(This essay was originally written as an assignment for Dr. Heather Hayes’ integrated course “Rhetoric, Incarceration, and Civic Engagement (RHET 270)” in October, 2017. The course was taught each week at the Washington State Penitentiary (WSP) in Walla Walla, Washington, and composed evenly of students incarcerated at WSP and students who live at Whitman College.)
During our class meeting last Tuesday night, an incarcerated student suggested that his group focus on anarchy as their topic for our final town hall presentation, and as a solution for the egregious wrongs of mass incarceration. His comment met with raucous laughter, both from Whitman and incarcerated classmates alike. In this essay, I aim to ask after the rhetorical conditions that make anarchy laughable. How is it that, amidst a group of students who are nearly univocally opposed to the current system of mass incarceration in America, revolutionary proposals become occasions for laughter rather than serious consideration? Framing my argument by way of Foucault’s “The Order of Discourse,” I will undergo an analysis of the rhetoric employed by Angela Davis and Roger Lancaster in their respective works Are Prisons Obsolete? and “How to End Mass Incarceration,” arguing that revolution becomes laughable precisely to the extent that its possibilities become covered over and pushed aside within contemporary discursive fields. That is, revolution remains a material impossibility so long as it remains a discursive implausibility. Our task emerges then, to use Davis’ language, as the imperative to “creatively explor[e] new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as the major anchor,” laying the rhetorical ground for prison abolition and revolt against the carceral state even as we work to reform and ameliorate the pressing ethical concerns that mass incarceration confronts us with today (Davis 21).
In order to better understand the conditions which relegate talk of revolution to the arena of comedy, it will first be necessary to generate a provisional and preliminary understanding of discourse’s relation to political endeavors in general. Here, Foucault’s 1970 lecture, “The Order of Discourse,” becomes useful insofar as he posits discourse to be “not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but … the thing for which and by which there is struggle.” In other words, “discourse is the power which is to be seized” (Foucault 52-53). Discourse possesses this power precisely because it operates by “procedures of exclusion” which determine — within a given historical, metaphysical and social horizon — whether or not speech will count as truthful, rational, compelling, persuasive, or legitimate (ibid.). Foucault identifies numerous processes which situate speech within these metrics, and, provocatively, suggests that recognizing the validity and efficacy of these processes entails suspending our own desires to judge speech by these metrics. The metrics themselves, as produced by discourse, do not hold any ‘substantial,’ ‘innate,’ or ‘eternal’ reality, but instead persist immanently within the horizon delimited by discourse itself. Foucault writes, “discourse is little more than the gleaming of a truth in the process of being born to its own gaze…. In this way, discourse is annulled in its reality and put at the disposal of the signifier” (Foucault 66).
All of this, of course, also applies to the very schema which Foucault develops: no appeals to truth or to an outside of discourse can have any meaning or intelligibility except within the confines of discursive reality itself. This is also to say that there is no unfettered access to material reality except through discursive reality. Material reality remains inextricably tied to the words we use to describe it. “It is always at the level of materiality that [the discursive event] takes effect,” Foucault insists. “It has its locus and it consists in the relation, the coexistence, the dispersion, the overlapping, the accumulation, and the selection of material elements” (Foucault 69).
Rarefied and abstract though all this may seem, we can understand the implications of Foucault’s theory more concretely by applying it to the current rhetoric used to discuss issues of mass incarceration in America. In her influential work of anti-prison literature Are Prisons Obsolete? scholar Angela Davis writes that “the prison is considered an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives,” and that the “natural reaction is to assume that prison activists — even those who consciously refer to themselves as ‘antiprison activists’ — are simply trying to ameliorate prison conditions” (Davis 9). The senses of ‘natural,’ ‘permanent,’ and ‘inevitable’ that Davis critically refers to here constitute paradigmatic examples of Foucault’s notion of the order of discourse: the prison appears as an ‘inevitable’ feature of our society because it has been discursively reified as a ‘necessity’ for centuries. Within the imbricated discursive fields which constitute (and continue to constitute) the material reality of mass incarceration, the existence of prisons is taken for granted, and the discursive hegemony meticulously suppresses the emergence of alternative possibilities. Davis writes, “[the prison] has become so much a part of our lives that it requires a great feat of imagination to envision life beyond the prison” (Davis 19). For purposes of brevity in this essay, it will not be my goal to elaborate the various reasons that I — along with Davis — believe prisons to be obsolete. The carefully catalogued empirical evidence compiled in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, as well as Davis’ own arguments, demonstrate the brutal and anachronistic nature of the prison for me beyond the necessity of restating it here. Instead, the more compelling question for me emerges in wondering how to tweak and agitate discursive and material conditions in order to move towards the actual abolition of the carceral state.
