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

Abolitionist Pedagogies and the Disruption of the Human

[T]he will to ignorance, the joyful wisdom, must also be prepared to rejoice in uncertainty, to rejoice in and even—to will the reversal of all values that might have come to seem untenable. –Spivak, pp. xlix

In the following section, I argue that abolition, as a political and epistemological praxis, is inherently unpredictable and thus destabilizes the category of the Human. First, I focus on how abolitionism is unpredictable, and thus unintelligible, to the carceral state. As I argued above, rationality is an idealized characteristic of the Human as it allows the West to maximize its ability to predict the actions of actors. Affect, however, is unpredictable and incapable of being captured linguistically or temporally by Western grammars. Abolitionist movements are driven, at least in part, by affect in two ways: desires and interpersonal relationships. In terms of desire, abolitionism is sustained by “envisioning and ultimately constructing ‘a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscape of our society’” (Rodriguez “Disorientation” 7). As such, abolition is always already tied to affects of rage, sorrow, and hope for futures oppositional to Western grammars and the Human. By imbuing multiple psyches and memories with common affective and political goals, abolitionists evade and disrupt rhetorical and temporal capture. The West’s fear of radical political collectives, including abolitionists, is thus not without merit as they hold the means to unravel the grid by which the carceral state sustains itself, both discursively and epistemologically, but also through material resistance and protests on the streets.

In tandem with desires, abolitionist affects manifest in relationality through non-Western kinship formations. In For the Children, Erica Meiners writes, “Across the world people are imagining and building other forms of community and accountability…sharing and proliferating tools and engagements continues to be transformative” (21). Movements like INCITE!, the Black Panthers, and the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective have, and continue to, move away from carceral punishment as a paradigm, instead focusing on transformative justice and community accountability (Palacios). For the purposes of this project, I use Lena Palacios’s explanation of transformative justice, a praxis that “seeks to develop strategies to address intimate, interpersonal, community, and structural violence from a political organizing and movement-building perspective in order to move beyond state-imposed, institutionalized criminal legal and punishment systems and professionalized social services” (94). As such, abolition is geared towards developing communities with strong interpersonal ties to ensure that when violence does occur, carcerally-driven, punitive punishment is not the automatic response. Instead, collectives center support, healing, and intervention to challenge and help individuals unlearn racist and misogynistic practices and beliefs while also centering the voices and desires of survivors. In this way, abolitionists imbue grammars and memory with affect to undermine Western power dynamics, proving that writing and affect are not oppositional but rather co-constitutive and intertwined systems.

Transformative justice also disrupts the fixation on trauma by the Western media and judiciary. As I argued previously, civil society thrives on the consumption and circulation of narratives of suffering, making pain an intrinsic condition of being for racialized bodies, particularly women of color (Weheliye). Transformative justice, as one avenue for abolitionism, “shift[s] our collective gaze away from an overwhelming focus on a liberal politics of recognition and toward radical, resurgent alternatives to the carceral state” (Palacios 95). Rather than placing survivors on trial, a process that almost always re-traumatizes and exposes them to more violence, transformative justice centers healing. The judiciary forces survivors to prove they suffered sufficiently to win cases, functioning as a politics of recognition. Empirically, since women of color, particularly Black and Indigenous women, are constructed as non-Human, their suffering is unintelligible to legal enterprises. Instead of centering Humanist interpretations of pain through recognition, abolitionists refuse the circulation of affect-as-capital under semiocapitalism to forefront alternatives to the carceral state.

Abolitionist collectives are also examples of building kinship formations outside of the nuclear family. Spillers writes that, under Western grammars, family is forced “to modify itself when it does not mean family of the ‘master,’ or dominant enclave. It is this rhetorical and symbolic move that declares primacy over any other human and social claim, and in that political order of things, ‘kin,’ just as gender formation, has no decisive legal or social efficacy” (75). In civil society, family is coded into intelligibility based on social and political recognition through blood relations, marriage, or guardianship, all of which rely on legal documentation and recognition. Communalism, such as in abolitionist collectives, is thus an unintelligible framework of making kin outside of politically coherent family structures. While this is not to say that abolitionist movements are perfect in their structure or politics, it does demonstrate that the inscription of nuclear family ideals occurs through the circulation of Western grammars across society. As such, these collectives disrupt the carceral state’s matrix of intelligibility by refusing normative kinship formations that are integral in sustaining the Human.

The second way abolitionism undermines modernity is by distorting Western temporality. Rather than theorizing temporality as linear or teleological, Palacios argues that “locating transformative justice feminism as process or praxis, rather than as something already existing or accomplished, allows it to remain a contradictory, unfinished, and ambiguous political project that rejects final solutions and ideological purity” (95). This, coupled with Rodriguez’s understanding of abolitionism as built on “genealogies of freedom,” shows how abolition is an ateleological project, much like writing itself (“Racial/Colonial” 810). As a perpetually incomplete and evolving political and epistemological praxis, abolition reads the past, present, and future as co-imbricated rather than distinct temporal zones. The past, present, and future are thus constantly affecting each other; developing new understandings and relationships to the past creates different interpretations of the present and informs evolving goals and visions for future changes and communities. Since abolition emerges as an ateleological and unfinished project, it is unpredictable to the carceral state. Western grammars are incapable of comprehending or articulating the project of abolition, a praxis that cannot be conscripted into the political matrix. According to Franco “Bifo” Berardi, the way out from the symbolic order exists in “you, the unpredictable” (“Game”). In a system that thrives on predictability and preemption, the Human can only be undermined by inducers of chaos, individuals and collectives that cannot be mapped into simulations of future chains of events or categorized in discrete subject positions.

This is not, however, an argument on “transcending” the Human through affect or writing. Rather, this is an interrogation of how Western grammars, as semiotics, come to stabilize anti-Black and carceral institutions. As King argues, “there are often reversals of the order and hierarchies of structural oppositions; the reversals fail to actually overcome and annihilate the need and desire for structural opposition as an actual order of knowledge” (177). Western grammars, then, evolve to incorporate bodies previously considered non-Human into the symbolic order, such as in how non-Black people of color often aspire to Whiteness by conforming to anti-Black norms of respectability; simultaneously, the Human requires the continuation of an exterior to define itself against. Even as new populations are marked as subjects under the nation-state, Black and Indigenous death remains a defining characteristic of civil society. However, as writing creates economies of difference to map identity into discrete zones, using Western grammars as a locus of analysis need not fall into the trap King isolates. Instead, abolition is oriented towards the eradication of hierarchies of difference themselves rather than transcendence or assimilation.

**
alone, we are lost
together we find fleeting moments of
freedom
conjoined with memory
with rage
with sorrow
with hope
to bring us
side by side
as we create
the impossible
**