When even the media paragon of free-market ideology argues that “Greece must default if it wants democracy,” you know something is profoundly wrong.

Here at ROAR, we usually don’t rely on the analyses brought forward by the mainstream media; in particular not those of the unreconstituted neoliberal intelligentsia at the Financial Times. But the latest article by financial analyst and EU expert Wolfgang Münchau deserves being disseminated widely. Arguing that “Greece must default if it wants democracy,” Münchau has just launched his most scathing critique of the EU’s approach to Greece yet:

When Wolfgang Schäuble proposed that Greece should postpone its elections as a condition for further help, I knew that the game would soon be up. We are at the point where success is no longer compatible with democracy. The German finance minister wants to prevent a “wrong” democratic choice. Similar to this is the suggestion to let the elections go ahead, but to have a grand coalition irrespective of the outcome. The eurozone wants to impose its choice of government on Greece – the eurozone’s first colony.

As a leading columnist, Münchau’s articles are widely read by policymakers in Brussels, Berlin and Paris. A friend of mine who used to work in the European Parliament once told me that his writings are extremely influential in informing the political debate among the Brussels eurocrats. What’s more, Münchau can hardly be considered a leftist or a radical. Indeed, most of his work has focused on how to save European capitalism from itself.

It is for this reason that Münchau’s criticism bears significant weight. If even the media paragon of free-market ideology argues that Europe’s approach to Greece has completely and utterly undermined democracy, you know something is profoundly wrong. Indeed, with Dutch Finance Minister De Jager calling for the establishment of a “permanent Troika” in Athens to monitor Greek economic performance, the colonialism critique hits straight home.

Now that the unelected Papandreou government has just committed to five years of austerity and an additional 15 percent wage cut (on top of the 30 percent that’s already been cut), and now that the EU has decided to move ahead with the taxpayer-funded subsidization scheme of its banks by disbursing yet another massive bailout, the battle lines are being drawn anew. Münchau echoes our warning that a social explosion might not be far off:

The German strategy seems to be to make life so unbearable that the Greeks themselves will want to leave the eurozone. Ms Merkel certainly does not want to be caught with a smoking gun in her hand. It is a strategy of assisted suicide, and one that is extremely dangerous and irresponsible.

Read the full article here (note: behind capitalist paywall!).

Första posten om en viss nyans av politisk ekonomi; den som är “relaterad till det som Whitehead kallar ‘misplaced concreteness’, och det som folk inom Marx-svängen kallar realabstraktion”.

Några av er minns kanske att Rasmus tidigare skrivit om “modernitet som kapitalism“; ett tema inom vilket han tänker samman Marx diskussion om kapitalism med Latours diskussion om modernitet. Detta är på många sätt en våghalsig manöver, eftersom Latour ofta lägger sig till med lite halmgubbesågningar av Marx, eller i åtminstone av “marxister”. Dessutom finns det en del abstraktions-agnostiska läsningar av Marx –  dessa kommer att diskuteras nedan – som rimmar illa med Latours mer STS- och etnometodologiskt influerade sociologi. Icke desto mindre finns det tolkningar som passar bättre med den senare, och det är dessa som Rasmus främst graviterar mot.

Det verkar (jag är ingen expert) som att många av de Grundrisse-fokuserade läsningar som blivit mer populära på senare år är mer kompatibla med exempelvis Latour. En person som kan verka som brygga i sammanhanget är den Whitehead som återupptäckts under 00-talet, i spåren av Stengers arbete. Latour är ju en av de som tagit till sig denna nya Whitehead. Indeed – han delar ju Whiteheads intresse för “vetenskapen och den moderna världen” (titeln på en av Whiteheads böcker), och kallas ju vår tids Whitehead av Graham Harman. Därför är det ju – just utifrån “modernitet som kapitalism”-tematiken – intressant att Stengers beskriver Whitehead som en “oavsiktlig marxist”. Kan man även se Latour som ett “offer” för denna oavsiktliga marxism?

De senaste åren har det alltså publicerats en del texter som söker koppla samman Whiteheads misstänksamhet mot abstraktioner med Marx beskrivning av kapitalismen såsom beroende av realabstraktioner. Här tänker jag på ett par texter som Alberto Toscano publicerade 2008, samt sista kapitlet i Michael Halewoods A.N. Whitehead and Social Theory, som kom ut förra året. Denna post är en slags intro till dessa texter. Låt oss utgå från det ursprungliga resonemanget kring “modernitet som kapitalism”.

Latour beskriver, som några av er vet, moderniteten som det tillstånd som uppstod då vi trodde oss kunna sortera in hela världen i objekt och subjekt, natur och kultur – men aldrig riktigt lyckats med detta. Rasmus tanke är att samma tillstånd kan förstås som kapitalism. På vilket sätt bidrar den moderna föreställningen om en värld snyggt uppdelad i rena objekt och rena subjekt till den process som vi associerar med kapitalism? Och vad får denna föreställning “tillbaka” från denna process?

Låt oss börja i just “process”. Som Rasmus skriver, Marx lade mycket möda på att skriva om just en sådan:

Kapitalet som process, närmare bestämt som “prozessierende Widerspruch“, vars logik förutsätter ständig tillväxt och som konstiterar en totalitet.

Halewood inleder sitt kapitel med ett resonemang kring hur ettan i Kapitalet-trilogin är en diskussion om kapitalismen som cirkulationsprocess. Någonstans i denna cirkel måste Marx börja; han väljer varuformen som sitt första “grepp” på denna flytande och svårfångade process. Därefter jobbar han sig runt i densamma.

Här skulle man kunna gå in och problematisera. Bortsett från totalitetsfrågan – finns denna process “överallt”? – kan man diskutera huruvida cirkulation är något som Marx “finner” eller “uppfinner”. Well, ett STS-igt perspektiv skulle antyda att han gör både och. Han greppar en process han tycker sig se, men de begrepp han producerar (exempelvis i Kapitalet) bidrar sedan till att “göra” kapitalismen-som-vi-känner-den.* Detta inte minst om denna ontologi blir poppis bland diverse individer och aktörer, och på så sätt integreras i folks “etnometoder”.

