like all oppressed people (and what people is not oppressed?) the habit to long for a Messiah and to be ready at any minute to follow him is in their blood or culture.  You could never wipe out that expectation.  But as Hegel writes in the Preface to Phenomenology of Spirit – also the False – is no longer False as a moment of truth – especially the ‘power of the false’.   Or was Huey Newton – post 1970 – just a ‘Stepford wife’?

Whatever the hero’s transgressions are, they become messianic forebodings of the death of law.  Apostasy becomes the messianic climate.   His tyrannical ways – the prelude to the coming of the black messiah (whose arrival the FBI so feared, tried so hard to undermine) when all sorts of seeming transgressive behaviour takes place precisely because the messianic epoch has dawned.  Newton’s murderous rages, his violence, extravagant life style, sexual rampages are proof of his being the chosen one, the genius of blackness.

His first addiction was literature – the word   but before that the ‘rhetoric’ of survival, the wit and talk one needs to impress the ‘brothers on the block’ their games of 'capping' and 'dozens'.   Was this perhaps a relic of Africa?

When the environment is bent on killing you – as is the case for homo sacer – can he still resist – even if only with words?  But words can be more than just words – as Bolaño writes in The Savage Detectives of his main protagonist Belano – seemingly lost on an indefinite journey in Africa.  “He’s picked up the lingo, I could tell that right away, the language of a country (Angola) where life was worth nothing and talk – along with money – was ultimately the key to everything.” (Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, New York, 2007, p. 500)    1.  What is homo sacer ‘worth’ in a place/country where life in general is “worth nothing”?  2.  The reverence for the good talk (rap) is deeply African.  Huey Newton was a conscious Afro-American.  Talk (like football?) is almost worth more than life.

Fiction is the medium of his life and actions in and out of prison – his life was a weave of lies and cover-ups – of necessity as he had to constantly ‘prove’ himself in court cases.   He had a permanent need to ‘beat raps’ – especially murder raps which could have led him more than once to the gas chamber.  Hence his ability to argue – to master the rhetorical sophistic skills of argumentation and persuasion was certainly essential to his physical survival. 

Words are immaterial yet powerful.  Not just the unconscious is structured like a language as Lacan says, so is the immortal soul.

As he reeled towards his death on that fatal night through the run-down streets of his old Oakland territory – shedding the last vestiges of his supreme commandership – Newton was dressed in the symbolic equivalent of a loincloth - like ‘Emperor Jones’ whose flight from the avenging ‘bush niggers’ leaves his blue gold and red emperor’s uniform in tattered faded rags. The scene of his death took place in those streets where he first started organizing poor blacks and the ‘brothers on the block’.   His crack habit had led him back to his beginning.

Where was the devious immateriality of words, the bracing fiction of Newton’s life?  Did he think again of K– who just before his execution wanted his trial to begin all over again?  He would also have an appointment with two ‘actors’, - people who knew him would be nearby but no one would offer him protection.  Kafka’s stone quarry on the outskirts of town has become the Oakland block of abandoned derelict houses, broken pavement – the house overlooking the quarry with its tiny figure at the window – his companion’s Willi Payne.  And why do they come for him now – the actors sent by that hidden court, a revolutionary court?  On so many occasions he had successfully outwitted the state legal apparatus, he was a champion of hung juries and acquittals – “Judges and juries kept granting him special dispensations.”  The state deputy attorney general Charles Kirk said of Newton: “The…guy’s led a charmed life.  He keeps evading accountability.” (Pearson, ibid., pp. 301-302)

He seemed almost immune to the official bodies of ‘white’ law.  But he could not flee that other court – especially because it was also the court of crack cocaine – and he was their client.  The cocaine dealers were identical with the rival party of the late George Jackson - The Black Guerilla Family who had scores to settle with him.  Cocaine and revolution had become inseparable – a revolution of ghosts was haunting him in the form of crack cocaine. 







A final wasteland loomed – one perhaps Newton already foresaw in his favorite poem, learned by heart, Ozymandias by Shelley, a poet whose cascading tones resonated with the fervour of the post Napoleonic wars of liberation of Borges’ tale – still audible in the desert prose of T.E. Lawrence:
 “(…) And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!”
Nothing besides remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.” (quoted in Revolutionary Suicide, ibid., p. 34)  Or did the poem he had carried around with him in his memory lead him like a divining rod to that spot?

Willie Payne, Newton’s friend with whom he smoked crack cocaine in the hours before his death acted like Crito – he tries to persuade Newton to flee – who seemed to expect that he would get killed that night.  Everyone seemed to expect that event on that night.  Someone had come earlier while Newton and Payne were holding an impromptu crack party with neighbors, relaying the sinister message – “there are people looking for Huey”.  Everyone melted away.  Payne wanted to barricade his door, so that Newton would have time to merge with the crowds of commuters hurrying to the underground at 5 in the morning.  But Newton – like Socrates – refused.  Had Newton (here more like Borges’ Irish traitor-hero Kilpatrick) agreed to his execution as a punishment for uncounted undisclosed fratricidal betrayals and the form of it was to be ‘platonic’ – a ‘platonic suicide’ (not a revolutionary one) – as the vehicle for separating the bodily dross from the immortal imperishable soul of the Black Panthers, their glorious leader and their ‘revolution’?  But his demise would not have been only platonic, its invisible transcendental  ‘aesthetic’ was rather Euclidian – the night had been a haphazard tracing of a right triangle between the friend’s house and two ‘crack houses’ – on the hypotenuse of which at the ‘golden proportion’ (phi) Newton came to a standstill. 

His last words are known to have been “You can kill my body, but you can’t kill my soul.  My soul will live forever!”  To whom would he have said that – other than to his murderer, the only witness to these last words?  No one else was around on that night – except the murderer’s friend.  Can one believe a murderer?  Did he play the role quite spontaneously of Socrates’ disciples – who faithfully recorded his final arguments for the immortality and indestructibility of the soul?  But then the disciples were not the murderers of Socrates – they were the companions of his last days.  Would the assassin have taken the time in the midst of a hit to listen carefully to the victim’s last words – just before he shot him twice in the face?  One knows he was so nervous he broke his own gun in a preliminary ‘pistol whipping’ of Newton (one of Newton’s own favourite methods of punishment), so that he had to run to his friend and borrow his friend’s gun for the shooting itself.  Newton waited mesmerized for him to return – rearmed.   He didn’t need a ‘silver bullet’ to kill the fallen idol Huey Newton.

