“Grammatology in the Carceral State: Writing, the Human, and Abolitionist Pedagogies”

Rhetoric and the Reproduction of the Human

[R]hetoric is rooted in a false ontology. [Rhetoric] is content to deal with what appears to be true and good rather than inquire into what it is in reality. –Gaonkar, pp. 5

Here, Dilip Gaonkar expands on Plato to articulate why rhetoric is always already an incomplete project, which I further elaborate on in the context of the Human. This raises the question of what, precisely, is the Human? According to Claire Colebrook, “Fixed kinds…are expressions of a more profound transitivity that is the condition for what becomes known as the [H]uman…the being who recognizes himself as becoming through difference. Difference becomes the way man becomes nothing other than becoming and refuses the nightmare of indifference” (228-229, emphasis in original). As such, the Human is constituted in an economy of difference sustained, at least partially, through writing and the production of a stable subject.

Since the Human is an evolving figure in Western modernity and politics, as specific bodies previously considered non-Human may be integrated into Humanity, rhetoric and writing are always incomplete and ateleological. However, the Human, by necessity, remains defined by what it is not. As such, the economy of difference “is a metaphor of energy—where two opposed forces playing against each other constitute the so-called identity of a phenomenon” (Spivak lxii). Order is sustained by binaries and opposition, bodies who threaten (but simultaneously define) the Human are conscripted into the zone of disorder and deviance. Modernity produces deviance through a co-constitutive process of phobia and philia: the fear of difference as a threat to order and stability in the West, yet the simultaneous need and desire for the Other to define the Self (Rodriguez “Racial/Colonial”; King). According to Derrida, “The system of ‘hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak’…through the phonic substance…had to dominate the history of the world…has even produced the idea of the world…in terms of the difference between the worldly and the non-worldly, the inside and the outside” (8). While hearing is not integral in writing or the circulation of signs, it is one example of how signs transcend images and written word and implicate other senses. “Hearing-as-understanding,” then, is only possible through the assignation of meaning onto signs through a collective Western psyche, i.e. the unending process of (re)signification inculcated by the circulation of mediatic images, the education and legal systems, and other linguistic processes, thus producing identity and difference through writing.

As writing is a process of making bodies intelligible, there must always be an exterior to the interior of civil society. Blackness is always unintelligible in the West, the exterior by which order is defined (Spillers; King). Under the carceral state, this is propagated by the guilt/innocence paradigm, which dictates that certain bodies are scripted as always already guilty of crime and deserving of punishment (Cacho; Wang). Specifically, Jackie Wang states in Carceral Capitalism that the “guilt-innocence schematization…fails to grapple with the fact that there is an a priori association of [B]lackness with guilt (criminality)” (263). As such, Western grammars produce a collective psyche that is built on an implicit association of Blackness with guilt and Whiteness with innocence. The guilt/innocence dualism is used to justify the mass incarceration of Black and Brown bodies who are presumed guilty, even when proven innocent, and the manifestation of quotidian anti-Black violence. This collective psyche is (re)produced through “constant perpetuation via institutions, discourses, practices, desires, infrastructures, languages, sciences, economies, dreams, and cultural artifacts [and] the barring of nonwhite subjects from the category of the [H]uman” (Weheliye 3). Therefore, legal infrastructures cannot be disentangled from discourses or epistemologies normalized in the circulation of signs in the West, as they are always co-constitutive in the production of the Human as an inherently anti-Black and carceral paradigm.

Within legal systems, specifically, the Human is scripted in relationship to the intelligibility of pain and the circulation of affect. According to Weheliye, “suffering becomes the defining feature of those subjects excluded from the law, the national community, humanity, and so on due to the political violence inflicted upon them even as it, paradoxically, grants them access to inclusion and equality” (75). While this manifests across the entire political and social landscape of civil society, in this paper, I focus on the judiciary and its circulation of pain in court cases. Specifically, in the judiciary, Black people are simultaneously hypercriminalized and policed, yet unable to win court cases as Humans without articulating sufficient injury, civility, and respectability to be worthy of reparation (Alexander; Weheliye). Speech-as-writing becomes only contingently intelligible to the judge or jury; as such, suffering becomes endemic to racialized bodies, a necessary condition by which they attain an almost-Human status. White institutions and individuals come to fetishize and desire witnessing, hearing, and circulating narratives of the suffering of racialized bodies for consumption. In this way, capitalism accelerates into semiocapitalism, a stage of capitalism in which semiotics, such as affects, signs, and images, are circulated and exchanged in the information economy as goods are no longer purely material (Shanks; Wang; Bifo). As such, affects of pain, suffering, and so on merge with identity to formulate not only economies of difference, but also cybernetic economies wherein data functions as currency.

