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Un récit
I had lost the sense of the story, and that is the nature of these kinds of accounts. The facts and events get lost amid so much upheaval and loss. In any event, I found myself in this group. It is for men who had been locked up, incarcerated, or even just spent a few days in the county lock up. The idea was that these kinds of experiences added a dimension of trauma to recovery, and we would all benefit from sharing our experiences with each other towards some kind of catharsis or sense of community with others who had had similar experiences.
In truth, how it all came to be the way it had come to be was a blur to me. I suppose this is the nature of a traumatic relationships: you really never know what happened, and it is effectively impossible to recount, give an account (provide un récit) of what exactly happened.
Jail is boring. It is just sitting. That is why one of the many slang terms for jail is “the stir.” You go stir crazy. Just sitting for hours upon hours with no idea what is happening. You soon forget that anything is happening. I did not want anyone to talk to me because speaking out loud seemed to break open the possibility of duration which returned me to time interminable. But people no longer know how to keep their mouths shut.
We spoke of our time behind bars. Most of the guys had been in prison; some for long stretches—years. I never asked what they did. I did not want to know, although a few of them shared what they did. Most of it was just felony theft and robbery shit, but there were some who had done horrible things. One guy killed two people by accident. He was driving drunk and high, blacked out, and caused an accident that left two people dead. He did seven years for that.>
In any case, we were all marked, branded, carried the stigmata of transgression. Depending on the nature of the crime, that stigmata would become who we are.>
A citation:
I disintegrate and am sent to pieces
as information to a server.
But where am I?
Dismembered,
scattered around the world,
folded,
tucked
away
in a dusty
airless
archive
(Wang 2018)
The account is embedded in something like a state of immanence. It exists purely as data, but this is the only account that will matter since this has become the official account. This immanent account is the one that will exceed all legal mechanisms. Long after the sentence has been served, this account, the one that exists purely as data, is the only one that will serve capitalism which is, as we know, the only reality that matters.
There are multiple accounts of what happened. Mine is just one, and mine is compromised at several levels, not the least of which is that it is what people like to call “purely subjective” and therefore subject to all kinds of distortions. Still, I have a version of events, an account, that I insist is fairly accurate and represents my lived and very real experience. This is all irrelevant.
The account that matters is the one that was entered into a system of records which are essentially eternal. As long as humanity exists, and even beyond, these records will remain. Even those records said to be expunged still remain in these digital records that are never actually deleted. Everything that has ever been entered into these records remains there. It too exists in a state of immanence. Built into the way the world derives a sense of reality under capitalism, is a set of digital records that offer official accounts of events as they pertain to things like crimes and transgressions. The accounts and the system are divine things now.
I am in there, dismembered, scattered around the world...
A récit is an account. The term is often translated as story, but that is not exactly correct. Un récit is something unique in that it is an account, a story, a recounting of events, but it never takes on the full dimensions of what we commonly understand to be an account of something important with all the pertinent information to make a judgement regarding the nature of the events. It is a brief recitation of sorts.
A re-citation:
His own words regarding his own words and in reference to the words of others regarding his own words:
“I was a bastard child, I had no right to the social order. What was left to me if I wanted an exceptional destiny? If I wanted to make the most of my freedom, my possibilities or, as you say, my gifts, since I wasn't yet aware of having any gift as a writer, assuming I do? What was left for me was nothing other than wanting to be a saint, that is, a negation of man” (Genet. 2004).
Genet offers many critically important themes in this passage. The idea of the bastard. The place of the criminal in society, in art, in culture. How does the bastard and the criminal gain access to culture and society. Our current world forbids this entirely. I am a bastard, and that digital record prevents it. Or rather, the mechanisms of capital maintain access to the digital record to ensure that no one of the criminal order can ever gain access to the social or to the cultural, much less that of the capitalist machines that generate wealth. Thus, the negation of man because fuck your order and the machines that generate wealth because these are the same machines that render some of us as saints, as the negation of man, as sacred men...
