“Grammatology in the Carceral State: Writing, the Human, and Abolitionist Pedagogies”
by Allegro Wang | Xchanges 15.2, Fall 2020
The Entanglement of Writing, the Human, and Temporality in Civil Society
As established above, writing and rhetoric are integral in the production of the Human as a racialized and carceral category. In this section, I further argue that writing, the Human, and temporality are deeply entangled in the West. Specifically, Western writing creates narratives of political progress and historical amnesia that sustain the carceral state. By reading the past, present, and future as distinct temporal zones, the state divests itself of responsibility from the slave trade and settler colonialism—violences that were, and remain, integral in the creation and evolution of civil society.
Historical amnesia, as a form of writing and memory-work, functions as an intentional forgetting of past events to defer change. The West “forgets” its basis in chattel slavery and colonial genocide to maintain a façade of civilizational progress. In Freud’s account of the psyche, as read through Derrida, the memory-trace is never fully erased; instead, it is deferred, producing the conditions for both remembrance and forgetting. Derrida argues that memory-work “is a present past, a living present qualified by the mark it bears” (Of Grammatology). Applied to the West, the violence of the slave trade and settler colonialism are perpetually present but actively suppressed through Western grammars—through legal, mediatic, and educational systems that produce a selective memory. This selective memory is not accidental but is instead a deliberate technology of power.
In tandem with historical amnesia, linear Western temporality turns the future into a zone of safety that must be secured through expanded surveillance and warfare. The West constructs the future as a space of promise for those deemed Human—a future that requires preemption against inherently threatening bodies. Writing is thus integral in the production of static identity categories for management, surveillance, and risk calculus (Gaonkar; Puar; Öberg; Bifo). The ability to simulate, predict, and preempt potential threats hinges on accurate information, necessitating the expansion of carceral systems, such as the police, the prison-industrial complex, and legal doctrine designed to punish and surveil bodies marked as non-Human (Rodriguez “Racial/Colonial”; Dillon; Weheliye). This expansion occurs not only domestically but also internationally through warfare to gain access to increasing amounts of datapoints and information.
The future, as a rhetorical construction, is thus always already a site of contestation. For Black and Indigenous bodies, the future is not a zone of safety but rather a continuation of the present violence. The construction of a “safe future” for the Human requires the perpetual inscription of non-Human bodies as threats. Writing, in this sense, is not merely a descriptive tool but a prescriptive one—it produces the futures it claims to merely predict. The information economy accelerates this process by turning affect, identity, and suffering into data, deepening the entanglement of writing, temporality, and the carceral state.