Newton had spoken similar elevated words before – especially about George Jackson’s death – the killer Tyrone Robinson was a member of the organization founded by Jackson in prison – the Black Guerilla Family.  He was also a crack-cocaine dealer.  Newton was tarnished with the suspicion that he had abandoned Jackson in prison – a leader as forceful as himself whom he feared as a rival – and was somehow responsible for his death by not aiding his planned escape from prison.  Members of the prison based BGF believed this theory all the more – when they learned that a few days before the breakout attempt George Jackson had written a new will bequeathing all his royalties from Soledad Brothers and his rich legal defense fund to the Black Panther Party.  (Pearson, ibid., pp. 254-255) Was it just a coincidence that Newton’s contract was completed on the night of August 21st to August 22nd – and that George Jackson was shot and killed in San Quentin prison on August 21st seventeen years earlier?

But even if the killer was from Jackson’s organization, does that mean that the Black Guerilla Family took out the contract?  The ‘contract’ is so free floating – it is almost a virgin birth – or it is so fleeting – when ripe it drops to the ground like dead moths from a screen. 

Newton’s last words have another uncanny precedence – 30 years prior to his death Genet’s play The Blacks premiered in Paris.  The governor, a courtier of the Queen’s court  – a black actor with a white mask, just barely covering his black skin – threatens the assembled troupe of rebellious blacks with the consequences of his demise.  He reads from a crumpled piece of paper: “(…) if I should fall, pierced by your arrows, you must still beware.  You will experience my resurrection.  (with thunderous voice) My corpse will stay on the ground, but my soul and my body will rise in the air.” (Jean Genet, Die Neger, in Alle Dramen, Hamburg, 1982,  p. 348 – author’s translation sm)  The inversion in Genet’s scene unmasks the irony of Newton’s last stand – it is not the revolutionary hero who threatens with his own immortality.  It is the mask of hegemonic power.  If Newton had been recognized as a collaborator, a traitor-hero – at least believed to be one by the powers of the ‘contract’ – then his final words ‘my soul will live forever’ promises them the immortality, indestructibility of sovereign power.  The passage is so vital for the play – the governor repeats the gesture a second time – taking out his script – reading out his ‘last words’ – “(…) you will see them (my body and soul) and you will die of fright.  Those are the means I have chosen to defeat you and to purify the earth from your shadows.” (ibid, p. 408)
If Newton knew Genet’s The Balcony – isn’t it just as likely that he knew The Blacks, perhaps saw it on stage?  Or heard those other prophetic oracular lines:  Village, one of the male rebel blacks shows Vertu, a female black insurgent his revolver.  Vertu wonders where it all will lead.  “And finally – imagine – it will go on for a long time.  These corpses, that are found at daybreak – and even in broad daylight -, in gruesome corners and positions.  One day they’ll find out everything.  One has to think about it, that a betrayal is possible.”  Neige another female black rebel asks: “What do you want to say by that?”  Vertu answers: “That a black is capable of selling another black.”  (ibid., p. 354)  Neige wants no part of that – “you’re speaking of yourself, madam.” (ibid.)   Vertu sees something inside herself – but something else which she calls the ‘temptation of the whites’ – but is that temptation not also inside?

The contract is also a sale – the sale of another life, or death. The ‘contract man’ is an offspring of the Faustian contract, an element of its genealogy.  But the person does not have, he is a contract – a contract is made about him – without his signature.  Does anyone sign this sort of contract?  Or is the act the only signature?  Does the history or legacy of slavery make it easier rather than harder to take out a contract on someone?  The selling of another human, in this case not his life, but his death – his living death, as he waits for his contractor.  Where and how does the contractor collect his fee?

Newton’s contracts were black.  As black as he was.  But the contract is also as blind as justice – anyone can pick it up and carry out the sentence.  Newton’s killer was given 32 years in prison as his reward for fulfilling the contract.  








3.  Uncounted Time

The contract is not just the delivering of a service.  The justice of a contract – or contract-justice includes or presupposes a certain duration – the ‘death row’ of the contract is temporal – the waiting, sensing how it circles around you, moves towards you, backs away again – all that is the time of the contract – a temporal object.  A contract needs time – is time.  As such the contract is most like a state of war – as defined by Hobbes – the war of all against all.  The war is in a “tract of time” – the state of war is not non-stop raging violence – it is the potential of war, a disposition to it at any moment.  That is the state of war – or the state of the contract.  Hobbes compares it to foul weather (thinking of England) – weather is not just a day of rain or even a couple of days – it is the expectation at any moment of meteorological disaster – floods, earthquakes, tsunami etc.  So that no time is free of it.  Waiting in the intervals is as much a state of war of all against all – as when the battering rams are bursting through the palace gates.  The same applies to the contract – if it were to be fulfilled immediately after being ‘taken out’ – it would lose its character of ‘justice’ in that other court.  Waiting for the execution is part of the execution.  The whole rite de passage of death row – is the spatialized time of ‘living death’ – but would one say that the time a condemned prisoner is waiting for his execution – is one in which ‘nothing’ is happening – just because he isn’t dead yet? 

The waiting time is also the time of ‘pure means’.  First the contract – it waits too – then the means.  Unlike in a formal judiciary or penal system – the means of execution – both the manner of ending life and the agency in charge of it - are not predetermined.  Any means are allowed.  They could even be accidental.   Whatever rises in the world from the time the contract is launched can be its means – even if the first contract withers – it is a regenerating organism – the contract ‘rolls over’ like a fixed deposit until it is withdrawn or redeemed.  The ‘New’ favours the contract.  In the 17-18 years from the taking out of the first contract to the eventual fulfilling of perhaps another – the uniquely tailored means for its ‘redemption’ came into existence.  Crack cocaine was invented, Newton became addicted to it, the Black Guerilla Family, his mortal enemies, started dealing it.  The later unforeseen events ‘cause’ the earlier.    

