ARTICLE From Inside a Black Box Lindsey Andrews North Carolina State University lcandrew@ncsu.edu Abstract This is the beginning of an inquiry into the relationship among entanglement, the pursuit of quantum realism, and black revolutionary aesthetics. Or more specifically, it’s about physicist Albert Einstein, novelist Ralph Ellison, and political prisoner George Jackson, and how they spent their whole lives trying to describe the total systems of the physical world, the nation, the prison…and ended up discovering that systemic explanations could never be total, that there was something excessive coursing through even the most rational of systems. The world Enlightenment thought tried to totalize was cut by blackness, and, as it turned out, science, art, and politics were always happening elsewhere and otherwise. These are strange bedfellows, I know, but it’s a queer little text. It’s also a text about how I found black study, or how black study found me, and how it changed my relationship to knowledge, study, thought, The World. Andrews, Lindsey. “From Inside a Black Box.” Lute & Drum 8 (2016): http://issue8.luteanddrum.com/#!andrews/ Introduction. In 2011 I embarked on what would become a labor of love, a labor about love. For the second chapter of my dissertation on “experiments” in science and literature, I thought I was going to study the relationship between quantum uncertainty and black aesthetics. From an intuition, I started to read and write about Albert Einstein, Ralph Ellison, and George Jackson. At the end of the year, I found that I had 100 sprawling pages and the realization that what I had really come to study was the relationship between isolation and connection, between all the different ways that world separated us and made us lonely, and all the ways that we are nevertheless together, all the surprising, impossible ways we would find each other. How could I have known that it was this certainty, this unbelievable, impossible certainty, and not quantum uncertainty, that would lie at the end of my study, that would turn out to be at the heart of study itself? After I graduated, the realities of academia set in: the academic job market, the requirements of the profession… For the next several years, I wrote and I re-wrote, struggling to put the writing in proper article form. I named my “intervention;” I established an “argument” with academic interlocutors; I somehow created a causal narrative and proper evidence of the impossible connections I had created. But something in that struggle alienated me from the work. I no longer felt the feelings that had once brought me to literature, to science, to the POLITICS OF LOVE…. And then came Tamar and Jessica. We were far apart—North Carolina, Mississippi, Argentina—but still we started what we called “a writing, thinking, loving group.” Through them I learned a new way of writing: not for the profession, and not for anonymous readers, but to and for each other, for the people who were intimately connected to us in study. And through them came the book Letters to the Other World, from which this excerpt is drawn. They read the original version from the dissertation, written five years before, and brought me back to a new old series of stories, a new old series of truths: of Einstein’s 2 mischievous heckling of Bohr, of Jackson’s epistolary promiscuity and relentless love, of Ellison’s insufferable perfectionism that left him at his death with over 10,000 files on his computer, of how I was moved to tears when I read the stories of quantum physics, how it had all changed my life. All the things that I’d had to leave out, that had not been “selected” in the first go, were the things they and I felt should go back in… And so I began again, this time unalienated, this time not alone. What follows is a short selection from this palimpsestic little book: the first book and the letters and thoughts that rewrite it. This is for Tamar Shirinian and Jessica Jones. *** “The function, the psychology, of artistic selectivity is to eliminate from art form all those elements of artistic experience which contain no compelling significance. This enables man to conquer chaos and master destiny.”1 --Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues” “I’ve always strived to see the indivisible thing cutting across the artificial barricades which have been erected to an older section of our brains, back to the mind of the primitive commune that exists in all blacks.”2 --George Jackson, Soledad Brother “It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”3 --Albert Einstein, quoted in Heisenberg’s Physics and Beyond Prologue: The First Letter. Dear θ and ψ, 3 I have been thinking about our thought, about your thoughts on my thoughts. I have been thinking of the infinite speed of social life and political desperation, and of the slow time of being in the world. I have been thinking how θ’s writers hold still to unfold an origami world, and how the writers I have been writing of and with, these black writers, writers of blackness, invaginate the world, not unfolding it, but making more folds inside it, accelerating