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What is Hell? Your definitions.
- The System of Dante's Hell-LeRoi Jones
In 1965, LeRoi Jones offered a paradox for our consideration. In the "SOUND AND IMAGE" postscript of The System of Dante's Hell, Jones tells us, Hell is definitions. Parts of that work were previously published in the Jones and Diane Di Prima editions of Floating Bear (1961-62) during a massive cultural-political and social identity shift in the U.S. Their publishing it resulted in them being arrested for obscenity charges in 1961. This history lends itself to our treatment of the logic of identity by considering one's position amongst others with respect to identity assertions. Our treatment is made by analyzing this puzzle through the philosophy language. We take on those tools to formulate a model of asserted and/or stipulated identity positions within socio-political and cultural matrices allowing or disallowing assertions. This model has proven central to work in Black studies. It was in 1968, after the jailing and the assassination of Malcom X, that Jones changed his identity to Amiri Baraka after System's publication, signaling a change in his identified sociopolitical and cultural position as a Beat poet to a Black Revolutionary, his location from the Village to Harlem. How can LeRoi and Amiri be different identities of the same individual? Not to trivialize the point, this classic puzzle in identity theory stems from a term becoming the object of its own definition. What is "White" is White or else it refers to some other thing indicative of its meaning. It is either interchangeable with some thing in the world; or its content is functional, utilized within a reference frame in which its assertion is relevant because previously employed as means to organize one's state of affairs. An issue arises once an exchange between object and label is made. We no longer have the relation between objects that we were looking to define. We understand that Jones, later Baraka, considered this paradox within a Wittgensteinian paradigm. In a 1965 essay, "The Revolutionary Theatre," Jones/Baraka details a program for Black aesthetics. Jones/Baraka states that ethics and aesthetics are one; the same conclusion rendered by Wittgenstein. Considering the above, an identifier exchanged with the identified object either forces us to arrive at an infinite regress,...