will / desire

from willful subjects by sara ahmed

"when the will becomes will power, then the fate of the subject becomes 'in its power.' and when social problems are narrated as problems of will, they become a consequence of the failure of individuals to will themselves out of situations in which they find themselves."

"given that the will becomes a technique, a way of holding a subject to account, it could be understood as a straightening device. . . a queer history of will might foreground the association between will and error and explore its myriad forms."

"the will is thus called upon to resolve the problem of the will: not being fully determined from without becomes the requirement to determine from within."

"not philosophy is practiced by those who are not philosophers and aims to create room within philosophy for others who are not philosophers. not being a philosopher working with philosophy can be understood as generative: the incapacity to return texts to their proper histories allows us to read sideways or across, thus creating a different angle on what is being reproduced. not philosophy aims not to reproduce the body of philosophy by a willful citational practice: if philosophers are cited (and in this book many philosophers are cited0 they are not only cited alongside those who are not philosophers but are not given any priority over those who are not."

"one of my key aims is to explore how the will becomes a question of time by thinking through how will relates to the past as well as the future, and how the will is thus never quite present or in the time we are in"

tabula rasa

quotes from the coming community by giorgio agamben

"only a power that is capable of both power and impotence, then, is the supreme power. . .in de anima aristotle articulates this theory in absolute terms with respect to the supreme theme of metaphysics. if thought were in fact only the potentiality to think this or that intelligibly, he argues, it would always already have passed through to the act and it would remain necessarily inferior to its own object. but thought, in its essence, is pure potentiality; in other words, it is also the potentiality to not think, and as such, as possible or material intellect, aristotle compares it to a writing tablet on which nothing is written. (this is the celebrated image that the latin translators render with the expression tabula rasa, even if, as the ancient commentators noted, one should speak rather of a rasum tabulae, that is, of the layer of wax covering the tablet that the stylus engraves.)

thanks to this potentiality to not-think, thought can turn back to itself (to its pure potentiality) and be, at its apex, the thought of thought. what it thinks here, however, is not an object, a being-in-act, but that layer of wax, that rasum tabulae that is nothing but its own passivity, its own pure potentiality (to not-think): in the potentiality that thinks itself, action and passion coincide and the writing tablet writes by itself or, rather, writes its own passivity."

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"there is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this something is not an essence nor properly a thing: it is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality. but precisely because of this things become complicated; precisely because of this ethics becomes effective.

since the being most proper to humankind is being one's own possibility or potentiality, then and only for this reason . . . humans have and feel a debt. humans, in their potentiality to be and not-be, are, in other words, always already in debt; they always already have a bad conscience without having to commit any blameworthy act. . .

this is why ethics has no room for repentance; this is why the only ethical experience (which, as such, cannot be a task or a subjective decision) is the experience of being (one's own) potentiality, of being (one's own) possibility -- exposing, that is, in every form one's own amorphousness and in every act one's own inactuality."

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"the process of technologization, instead of materially investing the body, was aimed at the construction of a separate sphere that had practically no point of contact with it: what was technologized was not the body, but its image. thus the glorious body of advertising has become the mask behind which the fragile, slight human body continues its precarious existence."

troublant

quotes from the argonauts by maggie nelson

"you, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth exploring. in the face of this fact, winnicott holds the relatively unsentimental position that we don't owe these people (often women, but by no means always) anything. but we do owe ourselves 'an intellectual recognition of the fact that at first we were (psychologically) absolutely dependent, and that absolutely means absolutely. luckily we were met by ordinary devotion.'"

"when you are a stepparent, no matter how wonderful you are, no matter how much love you have to give, no matter how mature or wise or successful or smart or responsible you are, you are structurally vulnerable to being hated or resented, and there is precious little you can do about it, save endure, and commit to planting seeds of sanity and good spirit in the face of whatever shitstorms may come your way. and don't expect to get any kudos from the culture, either: parents are hallmark-sacrosanct, but stepparents are interlopers, self-servers, poachers, pollutants, and child molesters. . .

when i try to discover what i resent my stepfather for most, it is never 'he gave me too much love.' no - i resent him for not reliably giving the impression that he was glad he lived with my sister and me (he may not have been), for not telling me often that he loved me (again, he may not have - as one of the step-parenting self-help books i ordered during our early days put it, love is preferred, but not required), for not being my father, and for leaving after over twenty years of marriage to our mother without saying a proper good-bye.

i think you overestimate the maturity of adults, he wrote me in his final letter, a letter he sent only after i'd broken down and written him first, after a year of silence."

"one of the most annoying things about hearing the refrain 'same-sex marriage' over and over again is that i don't know many - if any - queers who think of their desire's main feature as being 'same-sex.' it's true that a lot of lesbian sex writing from the '70s was about being turned on, and even politically transformed, by an encounter with sameness. this encounter was, is, can be, important, as it has to do with seeing reflected that which has been reviled, with exchanging alienation or internalized revulsion for desire and care. to devote yourself to someone else's pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own. but whatever sameness i've noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy."

"if there's one thing homonormativity reveals it's the troubling fact that you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority [leo bersani]."