Although Davis suggests that some recent leftist discourse has (thankfully) moved towards the elaboration of prison reform possibilities, she also suggests that these elaborations have “restrict[ed] discussion to the question of prison reform” without ever moving beyond reform to the question of abolition and revolution (Davis 20). Unfortunately, in her introduction at least, Davis offers few rhetorical clues as to what the discussion beyond reform might look like: though she suggests that “restorative rather than punitive justice,” the decriminalization of drug use and sex work, and attempts to ameliorate “social and economic conditions” may help make a world without prisons possible, she falls short of articulating what this world might look like in more precise terms. Instead, she prescribes that we continue “creatively exploring new terrains of justice,” imagining and articulating this world in order that it may eventually become possible (Davis 21).
Here, Roger Lancaster’s analysis becomes useful insofar as it (for the most part) affirms Davis’ project while deploying a more sobering rhetorical description of the present discursive reality. Lancaster writes, “rather than call for the complete abolition of prisons — a policy unlikely to win broad public support — the American left should fight to introduce [expressly rehabilitative] conditions into our penal system. We should not strive for pie-in-the-sky imaginings but for working models already achieved [elsewhere]” (Lancaster 12). Because the American discursive hegemony insists so fervently upon the ‘naturalness’ and ‘inevitability’ of the prison, current efforts to abolish it will be difficult at best and wastes of time at worst. Lancaster’s critique of Davis here — that she is engaged in ‘pie-in-the-sky imaginings’ — nevertheless stings, and seems to present a stronger condemnation of Davis than the the thrust of his overall analysis otherwise indicates. In Lancaster’s writing, there is little to suggest that we ought not continue to make Davis’ ‘imaginings’ more concrete, to further articulate the discursive possibilities for abolition. Rather than refuting Davis, Lancaster seems to suggest that reform cannot wait for these imaginings to take place. We cannot consign the hope for a better future over to the failures of contemporary prison abolition movements, but instead ought to seek substantial legislative and judicial reforms in the short term. He writes, “institutions become ‘obsolete’ only when more effective and more progressive alternatives become available.” Because “we see no such emergent institutions on the horizon today that might render prisons a thing of the past,” we ought to move towards the more concretely realized models presented by “criminal justice systems that have continued reforming, modulating, humanizing, shrinking and decentralizing the functions of the prison” (Lancaster 12).
As much as Lancaster’s response to Davis may come across as stodgy, pessimistic or ‘unhip,’ by Foucault’s reasoning he is certainly correct to point towards the failures of Davis’ project insofar as it offers few short term solutions and instead directs critical attention further down the road, towards unexplored “terrains of justice.” If discourse allows us access to reality and shapes it, then it becomes apparent that something which is not yet sayable or fully articulable under present discursive conditions still remains outside of the realm of material feasibility. That is, insofar as the prison abolition movement fails to lay out in intricate specificity what a world without prisons might look like, and what precise steps we must take in order to move from this world to that one — including radically altering the brutal and oppressive aspects of the current discursive hegemony — it will remain unsuccessful. The task at hand then, taking our cue from both Lancaster and Davis, is to more fully articulate a world without prisons, even while working to implement reforms in the short term. How can we work to make drug treatment available to incarcerated populations, even as we try to imagine how to broadly decriminalize drug use in the mean time? How can we install expressly rehabilitative aims into the prison system, even as we seek to develop and deploy mechanisms for effectively addressing social and economic factors which produce higher crime rates? How can we work to alter dominant societal perceptions and discursive understandings of the prison today so that more ethical possibilities can begin to be fully realized tomorrow?
These new terrains provide fertile ground for those invested in redressing the wrongs of the carceral state. And as Foucault’s schema shows us, these terrains are as broad as discourse itself: theorists, scholars, activists, politicians, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and many more all have a tremendous amount of work to do in order to counter the current discursive hegemony, making the unsayable sayable, making the laughable a legitimate possibility. In this way, we can move towards a vision of political action which is both lived and futural, and avoid the pitfalls of a political ethos which demands we commit ourselves wholesale to one vision of a political project, achieving coalitional closure before action can begin. Rather than hold out for a reality — which is already to say a discursive reality — in which abolition presents itself as a univocal political will, we should instead acknowledge that with every word spoken and heard, we are already beginning. Every utterance already effects change, often in ways we cannot anticipate. Our responsibility is to understand this, both in the short term and in the long term, and not to lose the forest for the trees, working constantly to maintain our ethical bearings, to make revolution possible, and to end mass incarceration in America.
WORKS CITED:
Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete?. Penguin, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. “The Order of Discourse.” Untying the Poststructuralist Text, edited by Robert Young, Routledge, 1981, pp. 51-78.
Lancaster, Roger. “How To End Mass Incarceration.” Jacobin, 18 Aug. 2017, jacobinmag.com/ 2017/08/mass-incarceration-prison-abolition-policing. Accessed 20 Oct 2017.
Collected Writings of Nolan Bishop 