Fugitivity Affirmative—beffjr Note
Download 1.17 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Fugitivity is the only resistance
FugitivityFugitivity and freedom exists in our use of language and it’s constant re-reading and re-use as a way of knowing the world. Freedom isn’t fiat; it is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive play rather than related to the location of the body or an abstract vision of social change. Such a “freedom” is utopian and fugitiveTremblay McGraw 10 – Robin Tremblay-McGraw @University of California, Santa Cruz “Enclosure and Run: The Fugitive Recyclopedia of Harryette Mullen’s Writing” MELUS Volume 35, No.2 Summer 2010. Pp 71-94 (Article) Oxford University Press [E.Smith] Harryette Mullen has published five books of original poetry—Tree Tall Woman (1981), Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), Muse & Drudge (1995), and Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002). Additionally, she has published two books which reissue her earlier works: Blues Baby: Early Poems (2002), which reprints Tree Tall Woman and also includes a previously unpublished collection; and Recyclopedia: Trimming, and Muse & Drudge (2006). Mullen self-consciously inherits and intervenes in what Kathy Lou Schultz calls the “legacy gone missing” of “avant-garde practice by African-American women poets” (n. pag.). Mullen is actively engaged in recovering this legacy through her creative, scholarly, and editorial work.1 Poised in the dialectic of what I call “enclosure” (identity, history, and the archive, but also, racism, exclusion, and limitation) and “run” (mobility, flight, escape, critique, ongoing poesis, and revision), Mullen’s work plies the tensions between these disparate but mutually dependent poles. From the negotiation of this tension, Mullen produces a formal strategy predicated on the communal participation of others and distinctive among innovative poets—the recyclopedia. Mullen’s writing creates texts that remain open to ambiguity, difficulty, and difference. Her writing engages in political and social criticism with particular attention to race, gender, and the discourse of the commodity, while it delights in the pleasures of an infinite linguistic jouissance. Many of the critics who have written about Mullen’s work, including Elisabeth A. Frost, Juliana Spahr, Allison Cummings, and Deborah Mix, foreground its complex “mixtery” of disparate sources and infl uences, illustrating its rich and critical interrogation and reframing of literary history. Importantly, each critic also emphasizes Mullen’s attention to communal reading practices and several situate Mullen’s work as a negotiation between multiple discourses and infl uences, including Black Arts, Steinian modernism, and Language writing. Mix locates Mullen’s work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T in relation to Gertrude Stein but demonstrates how Mullen’s “subversion of convention . . . is both more complicated [than Stein’s] (in its inclusion of race in the welter of discourses of femininity and sexuality) and more communitarian (in its recognition of the individuals tangled in these linguistic webs” (71). Frost demonstrates Mullen’s rare (“among recent avant-garde poets”) revamping of the lyric and argues 72 that Mullen “constructs lyric otherwise—as an experiment in collective reading and an assertion of the complexities of community, language, and poetic voice” (466). While Spahr asserts that “what has interested me about Mullen’s work has been her attention to reading, an attention that is rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy- and identity-centered poetry’s concerns with community building and alliance” (115), Cummings points out that “Mullen’s work then has garnered critical adulation not only because it works to synthesize disparate traditions, but because it reflects on that synthesis explicitly” (24). Surveying Mullen’s body of work as a whole and elaborating on Cummings’s assertion that Mullen self-consciously refl ects her work’s synthesis of multiple discourses, I contend in addition that Mullen’s writing is characterized by a productive tension between “enclosure” and “run,” between an archive of cultural, linguistic, and historical references, images, and information and the fugitivity that is both a thematics and a formal strategy. Her archive manifests in the form of the palimpsest, or, to use a fi gure that Mullen herself foregrounds, her archive is a recyclopedia. She takes debased, erased, and forgotten histories and found discourses and runs with and recycles them; she invites the reader to participate in this educative process of conservation and production, enclosure and fugitive run. Her work articulates a need for a more equitable ecology, one of acknowledgment and memory, conservation and reuse; she and we as readers are caught up in her recyclopedia, an ongoing poetics of reuse that benefits from the multiple perspectives of a heterogeneous community. The concept of the fugitive in Mullen’s work is connected equally to the history of the United States, the global