Join John as he interviews Kyla Schuller (Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers) about her new book The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke UP, 2017). The book develops concepts of impressibility and sentimentalism in order to interrogate practices of race science, race-making, and sex differentiation in 19th century America (and beyond). The conversation opens with an exploration of sentimental biopower and race as a spatio-temporal formation assigning capacities for impressibility and species-progress, the relation of Frances Harper and W.E.B. Du Bois to discourses of heredity, eugenics, impressibility, and more. From there, we open out onto questions of the state, critiques of feminist new materialism, epigenetics, and above all the challenges and promises of biopolitical analysis.
We’re back, and with an episode featuring frequent guest of the show Sid Issar joining Rachel and John! The trio engages with a two-part article (here and here) by Geraldine Heng, “The …
We’re back, and with an episode featuring frequent guest of the show Sid Issar joining Rachel and John! The trio engages with a two-part article (here and here) by Geraldine Heng, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.” How does Heng’s work reconfigure the temporality of race and racism? What does race-making look like in the Middle Ages, and how does that change our political analyses of the present? In what ways does medieval race-making consolidate whiteness? What genealogies of racialization are lost when we focus on modernity as the exclusive origin of racism? How is Heng’s work related to other investigations into race and racism? How many times can we use Heng’s work to pithily resignify Marxist concepts in just one hour?
Join us for this journey as we come to realize that maybe not EVERYTHING is modernity’s fault.
Starting to get books in for classes I’m teaching next semester...these are for classical justice and intro to political theory 📚📚📚📚📚📚 (at Beloit College)
My new article, in Political Theory. The abstract:
What would it mean to take antiblackness seriously in theories of biopolitics? How would our understanding of biopolitics change if antiblack racialization and slavery were understood as the paradigmatic expression of biopolitical violence? This essay thinks through the significance of black studies scholarship for disentangling biopolitics’ paradoxes and dilemmas. I argue that only by situating antiblackness as constitutive of modernity and of modern biopolitics can we begin to meet the theoretical and political challenges posed by biopolitics. While Roberto Esposito formulates some of the most important questions about biopolitics, his responses will always be insufficient insofar as he engages in no discussion of blackness, antiblackness, slavery, white supremacy, or the role of sociopolitical processes of racialization, violence, and domination. I move from a critique of Esposito to explore the modernity-making processes of the imbrication of antiblackness and biopolitics. To do so, I analyze the biopolitics of birth and of flesh, and interrogate the (im)possibility of an affirmative biopolitics. Ultimately, the essay argues that theories of biopolitics can be genuinely critical only to the extent that they center antiblackness.
Alexa, AutoMarxism, and Affect: The Feminine Mystique in the Age of Home-Based Artificial Intelligence
The intro the conference paper @amybessschiller and I are working on:
Introduction: Alexa, Can You Pass the Turing Test?
Perusing lists of suggested uses for Amazon’s Alexa written by a variety of tech and lifestyle websites, a common theme emerges of commanding her—and all these articles refer to the Alexa device as “her”—to manage a variety of domestic labor tasks. Frequent recommendations are to have her: suggest recipes; manage your personal schedule; keep track of to-do lists and shopping lists; change the light, heat, or air conditioning in your smart home; order delivery food; use an app to have your dry cleaning picked up; set a timer or alarm; request an Uber pick-up; and, of course, seamlessly order anything you could ever want from Amazon. Such lists also suggest you can change her name or tell her to quiet down (McGauley 2016; Nield 2017; Plummer 2017). An interplay between domesticity and control—over one’s life, one’s home, one’s efficiency, and over Alexa herself—runs through discourses about Alexa and similar devices such as Google Home, collectively categorized under the rubric of home-based artificial intelligence (AI) or intelligent personal assistants.