in deepest densities… You see, it is first and foremost a question of the relationship between isolation and connection: how to cross the cuts and divides? How fast can you go? Are you going fast even when you are slowed, still? CAN YOU RUN IN THE DENSEST MASS, IN THE BLACK HOLE? And next it is a question of loneliness and seeking, cathexis and breaks. Everyone is on the run. Can you make love on the run? Can you make the world? Did I tell you about Einstein crossing the ocean? In 1933, this man who MADE THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT GO, MADE IT WORK, was on a ship from Germany to the US. He was a man in flight, traveling along a Jewish diasporic line to make a home in a Black diasporic node on Witherspoon Street in Princeton, New Jersey.4 En route he wrote a dispatch OUT saying that the gulls overhead were his only friends.5 This is not exactly to say that he was lonely, but that he was in a way isolated, and in a way invented something new that is not the same as isolation. The gulls were his only friends and he made the thought experiment go. Often when I re-write, I begin again at the beginning. But that is arbitrary, of course. I cannot know where to begin. I could begin any place. Everything is so “disrupted and precarious”6—George Jackson’s words—one simply picks a disrupted point and begins there. His letters were like that: shot out of the prison, censored, and so cut had to begin again and in the middle, over and over. From solitary confinement, he wrote letter after letter out: to his father, his lawyer, his loves. Although collected and bound, there is no beginning because each letter is isolated, and yet they are together: Soledad 4 Brother a book. I know that you have gone with me already, followed and read each isolated thing. And now, this little book. Together we have come to know there are worlds in this world, worlds that exist isolated on the other side: the other side of History, the other side of knowledge, of science, of matter itself. Between this world and the other worlds there is THE CUT: what quantum physics calls “the Schnitt,” and Ellison and Jackson call “the break,” “barricades,” “the tracks.” One side is the classical side of people and objects and life that can be seen; the other side is the quantum: the world at its tiniest, fastest, most distant, most black—the invisible world. Or rather, on one side is a world coheres with classical explanations, a world that “works” and is described accurately by given knowledge systems. And on the other side there is a world that seems inexplicable, or at best a monstrous pathology, when viewed from the classical side—it is a world where matter matters differently. It was Du Bois who most precisely posed the question that is always the question of the cut, the divide: “Between me and the other world: … How does it feel to be a problem?”7 How does it feel to be entangled? Entanglement is two things. To clarify: Most precisely it is a shared quantum state. The experience of two (or more) entangled objects is inextricable and fully determining. The laws of relativity—Einstein’s own laws—say it is impossible to communicate faster than the speed of light,8 and yet somehow these objects do. Far apart, not locally connected, the particles speak without speaking; each reacts to the other, instantaneously. This is the continual paradox Einstein poses to physics, his constant challenge to the theory: BETWEEN ME AND THE OTHER WORLD, HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE A PROBLEM? (He had, you know, been writing letters to Du Bois, too.9) Less precisely, entanglement is a relation, an affectivity, a feeling between us: my life may affect yours, but what happens to me does not fully determine what happens to you; nevertheless, we are entangled. Both kinds of entanglement matter for this little book. 5 You see, the story of entanglement is the story of the mattering of matter, its possibilities beyond given meanings. The matter of light was always the heart of the matter. And as early as 1801, scientists began to see that light was a strange being: it can be a particle in one moment, and then, impossibly, the particle can interfere with itself to become a wave, to become two things at once. This has always been modern physics’ greatest paradox, its magical catalyst: how light behaves as both a wave and a particle. The question was an ontological one: What is light? But it was aesthetic, too, a question of form. All thought, even the most base positivist empiricism, must be composed. In the 1930s, when atomic physical experiments became difficult, when technical capacities could no longer keep up with the theory, Einstein created the thought experiment for quantum physics. This enabled him to observe something more: a new way of describing the paradox of light: entanglement. The thought experiment became a theoretical mode for inventing new aesthetic possibilities. And new aesthetic forms made new physical experiments possible. And it keeps going, this thought experiment keeps going. You see: even recently physicists have done new physical experiments, building