[-empyre-] the production of criminals in flexible economies

[claire pentecost <cpente@artic.edu>]

hi empyre,
i've had trouble getting my posts accepted -- hopefully this try will 
work. please excuse duplicates.

Dear empyre-ical thinkers,

Sorry for my delayed entry. Just getting my bearings. Both on the 
list and also in a new semester where I teach.

I want to thank the organizers for inviting me, as it has encouraged 
me to look at Australia in more detail. And thanks to Dr Ben Saul for 
his "Briefing on Sedition Offences in the Anti Terrorism Bill 2005" 
(and thanks to James Barrett for the posting the url:  
http://www.sisr.net/apo/SeditionBriefing05.pdf  ). That said, please 
forgive any errors in my information and assessments, since it is 
true I am far away and only just now reaching through the grids to 
get a feel for what is going on in Australia.

Nine-eleven was produced as an especially spectacular event both by 
al-Qaeda and by the U.S. government and media. Although these 
laws-the 2005 Sedition Act in Australia and the patriot act in the 
USA -stand out as particularly alarming responses to the "terror" 
induced by 9/11, they seem to be part of ongoing processes, well 
underway before that date.

I'm thinking of the fact that many of the cases in the U.S. against 
alleged terrorists are actually built on a law that was signed by 
Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing. Among other provisions, "The 
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996" renders it a 
crime for U.S. citizens to provide material support to the lawful 
political or humanitarian activities of any foreign group designated 
by the Secretary of State as "terrorist."  You could see this as a 
nascent piece of the policy that would become known as the Bush 
Doctrine, a declaration that the U.S. will treat nations suspected of 
harboring terrorist organizations as terrorists themselves, and that 
we are entitled to pre-emptive strike on any government that we judge 
to be lending support or refuge to terrorists.

In Australia you have 1992 changes to the Migration Act providing for 
mandatory and extrajudicial internment of designated persons as well 
as the institution of "Temporary Protection." And in 2001 the Border 
Protection Act, setting up limbo spaces in which to detain citizens 
crossing borders without resolved legal accreditation.

In the U.S. we have had the practice of extreme rendition (abducting 
"suspects" to offshore detention and torture facilities inside the 
borders of secretly cooperating nations), invented before September 
11, but expanded and elaborated in the last four years.

If I am understanding correctly, given that so many of the offenses 
putatively covered by Australia's new laws can already be prosecuted 
under other laws, the fresh legitimization of the very notion of 
sedition is all the more pointed.

Although in popular usage "sedition" seems to apply tacitly to a 
nation's own citizens, anti-sedition laws find a special sort of twin 
in laws policing borders and immigration; the policies addressing 
these issues are part of a larger set of policies controlling the 
rights accruing to citizenship itself. So we are talking about 
sedition or subversion coming from both "inside" and "outside" the 
"legitimate" population.

One of the frames in which I find it useful to view these 
developments is that which revealed the ascendance of "soft power" as 
in Foucault's ideas of biopower and governance, and relatedly, in 
Deleuze's concept of control societies. In this frame we also might 
examine the articulation of the "creative class" and the flexible 
worker. These are integral parts of the transformation of capital 
from value embodied primarily in fixed assets to the more fluid, 
mobile morphemes of ubiquitous financialization: credit, debt, 
speculation, brands, networks, all the things that make capital fast 
and smooth in the space of global operation.

What I am thinking is that, as capital becomes more flexible, the 
state administers a compensating rigidity in order to govern the 
human dimension of wealth production and concentration, specifically 
that part of the labor pool that needs to be kept dammed in large 
reserves and managed through precise valves. With the demise of 
factory discipline in affluent liberal democracies and with the 
porosity of borders to the movement of goods and capital, the job of 
the state becomes more focused on two aspects of one function: 
guarding the localization of capital accumulation -keeping it in the 
reach of only a few; and enforcing the borders that distribute labor.

Under neoliberalism the market is supposed to sort and solve all 
social problems. But who gets to be part of the market? The simplest 
answer is well rehearsed: anyone with a dollar or a euro or a yuan, 
etc. But the other side of the market is productivity, the role of 
the seller. As we know, the only thing most of humanity has to sell 
is their labor. But what determines the conditions of that sale? Here 
we see the rights of citizenship playing a greater and greater role. 
The price you can get for your labor, and the access you have to a 
labor market fundamentally depends on your citizenship.

The rights accruing to citizenship in one nation or another are 
grossly unequal, and under globalization this is increasingly the 
site of struggle. So of course borders, migration, asylum-seeking are 
all subject to increasingly brutal measures.

