Abstract
What does it mean to struggle against a system that is capable of crushing you? A system whose resources far outmatch your own: armed with weapons, with state power, and with multiple discourses of justice, security, and efficiency? What does it mean to struggle against a system that is beyond accountability, in part because it claims the right to hold individuals accountable for their own actions and choices? What does it mean—and what role does meaning play in this struggle?
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Notes
For more on rhythm and social concatenation, see Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 119–133.
For more on the political elaboration of intercorporeality in resistance to solitary confinement, see Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2013).
Daniel Defert, “Quand l’information est une lutte” (1971), FGIP-AL, 69.
Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). Cecile Brich, “The Groupe d’information sur les prisons: The Voice of Prisoners? Or Foucault’s?” Foucault Studies 5 (January 2008): 26–47.
SHU stands for Security Housing Unit; prisoners in the SHU are isolated in a 8 × 10 ft windowless cell for 22 to 24 hours a day. For more detail on the situation at Pelican Bay, see Lisa Guenther, “Political Action at the End of the World: Hannah Arendt and the California Hunger Strikes,” Canadian Journal for Human Rights 4:1 (2015), 33–56.
For a discussion of community self-surveys as a “tool of democracy” and of collective liberation in the context of Critical Participatory Action Research, see Maria Elena Torre, Michelle Fine, Brett G. Stoudt, and Madeline Fox, “Critical Participatory Action Research as Public Science,” in APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology, Vol 2: Research Designs: Quantitative, Qualitative, Neuropsychological, and Biological, ed. Harris Cooper, Paul M. Camic, Debra L. Long, A.T. Panter, David Rindskopf, and Kenneth J. Sher (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2012): 171–184.
Foucault, “Je perçois l’intolérable” (1971), FDE1, no. 94, 1073.
Foucault, “Non, ce n’est pas une enquête officielle …” (1971), FGIP-AL, 65.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
Foucault, “Préface” (1971), Enquête dans vingt prisons, FDE1, no. 91, 1064.
For more on epistemic disqualification and resistance, see for example Linda MartĂn Alcoff, “On Judging Epistemic Credibility: Is Social Identity Relevant?” in Engendering Rationalities, ed. Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgen (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001): 53–80, and Jose Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Foucault, “Pour échapper à leur prison …” (1972), FGIP-AL, 155.
Foucault, “Prisons et révoltes dans les prisons” (1973), FDE1, no. 125, 1296.
Foucault, “Il y a un an à peu près …” (1972), FGIP-AL, 197. See also the demands of prisoners at Nancy in January 1972, who called for “equitable justice” and “honorable justice” as well as for better food, uncensored access to newspapers, cleaner and heated dormitories, and an end to beatings by guards. Ibid.
Foucault, “Luttes autour des prisons” (1979), FDE2, no. 273, 814.
Dylan RodrĂguez, “Insurrection Against Racial Genocide: Prison Rebellions and the Logic of Evisceration.” Paper presented at the Rethinking Mass Incarceration in the South Conference, University of Mississippi, April 14, 2014.
The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Lori Gruen, The Ethics of Captivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
For an analysis of the will to punish and the “alibi” provided by moral concepts such as good and evil, which are deployed to justify both punishment and pardon, see Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homoi trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989).
Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 10–11.
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© 2016 Lisa Guenther
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Guenther, L. (2016). Beyond Guilt and Innocence: The Creaturely Politics of Prisoner Resistance Movements. In: Zurn, P., Dilts, A. (eds) Active Intolerance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137510679_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137510679_16
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