The object of the contract waits in an inanimate sort of way – but the contract is waiting too.  It is more alive than the object.  The contract is growing (not contracting) towards its blossoming – when it merges with its object.  Their union is the moment of signature – the contract signs itself.  The corpse, the  body is its flower and self-generated signature.

Taking out a contract is like putting a seed in the ground.  Or many seeds.  The contract originator(s) or his sub-contractors may broadcast their seeds, contracts over a larger or narrower ground.  A contract is organic – not normal like the law.  It resembles more the exception – in Schmitt’s sense.  The exception like the contract is ‘real life’ – the law is a mechanism, but “In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.” (Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, Cambridge, 1985, p. 15)  Newton was seduced by the mechanism of the law, by ‘the legal’ – more than by ‘the political’.  Perhaps that was his ‘déformation professionnelle’, his blind spot  – as a habitué of the courts, police and prison system.  He overestimated the totality of law, underestimating the exception: the power of chaos – the zone of life in excess of the legal norm – to disrupt the hegemony of law.  Negligent of the political – he misread the ‘will of the people’ – this ‘will’ is pre-legal, pre-contractual in the sense of the ‘social contract’.
“There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos.  For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist (…)” (Schmitt, ibid.)
Bobby Seale said of him – “Huey was in that vein of thinking of understanding the whole legal ramifications.”  His original credo had been – “armed with a gun and the knowledge of the law.”   The limits of his world were the limits of his language, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, and his language was legal.  Was not his ‘charmed life’ solid proof of the old Latin proverb quod non est in actis non est in mundo – what does not exist in the records, does not exist in the world?

Newton became oblivious to the ‘anomic zone’ – beyond the juridical – where paradoxically the contract acquires its own ‘illegal’ legitimacy.  The contract opens a ‘clearing’, (Lichtung – as in Heidegger’s forest clearing of Being) of uncounted time – the anomic zone of the Dealer and his Client – the ‘magical’ suspended space of rhetoric captured with great exactitude in Bernard-Marie Koltès’ In the Solitude of Cotton Fields.   This zone is not where homo sacer is indefinitely abandoned by the law – as in Agamben’s transcendental process without a process (Kant) – but where the ‘contract man’ is magnetically drawn by the ‘sirens’ of the contract to a location where the contract – an absolute process without a subject (Hegel) – has fashioned its sanctuary of ‘pure means’.   

Unmindful of this nearby abyss:
Newton writes: They had a law for everything.
Not everything.  Not for the contract.




© Shannee Marks, July 2013





Saturday 20 July 2013

Contract Man - Homo Sacer Investigations II


1.  ‘Infamy’ in the Americas 
2.  Black Rites


1.  ‘Infamy’ in the Americas

For some obscure reason Deleuze and Guattari were very jealous of Borges – or they appear to bear him some kind of grudge – claiming he ruined, “botched” at least two books – only the titles were good – A Universal History of Infamy and The Book of Imaginary Beings.  They reprimand him twice almost in the same words: “Everything is infamy, but Borges botched his history of universal infamy.  He should have distinguished between the great realm of deceptions and the great realm of betrayals.  And also between the various figures of betrayals.” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, London, 2004, p. 138) Or: “Jorge Luis Borges, an author renowned for his excess of culture, botched at least two books, only the titles of which are nice: first, A Universal History of Infamy, because he did not see the sorcerer’s fundamental distinction between deception and treason (…)” (ibid., p. 266)
Deleuze and Guattari imply that the phenomena of betrayal and deception – in themselves so ambiguous, so volatile, so chimeric – could be clearly differentiated.  Even Genet for whom treason belonged to the realm of religious transfiguration must concede through his character of Carmen in The Balcony – “One never knows whom one betrays – not even if one has betrayed.”

Leaving aside the phenomenon that some fidelities can have more terrible consequences than betrayals – why should Borges have written a book that Deleuze and Guattari think he should have written – or would have written in his stead had they had the good fortune to be Borges?  Borges was not writing a taxonomy or encyclopaedic treatment of betrayal or deception – he was if anything producing “pure appearance” – the opposite of all substantiality, essence, phyla and kingdoms – his betrayals were only literary – “falsifying and distorting stories” for his own amusement and possibly a reader’s – ‘mon hypocrite lecteur’.  He is a counterfeiter of stories, even of stories of betrayal.
The ruse (metis) is in the text itself – the conscious and unconscious ruse.  Of course as a falsifier Borges can also bear false witness to himself. (Metis is the characteristic associated with Ulysses – even polymetis.)  His stance is similar to the image of Hegel ‘the impostor’ conjured up by Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster.
As Borges is a counterfeiter of stories, Hegel (according to Blanchot) is a counterfeiter of truth.  “(…) – the death of reading, the death of writing – which leaves Hegel living: the living travesty of completed Meaning.  (Hegel the impostor: this is what makes him invincible, mad with his seriousness, counterfeiter of Truth: ‘putting one over’ to the point of becoming, all unbeknownst to him, master of irony…) (Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 79 quoted in Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle, Cambridge/Oxford, 1992, p. 4)