slave trade, historical strategies of escape for enslaved blacks, and formal methods for escaping and reinventing genre and poetic method. Furthermore, the fugitive is both critical and generative and intimately linked to Mullen’s concept of the recyclopedia. Mullen’s formal strategies explicitly reference the history of the fugitive slave laws. In an interview with Cynthia Hogue, Mullen delineates the connection of the fugitive to her own work: I wanted the poem to have that quality of quick movement from one thing to another, from one subject or thought to another, from one mood or emotion to another. Partly because I wanted things to be in flux, a state of flux, a state of change. If you stand still too long, they will put chains on you, so you want to keep moving. This is one of the things that is most fascinating to me about the slave narratives I was studying while I was writing my dissertation. The true freedom in the slave narrative is at the point of deciding to escape and the journey north . . . the freedom that people experience is actually when they are on the road, in fl ight. (par. 25)\ Mullen links the structure of her poetry to the fl ight of the fugitive slave and then connects these movements of fugitivity with freedom. Interestingly, Mullen simultaneously problematizes the effi cacy of such movement and the resultant freedom gained when she further locates the moment of “true freedom . . . at the point of [the slave’s] deciding to escape and . . . journey.” This quote suggests that freedom is elusive, momentary, and a state of mind; it is discursive rather than related to the location of the body. Such a freedom is utopian and fugitive. The diffi culties of fl ight and the frequency of slaves being returned to owners as mandated by the Fugitive Slave Act made the journey north dangerous, exhausting, and subject to failure. Furthermore, in the literature of passing Mullen surveys in her article “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,” which explores how whites repress and suppress miscegenation and argues that the racial category of white is predicated on the black, she notes that in texts such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, “Death is better than slavery.” This is a “recurring refrain in Jacobs’s and other slave narratives, [that] acquires an ironic signifi cance when Benjamin [Jacobs’s lightskinned uncle] dies as a slave, vanishing into the white race in his third and fi nal escape” (82). For some, freedom means leaving one’s family and community, effectively dying in order to take up a new life as a free person or as a black who passes for white. Historically, flight is a means of escape, but not an unproblematic or uncomplicated means. Flight and travel (voluntary or not) undertaken by slaves, refugees, exiles, or nomads does not always erase histories but rather sometimes produces a palimpsestic and productive layering. In her doctoral dissertation, Mullen writes about Olaudah Equiano, the son of an African king who was taken into slavery and wrote from England in the eighteenth century. Discussing how “captivity disrupts his life, so that this African child fails to be ritually initiated [via scarifi cation] as an adult member of his tribe,” Mullen notes that in Equiano’s own discursive production: the displaced African is no blank page, as his reconstruction of early memories goes to show. He is more like a palimpsest, or like the protean “form of this Narrative.” . . . In the pages of Equiano’s prolifi c narrative, the black body retains its relation to a place of origin, but never acquires a fi xed signifi cation; instead layers of meaning accumulate as the character of the narrator evolves through a series of travels and adventures. (“Gender” 59) According to Mullen, for Equiano “retrospectively this disruption of cultural continuity is figured as a divine providence that intervenes to open up a new identity and destiny—a destiny constructed out of the individual’s unique interaction with chance and continually changing environments— rather than a predetermined fate or fi xed identity” (60). For some individuals fl ight and “cultural disruption” will enable strategic redefi nitions or recycling and make possible an identity open to change and resignifi cation; flight can create a kind of open archive always sedimented and palimpsestic so that past traces are not erased but available and recontextualized, refi gured and thus open to the future. Individuals and texts constructed out of fugitive fl ight from the law or those that travel across multiple cultural communities constitute the “recyclopedias” of disparate experiences, ideologies, and discourses. In the recyclopedia, fugitive fl ight rewrites identity by enabling a return to and reappropriation of the past. The neologism recyclopedia in the title of Mullen’s collection of three of her previous books is a combination of recycle and encyclopedia. Recycle references reuse, suggesting “to use again in the original form,” and the taking of intractable “used” or “waste” material and making it suitable for something new. Pedia