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

The Entanglement of Writing, the Human, and Temporality in Civil Society

For those bearing the brunt of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, the past, present, and future are not distinct temporal spaces…The past is an image of the future because the future will be a repetition of the past. –Dillon, pp. 41

In the West, temporality is constructed as a linear teleology in which the past, present, and future are separate temporal zones without relationship. In the process, the collective Western psyche experiences historical amnesia as one manifestation of Freud’s understanding of “forgetfulness.” Specifically, Spivak writes that “in [Freud’s] early writings ‘forgetfulness’ makes its appearance in two opposed forms: as a limitation that protects the human being from the blinding light of an absolute historical memory…as well as an attribute…to avoid falling into the trap of ‘historical knowledge’” (l). I focus on the first form of forgetfulness that Spivak explains. Historical memory, here, refers to events that the West attempts to erase from the memory-work of the population, such as slavery and colonial genocide, practices that were, and are, foundational to the creation and maintenance of civil society. Historical amnesia functions both as an attempt to divest the West, today, from violences it committed in the past, but also as a means of displacing critique of the evolution of chattel slavery and settler colonialism into the PIC and colonial exploitation, such as in oil pipelines that run through Indigenous land (Alexander; Meiners).

In the continuation of carceral logic as an anti-Black and settler colonial enterprise, the past comes to repeat itself in the present and future. Historical amnesia is thus impossible for racialized bodies since, as Stephen Dillon argues, “Time does not erase what has happened, dissolving terror and violence into the progress of the future, nor is the past passively sedimented in the present. Rather, the past returns to the present in expanded form” (42). Civil society’s foundational logics of anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, capitalist exploitation, and more, reinvent and expand themselves under the carceral state in insidious ways, such as the evolution of slavery to the Jim Crow era to mass incarceration and police brutality (Dillon; Alexander). White institutions, however, weaponize historical amnesia to frame the critiques and dissent of Indigenous peoples and Black people as irrational, undeserved, and threatening to order in the West, allowing political and social infrastructures to continue unabated. Narratives of political progress, then, can only mean progress for those considered Human, ensuring that writing and temporality are perpetually intertwined in the production of difference.

In contrast to historical amnesia, linear Western temporality constructs the future as a zone of safety. I argue that this occurs in two ways: first, the future is where “progress” occurs, deferring political and social change (Dillon). According to Dillon, “The state describes the future as a space of safety and security in order to maintain the violence of the present, and to temper the rage of those who refuse to wait” (40). Western grammars sustain this through the circulation of mediatic images and stories, such as by framing Ferguson protesters as inherently violent “rioters,” or by citing institutional legislation as examples of progress (“at least slavery doesn’t exist!”) (Alexander; Meiners). Radical political orientations, communities, or acts, such as prison abolition, are demonized as irrational and dangerous threats to Western stability. Western writing thus comes to desire rationality as a characteristic of the Human, rendering affect destabilizing to order due to its unpredictability. The association of racialized and feminized bodies with emotion and irrationality, then, is a tactic to delegitimize their experiences of violence and pain in a racist and hetero-patriarchal society. However, the affect of pain surrounding the subjectivity of Black people, as explained through Weheliye above, is necessary to the carceral state as a precondition for non-Black people of color to aspire towards the category of the Human. Affect is thus simultaneously threatening and discredited due to its unintelligibility, yet necessary for semiocapitalism and anti-Blackness to function.

Predictability is the second process by which the future is constructed as a zone of safety. Rhetorical and temporal control are necessarily co-constitutive in that predictions, through simulations, are required for the Western state to secure the continuation of empire by preempting and eradicating potential threats before they emerge (Gaonkar; Öberg; Bifo). The future must be made safe for the West, by force, if necessary; as such, “[T]he future can be anticipated only in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted temporality and can therefore only announce itself, present itself, in the species of monstrosity” (Derrida 5). Temporal sovereignty is sustained through an anticipatory logic and temporality, i.e. the need to anticipate the actions of all actors, including individuals, other nations, and even the environment (Puar “Prognosis” and Terrorist). According to Jasbir Puar, this creates a “risk economy that attempts to ensure against future catastrophe. This is a temporality of negative exuberance—for we are never safe enough, never healthy enough, never prepared enough” (Terrorist, xxvii). In an anticipatory temporality, all actors are potential threats, hence why the West never understands itself to be safe. In an economy of risk, “identity is understood not as essence, but as risk coding” (Puar, “Prognosis,” 165). Identity comes to signify discrete datapoints in a matrix of intelligibility, categories that enable the carceral state to read specific communities and bodies as inherently at-risk or deserving-of-risk. Redlining, for example, was a policy in the United States that allowed the government and companies to deny services, like insurance and healthcare, to specific communities based on how “risky” they were¹⁰. Risk became associated with racial characteristics as communities of color experienced significantly higher rates of healthcare and credit denial, resulting in racist housing policies and segregation, which has lasting effects today, such as in gerrymandering (Badger). As such, the stabilization of identity through Western grammars is necessary for the state to create calculations of risk and to instill hierarchies of power.

To perfect this process, the state must maximize transparency to create more efficient and accurate predictions. This is done by using writing to create simulations through expanded warfare (Öberg; Bifo). According to Dan Öberg, transparency ensures that the “global battlefield expands through the operational coding of a military architecture which constantly aims to make space and time a derivate of an operational planning model” (1140). As such, warfare no longer exists purely in physical space, but instead manifests in logistics, such as in war rooms for military planning. Here, war is literally simulated on hypothetical battlefields to calculate the most effective and efficient means of eradicating the non-Human enemy. Western grammars thus become a tool by which warfare expands into simulations; by creating economies of difference, writing transforms bodies into intelligible datapoints on an information grid. Intervention becomes both a condition and result of predictions as intervention not only unveils more data about international actors and better enables Western surveillance, but also necessitates preemptive genocide to prevent the emergence potential threats to the West, such as in counter-terror operations performed in Afghanistan and Iraq that resulted (and continue to result) in thousands of deaths (Gaonkar; Öberg). Through the expansion of the surveillance state, the “international” and “domestic” come to signify not distinct political spheres, but entangled networks. Interventions in the Middle East are indicative of how the carceral state is exported globally as the United States comes to police the world. As such, the United States police force and military are not distinct institutions, but entwined assemblages of the Western war machine designed to eradicate the non-Human.

**
together we
wandered
moments of time
of past
of present
of future
danced by
intertwined, like us, as
one
**

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^[10] This is, however, not to say that redlining no longer exists withing the United States; rather, while the formal policy is no longer in place, health insurance companies, banks, and other institutions rely heavily on racialized notions of “risk” to determine which bodies are/not worthy of investment, security, etc. (Puar “Prognosis”).