Captivity,Citizenship,and the Ethics of Otherwise in the Society-of-Captives Thesis

When psychiatrically disordered convicts are placed in long-term disciplinary isolation, how and for whom does this practice exhibit courage, compassion, and generosity? When criminally adjudicated sex offenders are subsequently subjected to protracted civil commitment followed by multiple forms of communal inspection and monitoring, how and for whom is dignity affirmed, stigma averted, and healing advanced? When cognitively impaired juveniles are waived to the adult system, found competent to stand trial, and sentenced and punished accordingly, what version of nobility is celebrated and on whom is this goodness bestowed?

In his article titled “Managing Risk and Marginalizing Identities: On the Society-of-Captives Thesis and the Harm of Social Dis-ease,” Bruce Arrigo presents in succinct form an argument that is central to his recent volume, The Ethics of Total Confinement: A Critique of Madness, Citizenship, and Social Justice (with Heather Bersot and Brian Sellers), and earlier work with Dragan Milovanovic in Revolution in Penology: Rethinking the Society of Captives. This research provides a new, sharply critical framework from which to consider captivity not simply in the lives of the imprisoned but in the context of all actors, practices, discourses, and systems that contribute and are thereby caught in the “society-of-captives,” representative of a “totalizing madness” that is constitutive of the “ultramodern condition” (p. 673).

The society-of-captives thesis is auspicious in its theoretical foundations, spanning classical sociological treatments of life in prison (Goffman, 1961; Sykes, 1958), including deficit and desistance models, to a wide range of contemporary critical theory (humanism, Freudianism, the Frankfurt School, postmodernism, hyper-realism, and more). This account maps the centrality of intersections of citizenship, madness, risk, harm, power, bad faith, closure, and praxis, an account that demands an intensive rethinking and reworking of the forces of intensification that culminate in penal harm. At the heart of this condition are symbolic (aesthetic), linguistic (epistemological), material (ethical), and cultural (ontological) forces that regulate and intensify the management of difference, defined as “the social person being human and doing humanness differently” (p. 673). These regulatory forces materialize most visibly in institutional techniques of risk management in law, psychiatry, penology, social work, and other areas of expertise that are built upon “forces of fear and desperation” and function to “reduce/repress expressions of difference to sameness” (p. 673). These activities are defined by Arrigo as “expressions of harm, and they extend to and reach within those who are confined, those who treat and heal the kept, those who educate and legislate about them, and those who observe (often passively and complacently) captivity’s unfolding” (p. 673). “Under these collective conditions,” Arrigo writes, “humanness is normalized, knowledge about difference is territorialized, the self/society mutuality is homogenized, and dynamic potential is vanquished” (p. 673). In this regard, Arrigo’s thesis spans the universe of penality, marking the manner in which seemingly disparate realms of practice and interaction that create a society of captives ultimately “yields society’s own captivity” (p. 673), extending carcerality to the kept, the keepers, the regulators, and the watchers. No one then is NOT implicated in captivity.

One of the central contributions of this perspective is the argument that the most destructive component of the condition of captivity is the manner in which the most productive and dynamic aspects of human potential, the kind that can only be born of the most painful of lived experiences, are rendered “unimaginable, unspeakable, and uninhabitable” (p. 674). This condition is manifest in efforts at reduction, repression, reification, and restraint that are endemic to the everyday world of corrections: treatment, recovery, and reentry. In all of this, the social person is lost to “unimaginable portraits, captivity narratives, docility in being/doing humanness differently, and negative freedom” (p. 682). As we read in the clinical case anecdote, “On paper, I’m borderline, I’m treatment resistant, I’m difficult, I’m a paranoid schizophrenic, I’m lazy, and I don’t try hard enough” (Johnson, 2013, p. 669). In this way, the society-of-captives is most dangerous in its lack of recognition of other ways of being—the utter destruction of agency and possibility—at the site of the most extreme vulnerability.

