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I argue that Foucault’s shift from archaeological inquiry to genealogical critique is fundamentally motivated by his encounter with American-style racism and class struggle, and by his engagement with the political philosophies and docu- mented struggles of the BPP. The paper proceeds in four steps. First, I assess Foucault’s biog- raphies and interviews from the transitional period of 1970–72 that indicate the fact and nature of this formative encounter. Second, I turn to some of the writings of BPP leaders and to the theme of politics and war as they articulated it. Third, I address this same theme of politics as war as it gets taken up and rearticulated by Foucault between 1971 and 1976, with an eye to the degree to which the philosophies and struggles of the Black Panthers silently, yet profoundly, inform Foucault’s genealogical work. I conclude by raising some ethical and political questions pertaining to the criteria of truthful speech in scholarly discourse. ‘[P]olitics is war without bloodshed while engaged in an excavation of the epistemo- war is politics with bloodshed.’ logical foundations of the modern subject —Mao Tse-Tung, 19382 of knowledge, moves toward Foucault the political theorist of power relations and ‘Politics is war without bloodshed. War is techniques of domination. In the course of politics with bloodshed.’ this movement, concepts like ‘episteme’, —Huey P. Newton, 19693 ‘enunciation’ and ‘discursive formation’ ‘Politics and war are inseparable in a fascist are displaced in favor of ‘discipline’, ‘tech- state.’ nology’, ‘strategy’ and ‘biopower’.6 —George Jackson, 19714 This realignment has been treated exten- sively by Foucault scholars in the fields of ‘[P]olitics is the continuation of war by other philosophy, political theory, cultural and means.’ literary theory, and intellectual history.7 —Michel Foucault, 19765 However, in none of these studies is the particular research constellation ‘Foucault I n the early 1970s, Foucault’s method and the Black Panthers’ broached or and domain of critique undergo a explored, nor is the connection between significant shift. The archaeological Foucault and the Black Panther Party works, such as The Order of Things (1966) (BPP) even mentioned.8 Many of the schol- and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), arly works on Foucault, whether philo- give way to the more politicized genealo- sophical or historical, end up occasioning gies of Discipline and Punish (1975) and the effects that resemble those of what first volume of The History of Sexuality Foucault himself (by way of Nietzsche) (1976). Foucault the intellectual historian, called ‘monumental history’. They serve to ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/07/030313-44 © 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13604810701668969  314 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 memorialize Foucault as an intellectual inquiry to genealogical critique is motivated Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 ‘monument’. more fundamentally by his encounter with Nietzsche put forward a scathing criti- American-style racism and class struggle, and cism of this form of monumental history by his engagement with the political philoso- in his Untimely Meditations of 1874; phies and documented struggles of the Black Foucault—largely inspired, I argue, by the Panther Party. The standard story given by Black Panthers—rearticulated this criti- ‘monumentalist’ accounts is that Foucault cism in 1971: ‘Nietzsche accused this arrived at the genealogical method through history, one totally devoted to veneration, his reading of Nietzsche, which he is of barring access to the actual intensities purported to have discovered through his and creations of life.’9 On the present reading of Heidegger. Such a story is at worst occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the distorted, at best one-sided. If Nietzsche Black Panther Party, I too would like to features prominently in Foucault’s genealog- undertake some, perhaps, untimely medi- ical turn, it is, I argue, because the philoso- tations. I argue that Foucault’s genealogi- phies and struggles of the Black Panthers led cal work of the 1970s, as well as the Foucault both to Nietzsche and to genealogy majority of the existing scholarship on as a method of historico-political critique. Foucault’s middle period (i.e. 1970–76)— The urban insurrection of US black insofar as it is effectively devoted to the liberationists and black liberationist knowl- veneration of Foucault as an intellectual edges during the 1960s and early 1970s or genealogy as a philosophico-historical preceded and predelineated Foucault’s genea- project—bar access to the actual historico- logical project of ‘desubjugating historical political intensities and creations that in fact knowledges’. motivated the genealogical project. Revealingly, though Foucault credits The few published documents that make Nietzsche and Heidegger for their contribu- passing reference to the connection tions to his approach to genealogy and between Foucault and the Black Panthers power, he failed to ever publicly acknowl- indiscriminately refer to ‘the writings of the edge the influence that the BPP had on his Black Panthers’ as just one set among a thought. This influence can be recovered, series of documents that passed before however, and its foundational character Foucault’s eyes during the course of a life- appreciated through a comparative analysis long reading practice. The relation between of Foucault’s published reflections during the Black Panther Party’s political philoso- the period between 1970 and 1976 and the phies and struggles and Foucault’s own literature of the Black Panther Party genealogical project has never been pursued published between 1966 and 1972. as a topic of substantive philosophical and In the course of his shift from archaeologi- politico-historical significance. cal analysis to genealogical critique—the This paper will attempt to trace the geneal- same period in which Foucault came into ogy of that relation; in it I will suggest that contact with the writings of members of the the lack of engagement with this theme in the Black Panther Party—Foucault formulated scholarly literature itself bespeaks a silence the notion of the ‘will to truth’. The will to and erasure of a methodological and disci- truth is a historical, modifiable, institution- plinary, but also an explicitly political sort— ally constraining system of exclusion that a sort of silence and erasure that pervades regulates what sorts of statements can appear scholarly knowledge production, including, as truth-bearing events—what can and as we shall see, that of Foucault himself. cannot be intelligibly said in any given social Much more so than his return to the texts formation. This regulative principle, of Nietzsche, Marx or Clausewitz, I argue Foucault argues, silently governs the accept- that Foucault’s shift from archaeological able forms according to which knowledge is  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 315 produced, disclosed and circulated, and it and 1976. Looking at Foucault’s 1976 Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 functions in such a way as to mask its ‘prodi- Lectures and a 1971 pamphlet that he co- gious machinery’ and ‘vocation of exclusion’, wrote on the assassination of Black Panther leaving subjects thematically unaware of its Party Field Marshall George Jackson, operation. ‘This will to truth,’ Foucault L’Assassinat de George Jackson,12 and writes, comparing them with Jackson’s and Angela Y. Davis’s concurrent critical analyses of ‘like other systems of exclusion, rests on an American fascism and imprisonment prac- institutional support: it is both reinforced and tice, I will investigate the degree to which the renewed by a whole strata of practices, such philosophies and struggles of the Black as pedagogy, of course; and the system of Panthers silently, yet profoundly, inform books, publishing, libraries; learned societies Foucault’s genealogical work. in the past and laboratories now. But it is also renewed, no doubt, more profoundly, by the In conclusion, in Section IV, I will raise way in which knowledge is put to work, some ethical and political questions pertain- valorized, distributed, and in a sense ing to the criteria of truthful speech in schol- attributed, in a society.’10 arly discourse. For instance: What kinds of knowledge are excluded from or marginal- What does the silence regarding the link ized within the domain of truth-bearing between Foucault and the Black Panthers tell discourses, and how, if at all, do such us about the will to truth that imperceptibly discourses relate to those marginal knowl- regulates the contemporary production, edges? What sorts of delimitations, erasures, disclosure and circulation of truth-bearing silences—what epistemic and social injus- knowledge? tices—are necessary in order to consolidate This paper attempts to break this silence and maintain the signifying coherence of and, within the space of critical reflection truth-bearing discourse and the integrity and opened up by such an undertaking, to proffer legitimacy of American governmental an immanent critique of scholarly discourse authority? Given the formative role that as such, and the disciplinary formations that black power plays in Foucault’s elaboration govern it. I will proceed in the following way. of the concepts of power-knowledge, geneal- In Section I, I will assess a series of ogy and biopower, why is it that the enuncia- Foucault’s written and spoken statements tive force of black power is met with social, from the transitional period of 1970–72, as civil and biological death while that of well as historical and biographical texts deal- power-knowledge is subject to canonization ing with that period, which indicate the fact in a host of academic disciplines? Why is and nature of Foucault’s formative encounter Foucault’s brand of genealogical discourse with the philosophies and documented strug- incorporated by the ‘will to truth’ of contem- gles of the Black Panther Party. porary knowledge regimes, while the insur- Then, in Section II, I will turn to some of gent knowledges of black power movements the writings of Black Panther Party lead- remain largely unassimilable to these regimes ers—Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge of knowledge? Cleaver, George Jackson and Angela Y. Davis11—stemming from the period of 1966–72. My analysis here will focus on the I. 1970–72: Foucault’s encounter with the theme of politics and war (or politics as philosophies and documented struggles of war) as it was articulated in the philosophies the Black Panther Party and struggles of the Black Panthers. In Section III, I will address this same ‘These are intolerable: courts, cops, hospitals, theme of politics as war as it gets taken up asylums, school, military service, the press, and rearticulated by Foucault between 1971 television, the State.’13  316 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 The preceding words appear on the back American class dynamics played upon his Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 cover of a 48-page pamphlet published in thought in an interview conducted during Paris in May/June 1971;14 the pamphlet, this inaugural trip in the fall of 1970. entitled Intolérable, was the first of a series that would be created by a prison activist ‘[T]he more I travel, the more I remove organization called the Groupe d’Informa- myself from my natural and habitual centers tion sur les Prisons (GIP), an organization of gravity, the greater my chance of grasping that Foucault founded in February 1971. The the foundations I am obviously standing on. orientation and point of intervention of this […] A simple example: in New York I was discursive act—largely contrived by struck, as any foreigner would be, by the Foucault—marks a radical departure from immediate contrast between the “good sections” [of town] and the poverty, even the those of The Order of Things, the book for misery, that surround them on the right and which he rapidly acquired celebrity in 1966, left, North and South. I well know that one and even from the text that he had published finds that same contrast in Europe, and that only 2 years prior, The Archaeology of you too, when in Europe, are certainly Knowledge (1969).15 In 1966, Foucault was shocked by the great misery in the poor publishing an erudite book on the history of sections of Paris, Hamburg or London, it the human sciences—aimed primarily at an doesn’t matter where. Having lived in Europe academic audience—in which he called for for years, I had lost a sense of this contrast the abolition of humanism. On May Day of and had ended up believing that there had 1971, he was arrested outside La Santé Prison been a general rise in the standard of living of in Paris, alongside 13 other members of the the whole population; I wasn’t far from imagining that the proletariat was becoming GIP, for distributing a pamphlet that called middle class, that there were really no more for the abolition of the casier judiciaire (a poor people, that the social struggle, the system of keeping criminal records, which struggle between classes, consequently, was makes such records available upon request to coming to an end. Well, seeing New York, employers or potential employers, aiding perceiving again suddenly this vivid contrast recidivism by confining the formerly incar- that exists everywhere but which was blotted cerated to unemployment or underpaid out of my eyes by familiar forms of it, that employment).16 was for me a kind of second revelation; the How does one account for such a rapid class struggle still exists, it exists more and radical reformulation? In an interview intensely.’18 published in July 1971, Foucault accounts for it by saying the following: In a certain respect, this passage resembles Foucault’s preface to The Order of Things, in ‘In the past, I have focused on subjects that which he reflects upon the kind of limit- are somewhat abstract and far-removed from experience or epoché elicited by reading a us, like the history of the sciences. Now I certain passage in Borges. The passage, a would like to really move away from that. Particular circumstances and events have taxonomy of animals quoted from a fictional displaced my interest onto the prison encyclopedia, ‘shattered […] all the familiar problem.’17 landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and It is precisely these circumstances and events our geography’. Such an experience, he goes that are of interest to us. on, provides access to ‘the exotic charm of One event in particular had a pronounced another system of thought’, which in turn effect on Foucault’s reorientation: his first reveals ‘the limitations of our own exposure to the USA and, more specifically, [system]’.19 to American-style racism. Foucault indicated Whereas the exotic charm of Foucault’s the transformative role that his perception of literary limit-experience prompted him to  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 317 undertake an archaeological excavation of the anti-authoritarian struggles that students and Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 epistemological foundations of the human employees of the French university system sciences. The characteristic system of social waged against the State in the wake of the taxonomy that Foucault witnessed in the spring of 1968.22 Eribon goes so far as to streets of New York prompted a very differ- remark that it was Foucault’s two turbulent ent type of engagement. On 8 February 1971, years (1968–70) at the University of Vincennes less than 3 months after the above-cited that constituted his ‘entrance into politics’, interview, Foucault appeared at a press during which ‘a whole new Foucault was born conference in the Chapelle Saint-Bernard, […] the Foucault of demonstrations and mani- where he exclaimed: festations; the Foucault of “struggles” and “critique”’.23 But Eribon also points out that ‘None of us can be sure of avoiding prison. this initial period of political engagement, Less so than ever, today. Police control over our day-to-day lives is becoming tighter: in ‘did not for the moment make a deep the streets and on the roads; over foreigners impression on the strictly intellectual register. and young people; it is once more an offense At Vincennes Foucault gave a course on to express an opinion; anti-drug measures are Nietzsche, and the ideas expressed in his leading to increasingly arbitrary arrests. We inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in are living under the sign of la garde à vue.20 December 1970 were closer to the They tell us that the courts are swamped. We preoccupations of The Archeology of can see that. But what if it were the police Knowledge than to his later ideas on power. who had swamped them? They tell us that His articles and lectures from this period still the prisons are overpopulated. But what if it bear surprising marks of his earlier were the population that were being over- theoretical preoccupations and style.’24 imprisoned? Regardless what one takes to be a ‘strictly Little information is published about prisons; intellectual register’, the fact remains that the this is one of the hidden regions of our social wave of political struggles that took place in system, one of the black spaces (cases noires) France between 1968 and 1970, in which of our lives. We have the right to know, we want to know. This is why, together with a Foucault was an active participant, failed to number of magistrates, lawyers, journalists, elicit a radical reorientation in his written doctors and psychologists, we have formed a intellectual production. It was only after he Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons.’21 had witnessed evidence of the racially fash- ioned class warfare transpiring in the USA Having gone about his academic career until during that time, and had begun to inform this period without a sense of class himself about the radical anti-racist struggles contrast—indeed, ‘not far from imagining being undertaken in the context of that war, […] that the social struggle, the struggle that Foucault began to theorize power rela- between classes, […] was coming to an tions in any kind of explicit way. It wasn’t end’—Foucault asserts in the first months of until he had read the writings of the Black 1971, on the heels of the ‘second revelation’ Panthers that Foucault began to formulate he had received upon perceiving American- the genealogical method of critique. style racial and class segregation, that the After establishing the GIP in February prison is a hidden region of class struggle at 1971, Foucault began to meet frequently with the heart of the social system. Jean Genet, one of the most famous literary One might question Foucault’s earnestness figures in France, who was also a homosexual in characterizing himself as having been so and radical political activist. Having been a politically naive. For instance, his biographers ward of the State as a youth, been in and out and others have documented the public of prisons throughout his early life, and role that Foucault had already played in the frequently experienced persecution for his  318 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 homosexuality, Genet had a radical critical Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 perspective on the very disciplinary institu- tions that would come to occupy Foucault in the coming years. Genet, who quickly became a participant in GIP actions, profoundly influenced Foucault’s own polit- ical transition during this period. Perhaps the most far-reaching dimension of this influence stems from the fact that Genet brought to Foucault’s attention the philosophies and struggles of the US Black Panther Party. As Genet’s biographer Edmund White claims, Foucault and Genet were mutually attracted for political reasons, they came together out of a shared concern for the imprisoned members of the Black Panther Party.25 In the spring of 1970, at the invitation of the Black Panthers, Genet had spent 3 months in the USA. During his time there, he met with the Panthers and gave lectures and speeches in support of the campaign to free BPP leaders and political prisoners Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale (Figure 1).26 Genet was also a supporter of then political prisoners Angela Y. Davis (imprisoned from 1970 to 1972) and Figure 1 BPP leader and political prisoner Huey P. George Jackson (imprisoned from 1960 to Newton, 1968. Photo by Jeffrey Blankfort. 