"eve kosofsky sedgwick wanted to make way for 'queer' to hold all kinds of resistances and fracturings and mismatches that have little or nothing to do with sexual orientation. 'queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive -- recurrent, eddying, troublant,' she wrote. 'keenly, it is relational, and strange.' she wanted the term to be a perpetual excitement, a kind of placeholder -- a nominative, like argo, willing to designate molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip. that is what reclaimed terms do -- they retain, they insist on retaining, a sense of the fugitive."

"i told you i wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty. you said i misunderstood what you meant by honor. we haven't yet stopped trying to explain to each other what these words mean to us"

"how to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? i do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. neither do i want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if i behave in the right way. i don't want any of it [beatriz preciado]. how to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is ok -- desirable, even (e.g., 'gender hackers') -- whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? how does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality -- or anything else, really -- is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?"

"i think [judith] butler is generous to name the diffuse 'commodification of identity' as the problem. less generously, i'd say that the simple fact that she's a lesbian is so blinding for some, that whatever words come out of her mouth -- whatever words come out of the lesbian's mouth, whatever ideas spout from her head -- certain listeners hear only one thing: lesbian, lesbian, lesbian. it's a quick step from there to discounting the lesbian -- or, for that matter, anyone who refuses to slip quietly into a 'postracial' future that resembles all too closely the racist past and present -- as identitarian, when it's actually the listener who cannot get beyond the identity that he has imputed to the speaker. calling the speaker identitarian then serves as an efficient excuse not to listen to her, in which case the listener can resume his role as speaker. and then we can scamper off to yet another conference with a keynote by jacques ranciere, alain badiou, slavoj zizek, at which we can meditate on self and other, grapple with radical difference, exalt the decisiveness of the two, and shame the unsophisticated identitarians, all at the feet of yet another great white man pontificating from the podium, just as we've done for centuries."

vertigo

quotes by paul virilio from the aesthetics of disappearance

"child-society frequently utilizes turnings, spinning around, disequilibrium. it looks for sensations of vertigo and disorder as sources of pleasure. . . the child lartigue has thereby stayed in the same place, and is, nevertheless, absent. owing to an acceleration of speed, he's succeeded in modifying his actual duration; he's taken it off from his lived time. to stop 'registering' it was enough for him to provoke a body-acceleration, a dizziness that reduced his environment to a sort of luminous chaos. but with each return, when he tried to resolve the image, he obtained only a clearer perception of its variations."

"what happens is so far ahead of what we think, of our intentions, that we can never catch up with it and never really know its true appearance." -rainer marie rilke

"i don't think of a bilboquet as being bizarre. it's rather something very banal, as banal as a penholder, a key or the foot of a table. i never show bizarre or strange objects in my pictures. . . they are always familiar things, not bizarre but ordinary things are gathered and transformed in such a way that we're made to think that there's something else of an unfamiliar nature that appears at the same time as familiar things." -rene magritte

"to look at what you wouldn't look at, to hear what you wouldn't listen to, to be attentive to the banal, to the ordinary, to the infra-ordinary. to deny the ideal hierarchy of the crucial and the incidental, because there is no incidental, only dominant cultures that exile us from ourselves and others, a loss of meaning which is for us not only a siesta of consciousness but also a decline in existence."

"etienne jules marey understands that the acceleration of bodies, the fugacity of movement, as perceived by the vulgar eye, demand a guidance of vision disengaged from mnemonic traces. the whiteness of birds or that of horses, the brilliant strips pasted on the clothes of experimental subjects, make the body disappear in favor of an instantaneous blend of givens under the indirect light of motors and other propagators of the real. the heterogeneous succeeds the homogeneous, the aesthetics of the search supplants the search for an aesthetics, the aesthetics of disappearance renews the enterprise of appearance."

"reversible chronophotography, that is, cinema, illusion imposed on the physiology of our organs of visual perception (alfred fessard), oscillates, from the beginning, between the production of luminous, persisting impressions and the pure fascination that destroys the conscious perception of the spectator and conflicts with the natural functioning of the eye: 'fixity of the look directed at what we seriously think of as a single thing, for example, a colored spot, fixity that can last not much longer than a second without serious risk of seeing the subject fall into hypnotic ecstasy or into some other analogous pathological condition,' writes doctor abraham wolf. . .  the aim of cinema will be to provoke an effect of vertigo in the voyeur-traveler, the end being sought now is to give him the impression of being projected into the image."

"'the impact of disneyland and disney world,' says another collaborator, comes from walt's cinematic know-how: 'ideas, instead of entering in competition, complete and prolong each other. if the pedestrian is so comfortable in our kingdoms, it's because the size of the buildings and means of transportation is reduced a fifth of their normal dimension. nothing, neither trains, nor the identically duplicated cars, is on a normal scale, which creates. . . the dream.'"

"to the extent that its principle theme comes down to: science technology of other worlds, the revival of science fiction in the united states and in the industrialized nations seems linked to that of religions and sects. if on the one hand people like professor lawrence leshan are pointing out the similarity in vision of the universe and its laws in atomic physicists and in the great mystics, the science fiction narrative, on the other hand, demonstrates the incompatibilities existing between our presence in the world and the various levels of a certain anesthesia in our consciousness that, at every moment, inclines us to see-saw into more or less extensive absences, more or less serious, even to provoke by various means instantaneous immersions in other worlds, parallel worlds, interstitial, bifurcating, right up to that black hole, which would be only an excess of speed in these kinds of crossings, a pure phenomenon of speed, abrogating the inital separation between day and night."