on Einstein’s thought experiments. According to these experiments, single quanta of light do not choose their path until we choose to see it.10 After the fact, we retroactively choose its path. What I am saying sounds impossible: that in the now we make the past. Yet when we think the quantum in this way, we can think an other thing: history is not history. Impossibly, we are materially making the past in the now. By changing the path we change the past. So now we can know that in 1952, Ellison’s invisible man was not merely dreaming when, from his hospital bed, he asked, “Oh doctor … ever chew on sugar cane? … The same fall day I first saw the hounds chasing black men in stripes and chains my grandmother sat with me and sang…”11 We can know that in 1970 Jackson, alone in solitary confinement for over half a decade, was not merely being poetic when he said he 6 was on the slave ship, feeling the slave ship as he read it, as he wrote it. (Dreaming and poetry are never mere.) “IN AMERIKAN SOIL WITH … COTTON AND CORN GROWING OUT OF [HIS] CHEST,” he was in the present living embodied the past and rewriting it.12 He felt in order for us to feel “ALL THAT THEY EVER FELT, BUT DOUBLE.”13 Oh, θ and ψ, you see how excessive I have become. The capitalizations, the pathos. I tried so hard for so long to write with restraint, but I feel in my fingers—aesthesis—the hysterical femininity of Bidart or Plath, the confessional style that rushes forth in epistolary form. “…trying to stop my hunger with FOOD, is like trying to appease thirst with ink.”14 “I do it so it feels real.”15 Finding the form, letting go of restraint, is, as Jackson would say, “the thing at stake!!”16 So I have composed the book again, this time with my own letters, and here you are inside, too. (θ and ψ, you are now anonymous, the variables of physics, but also something akin to Mackey’s Mu…17) And now you are still specific yous, but you are also a receiver, there, anywhere, tuned in to the lower frequencies, attuned to the B-side of history. The variables of you entangle the world with these men I am entangled with. To get there, to bring the reader along—the reader, who you’ll remember, is always also a writer, experiencing the world, making it as she reads—I’ll have to ask of the reader what I asked of you: to begin over and over, to start anywhere and tolerate the isolation, the vignettes, the episodes. BEAR WITH ME, PLEASE. IT WILL ALL COME TOGETHER IT WAS ALWAYS ALWAYS TOGETHER. Tying it together to make it go, this was Ellison’s great challenge, too. Throughout the ’40s and ‘50s, Ralph Ellison wrote on and on, an invisible man writing Invisible Man, episode after episode, thousands and thousands of versions of each scene.18 His writing was excessive: at heart a picaresque. He 7 could have never stopped, except he knew he had to stop to get it out. To bring it together he wrote the bookends: pro- and epilogue. He tied it together. It is a false binding, but it makes it go. The thing is, I gave up on arguments, on causality, on the real ties. There is no place to begin, no place to end. I gave all that up when I left the academy. The world inside and outside academia is lonely, but at least on the outside no one’s forcing you to make causal connections and arguments. The thing is there. You can simply tell it. But sometimes it takes a binding. Or if it is an argument, it’s not a proof. It’s a plea. For description over explanation, for the force of blackness, for the impossible unseen, for the connective power of isolation, for communing with the dead who of course never die. Our lives ALL THAT THEY EVER FELT, BUT DOUBLE. *** There are some things I forgot to tell you, or some things I forgot to write in here, at least as explicitly as I meant. Perhaps most importantly, I forgot to tell you about the women. This is a little book about invisibility and entanglement. Invisibility and entanglement are the history of blackness—of both people called black and the entire range of aesthetic modes embodied, perpetuated in black life. That history is also the history of femininity. Invisibility is not a condition to be overcome: it is our condition of possibility. There are so many invisible women in this text, so many barely perceptible makers of the other world: Angela Davis, Fay Stender, Grete Hermann, Fanny Ellison… Maybe I kept them, these women, invisible because I was for so long keeping myself invisible. Maybe we are the secret commune under this commune, an undercommons under the undercommons, accelerating in deepest densities….19 I was lonely and I found these three lonely men. Oh, Ellison: “To paraphrase myself, I love you, write me, I’m lonely.”20 Dearest Einstein, his “lonely ways.”21 And Jackson, “alone in the most hostile jungle on earth.”22 The fundamental condition of writing, of study, is enforced solitude, loneliness. I’ve 8 been thinking of Michael Cobb who writes of the queerness of loneliness, of being alone.23 And through him I think the queerness of this binding, these men bound together by me is queer in me, through me. And here, too, all the women who are communing with each