En sådan invändning kan mötas av följande: Enligt de Marx-läsningar som på senare år blivit populära är denna form av problematiseringar redan införlivade i Marx tankegods. Det är bara det att lejonparten av hans läsare inte sett denna aspekt av hans arbete. Som Halewood skriver är Marx

always aware of the tension that inheres in this analysis as, in a sense, he is falsely rendering the commodity as an object, as a stable thing, when he is well aware that it is merely one element within the complex process of capitalism. Hence, the analysis of the commondity-as-a-thing is an abstraction from the reality which is the ongoing process of capitalism. Furthermore, and importantly, he wants to assert and explain how capitalism itself functions through the creation, sedimentation and operation of real abstractions. (2011: 150)

Här kan vi alltså skönja en Marx som är fullt medveten om att han själv leker med den tendens som kapitalismen också – förutom kapitalackumulationen – bygger på, nämligen tendensen att låta det abstrakta “slå ned” i det konkreta. Hans kritik av realabstraktioner utgår främst från en kritik av traditionell/”borgerlig” politisk ekonomi (“nationalekonomi” idag), men han är fullt medveten om att det finns någonting “mer” som pågår i kapitalismen. Detta “något” sker på ett ontologiskt plan: Kapitalismen kan sägas handla om skapandet av mervärde, eller om processer av “så kallad ursprunglig ackumulation”, men då missar man en viktig aspekt av vad som pågår. Som Toscano skriver:

Whether we consider the analyses of commodity fetishism, the formalization of surplus value, the investigation of abstract labour or the discourse on alienation, it is difficult to ignore that much of the force of the Marxian theoretical matrix is founded on its depiction of capitalism as the culture of abstraction par excellence… (2008: 67)

Att missa att kapitalismen är “en abstraktionens kultur” är att göra det misstag som många kritiserar “marxister” för: Att på ett oproblematiserande sätt peka på begrepp som produktionskrafter, bas och överbyggnad, och säga sig funnit den bakomliggande Sanningen om vad som verkligen händer “därute” i samhället. Marx skulle själv, menar Derek Sayer, ha kritiserat en sådan hållning:

Marx’s use of these concepts differed radically from that normally ascribed to him. [...] his analysis of capitalism provides more than adequate grounds for seeing orthodox conceptions of productive forces, economic structure and superstructure as fetishized. These are, to use Marx’s own vocabulary, ‘idealizations’ or ‘abstractions’ which falsely generalise from the misleading phenomenal forms our social relations take under capitalism. (1987: xii)

Sådant fetischerande av Marx-begreppen ligger för övrigt nära det som Latour kallar “idealistisk materialism” (och som för Whitehead är “scientific materialism”), som strävar efter att reducera ned all “materia” till enkla, entydiga kategorier. Marx själv behöver inte alls förknippas med en sådan; han hade en mycket mer komplex syn på materia. Halewood skriver att

it is not commonly held that Marx was interested in the efficacy of abstraction. Often it is presumed that Marx is opposed to the role and realm of abstraction, as he viewed it too Hegelian, too idealist; it would appear to give primacy to concepts and not real, material, living conditions. (151)

Denna föreställning (att ett eventuellt intresse för abstraktioner är förkastlig Hegelianism som skall ställas på huvudet) sammanfaller med den klichéartade bas-överbyggnad-Marxismen. (Abstraktioner bara är epifenomen i överbyggnaden, styrda av någonting hårt, tungt och “materiellt” i “basen”.) Det fina med dessa läsningar av Marx är att man kommer förbi dessa föreställningar. Som vi skall se senare – när Stengers pratar om kapitalismen som trolldom är det just för att lösa upp bas-överbyggnadsgrejen på samma sätt som Latour försöker lösa upp objekt-subjekt-grejen: Det finns ingen objektiv bas därute i samhället, det finns ingen yttersta Sanning om materian som vi (proletärerna?) måste känna till. Nej, materia är inte så enkel, den är konstigare än så.** Kapitalismen är – återigen – en abstraktionens kultur, där världen alltid visar sig på ett särskilt vis.

Detta är inte – som jag nu hör ideologikritikern invända – för att borgarna får oss att se världen på ett visst vis. Nej, abstraherandet behöver inte ha med klasser att göra. Om du frågar Whitehead så har dessa abstraktioner inte ens med människor att göra. Sohn-Rethel är intresserad av samma fråga – kan abstraktionen existera bortom och oberoende av den mänskliga tankeverksamheten?

Återigen – kapitalismen handlar delvis om mervärden och ursprunglig ackumulation, men dessa förutsätter existensen av en abstraktionens kultur. Det är lättare att förstå hur en sådan kultur uppstår om man (tvärt emot de onda “idealistiska materialisterna”) utgår från det faktum att verkligheten – återigen – är konstig. Kapitalismen (såsom den beskrivs av Halewood/Toscano) kan alltså grundas i en världsbild som lånar mycket från Whiteheads spekulativa metafysik, i vilken existensen självt förstås i termer av abstraktion. Mer om detta i nästa post.

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Refs

• Halewood, M. (2011) A.N. Whitehead and Social Theory: Tracing a culture of thought. London: Anthem Press.
• Sayer, D. (1987) The Violence of Abstraction. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Toscano, A. (2008) “The culture of abstraction”, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol 25, nr 4.

*: På många sätt är ju Marx mästaren av spekulativ samhällsvetenskap; hans teori inte bara beskriver sin egen uppkomst, hans teori är ju också en slags vadslagning inför framtiden. (Här menar jag alltså “spekulativ” främst i fiktions-meningen av ordet.)

**: Harmans SR-slogan lyder att “the ‘realism’ part of Speculative Realism means that the world exists independently of humans, which is what continental philosophy likes to call ‘naïve’ realism. The ‘speculative’ part of Speculative Realism means that the models of reality it generates are all notably strange.”

En besökande dignitär från ett land långt uppe i norr fick en mycket lätt släng av knölpåken.

Kanske är det så man kan säga om när utbildningsminister Jan Björklund blev angripen av en arg kvinnlig bosättare i Hebron. Utbildningsministerns obehag var  uteslutande känslomässigt. Hans SÄPO-livvakter hade tydligen snabbt klivit emellan. Varför hon angrep är oklart men tydligen hade utbildningsminister Björklunds sällskap inkluderat palestinier vilket fått bosättaren att se rött.

De israeliska militärer som eskorterade (men tydligen inte ingrep) beslutade raskt att besöket skulle avbrytas.ⁱ

Någon borde kanske upplyst Hebrons bosättare om att besökaren var en av deras bästa vänner. Björklund och hans Folkparti har bland annat genom ett idogt ryckande i allehanda tåtar sett till att Sverige som enda nordiska land röstade nej till det palestinska medlemskapet av UNHCR, utan att nämnvärt bekymra sig över det vållade svenska diplomater runtom i Mellanöstern stor förlägenhet. Björklund offrade med andra ord vitala svenska intressen för att Israels skull.