"if terror is the accomplishment of the law of movement, attraction itself can convey anguish. attracting the gaze is to capture it and thereby to subvert attention, the optical illusion in a world entirely perceived as illusion."

"in the 17th century there appeared in france some very strict rules about clothes, mandating that the male abandon the 'right to beauty.' but at the same time the wearing of the uniform became obligatory, in spite of the opposition of the nobility. . . from uniformity we pass to invisibility as during the war of 1914 the authorities agree on the evident advantage in renouncing bright colors in the manufacture of uniforms and in adopting a habit of neutral shade to diminish the visibility of troops in the field. . . the major concern being less with identification than disintegration, since the word comes from the hindustani khaki, meaning color of dust."

"the immediacy of terrestrial transport, modifying the relation to space, annihilates the relation to lived time and it's in this urgency that its dynamic exaltation consists. paradoxically, it's the extreme mobility which creates the inertia of the moment, instantaneity which would create the instant! finally the instant becomes like the illusory perception of a stability, clearly revealed by technical prostheses, such as is demonstrated for us by einstein's example of passing trains: the feeling of the instant can only be given by coincidence (epiteikos), the moment when two trains seem immobile to travelers while they are really launched at top speed one beside the other. the notion of a time, which, according to bachelard, would accommodate only the reality of the instant, could only be established on the basis of our remaining unconscious of our own speeds in a world entirely given over to the law of movement and thereby the creator of the illusion of inertia."

people

all quotes by giorgio agamben from homo sacer

". . . the technico-scientific problem of resuscitation: at stake was nothing less than a redefinition of death. until then, the task of determining death was given over to the physician, who made use of the traditional criteria that had remained substantially the same throughout the centuries: the stopping of the heartbeat and the cessation of breathing. overcoma rendered obsolete precisely these two ancient categories for the assessment of death and, opening a no-man's-land between coma and death, made it necessary to identity new criteria and establish new definitions as [mollaret and goulon] wrote, the problem expands 'to the point of putting the final borders of life in question, and even further, to the determination of a right to establish the hour of legal death.'"

"the hospital room in which the neomort, the overcomatose person, and the faux vivant waver between life and death delimits a space of exception in which a purely bare life, entirely controlled by man and his technology, appears for the first time. and since it is precisely a question not of a natural life but of an extreme embodiment of homo sacer (the comatose person has been defined as an intermediary being between man and an animal), what is at stake is, once again, the definition of a life that may be killed without the commission of homicide."

"the camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. in the camp, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order."

"if this is true, if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there and whatever its denomination and specific topography. . . an apparently innocuous space (for example, the hotel arcades in roissy) actually delimits a space in which the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign (for example, in the four days during which foreigners can be held in the zone d'attente before the intervention of the judicial authority).

in this light, the birth of the camp in our time appears as an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity itself. it is produced at the point at which the political system of the modern nation-state, which was founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (land) and a determinate order (the state) and mediated by automatic rules for the inscription of life (birth or the nation), enters into a lasting crisis, and the state decides to assume directly the care of the nation's biological life as one of its proper tasks. if the structure of the nation-state is, in other words, defined by the three elements land, order, birth, the rupture of the old nomos is produced not in the two aspects that constituted it according to schmitt. . . but rather at the point marking the inscription of bare life (the birth that thus become nation) within the two of them. something can no longer function within the traditional mechanisms that regulated this inscription, and the camp is the new hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the order - or, rather, the sign of the system's inability to function without being transformed into a lethal machine. it is significant that the camps appear together with new laws on citizenship and the denationalization of citizens - not only the nuremberg laws on citizenship in the reich but also the laws on denationalization promulgated by almost all european states, including france, between 1915 and 1933. the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the juridico-political order, now becomes a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabited by the bare life that more and more can no longer be inscribed in that order. the growing dissociation of birth (bare life) and the nation-state is the new fact of politics in our day, and what we call camp is this disjunction. . . the camp as dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living, and it is this structure of the camp that we must learn to recognize in all its metamorphoses into the zones d'attentes of our airports and certain outskirts of our cities."

"every interpretation of the political meaning of the term 'people' must begin with the singular fact that in modern european languages, 'people' also always indicates the poor, the disinherited, and the excluded. one term thus names both the constitutive political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics.

in common speech as in political parlance, the italian popolo, the french peuple, the spanish pueblo (like the corresponding adjectives popolare, populaire, popolar and late populus and popularis, from which they derive) designate both the complex of citizens as a unitary political body (as in 'the italian people' or 'the people's judge') and the members of the lower classes (as in homme du peuple, rione popolare, front populaire). even the english word 'people,' which has a less differentiated meaning, still conserves the sense of 'ordinary people' in contrast to the rich and the nobility. . .

such a diffuse and constant semantic ambiguity cannot be accidental: it must reflect an amphiboly inherent in the nature and function of the concept 'people' in western politics. it is as if what we call 'people' were in reality not a unitary subject but a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the set of the People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; or again, on the one hand, an inclusion that claims to be total, and on the other, and exclusion that is clearly hopeless; at one extreme, the total state of integrated and sovereign citizens, and at the other, the preserve - court of miracles or camp - of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated. in this sense, a single and compact referent for the term 'people' simply does not exist anywhere: like many fundamental political concepts. . . 'people' is a polar concept that indicates a double movement and a complex relation between two extremes."

from slavery to prisons

quotes from are prisons obsolete? by angela davis

“the u.s. population in general is less than five percent of the world's total, whereas more than twenty percent of the world's combined prison population can be claimed by the united states. In elliott currie's words, ‘the prison has become a looming presence in our society to an extent unparalleled in our history or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time.’"

