#carcerality

[fursasaida]

The Sense of a Killing

What does it mean for Americans to welcome the murder of Brian Thompson?

Amid all the ridiculous handwringing over how the public reacted to the shooting of the UHC CEO, this is one of the only reasonably grounded things I've read:

It is a rare thing for an American CEO or other public figure to be targeted in this manner. But the structure of feeling it unleashed did not seem novel to me. Americans have a great deal of recent experience assessing the worthiness of strangers for execution. It’s one of the things we do together online: when someone is killed by a cop or vigilante; when a protester is mowed down by a car; when a Palestinian child is killed by an Israeli sniper or an Israeli civilian by Hamas. Arguing about whose lives are expendable is one of America’s favorite pastimes.

What about our bloodlust? Should we be concerned that Americans have betrayed an appetite for political violence? Perhaps. But the flip side of appetite is metabolism: not what we want, but how we bear what we are given. Americans, we might say, have a prodigious capacity for metabolizing brutality and death — we have been conditioned for it. As the writer and gun-violence expert Patrick Blanchfield put it to me, “This event gives us something fairly rare: a situation where a person victimized by a distinctively American system of normalized human liquidation — i.e., gun homicide — is also representative of that other distinctively American institution for disposing of human life, our for-profit health-care system, a key function of which is determining how much individual human lives are worth, and enforcing those assessments with ruthlessly incentivized efficiency.” For Blanchfield, Thompson’s murder, and the system of mechanized cruelty from which he profited, are part of the same regime of “human disposability” — a system in which human life, instead of being precious and priceless, is “a fungible commodity like anything else.”

[processedlives]

What is the cell? The cell is where blackness is situated. It is situated there within prejudice leading to error. If the cell obviously refers to the endless circling of watchtowers up above and endlessly brutal exposures to power and violence from below, this is not because the cell cages being, but because black beingness is like living in a cell without a lock. We see, then, that the cell is where black beingness learns to adapt itself to constraints—paradigms, rationales—that decree that black life is, in a very specific way, a wrong that is almost categorial, whose principal aim is to offend or to commit offense (to the moral law, the state, and to God). It is not surprising, therefore, that the cell is where blackness finds itself obligated, where it is forced to adapt itself to rules, penalties, and conventions. The cell is where black beingness adapts itself to the carceral and where hands and feet, eyes and ears, buttocks and genitals are bound, as are affects and emotions. But in the most unlikely way—that is, without precedent—the cell is where black life also never stops: never stops experiencing itself as incarcerated and never stops testing the locks. The cell is where biopolitical life is no longer manifest in existence, but falls away entirely. [George] Jackson speaks here of a time that is without temporality, but a time that is also, quite explicitly, purely immanent, without words, world, or universality. It is not by chance that many of his letters struggle to express this without, or that many of the letters necessarily relapse into a ferocious opposition to it. Jackson’s theory of the cell is of a life denied existence, fundamentally under siege, wretched, and where beingness cannot be thought as merely alive, or truly alive, but as an enduring that is unendurable, that is, a life that can no longer endure the schism between its own impotence and the bonds that tie life to itself. Here, the meaning of temporal verbs and adverbs show a causality without effect, and one that expresses pure constriction itself.

David Marriott, Three Forms of Poetic Exaltation (x)

[antirelation]