recalls encyclopedia and its Greek root, paideia, meaning education. Mullen’s neologism clearly articulates a project that is both process and product. It entails a cyclical reuse of given materials and a process that takes dirty, contaminated, and worthless “waste” materials and turns them into something newly usable. Mullen’s recyclopedia suggests that the continual reuse of materials, even those that construct blacks as dirty, contaminated, and worthless, can serve to identify an original “use” (the racist construction of blacks as waste, for example); her writing enables the critical recycling of problematic materials to produce something new, something with different or oppositional value for writer, reader, history, and the future. Mullen’s recyclopedia constructs fugitive movement as a means of escape from arrest and as a productive process of remembering and rewriting. Mullen includes in her recyclopedia many diverse materials, yet she is particularly attentive to bringing to the surface the unarticulated, marginalized, nearly lost, and invisible as well as the “used” or “waste” material. Mullen’s recyclopedia enables the sort of activity described by David Scott that opens up “vast possibilities not just of memory but of countermemory; the moral idiom and semiotic registers of remembering against the grain of the history of New World black deracination, subjection, and exclusion” (vi). Such a process entails both identifying and preserving histories and experiences elided and prohibited from official discourses and simultaneously exposing such discourses’ bad faith. Rather than placing them under lock and key in order to solidify, arrest, and exclude racist and sexist discourses, Mullen remakes the encyclopedia—the discourse and its attendant pedagogies—through her recycling of its alphabets, grammars, metaphors, and other tropes. In the process, these discursive tigations reveal the often unmarked and unnamed structurings of various internecine ideologies. Fugitivity arises out of the inadequacy of society in its attempts to calculate and enframe blackness—while blackness is constitutive of societal relations and is always-already criminal, it doesn’t bar the creation of undercommon spaces of disorderMoten, UC Riverside Department of English professor, 2008 (Fred, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 2, Spring 2008, p. 186-188, ProjectMUSE, IC) So I’m interested in how the ones who inhabit the nearness and distance between Dasein and things (which is off to the side of what lies between subjects and objects), the ones who are attained or accumulated unto death even as they are always escaping the Hegelian positioning of the bondsman, are perhaps best understood as the extra-ontological, extra-political constant—a destructive, healing agent; a stolen, transplanted organ always eliciting rejection; a salve whose soothing lies in the abrasive penetration of the merely typical; an ensemble always operating in excess of that ancient juridical formulation of the thing (Ding), to which Kant subscribes, as that to which nothing can be imputed, the impure, degraded, manufactured (in) human who moves only in response to inclination, whose reflexes lose the name of action. At the same time, this dangerous supplement, as the fact out of which everything else emerges, is constitutive. It seems to me that this special ontic-ontological fugitivity of/in the slave is what is revealed as the necessarily unaccounted for in Fanon. So that in contradistinction to Fanon’s protest, the problem of the inadequacy of any ontology to blackness, to that mode of being for which escape or apposition and not the objectifying encounter with otherness is the prime modality, must be understood in its relation to the inadequacy of calculation to being in general. Moreover, the brutal history of criminalization in public policy, and at the intersection of biological, psychological, and sociological discourse, ought not obscure the already existing ontic-ontological criminality of/as blackness. Rather, blackness needs to be understood as operating at the nexus of the social and the ontological, the historical and the essential. Indeed, as the ontological is moving within the corrosive increase that the ontic instantiates, it must be understood that what is now meant by ontological requires special elucidation. What is inadequate to blackness is already given ontologies. The lived experienced of blackness is, among other things, a constant demand for an ontology of disorder, an ontology of dehiscence, a para-ontology whose comportment will have been (toward) the ontic or existential field of things and events. That ontology will have had to have operated as a general critique of calculation even as it gathers diaspora as an open set—or as an openness disruptive of the very idea of set—of accumulative and unaccumulable differences, differings, departures without origin, leavings that continually defy the natal occasion in general even as they constantly bespeak the previous. This is a Nathaniel Mackey formulation whose full implications will have never