“Geographer Ruth Gilmore describes the expansion of prisons in California as 'a geographical solution to socio-economic problems.' Her analysis of the prison industrial complex in California describes these developments as a response to surpluses of capital, land labor, and state capacity.

'California's new prisons are sited on devalued rural land, most, in fact on formerly irrigated agricultural acres. . . The State bought land sold by big landowners. And the State assured the small, depressed towns now shadowed by prisons that the new, recession-proof, non-polluting industry would jump-start local redevelopment.'”

“the ideologies governing slavery and those governing punishment were profoundly linked during the earliest period of u.s. history. While free people could be legally sentenced to punishment by hard labor, such a sentence would in no way change the conditions of existence already experienced by slaves. Thus, as hirsch further reveals, thomas jefferson, who supported the sentencing of convicted people to hard labor on road and water projects, also pointed out that he would exclude slaves from this sort of punishment. Since slaves already performed hard labor, sentencing them to penal labor would not mark a difference in their condition. Jefferson suggested banishment to other countries instead.

Particularly in the united states, race has always played a central role in constructing presumptions of criminality. After the abolition of slavery, former slave states passed new legislation revising the Slave Codes in order to regulate the behavior of free blacks in ways similar to those that had existed during slavery. The new Black Codes proscribed a range of actions – such as vagrancy, absence from work, breach of job contracts, the possession of firearms, and insulting gestures or acts – that were criminalized only when the person charged was black. With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, slavery and involuntary servitude were putatively abolished. However, there was a significant exception. In the wording of the amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude were abolished 'except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.' According to the Black Codes, there were crimes defined by state law for which only black people could be 'duly convicted.' Thus, former slaves, who had recently been extricated from a condition of hard labor for life, could be legally sentenced to penal servitude.

In the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for newly released slaves. Black people became the prime targets of a developing convict lease system, referred to by many as a reincarnation of slavery. The Mississippi Black Codes, for example, declared vagrant 'anyone/who was guilty of theft, had run away [from a job, apparently], was drunk, was wanton in conduct or speech, had neglected job or family, handled money carelessly, and . . . all other idle and disorderly persons.' Thus, vagrancy was coded as a black crime, one punishable by incarceration and forced labor, sometimes on the very plantations that previously had thrived on slave labor.”

“the expansion of the convict lease system and the county chain gang meant that the antebellum criminal justice system, which focused far more intensely on black people than on whites, defined southern criminal justice largely as a means of controlling black labor. According to mancini: 'among the multifarious debilitating legacies of slavery was the conviction that blacks could only labor in a certain way – the way experience had shown them to have labored in the past: in gangs, subjected to constant supervision, and under the discipline of the lash. Since these were the requisites of slavery, and since slaves were blacks, southern whites almost universally concluded that blacks could not work unless subjected to such intense surveillance and discipline.'”

“Slave owners may have been concerned for the survival of individual slaves, who, after all, represented significant investments. Convicts, on the other hand, were leased not as individuals, but as a group, and they could be worked literally to death without affecting the profitability of a convict crew.”

"thus far i have largely used gender-neutral language to describe the historical development of the prison and its reformers. but convicts punished by imprisonment in emergent penitentiary systems were primarily male. this reflected the deeply gender-biased structure of legal, political, and economic rights. since women were largely denied public status as rights-bearing individuals, they could not be easily punished by the deprivation of such rights through imprisonment. this was especially true of married women, who had no standing before the law. according to english common law, marriage resulted in a state of 'civil death,' as symbolized by the wife's assumption of the husband's name. consequently, she tended to be punished for revolting against her domestic duties rather than for failure in her meager public responsibilities. the relegation of white women to domestic economies prevented them from playing a significant role in the emergent commodity realm. this was especially true since wage labor was typically gendered as male and racialized as white. it is not fortuituous that domestic corporal punishment for women survived long after these modes of punishment had become obsolete for (white) men. the persistence of domestic violence painfully attests to these historical modes of gendered punishment."

“alderson's regimes were based on the assumption that 'criminal' women could be rehabilitated by assimilating correct womanly behaviors – that is, by becoming experts in domesticity – especially cooking, cleaning, and sewing. Of course, training designed to produce better wives and mothers among middle-class white women effectively produced domestic servants among black and poor women.”