So, within this short passage: a citation that invites questions regarding the recitation of the role of certain types of individuals, and therefore a demand is left open for the recitation of an account, a récit. At the same time, the récit will be almost instantly negated by the account of the digital record.
Another citation for a request for a recitation of a digital récit:
NOTICE TO CONSUMER OF REQUEST OF CONSUMER REPORT FOR EMPLOYMENT PURPOSES”
(National Center for Safety Initiatives, LLC)
County Criminal Records Search:
Records Shown
This is generated by the system, and one is compelled to submit (their récit of themselves, the receipt of the signature of the self) to the system. The progress and processes of the citation, recitation, and récit unfold and remain within a specific type of narrative form in which “(i)t is the 'I'-less 'I' of the narrative voice, the 'I' stripped of itself, the one that does not take place, it is he who brings them to light, who engenders these lawmen in giving them the insight into what regards them and what should not regard them” (Derrida. 1980). Stripped, or dismembered, the distinction does not much matter. The law is that of the law of genre, but considered in this context, a law of the genos, of the genera which can be further broken down into the story, the account, and the récit, whether digital and official or the account given by the living human being who is now barred from access as an official species of human, a different species altogether and therefore sacred and of the sacred ban. The sacred man. Also, the one who has no official claim to the world, the bastard child.
The bastard is illegitimate. The bastard is not properly integrated into the lineage, the genus of a familial arrangement that has the consistency and official legal status of the laws of nature and of society. Banned and exterior; permanently exterior on multiple levels now as the criminal and the bastard.
Un récit (continued)
I never lied to the guys in the group about my experiences. I knew many of these guys had been through some terrible things. They may have done terrible things themselves, but in prison, they endured monstrosities and horrors. Lem, for instance, was young, but he had done real time in prison. Lem had been through a prison riot somewhere in one of those for-profit prisons in rural Kentucky. He was good natured, and even a little dingy in his general demeanor. I remember he listened to the worst kind of pop music. I used to tell him, “how you gonna be from some Eastern Kentucky holler and listen to that shit?” He just laughed and went on singing along with some girlie sing-song shit. Lem spent almost two days completely naked hog-tired with zip ties in a yard outside the prison. The C.O.s never took a second to see who was who, and who did what. They hog-tied all of them and left them outside just for the sake of cruelty. Lem said he had to shit and piss right where he laid. I never went through anything like that. All these years later, my stigmata burns brighter every day. I do not know about Lem.>
The law of the genre stipulates a certain type of narrator and a certain type of narrative. The digital record is a voiceless voice. It is a voice stripped not only of an “I” but also of a living body. It exists purely as
Dismembered,
scattered around the world,
folded,
tucked
away
in a dusty
airless
archive.
In a state of immanence, just waiting to be initiated and called forth with the correct intersection of other digital mechanisms. This account/recitation uses a system of citation that will acquit all human action of any and all involvement. Once it is complete, it can legitimately be said that no one acted in any way. Only the system. The system did it. The system lined up with digital data points with the coordinates of other digital data points which initiates and sets in motion a specific action. This action is then rendered in the form of an account: an account of the account; the citation of the recitation of the final legally distilled version of the récit as it is now deemed appropriate for the policies and rules of capitalist procedure. At least three forms of genre are generated and deployed by the system. All stripped of the “I,” but all now completely in accordance with the filiations of the legal and natural bonds which exclude, both naturally and legally, the bastard and the criminal. This is why we are of the sacred, saints, the negation of man.
Consequently, as sacred men, as saints, as the negation of man, we must follow a different path. Maybe it comes to be that we need to cut a path where there is no path: “A bastard path, then, which will pretend to follow naturally the circle of the family, either to enter into it, or to share it: either to share it as one partakes in a community, a supper, or to share it out as one does by dividing it up” (Derrida, 2021). It all goes along this way. Like we do once a week when we meet to talk about recovery and incarceration. Sharing and dividing as men who have been in many ways forced to be together. People who have nothing in common other than the fact that we destroyed ourselves and will, at least in some measure, remain forever dismembered and scattered and given over to another account of ourselves that cannot ever include our “I.”