other, and with these men, as ghosts and at the same time materially real and so far from one another… Lonely, we have come to study together, to write each other. This is a queer little book, a black book, all these ghosts and people and particles miscegenating. And queer because I am white and so is Einstein—U.S. law tells us as much.24 But there’s something black in him, too, coursing through his Jewish flight, through his diasporic thought. Or what I mean is: everyone is thinking blackness, a radical blackness here. I came, like Einstein, seeking Enlightenment, and was instead cut by the thought of blackness. (And how, in coming to black study could I not? As Cedric Robinson says, “Black Studies is a critique of Western Civilization.”25) To break from Enlightenment is to go into the dark, into chaos, the irrational, the unknown, and to find there black thought that moves in concert with the materiality of the other world. (Blackness saved us; blackness made us possible. Queerest of births.) One thing that helps is the black box. The black box in its multiplicity gets at all of this. The light blitz box, Max Planck’s box (later Einstein’s box), is one kind of black box. Until Planck, everything we knew about light came from transparency, from glass lenses. Glass slowed down light or refracted it. Transparency allowed us to magnify the world or separate light into its spectral colors. So there is one history where lenses, transparency, led the study of the quantum. This is what Enlightenment was doing. But then there is a moment where blackness becomes key. In 1900, Planck used a box, a chamber, containing black-body radiation—purely absorptive light, invisible to the naked eye—to learn something about the matter of light, to quantize it,26 to make it possible to think further this strange dual wave-particle thing.27 It is from the black box that the quantum was born. 9 You see, black bodies and boxes compose the world through alternative aesthetics and therefore require new scientific values. They are not transparently visible; observing them can never be a matter of objectivity (although their existence may be objective). They are purely absorptive, nonreflective; their insides cannot be seen, their workings are necessarily opaque: opacity is their condition of possibility. There is no doubt that Ellison’s invisible man and Jackson lived in black boxes, were black in black boxes like Einstein’s light-blitz box: isolated, quantized…and impossibly entangled. The black box helped them all perceive blackness in its reality. It took blackness to make the other world. And to make this book. So I have written the book again, a book inside a book. This time there is still the first book that you have read, the book of Einstein and Ellison and Jackson, the book I wrote before I broke free, or rather, the book that in writing it tied me up and broke me free. And there is also the second book: all the things I have been telling you all along, every time we meet and read and talk about this little book. It is all the things bursting out of me, the things that made me explode as I first read their words and which still now are inside and outside this little book all the time… “You correctly sensed that I am in a terrible rush, all the time. This rush characterizes everything that flows from me.”28 That is Jackson, you know, but here, with this book it is also me. I feel it all the time as I re-write: the excessive urgency everywhere already in this book, flowing back in a terrible rush. And now I ask that you go with me again, that you let me go and that you come along. See, this is the thing: What I am telling you is impossible, of course. This twinning of quantum physics and black aesthetics, black life. Just like entanglement is impossible. And it is real. *** 10 “It is [even] possible to create triples of particles, for example, such that all three are 100% correlated with each other—whatever happens to one particle causes a similar instantaneous change in the other two. The three entities are thus inexorably linked, wherever they may be.”29 –Amir Aczel, Entanglement *** Matter of Black Thought. In 1971, George Jackson was shot to death by a prison guard at Soledad Prison. Jackson had been in the joint since 1961. At 18, he’d been accused of stealing seventy bucks. His court-appointed lawyer convinced him to plead guilty, and he was sent to San Quentin. California had and still has what is called “indeterminate sentencing.” The judge gave him “one year to life.”30 You see, Reagan was governor, and California was fucked up. The sentence ended up encompassing the entirety of Jackson’s adult life. During his decade in prison, seven and a half years of which were spent in “the hole,” in solitary confinement, Jackson began corresponding with supporters, including prison abolitionist Angela Davis, and allied himself with the Black Panther Party. Surrounded by nothing but books, pen, paper, he committed himself to study, to a rigorous analysis of the confined conditions that delimited his experience. His letters and writings, collected in Soledad Brother (1970) and Blood