“for most of the period after world war II, the female incarceration rate hovered at around 8 per 100,000; it did not reach double digits until 1977. today it is 51 per 100,000. . . at the current rates of increase, there will be more women in american prisons in the year 2010 than there were inmates of both sexes in 1970. when we combine the effects of race and gender, the nature of these shifts in the prison population is even clearer. The prison incarceration rate for black women today exceeds that for white men as recently as 1980.” - elliot currie

“for private business prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers' compensation to pay. No language barriers, as in foreign countries. New leviathan prisons are being built on thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, and make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds, and lingerie for victoria's secret, all at a fraction of the cost of 'free labor'.” -linda evans and eve goldberg

“the notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of the punishment process that take into account economic and political structures and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal conduct and efforts to 'curb crime'. The fact, for example, that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling. The notion of a prison industrial complex also insists that the racialization of prison populations – and this is not only true of the united states, but of europe, south america, and australia as well – is not an incidental feature. Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete without attention to the politics of imprisonment.”

“i hesitate to make unmediated use of such statistical evidence because it can discourage the very critical thinking that ought to be elicited by an understanding of the prison industrial complex. It is precisely the abstraction of numbers that plays such a central role in criminalizing those who experience the misfortune of imprisonment. There are many different kinds of men and women in the prisons, jails, and INS and military detention centers, whose lives are erased by the bureau of justice statistics figures. The numbers recognize no distinction between the woman who is imprisoned on drug conspiracy and the man who is in prison for killing his wife, a man who might actually end up spending less time behind bars than the woman.

With this observation in mind, the statistical breakdown is as follows: there were 1,324,465 people in 'federal and state prisons', 15,852 in 'territorial prisons', 631,240 in 'local jails', 8,761 in 'immigration and naturalization detention facilities', 2,436 in 'military facilities', 1,912 in 'jails in indian country', and 108,965 in 'juvenile facilities'. [2001] In the ten years between 1990 and 2000, 351 new places of confinement were opened by states and more than 528,000 beds were added, amounting to  1,320 state facilities, representing an eight-one percent increase.”

“companies that service the criminal justice system need sufficient quantities of raw materials to guarantee long-term growth. . . in the criminal justice field, the raw material is prisoners, and industry will do what is necessary to guarantee a steady supple. For the supple of prisoners to grow, criminal justice policies must ensure a sufficient number of incarcerated americans regardless of whether crime is rising or the incarceration is necessary.” - nils christie

“extensive corporate investment in prisons has significantly raised the stakes for antiprison work. It means that serious antiprison activists must be willing to look much further in their analysis and organizing strategies than the actual institution of the prison. Prison reform rhetoric, which has always undergirded dominant critiques of the prison system, will not work in this new situation. If reform approaches have tended to bolster the permanence of the prison in the past, they certainly will not suffice to challenge the economic and political relationships that sustain the prison today. This means that in the era of the prison industrial complex, activists must pose hard questions about the relationship between global capitalism and the spread of u.s.-style prisons throughout the world.”

“radical opposition to the global prison industrial complex sees the antiprison movement as a vital means of expanding the terrain on which the quest for democracy will unfold. This movement is thus antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist, and antihomophobic. It calls for the abolition of the prison as the dominant mode of punishment but at the same time recognizes the need for genuine solidarity with the millions of men, women, and children who are behind bars. A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners- calling for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing – and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, nor more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of the prison in our future?”

“it is within this context that it makes sense to consider the decriminalization of drug use as a significant component of a larger strategy to simultaneously oppose structures of racism within the criminal justice system and further the abolitionist agenda of decarceration.”

“it is true that if we focus myopically on the existing system – and perhaps this is the problem that leads to the assumption that imprisonment is the only alternative to death – it is very hard to imagine a structurally similar system capable of handling such a vast population of lawbreakers. If, however, we shift our attention from the prison, perceived as an isolated institution, to the set of relationships that comprise the prison industrial complex, it may be easier to think about alternatives. In other words, a more complicated framework may yield more options than if we simply attempt to discover a single substitute for the prison system. The first step, then, would be to let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system.

Since the 1980s, the prison system has become increasingly ensconced in the economic, political, and ideological life of the united states and the transnational trafficking in US commodities, culture, and ideas. Thus, the prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards' unions, and legislative and court agendas. If it is true that the contemporary meaning of punishment is fashioned through these relationships, then the most effective abolitionist strategies will contest these relationships and propose alternatives that pull them apart. What, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice?

An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategyy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment – demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.

The creation of new institutions that lay claim to the space now occupied by the prison can eventually start to crowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape. Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished communities of color – including the presence of armed security guards and police – and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prison. The alternative would be to transform schools into vehicles for decarceration. Within the health care system, it is important to emphasize the current scarcity of institutions available to poor people who suffer severe mental and emotional illnesses. There are currently more people with mental and emotional disorders in jails and prisons than in mental institutions. This call for new facilities designed to assist poor people should not be taken as an appeal to reinstitute the old system of mental institutions, which were – and in many cases still are – as repressive as the prisons. It is simply to suggest that the racial and class disparities in care available to the affluent and the deprived need to be eradicated, thus creating another vehicle for decarceration.”

new crush

from the post-colonial critic

chapter five: "questions of multiculturalism", a discussion between sneja gunew & gayatri spivak

(all quotes by gayatri spivak)

"a hundred years ago it was impossible for me to speak, for the precise reason that makes it only too possible for me to speak in certain circles now. i see in that a kind of reversal, which is again a little suspicious. . . the question of 'speaking as' involves a distancing from oneself. the moment i have to think of the ways in which i will speak as an indian, or as a feminist, the ways in which i will speak as a woman, what i am doing is trying to generalise myself, make myself a representative, trying to distance myself from some kind of inchoate speaking as such. there are many subject positions one must inhabit; one is not just one thing. that is when a political consciousness comes in. . . but when the cardcarrying listeners, the hegemonic people, the dominant people, talk about listening to someone 'speaking as' something or the other, i think there one encounters a problem. when they want to hear an indian speaking as an indian, a third world woman speaking as a third world woman, they cover over the fact of the ignorance that they are allowed to possess, into a kind of homogenization."