Under the information economy, narratives of suffering are intertwined with a politics of recognition. Wang argues that “[s]ocial, political, cultural, and legal recognition happens only when a person is thoroughly whitewashed, neutralized, and made unthreatening” (262). To demonstrate sufficient injury to the judiciary, then, is to rely on being recognized as a legitimate subject, i.e. as Human. Under the carceral state, Blackness is read as inherently threatening, legitimizing mass incarceration and creating the inability of the judiciary to recognize Black bodies as Human (Alexander; Cacho). This results in a legal enterprise where police brutality and the hypersurveillance of Black communities can occur without judicial repercussions. This is seen in how the Black Lives Matter movement, which protests, for example, the rising murder rates of Black people by the police, is framed as controversial and threatening by the media⁸. The circulation of news stories thus inscribes a particular political and social meaning to the movement, making it incapable of being recognized as a legitimate political orientation. It also results in the dehumanization of Black bodies who are murdered or experience violence at the hands of the carceral state as the police rarely face repercussions for killing Black people, even when there is video evidence.

In tandem with recognition, the circulation of affect in political institutions (and the media), under semiocapitalism, results in “cruel optimism” (Berlant 1). Cruel optimism is a phrase coined by Lauren Berlant that refers to “[a] relation…when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (1). This manifests in civil society as all individuals are raised to place faith in political, social, and economic institutions that, in reality, inhibit our potential for growth and creativity through labor exploitation, targeted violence, and other forms of inequality. Berlant goes on to argue that “fantasy and survival are indistinguishable effects of the affects' own informal economy. To be made to desire a normativity hangover trains the audience in cruel optimism” (178, emphasis in original). The media uses images and signs to circulate narratives of overcoming and resilience within a capitalist and anti-Black society; in the process, the “audience” exposed to said signs comes to develop cruelly optimistic attachments to political institutions and belief in individualist frameworks of success. Under semiocapitalism, stories are turned into a currency that are consumed, circulated, and desired by the population to demonize dissent. This results in a de-radicalization of much of the non-Black Western population as individuals are inculcated to participate in capitalist paradigms of production, consumption, and labor without question. As such, the assimilation of non-Black populations into economies of production is also a form of racial capitalism as non-Black bodies aspire to White norms of respectability and agency⁹ (Wang). Simultaneously, it creates justifications for the vilification of Black bodies who “fail” to overcome capitalist and anti-Black structures by tokenizing “successful” non-Black people of color. As a result, non-Black people of color who aspire towards Whiteness and the Human are parasitic on Black bodies whose deaths and incarceration are necessary for civil society to function.

While certain kinds of signs and writing come to function as currency, specific grammars remain unintelligible in civil society. According to Hortense Spillers in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” the Black body, as a captive body since the slave trade, is reduced to flesh based on cultural, political, and social norms of the West. Through writing and memory-work, the Black body comes to signify four things:

1) the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality;
2) at the same time--in stunning contradiction--the captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor;
3) in this absence from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of “otherness”;
4) as a category of “otherness,” the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general  “powerlessness,” resonating through various centers of human and social meaning (Spillers 67).

As the Black body is reduced to a perpetual condition of otherness, Black grammars of suffering, kinship, and so on are unintelligible in civil society. Western grammars are thus incapable of encompassing, articulating, or describing Black grammars and experiences. This is particularly true given “gratuitous violence,” one of Orlando Patterson’s tenets of social death (1982). Gratuitous violence is a term Patterson uses to explain the quotidian violence experienced by Black bodies in civil society since the slave trade; overkill, police brutality, and mass incarceration are all examples of how gratuitous violence manifests in the twenty-first century (Alexander). As anti-Black violence is normalized and overproduced, Western grammars are incapable of expressing the affective, physical, and emotional turmoil Black people experience, contributing to the relegation of Black bodies to a non-Human status. As such, the creation of alternative grammars to counteract and deconstruct Western grammars is a necessary sociopolitical project.

**
a hand reached out and
pulled us close
a whisper fluttered
through my ears
[you are lost, but together
we find
a miracle called
freedom]
**

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^[8] Political and mediatic narratives in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Derek Chauvin, in particular, demonstrate the prioritization of property and capital over Black life. In response to property destruction, protesters were labeled “looters” and “rioters,” disparaging outcry against not only Floyd’s murder at the hands of the Minneapolis police, but also against systemic anti-Black violence and death.

^[9] Here, I am thinking specifically about the conception of the Model Minority myth as a narrative weaponized to break Afro-Asian coalitions apart. The framing of particular East Asian bodies as the desirable racialized subject (almost white, but not quite) creates a racial hierarchy in which many East Asians come to be parasitic on Blackness in a futile attempt to assimilate to White political and social norms (Wang). Thus, the Model Minority myth pits racialized bodies against each other, fracturing coalitions and movements against racial capitalism.