Beating the Heat

I am now in South GA, and it is absurdly hot here. Basically getting to 100, 110, every day. I recently had a major allergic reaction to, well, something. Not sure. But it was all hives and swelling and scaryness and itchyness. This is one of the reasons that I haven't been as updating as much as I should. Everyone I have talked to is unsure what it is so far, but pretty sure the heat aggravated it. Which reminds me, prisons in this country are not, for the most part, air conditioned. That means there are prisoners in GA and FL and other places, in confined places with no air conditioning. No air for them, not for the guards. This policy is both obviously cruel, while at the same time probably economically stupid. It has to increase medical conditions, increase violence and disorder in the prison, increase violence and disorder between guards and prisoners, and increase turn over among the guards. Just a random thought about the cruel and stupid things we do to people we lock up.

Disciplinary power, still a problem

Deleuze got it wrong. In his "Postscript on Control Societies," Deleuze speaks about the transition from disciplinary societies to control societies:

But discipline would in its turn begin to break down as new forces moved slowly into place, then made rapid advances after the Second World War: we were no longer in disciplinary societies, we were leaving them behind. We're in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of confinement-- prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family. (Negotiations, p. 178)

However, there has been no generalized breakdown of sites of confinement and spaces of enclosure. Quite the opposite, we have seen a generalized expansion of sites of confinement. If we take prisons as a privileged example of a site of confinement (and there is good reason to do so), we can see both an extensive and intensive expansion. Extensive in the most obvious way, we have far more people in prison now then we use to. To give a few numbers, in the late 1960s we had slightly over 200 hundred thousand people locked up. Now, we have around 2.5 million people locked up in jails and prisons (this does not include all sorts of other forms of being locked up, like INS detention centers or juvenile detention facilities). Not only do we have have so many people locked up, but we also see an extensive international expansion of prisons, with many countries joining in on trying to lock up more of their populations and some countries opening up their first prisons in recent times (I suggest Julia Sudbury's edited volume Global Lockdown for more on this last issue). But we have also seen an intensive expansion in prisons. We see this in the rise of supermax prisons (also called control units, administrative units, special housing units, etc). In these units inmates are actively lockdown 23 hours a day, allowed out of their cells for one hour period. During this time, they are never allowed to talk to anyone. Cameras are turned on 24 hours a day, as are lights. The walls and plumbing are sound proofed so that zero communications are allowed, and food is given through a slot in the door.

Now, I recognize that Deleuze in his essay is not indicating that prisons or disciplinary power are disappearing, but rather transforming. Moreover, there are many things in this classic essay that I found useful, for example the change of the logic of power from analog to digital. And in this sense, I understand that the opening line of this post is obviously provocative, but provocation is necessary on this point. Too often we see people proceed as if disciplinary power is no longer a present and driving concern, that rather we need to understand how CCTV in London has made it so that we are all prisoners now, or something of the sort. However, those of us that live in the free world, aka are not incarcerated, sometimes greatly misunderstand the importance of sites of confinement in perpetuating the present order (in the same way that some people believe that primitive accumulation is a sin of the past rather than an ongoing process of capitalism).

Along this chain of thought, we have Mike Konczal's excellent post "Is economic freedom another way of saying we need to build more prisons?". Konczal, taking the libertarian CATO Institutes ranking of countries based on their economic freedoms, finds that countries with high levels of economic freedoms correlate with high levels of imprisonments (this is true even if we control for certain outliers, like the US). Now, obviously correlation doesn't imply causation, but that also doesn't mean these are two unrelated data sets. Konczal goes through several interesting possible answers for this correlation, but from a foucauldian perspective there is another explanation, which is that neoliberalism needs and shares the logic of the prison population. This argument ties together Foucault's book Discipline and Punish to his lectures on The Birth of Bio-politics. Economic freedoms, rather than generalizing freedoms to the rest of society, are built upon a militarized and repressive policing apparatus. Perhaps it is time to give up Deleuze's term of a control society, and rather take up Foucault's term of a normalizing society. As he explains in "Society Must Be Defended":

In more general terms still, we can say that there is one element that will circulate between the disciplinary and the regulatory, which will also be applied to body and population alike, which will make it possible to control both the disciplinary order of the body and the aleatory events that occur in the biological multiplicity. The element that circulates between the two is the norm. The norm is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize. The normalizing society is therefore not, a sort of generalized disciplinary society whose disciplinary institutions have swarmed and finally taken over everything-- that, I think, is no more than a first and inadequate interpretation of a normalizing society. The normalizing society is a society in which the norm of discipline and the norm of regulation intersect along an orthogonal articulation. To say that power took possession of life in the nineteenth century, or to say that power at least takes life under its care in the nineteenth century, is to say that it has, thanks to the play of technologies of discipline on the one hand and the technologies of regulation on the other, succeeded in covering the whole surface that lies between the organic and the biological, between the body and the population. (pp. 252-253)

So, it isn't that the technologies and formations of power haven't changed, but rather that whatever these new diagrams of power that exist, they are able to exist because of an extensive and intensive expansion of sites of confinement.

