Reconstruction 6.2 (Spring 2006)
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"Not only a consequence of power, but also one of its strategies": An Interview with Lorna Rhodes / Matthew Wolf-Meyer
Introduction
In 2004 Lorna Rhodes published Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison as part of the University of California Press’s Public Anthropology series. This ethnographic manuscript – supplemented by a number of articles – took as its object of anthropological analysis the supermax prison system in Washington State. In so doing, Rhodes brought to the fore questions of power and agency as they are shaped by prison officials, prisoners, psychiatrists, and other stakeholders in the state-run prison system. In the following, Rhodes discusses her current research, American culture, and her views on academia and ethnography with Matthew Wolf-Meyer.
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Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Could you please contextualize your recent Total Confinement within your oeuvre? How are the topics and themes that you explore therein extensions of or prefaces to other work?
Lorna Rhodes: During the early 1980s I taught in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland, where I was able to conduct ethnographic research in the locked emergency unit of a public psychiatric hospital -- that project eventually became my first book, Emptying Beds. I did not see it clearly at the time, but I now realize that what I was happening in that hospital -- which was trying to cope with growing numbers of deinsitutionalized, sometimes homeless, severely mentally ill patients -- was the beginning of the shift toward mass incarceration in the United States. One theme of Total Confinement is the intersection of the abandonment of the impoverished mentally ill with the growth of the prison as the last remaining public institution willing to take them in. Ironically, I found in the prisons many of the same themes and -- in some cases -- the same atmosphere -- that I found in the emergency unit -- beleaguered staff, inadequate resources, and constant pressure to move people (whether patients or inmates) on to somewhere "else." The connecting theoretical threads center on exclusion, fragmented and sometimes crumbling disciplinary structures, and the variety of ways staff and inmates resist and make a world for themselves within what are often overwhelming constraints.
MWM: One of the interesting absences in Total Confinement from the perspective of anthropology as a discipline is a discussion of American culture. It seems to me -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- that leaving culture out of the analysis allows you to make very different claims about power and influence (both inside and outside of the prison). Why did you decide to leave "culture" out of the equation, and how do you think that decision shaped the rest of your analysis?
LR: It is interesting to think about this question because I did not make a pro-and-con, one-time decision not to include "culture." Perhaps this means that as anthropologists we consider it implicit, and take for granted that an ethnography such as mine offers up a particular cultural world in some sense. But also, of course, I did not want "culture" to become explanatory in my text or to participate in the whole "window on another world" metaphor for the ethnographic enterprise. In addition there are some reasons specific to the prison for not emphasizing its "culture." One is that I did not want to reinforce the notion that the boundary around the prison makes it somehow another country; instead I was interested in the circulation of discourses, such as that on rationality and accountability, into and out of these institutions. A second reason is that there has been a tradition of work (mostly in sociology) on prison "subcultures" and I wanted in some sense to work against this by emphasizing some of the commonalities among prisoners and between prisoners and staff. Finally, the notion of "culture" is, at this point, part of prison culture! The term gets heavy use inside corrections to mean "things we can't seem to change even when we want to." If I had relied on culture as an analytic category, I think some readers would have assumed that I was using it to explain failures of policy.
MWM: There are a few passages within Total Confinement that seem to argue for prisoners having rather exceptional bodies (in the sense of being abject bodies); how do prisoners help rethink not just the “confined” (or disciplined or docile) body, but also all bodies?
LR: Prisoners’ bodies do not, of course, have anything inherently or specifically exceptional about them. But certain conditions of confinement produce the prisoner as an abject, minimized, stripped-down body. Remembering how Erving Goffman talked about this, we could say that the prisoner is deprived of a “backstage” for grooming, toileting, dressing, and all the other things we do to present ourselves to others as more than “mere” bodies. This deprivation is greater in supermax than it is in general population prisons, and of course usually greater in prison than outside. Further, prisons in general participate in a kind of exceptionalism about prisoners’ bodies in which criminals are regarded as stronger and less sensitive, in racially inflected ways, than other people. My point in Total Confinement was that the prisoner’s body becomes an exception not only because it is all that is left to him but also because what is left is the most “physical” aspect of the body. The body nevertheless remains, in the situation I describe, as resource and weapon. I also try to suggest that even there the brute facts of the “body” are part of the social as the body comes to have meaning in relation to others; thus, prisoners learn strategies like “throwing” from one another and not just because bodies “naturally” lend themselves to these possibilities.
In terms of what this might mean more generally, one thought is that the abject body is not only a consequence of power (a surplus power that overflows the disciplinary apparatus) but also one of its strategies. We can see two ways this point is surfacing in our present moment. One is that torture -- the most extreme form of abjection -- seems to be moving it increasingly into the open as a public strategy of political power. This move advertises the underside of power (largely kept hidden in the supermax). It also acts as a reminder of the always-available potential of the body to be made abject, a point made by Eric Santner. In fact Santner’s introduction to My Own Private Germany -- a book I draw on in Total Confinement -- seems more prescient every day. The abject body also surfaces in homelessness and other kinds of ejection from the social networks that normally allow individuals to maintain their bodies. Homelessness emerged as a highly visible form of abjection as a consequence of the neoliberal restructuring that began in the 1980s and its growth parallels the expansion of the prison complex. In both torture and homelessness, images of a kind of abyss circulate into the public sphere, pressing onto everyone what is normally repressed. And what is repressed is awareness that anyone can become what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare” -- that the fragility of individuals in the face of political and economic force is ever-present. Prisoners’ creative but futile uses of their bodies then raises difficult questions about what kinds of resistance are possible -- while perhaps putting us on notice that effective resistance needs to start before, not after, abjection has become a reality.