1971). He had written the preface to Jackson’s published prison letters entitled Soledad supplied him with further evidence— Brother (1970)—the French edition of which evidence that no doubt underlined the role was, in 1971, beginning to receive a great deal that race played in American class struggle. of attention among the French left27—and Racism in America, Genet writes in his between July 1970 and December 1971 he preface to Soledad Brother, made at least 20 statements about Davis, Jackson and the BPP in print, on the radio or ‘constitutes the basis of relations between during demonstrations.28 white men [sic] and black […]. This racism is According to Edmund White, Foucault scattered, diffused throughout the whole of America, grim, underhanded, hypocritical, and Genet first met at a demonstration in the arrogant. There is one place where we might summer of 1970, just after Genet’s visit with think it would cease, but on the contrary, it is the Panthers. Though I am unaware of any in this place that it reaches its cruelest pitch, existing documentation of the encounter, it intensifying every second, preying upon would not be unreasonable to assume that body and soul; it is in this place that racism some mention of Genet’s recent trip was becomes a kind of concentration of racism: in made, given that Foucault himself was sched- the American prisons […].’29 uled to visit the USA for the first time just a few months later. Perhaps that encounter Genet assuredly put Davis’s and Jackson’s with Genet oriented Foucault’s attention in prison writings in Foucault’s hands at this his initial exposure to the USA. In any case, if time. A US political prisoner at the time, Foucault required confirmation of his initial Angela Y. Davis was a prominent figure in perception of American class struggle, Genet the black liberation movement. She studied  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 319 political philosophy with Marxist scholars ‘surplus’ labor detention center for American Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse capital; that American prisons overwhelm- during the 1960s, was a member of the US ingly confine, at once, the radical political Communist Party (in which she served as activists and the unemployed and disenfran- Vice Presidential candidate in 1980 and 1984) chised people that live within US racialized and organized with the Black Panther Party. communities.32 She also was an active member of the Soledad By exposing the racializing and colonizing Brothers Defense Committee—an organiza- functions of the prison system, Davis and tion working to free Soledad political prison- Jackson not only linked the genealogy of the ers Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette and prison to the regime of chattel slavery,33 they George Jackson.30 placed the issue of prison abolition at the George Jackson was sentenced to ‘one year heart of the anti-racist and decolonization to life’ at age 18 for his role in a convenience struggles of their time. While Davis’s past store robbery. Politicized while imprisoned, and continued contributions to the move- Jackson studied history, politics and political ments for prison abolition and black libera- economy, reading such figures as Fanon, tion are more generally known, Jackson’s Malcolm X, Marx, Mao and Guevara. contributions have been subject, along with Renowned by his peers for his discipline and his life, to more concerted annihilation by the strength, intellect and commitment, Jackson State. Writing from behind bars in 1971, eventually became a Field Marshall of the Davis indicates the centrality of Jackson’s Black Panther Party. He was as an incisive contributions to the third world liberation spokesperson, strategist and activist in the struggles of the period. American anti-racist struggles of the period, and served as the principal BPP organizer ‘Soledad Brother […] perhaps more than any and educator within the American prison other [volume], has given impetus and shaped system. As we will discuss in further detail, the direction of the growing support he was also assassinated by the State on movement outside the prisons. George, from account of that service. behind the seemingly impenetrable walls, has Davis and Jackson were among the first— placed the issue of the prison struggle squarely on the agenda of the people’s and, without a doubt, among the most inci- movement for revolutionary change. […] sive—to critically appraise the strategic role Through George’s life and the lives of that the prison system played in the govern- thousands of other brothers and sisters, the ment of America’s colonized population. In absolute necessity for extending the struggle the letters, notebooks and articles that they of Black and third world people into the each wrote while imprisoned31—which were prison system itself becomes unmistakably published (many in The Black Panther clear.’34 newspaper in 1970 and 1971) and circulated internationally—Davis and Jackson exposed Largely inspired by Davis’s and Jackson’s the relationship between the rising number analyses of and mobilization against of political prisoners in the USA and the the prison system, and by the BPP’s role in imprisonment of rapidly increasing numbers the American decolonization movement, the of poor people of color. They created a Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons vocabulary for understanding the reciprocal engaged in a series of political interventions social process by which radical political between 1971 and 1972. To conclude the activism was criminalized and crime present section of analysis, I would like to politicized. They brought to light the fact simply point out some of the remaining facts that, since its inception, the prison system of Foucault’s encounter with the works of has served the dual, racially motivated func- the Black Panther Party, and indicate the way tion of political weapon of the State and in which this encounter guides Foucault  320 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 toward the concerns that would preoccupy who were charged with murdering a prison Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 him during the first half of the 1970s. guard in retaliation for the murder of three During the short period of their activity, black activists by a guard in California’s the GIP published four pamphlets under the Soledad prison, became known as the series title Intolérable.35 The first two were ‘Soledad Brothers’ and a campaign for their issued by the anarchist press Champs Libre in liberation was organized that attained June 1971, and included the results of a series international scope. The GIP wanted to of investigations of the Parisian prison system contribute to this campaign and increase the that the GIP had conducted in the spring of visibility of American political prisoners, and 1971.36 These pamphlets reproduced a few the American prison struggle more generally, GIP-generated questionnaires that had been in France. completed in-full by prisoners, first-hand After Jackson was assassinated in August accounts of prison life written by prisoners 1971, the GIP decided to issue the third and a selection of the ‘most characteristic’ pamphlet devoted to his life and assassina- responses provided by prisoners to the ques- tion. As its back cover announced, this tionnaires. The last two issues were published document sought to inform its audience that, by Gallimard in November 1971 and Decem- ‘[i]n America, assassination was and today ber 1972, respectively. The last issue, entitled remains a mode of political action’. Foucault Suicides de prison,37 and published jointly et al. also argue, as the concluding line of the with the Comité d’Action des Prisonniers and pamphlet reads, that ‘[t]he prison struggle the Association pour la Défense des Droits has become a new front of the revolution’. des Détenus, publicized and analyzed the 32 Before turning to the writings of the suicides that occurred in French prisons in Panthers themselves and then to Foucault’s 1972. The pamphlet included a series of ‘case- appropriation of them, allow me to repro- histories’ and prison letters of the prisoners duce part of the three-page introduction to who had committed suicide, of which a the GIP’s first pamphlet, which published quarter were immigrants and the majority the results of their investigations of the were in their 20s. Parisian prison system. This introduction, The third issue was devoted to the life and unsigned but written by Foucault, was assassination of US political prisoner and composed at precisely the time when the Black Panther Party Field Marshall George GIP made contact with the Black Panthers, Jackson.38 The contents of this pamphlet will and in it one can clearly see the rudiments feature prominently in my discussion in of the genealogical method coming into Section III, devoted to the subject of the being. Panthers’ influence on Foucault’s genealogi- cal work. Here it must be mentioned that ‘1. These investigations are not designed to the BPP’s influence on the GIP was such improve or soften an oppressive power, or that the GIP decided to make contact with make it tolerable. They are designed to attack the Panthers. In June of 1971, GIP activist it at those points where it is exercised under a Catherine von Bülow went to California and different name—that of justice, technology, met with Angela Y. Davis and George knowledge or objectivity. Each investigation Jackson, each of whom was imprisoned at must therefore be a political act. the time.39 She brought many documents 2. They are aimed at specific targets, at back from her meetings, which she, Foucault institutions which have names and places, and Genet studied in depth.40 people in charge and governors—and which Genet was eager to put together a book in claim victims and inspire revolts, even among support of George Jackson, who was going those in charge of them. Each investigation on trial in August alongside Fleeta Drumgo must therefore be the first episode in a and John Clutchette. The three prisoners, struggle.  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 321 3. They bring together, around these specific regarding prisons. Prisons convinced me that Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 targets, different social strata which the ruling power should not be considered in terms of class has kept apart thanks to the interplay of law but in terms of technology, in terms of social hierarchies and divergent economic tactics and strategy, and it was this interests. They must bring down barriers substitution of a technical and strategical which are indispensable to power by uniting grid for a legal and negative grid that I tried prisoners, lawyers and magistrates, or even to set up in Discipline and Punish, and then doctors, patients and hospital personnel. use in History of Sexuality.’42 Each investigation must constitute a front— an offensive front—at each important It is certainly true that Foucault’s concrete strategic point. experience with the GIP (to which he here refers) occasioned the theoretical and political 4. These investigations are not being made by reorientation he underwent during those a group of technicians working from the years. There is also no doubt that this outside; the investigators are those who are concrete experience motivated his later recon- being investigated. It is up to them to take the ceptualization of power relations. However, word, to bring down the barriers, to express what is intolerable, and to tolerate it no the preceding account neglects to point out a longer. It is up to them to take responsibility salient feature of the story: it was initially, if for the struggle which will prevent oppression not primarily, the Black Panthers’ analyses of from being exercised.’41 and mobilization against American racism and, in particular, Angela Y. Davis’s and It should be recalled that the above passage George Jackson’s analyses of the prison was composed less than 1 year after Foucault system as a strategic mechanism in the consol- had admitted to being ‘not far from imagin- idation of American governmental authority, ing […] that the social struggle, the struggle that both directed Foucault’s regard toward between classes, […] was coming to an end’. the institution of the prison and led Foucault Just over 2 years prior to the writing of this to conceptualize power through the grid of document Foucault was concerned with ‘the tactics and strategy, that is, through the formation of enunciative modalities’, the analytic of war. ‘historical a priori’ and the history of ideas. And yet, already in the summer of 1971, Foucault has begun to consider the knowl- II. 1966–72: politics and war in the edge-producing activity of investigation or philosophies and struggles of the Black inquiry (enquête) as a political act, as an Panther Party episode or front in a struggle. In a 1976 interview, Foucault commented What follows does not aspire to be either an on the shift that his work had undergone in exhaustive historical treatment of the forma- the years since the publication of The Order tion and struggles of the Black Panther Party, of Things (1966). or a comprehensive account of its foundational philosophies and aims. Tasks such as these ‘I wrote [The Order of Things] at a moment warrant, and have received, volumes unto of transition. Until then, it seems to me that themselves.43 From an orthodox historio- I accepted the traditional conception of power, power as an essentially legal graphical perspective, the analysis undertaken mechanism, what the law says, that which in this section must restrict itself in two related forbids, that which says no, with a whole dimensions: one empirical, one thematic. Inso- string of negative effects: exclusion, far as it seeks to trace the as yet undisclosed rejection, barriers, denial, dissimulation, etc. influence that the Black Panther Party exerted Now I find that conception inadequate.… on Foucault’s genealogical method, the analy- [T]his occurred to me in the course of a sis must primarily restrict itself to those texts concrete experience I had around 1971–72, of and about the BPP which we know or can  322 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 reasonably assume that Foucault read, and to inseparable; and (4) the argument that the Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 the themes that Foucault appropriated from American prison system plays a strategically those texts.44 From this perspective, the privileged role in the colonial oppression of present section serves as the connecting thread black people. between the initiatory documentary (Section One of the central features of the philoso- I) and conceptual (Section III) facets of an phies of the Black Panther Party was the historical inquiry that, in certain respects, does view that the black population within the not depart significantly from the orthodox USA constituted an internal, racialized method of the history of ideas. colony—one constantly threatened, impov- However, the present investigation as a erished and criminalized by the occupying whole also exceeds the restrictions of such an forces of American governmental authority. orthodox historiographical approach. It not An argument at the heart of this critique was only aims to expose the silenced and subju- the following: beneath the law and order of gated genealogy of Foucault’s own genealog- American government, beneath the ostensi- ical method, it also aspires to bring the local, ble peace of American civil society, a racially discontinuous, and generally disqualified and fashioned war is being continuously and delegitimized knowledges and struggles of permanently waged against the black the Black Panthers into play in the strength community. The type of peace that American that they possess in themselves—to enable governmental and civil institutions officially them to oppose and struggle against the coer- prescribe, according to this argument, is not cion of Foucault’s appropriation of them. In genuinely pacific at all but rather is itself a accordance with this aim, my treatment of form of coded warfare. the philosophies and struggles of the BPP The political strategies that emerged from will also break the methodological restric- this assessment varied in tandem with the tions mentioned above, in order to follow changing inner and outer circumstances of some of the ways that the issues of politics, the Party. For example, in the early years of war and survival are internally (and some- the Party’s existence, this philosophy fueled times discontinuously) developed by the an agenda of black nationalism—a political BPP itself, from within its own specific philosophy whose genealogical lineage historico-political circumstances. Seen from extends back from Frantz Fanon and the pre- this latter perspective, the present section can pilgrimage works of Malcolm X, to figures be viewed as the setting-into-motion of a such as Marcus Garvey, Nat Turner and critical current that courses through Sections Martin Delaney.45 As early as 1967, however, II through IV and that gives rise to questions the Party had embraced a veritably interna- about the politics of contemporary truth- tionalist, or what Newton in 1971 referred to bearing discourses and the practices of subju- as an ‘intercommunalist’, perspective which gation that silently undergird them. emphasized broad-based coalition-building The primary features of the philosophies and viewed the liberation of the black colony of the Black Panther Party that will orient in a functional relationship with revolution this inquiry are: (1) the view that blacks in in the USA as a whole.46 the USA are an internally colonized popula- Despite such differences of strategy, at the tion; (2) an understanding that the official root of the BPP’s philosophies, as well as discursive and visible practices of law and those of many other organizations in the order—including the constitutional docu- black power movement, was an assessment of ments founding American sovereignty—are, the situation of African Americans as one of in essence, tactical deployments within that internal colonization. Eldridge Cleaver racist colonial war; (3) the position that, provides an articulation of this position in an within that colonial context, politics and self- article published in Ramparts magazine in defense—politics and war—are functionally May 1968 entitled ‘The Land Question and  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 323 Black Liberation’, where he argues against Two of the most salient components of Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 political analyses that ignore ‘the distinction black liberationist counter-history can be and the contradiction between the white formulated as follows: (a) American sover- mother country and the black colony’. He eignty was founded upon and continues to be writes: underpinned by the economic enslavement and political disenfranchisement of black ‘Black people are a stolen people held in a people, and (b) the American institution of colonial status on stolen land, and any slavery was never comprehensively abol- analysis which does not acknowledge the ished, but rather persists into the present in colonial status of black people cannot hope altered forms. In other words, US sover- to deal with the real problem […]. Black eignty does not and has never protected or power must be viewed as the projection of guaranteed the freedom of black people; sovereignty, an embryonic sovereignty that Black Reconstruction failed. black people can focus on and through These counter-historical principles propel which they can make distinctions between the revolutionary demands of the Black themselves and others, between themselves Panther Party from its inception. The BPP and their enemies—in short, between the declared rights for black people that the USA white mother country of America and the black colony dispersed throughout the had failed to recognize and, in so doing, continent on absentee-owned land, making effectively declared war on the USA by Afro-America a decentralized colony. Black declaring rights; or rather, by declaring power says to black people that it is rights, the BPP rendered explicit the ongo- possible for them to build a national ing, undeclared war being waged against organization on somebody else’s land […]. black people in and by the USA. In fact, when he moved to found the The ‘Ten-Point Platform and Program of organization of Afro-American Unity, this the Black Panther Party’ of October 1966 is precisely what Malcolm X was doing, was precisely such a declaration of rights/ founding a government in exile for a people war. Indeed, Point Ten of the Platform and in exile.’47 Program employed the language of the US Constitution itself to justify the revolution- One of the features of this passage that is ary overthrow of the sovereignty founded typical of the BPP revolutionary vocabulary therein: is Cleaver’s employment of a counter-hege- monic understanding of American history— ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that in this case, an historical knowledge of the all men [sic] are created equal; that they are enslavement and displacement of black endowed by their Creator with certain people—as simultaneously a description of unalienable rights; that among these are life, the ongoing struggle for black liberation and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to a weapon in that struggle. Throughout the secure these rights, governments are instituted BPP’s activity, this kind of counter-historical among men [sic], deriving their just powers knowledge was central to their mode of from the consent of the