Kort sagt, det var en av Israels, ockupationens och därmed bosättarnas mest hängivna försvarsadvokater i Sverige som fick en mycket, mycket lätt släng av en knölpåk som under de senaste åren svingats allt oftare och allt hårdare.

Med det skall förstås att bosättarangreppen på Västbanken har börjat komma allt tätare. Guvernementen i Västbankens södra del brukade vara hårdast drabbade. De är de fortfarande men angreppen börjar komma allt tätare också uppe i norr. Sammanställningar visar på en stadigt växande feberkurva. Mellan åren 2010 till 2011 kom en 39 procentig ökning. Under hela femårsperioden från ökade bosättarnas våld med 315 procent. Under samma period minskade samtidigt de palestinska angreppen med på israeler med 95. En rapport från The Palestine Center i Washington har försökt sammanställa tillgängliga data. Man tycker sig ha hittat några trender:ⁱⁱ

De flesta angrepp, nästan 90 procent utgår ifrån de delar av Västbanken som kallas område C. Där har Israelerna full kontroll och rörelsefrihet medan det palestinska självstyrets polis, soldater och tjänstemän inte kan ingripa. Befolkningen är omsorgsfullt avväpnad och övervakad. Bosättarna själva är ordentligt försedda med vapen. Många av dem är dessutom militärt tränade. Den israeliska arméns posteringar ligger nära, skulle angriparna råka i underläge kan de raskt undsättas av tungt beväpnade arméförband.

Under ett seminarium på The Palestine Center tog man upp ett exempel, bosättningen Yitzhar söder om Nablus. Den låg på en kulle omgiven av palestinska byar. Man visade bland annat upp bilder som tagits från Yitzhar över den närbelägna byn Arif. Man hade en ypperlig utsikt och det fanns inget, absolut inget som förhindrade bosättarna från att ta sig in i Arif. En kort promenad var allt som krävdes, sen var det fritt fram att kasta sten, slänga in molotov coctails och vandalisera efter behag. Däremot var det nästan omöjligt för palestinier att ta sig från Arif  in i Yitzhar utan att omgående mötas av säkerhetsstängsel och väktare. Därmed var angrepp från bosättningarna nästan komplett riskfria. En blick på kartan viskar om en stor paradox. Enligt gängse militär logik borde bosättarna i Yitzhar vara den mest utsatta parten. Deras kulle är omgiven av palestinska byar vars sammanlagda befolkning är större Yitzhar men lik förbaskat är det den palestinska befolkningen som tvingas huka sig under återkommande räder från Yitzhar. Palestinierna är den part som utgör enkla måltavlor för angrepp. I område C är det bara den israeliska armén som är stark nog att ingripa men intresset är ljummet. Om andan faller på kan de ingripa. Oftast står de bara vid sidan om och tittar på.

Ibland kan soldaterna ansluta sig bosättarna.

Bosättningarna har utvecklats till Israels ”junkerland”, något liknande vad Preussen och Pommern var i Tyskland eller det protestantiska Nordirland var för det brittiska imperiet. Den tid när progressiva judar från kibbutzerna brukade tävla om posterna som elitsoldater, piloter och officerare ligger allt längre i det förgångna. Det utrymmet håller istället på att fyllas av nationalreligiöst anfäktade bosättare.

Av bosättarna landar 61 procent i så kallade stridande förband, jämfört med 44 ,2 procent för den övriga israeliska befolkningen.ⁱⁱⁱ Det finns en rätt stark uppfattning i armén att bosättarna är rejält folk som man skall se till att stötta. På flera olika områden håller bosättarrörelsen på att växa samman med statsmaskineriet. Bland annat har justitieminister Yaakov Neeman hörts diskutera med högerextrema aktivister hur de borde gå tillväga för att få loss fängslade kamrater. Neeman lovade att kontrasignera alla benådningar. Det framgick av inspelningen att det inte heller var första gången som den frågan diskuterades.^iv

Ett annat exempel glimmade till: en advokat – Allan Baker – vars firma var specialiserad på att hjälpa illegala bosättningar att legaliseras plockades in en regeringspanel vars uppgift var att godkänna samma utposter, utan att någon nämnvärt bekymrade sig över jävsfrågor.^v

Den typen av exempel är många. Summan av kardemumman är att bosättare som angriper palestinier mestadels kan räkna på ett mysigt samförstånd från såväl ockupationssoldater, myndighetspersoner och politiker ända upp på regeringsnivå. Det betyder också att för bosättare är angrepp på palestinier en tämligen riskfri sysselsättning. Offren är obeväpnade. Myndigheterna passiva eller sympatiserande. Kanske är det till sist orsaken till att angreppen äger rum. Det går att göra helt enkelt.

En vanlig invändning är båda sidor gör sig skyldiga till våld. Det stämmer nog men skillnaden är att palestinska angrepp ofta handlar om mer eller mindre desperata människor eller grupper. Bosättarrörelsens angrepp är mycket mer omfattande och handlar däremot om överlagda dåd från människor som allt som ofta agerar i skydd av – och tyst samförstånd med – den israeliska armén, polisen och förvaltningen.

SKULLE ockupationsmyndigheterna vara så taskiga att de försöker ingripa mot bosättarna, exempelvis när de upprättar ”utposter” eller ”vilda” minibosättningar, ja då har bosättarna på sista tiden demonstrerat att de inte tvekar att gå till angrepp mot egna armén.^vi Från bosättningen Yitzhar kom ett brev med vänliga råd: soldater ute på uppdrag riktade mot bosättarna borde vara försiktiga. Spikar och vassa föremål kunde dyka upp på vägarna, utrustning kunde oförklarligt bli saboterad.^vii En israelisk reservofficer klagade i en intervju: ”Helt plötsligt blir du angripen, bokstavligt talat av de människor du lämnade hemmet för att försvara.”^viii

Premiärminister Netanyahus första reaktion på nyheten att judiska bosättare angripit israeliska soldater var att dundra att skulle kämpa emot, ”Med all sin kraft” och ta itu med upploppsmakarna, ”med fast hand”.^ix

Den fasta handen förvandlades omgående till en konserverad sparris när det kom praktiskt handling. Istället övergick premiärministern till att kamma bosättarrörelsen medhårs. Ytterligare ett knippe ”vilda” bosättningar förklarades vara lagliga. Ännu fler skattelättnader och subventioner flödade över bosättningarna.^x

Budskapet är att för bosättarnas vidkommande är det bara att fortsätta mot nya djärva mål. En av dem, en viss Benny Katzover förklarade rent ut att han och hans meningsfränder inte brydde sig om att etablera någon demokrati: ”Vi kom hit för att det judiska folket skulle återvända till sitt land”. Skulle demokratin råka i vägen för bosättarrörelsens mål ja då var det demokratin som fick stryka på foten. Det var Benny Katzovers bestämda uppfattning.^xi

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Summan av den här lilla episoden är att Jan Björklunds besök i Hebron fick avbrytas. Kanske kom han ihåg att tacka sina livvakter för deras ingripande. Från Västbanken rapporteras att en viss Maysar Abd Al Majeed Ghanem, 61 år gammal, nu skrivits ut från sjukhuset där hon var inlagd. Den bil hon och hennes man åkte i hade stoppats och angripits av stenkastande bosättare från Yitzhar. En av stenarna gick rätt igenom rutan och träffade Abd Al Majeed Ghanem i huvudet. Hon låg ett dygn på intensivvårdsavdelning med flera skallfrakturer. Det var aningen osäkert ett tag om hon skulle överleva.

