Celltexts

‘Not too many good books being written in jail these days’, says a character in Michael Chabon’s novel Wonder Boys (1995). But over the last 200 years, few institutions have done more for literature than the prison; born in their mass forms at a similar period, the pair have often been found lurching together in lock-step, like an escapee with a ball and chain round his ankle.

The research architects Eyal and Inez Weizman’s web installation ‘Celltexts‘ (2008) supplies a library catalogue of some of the great prison classics, starting with Boethius’s shadow-of-execution treatise The Consolation of Philosophy (c.525) and continuing to the recent present. Austerely designed, and navigated via a sliding greyscale barcode, the index is organized according to the length of the prison sentence served. At one end of the shelf, the swiftly executed Irish republican leader Patrick Pearse’s 1916 letter to his mother registers at one day. At the other, Bonnie Foreshore’s anthologized short story ‘Faith, Power and Pants’ marks time on a 45-year rap for murder that is still being served.

This unorthodox classifying principle generates some strange bedfellows. Amongst the masterpieces bartering cigarettes with Boethius are three volumes of disgraced British politician Jeffrey Archer’s Dante-inspired A Prison Diary (2002-04) and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925-26). In the next entry along, none other than Rosa Luxemburg is down for 12 months with her manuscript ‘The Russian Revolution’ (1918). Archer meanwhile occupies the cell next door to Ezra Pound, who took advantage of his own 25 days in the slammer to produce the madder parts of the The Cantos (1915-62) on sheets on toilet paper. One wonders how each pair would have gotten on.

The inclusion of Hitler in the catalogue, though clearly germane, appears challenging in light of the Weizmans’ romantically accented curatorial statement. The installation declares itself ‘dedicated’ to prisoners engaged in writing as an ‘impulse to survive through texts, through reclaiming her [sic] own voice against the imposition of others.’ It asserts that it has been ‘assembled in recognition that spatial confinement and isolation may induce a process of creative, imaginative, sometimes spiritual, cultural production.’ ‘Paradoxically,’ it argues, ‘imprisonment emerges as an active practice of citizenship, a mechanism of political opposition that call for a confrontation or intolerance with certain forms of government.’ These ideas seem provocative in Hitler’s own case, strike a sentimental chord generally, and on numerous other occasions – the Marquis de Sade? O’Henry’s short stories? – register as highly dubious. Nonetheless, one point which does seem acute is that the kind of literary condensation which prison provides need not be progressive.

Of course, the great progressive heroes are present for roll call as well. Louis Auguste Blanqui, the man Karl Marx claimed was the leader that the Paris Commune lacked (he was in jail at the time) has two entries: the first volume of his collected works, and his strange book on astronomy Eternity Through the Stars (1872). It seems somehow revealing of Lenin that he choose to spend his three years in the Peter and Paul Fortress, St. Petersburg single-mindedly researching The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899). Lenin’s unfortunate inheritor Antonio Negri (a man who was recently the subject of a film about his time in prison – Angela Melitopoulos’ documentary The Cell, 2008) meanwhile supplies one of the library’s most interesting recorded statements on prison life itself, reflecting in the preface to his prison-written 1981 book on Baruch Spinoza The Savage Anomaly:

‘I was convinced that in prisoner there would be time. But that was an illusion, simply an illusion. Prison with its daily rhythm, with the transfers and the defense, does not leave any time; prison dissolves time: This is the principal form of punishment in a capitalist society. So this, like all my other works was drafted by the light of midnight oil, in stolen moments stripped away from the daily routine.’

‘Celltexts’ started life as a spatial installation presented at the ‘YOUPrison’ conference-show in Turin last summer. That installation, showcasing a selection of physical manuscripts culled from various second-hand bookshops, is currently on the road, travelling between various prison on its way to its final destination at the London branch of PEN.

This side of the project is practical and commendable, but the web installation adds another element: namely, a greater stress on the fate of the prison in the digital age. Call-centres are amongst the new industries inhabiting contemporary American Federal prisons, while in the UK felonious footballers now play in the Premier League with electronic tags on their ankles. With regards to enforcement, the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition recently pioneered an innovative ‘virtual stake-out’ programme off-shoring border surveillance to internet web cams. ‘If you see movement from the right to the left,’ reads a notice to web users, ‘please report this activity.’

All of this is of a piece with a wider transition away from the disciplinary model of power proposed by Michel Foucault to a more intricate logic of checkpoints and passkeys. In his 2007 book Hollow Land, Eyal Weizman provided (in the context of his academic dayjob as the director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths) one of the best guides to the spatial implications of this shift, tracing a patient analysis of the sinuous security architecture of the Israeli occupied territories. But the cultural and social implications of the new shift in logic still remain less clear.

‘Celltexts’ asks questions about these implications, but is generally not well equipped to consider them. The curatorial note refers to ‘all the books that will still be written under conditions of confinement.’ These doubtless will come, but it is worth bearing in mind that the status of books is not what it is once was. In the wake of a still-metastasizing proliferation of screens, the role of the book as the principal vehicle for the deliverary of information is being undermined by new forms of communication technologies – the web itself chief amongst them.

This development has caused conditions of censorship to step up a gear. Jean Genet’s prison-written debut novel Our Lady of the Flowers (1943) suffered repeated destruction from philistine guards. Today, however, information is not destroyed but deleted, disappeared without a trace.

In the course of writing this article, I noticed a duplicate entry on the ‘Celltexts’ website. I filled out the response form provided. A few moments later, the double entry was emptied of content, and then removed without warning. The new facility of this kind of procedure make processes of ‘creative, imaginative, sometimes spiritual, cultural production’ more difficult and challenging. It is no longer enough to produce a great statement; strategic factors of timing have now entered the picture, in the light of the full expectation of rapid correction. This is more than a matter of interest for jailbirds alone. When visitors to St. Ignatius Loyola’s monastery asked him where the prison was in his order, he famously gestured to the open door: the prison, he claimed, was outside in the world.