MWM: In Michel Foucault’s study of the prison system in France, Discipline and Punish, he discusses the way in which beliefs in the presence of a “soul” helped to justify punishment of the body; do you see the American prison system being indebted to a similar sort of Cartesian (and/or Judeo-Christian) thinking? And, if so, what sort of ethical problems does this create?
LR: We could say that what Foucault was calling “soul” is manifested now in notions of “personal choices” that are stripped of their social/historical context and left to stand alone as signs of “character.” There are many examples of this in my book: prisoners are addressed and described as though some “choice-making” or decisional faculty stands entirely separate from the life of the person as a whole. Despite the embeddedness of these conversations in much concrete detail (prison rules, inmates’ relations with one another) choice itself is an abstraction that serves as both cause (“bad choices”) and effect (as when bad choices are seen as a straightforward product of previous bad choices). Like the “soul,” it becomes the target of imprisonment (that is, through ideas about correcting bad choices or teaching a lesson). But unlike with the soul at the birth of the prison, choice is not necessarily seen as produced through discipline, nor does it require the intricate knowledge-producing practices of therapy. In this sense, an ideology of choice follows from and justifies the abandonment of rehabilitation, because choice is so pure -- it so effectively evacuates the inmates’ personal history -- that there is nothing to know and nothing to rehabilitate. The prisoner either chooses the right thing or he doesn’t. This perspective brings us to the heart of the ethical problems of neoliberal “responsibilization” -- to use Nikolas Rose’s term -- more generally. Responsibility that is figured as only for and of the individual makes the notion of social vulnerability seem scandalous, and undermines the possibility for an ethics that takes the social as its ground.
MWM: Speaking of Foucault, one of the arguments that you make in Total Confinement is about the ability of institutions to change over time, which is a challenge to Foucaultian thought on the subject; how do you see the prison as having changed over time, and through what forces? Do you foresee any changes in the prison system on the horizon?
LR: The point at which I finished writing the book coincided with a particularly hopeful moment in the supermax unit I was studying. I had been struck during my fieldwork by how many internal critics the prison system had. I felt then that there might be ways in which critics on the outside could align with those inside -- and I still feel that this is one of the few routes available for change in these systems, at least in the short term. It seemed important to make clear that there are critics on the inside. I was also struck by how much difference could be made in the daily, ordinary experience of supermax prisoners though small changes in administrative practice. Since supermax confinement is so difficult -- in some part through the exercise of surplus power on top of the extreme power already available to staff -- I felt an obligation to make visible the counterintuitive process I observed. But I must say that I am more discouraged now than I was then by the sheer inertia of the prison system. On the other hand, I think there is a force for change, and that is the economic reality that state governments simply cannot sustain the indefinite expansion of prisons. The most likely result of pressure to send funding elsewhere will be changes in sentencing laws that reduce the prison population as whole. I fear, though, that supermax prisons are a different matter. They seem to be part of a nationwide and now international project of extreme exclusion and also secrecy that does not yield to local economic pressures.
MWM: What role do you see ethnography (whether sociological, anthropological, or coming out of cultural studies) playing in the contemporary political scene, in the United States and abroad?
LR: For most of us in the disciplines you mention ethnography is not a “method” but rather a practice of placing oneself in a certain relationship to the world. I value this way of being because it surprises, it jogs me out of the habitual and taken-for-granted. I hope that this kind of decentering experience can be transmitted to others and that what I write might move them to understanding and action. But maybe we shouldn’t assume too much about what ethnography as such can do for the contemporary political scene. Most of us write primarily for one another -- and even when we try to make our work more accessible, as I did, the audience seems fairly limited. I’m wondering though if this isn’t the wrong question. Perhaps the value is not so much in the content of particular ethnographic work but in the circulation of ethnographers into the fraught and contradictory landscapes from which contemporary politics is fed. One thing we do differently from any other kind of researcher is to circulate among people who do not speak to one another (prison officials and prisoners, in my case, or environmental scientists and cyanide fishermen, in the case of a colleague of mine). This practice -- our practice at doing this -- certainly could have a role to play if we can find ways to articulate and demonstrate it publicly.
MWM: Are there particular sites that you see as in need of academic investigation? Are there particular sites that you see as being fruitless or in need or reevaluation? Where should academics be focusing their energy for the purpose of social transformation?
LR: I think our greatest failing is that we do too little to investigate sites where power is most concentrated: the boardrooms of corporations, the military and its related industries, big pharma and its lobbyists. Of course this is extraordinarily difficult; anthropologists have been calling for “studying up” for a long time. But there is a gradual increase in this kind of work -- a forthcoming book on global capital by Karen Ho, for example -- and it has the potential to really transform the way we think about how power operates at that level. To go back to your previous question, perhaps those academics (and ethnographers may stand the best chance) who can figure out how to get past the multiple gatekeepers keeping powerful interests out of sight will turn out to be most useful.