Borges declares his intentions quite explicitly in a preface to A Universal Book of Infamy: “The theologians of the Great Vehicle point out that the essence of the universe is emptiness.  Insofar as they refer to the particle of the universe which is this book, they are entirely right.  Scaffolds and pirates populate it, and the word ‘infamy’ in the title is thunderous, but behind the sound and fury is nothing.” (A Universal Book of Infamy, London, 1975, p. 12) Deleuze and Guattari like the title the most – or only the title – they were fooled by the sound of thunderous nothing.  Borges’ writing inhabits another plane – a plateau without depth.  Perhaps for this reason so eminently suited to divining and perpetrating betrayals and deceptions.  The authors Deleuze and Guattari have been successfully duped into thinking that Borges’ stories have a profundity of soundings – but this is mere illusion – a betrayal of depth.  “The book is no more than appearance, than a surface of images; for that very reason, it may prove enjoyable.” (ibid.)  Borges is simply describing the sort of book that Deleuze and Guattari would like to think they have written – he exercises that liberty of the author they so aptly circumscribe in their opening pages: “A book has neither object nor subject: it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.  To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.” (Deleuze and Guattari, ibid., p. 4)  And yet Deleuze and Guattari would force Borges – if the book were not to be a ‘botched’ one – to stick to his ‘subject’ – the nice title – and make sure that he produces an ‘exhaustive’ catalogue of all possible variations of the theme.  Adorno mocked such writers who imagine it is their duty to always start from “Adam and Eve”.  They had no understanding of the ‘essay’ – it starts anywhere and finishes nowhere.  In principle, Deleuze and Guattari even allow for such mapless writing – a book is “unattributable” whilst still “attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity.” (ibid.)  And even if Borges would have said nothing more about infamy than what resounds in his title – he did so with such sorcery, that Deleuze and Guattari are still scavenging for clues as to its whereabouts.

Besides the tales of infamy are not just ‘about’ treason – how to classify the story of the 47 loyal retainers – a fable of supreme vengeance – and fidelity beyond mere individual valour.  The retainers avenge their master who was condemned to commit hara-kiri because he aimed a grazing blow to the head of the imperial master of etiquette.  The enemy-villain – the infamous Kôtsuké no Suké himself is neither a deceiver nor a traitor – merely a courtier, a rude master of etiquette who insulted the unfortunate lord of the castle, whilst on an official visit to instruct the lord on how to receive the imperial envoy. His elevated position allowed him to indulge his greed and cruelty to an extreme degree.  The loyalty of the retainers verges on the supernatural – especially their pact of vengeance.  Finally after a year of preparation and the ‘simulation of infamy’ (shows of disloyalty to the memory of the dead master), the retainers march on the castle of the master of etiquette.  They slaughter most of his household – but he is nowhere to be found.  They notice that his bed is still warm and look down into a gloomy courtyard where a man in a nightshirt stands with his sword in a trembling hand.  He is too cowardly to commit hara-kiri when the retainers offer him this honour – so “as the day dawned, they are forced to cut his throat.” (Borges, ibid, p. 75)
Borges addresses the reader and himself as those who are not loyal, who will always drift off into some kind of betrayal – treason is the normal lot for most of us.  The story for us has no end because the retainers’ inimitable loyalty betrays us, the disloyal majority. 





Borges’ history of infamy is far more complicated than mere ‘realms of deception’ and ‘realms of treason’ – (insofar as one can speak of a type) his figures belong more to the type of the ‘desperado’, infamous in the pursuit of a dubious ‘respectability’ – a character more familiar to the Americas than in Europe. The desperado himself has infinite varieties – the impostor, the con-man, the hustler, the horse thief, the card shark, the pool shark, the Bible salesman, the preacher, the hustler’s manager, the pimp etc.  
For Deleuze and Guatarri treason and deception always end up either in a state apparatus or a ‘war machine’ – as they demonstrate on the next page – even Richard the Third their ultimate example of an “absolute traitor”, one of Shakespeare’s most anomalous characters – “the traitor springing from the great nomads and their secrecy” – whose secret project infinitely surpasses the conquest of power – all he finally is said to want is “to return the war machine both to the fragile State and pacified couples.” (ibid., p. 139)

How much more perverse and polytropic than Richard the Third is Borges’ character Lazarus Morell – despite even more humble origins – sprung from poor white stock out of the rotting bayous in the alluvial fish graveyards around the dead waters of the Mississippi – who devises an ingenious ‘philanthropic’ scheme to resell black slaves after enticing them to run away from their masters.  The blacks were promised freedom and cash after running away a second time.  Of course this does not happen - the runaway slave is eventually consigned to the Mississippi.  Morell’s nemesis – a nephew of a plantation owner, who had many slaves ‘emancipated’ in this fashion, poses as a ‘confederate’ of Morell (he becomes renowned for his vicious and cruel ways) and exposes his scam.  Morell manages to escape arrest even as the police surround his town house in New Orleans – and whilst riding the horse and wearing the good boots of a man he has just murdered on his way to Natchez  – he decides to (truly) lead a rebellion of the blacks against the whites and conquer the territory.  Morell mutates from brutal scoundrel to a dastardly poor white Don Quixote:  “His scheme was foolhardy.  He planned to enlist the services of the last men still to owe him honour – the South’s obliging blacks.  They had watched their companions run off and never seen them reappear.  Their freedom, therefore, was real.  Morell’s object was to raise the blacks against the whites, to capture and sack New Orleans, and to take possession of the territory.  Morell, brought down and nearly destroyed by Stewart’s betrayal, contemplated a nationwide response – a response in which criminal elements would be exalted to the point of redemption and a place in history.” (“The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell” in ibid., p. 28)  In Borges’ account the ‘real’ traitor is the fake confederate who sets up Morell – but his betrayal is the impetus for Morell’s grand scheme of redemption.  The criminal class has its own strict code of honour – and its behaviour cannot merely be assimilated to the rigid operations and calculations of a war machine or a state – nor is it simply ‘treason’ or ‘deception’.   Similarly Borges defends the more gentlemanly style of speech in the story “Streetcorner Man” against those who would claim a ‘hoodlum’ would not use such language:  “In that story, which is about life on the outer edge of old-time Buenos Aires, it will be noted that I have introduced a few cultivated words – ‘intestines’, ‘involutions’, and so forth.  I did so because the hoodlum aspires to refinement, or (this reason invalidates the other but is perhaps the true one) because hoodlums are individuals and do not always speak like The Hoodlum, who is a platonic type.” (ibid., p. 12)

Perhaps these other non-typical paradigms of infamy (the multiplicity of which are found in Borges’ universal history) appear flawed to Deleuze and Guattari because they originate in experience from the other side of the ‘abyssal line’ (de Sousa Santos) – the one between the new world and the old, colonies and ex-colonial masters – north and south – wherever one can look up at the night sky and see the southern cross.  On the North side of the line is where the western subject and his western modernity are valid (legal systems, criteria of truth and falsehood, loyalty and betrayal - science, theology, philosophy).  On the South Side of the line none of this applies.  The North is also the location of ‘civil society’, ‘humanity, ‘civilization’.  The other side of this geographical, navigational, ontological line is the ‘state of nature’ or rather a no man’s land, the outside of the law.  The ‘state of nature’ against which Hobbes devises his Leviathan – reflects at least in part reports of the time on the way of life of the “savage people” in America – who “(…) have no government at all and live in this day in that brutish manner.” (Thomas Hobbes, Chapter XIII, Leviathan 1909 edition [1651], The Online Library of Liberty)

The ‘North’ discovered its own ‘state of nature’ in the ‘South’ – later the South became a refuge from law and government for European adventurers and hasardeurs.