What are political theorists and critical theorists to make of the proliferation of home-based artificial intelligence that promises to make the menial tasks of household labor more efficient, less demanding, more interactive, and, as some might like, even fun? Furthermore, in what ways does this question become more vital considering that the promise of domestic AI involves, in practice, an issuing of commands to a gendered device of artificial intelligence enmeshed in neoliberal capitalist circulations? This paper explores the settings and circuits of production and social reproduction reshaped by home-based AI and the human-machine hybridization it induces. Critical theories of labor and affect—Marxism, different Marxist feminism projects, black feminism, and work on affective and emotional labor—guide our inquiry and are reconfigured in the process. Home-based AI offers visions of an automated (and thus less onerous) domestic workload, a mode of companionship through affective presence, frictionless purchasing of goods and services, and easier self-life-management. It also, however, offers only a simulacra of companionship, further individualizes and invisibilizes the (gendered, raced) subjects performing domestic labor, raises questions about the interface between humans and machines, and further entrenches individuals into neoliberal capital. These tensions constitute the central motivation for this paper.
Marx provides an important touchstone and framework for thinking through the questions Alexa raises for capitalism and labor. And yet, as numerous scholars have demonstrated, domestic labor and social reproduction—particularly in their gendered and racialized dynamics—are under-theorized, obscured, or problematically theorized by Marx and many Marxists (e.g. Hartmann 1979; Joseph 1981; Vogel 2013). Marx’s so-called “Fragment on Machines” from the Grundrisse (1973, 690–706) offers a liberatory version of the development of machines as “organs of the human brain, created by the human hand” that can enable “the process of social life itself [to] come under the control of the general intellect and [be] transformed in accordance with it” (706). Especially when considering Alexa or Google Home, this question of the human-machine assemblage pushes itself to the fore. Ann Cvetkovich argues that Marx’s analysis, rather than being entirely “dependent on essentialist or humanist distinctions” between humans and machines, “can also be said to denaturalize such distinctions by emphasizing the interpenetration of the material and the human” such that “the interactions between humans and objects, between constant and variable capital, and between worker and commodity produce a transmutation” in both machine and human (1992, 185–86). However, where these subject/object and human/machine binaries persist in Marx, they “sustain” a “relative silence” about reproductive labor, social reproduction, the home, and the family:
The domestic sphere remains invisible in his account of the structures of industrial capitalism, only referred to in the abstract as the domain in which the amount of socially necessary labor required to reproduce the worker’s means of subsistence would be determined. But the distinction between persons and objects or products is more difficult to maintain in the sphere of reproduction, since there the ‘object’ being produced is in fact a person (1992, 185).
Marx provides a way to interrogate the hybridization of human and machine in the industrial factory, while we work to think through that process within the social factory, a concept developed by Marxist autonomist feminists and the Wages for Housework movement in order to examine “the interdependencies between two fields of social cooperation, the household and the waged labor economy” instead of “isolate[ing] capitalist production in the times, spaces, and relations of waged labor” alone (Weeks 2011, 120–21). That is, we analyze the human/machine hybridization in the home effected by domestic AI. This enables us to rethink various theories of social reproduction and domestic labor as well as Marx on machines, and also to interrogate the relations of capital, labor, gender, and race that are (re)constituted by home-based AI.
Circuits of production and reproduction become the organizing framework for what follows. The first section examines multiple perspectives on domestic labor, social reproduction and the machine, including: Italian autonomist feminism and the Wages for Housework movement; the Marxist feminism of Lise Vogel, Kathi Weeks, and others; and black feminists such as Angela Davis. Next, we interrogate the production of affects, emotions, race, subjectivity and human machines through multiple modes of labor, particularly domesticized and machinic modes of labor. The third section analyzes the way that home-based AI presents a crucible through which all of our concerns must pass, with a focus on AI’s attempt to manage the user’s cognitive-affective load. More specifically, we interrogate the ways that domestic AI functions as both a helpful intervention with the potential to work against oppressive tendencies in domestic labor and social reproduction and amplifies patriarchal capitalist tendencies. The conclusion pieces together these problematics in order to sketch a response to the fundamental question of whether home-based AI is or ever could be in some ways liberatory.