in My Eye (1971) evince himself to be a serious philosopher of the prison. After his murder, almost one hundred books were removed from his cell, among them, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.31 By the time of Jackson’s death, Ellison had fallen out of favor with the black radical left. He had been increasingly criticized for his perceived liberalism and his commitment to aesthetic practice over and against overt political action and protest.32 The criticisms weren’t wrong. Ellison’s more overtly leftist politics (and especially his involvement with the communist party) had waned in the years following the Civil Rights Act, and in a number of public speeches he 11 consistently presented himself as an advocate for liberal individualism.33 Jackson was by all counts a radical, so his having Ellison’s book comes as something of a surprise… But how can it be a surprise when Jackson was reading everything? He had EVERYTHING. Not just Invisible Man and Shadow and Act, but books by Orwell and Nietzsche, Marx and June Jordan, CLR James and Gramsci and Cleaver and… There is no way to know what interested Jackson about the novel, but indeed, he may have been prompted to request it for his cell by black radicals’ criticism of it rather than the novel’s popular accolades. There is perhaps something more, too. There are political possibilities that irrupt within Ellison’s experimental novel and his writing practice that are not circumscribed by the lasting narrative about his public life. Those political possibilities are not circumscribed by literary critics’ pervasive reading of the novel, either. And you know, θ and ψ, these literary critics can’t circumscribe the aesthetic possibilities either, neither of Ellison nor Jackson, even though that’s so often what they try to do. I mean, the novel is not even really a novel. There is no beginning and no end. It is endless episodes that Ellison wrote and re-wrote. They only came together into what could be considered a “novel” in any conventional sense because Albert Erskine made him write bookends: a prologue and epilogue.34 The editor wanted Ellison to STOP this book that was going, and give it an ending. To get it out into the world, it had to be STOPPED. A book that was going had to be stopped to go somewhere else—to go eventually to Jackson’s cell. The same has to be said of Jackson’s letters. . . which continued to flow from the prison until they were stopped: first for Soledad Brother and then DEAD STOPPED by Jackson’s murder. Critics have presumed that the epilogue neatly wraps up the novel, gives Ellison’s final “so-what” on the matter, connecting up with the 12 prologue and converting the novel’s primarily picaresque form into a closed hermeneutic object. A beginning and an end make it possible to step back from the novel, to get the proper “critical distance,” and to “interpret” a meaning from it: A Prescription for Liberal Individualism. What interest could Jackson have in Ralph Waldo Ellison, then? For Jackson, liberalism was an enemy. Ellison professed a dream of reconciling American democratic ideals with their unequal expression through Emersonian individualism (he was even named after Emerson). Jackson wanted to “extinguish forever” the “ideals moralities, and institutions” of an irredeemable “Amerika.”35 Ellison’s path to freedom made Jackson, in his own words, a “neoslave.”36 Yet, what I want to say is, something invisible binds them. I am describing them here as opposites, I know. When ultimately I’m showing you how they’re I mean, pleading for them to be as they are entangled together. But it is very important to understand the ways they were so separated from each other: not only in space and time, but also in the historical record, in the interpretation of their writing. HOW WE HAVE SEEN THEM APART, KEPT THEM APART. And it’s true: they had very different ways of saying very different things—about art, about politics, about knowledge and science—at least overtly. I’ve positioned them as antithetical from the start. The quotations in the opening, for example. Those quotes describe oppositional aesthetico-political aims. You remember: Ellison stated early in his career that he wanted to erect the divisions that might allow art to take form. Jackson wanted to break down all divisions for a revolutionary return. As though Ellison’s art opposes Jackson’s politics; as though art opposes politics…. But, you see, they share a position, a black position, which makes them what Ellison described as both hypervisible— 13 signifying on Chicago School sociologists’ formulation of “high visibility”—and “unvisible.”37 They were both thinking invisibility. And in everything they do, there is something bubbling underneath, an aesthetic thing, a black aesthetic thing—black thought—which is in every way the condition of their politics, visible or invisible. It is their condition of possibility. Of Existence. Each had to develop an aesthetic, a formal mode, that could think the invisible unseen, that could move with it, that could act on the unknown. Ellison and Jackson both wrote missives from “the