The normalizing society, especially as it is tied to contemporary models of neoliberalism, should be read against (or at least in tension) with Agamben. As Mignolo has noted, bare life is a legalistic category, whereas disposable life is an economic category. Therefore, in Agamben's work we find a series of fascination over various legal lacunas, the nazi lagers, human experimentation, the comatose patient and the issue of brain death, Guantanamo bay. And yet, the concept of disciplinary power is not mentioned in Agamben's work, and something like the site of the prison is not thought through in his work. Maybe it is because the prisoners in Gitmo exist in a legal limbo, whereas inmates in an American prison have a clear legal standing. However, something like the concept of disposable populations would find prisons to be a necessary problem to be thought and understood.

Consider this post a reminder that disciplinary power hasn't gone away, and that the problems and issues raised by that concept have only increased since Foucault's Disipline and Punish. We need to keep such issues at the forefront of our political thinking and work.

More on being against all cages

I am currently traveling, and will have random and infrequent access to the internet (so, sorry I haven't responded to comments, I will hopefully do so shortly). However, I wanted to share an article I meant to share with you all from my post on animal and prison abolition. The article, "Ask Shamu: The US tortures both human and animal prisoners," draws the obvious and under-remarked connection between the sea world killer whale incident and issues of solitary confinement, both towards other animals and humans. More of this, please.

Animal Abolition and Prison Abolition: An historical perspective.

Over at the Animal Law Coalition, there is a post concerning a bill that will greatly expand prosecutors abilities in animal cruelty cases for GA. Considering I am still registered to vote in GA, I took my time to make some phone calls on behalf of this bill (if you are registered to vote in GA, you might want to take some time do the same). And while I think this change is important, I was somewhat uncomfortable at the same time. It goes to a broader conflict I have with the increasing police-ification of the animal rights movement.

As many of you know, not only am I am abolitionist when it comes to viewing animals as property, I am also a prison abolitionist. You know, I'm generally for empty cages, for everyone. So, it obviously bothers me that many animal abolitionists often support stronger prison sentences, and tend to get gleeful about locking up individuals. Now, I get it. When you think people are murderers and torturers, it's hard not to want them to get their just deserts, and we live in a society that makes you think that means prison. Or course, we also live in a society that makes most of what we do to animals not count as murder or torture. Rethinking some of these societal norms is probably a good idea, especially for the animal abolitionist.

It also bespeaks a great deal of privilege to think that increased presence of police and illegality leads to more justice and protection. Practically speaking, that's seldom the case. As Angela Davis phrases it in one of the better passages from Are Prisons Obsolete?

Why were people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who lived in the free world feel safer and more secure? This question can be formulated in more general terms. Why do prisons tend to make people think their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist? (p. 14)

Now, there are many animal abolitionists who come from either an anarchist tradition or a tradition that means prisons and cops don't make you feel more secure. But such people are marginal within a still relatively marginal movement. What is interesting is that this dynamic with an animal rights movement is not new.

I recently read Leela Gandhi's absolutely wonderful book, Affective Communities. I highly suggest it to anyone, especially the chapter on "Meat." In there, Gandhi distinguishes between two different turn of the century animal welfare movements occurring within the British metropol. On the one hand you had the socially semi-disgraceful group centered mainly around The Vegetarian Society, composed of anticolonial agitators, anarchists, socialists, feminists, gay activists, etc. On the other hand you had the respected animal welfare group centered mainly around the RSPCA (the royal part certainly indicts their level of social respect). This second group of mainstream animal welfarists were able to pass some of the first legislation on animal welfare.

These efforts finally bore fruit in 1822, when a historic bill, introduced into the Commons by Sir Richard Martin, member for Galway, succeeded in extending protection to "Horses, Mares, Geldings, Mules, Donkeys, Cows, Heifers, Bull Calves, Oxen, Sheep, and other Livestock." Henceforth anyone having charges of these creatures and caught wantonly beating, abusing, or ill-treating them was liable for a fine of between ten shillings and five pounds, or imprisonment for up to two months. (p. 88)