Let me just say that I believe that [George] Jackson—like Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton—presents a systematic and uncompromising aphilosophy. As far as the choices go, one must learn to train, to discipline oneself into a form of absolute revolt against the prevailing way of the world, for if one fails to renounce all loyalty to family and familiarity, if one fails to renounce all ease and desire, one will fail to grasp the true principle by which blackness entails the most severe form of frugality, discipline, and elation. The black revolutionary subject must accept, in brief, that the path of liberation lies beyond sign, value, inheritance, and mastery. This is why it is in his interest to be “nameless, faceless, emotionless, loveless”. Jackson’s Maoist aphilosophy must be understood as a discourse of pure revolt, for, in the process of its elaboration, it rebels against every desire, against every form of reconciliation and compromise, including discourses of art, politics, religion, and the state. Here, blackness takes the form of the purest wager that sees a total disjunction between reconciliation and rebellion. All this might sound indefensibly utopian, idealist even; however, such a judgment is premature. For even if we do not know what the outcome of the wager will be (racial civil war? extermination?), we can see its necessity clearly: to go beyond escape or fugitivity, which are both carceral notions. This is why one must become silent, go blind, embrace death. This is why black poesis is not defined by mimesis, but by incarceration, which it fanatically brings out and makes appear. And this is why black poesis exults on account of its ascesis (and this is its very condition); it endows all black speech with this freeing (freilassung) of language from language; it allows slavery to emerge from its sense, in the semiotic and historic senses of the word. In fact (to speak frankly), this is why one must not simply try to speak of the carceral or go beyond it. One must try and grasp black carcerality without the phantasy of a praxis: no more, in fact, than one should try to divine the force of a poem from the penitent-blissful effects of one’s discomposure in the reading of it.

David S. Marriott, from Three Forms of Poetic Exaltation

[fatehbaz]

During the Florida Land Boom of the 1920s, entrepreneurs and real estate developers deployed creative tactics to woo potential clients [...] to invest in Florida land. [...] At Miami Beach, where Indianapolis-based entrepreneur Carl Fisher invested millions in resort development during the 1920s, tourists encountered a surprising attraction: elephants. Two elephants were brought to Miami Beach. They were named Carl II (named after Fisher himself) and Rosie [...]. Seeing the elephants’ work at Miami Beach positions these more-than-human actors in the histories of leisure in South Florida, as they signal the uncomfortable degree to which work and leisure were deeply entangled in this place. [...]

Carl II, came to Miami Beach from Peoria, Illinois, in February of 1921. According to the Miami Daily Metropolis, [E.B.], who owned several circuses in the Midwest, gifted the elephant to Carl Fisher [...]. “I am going to get a million dollars’ worth of advertising out of this elephant.” [...] Carl II also carried advertisements on boards hung over a saddle. [...] Infantilizing Carl II, as reporters often did in the Miami newspapers, seems to have [...] helped uphold his value as a toy of sorts, which supported the idea of Miami Beach as a “playground,” as it was called at the time. [...] [A]rticles stressed, however, that the elephant’s education would involve more than “play.” The Miami Daily Metropolis reported that “Carl, the elephant will be put to work.” This is coupled with language that strikes a disciplinary tone; the reporter stated that “he must earn his keep.” [...] Such work ranged from moving portable houses on the beach to pulling presses on the polo field. Carl also cleared mangrove swamps to make land suited for residential development [...].

Like other resorts that pandered to a growing middle-class market for leisure in the roaring 1920s, Fisher’s venture on Miami Beach was carefully curated as a “playground to the World.”

Just as Henry Flagler had separated “work” from “leisure” by building Palm Beach separate from West Palm Beach in the 1890s, Fisher kept his beach workers’ labor largely invisible - except when it enhanced the tourist experience of its middle- and upper-middle class clientele, as when the elephants caddied on the golf course or stomped divots on the polo field. Fisher’s plan was to attract visitors to Miami Beach to come back year after year [...] [and] to prompt permanent settlement in his island subdivisions. These subdivisions, like his hotels, were meant to be exclusive. [...]

And while this landscape depended on an African American workforce, the city enacted Ordinance 457 in 1936, requiring the more than 5,000 service workers at the time to “register.” In addition to being photographed and fingerprinted, Black workers had to carry identification with them. [...]

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In March of 1921, Carl II lived at the local fairgrounds [...]. An article in the Miami Daily Metropolis that celebrated Carl II’s presence there also noted that “the fair doors are not open to the colored population this year.” [...] 

Part attraction and part workhorse, Carl II moved across spaces dividing work and leisure, non-human and human, and Black and white on which Miami Beach’s status as a “tropical paradise” for the white leisured classes depended. [...] Carl II was shipped off to the Circus in 1926, the same year that a devastating hurricane struck the beach and brought the “boom” years to an end. His companion, Rosie, eventually met the same fate. [...] While Miami Beach was developed as a playground for the white leisure class, its success was inextricably bound with the labor force that built and sustained it.