governed; that, political critique and struggle. History, for whenever any form of government becomes the BPP, was not only a knowledge of past destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute struggles, it was a vehicle for refashioning a new government, laying its foundation on African American identity, and a knowledge such principles, and organizing its powers in that was strategically deployed within a field such form, as to them shall seem most likely to of present struggles. The political strategies effect their safety and happiness. […] [W]hen of the black liberation movement were a long train of abuses and usurpations, consistently articulated through this kind of pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a counter-historical knowledge. design to reduce them under absolute  324 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 despotism, it is [the people’s] right, it is their and Democracy” to Korea, to Vietnam, to Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 duty, to throw off such government, and to Africa, Asia, and Latin America? provide new guards for their future security.’48 Is it the right to “political activity” when the U.S.A. attempts to legally murder Bobby The BPP called for the implementation of Seale, Chairman of the Black Panther Party, Point Number Ten of the Black Panther for his political beliefs? Party Platform and Program on 19 June 1970, Where was that right when brother Malcolm the 107th anniversary of the Emancipation was murdered, when Martin Luther King was Proclamation. The Panthers and their gunned down? supporters gathered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC where Where is Freedom when people’s right to BPP Chief of Staff David Hilliard issued a call “Freedom of Speech” is denied to the point for ‘a revolutionary people’s constitutional of murder? When attempts at “Freedom of convention’ to be convened on 7 September, the Press” brings bombings and lynchings? Labor Day, in Philadelphia.49 In this call, the Where is Freedom when the right to BPP referred to the USA as a ‘monster’ and “peacefully assemble” brings on massacres? ‘barbaric organization’ characterized by Where is our right to “keep and bear arms” ‘savage wars of aggression, mass murder, when Black People are attacked by the Racist genocide, and shameless slaughter of the Gestapo of America? Where is “religious people of the world; impudent, arrogant freedom” when places of worship become the White Racism; and a naked, brazen attempt to scene of shoot-ins and bomb-ins? Where is perpetuate White Supremacy on a world the right to vote “regardless of race or color” scale’. The BPP then goes on to criticize the when murder takes place at the voting polls? existing US Constitution and the Emancipa- Are we free when we are not even secure tion Proclamation, making point-by-point from being savagely murdered in our sleep by reference to the US Bill of Rights in order to policemen who stand blatantly before the world but yet go unpunished? Is that “… expose the permanent colonial war being equal protection before the laws”? The waged against black people by the State. The empty promise of the Constitution to call is an exemplar of black liberationist “establish justice” lies exposed to the world counter-history, and is worth citing at length. by the reality of Black Peoples’ existence. For over 400 years now, Black people have ‘The end result of the EMANCIPATION suffered an unbroken chain of abuse at the PROCLAMATION was supposed to be the hands of White America. For 400 years we freedom and liberation of Black people from have been treated as America’s footstool. the cruel shackles of chattel slavery. And yet, This fact is so clear that it requires no 100 and 7 years later, today, Black people still argumentation. are not free. Where is that freedom supposedly granted to our people by THE The Constitution of the U.S.A. does not and EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION never has protected our people or guaranteed and guaranteed to us by the Constitution of to us those lofty ideals enshrined within it. the United States? When the Constitution was first adopted we were held as slaves. We were held in slavery Is it in the many “Civil Rights Bills” that have under the Constitution. We have suffered been passed to try to hide the irrelevance of every form of indignity and imposition under the Constitution for Black People? the Constitution, from economic exploitation, political subjugation, to Is it in the blood-shed and lives lost by Black physical extermination. People when America brings “Law and Order” to the ghetto in the same fashion and We need no further evidence that there is by those same forces that export “Freedom something wrong with the Constitution of the  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 325 United States of America. We have had our EVERY AMERICAN CITIZEN THE Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 Human Rights denied and violated perpetually INVIOLABLE HUMAN RIGHT TO under this Constitution—for hundreds of LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF years. As a people, we have received neither the HAPPINESS!’50 Equal Protection of the Laws nor Due Process of Law. […] The Constitution of the United From the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street States does not guarantee and protect our Economic Rights, or our Political Rights, nor Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, our Social Rights. It does not even guarantee which killed Carol McNair, Cynthia and protect our most basic Human Right, the Wesley, Carole Roberts and Addie Mae right to LIVE! […] Collins—all four of them black girls under the age of 15—to the FBI’s assassination of Black people can no longer either respect the the Chicago Chapter Field Marshall of the U.S. Constitution, look to it with hope, or BPP Fred Hampton during his sleep, each live under it. […] We repudiate, emphatically, and every charge issued in the BPP’s call all documents, Laws, Conventions, and refers to distinct and isolatable instances of Practices that allow this sorry state of affairs the recent history of black people in Amer- to exist—including the Constitution of the ica at that time. Considered together, this United States. […] long train of abuses and usurpations, invari- ably pursuing the oppression of black WE THEREFORE, CALL FOR A REVOLUTIONARY PEOPLE’S people, exposes the official documents, laws, CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, conventions and practices of American TO BE CONVENED BY THE political authority as tactical deployments AMERICAN PEOPLE, TO WRITE A within a permanent racist war against black NEW CONSTITUTION THAT WILL people. GUARANTEE AND DELIVER TO It is precisely on account of this perceived failure of American sovereignty to guarantee and protect black people’s very right to live—moreover, on account of its persistent and explicit attack on that right—that the BPP conceived of politics and war as func- tionally inseparable (Figure 2). In Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Figure 2 BPP Brooklyn, ‘Defend the Ghetto’ (The Black Panthers Speak, Da Capo Press). Panther Party and Huey Newton, written in prison in 1968, Black Panther Party Chair- man Bobby Seale recounts a situation from the early phases of growth of the BPP that helps throw the issue of politics and war in relief. In Seale’s account, BPP members encountered a black nationalist faction that went by the name of the Black Panther Party of Northern California. Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and other members of the BPP met with the latter group in the planning of a Malcolm X Memorial Day Conference scheduled in San Francisco on the date Malcolm X was assassinated. Kenny Free- man, one of the members of the other group, Figure 2 BPP Brooklyn, ‘Defend the Ghetto’ (The Black asked the members of the BPP if they wanted Panthers Speak, Da Capo Press). to speak, and Newton agreed.  326 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 ‘Vince Lynth said, “That’s good, because you not protected by American governmental Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 can get into the history of self-defense.” authority. In the case of the Black Panthers, a simple glance at the history of repressive Huey said, “I’ll be talking about politics.” measures employed by the State to annihilate Kenny Freeman popped up and said, “Do and discredit them—such as the FBI’s you want to speak on self-defense or Counterintelligence Program (COINTEL- politics?” PRO)52—only confirms Newton’s and Seale’s prediction that activism aimed at black Huey said, “It doesn’t make any difference, liberation will be met with attacks upon the they’re both one and the same.” They went sovereignty and vitality of black people.53 As through some intellectual changes, with a few Seale would argue just 1 year later in 1969: statements here and there—Roy Ballard, ‘Because of [the Ten-Point Platform and Kenny Freeman, and a couple other people— Program of the Black Panther Party], we have and came back to the same question that they political prisoners. We have dead members. had asked Huey about a minute before. “Do you want to speak on self-defense or We have a war going on. The war started 400 politics?” Huey said that they’re both one years ago, and the war must be ended.’54 and the same thing. The BPP originally organized itself with the objective of ending this colonial war. “If I’m talking about self-defense, I’m talking Consider, for example, the action taken by about politics; if I’m talking about politics, the Party in response to the death of Denzil I’m talking about self-defense. You can’t Dowell in early 1967.55 Dowell, a young separate them.” black youth living in Richmond, California, had been shot and killed by police, whose They didn’t understand Huey when he said, “Politics is war without bloodshed, and war official account of the slaying explicitly is politics with bloodshed, a continuation of contradicted dozens of black eyewitnesses. politics with bloodshed.” They didn’t Having been called by the Dowell family to understand antagonistic contradictions and investigate, the BPP decided to hold a rally in non-antagonistic contradictions both being the neighborhood to expose the facts of the lodged in the arena of politics. They didn’t killing and to exhibit the political importance understand that the plight of black people’s of self-defense. Assuming the police would struggle here in the confines of decadent attempt to stop the rally, the Panthers America is a political-military whole, unified decided to demonstrate their point on site within itself. and set up armed guards to secure the event. When hundreds of black people turned […] Huey said, very firmly to all of them, that we would speak, and when we speak it out, many carrying their own guns, the won’t make any difference if we’re talking police who came to stop the rally rapidly about self-defense, or if we’re talking about retreated. Several Panthers addressed the politics. If we’re talking about politics and crowd and explained the Party’s program. the survival of black people, it’s the same Then Huey Newton spoke. thing.’51 ‘The masses of the people want peace. The Black people’s struggle for survival in masses of the people do not want war. The America, on Newton’s and Seale’s account, is Black Panther Party advocates the abolition of war. But at the same time, we realize that ‘a political-military whole, unified within the only way you can get rid of war, many itself’. If black people are to organize them- times, is through a process of war. Therefore, selves in the effort to secure the economic and the only way you can get rid of guns is to get political resources necessary to guarantee rid of the guns of the oppressor. The people their freedom, they will need to defend them- must be able to pick up guns, to defend selves militarily, because their livelihood is themselves.’56  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 327 The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense for Children Program to try to intimidate the Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 initially came into existence for precisely the children and the Party. They come down reason that its original name suggests: self- there with their guns, they draw a gun or defense, that is, the autonomous defense of two, say a few words and walk all over the place, with shotguns in their hands. Then the the black community against the experienced little kids go home and say, “Mama, the threat of police brutality and other forms of police came into the Breakfast for Children State violence.57 Newton went to great Program.” This is the power structure’s lengths to stress that arms were to serve a technique to try to destroy the program. It’s political purpose and were not to be viewed in an attempt to scare the people away from purely military terms. At the outset, that sending their children to the Breakfast political purpose was primarily defensive in Program and at the same time, trying to nature. The initial actions undertaken by the intimidate the Black Panther Party. Party were to trail police cars through the Meanwhile, through the politicians and the Oakland ghettos, equipped with guns and media they try to mislead the people about law books, in order to ensure that whenever the value of such a program and the political nature of such a program. […] black men or women were stopped by the police, their constitutional rights were not The Black Panther Party is not stupid at all in violated (Figure 3). understanding the politics of the situation. As the Party gained admiration and Figure 2 BPP Berkeley, organized petition for community control of police, summer 1970 (Billy X Jennings, www.itsabouttimebpp.com). We understand that the avaricious, support from the black community, and by demagogic, ruling class will use racist police 1967 when the Party had attained the level of departments and mass media to distort the a national organization with myriad local real objectives of the Black Panther Party. chapters, it dropped ‘for Self-Defense’ from The more we’re successful with the its name and greatly expanded the nature of programs, the more we’ll be attacked. We its community involvement. The political don’t take guns with us to implement these purpose of the Party expanded to include the programs, but we understand and know from our own history that we’re going to be productive procurement of the social and attacked, and that we have to be able to economic resources necessary for the survival defend ourselves. They’re going to attack us of the black community. These revolutionary viciously and fascistically and try to say it survival programs included not only the was all justifiable homicide, in the same Campaign for Community Control of Police, manner they’ve always attacked black people but the Free Breakfast for Children Program, in the black communities. Free Health Clinics, Free Clothing Program, Liberation Schools and the Free Busing to […] The power structure metes this violence Prisons Program so that members of the black upon the Black Panther Party because we’ve community could maintain affective ties with implemented programs that are actually their loved ones in the prison system. exposing the government, and they’re being The deepening of the BPP’s community implemented and put together by a involvement and the implementation of its revolutionary political party. many survival programs elicited even more violence from the State. Seale discusses the The freeing of political prisoners is also on the program of the Black Panther Party, way in which the police force deliberately because we have now, at this writing [1968], attempted to attack and dismantle the over 300 Black Panthers who have court cases survival programs set up by the Black that are pending. In addition there have been Panther Party through the related techniques hundreds of arrests, unjust arrests of Party of intimidation and criminalization. members, who were exercising their constitutional rights. We believe in exercising ‘The cops in Los Angeles and several other our constitutional rights of freedom of places have walked in on the Free Breakfast assembly, of freedom of the press (the Black  328 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 Figure 3 BPP Berkeley, organized petition for community control of police, summer 1970 (Billy X Jennings, www.itsabouttimebpp.com).  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 329 Panther Party newspaper), our constitutional political prisoners program’, was the criminal- Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 right to bear arms, to be able to defend ization of the BPP’s revolutionary survival ourselves when attacked, and all the others programs along with the self-defense methods [i.e. constitutional rights]. So we’ve been resorted to in order to protect them. Govern- arrested. ment programs such as the FBI’s Counterin- telligence Program (COINTELPRO) were What has to be understood is that they intend established for the express purpose of crimi- to destroy our basic [survival] programs. This nalizing, discrediting and ‘neutralizing’ black is very important to understand. The fact that liberation movements. As explicitly outlined they murder Black Panther Party members, conduct attacks and raids on our offices, by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in a 1968 arrest us and lie about us, is all an attempt to memorandum to FBI Field Offices: ‘The stop these basic programs that we’re putting purpose of [COINTELPRO] is to expose, together in the community. The people learn disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise from these programs because they’re clear neutralize the activities of black nationalist, examples, and the power structure wants to hate-type organizations and groupings, their stop that learning.’58 leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity The State’s attacks on the BPP’s survival for violence and civil disorder.’59 programs exemplify the way that the institu- A brief example drawn from the autobiog- tions of US political authority systematically raphy of the late (and dearly missed) Safiya produced and maintained the impoverish- Bukhari-Alston throws this governing ment of black communities while simulta- tendency into relief. Bukhari-Alston was a neously relying upon the power and support member of the Black Panther Party and a of those communities for the authorization lifetime social justice activist. In ‘Coming of and maintenance of its own sovereignty. The Age: A Black Revolutionary’, she describes survival programs were clear examples of the the event that awakened her to political black community’s power of autonomous consciousness and prompted her to join the self-valorization and determination—a power BPP, an organization with whose revolution- independent from (and in conflict with) US ary politics she previously disagreed. Sent by governmental and civil institutions. This is her college sorority to help ‘disadvantaged’ one of the things that Seale is referring to children in Harlem as part of a service when he writes of the educational function of project, she decided to volunteer for one of the programs: they were vehicles through many of the Black Panther community which members of the black community service enterprises: the Free Breakfast could learn and experience their own power. Program for Children. Given that US political authority relied upon and was invested in fostering the perception ‘I couldn’t get into the politics of the Black among members of the black community that Panther Party, but I could volunteer to feed they were dependent upon the State for their some hungry children; you see, children security and well-being, the education that deserve a good start and you have to feed was taking place in the Black Panther Party’s them for them to live to learn. It’s hard to survival programs about the autonomous think of reading and arithmetic when your power of the black community was, as Seale stomach’s growling.