Polisrapporter som läckte ut i israelisk press talade om att extremhögern planerade ännu fler våldsaktioner.^xii

Ute i Västbankens byar hade befolkningen börjat upprätta egna hemvärnsgrupper för att hålla vakt om nätterna och om möjligt avvärja bosättarangrepp.

En hög israelisk miltärtjänsteman förklarade sig orolig över att judiska bosättare som genomförde angrepp skulle dödas eller skada. Han berättade att de hade genomfört extra razzior föra att vara säkra på att den palestinska befolkningen förblev obeväpnad.^xiii

Remember the very inventive campaign in Tunis, when a huge poster of Ben Ali was put up again and then, when angry residents took it down, turned out to contain a warning that dictatorship can return? (See the making-of here.)

I missed it when it first came out, but a new e-zine by a group of Egyptian and Arab artists and designers, including Ganzeer with whom we recorded podcast #7, has the great following cartoon inspired by that. In Egypt though the end is different. You can get Zine al-Arab here, and they may still be accepting submissions for the second issue. They have great comic art.

Update: an event feat. Ganzeer tonight at the Townhouse Gallery:

Charles Duhigg’s article in the New York Times Magazine and this excerpt from Joseph Turow’s book at the Atlantic make for good companion reading. Both are about the rise of data mining for marketing purposes — the efforts to assign consumers a profile that will then determine their status in various retail spheres and what sort of deals they will be offered and ads they will see and what sort of service they will be offered and so on. Both give a sense of how our ingrained commitment to the values of consumerism then opens us to being further programmed in our habitual choices: consumerism is the maze in which retailers can hide the chocolate in the form of various goods. And scientists and statisticians are only too happy to treat us like lab rats we’ve become.

Duhigg’s article focuses mainly on Target’s efforts to figure out which customers are about to go through a major life change (like pregnancy) so that it can take advantage of their flux and vulnerability to change their shopping habits.

Consumers going through major life events often don’t notice, or care, that their shopping habits have shifted, but retailers notice, and they care quite a bit. At those unique moments, Andreasen wrote, customers are “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.” In other words, a precisely timed advertisement, sent to a recent divorcee or new homebuyer, can change someone’s shopping patterns for years.

Apparently humans’ habits are hard to alter unless they are thrown into a kind of emotional state of shock by impending situations. For the time being, companies like Target are content to sift through our data trails to figure out who among us are entering into chaotic periods (and the process for this involves all sorts of cross-referencing of data from pools most of haven’t ever thought it was possible to combine — the focus of Turow’s book). Perhaps the technology to instigate such chaos in people’s lives on an individual by individual basis is waiting in the wings.

Duhigg notes the efforts Target must make not to “spook” customers with obvious behavioral-based targeting. Since the company wanted to target pregnant women who haven’t explicitly notified Target about their pregnancy, they had to use informational camouflage:

“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons…. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.” … As long as Target camouflaged how much it knew, as long as the habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold.

As with political scandal, what’s so bothersome about this less the targeting itself — though that is bad for reasons Turow details, more on that below — but the cover-up. Retailers don’t want transparency in their attempts to manipulate your behavior; they want to control how your habits evolve. They understand that the more you know about their techniques, the less effective they will be. And they try to justify themselves with the idea that they know better than us what we really want and their marketing techniques allow us to get out of our way to indulge ourselves how we really want and become who we really want to be. Thus Duhigg concludes with this quote from Target’s targeting guru: “Just wait. We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.” We’re supposed to think that is a good thing. We’re not supposed to think that the company is using the data it has collected on us to shape the possibilities of what we can become, to control the context in which we make our lives and understand ourselves.

Turow is much more outspoken in his alarm at this, focusing on the ways marketing dictates to a degree the way we think of ourselves.

From this vantage point, the rhetoric of consumer power begins to lose credibility. In its place is a rhetoric of esoteric technological and statistical knowledge that supports the practice of social discrimination through profiling. We may note its outcomes only once in a while, and we may shrug when we do because it seems trivial — just a few ads, after all. But unless we try to understand how this profiling or reputation-making process works and what it means for the long term, our children and grandchildren will bear the full brunt of its prejudicial force.

Turow’s right to expect to have his concern dismissed. Felix Salmon, who may serve here as representative of the commonsense pragmatic view — doesn’t think this is a big deal since we “never really had personal privacy” and most people in America anyway don’t really mind. He argues that “companies like Target and Google have no interest in becoming some kind of Hollywood corporate villain” and only in the overheated imaginations of pessimists and Germans do such dystopian visions take root. An even more contemptuous take on the so-called right to be forgotten can be found here, where Jane Yankowitz calls it “crap” and concerns about it “hogwash.” How dare the EU try to restrict the money-making abilities of American tech companies? How dare they.

The underlying implication is we can’t do anything about it really, innovation must press on (and innovation always means at its root more aggressive and irresistible selling techniques), so let’s enjoy our time on the march instead of making it an unnecessary trail of tears. But I think that companies are not monolithic entities; they are themselves balances of different factions with different attitudes toward the ethical use of data. And there is no telling what those with access to data profiles will be willing to do with them extracurricularly, or what governments might do with them, should they be allowed access.

That may seem unduly paranoid, but the track record of companies and states is hardly unblemished. And the scope of data collection assures that no one is innocent. The creation of new facts about people through data cross-pollination means that something that can be used as leverage with people will be generated. Some convincing basis of discrimination against you will be made. Turow makes this point pretty effectively:

Advertisements and discounts are status signals: they alert people as to their social position. If you consistently get ads for low-priced cars, regional vacations, fast-food restaurants, and other products that reflect a lower-class status, your sense of the world’s opportunities may be narrower than that of someone who is feted with ads for national or international trips and luxury products …

In fact, the ads may signal your opportunities actually are narrowed if marketers and publishers decide that the data points — profiles — about you across the internet position you in a segment of the population that is relatively less desirable to marketers because of income, age, past-purchase behavior, geographical location, or other reasons. Turning individual profiles about individual evaluation is what happens when a profile becomes a reputation… Marketers divide people into targets and waste.