hole”—Jackson’s solitary confinement “hole” and the invisible man’s underground hole— across the cut, inside the cut, turning thing that separated into a place to dwell and write into a break, a “break” in time and space, a pause inside the secret excesses of the system to stop and “look around”38 and it was in the hole that both, to use Ellison’s words, “discovered [their] invisibility.”39 The thought of invisibility revealed itself to them both, over and over, in its most material and aesthetic dimensions, forcing them to question whether “proper” political thought (classical thought) could ever lead to emancipatory action. Invisible, in the hole, they invented processes of experimentation that could be attuned to the impossibilities of politics and history—the improprieties of the world—that were nevertheless there, unseen. Even though it seems like Ellison and Jackson place different value on division—what Ellison called “selectivity” and Jackson called “barricades”—both were deeply attuned to the ways in which such division had been the productive force of Enlightenment epistemology, which suppressed ontological excess (the invisible, the noncategorizable, the unrecognizable) and made it non-existent. Attunement to and affirmation of the reality of invisible experience would move them away from explanation and allow them to begin again with description from inside. This 14 move to ongoing description, constantly inside the very thing they are describing, not totalized or seen from the outside, made it possible to sense to the insistent, non-systematic, unpredictable materiality of the world (the other world, the black world). It is this kind of being INSIDE history that is dropping out of history! They had to, we have to, drop out of historicism to make a new way to think history, to write a history for the other world… For both Ellison and Jackson, recognition of a not quite originary world (conceptually and historically) prior to division and a capacity to return “to the mind of the primitive commune” or, through art, to produce entirely new forms of thought by way of selection from a prior and existing world, suggests that these two thinkers and their work are entangled. But you see, I think you can intuit this with me here: you can think their blackness as shared blackness. But here is where it gets weird. Here is the nonintuitive thing: they are not only entangled with each other, they are also entangled with Albert Einstein. Their blackness was his blackness, too. This is the impossibility and the truth of entanglement. For Einstein, the explanation of reality had come to a point of crisis, and it was the invisible world of the quantum that made it so. Entanglement (Verschrängkung) is the term physicist Erwin Schrödinger, in 1935, used to describe a quantum phenomenon that Albert Einstein had earlier called “spooky action at a distance”: the apparent capacity of two distant particles to affect each other with absolute simultaneity across space-time separation without local physical causality. Impossibly, these particles interact faster than the speed of light, which is, according to the theory of relativity, the absolute limit speed for information transfer. The particles spoke to each other, knew the condition of the other, instantaneously, and each was determined by the other instantaneously, faster than the speed of light, even though it was not possible. That two objects could affect each other while neither in proximity to one another nor connected by some other medium such as a force field, brought scientific study at its most 15 daring dangerously close to the pre-Enlightenment magic it defined itself against. There was an irrationality in the most rational system; it had to be accounted for, it had to be described. Is this metaphorical appropriation, using blackness and invisibility to justify the use of quantum mechanics’ “entanglement” for describing dispersed black relationality? But you see, even without explicitly thinking the blackness of physics, Caribbean poet Édouard Glissant knew that there was something shared—something aesthetic, and epistemological because aesthetic—by black thought and quantum physics. In 1984, in Caribbean Discourses, he describes “the point of entanglement” as a node that connects those scattered across the black diaspora.40 There was something mysterious and magical about the connective force that pulsed through black diasporic experience, a relation that was not locally causal—a kind of shared experience, transhistorical memory: Ellison’s blended-becoming of Buckeye and Br’er Rabbit, Jackson’s surreal chest bursting forth with cotton and corn—that could not be explained in the old realist ways. The mysterious and magical force of entanglement made sense to him. And it is through reversion, not to a mythical origin, but to the point of entanglement, that history can be remade. We change the past when we change the path… So, I think the question is actually a different one: If the SchrödingerEinstein concept is the correct description, the theoretically profitable description, for dispersed black relationality, HOW IS QUANTUM THEORY ITSELF ENTANGLED IN THE HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE OF BLACKNESS? If you are thinking the diaspora—the scattering of objects—you cannot help but think entanglement, because you observe this impossible thing. Black thought and quantum physics are always thinking the diaspora! 