“Grammatology in the Carceral State: Writing, the Human, and Abolitionist Pedagogies”
by Allegro Wang | Xchanges 15.2, Fall 2020
Contents
Introduction: The Human and an Economy of Exchange
Rhetoric and the Reproduction of the Human
The Entanglement of Writing, the Human, and Temporality in Civil Society
Writing and the Ontologization of Origins
Introduction: The Human and an Economy of Exchange
[E]conomy is not a reconciliation of opposites, but rather a maintaining of disjunction. Identity constituted by difference is economy. In Freud’s world, a train of thought is sustained by its opposite, a unit of meaning that contains the possibility of its opposite. –Spivak, pp. lxiii
In the above quote, Gayatri Spivak highlights the relationship between identity and economics as constructed by a Derridean understanding of writing. In the preface to her translation of Of Grammatology, she argues that Jacques Derrida conceptualizes writing as “the dream-content—a paradigm of the entire memory-work of the psyche—[that] ‘is given…in a picture-[not phonetic] script’…what we think of as ‘perception’ is always already an inscription” (lix-lx). As such, writing and rhetoric extend beyond intelligible inscriptions and, instead, encompass the overall process of signification, i.e. how signs are attached to signifiers and ascribed meaning in society. In this essay, I argue that writing, as Derrida articulates it, is integral in the production and maintenance of the anti-Black and carceral category of the Human as the ideal Western subject. I further contend that abolitionist pedagogies1 and epistemologies are one means by which Western grammars2 can be disrupted. Specifically, signification produces an economy of difference in which the Self is defined by its opposition, i.e. what it is not; thus, the Human is white, cis, male, heterosexual, middle-class, and able-bodied because the Other is not (Cacho; Weheliye; Derrida). The assignation of meaning to signs becomes a necessity in categorizing and regulating the population, rendering bodies as intelligible datapoints in the West3.
To demonstrate how signification becomes a regulatory process, I argue that rhetoric produces identarian capture by dictating who can/cannot be an intelligible subject under the carceral state. Blackness, as a visual and rhetorical signifier, is always already associated with guilt and criminality in civil society4 (Gramsci; Weheliye). As such, Blackness is framed as both threatening to and deviating from the Human, justifying systems like mass incarceration and police brutality. By reading Hortense Spillers and Jacques Derrida in conversation, I demonstrate how particular grammars are marked as illegible in the West, unable to be recognized as coherent or legitimate memory-work or script5. Illegibility is a necessity for the West to define its exterior by demarcating which bodies and grammars are always already threatening to the position of the Human.
In the process of circulating and producing legitimate lexicons, writing and the Human are entangled with temporality. I demonstrate this by reading Derrida’s interpretation of writing and forgetfulness, in a Freudian lens, in conjunction with Alexander Weheliye’s explanation of the Human based on critical Black race-radical feminist theories from Habeus Viscus. By doing so, I argue that, in the West, memory-work is partially sustained by historical amnesia, an intentional forgetting of past events to defer change, particularly for settler colonialism and the slave trade, which bleeds into the present under the carceral state in systems like the prison-industrial-complex (PIC)6 (Davis; Dillon). Through historical amnesia, Western institutions divorce themselves from past foundational violences to frame themselves as benevolent actors who hold no accountability as the past, present, and future are constructed as distinct temporal zones. The West “forgets” its basis in chattel slavery and colonial genocide to maintain a façade of civilizational progress. In tandem with historical amnesia, I argue that linear Western temporality turns the future into a zone of safety for Western subjects. As such, writing is integral in the production of static identity categories for management, surveillance, and risk calculus (Gaonkar; Puar; Öberg; Bifo). The ability to simulate, predict, and preempt potential threats thus hinges on accurate information, necessitating the expansion of carceral systems, such as the police, PIC, and legal doctrine designed to punish and surveil unintelligible, and inherently threatening, bodies (Rodriguez “Racial/Colonial”; Dillon; Weheliye). This occurs not only domestically, but also internationally through expanded warfare to gain access to increasing amounts of datapoints and information.
The ability to simulate and predict warfare through the information economy necessitates establishing an origin in the teleology of Western grammars. As such, I argue that writing comes to function within a primitive/brink figuration by building on J. Rosenberg’s article, “The Molecularization of Sexuality.” 4Specifically, writing is a perpetual process of (re)signification that functions simultaneously as the beginning, present, and endpoint of signs. The West attempts to stabilize the fluidity of writing by establishing an origin of Western grammars in the slave trade as a foundational system wherein Black bodies were reduced to mere flesh, the antithesis of the Human (Spillers). In tandem with this originary moment, rhetoric came to be structured by a transcendence of the Human itself (a post-Human enterprise). Through semiotics, Whiteness becomes the universal norm and presumed subject of writing as a marker of the Human while simultaneously moving beyond the political limits of Human agency (King). Under racial and carceral capitalism, the primitive/brink figuration of writing is used to stabilize the Human as an abstraction of temporality that contributes to the drive for accumulation (Rosenberg).