Apparently those are the terms of art in the media-buying business. At this point the article had me speculating whether we will see attempts to make exemption from this sort of profiling into a luxury good: You pay others to shop for you, or pay extra to not have data collected on you. You aspire to be unsimulatable in data — to have that level of rich complexity and private access. Since personal data is explicitly currency already, it devalues other currencies, Gresham’s law style. Perhaps reverse interchange fees could be put in place, by which goods would cost more when you pay in cash. (Right now, the war on cash is limited to the FBI thinking cash users are potential terrorists.) Since privacy is becoming scarcer and scarcer, why not go ahead a make it a full on positional good? The little people will fret about their data selves and what sort of person Target thinks they are. But true elites will be beyond reputation.

What Turow’s getting at, beyond the obvious problem of using people’s data history to exclude them socially, is what Judith Williamson described in Decoding Advertisements (summary here). She uses Althusser as a frame for showing how ads interpellate us as certain kids of subjects. The ads call out to us in certain ways, and we recognize ourselves as the sort of person they are hailing.  Williamson argues that “advertisements are selling us something else besides consumer goods: in providing us with a structure in which we, and those goods, are interchangeable, they are selling us ourselves.”

Williamson points out that “there is no logical reason to suppose that the advertisement had ‘you’ in mind all along. You have to exchange yourself with the person ‘spoken to,’ the spectator the ad creates for itself.” Ads turn us into their implied reader when we consume them, an apparently attractive bargain because the “you” of ads is always an important person with money and taste whose decisions about breakfast cereals or watch brands are held to be earth-shatteringly important.

Advertisements have always exploited this principle, intimating that we have magically earned a right to think of ourselves as special and significant. Most important, it allows us to feel for a moment as though we have garnered social recognition without having to do anything socially useful. Then, so flattered,we don’t question some of the other assumptions about us that ads establish as social facts. As Williamson explains:

Ads create an ‘alreadyness’ of ‘facts’ about ourselves as individuals: that we are consumers, that we have certain values, that we will freely buy things, consume, on the basis of those values, and so on. We are trapped in the illusion of choice… [Ads] invite us ‘freely’ to create ourselves in accordance with the way in which they have already created us.

Obviously, data mining makes this process more insidious. Williamson argues that ads work mainly by creating an arena into which we can enter and make meanings, and it’s that meaning-making process that traps us, not any specific ad-based purchases. Making that arena easier to enter is part of what data mining achieves, making it easier to construct ourselves as primarily consumers, to slip in the simulacrum of ourselves marketers can build from our data, a self constituted entirely of shopping decisions. In this phantom self, all other data is important only insofar as it shapes consumer preferences, which is the ground of the “real” self.

Williamson’s describes the interpretive work we perform on ads as simultaneously work on the self.

Nothing [in the ad] even ‘says’ that Catherine Deneuve is ‘like’ Chanel no. 5, or that they have a similar aura. We are given two signifiers, and required to make a ‘signified’ by exchanging them. The fact that we have to make that exchange, to do the linking work which is not done in the ad, but which is only made possible by its form, draws us into the transformational space between the units of the ad. Its meaning only exists in this space: the field of transaction; and it is here that we operate — we are this space.

Even when we aren’t convinced by a particular ad to buy anything, the work changes us. And we are nevertheless tempted to assume that other people are convinced and that from the totality of ads we can deduce social norms and salient lifestyle distinctions that are operating generally, even as we hold ourselves above them. Ads lift us above the other people who are duped by them. That is part of how they persuade us.

That is why the informational camouflage is so important to Target. If we see Target doing the work, we won’t do it, and we won’t be brought in. We are hailed by ads only under the pretense that we are observing someone else being hailed (someone who turns out to become us).

I’m not sure to what extent the emergence of commercialized “social” consumption is changing the premises of Williamson’s analysis, making identity feel more collective in our consciousness and upending the necessary fiction of our total personal autonomy over our own identity. For the time being, though, capitalism still relies on consumers who believe against the evidence that they are in control.

This is the 8th day of the occupation of the building of prefectural administration in Chania, Creta, Greece. We just translated our main text in english and we send it to you, to inform and spread the message of the occupations worlwide. There is also a frech translation available (http://kaxania.tumblr.com/post/17636913606/communique-de-loccupation-du-batiment-de-la-region).

We also have a blog (kaxania.tumblr.com) and internet radio (http://katalipsixania.listen2myradio.com/), live from the occupation. Today at 18:00 (greek time) we have orginized a march in the main streets and the neighbourhoods of Chania. In Creta there are also occupied buildings in Rethimno and Lasithi. Moreover, the students are occupying their schools day by day. There at least 11 schools occupied in Chania today.

Our text follows:

Announcement of the Occupied Prefectural Administration of Chania

We are also part of the struggling people that rushed into the streets for the 48hour strike demonstrations and the massive protest of Sunday 12Feb against the devaluation of our employment and the pauperization of our lives. Since Friday 10Feb, after the march in the city streets, we have occupied the building of Prefecture of Crete in Chania. The occupation serves as a meeting and coordination centre of a collective effort to organize the struggle for a life that is characterized by solidarity, resistance and dignity. By blocking the ordinary function of a central administrational building, we pose political pressure against the implementation of the recent decisions of the foreign and local exploiters. We are referring to the voting by the Greek parliament of the second Memorandum and the new austerity measures according to the commands of Troika (EU, IMF, ECB) and global Capitalism.

We salute the hundreds of thousands demonstrators that during the last few days, and especially on Sunday 12Feb, fight against barbarism and the plundering of the basic social goods such as health, education, electricity and water.

We are a part of dozens of occupied state administrative, educational and labour buildings that spread across the country the last few days. Against a spirit of struggle decline and defeatism after the voting of the new laws by the parliament, we continue to fight against the fake dilemmas they impose, such as “bankruptcy or consent”. We call the grassroots labour unions of Chania to take decisions towards a Long-term General Strike. We call all the citizens of Chania and the countryside, students, workers and unemployed, immigrants and locals, to join our ideas, agonies and creativity.

To defend the dignity in our employment and in our life.

No prosecution to the detainees of the strike demonstrations.