As a way out (“revolutionizing,” “the revolution-in-the-making”), Arrigo points toward attention to these capacities and the possibility of difference as a means to move toward commitments that are grounded in a “a mode of being/doing (i.e., a praxis) steeped in a critical cosmopolitan imagination,” a “mindfulness,” a “clinical praxis,” and a “critical reformist agenda in mental health and justice system theory, research, policy, and education” (p. 674). In all of this, there is a stake in a type of being and becoming that oppose images of the self as “axiomatic categories to be contained or controlled . . . fixed or static subject-positions to be finalized . . . expressions of human risk to be assigned the status of lack, deferred and postponed, and made docile” (p. 684). This is an exercise, Arrigo writes, in “virtuous citizenship,” requiring the reconfiguration of the social person as the imagining of “flourishing and excellence,” one, as the epigraph to this commentary indicates, that is attentive to courage, compassion, generosity, dignity, nobility, and goodness. The trick, of course, is wedding this vision to the already foundationally dysfunctional spaces of penality: prisons, mental health settings, juvenile facilities, and beyond. As Arrigo notes,

This imagined, spoken, written, and embodied excellence is the journey through the totalizing madness of captivity’s systemic pathology and harm-generating social dis-ease. Indeed, when fitted to institutional and community-based offender treatment and correctional philosophy, it is, admittedly, a strange and uncharted path. (p. 686)

Arrigo provides three recommendations in the end: (a) to create a space within meaning and practice for diverse ways of being and coexistence—to hold out a place for difference; (b) to give attention to clinical praxis as reflexive mindfulness, attentive to its own harm-generating totalities and negative potentialities; and (c) to privilege a moral philosophy and ethical activism that allows for the unmapped innovations of human productivity and dynamism—a being otherwise as being. He writes,

Thus, activating a journey whose intention is departure (Movement toward inhabiting the path of difference), is a revolution-in-the-making for the in-and-of-society self. Seizing this departure both productively and innovatively anticipates us all. As such, reforming correctional policy and programming as tentatively proposed in this article is but one exemplar of how captivity’s release signifies character’s promise. (p. 688)

Key then is Arrigo’s claim that “investing in this praxis is a journey into captivity’s madness,” whose outcomes will inevitably be emergent, provisional, positional, relational, and, thereby, antithetical to the static image of captivity (p. 674). Nowhere is this more clearly exemplified than in Amy Johnson’s elaboration of her life in the clinical case anecdote. In Johnson’s world, institutions—the nuclear family, hospitals, mental health systems, education, and criminal justice systems—image care and compassion through hierarchy, stratification, and vectors of poverty, class, race, and gender, thereby simply exacerbating her pain and suffering. These forces materialize in the madness of expert discourse and practice where the rampant use of force (restraint, repression, reification) in policing and mental health custody mirrors her original violation: “I went into the hospital looking for understanding support and what I got was rape and abuse” (Johnson, 2013, p. 669).

They too treated my fear as if it, as if I, were a dangerous criminal. They also bum rushed me, jumped me, and restrained me. They too enforced their power when it wasn’t necessary. They too lied about their reasons for using violence. (Johnson, 2013, p. 670)

Raped, tortured, denied, dismissed by those who should have loved her most, by institutions designated to care and provide justice, she writes “through no fault of my own, I was becoming a killer and a rapist” (Johnson, 2013, p. 666). The first step in overturning the “society-of-captives,” one of those mindful moments of unmapped innovation, is simply allowing a statement to begin here in the realm of structural violence without the inevitable follow-up therapeutic, correctional response of responsibilizing the individual. This correctional response must always deny the possibility, the embodied paradox, that “to ‘give in’ to addiction, to the black market, to wrong behaviors, to rape and abuse and violence, is to alleviate the rage and the hurt of being abused and taken advantage of” (Johnson, 2013, p. 667). Totalizing madness, then, is precisely when one is not allowed to say that racism, poverty, and violence overlap in so many ways and at so many levels in one’s most intimate experiences that

now I can only at best guess what reality is. . . And the most I can hope for is agreement between me and life that I will always be in the dark, always wondering what’s real, always second guess myself. This is the end result of a lifetime of abuse. (Johnson, 2013, p. 667)

In this denial of the social person—of biography and history—is the forceful dominance of what Lauren Berlant (2010) calls a “cruel optimism,” “ a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic” (p. 94), but nonetheless continues to be the primary expectation of law, psychology, and justice frameworks.

What we might imagine in its stead, and what Arrigo directs us toward, is a space that allows for complex understandings of victimization and its criminogenic force, as opposed to the linguistic repression of closure. As Johnson (2013) tells her story, “to think that one can ‘recover’ from all that [rape, torture, retraumatization] is delusional on anyone’s part” (p. 667). Rather, an alternative starting point is that,

Abuse is real. The effects of abuse are real. They don’t just disappear. Abuse steals self-esteem, and long term, many repeated abuses, they steal self-esteem permanently. And it is wrong to shame someone for his lack of ability to die from abuse. People like me, we are killers and rapists, we are sociopaths and zombies, we are addicts and alcoholics. We are killers for a reason. And when you stop and listen to my pain for real, it works in your favor, it creates a new experience for me, one with a loving person, with someone who cares, and it helps deflate the rage that would otherwise have me kill. (Johnson, 2013, p. 667, italics added)