Home-based AI, as a material-technological phenomenon posing new problems for theories and practices, reconfigures the frameworks and processes we engage in this paper. It enables us to rethink them on their own, and to think them anew together, all in relation to the automation and affectivity of this newest instantiation of gendered domestic labor. As such, this paper examines the effects and affects of machines and automation as they concentrate ever more in domestic space. Home-based AI poses questions and paradoxes of: the call-and-response affective presence in the performance of household work; the subjectivizing and alienating effects of the automation of domestic labor; the rearranging of the human-machine assemblage; the further isolation of domesticity; and maybe even the potential liberatory opportunities of automation. Especially as domestic AI devices increasingly saturate homes, political theory and critical theory must grapple with these machinic and affective questions, as we seek to do in this paper. Alexa, the machines are coming from inside the house.
Join us for this special episode of the AAP – special because all of your hosts are actually in the same place, and special because we devote the whole episode to pedagogy. Rachel, John, and …
Join us for this special episode of the AAP – special because all of your hosts are actually in the same place, and special because we devote the whole episode to pedagogy. Rachel, John, and previous guest host Siddhant Issar convene in St. Louis to discuss what it means to teach the political theory canon in our contemporary political situation. How important are all these dead white European men in shaping the politics of today? What is the best way to engage students in teaching the canon? How can one both teach the canon – as many have to do – while also challenging structures and discourses of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism? Listen in as we try to puzzle through some of these challenges. Stick around for some dream analysis, as we try to interpret a listener’s dream about mahogany rooms and never-ending curtains.
Black Lives and Black Thought at Court: Sonia Sotomayor’s Phantom Dissent in Utah v. Strieff
about done with my conference paper for APSA. from the intro:
What, then, makes Sotomayor’s dissent so remarkable? Numerous commentators noted Sotomayor’s citations to James Baldwin, Michelle Alexander, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, critiques of police practices, and potential allusions to #BlackLivesMatter. In this paper I read Sotomayor’s dissent in Utah v. Strieff as a mode of black political thinking, or at least put her dissent in conversation with black thought. To do so, I take up the aspects of her dissent picked up on by media outlets, but also theorize her writing as a form of political phenomenology, and as in loose connection to Afro-pessimist scholarship on blackness, antiblack racism, and social death. These potentially radical dimensions of her dissent exist in tension, however, with the structural and institutional position of the Supreme Court as an entity often effecting dehumanization and depersonalization, especially when it comes to people of color and/or those convicted of a crime (Dayan 2011). On one hand, Sotomayor’s dissent operates as political thought and phenomenology concerned with the question of racial injustice and in conversation with black political thought. On the other hand, as Colin Dayan notes, one way of making sense of American jurisprudence on confinement, punishment, and race is to conceptualize it as the “obscene made lawful,” a “state-sanctioned degradation” through which “personality is recognized, threatened, or removed,” all constituting a “legal history of dispossession” (2011, xii). Monica C. Bell argues that Sotomayor’s dissent in Strieff does indeed “understate” the problems of racism vis-à-vis Fourth Amendment jurisprudence (2017, 2057–58). The majority of the paper concerns itself with articulating the multidimensional critique and political theorizing of the dissent, turning to the substantial restrictions on her radicalness toward the end of the paper. I thus intend a dual movement of both pushing Sotomayor’s dissent into the register of political theory and critical race theory and exploring the considerable limits on the critical potential of her dissent.
