The Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as Pedagogical Position

Abstract

The Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as Pedagogical Position Dylan Rodríguez (bio) Prison Regime/the Disorientation of the Teaching Act The global U.S. prison regime has no precedent or peer and has become a primary condition of schooling, education, and pedagogy in every possible site. Aside from its sheer accumulation of captive bodies (more than 2.5 million, if one includes children, military captives, undocumented migrants, and the mentally ill/disordered),1 the prison has become central to the (re)production and (re)invention of a robust and historically dynamic white supremacist state: at its farthest institutional reaches, the prison has developed a capacity to organize and disrupt the most taken-for-granted features of everyday social life, including “family,” “community,” “school,” and individual social identities. Students, teachers, and administrators of all kinds have come to conceptualize “freedom,” “safety,” and “peace” as a relatively direct outcome of state-conducted domestic war (wars on crime, drugs, gangs, immigrants, terror, etc.), legitimated police violence, and large-scale, punitive imprisonment. In what follows, I attempt to offer the outlines of a critical analysis and schematic social theory that might be useful to two overlapping, urgent tasks of the radical teacher: 1) to better understand how the prison, along with the relations of power and normalized state violence that the prison inhabits/produces, form the everyday condition of possibility for the teaching act; and 2) to engage a historically situated abolitionist praxis that is, in this moment, primarily pedagogical. A working conception of the “prison regime” offers a useful tool of critical social analysis as well as a theoretical framework for contextualizing critical, radical, and perhaps abolitionist pedagogies. In subtle distinction from the criminological, social scientific, and common sense understandings of “criminal justice,” “prisons/jails,” and the “correctional system,” the notion of a prison regime focuses on three interrelated technologies and processes that are dynamically produced at the site of imprisonment: first, the prison regime encompasses the material arrangements of institutional power that create informal (and often nominally illegal) routines and protocols of militarized physiological domination over human beings held captive by the state. This domination privileges a historical anti-black state violence that is particularly traceable to the latter stages of continental racial chattel slavery and its immediate epochal aftermath in “post-emancipation” white supremacy and juridical racial segregation/apartheid—a privileging that is directly reflected in the actual demography of the imprisoned population, composed of a Black majority. The institutional elaborations of this white supremacist and anti-black carceral state create an overarching system of physiological domination that subsumes differently racialized subjects (including whites) into institutional routines (strip searching and regular bodily invasion, legally sanctioned torture, ad hoc assassination, routinized medical neglect) that revise [End Page 7] while sustaining the everyday practices of genocidal racial slavery. While there are multiple variations on this regime of physiological dominance—including (Latino/a, Muslim, and Arab) immigrant detention, extra-territorial military prisons, and asylums—it is crucial to recognize that the genealogy of the prison’s systemic violence is anchored in the normalized Black genocide of U.S. and New World nation-building.2 Second, the concept of the prison regime understands the place of state-ordained human capture as a modality of social (dis)organization that produces numerous forms of interpersonal and systemic (race, class, gender, sexual) violence within and beyond the physical sites of imprisonment. Here, the multiple and vast social effects of imprisonment (from affective disruptions of community and extended familial ties to long-term economic/geographic displacement) are understood as fundamental and systemic dimensions of the policing and imprisonment apparatus, rather than secondary or unintended consequences of it.3 Third, the prison regime encompasses the multiple knowledges and meanings that are created around the institutional site and cultural symbol of “the prison,” including those that circulate in popular culture and among the administrative bureaucracies and curriculum of schools. Given this conception of the prison regime as a far-reaching and invasive arrangement of social power, state violence, and human domination, we might better be able to understand the significance of everyday routines of school-based discipline that imply the possibility of imprisonment as the punitive bureaucratic outcome of...