Many of the laws suggested or passed by the English Parliament about animals welfare, were dedicated to the bloodsports and pass times of the poor and working classes (and indeed, most of our laws about animal welfare in this country follow a similar model). The laws were meant not to (just) protect animals, but also instill into the poor and working class a examples in order to make them "better." Or, as the the RSPCA put it in their original meeting, their purpose was not only "to prevent the exercise of cruelty towards animals, but to spread among the lower orders of people.. a degree of moral feeling which would compel them to think and act like of a superior class." (quoted in Gandhi, p. 93) And if these laws, therefore, resulted in more policing and interference among these classes, well it wasn't an accident but a purposeful by-product discussed as much among the members of Parliament.
In this case the relationship between the respected animal welfarists and the early utilitarians does not come across as an accident. Rather, we see in utilitarianism a similar desire for hierarchical forceful obedience in order to produce a people that followed certain mores and norms (governmentality, in other words). We can see this in Bentham's involvement with prisons and James and John Stuart Mill's involvement and support of British colonialism.
And while I am not sure I would ascribe the obvious defects of the classical animal welfare movement to the people fighting for animal rights today, I would say that the modern penal system carries with it the indelible marks of its origins: those of coloniality, racism, and classism.
Those of us in the animal abolition movement have a duty to tread carefully around these legal instruments, and to refuse to support, at least more often than not, anything that expands the present prison industrial complex.
Which I guess brings me back to the GA bill. I'm not sure about this bill, but I also believe it is important to get other animals out of situations of neglect and abuse that doesn't currently exist. Which is why I think it is probably something to be supported. But I certainly won't hide the fact that such issues are complex, and I that I could be wrong.


As sort of an asterisk on the discussion of utilitarianism. I want to say that not only do I think we've seen a change the current animal rights movement, I think we have as we have as well in the current utilitarian philosophy, as well. It is also worth noting that Bentham supported a good number of liberal, even radical positions in his day. So, I think utilitarianism, especially the ways it was originally formulated were deeply messed up. I also sometimes think it gets a bum rap. But I don't have much to say (at this time) on this last point.

Some thoughts on Abolitionism vs. Welfarism

As most of you know, I don't think much of turning tactical or strategic disagreements into absolute disagreements among those who seek animal emancipation. Well, while writing a review of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals for this blog (and btw, let me suggest Peter Gratton's post on this book), I found myself getting into a long tangent that I have decided to make into a post of its own.

One of the things that will confuse and/or bother traditional vegan abolitionists who read JSF's Eating Animals is that not only is he generally favorably disposed to both the HSUS and PETA, but he treats them as different sorts of organizations. That is to say, while he calls HSUS an animal welfare organization, he calls PETA an animal rights organization. Now, in certain circles of animal abolitionists it has become almost a tautology to call both PETA and HSUS welfare organizations. The logic of such a move is explained by Gary Francione in this podcast. (I know that podcast is from September, may I also say that I almost never listen to podcasts from anyone, I just don't have a lot of time that format makes sense for me).

In this podcast Francione argues that one cannot both support abolition for animals and support moves of animal welfare. One cannot both be for bigger cages and no cages. He makes makes two types of arguments to support this claim: The second set he makes a series of historical arguments that the only welfare changes that industry adopts are made for profit. That is to say, they would do so regardless of the efforts of organizations like PETA. The first set of arguments is the ones I have problems with, which is that he argues that it is simply speciesist to say one is for welfare now as we work for an end goal of abolition. His support for this argument is that one would never argue for better rape, or better murder, or better torture (though he catches himself when he says this), or better child molestation. One would fight to end all of this. It is only because they are animals that we argue for better slaughtering practices rather than an end to all slaughtering practices. But Francione's analogies are problematic because they all represent things we have already agreed as a society to oppose. What we need to look at are other radical movements, but these involving humans.
Well, one of the other issues I am very concerned with is the abolition of prisons. Again, this is an institution that is truly unforgivable. And even a cursory history of prisons would show that many reforms actually strengthen the carceral society rather than reduce its strength. (For those interested in knowing more, I cannot suggest Stanley Cohen's Visions of Social Control strongly enough). Even with all of this being true, one of the things that prison abolitionists are constantly confronted with is if they should devote resources to reformist projects or not. Should you, for example, spend time to make sure prisoners get decent health care treatment? Or create a drop-in center for the formerly incarcerated? Or allow condom distribution in prisons (which was, last I checked, banned in 49 states and the federal system)? Or a million other things that could make the lives of those caught up in the carceral society slightly better? I don't think these questions can be answered ahead of time. I don't think we can always say we should support every reform, no matter how small, or oppose every reform, no matter how big. I think these questions have to be addressed as they come, with a grasp of history and the stakes involved. We also have to admit that we are not purists, but the abolition is necessary to stop the suffering, exploitation, and violence systematically done to those caught up in these processes and institutions. Labeling those who disagree with the decision you have made about these questions as not being sufficently dedicated doesn't seem to help.

Are Prisons Obsolete?

A random thought.

I really liked Angela Davis' Are Prisons Obsolete? when I read it. Not only interesting, I also found it quite convincing. The short size, and accessible language also make it a great book to give around, or hold discussions about.

But the title has always puzzled me. If she means obsolete as in gone, quite obviously that goes against the book which is all about the continued growth and expansion of the prison industrial complex. If, on the other, she means obsolete as something that was useful and now we have a better solution, that also has no bearing on her book. She never argues that prisons were once a good idea, and her book is not so great if you are looking for a criminal justice alternative to prisons (indeed, part of the genius of the book is to untie the conceptual connection between prisons and criminals).

It has just always struck me as a silly title. Great, small book though. Read it.