My approach to Sotomayor’s writing in Utah v. Strieff takes a cue from Dayan, who conceptualizes her project as “seek[ing] to know what happens to conventional historical and legal sources when they are pressed to answer unconventional questions,” especially in relation to issues of personhood (xi). She does this by pressing case law into conversation with issues such as slavery, the legal fiction of civil death, jurisprudence surrounding prison conditions and confinement, and the legal status of dogs, as well as numerous apparitions and ghosts in and around the law. I take Sotomayor’s dissent and press it to answer questions such as: how does #BlackLivesMatter circulate in and influence the discursive economy of law?; can Sotomayor be engaged in a project of black political thought?; how could a Supreme Court opinion construct a phenomenology theorizing racial injustice and lived experience?; are there connections between Sotomayor’s writing and Afro-pessimist thought on social death and the political ontology of race? Sora Y. Han notes in her critique of the strict scrutiny doctrine that “the fundamental relationship between state racism and democratic principles is most intimately drawn in the judicial life of law—the institution of law's written interpretation,” which produces the near-impossible “difficulty of describing in juridical-political terms a position of suffering for which there is no justification—being subject to state action motivated solely by race, subjection under racial animus” (2011, 109–10). I claim that that Sotomayor’s dissent in Utah v. Strieff partially overcomes this institutional interdiction to actually articulate race-based subjection in judicial terms. My approach throughout the paper focuses on taking seemingly minor aspects of Sotomayor’s dissent—citational practices, specific phrases, sentence construction, rhetorical moves, and so on—and expanding outward from the specificities of her writing to broader legal, political, and social theorizing. I thus work to engage in a close reading of her dissent and to take that dissent in unexpected yet generative directions.
The first section of the paper provides an overview of Utah v. Strieff, summarizing the facts of the case, the majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, and some of the more conventional legal reasoning found in Sotomayor’s dissent. From there, I examine the invocation of black thinkers and evocation of #BlackLivesMatter in her dissent, working outward from her citational practices and two key passages to contend that Sotomayor is centrally concerned with questions of race, racism, blackness, and antiblackness. Next, I read Part IV of the dissent as a phenomenology of being stopped and searched, one that brings lived experience and embodiment into Supreme Court discourse, and focuses attention on the systemic racialization of police conduct and of stop-and-searches. Putting Sotomayor in conversation with Sara Ahmed (2006) and Colin Dayan (2011), this section contends that Sotomayor’s phenomenology enlivens her legal writing, in opposition to the tendency of legal writing to evacuate liveliness and experience. The subsequent section proceeds from Sotomayor’s two mentions of “civil death” in the dissent to an investigation of historical and contemporary modes of civil death, all vis-à-vis the political ontology of social death and antiblack racism. Here, I depart some from Sotomayor to examine the analysis of the “new civil death” by Gabriel Chin, whom Sotomayor cites twice, juxtapose Chin with contemporary discussions of social death, and eventually turn back to Sotomayor and the indirect entry of the concept of social death into her jurisprudential discourse. I conclude by working through some of the tensions between the racial justice critique Sotomayor constructs and the structural limitations imposed by that critique’s situatedness in an institution complicit in the perpetuation of white supremacy, conceptualizing Sotomayor’s dissent as a “phantom opinion.”
the abstract:
Can black political thought challenging racial injustice emerge from the legal writing of a Supreme Court Justice? To explore this question, this paper analyzes Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in Utah v. Strieff (579 U.S. ___ (2016)), a Fourth Amendment case regarding police conduct. I argue that through multiple rhetorical and theoretical moves, Sotomayor’s dissent gives legal life to racial oppressions in a way that is potentially in conversation with black political activism and black political thought. My interpretation of the dissent makes three claims. First, I examine the phrases and citational practices that connect Sotomayor’s writing to #BlackLivesMatter and black political thought. Second, I work with Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology to theorize Sotomayor as constructing a phenomenology of being stopped and searched that brings the habitual lived experience of people of color to the center of legal discourse. Third, I work from Sotomayor’s invocation of “civil death” to put her dissent in conversation with recent Afro-pessimist theory on social death and the afterlife of slavery. These radical dimensions of her dissent exist in tension, thought, with the structural and institutional position of the Supreme Court as an entity often effecting dehumanization and depersonalization, especially when it comes to people of color and/or those convicted of a crime. I thus intend a dual movement of both pushing Sotomayor’s dissent into the register of political theory and critical race theory and exploring the considerable limits on the critical potential of her dissent.
