Yoga, Meditation, and Neoliberal Penality: Compliance or Resistance?

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that a normative commitment to dismantling mass incarceration requires us to examine the effects of self-care and self-disciplinary practices within carceral spaces. I take up the specific case of the South Asian traditions of yoga and meditation. Many critics have suggested that their practices can produce pacifying, politically neutering effects through their emphases on non-judgment and non-reaction. They can teach acceptance of an unjust, immiserating reality, seen as the result of individual responsibility or pathology, rather than of structural factors. But others insist that yogic and meditative traditions can be interpreted to generate attention and resistance to social injustice. I explore the conditions under which the therapeutic, rehabilitative forms of self-discipline taught by these traditions reproduce neoliberal penality, encouraging the targets of mass incarceration to accept their own responsibility for structurally unjust outcomes. I also explore conditions under which they may undermine such penal logic by teaching attention and resistance to systemic inequity. Ultimately, the political meaning and effects of these practices are ambiguous: they can render the carceral apparatus more habitable and acceptable, or ensure that the tools of neoliberal penality are turned against the system itself.