But in liberal democracies, the ideology of equality, human rights 
and humane governance potentially pose conflicts over the imbalance 
of citizenship in the world. This sets a stage in which loyalty to 
the nation, and its opposite, sedition, are ripe for reinvestment. 
The division between _kinds_ of people has to be established on 
grounds that can justify the devastating forms of exclusion that 
distribute the privileges of differential citizenship. Hence 
criminalization of the status of non-citizens or "illegal" immigrants 
extends to those crossing borders to escape life-threatening 
conditions, whether those conditions result from the economic 
wreckage caused by neoliberal policies, trade agreements, and global 
debt servicing; or from the terror of civil wars and dictators.

The claim to human rights is only officially entertained for migrants 
in the latter category, a distinction we should question. But even 
within that dubiously separated category, the appeal to basic human 
rights is a thin shield as these populations are absorbed into 
systems organized for foreigners designated as criminals. We see this 
in the alien detention centers run by both the U.S. and the 
Australian governments. In the U.S. fears of terrorism have been 
exploited to extend the designation of illegal status into ever more 
murky judicial territories. The several hundred people (mostly 
"foreign" by some definition of ethnic or religious heritage) held in 
Guantanamo for four years without charges or entitlement to 
internationally established standards of treatment and process, make 
up only the most publicized example of the violence committed through 
the merger of immigration, terrorism and criminality.

If the Bush administration has its way, the identification of 
criminal sedition exceeds all parameters in the category of the 
"enemy combatant." This power is the unmediated instrument of the 
president alone. Enemy combatants have zero civil rights - no right 
to an attorney, no habeas corpus, no restrictions on unwarranted 
search and seizure-and without civil rights how can human rights be 
assured? Enemy combatants fall into a black hole from which no 
information is available. They can be held indefinitely without 
charges and without the right to an attorney. Such an extra-juridical 
space is almost assured to produce human rights violations.

In the case of this classification no citizenship is protection. Such 
a status could be said to mark one end of the spectrum of potential 
abuse derived from the invigorated instruments of alien and sedition 
laws. Servicing this spectrum of selective abuse is the legal and 
enforcement infrastructure of the penal system. In many parts of the 
U.S., an individual history of incarceration for criminal offenses 
restricts a person's full access to citizenship even after he/she has 
served the time.  This may include permanent suspension of the right 
to vote, but even more commonly, restriction of the kinds of jobs one 
is entitled to hold. So again full enfranchisement in the labor 
market, an advantage of citizenship, is available only to those 
consistently deemed fit -in terms of both birth and behavior.

At the softer end of this spectrum is the power of accusation. It 
takes less and less actual deviance from the narrowest norms of 
patriotic citizenship to put an individual under state suspicion. 
Under the PATRIOT Act sneak-and-peak provisions (even without the 
illegal wiretapping operations of the bush oligarchy) the state is 
empowered to gather evidence without justifying suspicion, and once 
so empowered may find any number of small irregularities that can be 
distorted into charges and even indictments that ruin reputations, 
health, finances and spiritual well being of accused persons. Even if 
the prosecution is unsuccessful and the charges are proven 
groundless, serious damage is done. In my paper on the prosecution 
Steven Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble and Bob Ferrell 
(http://www.caedefensefund.org/reflections.html) I refer to several 
such cases.

In that paper too, I briefly review the way that the production of a 
new judicial atmosphere after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 has 
facilitated widescale intensification of prosecution and deportation 
for minor visa and immigration violations. An almost total confusion 
of the issues of terrorism and labor-driven immigration is rampant 
and virulent. Just this morning I heard a radio host justifying 
Bush's illegal wiretapping, declaring that if al-Qaeda is here 
talking on the phones he wants the government listening because we 
can be sure they [al-Qaeda] aren't just here for jobs Americans don't 
want to do, but they also have the bombs Americans don't want. 
(Sorry, it really is this bad.)

I guess what I want to say is that the sedition laws in themselves 
are alarming but I think to understand their actual weight, we have 
to look at the context in which they are legitimated and brandished. 
To me the root of that context is made of the economic ravaging of 
most of the world by the elites of a few more powerful nations (with 
whom elites everywhere struggle to collude). I


oh i really should stop here and hope for comments, questions, corrections---

also, i need to catch up on the last few posts.

thanks for reading,
claire

--
Claire Pentecost
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Photography
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
312.443.3783
773.862.7603