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Images, captions, and all text above by: Anna Andrzejewski. “Work, Play, and Elephants in South Florida’s Leisure Landscape.” Edge Effects. 27 April 2023. Published at: edgeeffects.net/miami-beach-elephants/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[velvet-vox]

Is anyone interested in hearing me rant about indoctrination and how/why it ruins art in a pretty long post?

This message is referred to mostly my Murder Drones and Wakfu audience since those are my main demographic as it stands but realistically I won't put the tags associated to those shows in the description unless I directly name them in the actual post.

[theinwardlight]

This prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot, for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.

William Penn, No Cross, No Crown, 1669, written from Penn’s prison cell in the Tower of London 

[panharmopticon]

An Abolitionist Analysis: Tracking the Carceral Histories of Disability by Keith Rosenthal in Spectre Magazine

Many scholars of post-institutionalization have focused on the ambivalent character of the net results. Anne Parsons, author of From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945, argues that a “plethora of civil rights and freedoms” were gained by deinstitutionalized disabled people, but the “legal changes ultimately did not provide the right to adequate medical and social services in their communities…. As people who had been released from state mental hospitals struggled to find housing and employment, more ended up in jail.” As the debate over deinstitutionalization was originally taking place, the fear that inadequate ‘community’ alternatives would replace the state institutions was, to be fair, a concern harbored by some people, including most notably many families of the institutionalized. While such concerns would at least partially prove founded, it is important to recognize that blame lies not with the activists or advocates who pushed for deinstitutionalization, but rather with the various ruling agencies and state bodies that negligently ‘dumped’ their former charges into communities bereft of adequate supports or infrastructures. [...]

Deinstitutionalization was certainly a ‘freedom’ struggle, but it ultimately proved to be a one-sided, negative sort of freedom. It was a freedom from state internment (of a particular kind), but it did not simultaneously engender a freedom to access the resources and supports necessary to engage in a truly emancipated, integral, and self-actualizing development of one’s life-potential. A positive freedom would involve meaningful, socially valued, and unalienated labor accommodated to one’s abilities and interests, unconditional access to the education of one’s choosing, universal and comprehensive health care, and decent standards of living on par with an expansive notion of social needs. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of the abolition of racial slavery in the U.S., abolition is not necessarily coterminous with emancipation. Put differently, abolition must comprise both a process of deconstruction and reconstruction.

When it comes to trans-institutional systems of coercion, domination, and incarceration, the question of abolition must be inextricably tethered to the question of emancipation. As long as the basic social relations, economic class hierarchies, and political inequities remain unchanged at the bedrock level of society, the dissolution of one particular institution, artifice, or manifestation of oppression will prove ephemeral. The conditions that necessitated or encouraged the rise of said institution will simply produce another in its stead. Without a revolution in the very mode of socioeconomic existence, a genuine trans-deinstitutionalization will remain elusive.

[fursasaida]

1. next time somebody wants to make fun of Foucault for saying schools are prisons just know this thread is full of teachers saying this sounds so great, they do the same kind of work and love it, or they "always wanted to work in a correctional facility" and will look into this line of work

2. slightly more sympathetically, this is a demonstration of the abolitionist argument that in a neoliberal carceral society, prisons become the only government institution that the state is willing to direct resources to, and so what should be generalized social service programs like mental health treatment or continuing education get hung on its framework like ornaments on a christmas tree. this is how you get proposals for new prisons that include things like community meeting rooms in the building, because no one will find a community center but they will fund "amenity designed to sell a prison to a community." that is 100% a big part of what these teachers are responding to: having actual resources and a system that doesn't expect them to be an entire family, community, supply closet, and institution in one human body. but like, how is your response "prison school rules!" rather than "hold the fuck up"

(of course there's some talk about learning about how the other half lives and not being so quick to judge etc etc but. come on)