16 More specifically, how is Einstein—separated not only in space and time, but also by discipline—entangled with Ellison and Jackson. They are here together, though. They are all here. They are affecting each other. Now they are together and newly determining each other. It is epistemological. It is material. It is real. You see, they are all entangled in an irruptive counter-history of blackness and black radical possibility that traverses the dominant history of science and the Enlightenment. Throughout their lifetimes, science—its rationalizing logic— was being translated to the social and medical sciences and being used to justify racialized practices in criminology, psychology, and sociology. For Ellison and Jackson, there was something wrong, something pernicious, about this supposedly objective science when it was applied to social life. These social and medical sciences that took black life as its object could see only pathology. So Ellison and Jackson had to take up their position as objects, take up the side of pathology, of the strange and mutating world, and study from there. They made the object side, the quantum side, the black side into the side of the observer. They insisted on altering the science. Einstein’s great contribution was to see that the need alter something about scientific practice was not external to natural science practice—was not merely about its expansive (mis)application onto the realm of social study—but was internal to it. (It was Einstein, after all, who called white supremacy America’s “disease.”41) There was something excessive, non-systematic, pathological—something on the outside-otherside of the system—that disrupted the known causality and rationality of this system. Something had to be fundamentally re-thought. To Schrödinger he laments that the other physicists “somehow believe that the quantum theory somehow provides a complete description of reality.”42 But Schrödinger knows, writes to him, they share the thought: “It is probably justified in requiring a transformation of the image of the real world as it has been constructed in the last 300 years … One must 17 therefore go back … and reflect on how one could have proceeded differently … how the whole subsequent development would then be modified. No wonder that puts us into boundless confusion!”43 They have to begin to describe anew! Engaged in their specific struggles with the quantum world, civic life, and the prison system, each came to see division as a structuring feature of Enlightenment epistemology, which takes the world as fully systematic and knowable through a given theory of the (divided) sensorium (what it can sense and therefore know). They had to get at the very function of division itself. Ellison, Jackson, and Einstein all recognized that division was a method of bracketing, isolating, the seemingly irrational of the world in order to totalize and rationalize the world—it creates the world as it seems, the apparently sensible world, not the world as it is. Those divisions make a world inaccessible to other worlds and to its own irruptive forces across and beyond it. So they demanded, these three demanded, new ways of sensing the world! They invented theories that could make the actually existing thing, the real thing, in the work of the others perceptible, observable, in all its invisibility. They produce new ways of observing, of making sense of the senses, and of making sense of each other. To do it, they had to drop out of history.44 Get back to something before division by getting across the divide. Entanglement names an impossible, transhistorical connection: it abandons known causality. It fucks with time. You seek and you seek and you seek for the cause: but in seeking you find the thing that exceeds causality, exceeds historicism, exceeds its own historicity. An impossible force. Together, they produce new ways for us, too, to make sense. And this is what this is all for, this book, these letters: I am writing to you and you are reading and we are writing together to make an other world. But we have to make new sense, and to make new sense we have to learn how to read again. 