The 19th century Europeans, especially the government of Emperor Napoleon III, must have still believed what Hobbes wrote about the Americas – sending a Habsburg for instance to become the emperor of Mexico – as if they had no government of their own.  It shows that one emperor tends to breed another. The pretext for the French invasion of Mexico was the decision of the government of President Benito Juárez to suspend interest payments on its debts to its creditors in particular France, Spain and England.  The creditor nations were united in an invasion coalition called “The Treaty of London”.  But the Spanish and English soon withdrew when they realized the French wanted to seize all of Mexico – especially its silver mines.
The Mexicans endured the reign of the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian the First of Mexico briefly before they followed the example of the French Revolution and in 1867 executed him.  Napoleon III had already prudently abandoned his protégé, withdrawing his invasion troops the year before. 


For Nietzsche writing mid 19th century – the abyssal line ran through the middle of Europe itself.  He uses the cartography of North and South (not east and west) – seeing himself as an escapee from the stifling sickly North (in particular Bismarck’s Germany) seeking health and gaiety (le gai savoir) in the South.  The Americas don’t seem to exist for Nietzsche. 

But nowadays during the reign of the ‘Troika’ – the abyssal line of demarcation in Europe is between the ‘PIIGS’ plus Cyprus and the imperators of the North. “Der Ab-grund ist Ab-grund”. (“the a-byss is a-byss”, Heidegger)  It is an abyssal line of ‘sovereign debt’.  In the case of Greece many analysts consider this sovereign debt to be of the category of ‘odious debt’ or illegitimate debt.  The debt regime Greece has been made to endure by the European Commission etc is thus regarded by a majority of the population as a renewed German ‘occupation’ of Greece. 
(see the Greek documentary films Debtocracy and Katastroika, Directors/Writers Katerina Kitidi and Aris Chatzistefanou, online) 

Carl Schmitt foresaw the time when a people could be proscribed (Ächtung) - not just for alleged “Menschenfleisch fressen” (cannibalism), as Bacon ordained for the Indians of the Americas (and which was seconded by Pufendorff), but for lesser more harmless aberrations such as when a “people can not pay their debts.” (see Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, Berlin, 2009, (1932), footnote pp. 52-53)]  Naturally, when Schmitt wrote his treatise in 1932 – he was not thinking of the American Indians, but of the “Schuldnernation” (debtor nation) Germany and its heavy burden of war reparations from World War I – dictated by the Versailles Treaty.      

Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of treason and deception presupposes (although they would deny this strongly) a unified Cartesian cogito/subject/certainty (a subject of certainty and its pendant doubt) – equivalent to the One of the State or its Grand Rival the War Machine - in turn sprouting/spawning/generating its own established/familiar forms of transgression, haunted by its too familiar ‘evil genius’ or ‘deceitful god’.           

Badiou clearly and emphatically refutes the notion of Deleuze as the philosopher of lavish/riotous confusion or the chaotic multiplicity of the organic and inorganic world – rather one must recognize in his work a “metaphysics of the One“ – a distinctly Heideggerian ‘clamor’ from the great univocity of Being. (see Alain Badiou, The Clamor of Being, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, Chapter 1. “Which Deleuze?”, Chapter 2. “Univocity of Being and Multiplicity of Names”)

Balibar has coined the term “ideality” for this sort of necessary transcendence – hegemonic violence cannot do without it, he contends, neither can revolutionary organizations insofar as they are implicitly contained in the idea of the State as the immanent ‘counter-violence’ to sovereign institutions. 

“Ideality” is another revamping of what Deleuze and Guattari would call the double subject of “modern or Christian philosophy” – Descartes’ Cogito, whose ‘heteronomous’ point of subjectification is transposed to and dependent on the Infinite or the Absolute.  The first subject is the Cogito itself (subject of enunciation) – the I of I think, assume, perceive etc – the second subject is the I of feeling or sensing (the subject of statement) who forms propositions concerning one’s self.  The second subject is often hidden by the first, but dependent upon it as the guarantor of interpretation – but has potentially a more immediate relation to the material world.  No matter how many times this subject is declared dead and defunct it resurrects itself zombie-like in a certain French theory or western philosophy – the word in Deleuze for this self-correcting resurrection is ‘recommencing’ -  “The cogito is a proceeding that must always be recommenced, (…)” (A Thousand Plateaus, ibid.,  p. 142)  The recommencing is a safety mechanism/device against its own ‘brokenness’ – the split between the norm, its inner legality and the darker face of its own transgressive potential.  One can thus never comprehend transgression (or more simply evil) according to this paradigm without relating it to the proper recommencing of cogito.  Evil or transgression though is the impetus for the recommencing – almost a purged reunifying of cogito with itself, or its reunion with the Absolute.

