Abstract
Solitary confinement has become one of the most visible carceral practices in mainstream American media in recent years. It has come to serve as a fulcrum for a variety of critiques of mass incarceration: from critiques of the effects of prison on mental health, to those that highlight the racial imbalances that seep into every step of the criminal justice system from police stops to sentencing, to critiques of the living conditions within modern prisons. In writing Solitary Confinement, Lisa Guenther plays a critical role not just in advancing these critiques but also in probing why American society clings so insistently to punishment for its moral and political self-understanding. Her account is limpidly written and brilliantly argued. For all that Solitary Confinement offers a searing account of the dehumanization of solitary confinement, it also is a book of philosophy that returns its readers to the question of what it means to be human and to face the challenges of an “elementary living-together with others.”
Guenther’s book opens with a breathtakingly direct claim: “There are many ways to destroy a person, but one of the simplest and most devastating is through prolonged solitary confinement” (xi). In the hands of a less deft thinker and writer, such an opening could easily become sentimental or polemical. Instead, Guenther uses this flat observation to inquire into how, exactly, human society hangs together and (more implicitly) how severing those threads reverberates beyond the prison walls. The organizing figure for these questions is that of the hinge: “In the context of this inquiry, ‘becoming unhinged’ is not just a colloquial expression; rather, it is a precise phenomenological description of what happens when the articulated joints of our embodied, inter-relational subjectivity are broken apart. […] The very possibility of being broken in this way suggests that we are not simply atomistic individuals but rather hinged subjects who can become unhinged when the concrete experience of other embodied subjects is denied for too long” (xii). Selfhood, as it turns out, requires more than coherent and cohesive individuality; it requires sustained moments of contact and circulation with and among others. Subjectivity is actually a hinged subjectivity that can be sustained only in relation to others.
Even as this insight is disarmingly simple, it serves as a gentle rebuke to those thinkers who have become enmeshed in epistemological debates about the terms of subjectivity; to claims of its decentering, social construction, or false essentialism; or to those faint reports of the possible demise of the subject. Across these debates, a more straightforward point has been lost: namely, that humans experience the world through the interconnections that are housed in their subjectivity. Humans make claims, take responsibility, defend lives, and even take lives as subjects, however socially entangled these subject-positions must be. By reading the tradition of phenomenology through Orlando Patterson’s concept of social death, Guenther is able to develop a method of critical phenomenology that begins at the limits of lived experience (xxiii). This method allows Guenther to focus on the interconnected obligations that “create and sustain social personhood” as well as a “meaning of personhood [that] is not fully captured by legal constructions and destructions” associated with being (merely) dead to the law (xx). Such a method permits Guenther to step outside the carceral logic—at once institutional and philosophical—that seeks to define prisoners through isolation and forced individuation. Guenther’s presumption here is that the isolation of solitary confinement offers an analogous context in which to evaluate the effects of philosophically insisting on the containment of personhood to the individual. Guenther can thus recover the experience and value of social phenomena, as well as the effects of their absence, without theorizing from some putative account of an ideal society. Guenther’s critical phenomenological perspective inadvertently reveals the extent to which these presumptions of moral innocence are deeply embedded in American social imagination. Prisoners are figured as “ghosts” whose spectral existence allows them to speak and act but without influence on the social world (xxvii).
Although these twin trajectories of incarceration and phenomenology give Solitary Confinement a number of moving parts, the book is very elegantly organized. The book’s three parts follow the chronology of incarceration from early penitentiary systems, to the modern prison, to contemporary supermax prisons. Each part also tackles a different set of philosophical resources. Part I moves from a critique of Husserl’s monadism and its reliance on transcendental consciousness, to those thinkers (Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Frantz Fanon) whose work treats criminalized racial embodiment as a historically specific lived experience. Here Guenther argues that a concrete sense of personhood relies on embodied relations to others sharing that social world. Part II expands this preliminary ground for critical phenomenology by using Merleau-Ponty to explore intercorporeality and the ontological structure of social existence that is so undermined by the social and sensory deprivations of solitary confinement. Each chapter begins with a problem derived from incarceration and then returns to phenomenology to explore what holds that problem in place and what it reveals about human interactions. Along the way, it traces the history of the 20th century prison and its effects on penal policy, with specific attention to the factory farm and the supermax prison. Finally, in Part III, Guenther deepens her analysis of the supermax prison. She turns to Levinas to analyze the unbearable burden of being that comes from being reduced to a relation with impersonal existence. The thinness of human relations in supermax prisons ought to call forth an ethical responsibility and political solidarity from those on the outside. Refusal of such a call is a refusal of accountability.