"subordinate people use this also; and we are not without a sense of irony: we use it. i talk a lot, right? and when i get very excited i interrupt people; and i am making a joke, but in fact it is never perceived as a joke unless i tell them. i will quite often say, 'you know, in my culture it shows interest and respect if someone interrupts': and immediately there are these very pious faces, and people allow me to interrupt. it is not as if we don't perceive the homogenization; we exploit it, why not?"

"when you are perceived as a token, you are also silenced in a certain way because, as you say, if you have been brought there it has been covered, they needn't worry about it anymore, you salve their conscience."

"i will have in an undergraduate class, let's say, a young, white male student, politically-correct, who will say: 'i am only a bourgeois white male, i can't speak.' in that situation - it's peculiar, because i am in the position of power and their teacher and, on the other hand, i am not a bourgeois white male - i say to them: 'why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced?' then you begin to investigate what it is that silences you, rather than take this very deterministic position - since my skin color is this, since my sex is this, i cannot speak. i call these things, as you know, somewhat derisively, chromatism: basing everything on skin color - 'i am white, i can't speak' - and genitalism: depending on what kind of genitals you have, you can or cannot speak in certain situations. from this position, then, i say you will of course not speak in the same way about the third world material, but if you make it your task not only to learn what is going on there through language, through specific programmes of study, but also at the same time through a historical critique of your position as the investigating person, then you will see that you have earned the right to criticize, and you will be heard. when you take the position of not doing your homework - 'i will not criticize because of my accident of birth, the historical accident' - that is a much more pernicious position. in one way you take a risk to criticize, of criticizing something which is other - something which you used to dominate. i say that you have to take a certain risk: to say 'i won't criticize' is salving your conscience, and allowing you not to do any homework. on the other hand, if you criticize having earned the right to do so, then you are indeed taking a risk and you will probably be made welcome, and can hope to be judged with respect."

limit zone

quotes by giorgio agamben from homo sacer

"in the notion of bare life the interlacing of politics and life has become so tight that it cannot easily be analyzed. until we become aware of the political nature of bare life and its modern avatars (biological life, sexuality, etc), we will not succeed in clarifying the opacity at their center. conversely, once modern politics enters into an intimate symbiosis with bare life, it loses the intelligibility that still seems to us to characterize the juridico-political foundation of classical politics."

"karl lowith was the first to define the fundamental character of totalitarian states as a 'politicization of life' and, at the same time, to note the curious contiguity between democracy and totalitarianism: 'since the emancipation of the third estate, the formation of bourgeois democracy and its transformation into mass industrial democracy, the neutralization of politically relevant differences and postponement of a decision about them has developed to the point of turning into its opposite: a total politicization of everything, even of seemingly neutral domains of life.'"

"it is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves."

"if there is a line in every modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones. this line is now in motion and gradually moving into areas other than that of political life, areas in which the sovereign is entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with the jurist but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest."

"modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body, making it into what is at stake in political conflict. . . if it is true that law needs a body in order to be in force, and if one can speak, in this sense, of 'law's desire to have a body,' democracy responds to this desire by compelling law to assume the care of this body. this ambiguous (or polar) character of democracy appears even more clearly in the habeas corpus if one considers the fact that the same legal procedure that was originally intended to assure the presence of the accused at the trial and, therefore, to keep the accused from avoiding judgment, turns - in its new and definitive form - into grounds for the sheriff to detain and exhibit the body of the accused."

"in the system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state."

"one of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside. once it crosses over the walls of the oikos and penetrates more and more deeply into the city, the foundation of sovereignty - nonpolitical life - is immediately transformed into a line that must be constantly redrawn."

 "sade stages. . . the theatrum politicum as a theater of bare life, in which the very physiological life of bodies appears, through sexuality, as the pure political element. . . not only philosophy but also and above all politics is sifted through the boudoir. indeed, in dolmance's project, the boudoir fully takes the place of the cite, in a dimension in which the public and the private, political existence and bare life change places. . . sade's modernity does not consist in his having foreseen the unpolitical primacy of sexuality in our unpolitical age. on the contrary, sade is as contemporary as he is because of his incomparable presentation of the absolutely political (that is, 'biopolitical') meaning of sexuality and physiological life itself."

"it is as if every valorization and every 'politicization' of life (which, after all, is implicit in the sovereignty of the individual over his own existence) necessarily implies a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only 'sacred life,' and can as such be eliminated without punishment. every society sets this limit; every society - even the most modern - decides who its 'sacred men' will be."

"the paradox of nazi biopolitics and the necessity by which it was bound to submit life itself to an incessant political mobilization could not be expressed better than by this transformation of natural heredity into a political task. the totalitarianism of our century has its ground in this dynamic identity of life and politics, without which it remains incomprehensible. . .  when life and politics - originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-man's-land of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare life - begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception."