Un récit, the end
I counted all the hours I spent in the group. When the night came, I announced that I had officially spent more time in the group designed to help me recover from being behind bars than I ever spent behind bars. The guys laughed and applauded. We all had the same sense that what we were doing was ridiculous anyway. Still, there were times when it all became quite serious, quite real. We usually became silent at those moments. None of us spoke. We became silent together. Maybe that was what it was meant to be. The simultaneous understanding that there is nothing that can be said.>
One wonders if there was ever a time when a single account could suffice; a form of testimony that would hold up to all sectors of what we commonly call “reality.” As it stands, every sector of the world will recognize one specific rendering of the account so that the law, the social arrangements in which we live, the pathways of economic viability, and the story we are allowed to share in a group of men who had been incarcerated are all different. Each a récit of its own that is determined by rigorously defined laws of accountability, laws of genre, if you will...
Accounts become fractured but at the same time each fractured account becomes a complete account.
The one who says “I” in this account is the least qualified and the least valid speaker/writer of the events which form an account of the events. The one who says “I” in this is a priori invalidated for reasons that pertain to both law and custom, but also reasons that are embedded in deeply ingrained forms of belief which have their origin in the gods. This is not the unconscious of the account. This sacred dimension remains on the surface. It simply goes by other names in our contemporary context. In any event, “the one who says 'I,' and the one after all who speaks to us, who 'recites' for us, this one who says 'I' tells his inquisitors that he cannot manage to constitute himself as narrator” (Derrida. 1980). The facts are not lacking. Quite the opposite, there are too many facts, too many events, too much experience for words to capture and relate. The events lack sequence and exceed his ability to order them. Consequently, “he cannot manage to identify himself sufficiently, or to remember himself well enough to gather the story and récit that are demanded of him—which the representatives of the law require of him” (215). And he fails before the law—before the Law, at the door that was made only for him which then abruptly shuts forever.
That récit which can form the basis of a testimony to truth finds a set of narrative forms that are already in place, and therefore one account of events never needs to be fully recited as this version of events, this récit can be recited within laws of genre which are cited in advance. The re-citation of the recitation renders the récit legitimate according to the laws of genre, nature, the law of the Law, and God. There are pathways of legitimacy within the familial relations of the law.
With the passing of the millennia, the kernel of meaning in every term remains precisely as it has always been so that, the surrounding of terms with the language of secular and legal limitations retains always that form in which we encounter “Archangel or whore/ I don't mind/All the roles/ are lent to me/ The life never recognized” even as the modes of understanding deny such mythologemes and even recoil at the prospect of such language (Laure. 1995). All this because “(t)he dialectic of language is dialectophagus” (Derrida. 2021). So remains the account that never rises to the level of an account; that remains the récit in its fragmentary invalidated unspeakable-ness.
For the saints and sacred men, and especially for those of us who are also bastards, there will only ever be an accounting, never an account. The account that can never rise to the level of récit simply dies in the silence of the unsignifiable, and “instead of burning everything, people begin to love flowers. The religion of flowers follows the religion of the sun” (Derrida). Genet's nicknames and the ephemeral meaning of those whose names refer to families and archangels that are not our own.
There are the accounts which are always already valid. There are the accounts which can only ever be invalid. There are no new gods or new sacred spaces. They are all the same gods and the same sacred spaces. The damned are also the holy. This is the ambivalence of the sacred.
“Un récit? Non, pas de récit, plus jamais” (Blanchot, 1981).
Works Cited and Recited:
Blanchot, Maurice. The Madness of the Day. Translated by Lydia Davis. Rhinebeck: Station Hill Press, 1981.
Derrida, Jacques. Clang. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and David Wills. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. “The Law of Genre,” from Glyph: Textual Studies 7. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
Laure. The Collected Writings. Translated by Jeanine Herman. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995.
Genet, Jean. The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews. Translated by Jeff Fort. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e) Intervention Series 21, 2018.