The real strength of Guenther’s book lies in its ability to connect solitary confinement to the existential needs of humans both inside and outside prison. The implications of such a reading are tremendous. Although Foucault remains at the margins of Solitary Confinement, his work on punishment and prisons similarly locates punishment at the heart of the social contract. Punishment constitutes the conditions of society, the terms of its exclusions, and the borderlands of the criminal and marginalized. Abolishing the ills of incarceration requires more than prison reform or even the diminution of the prison’s role as social institution; it requires undoing and rewriting the terms of any social contract. For both Foucault and Guenther, such undoing and rewriting would require rethinking the terms of agency and social organization.
At times, then, one wishes to hear more from the prisoners in Solitary Confinement. Guenther acknowledges the complexity of writing about prison while on the “outside” as well as the relative privilege of many of those whose testimonies do have a place on the book’s pages (xiv). However, in this book prison remains a site that is primarily destructive and debilitating. Guenther acknowledges the sheer ingenuity of prisoners who transform everyday objects even while resisting objectification themselves (187–89). Yet these accounts leave the reader wondering whether other transformations—of social interactions or existential bonds, for example—also occur. The deprivations of prison life suggest that many of these transformations may be distortionary because prisoners are forced into an intense, forced relationality premised on surveillance and control (147–53). Yet prisons are also sites with their own sociality – a sociality not exhaustively defined by deprivation relative to the outside. Such sociality would seem to complicate any critical phenomenology, and perhaps to offer the starting point for rethinking modern punitive society.
Likewise, the back-and-forth between prison and “outside” raises questions about the entwinement of carceral and colonial (or slave-holding) logics. For example, Chapter 2, titled “The Racialization of Criminality and the Criminalization of Race,” tracks the move from plantation slavery to plantation prisons and then the “forced idleness” of supermax prisons (41). What broader logics of labor, property, theft, and dependency make possible this fungibility of socioeconomic systems? And what explains the investments—at once psychological, political, and existential—that sustain these systems? What might be the conditions of their undoing? At times, Guenther hints at possible political responses to specifically carceral logics, but these pull her account in different directions. For example, in discussing the activist work of Mothers Recovering Our Children (or Mothers ROC), Guenther describes their work as “engender[ing] a new sense of humanism that is rooted in the particular struggles of decolonizing peoples, but it expands the scope of solidarity to include anyone who wants to join in the struggle, and ultimately to anyone at all” (60). Such inclusive humanist politics gains political potency through the specificity of caring for specific mothers and children, and from recognizing that such care needs broad social participation. This participation, however, seems less radical than the one proposed a page later, when Guenther uses the language of prison abolition to advocate “the creation of new ways of thinking, seeing, feeling, speaking, and experiencing a world that is shared in common with all other human […] beings” (61). With this vision of abolition, Guenther more radically tackles the process of revivification after social death, a process that necessitates not just the inclusion of former prisoners in society, but also a new sensory experience and one that engenders the transvaluation of the very bonds of social kinship. If the first example of activism suggests a care rooted in empathy and political mobilization, then the second requires a sweeping change of socially lived experience.
How might such radical change proceed? In answering this question, the concept of “hinged subjectivity” may reach its limits. After all, it captures the social, ontological, and perhaps political conditions necessary for a meaningful personhood to thrive, but it can only speak indirectly to the solid institutions, hierarchies, and practices that are the stolid structures joined by these “hinges.” If the organization of the book enacts the brilliant rhetorical effect of making solitary confinement inhuman without recourse to essentialist claims about humanity, it leaves readers with a clearer impression of the destruction to individuals than it does of which politics, or political order, might be most responsive. And indeed, pressing such abolitionist questions at this level of generality could only happen after the book’s powerful arguments, which make proposals for prison reform appear paltry and inadequate. The breadth of the challenge posed by social death thus leaves readers haunted by the deeper question of how modern American society, at least, has come to be fundamentally organized not just through prisons but also through conceptions of guilt and innocence. Reforming or even abolishing the institution of the prison is not enough. As Guenther writes, “what we need is rather collective resistance and revolution at the scene of the ‘crime’ itself” (61). Primal scenes of punishment need to be revisited, worked through, and surpassed.
Ultimately, Guenther’s Solitary Confinement is a remarkable contribution to this project. Its astonishing sweep expands the terrain of philosophical exploration of the social phenomenon of imprisonment. It leaves to readers the task of picking up the threads of inquiry it bequeaths and using these to unravel punishment’s entanglement in modern political and social order. More importantly, it places an ethical demand on readers to seek out the solidarities that will make such genealogical work an emphatically political project.