In this very special episode, John talks with Charles W. Mills (Philosophy, The Graduate Center, CUNY) about his new book, Black Rights/White Wrong: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2017). Mills walks us through some of the main arguments and concepts from the book, including the terminology of racial liberalism, the importance of white supremacy as a concept, his critiques of Kant and Rawls, the prospects for a “black radical liberalism,” and much more. But, the two build out the conversation to also discuss whiteness in the academy, race and ontology, the ongoing importance of historical materialism, whether liberalism can be reconstructed, and race and pedagogy in the political philosophy/theory classroom.
We were thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with Mills – don’t miss out on the dialogue.
I’m working on a conference paper about Sonia Sotomayor, and especially her dissent in Utah v. Strieff (2016). One part of the paper uses Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology to try to think through what Sotomayor is doing in the dissent. Here’s some of what I wrote today, in draft form:
Sotomayor’s dissent pushes further than its citational practices alone. This section argues that Sotomayor constructs, in Part IV of the dissent, a phenomenology of the bodily experience of being stopped and searched, which I explore through Sara Ahmed’s theorization of a “phenomenology of ‘being stopped.’”(2006, 139) In doing so Sotomayor enables, at least for a few pages, the loftiness of a Court opinion to reach down and connect to lived experience. Dayan contends that law and its “rituals” creates new forms of legal personhood that often do not have connection to law as it is lived by those the law affects—by those whose personhood is put into question, disfigured, made ghostly, or seized in the operations of law. She focuses on the “law’s power to define” as “mak[ing] things on its own terms, terms that may or may not be accountable to experience” (216). This entails, for Dayan, “unearthing … the ‘dry bones’ of law and giving them life in unexpected places,” something that is possible only “outside the guild of lawyers” (xi). And yet, in her dissent in Strieff, Sotomayor performs this unearthing and enlivening from within not just the guild of lawyers, but from inside the Supreme Court itself—albeit, of course, in a decision in which she is in the minority. While Dayan’s overall argument is essential, we see in Strieff the occasional crack in the façade of deadened legal language through which law might illuminate life.
Sotomayor’s dissent works against the tendency of obscuring experience that Dayan identifies—a tendency that the majority in Strieff partakes in—by providing a detailed and I argue phenomenological analysis of what being stopped and searched entails. Notably, she opens Section IV with the disclaimer “Writing only for myself, and drawing on my own professional experiences…” (9-10). No longer joined by Ginsburg in the dissent, Sotomayor makes explicit the turn to personal experience, to the law as lived. She marks this dissent as something different, and marks herself as a living, experience person, even in her position as a Justice of the Supreme Court. What follows involves bringing to the Court a detailed account of being stopped that integrates a phenomenology of the stop and search with a command over Fourth Amendment precedent.
Part IV of the dissent commences, following Sotomayor’s avowal of drawing on her own professional experience, with her assertion that she “would add” to her dissent that “unlawful ‘stops’ have sever consequences much greater than the inconvenience suggested by that name” (10). For her, the naming of the stop in an opinion does not capture its reality; conventional legal rhetorics are not enough to grapple the law as lived. Furthermore, while “many Americans have been stopped for speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be when the officer is looking for more” (10). It is not that all experience being stopped in the same way, but rather that the experience of being stopped and searched is differentially distributed. Sotomayor writes that while Strieff is white, “it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny” (12). Thus, we should not focus primarily on the lived experience of any random person living in the United States, or of a generic colorless (read: white) citizen. Rather, conceptualizing the stop-and-search encounter with police requires proceeding from the lives of the people of color disproportionately targeted by police.