been fully explorable.12 What Fanon’s pathontological refusal of blackness leaves unclaimed is an irremediable homelessness common to the colonized, the enslaved, and the enclosed. This is to say that what is claimed in the name of blackness is an undercommon disorder that has always been there, that is retrospectively and retroactively located there, that is embraced by the ones who stay there while living somewhere else. Some folks relish being a problem. As Amiri Baraka and Nikhil Pal Singh (almost) say, “Black(ness) is a country” (and a sex) (that is not one).13 Stolen life disorders positive value just as surely as it is not equivalent to social death or absolute dereliction. So if we cannot simply give an account of things that, in the very fugitivity and impossibility that is the essence of their existence, resist accounting, how do we speak of the lived experience of the black? What limits are placed on such speaking when it comes from the position of the black, but also what constraints are placed on the very concept of lived experience, particularly in its relation to the black when black social life is interdicted? Note that the interdiction exists not only as a function of what might be broadly understood as policy but also as a function of an epistemological consensus broad enough to include Fanon, on the one hand, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, on the other—encompassing formulations that might be said not only to characterize but also to initiate and continually re-initialize the philosophy of the human sciences. In other words, the notion that there is no black social life is part of a set of variations on a theme that include assertions of the irreducible pathology of black social life and the implication that (non-pathological) social life is what emerges by way of the exclusion of the black or, more precisely, of blackness. But what are we to make of the pathological here? What are the implications of a social life that, on the one hand, is not what it is and, on the other hand, is irreducible to what it is used for? This discordant echo of one of Theodor W. Adorno’s most infamous assertions about jazz implies that black social life reconstitutes the music that is its phonographic.14 That music, which Miles Davis calls “social music,” to which Adorno and Fanon gave only severe and partial hearing, is of interdicted black social life operating on frequencies that are disavowed—though they are also amplified—in the interplay of sociopathological and phenomenological description. How can we fathom a social life that tends toward death, that enacts a kind of being-toward-death, and which, because of such tendency and enactment, maintains a terribly beautiful vitality? Deeper still, what are we to make of the fact of a sociality that emerges when lived experience is distinguished from fact, in the fact of life that is implied in the very phenomenological gesture/analysis within which Fanon asserts black social life as, in all but the most minor ways, impossible? How is it that the off harmony of life, sociality, and blackness is the condition of possibility of the claim that there is no black social life? Does black life, in its irreducible and impossible sociality and precisely in what might be understood as its refusal of the status of social life that is refused it, constitute a fundamental danger—an excluded but immanent disruption—to social life? What will it have meant to embrace this matrix of im/possibility, to have spoken of and out of this suspension? What would it mean to dwell on or in minor social life? This set of questions is imposed upon us by Fanon. At the same time, and in a way that is articulated most clearly and famously by W. E. B. Du Bois, this set of questions is the position, which is also to say the problem, of blackness. Fugitivity is the only resistanceMoten 8 Fred, OG, Member of the Undercommons. "Black optimism/Black operation". PMLA, October 2008. Pgs. 1743–1747. PWoods. My field is black studies. In that field, I’m trying to hoe the hard row of beautiful things. I try to study them and I also try to make them. Elizabeth Alexander says “look for color everywhere.” For me, color + beauty = blackness which is not but nothing other than who, and deeper still, where I am. This shell, this inhabitation, this space, this garment—that I carry with me on the various stages of my flight from the conditions of its making—is a zone of chromatic saturation troubling any ascription of impoverishment of any kind however much it is of, which is to say in emergence from, poverty (which is, in turn, to say in emergence from or as an aesthetics or a poetics of poverty). The highly cultivated nature of this situated volatility, this emergent poetics of the emergency, is the open secret that has been the preoccupation of black studies. But it must be said now—and I’ll do so by way of a cool kind of accident that has been afforded us by the danger and saving power that is power point—that there is a strain of black studies that strains against black studies and its object, the critique of western