… critically points out, a kind of learning that Every morning, at 5:00 my daughter and I the power structure wanted to put a stop to. would get ready and go to the Center where I The primary technique by which American was working on the Breakfast Program— institutions of political and civil governance cook and serve breakfast, sometimes talk to attempted to accomplish this goal, as is children about problems they were evidenced by the BPP’s need for a ‘free encountering and sometimes help them with  330 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 their homework. Everything was going along Black Liberation’. Written from behind bars Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 smoothly until the number of children in May 1971, just weeks before GIP member coming began to fall off. Finally, I began to Catherine von Bülow’s visit, this essay is question the children and found out that the what Joy James calls ‘perhaps the first essay police had been telling the parents in the authored by an African-American woman neighborhood not to send their children to within the genre of contemporary black the Program because we were “feeding them poisoned food.” protest and prison literature’.61 In this work, Davis cites numerous extra-legal acts of resis- It’s one thing to hear about underhanded tance to terror and oppression in black things the police do—you can ignore it history, from the underground railroad and then—but it’s totally different to experience it abolitionist opposition to the fugitive slave for yourself—you either lie to yourself or laws, to the sit-ins of the civil rights era, to face it. I chose to face it and find out why the the 11 members of the L.A. Chapter of the police felt it was so important to keep Black BPP who in the spring of 1970, ‘took up arms children from being fed that they told lies. I to defend themselves from an assault initiated went back to the Black Panther Party and started attending some of their Community by the local police force on their office and Political Education Classes.’60 on their persons’. As Bukhari-Alston’s testimony makes ‘All these historical instances involving the quite explicit, the police felt it was so impor- overt violation of the laws of the land tant to keep black children from being served converge around an unmistakable common by the autonomous actions of their own denominator. At stake has been the collective community that they explicitly fabricated a welfare and survival of a people. […] narrative of criminality in order to obstruct Whenever blacks in struggle have recourse to self-defense, particularly armed self-defense, such action. ‘Don’t send your children to it is twisted and distorted on official levels participate in the Black Panther Party Free and ultimately rendered synonymous with Breakfast Program for Children, because the criminal aggression. On the other hand, when Black Panthers are criminals trying to kill policemen are clearly indulging in acts of your children.’ In this act, the police fashions criminal aggression, officially they are the Party as criminals and the potential bene- defending themselves through “justifiable ficiaries of the Party’s programs as victims assault” or “justifiable homicide.” […] The who are in need of protection from the political act is defined as criminal in order to State—the same State whose systemic discredit radical and revolutionary oppression of black people motivated the movements. The political event is reduced to autonomous organization of the BPP to a criminal event in order to affirm the absolute invulnerability of the existing order. begin with. The State executes acts of gover- […] As the black liberation movement and nance such as this in order to dismantle the other progressive struggles increase in radical political movements that are ques- magnitude and intensity, the judicial system tioning the very foundations of its political and its extension, the penal system, authority. consequently become key weapons in the The criminalization of black resistance to state’s fight to preserve the existing oppression, as participants in the black liber- conditions of class domination, therefore ation struggle have always well-understood, racism, poverty, and war.’62 is by no means a phenomenon that began with the BPP. Angela Y. Davis, a BPP By exposing the reciprocal link between member and political prisoner at the time, black survival and black resistance, and relat- provided an incisive articulation of the ing them to the processes by which such historical criminalization of black political survival and resistance are ritually attacked, resistance in ‘Political Prisoners, Prisons, and distorted and criminalized on official levels,  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 331 Davis’s account gives us an indication of the our part, political, will have to be Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 historical experience that motivated the Black accompanied by a latent threat. And all the Panther Party to posit politics and war as func- projects for survival that comrade Newton tionally inseparable. Put simply, struggles for has started and developed, I think that they’re going to have to be defended.’64 black survival and liberation have consistently been compelled to openly make recourse to Jackson shared Newton’s and Seale’s extra-legal action, and they have just as consis- assessment that black people’s struggle for tently been met with State violence and terror. survival in America was ‘a political-military It is precisely the counter-revolutionary whole, unified within itself’. Organizing and violence and terror waged against the BPP’s educating from within the prison, he revolutionary survival programs that led BPP attempted to transform the prison—what Field Marshall George Jackson to assume the Davis called ‘a key weapon in the state’s role, from within the American prison fight to preserve the existing conditions of system, of preparing military protection for class domination, racism, poverty, and those programs; for, without such protection, war’—into a tool for revolutionary mobiliza- their continuation would have been incon- tion (Figure 4). And it was his principled ceivable. If the American prison system commitment to the politico-military struggle played a strategic role in the colonization of for black liberation that ultimately magne- the black community—not only as an appara- tized the counter-revolutionary bullets of the tus that criminalizes and detains the radical State to his person. Jackson was assassinated community activists of black liberationist organizations, but also as a surrogate solution to the social problems associated with poverty and racism—Jackson transformed the prison, granting it a strategic role in the decolonization of the black community.63 In a 29 March 1971 interview transcribed and published in The Black Panther, which the GIP translated and published in L’Assassinat de George Jackson later that year, Jackson argues the following: ‘I feel that the building of revolutionary consciousness of the prisoner class is paramount in the overall development of a hard left revolutionary cadre. And I repeat— cadre. Of course, the revolution has to be carried out by the masses. But we need a cadre; we need a bodyguard; a political worker needs a bodyguard. We [i.e. the prisoner class] see ourselves as performing that function. The terms of existence here in the joint conditions [sic] the brothers for that type of work. Although I have become more political recently, from listening to Comrade [Huey] Newton, and from reading the [Black Panther] Party paper, I’ve gained a clear Figure 4 Cover page of The Black Panther newspa- understanding of the tie-in between political per announcing the establishment of the San Quentin and military activities. I still see my function Branch of the Black Panther Party, co-founded by as military. […] I feel that any movement on George Jackson (The Black Panther, 27 February 1971).  332 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 by San Quentin prison guards on 21 August politics and warfare in the published works Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 1971. of 1975–76.67 The written and practical works of George The editors of the anthology on the GIP Figure 4 San Quentin Branch of the BPP opens, February 1971 (The Black Panther, 27 February 1971). Jackson and Angela Y. Davis played a funda- call attention to two events in particular that mental role in galvanizing the international generated strong mobilization in both France prison abolition movement of the 1970s. And and Italy. The first of these was the political more than any other Black Panther intellec- assassination of George Jackson in August tual, it was Davis and Jackson who exerted 1971. The second was the prisoner revolt that the greatest influence on Foucault’s thinking took place at Attica State Correctional about politics during this period.65 In the Facility in New York in September 1971.68 following section I will analyze their work in On 21 August 1971, a group of revolution- further detail, and assess the manner in which ary prisoners, George Jackson among them, Foucault appropriates it. took control of the first-floor tier of San Quentin prison, taking four hostages and releasing the other prisoners from their cells. III. 1971–76: black power in the Collège de Jackson, who at a certain point exited the France? ‘adjustment’ center door, was gunned down in the yard by a sniper guard. Having been The editors of the recently published anthol- shot in the back, Jackson bled to death on the ogy Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons: asphalt. The some 30 minutes during which Archive d’une lutte, 1970–1972 corroborate these events took place are shrouded in obscu- the formative effect that the US black libera- rity.69 Fellow prisoners and companions of tion movement had on the GIP and other Jackson, such as Luis Talamantez, have called constituents of the radical political movement the event ‘the half-hour revolution’. San in France during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Quentin prison authorities referred to it as a ‘riot’, a ‘massacre’ and a failed escape attempt ‘It is, above all, the GIP’s engagement with lacking precise organization or objective. One the American situation that is the most thing about which there is rather widespread important. […] The resistance movements in the United States—and particularly the black agreement is that the account of the events liberation movement—sustained the post- given by the San Quentin prison authorities is May 1968 French movement and contributed internally inconsistent. The Groupe d’Infor- to the redefinition of political action.’66 mation sur les Prisons scoured the accounts published in the popular American press in In this section, I will inquire further into the the weeks following the assassination. Having sustaining contribution that the black libera- exposed the blatant inconsistencies among tion movement made to the redefinition of them, they wrote the following. political action and the manner in which that contribution gets appropriated and rearticu- ‘A man who described the death of his lated by Foucault and the GIP. Through this neighbor with only half the incongruities that consideration it will become apparent that have been provided by the director of San the events of revolutionary anti-racist strug- Quentin on the death of Jackson would be immediately accused of the murder. […] gle in the USA were the primary inspiration Jackson’s murder will never be prosecuted by for Foucault’s genealogical reorientation. the American justice system. No court will These events, coupled with the counter- seriously attempt to find out what took place; revolutionary terror that the State unleashed it is an act of war. And what has been in response to them, exposed American published by the established power, the politics as a continuation of war, which then prison administration, reactionary served as the (unacknowledged) model for newspapers, must be considered a series of Foucault’s reflections on the continuity of “war bulletins.”’70  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 333 Angela Y. Davis, listening to radio broad- Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 castings about the events surrounding the murder from her cell in Marin County Jail, commented on the incredulity of the prison administration’s account. ‘I listened to the radio talk shows. The majority of the people who called in to the shows suspected that something was very wrong inside San Quentin; that whatever was askew was not the fault of the prisoners, but of the prison hierarchy. The most consistent aspect of these responses was the belief that the prison administration had taken them for fools. Over and over again, people Figure 5 September 1971: Attica prisoners negotiat- commented on the contempt the ing with New York State officials after taking control of administration had shown by not even the prison facility (Liz Fink Attica Photographs File constructing a sensible story. Who on earth Collection and www.talkinghistory.org). would believe that the tale [the administration told] justified all the violence improve conditions, [and] years of false unleashed on the prisoners?’71 promises of reform by the prison administra- The night of the murder, Davis, who was tion’.73 ‘The Attica Liberation Faction Mani- quite close to Jackson, reflected upon her festo of Demands and Anti-Depression mourning and that of others. ‘Tonight men Platform’, included demands for such things and women in every prison in the country as access to proper medical care, adequate were probably awake, like me, mourning and visiting conditions, an end to political and trying to channel their anger constructively. racial persecution and punishment, and the People all over the world must be talking legal prosecution of correctional officers for about vengeance—constructive organized acts of cruel and unusual punishment. mass retaliation.’72 Despite the explicitly expressed will of the Figure 5 Attica 1—prisoners negotiating, September 1971 (Liz Fink Attica Photographs File Collection and www.talkinghistory.org). One such action of constructive organized prisoners to negotiate with State authori- mass retaliation transpired at Attica prison. ties,74 New York State Governor Nelson Spurred in part by Jackson’s murder at the Rockefeller ordered some 600 State Troopers hand of San Quentin prison guards, and and National Guards to storm the prison. acting in resistance to protracted abuse and Armed with high-powered rifles and shot- neglect by prison authorities, over 1200 guns, the agents of the State fired some 4500 prisoners took control of Attica prison on 9 rounds of ammunition on the prisoners and September 1971, in an occupation that hostages, shooting 150 people, killing 29 endured for 5 days. Referring to themselves prisoners and 10 hostages; they then as the Attica Liberation Faction, they held 42 proceeded to torture 1289 prisoners (Figures prison officials hostage, issued a list of 27 6 and 7).75 Following the event, the New demands and requested that a select group of York State Special Commission on Attica intermediaries—including black liberation wrote: ‘With the exception of Indian massa- movement leaders and lawyers—facilitate cres in the late 19th century, the State Police negotiations between them and the State in assault which ended the four day uprising order that their demands be met (Figure 5). was the bloodiest one-day encounter As stated in The Freedom Archives audio between Americans since the Civil War.’76 documentary Prisons on Fire, ‘[t]he Attica Jackson’s assassination and the events at Figure 76 Attica 3—NY 2—NY State Trooper Troopersand anddead prisoners, prisoners, September September 19711971 (Liz (Liz FinkFink Attica Attica Photographs Photographs File File Collection Collection and www.talkinghistory.org). and www.talkinghistory.org). rebellion was preceded by a long chain of Attica State Prison gained widespread interna- abuses, years of petition and protest to tional attention, particularly in France where  334 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 Figures 6 & 7 September 1971: New York State Troopers in Attica prison yard following the violent seizure of the prison by some 600 State Troopers and National Guards. Armed with high-powered rifles and shotguns, agents of the State fired some 4,500 rounds of ammunition on the prisoners and hostages, shooting 150 people, killing twenty-nine prisoners, and ten hostages. (Liz Fink Attica Photographs File Collection and www.talkinghistory.org) there was a sizeable community of African after the prisoner revolt and State repression Americans living in exile (both willed and at Attica, the GIP wrote: forced). Consider, for instance, the following statement by African American writer and ‘The prisoner confronts segregation, social activist James Baldwin, speaking of abasement, and physical and mental Jackson’s assassination in Paris in 1971: degradation every day. That’s racism: the ready instrument of fascist terror. The ‘Beneath the political implications of this prisoners’ struggle is part of the general bloody event there’s also an anguish, which struggle against racism and fascism. The life has endured in my country for nearly 400 and death of [George] Jackson and the years. I, myself, have lived through too many massacre at Attica revealed that amerikkkan murders and too many assassinations to prisons (les prisons amerikkkaines) are believe a word that [President Richard] centers for the formation of revolutionary Nixon […] or any other of the American militants.’78 authorities say. […] I know very well that the intention of the American Republic was to In addition to confirming the importance keep black people slaves forever. And I know of these two events for the GIP and the that now that black people have discovered in French prison abolition movement, the above their own minds, in their own hearts, that passage has a number of features that warrant they are not what they are told they were, comment in this context. First, note the use of that America is on the verge of panic—on the the expression ‘amerikkkan’; this expression verge of civil war.’77 is taken directly from the black liberationist The GIP was among those of the radical vocabulary, in which it is employed in order political movement in France during that to draw attention to the white supremacy (Ku period who were galvanized by the events Klux Klan) perceived to exist at the heart of within the US prison system. In ‘Le prison- the American polis. Secondly, the GIP takes nier affronte chaque jour la ségrégation (The two positions that, while not exclusive to, are prisoner confronts segregation every day)’, primarily drawn from—and, as we will see, published in La Cause du peuple just days become formulated in terms quite similar  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 335 to—the political philosophies of the Black ‘the discourse of race struggle’, a discourse Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 Panthers: (1) racism is the primary instrument that he traces back to the 17th century. On of fascist terror, and (2) the prison movement another level, however, Foucault is engaging is a continuation of revolutionary struggles in a very different kind of self-assessment. outside the prison. Foucault will later appro- Daniel Defert draws our attention to this priate each of these theses in his political self-critical subtext in his discussion entitled theory. He appropriates the first thesis in the ‘The “Mechanism of War” as an Analytic of 1976 Lectures, where he first publicly Power Relations’.80 In this presentation, discusses the concept of biopower. The delivered in 1996 at a conference devoted to second thesis fuels his critique of the Foucault’s 1976 Lectures, Defert argues that orthodox Marxist conception of power.79 the 1976 Lectures constitute a turning point Comparing Angela Y. Davis’s and George in Foucault’s work, but they do ‘not mark a Jackson’s distinctive formulations of these rupture with the genealogical method of ideas, arrived at in the context of revolution- approach, announced in 1970’. The course, ary struggle, with Foucault’s theoretical he argues, ‘must be understood less as an appropriation of them, I will advance the inaugural discourse’, that is, less as a discus- following three arguments: (1) Foucault’s sion that inaugurates the approach to method of genealogy, and the notion of biopower and governmentality that Foucault biopolitics that was generated by that would pursue for the rest of the 1970s. method, in many ways takes its cues from Rather, the course must be understood ‘as Davis’s and Jackson’s analyses of the struggle the end of the line of the genealogical analy- for black liberation, and the critique of ses inaugurated in 1970’. Foucault’s discus- American State racism that was articulated in sion of the mechanism of war, Defert argues, those analyses. (2) The sovereign power/ bears a ‘methodological continuity’ with disciplinary power schematic that Foucault those prior analyses, and even though the famously outlines in Discipline and Punish is analysis focuses on ‘a slightly new object’, largely inspired by Jackson’s analysis of Defert claims, ‘it is really a course that is American fascism and by Foucault’s inter- somewhat “in abyss” (en abîme)’. pretation of the events surrounding Jackson’s With this last claim, Defert plays upon the death. (3) Foucault’s critique of the orthodox French expression mise en abîme, which Marxist conception of power in the 1976 refers to the containment of an entity within Lectures is primarily motivated by the revo- another identical entity, or as an image of an lutionary role that the US black liberation image.81 What does Defert intend by struggle accorded to the unemployed and employing this expression to describe imprisoned populations—a role that Davis Foucault’s discussion of the mechanism of and Jackson explicated quite clearly. Each of warfare? To fully appreciate the claim, allow these points indicates the formative role that me to reproduce parts of Defert’s subsequent the revolutionary philosophies and struggles discussion. of the Black Panther Party had on Foucault’s genealogical work. ‘The years from 1970 to 1976 were all years To uncover the hidden genealogy of of genealogical analysis. The discourse of war constitutes a discourse that is typically Foucault’s genealogical work, one must genealogical, given that Foucault explains begin with the 1976 Lectures at the Collège that genealogical discourse is a discourse de France, because those lectures contain an founded upon passion, violence, important—though codified and, therefore, appropriation, and insufficiently elaborated underappreciated—subtext, which supplies a rationality.82 It just so happens that he leading clue to that hidden genealogy. On the takes up the same themes when surface, the lectures present themselves as a characterizing the discourse of war. That is to genealogical analysis of what Foucault calls say, the discourse of war is in effect a  336 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 “construction-into-an-abyss (une concepts of sex and the so-called ‘deploy- Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 construction en abîme)” of genealogical ment of sexuality’.84 The meaning of this analysis. […] We should perhaps focus our erasure, as well as the genealogy thereby attention less on the objects analyzed [in the effaced, must be interrogated. 