5 April 2010: "Should Lil Wayne be allowed to blog + sell ‘merch’ from jail?"

This post is about organic intellectuals. Gramsci, while a political prisoner of conscience during the Mussolini regime in Italy, wrote extensively, producing a series of tracts in political theory that would profound alter the course of Marxism in the decades that followed their publication. Carles suspects that the writings of another prisoner of conscience, Lil Wayne, will have similar impact: "It seems like he is trying to utilize a blog to keep his brand alive. He is also selling t-shirts that say ‘Free Weezy.’ Instead of letting people think he is a ‘criminal’ who is ‘getting his ass pounded’ behind bars, he wants people to know he is having a ‘deep, reflective experience.’" Wayne, as Carles notes, has begun his carceral jottings by exploring the nexus of commercialism, domination and phenomenology, the intersection of "reflective experience" and personal branding under the sign of sexual threat.

In his notebooks, Gramsci questioned the usefulness of self-criticism for party discipline and the elaboration of theory. Carles may have that in mind in his skeptical evaluation of Lil Wayne's effort at rigorous self-criticism. Wayne writes:

Love. Live. Life. Proceed. Progress. That’s who I am and who I’ll always be. You see, we’re all living on borrowed time, so I’m not worried about this situation. Life happens quick. The more time you spend contemplating what you should have done…you lose valuable time planning what you can and will do.

Wayne commits himself to a progressive philosophy and dares to tread a line both teleological and paradoxically existential. He posits identity that is both contingent and transcendent -- in time and outside of it. But this may all be skirting the historical materialist questions that authorize such idle philosophical speculations. Gramsci argues that "when a struggle can be resolved legally, it is certainly not dangerous; it becomes so precisely when the legal equilibrium is recognised to be impossible." Lil Wayne's incarceration seems to provide a spectacle of the juridical, and his mode of contemplation a feat of evasion. But Gramsci also warns that this does not mean that "by abolishing the barometer one can abolish bad weather." Lil Wayne finds himself in a liminal position: is he the broken barometer?

Of course, while in prison Gramsci famously elaborated the concept of hegemony to theorize the durability of capitalism in the face of the international socialist threat, establishing the alienated social relations as a natural rather than contingent formation. The sustenance of consensus by purely socio-institutional means erects a veritable prison house of language, as discourse itself serves to negate the possibility of theorizing revolution. Carles, noting perceptively that "I wouldn’t have the same freedoms I have in normal society if I lived in a prison," indicates the double nature of incarceration -- while some freedoms are stripped away, new ones are suddenly revealed and made accessible to consciousness. Taboos fall away, as well as the scales from one's eyes. One's perspective on the given social conditions is in one sense purified: "There would be no HD TV, no personal space, no macbooks, no memes, no youtube videos, no retail shopping opportunities, no high quality fast food, and tons of minorities/uneducated ppl who don’t care how ‘alt’ u r." In other words, one's relation to mediated identity would be disrupted, and the interpellation of subjectivity would be suspended. Carles suggests that "Lil Wayne will end up ‘preferring life on the inside’" for precisely these reasons.

From such a position, the prisoner may access insights into the workings of society but at the same time lack the expressive resources to articulate them. The critque is experienced directly, written on the body as it were, and may not be articulatable in language as such. Carles notes that he is forced to "Wonder how Lil Wayne is blogging." This question cuts both ways: How does Lil Wayne muster the expressive resources on the one hand, and how does he maintain the critique of consciousness without encountering the prison guards in his own mind. In Freudian terms, the superego in the unconscious is suspended in favor of an explicit disciplinary apparatus, liberating libidinous energy heretofore trapped in the psyche by its repressive operations. In prison, then, a subject may be in a position to forge a truly radical critique rather than purely reactionary or partial one. "It seems ‘bad for America’ that we can glorify this bro who is ‘behind bars,’" Carles presciently notes, anticipating the critique that may potentially ignite a movement, that may allow those who have only comprehended Lil Wayne by way of aesthetics to reconcieve his recordings as praxis, as the elaboration of an entirely organic, immanent critique, expressed in the discourse of the oppressed rather than in terms of the hegemonic language that bears with it the conditions of its domination.

But there is danger as well in the sudden rupture with the received mores of consumer capitalism. One faces the threat of bodily perforation and one must also regress to a positively Hobbesean mode of social relations. Not only does it evoke atavistic predilections, raising the question of racial prejudice ("Does n e 1 know if racism in jail exists?" Carles asks wryly) but it prompts a reinscription of the prevailing assumptions that underwrite the neoliberal order, namely possessive individualism and the rejection of collective identity. Power as the essence of politics, in theory and practice. Carles points out that a prison inmate may "get ‘raped in the ass’ until you murder some1." It is this reversion to a more rigorously contractual theory of rights, of naked power as a philosophical basis for the erection of a theory of state power that troubles Carles and prompts him to suggest that "It seems unfair that Lil Wayne gets to blog from jail."

Thus Carles's answer to his question "Should blogging be allowed behind bars?" is multifarious. Behind bars may be the only authentic position with in the hegemonic prison of capitalist society, except that authenticity comes with an atavism that Carles is reluctant to endorse. Gramsci pointed out that "it is worth noting that the elaboration of intellectual strata in concrete reality does not take place on the terrain of abstract democracy but in accordance with very concrete traditional historical processes." Carles sees that Lil Wayne may very will emerge from his prison experience as an organic intellectual of the incarcerated masses, but the historical processes that have shaped the flow of his discourse will remain unaltered unless Wayne opts for a more aporic instantiation of his embedded critique of everyday life. The bars on his prison are there for all to see, but can he make us see the bars on our own?