"what is decisively more disquieting is the fact (which is unequivocally shown by the scientific literature put forward by the defense and confirmed by the expert witnesses appointed by the court) that experiments on prisoners and persons sentenced to death had been performed several times and on a larger scale in our century, in particular in the united states (the very country from which most of the nuremberg judges came). . . what the well-meaning emphasis on the free will of the individual refuses to recognize here is that the concept of 'voluntary consent' is simply meaningless for someone interned at dachau, even if he or she is promised an improvement in living conditions. from this point of view, the inhumanity of the experiments in the united states and in the camps is, therefore, substantially equivalent."

"the only possible answer is that in both contexts the particular status of the VPs [human guinea pigs] was decisive; they were persons sentenced to death or detained in a camp, the entry into which meant the definitive exclusion from the political community. precisely because they were lacking almost all the rights and expectations that we customarily attribute to human existence, and yet were still biologically alive, they came to be situated in a limit zone between life and death, inside and outside, in which they were no longer anything but bare life."

suspension

all quotes by gilles deleuze from masochism: coldness and cruelty

"as soon as we read masoch we become aware that his universe has nothing to do with that of sade. their techniques differ, and their problems, their concerns and their intentions are entirely dissimilar."

"georges bataille explains that the language of sade is paradoxical because it is essentially that of a victim."

"[sade] is interested in something quite different, namely to demonstrate that reasoning itself is a form of violence, and that he is on the side of violence, however calm and logical he may be. he is not even attempting to prove anything to anyone, but to perform a demonstration related essentially to the solitude and omnipotence of its author. the point of the exercise is to show that the demonstration is identical to violence. it follows that the reasoning does not have to be shared by the person to whom it is addressed any more than pleasure is meant to be shared by the object from which it is derived. the acts of violence inflicted on the victims are a mere reflection of a higher form a violence to which the demonstration testifies. whether he is among his accomplices or among his victims, each libertine, while engaged in reasoning, is caught in the hermetic circle of his own solitude and uniqueness."

"similarly the imperatives uttered by the libertines are like the statements of problems referring back to the more fundamental chain of sadistic theorems: 'i have demonstrated it theoretically,' says noirceuil, 'let us now put it to the test of practice.'"

"the sadist is in need of institutions, the masochist of contractual relations. . . possession is the sadist's particular form of madness just as the pact is the masochist's."

"sade is sponozistic and employs demonstrative reason, masoch is platonic and proceeds by dialectical imagination."

"[masoch] is prepared for anything, a true dialectician who knows the opportune moment and seizes it. plato showed that socrates appeared to be the lover but that fundamentally he was the loved one. . . dialectic does not simply mean the free interchange of discourse, but implies transpositions or displacements of this kind, resulting in a scene being enacted simultaneously on several levels with reversals and reduplications in the allocation or roles and discourse."

"pornological literature is aimed above all at confronting language with its own limits, with what is in a sense a 'nonlanguage' (violence that does not speak, eroticism that remains unspoken). however this task can only be accomplished by an internal splitting of language: the imperative and descriptive function must transcend itself toward a higher function, the personal element turning by reflection upon itself into the impersonal. . . in sade the imperative and descriptive function of language transcend itself toward a pure demonstrative, instituting function, and in masoch toward a dialectical, mythical, and persuasive function."

"the idea of that which is not, the idea of the No or of negation which is not given and cannot be given in experience must necessarily be the object of a demonstration."

"disavowal should perhaps be understood as the point of departure of an operation that consists neither in negating nor even destroying, but rather in radically contesting the validity of that which is: it suspends belief in and neutralizes the given in such a way that a new horizon opens up beyond the given and in place of it."

"[masoch] does not believe in negating or destroying the world nor in idealizing it: what he does is to disavow and thus to suspend it, in order to secure an ideal which is itself suspended in fantasy. . . we should note here that the art of suspense always places us on the side of the victim and forces us to identify with him, whereas the gathering momentum of repetition tends to force us onto the side of the torturer and make us identify with the sadistic hero."

"eroticism is able to act as a mirror to the world by reflecting its excesses, drawing out its violence and even conferring a 'spiritual' quality on these phemomena by the very fact that it puts them at the service of the senses."

"a genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim. . . neither would the masochist tolerate a truly sadistic torturer. he does of course require a special 'nature' in the torturer, but he needs to mold this nature, to educate and persuade it in accordance with his secret project."

"it would never occur to the sadist to find pleasure in other people's pain if he had not himself first undergone the masochistic experience of a link between pain and pleasure."

"we are inevitably led back to the problem of syndromes: some syndromes merely attach a common label to irreducibly different disturbances. biology warns us against over-hasty acceptance of the existence of an uninterrupted evolutionary chain. the fact that two organs are analogous need not mean that there is an evolutionary link between them."

the relation of abandonment

quotes from giorgio agamben from homo sacer

"the cipher of this capture of life in law is not sanction (which is not at all an exclusive characteristic of the juridical rule) but guilt (not in the technical sense that this concept has in penal law but in the originary sense that indicates a being-in-debt: in culpa esse). . . guilt refers not to transgression, that is, to the determination of the licit and the illicit, but to the pure force of the law, to the law's simple reference to something."

"the sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence."