The double subjects in Balibar’s analysis of violence are compressed into one state subject of power  – potentially also encompassing what is not-state or counter-power  (rebellion, revolution, anti-systemic movements) – so that any ‘legitimate violence’ (is that also a vestige of the subject of statement?) must appeal to its own transcendence (the subject of enunciation) to truly appear/function as legitimate.  Such power or power apparatuses may appear multiple – but per force of quasi-gravity will inevitably act to reduce complexity (meaning to crush all internal and external resistance to it)  – and how?  “(…) not only by virtue of its material force, which would never suffice (subject of statement again sm), or could never be sufficiently focused, but by virtue of its own transcendence (the subject of enunciation sm).  I would say: by virtue of the ‘tautological power’ and violence of its ideality, as expressed in such formulas as God is God, the Law is the Law, which try to encapsulate the Absolute.” (Étienne Balibar, “Violence, Ideality and Cruelty” in Politics and the Other Scene, London/Brooklyn, 2002, p. 136) 
Voilà – “ideality” is also a ‘metaphysics of the One’.
 (In a slight variation of this metaphysical twist: Lacoue-Labarthe in his analysis of Heidegger’s Rectoral Address of 1933 “Transcendence Ends in Politics” concludes that Heideggerian politics is nothing but the continuation of metaphysics by other means – as opposed to Balibar’s more Clausewitzian approach to the relation of transcendence and politics – which might be abbreviated – metaphysics is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means.)      

Counter-violence ‘haunts’ the state body as its necessary chimera – for all state violence in Balibar’s assessment is “preventive counter-violence” against an anticipated quasi-transcendental primary counter-violence – which need not ever materialize.  This presumed counter-violence is the source of its legitimacy.  The counter-violent forces belong to the realm of the imaginary – mythically predating the state’s foundation and as such ever present as a potential recurrence.  This is the classic Hobbesian “state of nature”.  But foundational state violence alias “preventive counter-violence” cannot just remain possible or potential – it must become actual – for its own sake, for the self-preservation of its being.  “And basically, I think, that if the so-called ‘foundational violence of state power’ is to exist (or appear as foundational), it must not only be idealized or sacralized – that goes without saying – but also actually exercised and implemented at some points and times, in some visible ‘zones’ of the system…”(ibid. p. 138)  Foundational state violence - like any other machinery – if it is not tested at its limits once in awhile – it will rust and eventually fall apart.  Theoretically, Balibar would imply, preventive counter-violence must occur periodically with or without a counter-violent pretext.

The ‘South’ or “state of nature”, the declared outside of the law for the ‘North’, was historically a most efficacious zone (although not always so visible) for exercising European foundational state violence in the sense recommended by Balibar.  One could indulge there in material practices where violence crosses the border to transgressive cruelty – much more freely than if one were to be restricted to ‘normal’ European policing.  But still says Balibar – this is only possible because of the authority of an extreme ideality (not its abandonment/absence) – as one can see in the history of the Spanish conquest of South America – the practices of the conquistadores. 
“(…) the conquistadores were acting in the framework of an extremely powerful hegemony  – under the authority of an extremely powerful ideality, namely the Catholic religion, combining legal apparatus and messianic faith, which allowed them to subsume the practices of cruelty under the discourses of hegemony – that is, a spiritual and material violence which could be disciplined and ‘civilized’.” (ibid.)  But is that really the case?  Balibar overlooks that these discourses of hegemony were established elsewhere – not yet in the Americas – the conquistadores were in the process of transferring them there from the ‘motherland’, that was their practice of conquest – as an imported hegemony.  Their actions thus already assumed a discourse of hegemony, which was not yet established, they cannot be said to have been acting within an existing one.  The ‘zone’ in which they were operating could be better described as ‘anomic’, extrajuridical, (a sort of ‘primitive accumulation’ of legitimacy) rather than hegemonic (not even a ‘state of exception’) – or at least from the conquistadorial point of view there was not any law or right except their own. And within that law – the conquistadores were practicing cruelty in the encapsulated zone of the system which Agamben calls “pure violence without logos”. (Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Chicago, 2005, p. 40)
The actions of the conquistadores were pre-hegemonic, – the period of conquest was rather a de facto tyranny.  Tyranny is a phenomenon of the ‘state of nature’, it is not civilizable – it substitutes for a legal apparatus, it is its own legal apparatus.  In that sense tyranny is devoid of ideality – it is rather empirical, pure facticity or contingency – but not to be confused with chance, or the aleatory.  Tyranny is not adequately described as the rule of the One – the One suggests a coherent unity, an omniscient Singularity, the sovereign Individual (whatever form).  But tyranny is precisely the body cancelling this unity – diffuseness rules, not the One.  

For the Aztecs and Incas the presence of the conquistadores would have seemed rather like an invasion from another planet. Precisely because they were completely ignorant of any ‘framework of hegemony’ – they would have regarded the conquistadores as supernatural beings.  The brutal incursions of the conquistadors were inexplicable occurrences for the autochthonous populations, more like oracles than material events; – but whatever motivation the conquerors drew from “messianic faith” or “ideality” – this was their ‘past’.  Their onslaught, as Adorno notes in Negative Dialectic came from their future even if it took the antiquated form of a bloody Inquisition and Crusade.  The conquistadores unfolded an historical teleological principle immanent in nascent bourgeois society: the ‘irrational’ expansion of bourgeois rational society until it could achieve its ultimate conceptual limits of “one world” (see Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt, 1982, p. 297).   

‘Ideality’ is one of many terms forged by ‘western metaphysics’ to embody the logic of the Absolute; in this example of the transplanting of dominion from the ‘old world’ to the ‘new’ –it magically converts any ‘hegemonic’ act of cruelty or ‘infamy’ against populations whether in one’s own territory or anywhere else on the globe into a civilizing process.  In the mother country such ‘ideality’ is also a prerequisite for biopolitics.  

Obviously then, Deleuze and Guattari who come from the same school of thought as Balibar – will not have found this ‘ideality’ of transgression in Borges’ A Universal History of Infamy - thus they cannot identify the infamy and betrayal in his stories according to their customary models of cogito and its infinitude of transgressive renewal.