Solidarity – Victory to the long-lasting strike of the Greek Steelworkers and all labour struggles.

All ahead towards a Long-term General Strike.

We call all people daily to participate in the public open assembly at 20:00 in the Occupied Prefectural Administration of Chania and in the actions that are decided. The last few days hundreds of people participate in the decisions of our assemblies.

”these riots are roughly what eurosceptics expected to see, at some point, at the periphery of the euro-zone as the slow-burn effects (excuse the pun) of Europe's monetary union begin to corrode the democratic legitimacy of governments.”

“Just think, the next time I shoot someone, I could be arrested.”  Lt. Frank Drebin

These days, our conversations and heads seem to bloat with images, fears, theories, and anxieties of – and loathing, laughter, and rage at – that obscure object of hatred that calls itself the police.  Their omnipresence is nothing new, but there’s no doubt that the past year has turned a spotlight on them, however diffuse or prismed, however spun and dodged.  Yet the more that media circuits are awash with them and that we’re saturated by them, the more we feel proud to watch people kick back and and feel sick when CCTV footage shows them kicking in the door and charging up the stairs,‡ the more we have to suffer through inanities about how it is “alienating” to see open and practically enacted recognitions of the hate and fear most people feel when faced with the law in the flesh, the more first-hand experience more people have about how it is to square off, get hit, burst out of the kettle, or tend to the seriously hurt, the more the police are made to, or make themselves, look simultaneously silly and murderous, the more silliness we hear about “peaceful uprisings”: the more of all this, the clearer it becomes just how unclearly we see them.

I don’t doubt that many others have a more solid grasp than I do on this slippery force.  But I also know from conversations with a lot of people who have thought extensively about this and from the general noise of the internet that a lot of us are realizing that the more the spotlight turns on the murky orcs in blue, the greater the glare that reflects off the aviators and riot shields, and the harder it becomes to draw a conceptual and practical bead on them.

As always, the best research into the police will be lived, especially through struggles in which people engage, the conversations they have and actions they take, and the internal discussions, splits, and and tensions that threaten to “ruin a movement.”‡   But the divide of practical and theoretical should never map simply onto things bodies do and things heads do, nor should it imagine that a consideration of philosophy, film, science, literature, psychology, et cetera is necessarily too far from praxis, that oft-mythical category that tends to just mean getting serious.  It is the quality and aim of certain kinds of research‡ that damns them to water-treading irrelevance, born of those who cling to the life ring while claiming to be mutinous divers.  Not the category of their concerns, not the fact that they may speak of concepts, paintings, pollen, and desire.

In my case, the question I want to ask after in this ACAKK series is that of the police as a comic object.  More specifically, this entails a glance back through a century’s worth of cop comedy movies.  (And there are reams of them: it is one of global cinema’s oldest recurring sub-genres, and even if you narrow the focus away from detective and private investigator films, even if you were to subtract most of buddy films – a special province of the cop comedy, as it lets the odd couple bromance logic feedback into the good cop/bad cop routine – or just those in which one of the buddies is not human, there is still a tremendous reserve of films in which the cops abuse and are abused in ways that might make us laugh.)  The potential irrelevance of this inquiry remains to be determined.  But, at the outset, it is by no means a joke or flighty response to a brutal history of incarceration, racial profiling, and murder.  It’s a deadly serious way in.  Yes, it is one which sports a frozen death’s head grin as a way to go on.  It’s one that will dwell on a lot of instances of a cop getting booted in the ass by a tramp or sweatily running in jowl-bouncing terror from a neighborhood’s worth of rioters.  But it is also one which also takes laughter seriously enough, as we always should, to find a lot of this scattered material genuinely, shatteringly,  funny and to find that laughter as simultaneously a camouflage and a point of entrance into some of the aspects of the police which remain hardest to detect and grasp.

A couple dry notes are in order, on terminology and intent.  Why comedic object?  After all, even if the police is a general notion more than a local instance, it is nevertheless made up of “subjects” (individual cops) who, taken together, seem to make up a subject of sorts: an agency that acts with force upon the world and passes judgments on it, albeit flailingly and with no small degree of internal contradiction and incoherence.  This, though, would miss the point.  People who work as cops are subjects, yes, in an everyday, psychological, and philosophical sense.  As people love to remind those of us who speak ill of “our nation’s officers,” some of them even have things like parents, spouses, children, pets, and hobbies.  One could go further and venture that some are decent people when off-duty (or try to be while on-duty), with varying motivations for having become cops in the first place, with varying degrees of wealth and poverty, and with many of the same worries, desires, and hopes as those who have different jobs or none at all.  No doubt.  Moreover, we know that the hallmark of a revolutionary situation, when it becomes something fierce and beautiful, is not when people take a side against the cops.  That happens.  No, it’s the rare moment when the cops switch sides, or dissolve the notion of sides itself, by refusing to arrest, restrain, and fire on others.  Yet the particularity of that moment isn’t that they become “good cops”: it’s that they break with the order and values which they defend.  When they stop being cops.

For specificity of cop is that, during time on the job, time in uniform and beyond‡ , the cop is a negated subject.

On two counts.  First, he‡ is the expression of the law, merely part of its “long arm,” its corporeal extension.  They are the meaty tendons between those declared criminal, the abstract order that declares them as such, and the cars, bullets, batons, handcuffs, jail cells, and electric chairs that make sure such a declaration will not go misheard.  In other words, a cop is like Pinocchio: even when the strings come off and the wood fleshens up, gets the blood going, the origins can’t be forgotten.

Second, a cop is specified as “untouchable” by the same order of law which he enforces: there is are declared rules of engagement with different conditions for those involved (for example, you and an officer on the same street).  One need not be a Hegelian of any stripe to recognize that the impossibility of exchange between nominal equals, of any struggle on terms that apply mutually to both parties (i.e. if you try to hurt me, it makes sense that I will act in such a way to prevent you from doing so), means that the two cannot both be understood as subjects in the same register.

Therefore, two possibilities.  Either the police are the only subjects that exist in society, and we are not, just obstinate bundles of affect and labor-power that we are.  Or we are the only subjects, cursed and doomed to unravel as such a position may be, and they are something else, a peculiar breed of vicious object coordinated by a logic that exceeds it and constantly encroaching upon the society it purports to toolishly defend.