In this sense, Sotomayor recognizes and makes legible in her dissent what Ahmed calls in her queer phenomenology a “political economy” of stopping (Ahmed 2006, 140). This political economy analyzes how “stopping…is distributed unevenly between others” and how the stop and search “is a technology of racism: “some bodies more than others are ‘stopped’ by being the subject of the policeman’s address” (139-40). The third chapter of her work examines the racialization of space, contrasting “the ease with which the white body extends itself in the world through how it is orientated” (a phenomenology of “the ‘I can’”) with a Frantz Fanon-inspired “phenomenology of the black body” that “could be described in terms of the bodily and social experience of restriction, uncertainty, and blockage” (a phenomenology of “the utterance ‘I cannot’”) (138-9). She delineates two different modalities of phenomenology:
…whiteness becomes a social and bodily orientation given that some bodies will be more at home in a world that is orientated around whiteness. … For bodies that are not easily extended by the skin of the social, bodily movement is not so easy. Such bodies are stopped, where the stopping is an action that creates its own impressions. Who are you? Why are you here? What are you doing? … A phenomenology of ‘being stopped’ might take us in a different direction than one that beings with [whiteness and] motility” (138-9).
I argue that in her dissent Sotomayor engages in this second mode of phenomenology, one that interrogates the legal mechanisms that authorize the stopping from the perspective of one who is stopped and details the impressions such stopping makes.
Only those bodies subject to constant stopping “realize how degrading a stop can be,” and their experience is most important for examining how “this Court has given officers an array of instruments to probe and examine” as a result of Strieff—which itself is only the most recent case in a long trajectory of cases weakening Fourth Amendment protections. The language Sotomayor uses in her phenomenology is striking, especially given the venue. In the span of only the three pages of Part IV on their own, she describes the rampant stop and search practices as (10-12): “degrading”; an “indignity”; making the person being stopped “‘helpless’ (citing Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1); placing one under an “officer’s control”; effecting civil death (about which more in the next section); subjecting one to “humiliation” and a “violation” of one’s “dignity”; producing a “double consciousness”; and making one’s “body…subject to invasion.” All of this language suggests that those subject to being stopped at any time, for no particular reason, experience a loss of personhood and bodily integrity. Dayan analyzes the ways that “law encapsulates, sustains, and invigorates philosophies of personhood,” contending that American law has constructed a set of “negative personhood” statuses as a series of “legal disabilities,” many of which depersonalize and disfigure (in multiple sense of the word) people of color and/or those convicted of crimes (2011, xii). Sotomayor’s dissent, rather than further entrenching the seizing of personhood as much of the Court’s jurisprudence does, uses its positionality within the official legal discourse to unearth the way the Court has participated in the construction of negative personhood and legal disability. The effect of the Court’s decisions when it comes to the Fourth Amendment is to ensure that the bodies of people of color constantly experience a political economy of stopping and cannot extend into space, with the result of this being the robbing of their very personhood.
In this especially agentic episode, Emily, John, and B attempt to meet Karen Barad halfway–examining three chapters from her major work, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Exploring how the concepts of agency, quantum theory, feminist science studies, and “the real” might be updated through Barad’s notion of intra-action, the team tackles everything from Barad’s agential realism right down to the heart of whether “yous dudes” can be a thing. Along the way, they puzzle over the difference between a phenomena and an apparatus, ask what a Barad-influenced interpretation of liberalism would be, explore how Barad can influence our pedagogy, and quasi-heatedly debate the relationship of Barad’s work to phenomenology, They even have time for Emily’s favorite segment, One or Several Wolves–in this installment, bears, poop, a dog iPhone, and a sense of belonging are all found in a listener’s recurring dream from childhood.
Thanks to listener Marianne in Norway for the request to read Barad!