Borges does not situate infamy in a firmly hegemonic ideality or ‘ontotheology’ – as is customary in Europe.  His history of infamy is much closer to a ‘state of nature’ than to civilization – norms and systems are as mutable as clouds or rivers.  Perhaps as the ‘treacherous’ literary anthropologist or purveyor of counterfeit anthropologies and “baroque” histories of the ‘South’ – Borges, the untitled ‘infamous’ compiler of his history of infamy (itself a forgery, a false history) –unconsciously confirms the traveller’s tales about the new world Montaigne reports in his essay Of Cannibals “This is a nation, I should say to Plato, in which there is no sort of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name for a magistrate or for political superiority, no custom of servitude, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupations but leisure ones, no care for any but common kinship, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat.  The very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, belittling, pardon—unheard of.” (The Complete Essays of Montaigne, Stanford, 1998, p. 153)

How then could one satisfy the criteria of a European canon of treason or deception when grounded in such a void?






2.  Black Rites

Is the exalted position of the traitor in Deleuze, Genet etc analogous to the ‘outside of thought’?  The traitor is the inside outside or (like homo sacer) – the included excluded, not to be mistaken with resistance?  If there is a deep state, there is certainly a deep society, which has already consumed the state.   Would what deep society then regurgitates – be the factum brutum of a new biopolitical state of nature?


Bob Trivors, Huey Newton’s instructor at UC Santa Cruz and occasional ‘confessor’ never heard him unequivocally confess to any act of murder – although Newton would frequently tell him ‘I feel so guilty’.  Ever cognizant of the law, he would explain almost coquettishly – the statute of limitations never runs out on murder – meaning the state never relinquishes its right to punish the crime of murder – but this sentence was true not of the state but of that other ‘revolutionary court’ who in the end had the longest memory.

When the Black Panther Party was still just staking its claim to overlordship over all of black power - with the consciousness of a demiurge of history – Newton himself called the revolutionary court into being.  He publicly drafted Stokely Carmichael of the SNCC into the Black Panther Party – assigning him the rank of field marshal in charge of “revolutionary law, order and justice” for the territory east of the continental divide – just as the Black Panther Party was the supreme adjudicator for the western parts.  The title of field marshal was perhaps also an inside joke – Carmichael had recently been demoted to ‘field secretary’ of SNCC.   

Bobby Seale, cofounder of the Party, read out this official act of vestment at a press conference in San Francisco in 1967.  The Black Panthers had a precocious sense of legal diction and representation, ranks, titles and party bureaucracy – even in their early phase when members numbered only a dozen or so.  They were desirous of a merger with SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) a veteran organization of the civil rights movement.  In the world of rival black militants of those days – this public act of reading out Newton’s “executive mandate” was the Black Panther Party’s symbolic claiming of authority over the entire black movement.  The proclamation implies - The Black Panther Party is vested with the complete authority and can bestow at its discretion portions of this authority upon chosen others.  They styled themselves already as a quasi-state authority/body, an incipient state apparatus of a separate black nation.

The “10 point program” ended with a long unidentified direct quotation from the introduction and the preamble of the American colonies’ “Declaration of Independence” from the British Crown – “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, (…)”  This passage also includes the “(…) the right of the people to institute a new government (…)” -  and the first act of the ‘new government’ instituted as the Black Panther Party was to grant themselves titles – Bobby Seale became Chairman – Newton chose Minister of Defense.

Perhaps the idea to become Minister of Defense was inspired by Malcolm X’s public statement on the occasion of his break with the Nation of Islam in 1964.   In it, he asserts the right of the American Negro to “fight back in self-defense” (Malcolm X Speaks, Selected Speeches and Statements, New York, 1990, pp. 18-22).  Point 7 of the Panther’s 10-point program similarly declares: “We (…) believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense.” (Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, New York, 2009, p. 124)

In Newton’s autobiography Revolutionary Suicide he marvels at the speed – 20 minutes – with which he and Bobby Seale composed this document in October 1966 – not mentioning that the second half of this short document is a patriotic ‘plagiarism’.  The quotation must have seemed very natural – as they deemed themselves “black colonial subjects”, not in the sense of the anti-colonial movements of the Third World, but in the way the American colonists had been ‘white colonial subjects’ of the British monarchy – and their party platform and program was an imitation of that historical declaration of separation.
Contrary to Badiou’s theory that the Organization arises after an Event as the vehicle of a militant subject’s ‘fidelity to the event’ of the rebellion, riot etc – the founding of the Black Panther Party was itself the Event – or a prelude to a phantom (black American) 18th century revolution.  In other words – if one can speak of an Event, which transfixed their fidelity, it would be the American Revolution of 1776 – making them seem closer in their constitutive origins to The Daughters of the American Revolution or the later Tea Party Movement – than to Mao or Fanon.  
(Genet has little sympathy for the interviewers from Ramparts who punctured his romantic view of the Black Panther’s menacing shadow play – they ask him “‘Was the Panthers’ failure due to the fact that they adopted a ‘brand image’ before they’d earned it in action?’ (Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, London, 1990, p. 84) – but the question reflects the impression of the time – the Panthers were an organization – or a new brand of black - in the search of an Event – not yet the militant ‘subjects of an exception’.) 

It was also during this time that Eldridge Cleaver staged a publicity photograph of Huey Newton wearing his Black Panther uniform (black leather jacket and beret) but transfigured as an ‘African king’ - sitting in a wicker seat, two shields leaning against either side of the ‘throne’, an animal pelt on the floor, holding a spear in one hand and a shotgun in the other. 

The Black Panther Party inhabited a vanishing point between theatrical rites, military bravado and a nascent mandarin style civil service.
Hugh Pearson, in his critical study of Huey Newton’s life and career, The Shadow of the Panther, calls this proclamation of “revolutionary law, order and justice” simply “more cosmetic than anything else” – for the internal reason that: “The Panthers and SNCC didn’t hold serious discussions about a coalition until after Newton was arrested and charged with the shooting death of Officer Frey.” (Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America, Cambridge, 1996, p. 142)
When Stokely Carmichael though resigned from the party in 1969 in the wake of allegations that the Black Panther leadership had tortured fellow SNCC member James Forman with a gun - he alluded precisely to an authoritarian manner already evident in that earlier proclamation, dubbing him ‘field marshal’: “I cannot support the present tactics and methods which the party is using to coerce and force everyone to submit to its authority.” (ibid., p. 164)   

The Black Panther Party might have been a “phantom bureaucracy and a shadow administration” (Edmund White, Introduction to Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, ibid., p. xiii) but they could generate real fear.