As a response to racial and carceral capitalism, I argue that abolition, as a political praxis, builds alternative grammars and modes of relationality. I do so by expanding on two primary points. First, abolition is necessarily affective as a communal and interpersonal project oriented towards the end of carceral systems (Rodriguez “Disorientation”). The production of affective ties between individuals, and uses of affects, such as rage, sorrow, and hope for building different futures, are unintelligible to Western grammars. I contend that, in the construction of the Human, the West idealizes rationality and a divestment from affect as affect is unpredictable and transcends Western writing (Shanks). As such, abolition’s imbuing of memory-work and political praxes with affect creates a different kind of writing, one that is unintelligible to civil society and deconstructs the Human.
Abolition further disrupts the Human through non-linear temporality. Specifically, Dylan Rodriguez writes that abolition is built on “genealogies of freedom struggle that emerge in direct, radical confrontation with genocidal and protogenocidal regimes: lineages of political intellectual creativity and organized, collective (and at times revolutionary) insurgency that have established the foundations on which people have relied to build life-sustaining movements” (“Racial/Colonial” 810). As a result, abolitionist movements and collectivities utilize historical memory to inform present struggles and develop visions of different futures. In the process, abolitionism disrupts Western temporality by reading the past, present, and future as co-imbricated. Through constantly evolving interpretations of the past, present, and future, abolitionism evades temporal and rhetorical capture by Western simulations of threats and preemption, disrupting the Western construction of the Human (Bifo). In this process, abolitionism creates alternative grammars that are imbued with affect and historical memory to guide struggles for a better future.
**
last night i dreamt
of worlds, far away
where we drifted together
amongst galaxies, swirling red and blue
colors and lights brighter
than i'd ever seen7
**
[1] Abolition is an expansion of prison abolition, which Critical Resistance, a national organization, defines as “a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment” (“What”). Erica Meiners builds on this definition to frame abolitionism as a process that “involves the potentially more challenging work to build up networks, sites, and languages that facilitate self-determination and liberation. This necessitates moving away from the site of the prison to critically engage conceptions such as safety and justice, as well as the wider frames and artifacts that serve as their condition of possibility” (19).
[2] The term “grammar,” for this paper, encompasses the circulation of signs and signifiers, both rhetorical and otherwise. Western grammars, then, describes how Western systems of knowledge instill and propagate idealized modes of Being through rhetorical, affective, and mediatic exchange.
[3] While the West can be defined or understood in geographic terms, i.e. the United States, Canada, and European countries, the West, here, will refer to Western ideologies (Weheliye). This is because while some bodies may be in the geographic West, they are not necessarily read as Western or assimilated into infrastructures of capitalism, racism, and so on. Western ideologies, then, encapsulate the overarching systems of power that Western empires rely on to sustain themselves (Wang).
[4] Here, civil society is based on Antonio Gramsci’s definition of civil society, one of two “superstructural levels” that relates individuals to the “world of production,” the other level being “‘political society’ or ‘the State’” (12). Specifically, he argues that civil society is “the ensemble of organisms commonly called ‘private,’” and intertwines with political society to form “the function of ‘hegemony’ which the dominant group exercises throughout society” (12).
[5] Here, the term “memory-work” is used to describe the kinds of knowledge and impulses that operate within our psyches. In the circulation of signs and signifiers, we are indoctrinated into Westernized modes of thinking and Being that come to represent memory-work under Empire. However, as a question of the psyche informed by relationality and knowledge production, memory-work is in a perpetual process of deconstruction and reconstruction (Derrida).
[6] For the purposes of this paper, I use Angela Davis’ definition of the prison-industrial-complex as a term that refers to how “the proliferation of prisons and prisoners is…linked to larger economic and political structures and ideologies,” particularly a binary of guilt/innocence (2).
[7] The poems throughout this piece are inspired by Jackie Wang’s final chapter in Carceral Capitalism as she imagines prison abolition through numerous styles of writing. For me, the stars, as a locus of theorizing abolition, invokes a zone of liminality. The stars, from where we came and where we inevitably all return, are simultaneously all-encompassing and not-yet here, much like abolition and writing as ateloeolgical projects in a constant process of Becoming.