For the Court, talk of private experience and subjective mental states has become irrelevant. We are far from the days of the Warren court, when attention to psychological anguish, dignity, and human worth mattered. … helplessness, extreme isolation, and other mechanisms of incapacitation are incorporated into incarceration. Tools of mind alteration are now dubbed ‘rehabilitation.’ So with the emphasis on ‘reasonableness’ the courts endorse techniques that force inmates outside the precincts of thought and feeling but leave no marks on the body.
Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, p. 110
My polemic is … against the tendency in contemporary cases to reduce constitutional claims to the most basic terms: bodies emptied of minds, and hence of the defining qualities of personhood. Perhaps nowhere is the pressure to reclaim and return to an earlier kind of law more evident than in supermax confinement. To be turned into ghosts before actual death necessitated the redefinition of punishment. If one assumes the criminal is civilly dead, with nothing intrinsic worth saving for posterity, without those intangible qualities that constitute what we know to be human, then punishment has to retooled. … The legal history of civil death provides a crucial ground understanding how ostracism is materialized. But only the supermax in its evasion of constitutional claims has created the perfect crucible for transformation.”
Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, p. 86
Current practices of punishment in the United States derive not only from a colonial legal history that disabled the slave while inventing the legal person, but also from the thoroughly legalistic nature of the American system in general. It is not an absence of law but an abundance of it that allows government to engage in seemingly illegal practices. We need to explore this hyperlegal negation of civil existence. ... Before the state can punish, it must appear to know what is being judged. The rules of law and the leeway within them enact and enable a philosophy of personhood and create the legal subject. They also recognize forms of punishment that are activated for people of a certain "nature" or "character"-those labeled unfit, barbaric, subhuman, or "the worst of the worst." Once categorized as such, and stigmatized as criminals or security threats, they can be restrained in their liberty, deprived of rights, and ultimately undone as persons.
Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, pp. 72-73
The racialized idiom of slavery in the American social order depended on the legal fiction of "civil death": the state of a person who though possessing natural life has lost all civil rights. Unnatural death as punishment for crime entails a logic of alienation. Its paradoxes, its oscillation between tangible and intangible, life and death allowed the law to recognize and legitimize political control. This powerful legal and public denunciation decrees the loss of any right whose exercise or enjoyment depends on a positive provision of law. What had been forfeiture of property and corruption of blood-those few circumstances in which civil death was coextensive with physical death Blackstone noted as specific to the occupations of monks or members of religious orders. They were overlooked as if no longer in the land of the living. But abjuration or banishment on attainder for treason or felony also helped to create forms of punishment that laid the ground for a specifically colonial legal incapacitation.
Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, p. 44
In its manipulation of categories such as the spirit and the flesh, the law perpetuates its claims to mastery and comprehension, all the while investing the juridical order with the power to redefine persons. Legal culture has carved up human differences into hierarchies capacious enough to accommodate subordination. The law's artificial entities—whether disabled as slaves or degraded as felons-are made "vulnerable," in the scholar and activist Ruthie Gilmore's words, to "premature death."l … In varying sites of struggle, sacrifice, and stigma, legal rituals give flesh to past narratives and new life to the residues of old codes and penal sanctions. My intention in this chapter is to contemplate how law materializes dispossession, and in far more corporeal ways than its abstract precepts might at first suggest. In past centuries, a purely juridical application of legal disabilities aimed at humiliating and excluding the criminal or any individual considered "infamous," a term with a long and complicated history. This legal machinery supported public, highly visible punishments that soon gave way to the reconstruction of persons recognized only in so far as they were degraded.
Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, p. 40
What is the design of the juridical no-man's-land that has been created when law loosens the link between human beings, animals, devils, other noxious creatures, or infernal vexations? I have cast this traffic and transplantation of persons across vast social, temporal, and spatial distances in the drama of rituals that are both penal and religious. The stuff of spiritual life becomes the raw material of legal authority. My understanding of law thus summons persons as essential to its sustenance: 'No person itself, the law lives in persons.'
Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, p. 25