Here, victims and perpetrators are constructed and treated as juridical monsters: living corpses, grief-stricken, and volatile hybrids, irreconcilable bodies of threat and bearers of rights, caught between a politics of pity and a politics of risk, moving from suffering beings to dangerous beings to half-dead beings, caught between life and death. And in this all, praxis originates in embodied experience—Johnson’s account points to the way out: “And when you stop and listen to my pain for real,” possibilities materialize. I am reminded, while reading Johnson’s account and Arrigo’s thesis, of Wendy Brown (1995) who writes that one possibility in the culture of wounded attachments is that “the problematic of pain installed at the heart of many contemporary contradictory demands for political recognition” may long for something “more than revenge,” more than death, and that may simply be “the chance to be heard into a certain release, recognized into self-overcoming, incited into possibilities for triumphing over, and hence, losing, itself,” requiring “a radically democratic political culture that can sustain such a project in its midst without being overtaken by it . . . even as we acknowledge the elements of suffering and healing we might be negotiating” (Brown, 1995, pp. 74-75).

In Johnson’s story, we see the totalizing madness of the society-of-captives writ across lived experience and it speaks to an emergent literature on closure, loss, and bereavement in criminal justice. Legal scholar Jodi Madeira (2012) argues in her recent volume Killing McVeigh, a thoughtful map of the experiences of survivors and victims’ families in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, that complex forms of memory work and closure have been systematically denied by culture, particularly by way of the institutions of law and media.

First, closure is most affirmatively not what contemporary culture says it is—absolute finality, in the sense of such colloquial phrases as “over and done with,” “dealt with,” “put behind one’s self,” “let bygones be bygones,” “forgive and forget.” Closure is not a state of being, a quality, or even a realization. If closure exists at all, it must be as a process, a recursive series of adjustments that a self makes in response to external, often institutional, developments. It involves struggles between self and other, embodiment and disembodiment, agency and passivity, speech and silence. This view of closure as a strategic, sense-making process suggests that it not only cannot but should not be exorcised from contemporary culture. (Madeira, 2012, p. xxiii)

Judith Butler (2004) writes similarly on the manner in which grief and mourning are fundamentally social and transformative, echoing Johnson’s account.

There is losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned. One can try to choose it, but it may be that this experience of transformation deconstitutes choice at some level. I do not think, for instance, that one can invoke the Protestant ethic when it comes to loss. Once cannot say, “Oh, I’ll go through loss this way, and that will be the result, and I’ll apply myself to the task, and I’ll endeavor to achieve the resolution of grief that is before me.” I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. One finds oneself fallen. One is exhausted but does not know why. Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing. (Butler, 2004, p. 21)

Furthermore, these complex contours of suffering and loss mark the most troubling foundations of madness and captivity at the level of self and (or self-in-) society. Those who are the targets of the intensification of carceral forces know the markers of carcerality and its foundations of abandonment best—what it means to be left waiting,

to be trapped, tied tightly so I couldn’t move dark so I couldn’t see, naked and cold, with no way to warm myself, with no one responding to my cries of help, the door closed, the lock locked, with no idea if I would get out alive.

And a society that creates these worlds for its most vulnerable is a society, like its captives, that is changed: “It has made me permanently sad. It has changed me. It has made me permanently distant from humanity . . . It can’t be undone. It can only be—cried over, covered up, balanced accordingly against depression” (Johnson, 2013, pp. 668). What constitutes treatment in the society-of-captives succeeds “only in cementing the crippling fear I now live with every day” (p. 670). The correlates of this fear, the by-now classic features of carcerality—despair, loneliness, avoidance, anxiety, panic, terror, isolation, stigma at the level of family, culture, society, and self—leave all “stuck with a fearful attitude and a fearful brain” (p. 671). As Johnson insists, trauma changes the structure—of minds, brains, selves, and societies.