civilization, precisely insofar as it disavows its aim (blackness or the thinking of blackness, which must be understood in what some not so strange combination of Nahum Chandler and Martin Heidegger might call its paraontological distinction from black people). There was a moment in Rebecca’s presentation when the image of a black saxophonist (I think, but am not sure, that it was the great Chicago musician Fred Anderson) is given to us as a representative, or better yet a denizen (as opposed to citizen), of the “space of the imagination.” What’s cool here, and what is also precisely the kind of thing that makes practitioners of what might be called the new black studies really mad, is this racialization of the imagination which only comes fully into its own when it is seen in opposition, say, to that set of faces or folks who constituted what I know is just a part of Lauren’s tradition of Marxist historiographical critique. That racialization has a long history and begins to get codified in a certain Kantian discourse, one in which the imagination is understood to “produce nothing but nonsense,” a condition that requires that “its wings be severely clipped by the imagination.” What I’m interested in, but which I can only give a bare outline of, is a two-fold black operation—one in which Kant moves toward something like a thinking of the imagination as blackness that fully recognizes the irreducible desire for this formative and deformative, necessarily supplemental necessity; one in which black studies ends up being unable to avoid a certain sense of itself as a Kantian, which is to say anti-Kantian and ante-Kantian, endeavor. The new black studies, or to be more precise, the old-new black studies, since every iteration has had this ambivalence at its heart, can’t help but get pissed at the terrible irony of its irreducible Kantianness precisely because it works so justifiably hard at critiquing that racialization of the imagination and the racialized opposition of imagination (in its lawless, nonsense producing freedom) and critique that turns out to be the condition of possibility of the critical philosophical project. There is a voraciously instrumental anti-essentialism, powered in an intense and terrible way by good intentions, that is the intellectual platform from which black studies’ disavowal of its object and aim is launched, even when that disavowal comes in something which also thinks itself to be moving in the direction of that object and aim. I’m trying to move by way of a kind of resistance to that anti-essentialism, one that requires a paleonymic relation to blackness; I’m trying to own a certain dispossession, the underprivilege of being-sentenced to this gift of constantly escaping and to standing in for the fugitivity (to echo Natahaniel Mackey, Daphne Brooks and Michel Foucault) (of the imagination) that is an irreducible property of life, persisting in and against every disciplinary technique while constituting and instantiating not just the thought but that actuality of the outside that is what/where blackness is—as space or spacing of the imagination, as condition of possibility and constant troubling of critique. It’s annoying to perform what you oppose, but I just want you to know that I ain’t mad. I loved these presentations, partly because I think they loved me or at least my space, but mostly because they were beautiful. I love Kant, too, by the way, though he doesn’t love me, because I think he’s beautiful too and, as you know, a thing of beauty is a joy forever. But even though I’m not mad, I’m not disavowing that strain of black studies that strains against the weight or burden, the refrain, the strain of being-imaginative and not-being-critical that is called blackness and that black people have had to carry. Black Studies strains against a burden that, even when it is thought musically, is inseparable from constraint. But my optimism, black optimism, is bound up with what it is to claim blackness and the appositional, runaway black operations that have been thrust upon it. The burden, the constraint, is the aim, the paradoxically aleatory goal that animates escape in and the possibility of escape from. Here is one such black op—a specific, a capella instantiation of strain, of resistance to constraint and instrumentalization, of the propelling and constraining force of the refrain, that will allow me to get to a little something concerning the temporal paradox of, and the irruption of ecstatic temporality in, optimism, which is to say black optimism, which is to say blackness. I play this in appreciation for being in Chicago, which is everybody’s sweet home, everybody’s land of California, as Robert Johnson puts it. This is music from a Head Start program in Mississippi in the mid-sixties and as you all know Chicago is a city in Mississippi, Mississippi a (fugue) state of mind in Chicago. “Da Da Da Da,” The Child Development Group of Mississippi, Smithsonian Folkways Records, FW02690 1967 The temporal paradox of optimism—that it is, on the one hand, necessarily futurial so that optimism is an attitude we take