Such is the hostility of the police: as corporal extension of the law as such and as non-subjects, they belong to a fundamentally different order with which there can be no dialogue.  There can be none because the rules of the game insert a bar – called, among other things, “assault an officer,” “resisting arrest,” “the culprit had a gun drawn, or at least it looked like a gun, even if it was a candy bar” – between any potential commensurability.  You can’t talk to someone who will be legally defended for striking you in the face while you will be jailed for returning the blow.  That’s a gulf that approaches the ontological.‡

The common – and none the less correct for it – understanding of the police as apparatus holds, and, in future texts in this series, I’ll qualify that by a clarification of terms and how it relates to my interest in technique.  My emphasis here, though, will be largely on the police as comedic object: as something with weight, density, blood, velocity, and shame, that shows itself capable of being hit, pied, splashed, soaked, shot, socked, jailed in its own cell, encouraged to bring about its out downfall (i.e. the process of a subject getting itself objectified, the work of cunning), tripped, escaped from, pissed on, and, above all, laughed at.  A thing that blunders, that gets subordinated to the joke, and in that moment of disappearance, comes to light otherwise.

[The other word in my designation - comic - will unfold across all the actual posts in the series.  Because if the role as object remains relatively constant, the mode in which it is or is not funny, and the degree to which this bears on its position as comic, can only be talked about through specific instances.  The way in which cops look foolish in Police Academy is not identical to the way they look foolish in Bon Cop, Bad Cop, nor is their role in On the Beat at all equivalent to that in Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son.  (In part because while On the Beat is brutally, viciously funny, Big Mommas should be cast back to the infernal bolgia/Regency Enterprises studio from which it crawled.)]

More generally, there are two elements to draw out.  These are not specific to cop comedies – I will barely resist the urge to call them copmedies, other than to let that horrible portmanteau hang in the air – but they form the main lines of investigation that the comedies circle around, seize on, worry away at, and let rip.  For these are the central ideological qualities of copness, especially in the American context, ones that are materially reinforced again and again, such that their justness or truth becomes utterly irrelevant.  They may be false or incoherent, we may wish it otherwise, but they are backed up with force, with law, with habit, and hence they present and represent themselves as if necessarily and naturally the case.

1.  It is not OK to defend oneself against the police: with them, there is only self-offense, and it shall not be allowed.

2.  The police are not hostile: they merely react to, manage, and reflect the antagonism of the social order at large and of particular bad actions and people.

1.  It is not OK to defend oneself against the police: with them, there is only self-offense, and it shall not be allowed.

This is entirely unique to the police: to take a rather Socratic example, if I am slapped or insulted by a pastry chef, during his working day, my return slap or insult is indifferent to his work as a pastry chef, unless I am specifically insulting him about the shittiness of his mille-feuilles.  Moreover, I have “the right,” both legally and in terms of a basic social understanding, to retaliate or, at the least, defend myself or flee if I don’t want to fight back at that moment.  If, however, I am slapped or insulted (or beat or shot or handcuffed) by a cop, during his working day, my retaliation will necessarily be construed as particular to his job and role as a cop, whether or not I shout fucking pigs!.  More importantly, I have no right, either legally or in terms of a mass understanding, to do anything – including “non-violently flee” – other than take the abuse and allow myself to be arrested.  And, lest we forget, the cop is nominally an employee of those he arrests, sprays, tickets, and jails: they are paid by the taxes of the citizens who are forbidden from refusing to pay or to remain calm.

No other figure whatsoever in contemporary society has this status.  Even the army is different: the specificity of the army is the assumption of retaliation, the expectation – however old fashioned the no-longer-so-new nomos of uneven warfare and non-declared “interventions” may be – that the enemy is a combatant.  The first aspect, that of violence against a solider as necessarily construed as political and military, holds for this case: if someone attacks a soldier, particularly when the soldier is part of an occupying force, it is an act of military aggression.  But the second condition – having no right to do so -  does not hold, as barring the tenuous waters of “rules of war” and international tribunals, the state of war means nothing more than entering a state of affairs in which one is expected to fight back.

As such, the police are an active object against which all action is forbidden and against which all action will be taken as purposeful.  And the history of police film – and almost all film not explicitly about the police but in which they figure, in however a minor role – shows the near total domination of this principle.  Few taboos remain in cinema, but the depiction of someone harming a cop without getting punished later or without the qualification that the cop was a “bad cop” (i.e. acted in such a way to no longer count as cop, such as being a “maniac cop” or a fascistic motorcycle riding murderer) is one of the few that persists.  It is as uncommon as the depiction of the sexual assault of a minor.  One is more likely to see a full-frontal male nudity, blackface, flaying alive, and rape jokes (far, far more likely) than one is to see a character get away with slaying an officer without a condemnation internal to the film.  Escaping from them, sure.  Getting away in a chase such that the police are responsible for their own cars crashing in the chase, yes.  Killing them but subsequently being killed by them or an accident or by a citizen who decides to side with the law, absolutely.  But causing harm or simply getting away from them: no.

(Interestingly, the same doesn’t hold true whatsoever for private property, which is often laid to waste precisely in the midst of these cop films, especially by cops themselves, as they hijack vehicles, blow them up, blow up buildings, drive through shopping malls, and on and on.)

Therein lies the rarity of the cop comedy.  To be sure, most of them reinforce the peculiar logic of the police all the more, and the ones that don’t tend to nevertheless pull their punches and rely on a concatenation of quieter slaps, trips, and collisions.  Yet it is in that distinct admixture of rarity, restraint, and occasional explosion that we might, at the least, better map the long history of how hard it has been to shake off this curse of law and order.

2.  The police are not hostile: they merely react to, manage, and reflect the antagonism of the social order at large and of particular bad actions and people.

This will reveal itself better through an extended set of examples to come, but as a prelude…

The reflection and distortion of this in comedy emerges not merely through the more common routines of a cop who is fired upon first, who has to smack a perp down because they would not go quietly, or who loses it for a bit but only because the world at large is so hostile and chaotic and they killed his partner, but they messed with the wrong cop…  It also shows itself in a very specific tendency toward the routing of violence through the built environment or the landscape itself, such that the innate hostility of the world and its commodities are the objects technically to blame.  Such that guns and knives may be used but primarily as catalysts and sparks to set off the chain of the antagonstic powderkeg called the material existence.  Such is the deep linkage between slapstick and the police, not merely because the earliest iterations of cop comedies – the Keystone Kops films, followed by those of Buster Keaton – were slapstick.  Therein the tendency across the cop comedy genre – and into cop dramas and action flicks – to allow suspects to:

fall off a building edge (despite the cop’s best efforts to hold on)

slip off a building edge while trying to punch the cop (or, at most, because the cop landed a good punch)

land on their own knife because they were trying to stab a cop (who did not have a knife, because knife users are traditionally coded as punks in film)

get trapped under a supporting beam (which was shot by a cop, but the bullet touched no body)

get caught in a turbine which they backed into while holding a gun at a cop (who was unarmed)

crash the boat, the car, the helicopter, the plane, the motorcycle

be consumed in flames not lit by the cop but by the anxious combustability of the modern metropolis (for there is much that can burn)

This is linked to, but goes way beyond, the tendency to keep violence at the loosely PG/PG-13 level familiar to nominally bloodless children’s action series or cartoons.  (i.e. smacking someone with a gun instead of pulling the trigger, smacking someone with the hilt of a katana instead of the blade)

Notice how despite five sharp objects here – two sai, three katanas, not to mention broken glass – no one gets cut.  No weapons land a blow.  Even the teaser of the falling sword at the end misses, just quivering in the ground.  The innate danger of skylights, gravity, and a large man have done the work.