1976 Lectures] than on the apparatus of With our attention now attuned to the analysis itself. […] [T]he vocabulary used to self-reflexive subtext at work in the 1976 describe the genealogical pursuit itself shares many features in common with the Lectures, let us begin this interrogation by vocabulary that is used to describe the looking at what Foucault called the discourse analyses that are produced by the discourse of race struggle. This will permit me to clar- of war.’83 ify the argument I am putting forth regarding the subjugated genealogy of Foucault’s gene- By saying that the discourse of war is a alogical work. It will also permit us to assess ‘construction en abîme’ of genealogical analy- the filiations that exist between (a) the sis, Defert means that the 1976 Lectures discourse of race struggle as Foucault constitute a genealogical analysis of genea- construes it, (b) Foucault’s genealogical logical analysis itself. In those lectures, discourse at large, and (c) the American Foucault engages in a self-reflexive critique discourses of black liberation with which of genealogical discourse that employs the Foucault was concurrently familiar. tools of genealogical method while simulta- The historiographical merits of Foucault’s neously calling into question (as we shall see account in the 1976 Lectures are debatable at below) the necessarily possible ‘inverted’ best, especially considering both the paucity meaning and direction toward which such a and the regional and ethnic homogeneity of method can ultimately lead. his sources.85 My present objective is not to Foucault signals this self-critical subtext to evaluate the historiographical merits of his his audience in at least two ways. First, he account, in large part because, as with many spends the first two lectures reflecting on the of his genealogical works, I would argue that genealogical project and the various power the 1976 Lectures are first and foremost an effects it had during the early 1970s; and, attempt to grapple with problems of power secondly, he describes the 17th-century relations in the present rather than in the method of ‘counter-history’ in terms similar past.86 My objective is to uncover the hidden to the way he generally describes genealogi- genealogy of Foucault’s account of the cal analysis. discourse of race struggle—a genealogy that The 1976 Lectures also disclose two histor- must be traced to 20th-century race struggles ical facts that it is important to point out. in the USA. In other words, I seek to expose First, they demonstrate that Foucault the actual historico-political intensities and initially developed his theory of biopolitics creations that motivated Foucault’s project in the context of an analysis of ‘the discourse and to which his own work bars access. of race struggle’ and a critique of State For the purposes of this inquiry, it is thus racism—discussions which themselves arose sufficient to point out that the genealogy within the horizon of a self-reflexive critique Foucault provides for the discourse of race of genealogical discourse. Secondly, given struggle is exclusively European—one which that the final lecture of the 1976 Lectures he traces back to 17th-century England, and (delivered in March 1976) served as the basis follows through the France of Louis XIV to from which Foucault produced the first its articulations in Nazi Germany and published version of his account of Stalin’s Soviet Union. One of the most biopolitics (published October 1976), the important formal features of Foucault’s argu- former allows us to see that in the latter ment is that the discourse of race struggle Foucault erases every reference to race and begins as a revolutionary form of discourse, a racism, replacing them instead with the discourse that ‘was essentially an instrument  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 337 used in the struggles waged by decentered own discourse—a racism about which Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 camps’, but that it eventually becomes Foucault remains distressingly silent. ‘converted’ and ‘inverted’ into the counter- Allow me to clarify the argument I am revolutionary discourse of biological racism. putting forth. I am not making any claims As he puts it, race discourse is recentered and about the nature or validity of the 17th- or becomes the discourse of the dominant 18th-century discourses that Foucault explic- power itself, ‘the discourse of a centered, itly deals with in the 1976 Lectures (i.e. centralized, and centralizing power’.87 Boulainvilliers, Thierry, etc.). The claim I’m Thus, whereas Foucault begins the lectures making is this: before Foucault ever set eyes by praising the discourse of race struggle as it upon those discourses, he was exposed to (1) manifested itself in the form of revolutionary the revolutionary discourse of race struggle ‘counter-history’, he ends by criticizing the as it was variously articulated by Davis, way that this same discourse undergoes a Jackson and other participants in the US ‘biological transcription’ and becomes the black liberation movement, and (2) the kind of discourse that fuels State racism. The evidence of the racist, counter-revolutionary details of Foucault’s account of how one and violence waged by the USA in response to the same form of discourse can undergo such those revolutionary movements. It is only in a radical inversion exceeds the scope of our virtue of this initial exposure that Foucault analysis. Suffice it to say that the way begins to pursue the genealogical project in Foucault describes race discourse is consis- the early 1970s, which culminates in the 1976 tent with the way he describes discourse in Lectures, in which he provides a genealogy of general during his genealogical period, the genealogical project itself. In a word, namely, as a practice or ‘tactical block’ that is American race struggle motivated Foucault- intertwined with relations of power, that is ian genealogy. Had Foucault not been intrinsically unstable, modifiable and exposed to that struggle, it is quite reasonable ‘tactically polyvalent’.88 It is precisely the to assume that there would be no ‘Nietzsche, principle of ‘tactical polyvalence’ that Genealogy, History’, no Discipline and accounts for the radical inversion that the Punish and no theory of biopolitics; he discourse of race struggle undergoes. For, would not have set out to theorize the what Foucault means by this principle is that institution of the prison, discourse as power- the essence of discourse is such that any knowledge or sought after the historical single type of discourse lends itself to being sources that he did in ‘writing a history of the taken up and utilized for divergent, even present’. contradictory strategical purposes, and thus The 1976 Lectures are characterized by the can assume very different political meanings. structure of repression. The genealogy of the I would like to suggest that both of the genealogical method that Foucault provides forms of what Foucault calls the discourse of under the code word of ‘the discourse of race struggle are primarily modeled after race struggle’ simultaneously acknowledges discursive and visible practices of race struggle and disavows the foundational role that race in the USA. What he calls ‘counter-history’ is struggle played in Foucault’s formulation of modeled after the revolutionary discourse of genealogy. In the subtext of the 1976 the Black Panther Party. What he describes as Lectures, Foucault tacitly acknowledges the the ‘biologico-social racism’ that fuels State discourse of race struggle as a harbinger of racism, while he explicitly draws from the his genealogical method. However, at one instances of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet and the same time, by failing to mention the Union, is also—and, I would argue, more American context, Foucault symptomati- fundamentally—inspired by the brand of cally denies the actually existing race strug- racism that was being deployed by the US gle that in fact motivated his method to government in concurrence with Foucault’s begin with.  338 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 We have already seen examples (in Section ‘What is this discourse saying? Well, I think it Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 II) of the sort of black liberationist counter- is saying this: […] Law is not pacification, for history that was central to the Black beneath the law, war continues to rage in all Panthers’ mode of political critique and the mechanisms of power, even the most regular. War is the motor behind institutions struggle. Allow me to further substantiate and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is my claims about the roots of Foucaultian waging a secret war. To put it another way, genealogy by comparing Foucault’s charac- we have to interpret the war that is going on terization of the two inverted forms of the beneath peace; peace itself is a coded war.’92 discourse of race struggle with selected excerpts of the concurrent political analyses This depiction of the discourse of counter- of George Jackson and Angela Y. Davis— history could very well be a quotation of analyses about which we can be certain that George Jackson, who argues from within the Foucault was familiar. Maximum Security Unit of Soledad Prison in The practice of ‘counter-history’, whose California that ‘the ultimate expression of genealogy Foucault traces in the 1976 law is not order—it’s prison’.93 Between 1969 Lectures and which prefigures the genealogi- and 1971, Jackson argued that the USA was cal method itself, radically breaks from and in the third stage of fascism.94 After a first displaces the traditional practice of history. stage of monopoly capital, in which old Within the critical disclosure space opened bourgeois democracy had already begun to up by this counter-historical discourse, the diminish; and a second ‘spectacular stage’, traditional practice of history appears not as during which American sovereignty gained a neutral and universal, but as a ritual that rein- certain degree of security through the forces established sovereignty, a discourse violently repressive tactics of the McCarthy that reinforces the law by erasing the funda- era during which no dissent was permitted; mental relations of domination that under- Jackson argued that American sovereignty gird it. In short, counter-history exposes had reached a third, secured stage of fascism, traditional history as a form of codified which he called ‘corporativism’. Corporative warfare.89 ‘It is interested in rediscovering capitalism is characterized by what he calls a the blood that has dried in the [legal] codes ‘prestige of power’, which he describes as […] in the battle cries that can be heard follows: beneath the formulas of right, in the dissym- ‘The prestige of power at its maturity is a metry of forces that lies beneath the equilib- thing that will prevent people from acting rium of justice.’90 Counter-history, as an against that power. This pig is a psychological analysis of the State, describes State sover- thing, a state of being wherein the eignty as founded upon real, historical rela- bourgeoisie[’s] reign of terror need not rely tions of force. Contra Hobbes, who argues on violence to sustain itself. It’s relying on that the modern State emerges from ‘the war something that happened in the past, or some of all against all’—an abstract notion of war accomplishment, or some, let’s say, coup, construed as a generalized ‘state of nature’— that went down in the past, where it secured counter-history argues that the order and itself. And it’s drifting at this point, the peace of the law is undergirded by an actual, prestige of power means that it’s drifting at this point and living off its laurels. At this historically specifiable battle. This founda- stage, people just are not inclined to attack tional battle also continues to well up after that power. So, consequently, our first attack the State has been constituted, as the State is on the prestige of power. That was repeatedly attempts to secure its (always Jonathan’s95 job, to destroy the prestige of tenuous) monopoly over the legitimized power, the iconoclastic act of crushing means of violence.91 symbols. Once these symbols are crushed, Foucault characterizes the discourse of and people see that they are vulnerable, then counter-history in the following way: we can move on to the actual destruction of  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 339 the bases of power. Because […] after the the sedimentations of slavery and white Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 destruction of the prestige of power, power supremacy that, while disguised by the pres- will be forced to revert back to its original tige of power, remain at the heart of the force, raw brute force—violence.’96 American republic.98 The Panthers argued Jackson’s is a discourse that reveals the laws that a fundamentally racist, repressive war of the USA as having been ‘born in the blood continually seethed beneath the surface of and mud of battles’ and as covering over that American politics, and that this war wells up foundational violence with the prestige of in order to govern racialized populations, power. Whether it be the colonial proprietary especially those who challenge the conditions and criminal codes that justified the genocide of their continued oppression. of Native Americans, the slave codes that Consider the following comment about the justified the continued enslavement of expro- repressive and racist character of American priated Africans, postbellum Jim Crow laws, law that Davis provides from Marin County or the so-called ‘war on crime’ that began to Jail in May 1971, 1 year before she was acquit- take root in the late 1960s—American law and ted of all charges: order, Jackson argues, has consistently and predominantly manifested itself to black and ‘Needless to say, the history of the United other nationally oppressed people as a form States has been marred from its inception by an enormous quantity of unjust laws, far too of codified and institutionalized violence. many expressly bolstering the oppression of And when real challenge is made to that black people. Particularized reflections of violence in its codified and institutionalized existing social inequalities, these laws have forms, power reverts back to its original repeatedly borne witness to the exploitative force: raw brute force—violence. and racist core of the society itself. For A reversion of this kind, Jackson contin- blacks, Chicanos, for all nationally oppressed ues, is precisely what took place when the people, the problem of opposing unjust laws Black Panther Party came into being and and the social conditions which nourish their began to crush the symbolic prestige of growth, has always had immediate practical American governmental authority. implications. Our very survival has frequently been a direct function of our skill ‘[O]nce secure and in power, it was possible in forging effective channels of resistance. In for them [i.e. those in power] then to allow resisting we have sometimes been compelled some dissent. It was possible for them to have to openly violate those laws which directly or a C.P. (Communist Party), just so long as indirectly buttress our oppression. But even that C.P. didn’t have any teeth; it was when containing our resistance within the possible, then, for them to allow us to form orbit of legality, we have been labeled what appeared to be an opposition party. criminals and have been methodically But, now, to make my point very clear, a real persecuted by a racist legal apparatus.’99 opposition party did come into existence. The BPP, Black Panther Party. What To the extent that they expose the racialized happened? What happened: they reverted violence and oppression that State sovereignty back to the second stage, back to the second at once bolsters and obfuscates, the analyses dimension [of fascism]. They were kicking of Davis and Jackson epitomize the form of doors in and killing people. It’s pretty race discourse that Foucault later champions obvious, it’s pretty obvious that a mature under the name of counter-history. fascism exists in this country, and it exists in Furthermore, the other, ‘inverted’ form of disguise, and the disguise takes the form of all those idiotic, ridiculous statements about the discourse of race struggle that Foucault [this being] a welfare state.’97 describes in the 1976 Lectures—the ‘biological transcription’ that develops into the kinds of The Black Panther Party was nailed to the biological racist discourses of degeneracy that orbit of State repression because it exposed inform biopolitical State racism—also  340 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 features in the analyses of Davis and Jackson. Manifesto was published, the GIP issued a Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 Biologico-social racism features in their anal- pamphlet on the assassination of George yses as it does in most of the anti-essentialist, Jackson, and the next day held a meeting at anti-racist discourses that emerged from the which they projected two films on the third world liberation movements of the American prisons in San Quentin and period—namely, as an object of critique. Soledad, where Jackson had been incarcer- Take, for example, Davis’s argument (in the ated. The pamphlet, which included transla- self-same 1971 essay to which Foucault had tions of two interviews with Jackson, a access) that American governmental authority preface by Jean Genet and a strategical analy- ascribes an ‘a priori culpability’ to those it sis of the discourses issued by the American deems social enemies. She cites US Judge prison authorities and popular press regard- Webster Thayer’s comment upon sentencing ing Jackson’s death, was written by Foucault, anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti to 15 years von Bülow and Defert. In the final words of imprisonment in 1920 for an attempted his preface, Genet writes: payroll robbery: ‘This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attrib- ‘We [i.e. the GIP] maintain the following: uted to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, The word “criminal,” applied to blacks by because he is the enemy of our existing insti- whites, has no meaning. For whites, all blacks tutions.’ Associating this policy to the legal are criminals because they’re black. This amounts to saying that in a white society, no theory put forth by Nazi Germany’s foremost black can be criminal.’102 constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt—accord- ing to which, ‘[a] thief, for example, was not In the American context, of which Foucault necessarily one who has committed an overt was clearly aware, racism operated in a act of theft, but rather one whose character distinctly ‘biopolitical’ mode; it served as the renders him a thief’—Davis attributes such a ‘indispensable precondition’ that allowed the policy of a priori culpability to the existing State to subject its own population to expul- American governmental authority. sion and rejection, and to social, civic and ‘[President Richard] Nixon’s and [FBI biological death.103 As Davis and Jackson Director] J. Edgar Hoover’s pronouncements point out, the American judicial and penal lead one to believe that they would readily systems are at the center of this racist function accept Schmitt’s fascist legal theory. Anyone of the State, playing a strategic role in the who seeks to overthrow oppressive State’s fight to preserve the existing conditions institutions, whether or not he has engaged in of social domination. an overt illegal act, is a priori a criminal who It is precisely in virtue of this strategic role must be buried away in one of America’s that the Black Panthers ascribed an equally dungeons.’100 strategic role to American prisoners in the revolutionary movement. Davis and Jackson Davis further indicates the way that this a were, again, among the first to thematize and priori culpability ultimately gets articulated strategically organize this continuity between in biological terms, inscribing itself, within the prison movement and the revolutionary the American context, upon the bodies of movement at large. Consider the following black and other racialized individuals. ‘For exchange in an interview just before the black individual, contact with the law- Jackson’s death. enforcement-judicial-penal network, directly or through relatives and friends, is inevitable Jackson: ‘[…] [T]he prison movement was because he or she is black.’101 started by Huey P. Newton and the black This argument gets directly taken up by panther party. Huey and the rest of the the GIP. On 10 November 1971, the same comrades around the country. We’re day that a French translation of the Attica working with Ericka [Huggins] and Bobby  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 341 [Seale], the prison movement in general, the lumpenproletariat, in revolutionary struggle, Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 movement to prove to the establishment that must be given serious thought. […] In the the concentration camp technique won’t context of class exploitation and national work on us. We don’t have to contrive any oppression it should be clear that numerous importance to our particular movement. It’s a individuals are compelled to resort to very real, very, very real issue and I’m of the criminal acts, not as a result of conscious opinion that, right along with the student choice—implying other alternatives—but movement, right along with the old, familiar because society has objectively reduced their workers’ movement, the prison movement is possibilities of subsistence and survival to central to the process of revolution as a this level. This recognition should signal the whole.’ urgent need to organize the unemployed and lumpenproletariat, as indeed the Black Karen Wald: ‘Many of the cadres of the Panther Party as well as activists in prison revolutionary forces on the outside have been have already begun to do.’105 captured and imprisoned. Are you saying that even though they’re in prison, these On this point as well, a direct genealogical Figure 7 Huey P. Newton behind bars (Jeffrey Blankfort). cadres can still function in a meaningful way line can be traced from the thought of Davis for the revolution?’ and Jackson to that of Foucault and the GIP. In the concluding section of their pamphlet Jackson: ‘Well, we’re all familiar with the on George Jackson, devoted to ‘Jackson’s function of the prison as an institution serving Position in the Prison Movement’, the GIP the needs of the totalitarian state. We’ve got to destroy that function; the function has to write that ‘the most notable aspect of be no longer viable, in the end. It’s one of the [Jackson’s] reflections is that which regards strongest institutions supporting the the relations between military action and totalitarian state. We have to destroy its political action’—what they go on to call ‘a effectiveness, and that’s what the prison fundamental problem’.106 Referring to the movement is all about. What I’m saying is BPP’s many revolutionary survival programs, that they put us in these concentration camps the GIP contend that: here the same as they put people in tiger cages or “strategic hamlets” in Vietnam. The idea is ‘[t]hese programs enable the black to isolate, eliminate, liquidate the dynamic community to organize itself. However, they sections of the overall movement, the will be increasingly threatened by fascist protagonists of the movement. What we’ve repression. This is why Jackson wrote that got to do is prove this won’t work. We’ve got these programs will quickly become to organize our resistance once we’re inside, inconceivable without a military rampart. give them no peace, turn the prison into just another front of the struggle, tear it down For at least two years, Jackson had the task of from the inside.’104 preparing this military protection, and of preparing it from within the prisons, where The Black Panthers not only conceived of disarmed and shackled men were trained for the prison as a site of struggle for those war. This is Jackson’s grand initiative. Two imprisoned for their involvement with the profoundly connected facts made this revolutionary movement outside the prison possible: on the one hand, the entire black walls. They also thought of the prison as a vanguard lives under the threat of prison, and place to politicize the many unemployed, so- many of its leaders remain there for quite a called ‘common law’ prisoners. long time; on the other hand, this presence, in turn, moves other prisoners to become ‘Especially today when so many black, politicized. One of these prisoners, for Chicano, and Puerto Rican men and women example, when asked what his plans are for are jobless as a consequence of the internal when he is released, responded, “To help my dynamic of the capitalist system, the role of people.” Hence, not only in the ghettos, in the unemployed, which includes the the factories, in the rebellions in the military,  342 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 but also in the prisons, nuclei of resistance are kills, it is not as a glorification of its strength, Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 taking form, the elements of the but as an element of itself that it is obliged to revolutionary army. tolerate, that it finds difficult to account for.’108 These previsions overturn many traditional ideas about the imprisoned in the history of This theory begins to take shape in the GIP’s the working class movement. depiction of the official discourse of San Quentin prison authorities in the wake of From within the prisons, Jackson prepared Jackson’s assassination. The GIP claims that the military protection necessary for political the American prison administration launched work; preparation that had not yet been a series of ‘counteroffensive operations’ in consolidated before it was threatened by the authorities that systematically practice the form of communications, news and homicide. That’s the reason why, outside the disclosures, in order to mold public opinion walls of the prisons, political organizations and ‘prepare a certain number of repressive launch military operations in order to rescue measures’. One of the aforementioned opera- and liberate prisoners whose lives are daily tions, they claimed, was to represent the threatened. Angela Davis became a heroic power of the prison guards as a lenient, figure for black people, when she was accused peaceful—even defenseless—force. (despite belonging to the pacifist and legalist U.S. Communist Party) of contributing to ‘On the side of the prisoners [were] all of the bold action of support, undertaken from the weapons, all of the cunning, and all of the outside on August 7, 1970, to rescue the violence; opposite them [were] guards Soledad prisoners. On both sides of the walls, who were empty-handed, impotent, and the army of the prisoners and the army of the absent-minded. The blacks are the ones people are preparing themselves for the same waging permanent war; the whites are war of liberation.’107 attempting to maintain a lenient order. If the guards don’t want to be the first and The juxtaposition of Davis’s and Jackson’s only victims, they will be forced to return, writings and the GIP’s engagement with them as Jim Park [the assistant warden of San further evidences the degree to which the Quentin] said, “to old correctional events of revolutionary anti-racist struggle in methods.” One day, they too will be forced to be armed.’109 the USA motivated Foucault’s turn to the method of genealogy, to the institution of the This reversion to ‘old correctional methods’, prison, and to the concepts of carcerality, to which the assistant warden of San Quentin discipline and biopower. The writings of the alludes, is precisely what in Foucault’s Black Panthers served as the model for vocabulary would later be cast as a reversion Foucault’s reflections on the continuity of from the ‘faceless gaze’ or ‘empty-handed’ politics and warfare in the published works of force of disciplinary power to the explicitly 1975–76. They also in many ways function as bellicose violence of spectacular power. precursors to Foucault’s theory of the spec- Racialized communities in the USA have tacular power/disciplinary power schematic. continually experienced and observed just Foucault argues that in the historical tran- such a reversion. Before his death, Jackson sition from the spectacular power regime to brought it to theoretical articulation in his that of disciplinary power, punishment analysis of American fascism and ‘the pres- ‘tend[s] to become the most hidden part of tige of power’. Where power’s prestige wears the penal process’. thin, where the ‘empty-handed’ force of ‘As a result, justice no longer takes public disciplinary power fails in its effort to manu- responsibility for the violence that is bound facture docile bodies, the State brings to bear up with its practice. If it too strikes, if it too the sovereign weight of spectacular violence  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 343 upon its own subjects. In Jackson’s words, ‘a mechanism that allows biopower to work. Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 power ‘reverts back to its original force, raw [It] is bound up with the workings of a State brute force—violence’. This is precisely what that is obliged to use race, the elimination of happened when the Black Panther Party races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power. […] Biopower came into existence. ‘What happened: they functions through the old sovereign power of reverted back to the second stage, back to the life and death’ second dimension [of fascism]. They were kicking doors in and killing people.’ Foucault was aware of the coexistence in and the way that it does so ‘implies the the USA of spectacular and disciplinary workings, the introduction and activation, of modalities of power, and he was cognizant, racism’.112 from afar, of the dimensions of race that regu- It is beyond doubt that Foucault knew of lated the dissymmetrical deployment of spec- the Black Panthers and their revolutionary tacular violence upon the American people. struggles. He knew about a real ‘race war’ Indeed, he wrote about it—in a political being waged by the government of the USA pamphlet that had very limited circulation, against its racialized populations; he knew but which was formative for his own thinking about the State racism that existed contem- about power. The question must be asked: poraneously with his discourse. Not only did Why, then, in his characterization of disci- Foucault elaborate his theories of biopower pline and the ‘panoptic’ power regime in his and politics-as-war, as well as his genealogi- widely distributed book Discipline and cal method as a whole, in concurrence with Punish, did Foucault erase the spectacle of these events; he drew heavily from the theo- racialized State violence?110 How, after know- retical writings of the Black Panthers in the ing what he knew of the race struggle in the course of elaborating his theories. And yet, USA, could he pen the following claim? Foucault makes not a single citation or explicit reference to the BPP in his published ‘Our society is one not of spectacle, but of writings or lectures. surveillance […]. We are neither in the We must ask ourselves two sets of ques- amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the tions, the fundamental answer to which is, I panoptic machine, invested by its effects of think, largely the same. The first stream of power, which we bring to [bear upon] questions is the following: Why did Foucault ourselves since we are part of its neglect to treat American State racism in his mechanism. […] [T]he pomp of analysis of biopolitics and State racism in the sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular 1976 Lectures? Why did he instead focus on manifestations of power, were extinguished the instances of Nazi Germany and the one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance […].’111 Stalinist Soviet Union, which were, in a sense, more ‘safely’ implanted in the histori- When forced by the phenomena of power cal past? Moreover, why did Foucault neglect relations themselves to include the theme of to mention black power and the ways in race in his analysis, as he does in the 1976 which his own analysis of power was Lectures, Foucault is forced to very different inspired by the analyses and struggles of the conclusions. He is compelled to formulate Black Panthers? Why, in the Collège de the concept of biopower, in which race oper- France, was black power contorted into a ates as the conduit through which the power European mold and suppressed from speak- of normalization and the spectacular power ing? Finally, why did Foucault jettison any of life and death commingle. ‘If the power of and all discussion of race or State racism normalization wished to exercise the old from his first published writings on sovereign right to kill, it must become racist.’ biopower in the initial volume of The Modern racism is History of Sexuality?  344 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 The second stream of questions issues from constitutes one’s ‘epistemic “second Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 the silence that has until now followed in the nature”’.114 wake of Foucault, that is, the silence among ‘Our normal unreflective reception of his variously disciplined commentators. Why what people tell us’, Fricker argues, ‘is has the topic of Foucault and the Black conditioned by a great range of collateral Panthers been ignored for so long? Why is it experience.’ Just as our actions toward others that Foucault scholars and intellectual histori- are in many ways learned and internalized ans have not only failed to propose possible through social processes of normalization, answers to this question, but failed, for the ‘our responses to the testimony of others are past 40 years, to even ask it? learned and internalized through processes of The answers to these questions are simul- epistemic socialization—a social training of taneously clear and obscure. One way of the interpretative and affective attitudes in answering them might be simply to say that play when we are told things by other the discourse and commitments of black people’.115 Importantly, this sensibility is not power magnetize bullets; Malcolm X, Bobby immutable, it is not ‘a dead-weight social Hutton, Alprentice ‘Bunchy’ Carter, Fred conditioning’, but rather is characterized by Hampton, Mark Clark, Brenda Harris, an essential adaptability—hence, its claim to Jonathan Jackson, James McClain, William be a capacity of reason.116 One’s testimonial Christmas, George Jackson and many others sensibility is thus an habitual (i.e. adaptable) have been killed precisely for having structure of response that shapes what sorts deployed them. The discourses of disciplin- of people one takes to be trustworthy in ary power, biopower and governmentality, what sorts of circumstances. Epistemic injus- by contrast, have received widespread tice occurs when ‘a speaker receives the acclaim and attention in the American and wrong degree of credibility from his hearer European academies; they have been incor- owing to a certain sort of unintended preju- porated into numerous and variously disci- dice on the hearer’s part’, for example, when plined academic narratives. a person or group of people are ritually For all its truth, however, this response excluded from participating in truth-bearing remains unsatisfactorily terse. In my discourse.117 concluding remarks, I would like to briefly Although not an instance of the verbal consider two possible avenues of response to testimonial sort of epistemic injustice that the questions posed here. The first response Fricker treats, the erasure of and silence is posed within the horizon of ethics, the about the link between Foucault and the second within the horizon of politics. Black Panthers, I argue, is a form of epistemic injustice. Given Foucault’s suppression of the link between his thought IV. Epistemic injustice and disciplinary and that of the Black Panthers, given the silence in truth-bearing discourse painstaking ethnocentrism with which he casts the genealogy of the discourse of race In an emerging debate on the ethics of testi- struggle in an exclusively European frame, mony and the politics of knowing, feminist and given his silence about the State racism philosopher Miranda Fricker has put forth of his time, I argue that Foucault is culpa- the idea of epistemic injustice.113 She suggests ble of epistemic injustice. The philosopher that individuals in unreflective testimonial who claimed to ‘desubjugate’ local, disqual- exchanges exercise a ‘testimonial sensibility’ ified, marginalized or non-legitimized that regulates the nature and degree of their knowledges through the practice of geneal- receptivity to a speaker’s testimony. She ogy now appears, vis-à-vis the Black describes this sensibility as ‘in the first Panthers, not only to have himself subju- instance a passive social inheritance’ that gated just such a body of knowledges, but  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 345 to have subjugated the very knowledges Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 from which he largely culled his method of genealogy. One can only assume that Foucault takes the so-called ‘counter-historical’ discourses of Boulainvilliers and Thierry to be more credible than those of Cleaver, Davis, Jack- son, Newton, Seale, etc.—or, at the very least, that he takes them to be more appropri- ate or legitimate types of knowledge for discussion in lectures and writings published in such widely circulating, ‘truth-bearing’ institutions like the Collège de France and major academic presses. (His one acknowl- edgement of the philosophies and struggles of the Black Panthers has until now remained muted in a pamphlet in a Parisian archive devoted to the documentation of Foucault’s ‘monument’.) The most generous reading of the epistemic injustice that Foucault inflicted upon the Black Panthers is perhaps to say (speculatively) that he thought it ‘safer’ to Figure 8 The faulty charges currently being brought cite revolutionary discourse from 17th- against the San Francisco 8 are the most recent attempt century Europe and to critique instances of by the United States government to destroy and distort State racism in Europe’s recent past than to the legacy of the Black Panther Party. challenge the global institutions of authority as the Black Panthers were doing in their follow Fricker in espousing an ethical virtue philosophies and struggles. Such a reading, of of ‘reflexive critical openness’. By safeguard- course, only serves to clarify the fact that ing against the kind of pre-propositional prej- Foucault, by virtue of the position of his udicial attitudes that result in epistemic discourse, enjoyed a kind of safety and injustice, such a virtue would play an impor- distance from potential fire that the Black tant role in combating this ‘distinctively Panthers did not. In any event, Foucault’s epistemic kind of oppression’. But Fricker ethical culpability seems quite clear. herself acknowledges the restrictions placed Assessing the ethical culpability of the on ethical action by the social and political epistemic injustice inflicted in the wake of horizon within which that action takes place. Foucault, however, is not quite as clear-cut a task. Commentators who lacked access to the ‘[T]here are circumstances under which the resources that evidence the link between virtue [of reflexive critical openness] cannot Foucault and the Black Panthers—and which be achieved. […] As something possessed [by] mere individuals whose social-historical thereby disclose Foucault’s own suppression situation can deprive them of the very of that connection—cannot in good faith be resources they need in order to attain the judged responsible and culpable on ethical virtue, its anti-oppressive power remains grounds for reinstantiating that erasure hostage to the broader social structures in through their silence about it. The limitation which our testimonial practices must take of an ethical framework for understanding place.’118 and evaluating the infliction of epistemic injustice at this level is evident. Were an ethical One must pose the question, then, not framework not limited in this way, we might within the horizon of the ethics of interper- Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 346 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 347 Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 Figure 9 Information sheet from the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights.  