Genet, whom they courted in the sixties, was so impressed by their ‘spectacle’: how striking the colour black looked clothed in shades of mauve, pink, gold and azure, their massive hairdos, as if pubic hair were growing everywhere (“furry sex on their heads”), their ithyphallic moldings in “Florentine trousers” (like the ‘stage pants’ of ancient Greek comedy) – their theatre of extreme visibility – he could not see that the same excessive carnivalesque appearance was perhaps merely the inversion (like carnival itself) of a puritanical drive to rule the black community.  He identified them rather with the Palestinians – two ‘homeless’ people in a permanent diaspora.
“But even if they themselves had been the masters, or had had sovereignty over some territory, they probably wouldn’t have formed a government complete with president, minister for war, minister of education, field marshals and Newton as ‘supreme commander’ as soon as he got out of jail.” (Prisoner of Love, ibid., p. 85)
But that’s precisely what happened.  The Oakland neighbourhood – the ‘flatlands’ was their territory.  Newton gave himself various titles – after Minister of Defense he changed himself into the Supreme Commander, then Servant of the People, after that Supreme Servant of the People.  Or just The Servant.  In the first phase – when he was Minister of Defense – their rule tended to martial law, but this intimidated the black community as Newton himself notes.  They then switched (after his release from prison) to ‘civilian rule’ implementing ‘survival programs’ (free breakfasts for schoolchildren, an education centre) in the community – but that was when mafiaesque ‘enforcement’ also flourished well hidden behind the scenes of the ‘legit’ community services – against members of the party and the general black community.  Behind the visible public benefits of these programs, the Black Panther Party had evolved its own ‘deep state’.  Those closely associated with the movement regarded the Black Panther Party as having changed from a people’s organization to Newton’s “private army”. (see Lee Lew-Lee ‘s documentary All Power to the People! The Black Panther Party and Beyond…, online)     

Was the Black Panther Party’s typical American gangster pragmatism one metamorphosis Genet did not care to look at?






If Newton’s first law book was the California state legal/penal code – his second was Kafka’s The Trial.  He mentions it in his autobiography as one of those books, which he read in his early college years. Another was Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
One can imagine that for someone as experienced with courts, court officials and prisons as he was – Kafka would have become an intimate companion, his fables of the law writing themselves on Newton’s body just as indelibly as the execution apparatus scored the bodies of the condemned in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony.  Part Five of Revolutionary Suicide contains two chapters titles clearly echoing Kafka: “The Trial” – his trial for first degree murder of the police officer Frey and “The Penal Colony” – one of the California prisons in which Newton served time for the lesser crime of voluntary manslaughter after his first trial.     

But Kafka returns in two other crucial passages directly reflecting Newton’s experience of the unreality of his imprisonment and numerous court appearances.

As one of that rare breed amongst blacks (of that time), being both a ‘brother off the block’ and an intellectual – a ‘streetcorner man’ and someone who cultivated his ‘bourgeois skills’ like reading novels - Newton could easily see himself as a character in a work of art.  So when he re-entered the same courtroom where two years earlier he had been tried for the capital offence – he is reminded of some lines from The Trial – quoting K. as if he were another one of his brothers.  
“Going into the packed courtroom (…) was like a flashback to the same scene two years before.  The whole thing seemed to be starting over again.  It reminded me of a line from Kafka’s The Trial that I think of when events seem to be repeating themselves.  When K., the hero of the novel, is about to be executed, he says “…at the beginning of my case I wanted it to finish and at the end of it [I] wanted it to begin again.”  At first K. is bothered by the confusion of going through the court system—the slow wheels of justice or injustice, the questioning, the stifling routine.  It is a slow, draining process, which K. equates with the absurd toil and the endless striving of life.  I felt the same emotions—wanting the absurdities and the eternal toil to end.  Then, at the end, I was not quite ready for it to be over, and I felt a vague desire for it to start all over again.” (Revolutionary Suicide, ibid., p. 310)

When he was released from the Penal Colony to await his retrial Newton sees the scene during which the prison authorities hand him over to his escort of sheriffs as reminiscent of Genet’s The Balcony and Kafka.  The warden and his assistant see him off, wishing him luck upon his release:  “It was like a scene from Kafka or Genet’s The Balcony—normal and logical on the surface but nightmarish and phantasmagorical in essence.  It had the quality of a symbolic ritual; no one was truly involved or affected.” (ibid., pp. 291-292)   
(Most of Genet’s theatricality draws on the naturally occurring  ‘command performance’ of the prisoner for his guards and punishers – also for fellow prisoners - and vice versa.  The most thrilling spectacle is the state execution – although in Genet’s work it takes place mostly off-stage – unlike in Kafka.)

In the prison system one is always under immediate physical surveillance (the paradigm is the Panopticon) – as a captive actor the prisoner is totally exposed (360°) to his captive audience of punitive officials.  Rituals and repetitiveness mark both prison and the court system – each causes one to lose track of time – the life-time one is meant to lose when punished by confinement or when standing trial.  The loss of time and repetitive sequences create detachment from one’s surroundings – and one’s self.  Repetition is both what is happening now – and an augury of the predictable future, how it will be.  One is in the scene and not – one is less real than the institutional correctional mask one has become.
But still why The Balcony? – where the uprising, the revolting masses are invisibly raging outside – they besiege the brothel, the symbolic state (‘the house of illusions’), with its cast of auxiliary masquerade notables (the Queen, the Bishop, the Judge, the General) – and the real hero is the police president, the only one who is still himself, but who will also be duly sacrificed, entombed alive in his mausoleum. 

Had Newton psychically traded places (swapped souls) with the warden at the moment of his departure, his rite de passage – his spirit remaining with the warden in the prison/brothel – while the warden’s spirit went out inside his body into the revolt?  And when sudden enlightenment comes – it also has the form of repetition…


(Contract Man – Homo Sacer Investigations III will follow.)



© Shannee Marks, July 2013