towards that which is to come; but that it is, on the other hand, in its proper Leibnizian formulation, an assertion not only of the necessity but also of the rightness and the essential timelessness of the always already existing, resonates in this recording. It is infused with that same impetus that drives a certain movement, in Monadology, from the immutability of monads to that enveloping of the moral world in the natural world that Leibniz calls, in Augustinian echo/revision, “the City of God.” With respect to C. L. R. James and José (Muñoz), and a little respectful disrespect to Lee Edelman, these children are the voices of the future in the past, the voices of the future in our present. In this recording, this remainder, their fugitivity, remains, for me, in the intensity of their refrain, of their straining against constraint, cause for the optimism they perform. That optimism always lives, which is to say escapes, in the assertion of a right to refuse, which is, as Gayatri Spivak says, the first right: an instantiation of a collective negative tendency to differ, to resist the regulative powers that resistance, that differing, call into being. To think resistance as originary is to say, in a sense, that we have what we need, that we can get there from here, that there’s nothing wrong with us or even, in this regard, with here, even as it requires us still to think about why it is that difference calls the same, that resistance calls regulative power, into existence, thereby securing the vast, empty brutality that characterizes here and now. Nevertheless, however much I keep trouble in mind, and therefore, in the interest of making as much trouble as possible, I remain hopeful insofar as I will have been in this very collective negative tendency, this little school within and beneath school that we gather together to be. For a bunch of little whiles, this is our field (i.e., black studies), our commons or undercommons or underground or outskirts and it will remain so as long as it claims its fugitive proximity to blackness, which I will claim, with ridiculousness boldness, is the condition of possibility of politics. We must accept fugtitivity to create a “space of acceptance” – this is the only way to escape the state’s labels reflecting institutionalized racismDillon 13 assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnesota. (Stephen, “Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State “,A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA , May 2013 //SRSL) In her essay “Reflections of Being Buried Alive,” Susan Rosenberg describes her first time entering the Lexington High Security Unit for Women—a small underground prison in Lexington, Kentucky, that held Rosenberg and other women involved in 1970s revolutionary movements from 1986 until 1988. Rosenberg, a white lesbian and member of a number of feminist and anti-racist revolutionary groups in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, writes: We stood at the electronically controlled metal gate under the eye of one of eleven security cameras, surrounded by unidentified men in business suits. We were wearing newly issued beige short sleeved shirts, culottes, and plastic slippers. We were in handcuffs. An unidentified man had ordered us placed in restraints while walking from one end of the basement to the other. The lights were neon fluorescent burning and bright, and everything was snow white—walls, floors, ceilings. There was no sound except the humming of the lights, and nothing stirred in the air. Being there at that gate looking down the cell block made my ears ring, and my breath quicken. 429 What is remarkable about Rosenberg’s writing from Lexington is how her attention to the banality of the unit captures the ways torture and terror became inscribed in the ordinary. A white room. Plastic Slippers. Men in suits. The humming of lights. Eleven cameras. Dead air. Her ears rang and her breath was lost, not at the spectacle of it, but at its normality, its routineness, its technological perfection. The unimaginable violence of this new form of incarceration was cloaked in a new visual episteme. The unit was clean, quiet, modern, rational, and orderly. It helped inaugurate a variety of psychological and physical contortions of the human mind and body that are now so routine that they remain invisible in their banality. Addressing the logics behind the unit would necessitate an epistemology that could confront the rationality and mundaneness of modern terror. The Control Unit at Lexington embodied a new type of penal rationality that, once it was shut down in 1988 after Amnesty International declared it “deliberately and gratuitously oppressive,” has spread to over 60 prisons across the country and the world.430 In these High Security Units (or Control Units)—what amount to prisons within prisons—thousands of people are held in solitary confinement and are subjected to extreme sensory deprivation for 23 hours a day, often indefinitely. The last forty years of neoliberal economics has not only witnessed the exponential growth the prison as system of