348 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 sonal exchange, but rather within the horizon safeguarded against only after the social and Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 of the social and political formations within political injustices inflicted upon them have which such interpersonal exchange takes been rectified. Epistemic and social justice place. A shift of this sort moves us from remain impossible so long as these prisoners Fricker’s ‘testimonial sensibility’, which have not been freed from confinement, and operates at the individual level, to Foucault’s so long as others are not free from the threat own analysis of the ‘will to truth’, which of being confined for struggling for their operates at the level of the assemblage of freedom (Figures 8 and 9). normalizing social institutions. Figure 98 Information The faculty charges sheet from currently the Committee being brought for the against Defense theof San Human Francisco Rights. 8 are the most recent attempt by the United States government to destroy and distort the legacy of the Black Panther Party. ‘[The] will to truth, like other systems of Notes exclusion, rests on an institutional support: it 1 A shorter and otherwise modified version of this 1 is both reinforced and renewed by a whole paper is appearing in Biopolitics and Racism: strata of practices, such as pedagogy, of Foucauldian Genealogies, eds Jeffrey Paris and course; and the system of books, publishing, Eduardo Mendieta (Albany: SUNY Press, libraries; learned societies in the past and 2007). laboratories now. But it is also renewed, no 2 2 Mao Tse-Tung, ‘On Protracted War’, Selected doubt, more profoundly, by the way in Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. II (Peking: Foreign which knowledge is put to work, valorized, Language Press, 1965), p. 153. 3 Huey P. Newton, ‘Functional Definition of 3 distributed, and in a sense attributed, in a society.’119 Politics’, The Black Panther, 17 January 1969; reprinted in The Black Panthers Speak, ed. Philip S. Foner (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995 What does the silence regarding the link [1970]), p. 47. between Foucault and the Black Panthers tell 4 4 George Jackson, ‘George Jackson: P.S., On us about the will to truth that imperceptibly Discipline’, The Black Panther, 27 March regulates the contemporary production, 1971. 5 This claim derives from Foucault’s 1976 lectures 5 disclosure and circulation of truth-bearing at the Collège de France. Foucault foreshadows knowledge? What is it about existing disci- this claim in 1975 in Discipline and Punish, and plinary formations (both academic and he reiterates it in the 1976 publication of the first social) that makes possible the kind of ethical volume of The History of Sexuality. Cf. Foucault, and political deficiency that is evidenced by ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. David such a silence? Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 15 I am unequipped to answer such far-reach- (hereafter referred to as 1976 Lectures); ing questions; in part, because their answer Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New must ultimately be given by the temporally York: Vintage, 1999), p. 168; The History of protracted domain of collective social practice. Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 93. In the present paper, I can only hope to clarify 6 It is important not to overstate the radicality of 6 some of the questions involved. But I will say this change of orientation; for instance, there this: according to information compiled by the exist several crucial elements of continuity Prison Activist Resource Center and the between Foucault’s work of the 1960s and that National Jericho Movement, there are over of the 1970s, namely, a concern with the role of knowledge in processes of subjectivation. In 100 political prisoners and prisoners of war addition, one can surely locate certain currently confined in American detention components of Foucault’s analysis of power centers, many of whom were incarcerated or relations and techniques of domination in the have been maintained in prison because of earlier books Madness and Civilization (1961) their activism within the Black Panther Party and Birth of the Clinic (1963). Nevertheless, the shift that Foucault’s work undergoes in the early or other third world liberation movements.120 1970s does lead to the displacement of certain The epistemic injustice inflicted upon the concepts and the formulation of new ones. For Black Panthers and other third world libera- example, ‘episteme’, a concept that pervades tion movements can be rectified and the earlier texts, appears only once in Discipline  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 349 and Punish (p. 305), and the concept of ‘the 10 L’ordre du discourse (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 historical a priori’ is abandoned entirely. As for p. 55; translated as ‘The Discourse on Language’ the methodological concept of ‘archaeology’, it and published as an appendix to The is neither mentioned in Discipline and Punish nor Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 219. I have ‘The Discourse on Language’—a text written just modified the translation. 1 year after Foucault had so meticulously 11 It is important to note that Angela Y. Davis opted 11 defined the concept in The Archaeology of not to assume an explicit position within the BPP’s Knowledge. leadership structure. In her introduction to The 7 See, for example, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Angela Y. Davis Reader, Joy James reports the 7 Rabinow, Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism following: and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 104–117; Béatrice ‘[Davis] describes her affiliation with the Panther Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the organization as a “permanently ambiguous Transcendental and the Historical, trans. status” that fluctuated between “‘member’ and Edward Pile (Stanford, CA: Stanford University ‘fellow-traveler’.” Active in community Press, 2002), pp. 73–108; Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: organizing, temporarily in charge of political University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and education in the West Side office […] and ‘What is a Dispositif?’, in Michel Foucault: formulating political education for the Los Philosopher, trans. Timothy Armstrong (New Angeles Chapter, Davis remained on the fringes York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 159–168; of the Panthers’ internal contestations. Years Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence (New later, she recalls her doubts about the Party’s York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 30–96; Jeffrey militarist posturing: “I thoroughly respected the Minson, Genealogies of Morals: Nietzsche, BPP’s visible defiance and principally supported Foucault, Donzelot, and the Eccentricity of the right to self-defense.… I also found myself Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 40–78; using funerals and shootings as the most obvious Peter Miller, Graham Burchell and Colin Gordon (eds), The Foucault Effect (New York: signposts of the passage of time. However, Harvester, 1991); Jeremy Moss (ed.), The Later sensing ways in which this danger and chaos Foucault (New York: Sage, 1998); Gary emanated not only from the enemy outside, but Gutting, Foucault and Literature: Towards a from the very core of the Black Panther Party, I Genealogy of Writing (London: Routledge, preferred to remain uninformed about the 1992), pp. 119–146. organization’s inner operations.”’ 8 As will be discussed below, the three published 8 documents, to my knowledge, where a Despite the distance she retained with respect to connection between Foucault and the BPP is the BPP’s inner operations, Davis maintained her mentioned are (1) the brief notes included in affiliation with the Party and remained a Daniel Defert’s ‘Chronology’, Dits et écrits, Vol. 1 prominent figure in the black liberation movements (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 33, 38, 39; (2) of the time. Cf. The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani’s editors’ Joy James (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), pp. postscript to the 1976 Lectures, ‘Situating the 6–7. Lectures’, where they cite Defert’s notes on the 12 12 I have translated part of this pamphlet into connection (1976 Lectures, p. 282); and (3) English. See ‘The Assassination of George Edmund White’s biography of Jean Genet, where Jackson’, in Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit. he documents Foucault’s association with Genet, Original Fr. pub. Groupe d’Information sur who was a prominent French literary figure, a les Prisons, L’Assassinat de George Jackson, contemporary of Foucault, and a BPP supporter. «Intolérable», No. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, See Genet: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1971). 1993), pp. 567, 570, 697 n. 43 (hereafter cited 13 13 Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, Enquête as Genet). The influence that the US black dans vingt prisons, «Intolérable», No. 1 (Paris: liberation struggle had on the Groupe Champ Libre, 1971). d’Information sur les Prisons, of which Foucault 14 14 According to Eribon, it was published in May, was a founding member, is mentioned in Le according to Macey, it was published in June. Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons: Archives Cf. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy d’une lutte, 1970–1972, eds Philippe Artières Wing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University et al. (Paris: IMEC, 2003), pp. 91–132. Press, 1991), p. 224; David Macey, The Lives 9 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, of Michel Foucault (New York: Vintage, 1993), 9 Essential Works, Vol. 2, p. 386. p. 268. 10 15  350 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 15 Reflecting upon this break, Eribon writes: ‘How favorite toy. He did not fear us. Strangely, he Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 distant this text founding the GIP seems from the seemed to feel as one with us. His Yale inaugural lecture at the Collège de France given [University] speech certainly showed a deep just two months before!’ (p. 225). support for the significance of the [Black 16 ‘Outside La Santé’, Macey reports, ‘Foucault and 16 Panther] Party in American life. Perhaps, as others were arrested on the grounds that their an outsider, he perceived these other outsiders leaflets had not been duly registered for copyright’ (p. 270). as insiders?’ 17 Foucault, ‘Je perçois l’intolérable’, interview with 17 Geneviève Armedler, Journal de Génève: Samedi Former BPP Chief of Staff David Hilliard shares littéraire, Cahier 135, 24 July 1971. similar reflections of Genet: 18 Foucault, ‘Rituals of Exclusion’, in Foucault 18 Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. ‘Jean Genet, the French novelist and playwright, Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotexte, has come over to help mobilize support for us. 1989), p. 73. Genet’s an ex-inmate himself, a rebel and 19 Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: homosexual; although I don’t understand a word 19 Routledge, 1966/1994), p. xv. he says—and he claims not to know English—I 20 La garde à vue, as Macey describes it, ‘refers to feel we are completely and easily accepted by 20 the common police practice of holding people him, that this world-famous writer is a comrade in without charge for a period of up to twenty-four arms.’ hours. […] The usual pretext for taking people into custody is the alleged need to check their Cf. Mumia Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom: A Life identity’ (p. 515 n. 1). in the Black Panther Party (Cambridge, MA: 21 ‘Création d’un Groupe d’Information sur les Southend Press, 2004), pp. 202–204; David 21 Prisons’, Esprit, March 1971, p. 531 (quoted in Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Macey, p. 258). Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of 22 See Macey, pp. 209–236; Eribon, pp. 201–211. the Black Panther Party (Boston: Little, Brown, 22 23 Eribon, pp. 209–210. 1993), pp. 260, 285, 294. 23 24 Eribon, p. 210. 27 In a letter to Marianne de Pur in the summer of 24 27 25 White, Genet, p. 570. 1971, Genet wrote that George Jackson’s book 25 26 A number of BPP members have published Soledad Brother ‘has received a lot of attention 26 mention of their encounters with Genet during his here [in France]’ (cited in White, Genet, p. 562). visit in the spring of 1970. Here is former BPP See George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison member and current US political prisoner and Letters of George Jackson (New York: Bantom, death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal recalling his 1970); the French edition was published in encounter with Genet at the BPP national office in 1971, cf. George Jackson, Les Frères de Oakland, California: Soledad. Lettres de prison, Paris, Gallimard, 1971. 28 A number of these statements have been 28 ‘[Genet] seemed more honored to be in the translated and published in Jean Genet, The company of the Black Panthers than if he Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, ed. Albert were accorded an honor guard by the Dichy, trans. Jeff Port (Stanford, CA: Stanford president of the United States. […] I often University Press, 2004). wonder why his wordless visit stands so stark 29 29 Jean Genet, Preface to George Jackson’s in my memory. It is not because he was the Soledad Brother (New York: Bantom, 1970), only white visitor to the office. He wasn’t. p. 4. 30 For more on Davis’s life during this period, see 30 Several white radicals came by, some fairly often, but almost all of them radiated fear Angela Y. Davis, An Autobiography (New York: and discomfiture in the office. Genet seemed International Publishers, 1974). 31 Davis, as is generally well known, continues to be 31 oddly at home and at ease around the office. a prominent leader and spokesperson in the As a former prisoner, and a homosexual, prison abolition movement. perhaps he saw himself as the perennial 32 32 For further elaboration of this dual function of the outsider, the consummate outlaw. I could tell American prison system, see Brady Heiner, ‘The by his body language, by the openness of his American Archipelago: The Global Circuit of face, by his vibration, that he really dug Carcerality and Torture’, in Colonial and Global being in the office. It gave him a kick. He Interfacings, ed. Gary Backhaus (Cambridge looked like a little boy who had found his Scholars Press, 2007). 33  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 351 33 In an essay written while incarcerated in May 42 Foucault, ‘Power Affects the Body’, in Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 1971, Davis explains that: Foucault Live, op. cit., pp. 207–208 (my emphasis). ‘[a]fter the Civil War, the Black Codes, 43 For primary sources, see many of the published 43 successors to the Slave Codes, legalized convict writings and memoirs of members of the BPP, a labor, prohibited social intercourse between by no means exhaustive list of which includes: blacks and whites, gave white employers an Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (New York: Avon Books, 1995); All Things Censored excessive degree of control over the private lives (New York: Seven Stories, 2000); We Want of black workers, and generally codified racism Freedom, op. cit.; Safiya Bukhari-Alston, and terror’. ‘Coming of Age: A Black Revolutionary’, in Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Jackson writes in a July 1965 letter to his father: Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion, ed. Joy James (New York: Rowman ‘The forms of slavery merely changed at the and Littlefield, 2003); Philip S. Foner (ed.), The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation Black Panthers Speak, op. cit.; David Hilliard from chattel slavery to economic slavery. If and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory, op. cit.; you could see and talk to some of the George Jackson, Soledad Brother, op. cit., and blacks I meet in here [i.e. prison] you would Blood In My Eye (Baltimore, MD: Black Classics immediately understand what I mean, and Press, 1990 [1972]); Huey P. Newton, To Die see that I’m right. They are all average, all for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton with the same backgrounds, and in [prison] (New York: Writers and Readers, 1995 [1972]); Huey P. Newton, The Huey P. Newton Reader, for the same thing, some form of food eds David Hilliard and Donald Weise (New getting.’ York: Seven Stories Press, 2002); Bobby Seale, Seize the Time (New York: Vintage, 1970 Cf. The Angela Y. Davis Reader, op. cit., [1968]); Assata Shakur, Assata: An pp. 40–41; and Jackson, Soledad Brother, op. Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1987); cit., pp. 61–62. Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Mumia Abu Jamal and 34 Angela Y. Davis, ‘A Statement on our Fallen 34 Assata Shakur, Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors Comrade, George Jackson’, The Black Panther, of the War Against Black Revolutionaries, eds 28 August 1971, p. 18. Jim Fletcher et al. (New York: Semiotext(e), 35 For a more in-depth historical treatment of 35 1993). the GIP than can be provided here, I An orientational list of secondary sources direct the reader to Le Groupe d’Information includes: Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, sur les Prisons: Archives d’une lutte, 1970– Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars 1972, eds Philippe Artières et al. (Paris: Against the Black Panther Party and the IMEC, 2003). American Indian Movement (Boston: South End 36 GIP, Enquête dans vingt prisons, «Intolérable», 36 Press, 1990); Kathleen Cleaver and George No. 1 (Paris: Champ Libre, 1971). GIP, Enquête Katsiaficas (eds), Liberation, Imagination, and dans une prison-modèle: Leury-Méroqis, the Black Panther Party (New York: Routledge, «Intolérable», No. 2 (Paris: Champ Libre, 2001); Charles E. Jones, The Black Panther 1971). Party Reconsidered (Baltimore, MD: Black 37 GIP, Suicides de prison, «Intolérable», No. 4 37 Classics Press, 1998); Jack Olson, Last Man (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). As Foucault Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of biographer David Macey points out, the title of Geronimo Pratt (New York: Doubleday, 2000); the pamphlet Suicides de prison ‘makes telling Nkechi Taifa et al., ‘Human Rights: U.S. use of the conjunction de: these are not suicides Political Prisoners and COINTELPRO Victims’, in which simply happen to occur in prison. They States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and are caused by the prison system: the prison’s Prisons, ed. Joy James (New York: Palgrave, suicides’ (p. 287). 2002). 38 See GIP, ‘The Assassination of George Jackson’, 38 44 Among the primary texts from the American black 44 in Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit. Fr. pub. power movement that had been translated and L’Assassinat de George Jackson, «Intolérable», were circulating in France during this period were No. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). (1) Eldridge Cleaver’s early memoir Soul on Ice 39 White, Genet, p. 697 n. 43. 39 (New York: Dell, 1968), Fr. pub. Panthère noire, 40 White, Genet, p. 567. 40 Paris, Seuil, coll. «Combats», 1970; (2) a small 41 GIP, Enquête dans vingt prisons (quoted in 41 95-page transcription of a series of interviews Macey, pp. 268–269). 42  352 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 with Angela Y. Davis recorded while she was through the lens of what is generally considered Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 awaiting trial in 1970, entitled Angela Davis to be identity politics today. But as a matter of parle, Paris, Éditions Sociales, 1971; (3) a fact, the black power movement per se was not translation of Davis and Bettina Aptheker’s If They an exclusive movement. There were people of Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (New all racial/ethnic backgrounds involved in that York: Third Press, 1971), Fr. pub. S’ils frappent à movement. There was a connection with global l’aube, Paris, Gallimard, 1972; (4) Davis’ An Autobiography, op. cit., Fr. pub. Autobiographie, movements. […] We were part of a global Paris, Albin Michel, 1975; (5) George Jackson’s revolution. There was no question about the Soledad Brother, op. cit., Fr. pub. Les Frères de importance of making those connections and Soledad. Lettres de prison, Paris, Gallimard, building those bridges.’ 