18 What we say when we speak from already given theories—about the social lives of particles, about the social life of blackness—cannot account for something we can sense, despite what we say we see. If we can believe it’s there to be sensed. Taken together, their new perceptive practices and descriptive possibilities provide continuity across all the divisions, not only the physical ones of space and time that separate them, but also the historical divisions that separate art from politics from science. Somehow in seeking the promises of Enlightenment, they leave it behind and instead find a blackness that makes possible an epistemological revision that we now might perceive to traverse the whole social and material realm that art, politics, and science try to think. We just have to find new ways to think them. WE SEPARATE THEM TO SHOW THAT SEPARATION IS IMPOSSIBLE. THEY ARE QUANTIZED TO REVEAL THE PARADOX OF THE QUANTUM. THEY DEMAND NEW WAYS OF SENSING THE WORLD. And it might lead us, as it led them, beyond epistemological determinism and closed ontologies, beyond the limits of historical causality, ideology, and institutional structures. It might lead us, as it led them, to perceive and pursue an anoriginal world prior to division and the possibility of what Ellison described as a politics of love.45 What I mean to say is: quantum physics, too, in all its blackness, is here has always been here to make “the love act” go (Jackson’s love act)46 19 the love act that has always been in the making, this politics of love. It has been here to make love in order to perceive and make what has always been in the making—“the primitive commune”—the ongoing connection and material force of those scattered across the diaspora. These letters all love letters. Can we sense it too? *** “And the World, I love it, send it to me. I’ll share it with all the rest here who can still love. But will have to transfer it soon. The day I leave I’ll send you a line or two. You let them know”47 --George Jackson, Soledad Brother 1 Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Shadow and Act (New York, NY: Signet, 1966): p. 94. 2 George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994 [1970]): p. 4. 3 Albert Einstein quoted in Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1971): p. 77. 4 Quoted in Fred Jerome and Roger Taylor, Einstein on Race and Racism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2005), p. 33. 5 See: Peter Michelmore, Einstein: Profile of the Man (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead, 1962): p. 167. 6 Jackson, p. 272. 7 W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, NY: Dover Thrift Editions, 1994 [1903]): p. 1. 20 8 Albert Einstein, “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” (“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”), Annalen der Physik 17 (1905): p. 891. 9 Jerome and Taylor, 7-8. 10 Aczel, p. 89-93. 11 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York, NY: Vintage International, 1995 [1952]): p. 234. 12 Jackson, p. 233. 13 Ibid., p. 234. 14 Frank Bidart, “Ellen West,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-andpoets/poems/detail/48284 15 Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-andpoets/poems/detail/49000. 16 Jackson, p. 319. 17 See: Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem (New York, NY: New Directions, 2006). 18 See: Adam Bradley, Ralph Ellison in Progress: From Invisible Man to Three Days Before the Shooting. . . . (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2010). 19 On “the undercommons,” see: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercomons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013). 20 Quoted in Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2007): p. 215. 21 Max Born (ed.), The Born-Einstein Letters (New York, NY: Macmillan, 2005): p. 160. 22 Jackson, p. 240. 23 See: Michael Cobb, “Lonely,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106:3 (2007): p. 445-457. 24 On the legal construction of whiteness, and its changes across the twentieth century, see: Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106: 8 (1993). 25 Cedric Robinson, “Capitalism, Marxism, and the Black Radical Tradition: An Interview with Cedric Robinson,” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 3:1 (1999): http://flag.blackened.net/ias/5robinsoninterview.htm 26 “Quantum” refers to the smallest discrete amount of matter that can be involved in a physical interaction. To quantize light means to describe it in terms of particles or “packets” expressed as discrete entities. See: Norbert Wiener, Differential Space, Quantum Systems, and Prediction, (Cambridge, MA: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1966). 27 See: Aczel, p. 34-35, and Louisa Gilder, The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2008), p. 27. 28 Jackson, p. 323. 29 Aczel, p. 2. 30 Jackson, p. 9. 31 A complete list of books removed from Jackson’s cell is available at kamasaproject.org/2009/08/22/books-taken-from-george-jacksons-cell (accessed July 5, 2012). 21 32 See: Bradley, p. 57. See: Rampersad, p. 141-142; and Barbara Foley, Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2010). 34 Bradley, p. 7, 27. 35 Jackson, p. 100. 36 Ibid. p. 252. 37 Ralph Ellison, Invisible, p. xv. 38 Ellison, Invisible, p. 8. 39 Ellison, Invisible, p. 7. 40 Édouard Glissant, “Reversion and Diversion,” Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville, VA: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1999), p. 7. 41 Jerome and Taylor, p. 33. 42 Letters on Wave Mechanics, p. 44. 43 Ibid. p. 42. 44 “I suppose sometimes a man has to plunge outside history.” Ellison, Invisible, p. 377. 45 Ellison, Invisible, p. 452. 46 Jackson, p. 272. 47 George Jackson, p. 319. 33 22