Johnson’s (2013) way out is to recognize that the space of inescapable discomfort, of madness is precisely where she resides. She writes that she must learn to live with “permanent depression,” a world of violence and institutional disregard that manifests as a “dark cloud” that “isn’t going anywhere” (p. 668). A cloud she cannot deny and yet, importantly, for which she refuses to be shamed. She improvises,

though this is not exactly living—this feeling things from a distance—I make it work. I make it work because I have to. Because I am up against a vast depression of loneliness and hurt. I’m up against death. (Johnson, 2013, p. 669)

This is my life. This is what my life consists of today, a dizzying mix of fear and flashbacks, a mix of despair and loneliness and alienation. Unfortunately, I also have lupus, fibromyalgia and sarcoidosis, all systemic and all involve massive amounts of body pains and fatigue. It’s almost like my body is saying is remembering all its hurts, all its violations, on its own. My mind cries in its pain and my body cries its pain. If it weren’t for my incredible self-made spirit, I’d be dead. (p. 671)

Amid the harm of social dis-ease, there is a will to life in the midst of social death—one that Arrigo asks us to aspire toward and make room for, that Johnson must simply cling to because there is no other way when one is trapped tight, with the locks locked and no one heeding one’s cries. We might pose some questions of the two visions of ambiguous hope Arrigo and Johnson provide. What are the structures that undergird the kind of transformation to which Arrigo points—and the structures that prohibit this formation? To invoke reform and revolution from within and without institutions and world systems that are fundamentally dysfunctional is something of a hornet’s nest of problems. Can the human, the humane, materialize in contexts that are fundamentally dehumanizing? And if not, what is to be done with the life that resides and has been lost there? How, as Arrigo recommends, do we privilege a moral philosophy and ethical activism that allows for the unmapped innovations of human productivity and dynamism—at all levels of self and society—within and without the very structures and institutions that drive captivity?

In this sense, it is worthwhile to examine some of the pragmatic language that Arrigo perhaps necessarily invokes but carries with it a series of contradictions. To begin, what are the spaces beyond citizenship, captivity, and racialization that underpin this work? Or can citizenship be a site for immanent subjectivity—for the recognition and acknowledgment of humanness done differently. I suspect it is inevitably bound to sovereignty in a manner that reproduces the bondage of captivity. The practical site for theoretical existence, citizenship always carries with it fantasies of nation-building, the precise space from which difference can have no standing/recognition before the law—or, as Agamben (1998) argues, the site that depends on inclusive exclusions, that “we” the people depend on a “them” relegated to the realm of bare life. Alternatively, when imagined as the everyday life of embodied subjects, then citizenship dislocalized perhaps allows for the activities of ordinary people to force accountability and imagine new possibilities for social and collective life—a citizen beyond citizenship. In its contradictions, the story of the citizen and the carceral (embodied in the case study) cannot be told without attention to the unfolding simultaneity of the U.S. projects of domestic racial reform and neoliberal global democracy. The specter of race as a fundamental marker of difference underpins state, citizen, and penal formations. As Foucault argues, race underlies the biopolitical state in its power to moderate who lives and who dies. Liberal progressivism has played the pivotal role in laying the groundwork for the suspension of rights, for violence at home and abroad, embedded in the very logic of U.S. democratic capitalism, which drives simultaneously categories of captivity, citizenship, and carcerality. In Arrigo’s beautiful language of aspiration, which invokes categories of reform and revolution, immanence, and democratic citizenship, I struggle with the contradictory and structural locations of praxis, even as I am relieved to find an account that leaves no captive behind.

In this respect, the problems invoked in Arrigo’s theoretical framework also point to the problem of trodding too lightly over the complexity of acknowledgment embedded and denied in citizenship and captivity, including that certain forms of recognition, pathologies of recognition, as Patrice Canivez (2011) writes, “turn out to be forms of alienation in or from the world,” where “the desire for recognition may express itself and be used in such a way that individuals become entirely manipulated” (p. 851). Rather, the force of relations at the intersection of lived captivity, the kind of embodiment that Johnson’s account exemplifies, might help us “give up our capacity to quickly judge others” and instead “become receptive to both the hurts and the possibilities in this world” (Han, 2012, pp. 234-235). Here, in the lived “politics of incommensurability,” a different rendering of obligation and authority produce an otherwise that is beyond liberalist recognition (Clarke, 2009). So, to further explore and conjugate this space of becoming, against the desperate fear of the ultramodern, what would it mean to bring about a real state of emergency? What might it mean to recognize the kind of bare life human actor whose life force, whose madness, is the only claim to recognition—not relationships to kin, states, or institutions—this dangerous “nonstate” actor caught in complicated structural and paradoxical relationships to violence, the space of carceral abandonment, of captivity? This is the hybridity that Johnson’s pain-filled account represents, subjectivity formed by putting one foot in front of the other and living through the kind of ambiguity and uncertainty in which, with every step, fear, and sometimes virtuousness, flourishes. Solace for the captive? I hope.