Promises, Promises

Abstract

Promises, Promises Sarah Haley (bio) To say that prison is place may be self-evident. And yet, Ruthie Gilmore does the awe-inducing work of transforming our understanding of prisons as placemaking, which is to say economy-making and state-making formations; she also delineates ways of being present together that make prisons less possible. Her theorization of abolition as presence is so dramatically sharp because of her own organizing work to create and dismantle. Those of us working on research toward abolition will have already read many of the essays in Abolition Geography. Indeed, Gilmore's essays are avidly and passionately read, recited, circulated, lines shared between us. You know the one: "The expansion of prison constitutes a geographical solution to socioeconomic problems, politically organized by the state which is itself in the process of radical restructuring."1 The grammars of Gilmore's essays have already saturated abolitionist research: planned concentrations, aggrandizement, surplus, individualization. Gilmore's work to demonstrate that places are made through the movement of people and commodities and "people as commodities," and her deft theorization of racism as a practice of abstraction, has transformed multiple fields. So the task to assess (read: celebrate) the merits of work already so influential and now collected is a somewhat peculiar one. And yet Abolition Geographies is urgent as an announcement of Gilmore's eminence and the necessity of circulating her ideas beyond those who have and will enter the portals of JSTOR collections or google scholar searches confronted with paywall and passcode requests. Also, the gathering of ideas into a form that ardent Gilmore readers can hold and carry and place on the portion of the shelf reserved for the books to which we must return over and over is consequential; in other words, the affective gift of the collection should not be underestimated. Promise or premise? Whenever I think of the famous Gilmore line (which is very often), both words come to mind, and I fumble for a second before remembering which it is: right, promise. "Anti-state state: a state that grows on the promise of shrinking" (276). Perhaps the moment of uncertainty is because the premise of the anti-state state that Gilmore offers is so powerful. [End Page 377] But promise is important because it highlights the active (or maybe activist) character of the state, its dynamism, and its historical contingency. Gilmore writes, in an essay coauthored with Craig Gilmore, a "state is a territorially bounded set of relatively specialized institutions that develop and change over time in the gaps and fissures of social conflict, compromise, and cooperation" (262). States interact and "attempt to maintain consent or coercion" largely by retaining "singular control over who may commit violence and to what end" (263). States are, they note, the "residue of struggle," or "the long bloody process of staking out control of the planet's surface" (263), and so "the institutions comprising them are the same substance: partly realized and partly failed attempts to make general certain modes of social being whose underlying contradictions never fully disappear" (266). If the state is seemingly composed of stable, calcified qualities, it instead must be understood as characterized by agency, and its residue; structures making up the state are, Gilmore teaches us, "animated by agential capacities while the modes in which ordinary people organize to relieve the pressures that kill them and their kin are, or become, structural" (425). While Gilmore's work has been central to debates within Black, cultural, and leftist organizing and scholarship about whether the state itself holds promise, it is critical to the abolitionist imperatives (read: brilliance) of Gilmore's work to highlight the state as agent and residue of historical agency and, as such, a formation that can promise. Promise to decrease, to solve, to resolve, to redress, to protect, to stabilize and equalize, and on and on. This is especially significant because the emphasis on state agency in Gilmore's work demands new ways to consider the insurgent organizing of the dispossessed, caged, formerly caged, future caged, and enclosed. Gilmore's argument that one must understand state agency and structural insurgency exemplifies her way with contradiction and her unfaltering ability to shift...