"language also holds man in its ban insofar as man, as a speaking being, has always already entered into language without noticing it. everything that is presupposed for there to be language (in the forms of something nonlinguistic, something ineffable, etc.) is nothing other than a presupposition of language that is maintained as such in relation to language precisely insofar as it is excluded from language."

"one of the peculiar characteristics of kafka's allegories is that at their very end they offer the possibility of an about-face that completely upsets their meaning. the obstinacy of the man from the country thus suggests a certain analogy with the cleverness that allows ulysses to survive the song of the sirens. just as the law in 'before the law' is insuperable because it prescribes nothing, so the most terrible weapon in kafka's 'the sirens' is not song but silence ('it has never happened, but it might not be altogether unimaginable that someone could save himself from their song, but certainly never from their silence.')"

"the law of this oscillation [between the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves it] rests on the fact that all law-preserving violence, in its duration, indirectly weakens the lawmaking violence represented by it, through the suppression of hostile counterviolence. . . this lasts until either new forces or those earlier suppressed triumph over the violence that had posited law until now and thus found a new law destined to a new decay. in the interruption of this cycle, which is maintained by mythical forms of law, in the deposition of law and all the forces on which it depends (as they depend on it) and, therefore, finally in the deposition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded." -walter benjamin

"sovereign violence opens a zone of indistinction between law and nature, outside and inside, violence and law. and yet the sovereign is precisely the one who maintains the possibility of deciding on the two to the very degree that he renders them indistinguishable from each other. as long as the state of exception is distinguished from the normal case, the dialectic between the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves it is not truly broken, and the sovereign decision even appears simply as the medium in which the passage from the one to the other takes place."

"the sentiments provoked by the one and the other are not identical: disgust and horror are one thing and respect another. nonetheless, for actions to be the same in both cases, the feelings expressed must not be different in kind. in fact, there actually is a certain horror in religious respect, especially when it is very intense; and the fear inspired by malignant powers is not without a certain reverential quality. . . the pure and the impure are therefore not two separate genera, but rather two varieties of the same genus that includes sacred things. there are two kinds of sacred things, the auspicious and the inauspicious. not only is there no clear border between these two opposite kinds, but the same object can pass from one to the other without changing nature. the impure is made from the pure, and vice versa. the ambiguity of the sacred consists in the possibility of this transmutation." -emile durkheim

"once placed in relation with the ethnographic concept of taboo, this ambivalence is then used - with perfect circularity - to explain the figure of homo sacer. there is a moment in the life of concepts when they lose their immediate intelligibility and can then, like all empty terms, be overburdened with contradictory meanings."

"the sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life - that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed - is the life that has been captured in this sphere."

"sacred life is in some way tied to a political function. it is as if, by means of a striking symmetry, supreme power - which, as we have seen, is always vitae necisque potestas and always founded on a life that may be killed but not sacrificed - required that the very person of sovereign authority assume within itself the life held in its power. and if, for the surviving devotee, a missing death liberates this sacred life, for the sovereign, death reveals the excess that seems to be as such inherent in supreme power, as if supreme power were, in the last analysis, nothing other than the capacity to constitute oneself and others as life that may be killed but not sacrificed."

". . .ancient germanic law was founded on the concept of peace and the corresponding exclusion from the community of the wrongdoer, who therefore became friedlos, without peace, and whom anyone was permitted to kill without committing homicide. the medieval ban also present analogous traits: the bandit could be killed (. . . 'to ban' someone is to say that anyone can harm him) or was even considered to be already dead."

"we have seen that the state of nature is not a real epoch chronologically prior to the foundation of the city but a principle internal to the city, which appears at the moment the city is considered tanquam dissoluta, 'as if it were dissolved' (in this sense, therefore, the state of nature is something like the state of exception). accordingly, when hobbes founds sovereignty by means of a reference to the state in which 'man is a wolf to men,' homo hominis lupus, in the word 'wolf' (lupus) we ought to hear an echo of the wargus and the caput lupinem of the laws of edward the confessor: at issue is not simply fera bestia and natural life but rather a zone of indistinction between the human and the animal, a werewolf, a man who is transformed into a wolf and a wolf who is transformed into a man - in other words, a bandit, a homo sacer."

hobbes, from leviathan: "this is the foundation of that right of punishing, which is exercised in every common-wealth. for the subjects did not give the soveraign that right; but onely in laying down theirs, strengthened him to use his own, as he should think fit, for the preservation of them all: so that it was not given, but left to him, and to him onely; and (excepting the limits set him by naturall law) as entire, as in the condition of meer nature, and of warre of every one against his neighbour."

"the relation of abandonment is so ambiguous that nothing could be harder than breaking from it. the ban is essentially the power of delivering something over to itself, which is to say, the power of maintaining itself in relation to something presupposed as nonrelational. what has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it - at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured. the age-old discussion in juridical historiography between those who conceive exile to be a punishment and those who instead understand it to be a right and a refuge. . . has its root in this ambiguity of the sovereign ban."

"we must learn to recognize this structure of the ban in the political relations and public spaces in which we still live. in the city, the banishment of sacred life is more internal than every interiority and more external than every extraneousness. the banishment of sacred life is the sovereign nomos that conditions every rule, the originary spatialization that governs and makes possible every localization and every territorialization."