1971; (6) Jackson’s posthumously published book Blood In My Eye, op. cit., Fr. pub. Devant mes The above quotation is transcribed from an yeux, la mort, Paris, Gallimard, coll. «Témoins», interview recorded on the documentary CD 1972; (7) Huey P. Newton’s ‘Declaration at the Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica & Black Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention’ Liberation, produced by the Freedom Archives, (delivered Nov. 1970), Fr. pub. ‘Declaration and available at www.freedomarchives.org. On à la Convention constitutionelle des peuples the internationalist character of the Black Panther révolutionnaires’, La Taupe bretonne, No. 2, Party, see also Eldridge Cleaver, ‘The Land decembre 1971; (8) a tract by Huey P. Newton Question and Black Liberation’ (April/May translated as ‘Mouvement noire et lutte 1968), in Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, révolutionnaire’, Partisans, No. 44, octobre– ed. Robert Scheer (New York: Ramparts, 1969); novembre 1968; (9) Bobby Seale’s Seize the Lee Lockwood, Conversation with Eldridge Time, op. cit., Fr. pub. À l’affût. Histoire du parti Cleaver (New York: Delta, 1970); Huey P. des Panthères noires, Paris, Gallimard, 1972; Newton, To Die for the People, op. cit.; The (10) Philip Foner’s anthology The Black Panthers Huey P. Newton Reader, pp. 181–293 (esp. Speak, op. cit., Fr. pub. Les panthers noires pp. 181–199); and Abu-Jamal, We Want parlent, Paris, François Maspero, coll. «Cahiers Freedom, pp. 80–88. 47 Cleaver, ‘The Land Question and Black 47 libres 224–225», 1971; and (11) an anthology of BPP writings edited by Yves Loyer entitled Black Liberation’, op. cit., pp. 123–124. 48 Point Ten of ‘The Ten-Point Platform and Program 48 Power (Études et documents), Paris, EDI, 1968. 45 45 Mumia Abu-Jamal provides the following of the Black Panther Party’ (October 1966), characterization of the early ideological original emphasis. 49 Cf. Foner, ‘Introduction’, The Black Panthers 49 formation of the BPP: Speak, p. xxxvii. 50 ‘Call for Revolutionary People’s Constitutional 50 ‘In the beginning, the Black Panther Party for Convention’, reprinted in The Black Panthers Self-Defense was, for want of a better term, a Speak, pp. 268–271. Malcolmist party. […] The influence of Malcolm 51 Bobby Seale, Seize the Time, op. cit., 51 X permeated early BPP thought, rhetoric, and pp. 116–117 (my emphasis). self-perception. In this formative period, the BPP 52 52 Dhoruba Bin Wahad (formerly Richard Moore) used language and themes that did not was a former Black Panther leader who was significantly differentiate it from other Black wrongly convicted on evidence that was falsely nationalist groups of the period […]. This meant, concocted by the FBI. Falsely imprisoned for in practical terms, that whites were anathema to 19 years, he argues that America’s COINTELPRO any organizational or political work.’ (We Want enacted a civil war against its colonial interior in Freedom, op. cit., pp. 80–81) the late 1960s and early 1970s. ‘The implementation of the Counterintelligence See also The Huey P. Newton Reader, op. cit., Program transcended mere investigation. It was pp. 1–180. 46 46 Angela Y. Davis speaks of the international and in effect a domestic war program, a program multi-racial character of the liberation movements aimed at countering the rise of Black militancy, of the 1960s and 1970s: Black independent political thought, and at repressing the freedoms of Black people in the ‘Today people tend to think about the United States. The Counterintelligence program movements of the 60s as movements that were can be seen as a program of war waged by a very separate, nationalist, [and] racially- government against a people, against its own defined, because they’re looking at them citizens. It was a program of domestic warfare.’  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 353 Dhoruba Bin Wahad, ‘War Within’, in Still Black, defcon1/davisinterview.html, consulted 7 Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 Still Strong: Survivors of the War Against Black October 2006. See also Angela Y. Davis, Revolutionaries, eds Jim Fletcher et al. (New York: Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, Semiotext(e), 1993), p. 18. Bin Wahad was and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, released in 1990 after a New York State judge 2005). found that the FBI had suppressed crucial 64 ‘Interview with George Jackson 3-29-71’, The 64 evidence from his defense. Black Panther, 3 April 1971, p. 6. 53 See Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of 65 A separate work would be required to assess 53 65 Repression, op. cit.; Nkechi Taifa et al., ‘Human the points of disagreement that exist between the Rights: U.S. Political Prisoners and COINTELPRO works of Davis and Jackson during this period. Victims’, in States of Confinement, ed. Joy James Divergences between their respective political (New York: Palgrave, 2002). analyses, as well as their respective strategic 54 Bobby Seale, ‘The Ten-Point Platform and assessments of effective political action at the 54 Program of the Black Panther Party’, The Black time, are quite evident. This is partly evidenced Panther, 18 October 1969 (reprinted in The by the somewhat removed stance Davis Black Panthers Speak, p. 80). maintained in relation to the internal leadership 55 My account of this action closely follows, of the BPP (cf. note 11). By no means does the 55 sometimes to the letter, that of Foner in his present work intend to represent Davis and Introduction to The Black Panthers Speak. Cf. Jackson as homophonous figures; for they are p. xxviii. not. However, there are salient points of 56 Quoted in Foner, ‘Introduction’, The Black continuity between their respective analyses of 56 Panthers Speak, p. xxviii. the prison, as being both a repressive and 57 Seale and Newton originally chose the name of ideological State apparatus, and of prisoners, as 57 the Black Panther Party because the panther is being political agents in more global struggles. reputed never to make an unprovoked attack but These dimensions of their thought continue to to defend itself ferociously whenever it is influence prison abolitionism in the present day; attacked. Cf. Foner, ‘Introduction’, The Black they also greatly informed the French prison Panthers Speak, p. xv. abolition movement of the 1970s, and 58 Bobby Seale, Seize the Time, pp. 412, 418–419. Foucault’s political philosophy of the same 58 59 See Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of period. 59 Repression, op. cit., and The COINTELPRO 66 Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons: 66 Papers (Boston: South End Press, 1990); Archives d’une lutte, 1970–1972, eds Philippe Nkechi Taifa et al., ‘Human Rights: U.S. Artières et al. (Paris: IMEC, 2003), pp. 92–93. Political Prisoners and COINTELPRO Victims’, This and all subsequent translations of this work op. cit. are my own. 60 Safiya Bukhari-Alston, ‘Coming of Age: A Black 67 Discipline and Punish (1975), the 1976 Lectures 60 67 Revolutionary’, in Imprisoned Intellectuals: and the first volume of The History of Sexuality America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, (1976). Liberation, and Rebellion, ed. Joy James (New 68 The Freedom Archives has produced an extremely 68 York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 126 (my informative documentary audio CD on the Attica emphasis). rebellion and the assassination of George 61 Joy James, ‘Introduction’, The Angela Y. Davis Jackson, entitled Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, 61 Reader, p. 14. Attica & Black Liberation, available at 62 Angela Y. Davis, ‘Political Prisoners, Prisons, and www.freedomarchives.org. For more information 62 Black Liberation’, The Angela Y. Davis Reader, on the Attica rebellion, see the ‘Attica Revisited’ pp. 41, 43–44. Also available online in the e- web resources at www.talkinghistory.org/attica. book History is a Weapon, A copy of ‘The Attica Liberation Faction www.historyisaweapon.org. Hereafter referred to Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Depression as PP. Platform’, drafted by the resisting prisoners, can 63 63 For an analysis that demonstrates the continued also be found online at The Harriet Tubman relevance of Jackson’s critique of the American Literary Circle website: http://www.brown.edu/ prison system, see Brady Heiner, ‘The American Departments/African_American_Studies/JJames/ Archipelago: The Global Circuit of Carcerality incarceration/attica_manifesto.pdf (accessed 27 and Torture’, op. cit.; see also the discussion January 2007). between Angela Y. Davis and Dylan Rodriguez 69 69 For secondary (and sometimes contradictory) published in ‘The Challenge of Prison Abolition: sources on George Jackson’s life and the A Conversation’, History is a Weapon, circumstances of his assassination, see Churchill available at http://www.historyisaweapon.com/ and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, op. cit.;  354 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 Angela Y. Davis, An Autobiography, op. cit.; Jo Manifesto, 11 May 2004. My English Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson? translation, ‘The United States Underground’, (New York: Knopf, 1976); Joy James (ed.), is available on the Prison Activist Resource Imprisoned Intellectuals (New York: Rowman and Center website: http://www.prisonactivist.org/ Littlefield, 2003), pp. 84–87; Paul Liberatore, The pipermail/prisonact-list/2004-May/ Road to Hell: The True Story of George Jackson, 008991.html Stephen Bingham, and the San Quentin 76 In 2000, after 25 years of delays by the State, 76 Massacre (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, New York State was forced to settle for $12 1996); Eric Mann, Comrade George: An million in a civil suit that was originally filed in Investigation into the Life, Political Thought and 1974 and in which juries ruled that the State Assassination of George Jackson (New York: had engaged in cruel and unusual punishment, Harper and Row, 1974). violating human and civil rights. Cf. The 70 GIP, ‘The Assassination of George Jackson’, Freedom Archives, Prisons on Fire, op. cit.; and 70 trans. Brady Heiner, in Paris and Mendieta (eds), the ‘Attica Revisited’ web resources at Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit. www.talkinghistory.org/attica. The quotation 71 Davis, An Autobiography, op. cit., p. 319. from the NY State Special Commission on Attica 71 72 Ibid., p. 317. is cited in Voices of Freedom: An Oral History 72 73 Transcribed from archival audio, The Freedom of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s 73 Archives, Prisons on Fire, op. cit. through the 1980s, eds Henry Hampton and 74 On the morning prior to the massacre on 13 Steve Fayer (New York: Bantam, 1991), p. 74 September 1971, William Kunsler, a lawyer 561. who was serving as an intermediary in 77 Transcribed from archival audio, The Freedom 77 negotiations between the prisoners and the Archives, Prisons on Fire, op. cit. State, made the following prophetic statement to 78 Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, op. cit., 78 the press: p. 124. 79 It is on precisely this point that Foucault makes his 79 ‘We implore [the Commissioner], we implore only mention of the Black Panthers, aside from that him now, to have no force in there [i.e. inside made in the GIP’s pamphlet L’Assassinat de the prison]. They [i.e. the prisoners] want to George Jackson. In a letter to Daniel Defert he continue to talk. If they [i.e. the agents of the writes that the Black Panthers ‘are developing a State] go in there, it’s going to be a massacre in strategic analysis that has emancipated itself from Marxist theory’. See Daniel Defert, ‘Chronologie’, this prison, and it’s on the heads of the Dits et écrits, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), authorities if it takes place. […] [Governor pp. 33, 38, 39. Also see Alessandro Fontana and Rockefeller’s] refusal to come here is a Mauro Bertani’s editors’ postscript to the 1976 monstrosity, because what he is saying is: “Kill Lectures, ‘Situating the Lectures’, where they cite these men, I have no concern. All I want to do is Defert’s notes on the connection (1976 Lectures, restore law and order.” And I think that’s a p. 282). rotten exchange for lives.’ (Transcribed from 80 Daniel Defert, ‘The “Mechanism of War” as an 80 archival audio, The Freedom Archives, Prisons Analytic of Power Relations’, trans. Brady Heiner, on Fire, op. cit.) in Paris and Mendieta (eds), Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit. 75 Immediately after the exposure of the torture 81 Literally translated, mise en abîme (also mise 75 81 that was organized and carried out by CIA en abyme), means ‘placing into an abyss’ and US military personnel at Abu Ghraib or ‘placing into infinity’. The expression is prison in Iraq, Silvia Baraldini wrote an op- used to describe a formal technique ed piece describing the torture that New employed in painting, film and literature in York Sate Troopers and National Guards which a frame-structure is constructed whose had enacted against Attica prisoners in the internal structure reiterates the frame-structure violent counter-revolutionary aftermath of the ad infinitum, effecting a kind of recursion. Attica prisoner revolt. The State’s treatment of My thanks to Sam Butler for calling my Attica prisoners in 1971 belies, over against attention to some of the nuances of this official State rhetoric to the contrary, that the expression. systematic use of torture has remained a 82 Cf. Foucault, 1976 Lectures, pp. 7–9. 82 hallmark of the State’s official and de facto 83 Defert, ‘The “Mechanism of War” as an Analytic 83 procedure for the treatment of racialized of Power Relations’, op. cit. subjects deemed ‘resistant’. See Silvia 84 Cf. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Part 84 Baraldini, ‘Nei sotterranei degli States’, Il Five. 85  HEINER: FOUCAULT AND THE BLACK PANTHERS 355 85 Numerous commentators, particularly in the 87 ‘Racism is, quite literally, revolutionary discourse Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 area of postcolonial studies, have critically in an inverted form.’ Cf. Foucault, 1976 Lectures, pointed out how Foucault remained, as James pp. 61 and 81. Clifford put it, ‘scrupulously ethnocentric’. 88 Cf. 1976 Lectures, pp. 76–77, and the 88 Gayatri Spivak and Ann Laura Stoler have first volume of The History of Sexuality, each rightly dismissed Foucault’s genealogies of pp. 92–102. power as self-contained versions of history that 89 Cf. Foucault, 1976 Lectures, pp. 49–51. 89 remain only about the West. For instance, 90 Ibid., p. 56. 90 Stoler writes: 91 Cf. ibid., pp. 87–114. 91 92 Foucault, 1976 Lectures, pp. 50–51. 92 ‘In both the [1976] lectures and [The History of 93 Jackson, Blood In My Eye, op. cit., p. 99. 93 94 In addition to Soledad Brother and Blood In My 94 Sexuality] volume one, the focus is on the internal dynamics of European states and their Eye, see ‘Comrade George Jackson on Angela disciplinary biopolitical strategies. Contiguous Davis’, The Black Panther, 13 March 1971; and ‘Field Marshal George Jackson Analyzes the empires figure in Foucault’s genealogy of racism Correct Method in Combating American in his lectures, but imperial expansion outside Fascism’, The Black Panther, 4 September 1971. Europe does not. In short, the genealogy of The latter of these was posthumously transcribed racist discourse is sui generis to Europe: colonial from an audio recording that was played at genocide is subsumed, dependent, accounted Jackson’s funeral. for, and explained in absentia.’ 95 95 On 7 August 1970, Jackson’s 17-year-old brother, Jonathan, entered the Marin County See Clifford, The Predicament of Culture Courthouse during the trial of prisoner James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, McClain, who was charged with the attempted 1988), p. 265; Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern stabbing of a Soledad prison guard. Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds Cary Nelson and Lawrence ‘Jonathan Jackson armed McClain and, with Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois prisoner witnesses Ruchell Magee and William Press, 1988); and Stoler, Race and the Christmas, herded the assistant district attorney, Education of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke Judge Harold Haley, and three jurors into a van University Press, 1995). Stoler citation from parked outside. Law enforcement officers fired pp. 28–29. 86 86 Paolo Napoli makes a similar argument in a upon the parked van without regard for the debate on the 1976 Lectures: hostages, as was prison policy, killing Christmas, McClain, and Jackson; wounding ‘At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Magee; and killing Haley and wounding other when Boulainvilliers affirms that “the Gauls hostages.’ (George Jackson bio in James, were invaded by the Franks,” he expresses Imprisoned Intellectuals, op. cit., p. 85) something that probably doesn’t correspond to The GIP wrote about their understanding of the actual truth. But if one gives up that Jonathan Jackson’s actions. empirical and descriptive approach and places oneself on the terrain of the very ‘Sequestering a judge in a full courtroom, construction of historical events, as is Jonathan Jackson denounced justice as an Foucault’s intention, it is less a matter of evident instrument of the fascist repression of the saying what occurred than of releasing a new U.S.—the justice that, with its white judges and its possibility for speaking, of taking a position in white juries, consigned hundreds of thousands of the present, and thus of producing reality. In African Americans to the blood-thirsty slave- short, what is at stake is a veritable historical drivers of concentration camps. He demonstrated practice: saying and doing history fall within that the act of supporting prisoners is one of the the province of the same act.’ forms of war.’ (‘The Assassination of George Jackson’, in Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit.) Foucault’s own discourse in the 1976 Lectures, I argue, is just such an attempt at historical 96 96 ‘Field Marshal George Jackson Analyzes the practice, at taking a position in the present. Correct Method in Combating American Napoli’s intervention appears in Defert, ‘The Fascism’, The Black Panther, 4 September 1971, “Mechanism of War” as an Analytic of Power p. 3. Relations’, op. cit. 97 97 Ibid., p. 5. 87  356 CITY VOL. 11, NO. 3 98 Angela Y. Davis articulates a similar position at 110 For a critique of this erasure in Foucault’s analysis 98 Downloaded By: [Heiner, Brady Thomas] At: 00:12 3 December 2007 this time: in Discipline and Punish, see Joy James, ‘Erasing the Spectacle of Racialized State Violence’, in ‘Although the most unbridled expressions of the Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, fascist menace are still tied to the racist and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: domination of blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Minnesota University Press, 1996), pp. 24–43. [and] Indians, it lurks under the surface wherever Ariana Mangual and I wage a similar critique of there is potential resistance to the power of Foucault in the context of an analysis of the monopoly capital, the parasitic interests which function of schools in racialized communities. See control this society.’ (PP, p. 51) ‘The Repressive Social Function of Schools in Racialized Communities’, in States of 99 Davis, PP, p. 40. 99 Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons, 100 Ibid., p. 42 (my emphasis). 100 ed. Joy James (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 101 Frantz Fanon famously advances a similar 101 222–230. argument in his analysis of the colonial situation: 111 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 217. 111 ‘The native is a being hemmed in […]. 112 Foucault, 1976 Lectures, pp. 256, 258. 112 Confronted with a world ruled by the settler, the 113 Miranda Fricker, ‘Epistemic Injustice and a Role 113 native is always presumed guilty.’ See Wretched for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing’, of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New Metaphilosophy, 34(1/2) (January 2003), York: Grove, 1963), pp. 52, 53. The Davis quote pp. 154–173. Fricker’s analysis is developed above comes from PP, p. 50 (my emphasis). further in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics 102 GIP, L’Assassinat de George Jackson, 102 of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, «Intolérable», No. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 2007). p. 11. 114 Fricker, ‘Epistemic Injustice and a Role for Virtue 114 103 Cf. Foucault, 1976 Lectures, p. 256. 103 in the Politics of Knowing’, p. 161. 104 Published online: ‘Remembering the Real 104 115 Ibid. 115 Dragon—An Interview with George Jackson, May 116 Ibid., p. 163. 116 16 and June 29, 1971’, History is a Weapon, 117 Ibid., p. 153. 117 www.historyisaweapon.org. Also: 118 Ibid., pp. 170, 172. 118 www.brown.edu/Departments/ 119 Cf. note 10. 119 African_American_Studies/ 120 The Prison Activist Resource Center: http:// 120 wayland_fac_seminar/interview/ www.prisonactivist.org/pps+pows. The Jericho george_jackson.html Movement: http://www.thejerichomovement.com 105 Angela Y. Davis, PP, p. 46. 105 106 GIP, ‘The Assassination of George Jackson’, in 106 Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit. 107 Ibid. 107 108 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 9. 108 Brady Thomas Heiner is in the Department 109 GIP, ‘The Assassination of George Jackson’, in of Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook, New 109 Biopolitics and Racism, op. cit. 110 York, USA. E-mail: bheiner@ic.sunysb.edu