More relevantly, consider this:

And such indirect firing is not for reasons of gore-shyness.  This is in a film in which a woman is stabbed with gardening shears, a chunk of cathedral impales a man, a couple is beheaded, and a man is burned to death in a gas fire, all with lingering lusty gazes at the sticky crimson aftermath.  Yes, a foot is shot by a cop, but the man is a doctor, and they even remind him of this fact when he howls in pain.  Yes, a cop is shot, but – surprise! – he survives.  When the police mete out violence, it is routed through the landscape, through chandeliers, barrels, shopping carts, and through the clumsiness of an antagonist who will find a miniature of a cathedral speared through his jaw, not because a cop put it there but because he tripped.

It doesn’t kill him, of course: the villains will all survive, so that they can be sent to jail.  Because, you know, cops don’t kill people.  Bad people – subjects – and the armature of landscapes do.

Because, to inflect the principle gestured to above, the police are indirect hostile objects.  Except when one goes rogue and “takes the law into his own hands”‡ , their imagined status is that of a neutral substance that cannot help but respond, even if occasionally a bit too “heated,” to the stains and stones of mean and nasty world out there.

And there’s no doubt that it is.  Given that, the “fictional” status of an encounter in which a skinny tramp punches a cop and gets away with it may prove it cold comfort, even if it warms the hell out of the heart for a moment.  But given the total hegemony of defense for the untouchable, indirect hostility of the boys in blue, such moments – fleeting, goofy, fantastic as they may be – are also necessary.

No, they aren’t “enough” and never will be.  But they are, like the decision to slam your foot on the gas pedal when the flashers appear in in your rear-view mirror, a point of departure.

‘This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.’ —James Baldwin, ‘My Dungeon Shook—Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation’

‘A favela um inferno, Oh Jerusalém.’ —Asian Dub Foundation, ’19 Rebellions,’ a track about the Carandiru massacre

In 2009 Honduras was the site of the first military coup in Latin America since 1993.  In 2012 it has become locus of the worst penal fire ever registered in the Americas. A blaze that started in the prison in Comayagua on 14 February killed upwards of 360 people at last count, including one woman , the fire department chief, and the brother of a police officer. In a prison overcrowded with 800 inmates it is extraordinary that almost half of them perished in a single night (it is not clear how many of the 465 survivors are suffering from suffocation and severe burn injuries). The last time a fire broke out in a Honduran prison was in 2004 when at least 107 inmates were killed.

Desperate family members and mourners of the victims crowded around the prison’s barbed wires, where police did not hesitate to disperse them with tear gas canisters and fires shot into the air, as the Honduran El Heraldo reported.

Honduran journalist Osmán Reyes Pavón tweeted that survivors of the fire said police were reluctant in coming to their aid, corresponding to other reports that firefighters demurred in reaching the victims because gunshots were fired into the air.

The mainstream press has widely disclosed the fact that Honduras is the murder capital of the Americas and that many of the incarcerated men were gang members. That does nothing to diminish the unspeakable horror of their last hours. And while the thought of human beings being suffocated and burned alive em masse in their cages without hope for escape chills the spine, Pavón also says that some prisoners were still awaiting sentencing and ‘could have died innocent.’

Whatever the discrete cause of this nightmare it is inarguable that the incompetence and disastrous neglect of the prisoners’ rights led to their collective death.

Comayagua firefighters’ spokesman Josue Garcia said there were ‘hellish’ scenes at the prison and that desperate inmates had rioted in a bid to escape the flames. ’We couldn’t get them out because we didn’t have the keys and couldn’t find the guards who had them,’ he said.

We should recall the Carandiru massacre in São Paulo’s Casa de Detenção where 102 of 111 dead prisoners were killed by direct gunshots fired by the military police. Zero of the 68 police were killed, and inmates who had already surrendered in their cells were also killed:

When the police shock troops invaded, after gaining control of the [prison revolt] situation, they forced prisoners to strip naked and executed dozens of them, including many who were trying to hide under their beds. No police were injured by gunfire, undermining the official story that the police engaged in a ‘shootout.’ The police commander (Col. Ubiratan Guimarães), who continues to advance this version of events, was elected to the São Paulo State Legislative Assembly.

If severe overcrowding and the structural violence of the penal system were to blame for the Carandiru massacre, which has become an indelible pockmark on Brazilian history (and mythologized in a motion picture), we can expect a similar outcome in Honduras.

Meanwhile, Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan, a leader of the Islamic Jihad movement, has been on a full hunger strike that is approaching two months. Adnan has refused meals continuously as a protest against his detention without charge or trial since his arrest in December 2011.

Physicians for Human Rights issued a report (on the same day as the infernal massacre in Comayagua) about Adnan’s protest of the ‘harsh and degrading treatment and torture he claims he was subjected to at the hands of Israeli authorities.’ In it the doctors who examined him describe that shackled to his bed by both legs and one arm, Adnan has lost 30 kilos (roughly 66 pounds) and ‘suffers from stomach aches, vomiting, sometimes with blood, and headaches, slight bleeding from the gums, dry skin, loss of hair, and significant muscular atrophy.’

Institutional state violence of the scale that we have come to know it (in both the global South and the global North) appears like a nearly insurmountable knoll, one that the public (beyond those directly and indirectly involved with prisoners’ rights) glimpses on the occasion of a disaster. But if the judicial, police, and incarceration complex can execute Troy Davis, send Khader Adnan to his death without charge or trial, shoot more than a 100 Brazilian prisoners to death point-blank, and fail to save more than 350 Honduran inmates in a ghastly fire, then the enterprise itself is the real disaster. Securitizing an immured prison population without providing adequate assurance that they will not die passively, helplessly, and caged is a historical scar that implicates us all.