racialized governance, but this period of economic restructuring has also seen the rise of a new method of containment and bodily incapacitation in the form of the control unit. Anti-racist, feminist, and queer activists in the 1970s and ‘80s were subjected to this new form of carceral state violence before it rose to dominance in the 1990s. We can turn to their writings as a critique of not only the broad contours of neoliberal-carceral state, but also the micro-politics of its operation as practiced in the control unit. In addition, the writings embody what I have been describing as a politics of anticipation—when Rosenberg looked down the cellblock, she saw something she couldn’t yet describe— indeed, something prisoners continue to say is indescribable. She knew something was coming. And what she saw made her senses fail. Lexington set the stage for the expansion of the control unit as the prevailing domestic model of neoliberal containment and immobilization. But under the “war on terror,” the control unit of the 1970s and ‘80s has since extended its reach transnationally. Scholars like Avery Gordon, Michelle Brown, Colin Dayan, and Caleb Smith have observed that the living death of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation at Guantánamo and elsewhere was first created in supermax prisons in the United States.431 This work opens up opportunities for considering the connections between the imprisonment of 1970s radicals and the detention of an unknown number of people in the carceral archipelago created under the “war on terror.” Indeed, Ivan Greenberg has argued that the FBI’s production of the domestic terrorist in the 1970s acted as the template for the creation of “the terrorist” in the “war on terror.” In fact, it was during the 1970s that domestic terrorism first emerged as a major public policy and policing issue.432 The ways that the category of terrorism was shaped around groups like the Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground created a legal apparatus and a set of discourses that would rise again in the U.S. government’s response to the attacks of September 11th. What Rosenberg and other imprisoned radicals (who were often categorized as “terrorists”) experienced thirty years ago set the conditions for a global prison regime driven by an imperial politics of “permanent abandonment.”433 In this chapter, I examine the history of Lexington and the writings of the women detained there to consider the connections between the carceral politics of the neoliberal state and what has become a global prison regime under the “war on terror.” An engagement with the gender and sexual politics of the control unit at Lexington can lead to a different understanding of the forms of power inaugurated at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. Lexington is unique among the control units that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s because it was designed specifically for women and ended up holding a number of women who identified as lesbians. Focusing on Lexington as central to the emergence of the “space of exception” in Iraq and Guantánamo, as well as the neoliberal state, reveals a network of institutional, discursive, and affective connections that traverse space, time, race, gender, and sexuality. Such an investigation can make clear the relationship between the neoliberal-carceral state and the permanent warfare state, as well as the ways that these changing formations were built on the bodies contained within new formations of captivity. Activists and prisoners confronting the emergence of the neoliberal-carceral state anticipated the emergence of that formation; further, their writings reveal a critique of the forms of torture and terror constitutive of what Brown calls the “global prison-industrial complex.”434 Unintelligibility is the only way to combat the state—writing is a tool to combat state violence that the usfg itself cant registerDillon 13 assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnesota. (Stephen, “Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State “,A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA , May 2013 //SRSL) Before being placed at Lexington, Rosenberg and Torres were held in a men’s prison in Tucson, Arizona. They were two of five women held there.513 Before being moved to administrative segregation units (or isolation cells) on the women’s side of the prison at Tucson, both women were held in solitary confinement with men. This meant they were subjected to on-going, incessant sexual harassment from male prisoners and guards. It was here that they were told they would soon be transferred to Lexington. Guards taunted them with the unimaginable forms of violence and terror they would be subjected to at the unit. Part of the transfer process to Lexington involved a strip search and cavity search performed by a male guard. Rosenberg writes of this experience: We were all standing in the hall and then the captain and the associate warden showed up. The captain had papers in his hand; he shoved them at us. I saw the heading “Permission/Notification for High Security Contraband Search” and boxes with writing next to them. The first box that was checked was “cavity search” and the was second was “rectal.” They wanted us to sign the forms. Alex said, “You can do an X-ray in stead.” The captain laughed. “No, we don’t have to and we won’t. You are going to a control unit and it’s our call on this. We have the right to do it. Rosenberg and Torres were then forcibly separated. Rosenberg heard Torres screaming: Five CO’s pushed me in an examining room…I went crazy. I started hitting and kicking with every ounce of my being. I might have to do it, but I would not do it easy. The y overpowered me, pushed my head down onto the examining table, pinned me there, and pulled down my pants. I kept kicking backward until they held my legs. I was cursing and yelling. “This is rape. You’re fucking raping me! You could do an X-ray. You know we don’t have contraband. The physician’s assistant took his fist and rammed it up my anus, and then he took it out and did the same thing up my vagina. He didn’t “look” for anything. The woman officer who had talked to me had to leave the room…They half carried, half walked me down the hall of the building into receiving and discharge. Alex was sitting on the floor against the wall. She was shackled with full chains. When the marshals came to transport us and I stood up, there was blood on the floor. They wouldn’t let me change my uniform or get medical attention. It was just policy.514 Many accounts of sexual violence committed against women in prison concern exceptional cases where a guard violated the law or other inmates perpetrate the violation. In this the case, sexual violence was performed by the state in the name of the safety of the state. As the captain put it, the state simply has the right to sexually assault those in their custody. Whether the cavity search is authorized by the consent of the prisoner or not, consent is not available to the captive who is always already subject to the systems of violence and force available to the prison. As Angela Davis observes, if strip searches and cavity searches were performed by men in plain clothes on the street, there would be no question that an act of sexual violence was taking place.515 Yet, the body of the prisoner is ontologically a threat to the state and the public, and thus violence performed on the captive body preempts the violence the prisoner is perpetually waiting to unleash. Simply, a rape is not a rape—it is safety and security. This particular act of state violence did not occur because prisoners are “juridical non-people” as Dylan Rodríguez would have it.516 Instead, sexual violence was authorized and performed by the law and through the law. The women were even given the non-choice of signing a legal document authorizing the terror that was coming regardless of their forced consent. Torres and Rosenberg were viewed as legal subjects who could authorize their own violation. For example, when Amnesty International wrote the FBP about the assault, the Associate Director responded: Regarding the particular search conducted of Ms. Torres and Susan Rosenberg prior to their transfer to Lexington, our careful review indicates that the search was not punitive nor outside of agency policy. This very isolated occurrence involved a search that was performed in a professional manner by a qualified physician’s assistant.517 The sexual assault was the law, policy, and procedure of the prison. It was professional and part of the larger system of the prison’s humane care of the prisoner. Like the unimaginable violence at Guantánamo, the women at Lexington were not beyond the safety of the law—they were possessed by it. Rosenberg countered state violence and terror: “I found a new way to survive by reading and writing and thinking with purpose.”518 Her lawyer told her to write down the forms of violation, pain, and horror that were too numerous to catalogue during their visits, were so unimaginable they could not be conveyed by speech, or were simply unspeakable. Rosenberg’s lawyer framed this process as building an archive that would contradict the state’s account of Lexington and thus would produce a different conception of the truth. Rosenberg writes: “Write it down, for the record. I half believed that keeping a record was a futile effort, and she half believed it would be of use in fighting for justice, but that sentence became a signal between us, a way to reference acts of violence too difficult to discuss.”519 The “record” in this formulation was a legal account that could potentially contest the state in court, but it was also an alternative record of events that could live on in places and times beyond the state’s determination of what is real and true. In this way, writing became a way of producing an epistemology that haunts the neoliberal-carceral state’s discourses of freedom, equality, and justice. Writing became a way to document the violence of the law—violence the law itself could not register. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.17 Mb. Share with your friends:
|