Iii KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION, CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, AND

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KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION, CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

A dissertation submitted

to Kent State University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the

degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Alex R. Colucci

May 2019

©Copyright

Except for previously published materials

iii

Dissertation written by

Alex R. Colucci

B.A., The State University of New York at New Paltz, 2010

M.A., Kent State University, 2013

Ph.D., Kent State University, 2019

Approved by

Dr. James A. Tyner___, Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Dr. Christopher Post _, Members, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Dr. Joshua F.J. Inwood

Dr. Joshua Stacher _ _

Dr. Babacar M’Baye _

Accepted by

Dr. Scott Sheridan__ _, Chair, Department of Geography

Dr. James L. Blank__ _, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

Table of Contents

Table of Contents ...... iii Table of Figures ...... v Acknowledgements ...... vi Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 I. Chapter Summaries ...... 8 Chapter 2: Geographies of Execution, Capital Punishment, and Prisons ...... 13 I. Positivist Geography and Execution ...... 14 I.I How Positivist Studies of Capital Punishment Happen (and their Limitations) ...... 14 I.II An Attempt at Understanding Why Positivist Studies of Capital Punishment Happen ...... 20 I.III The Questionable Uses of Positivist Empiricism ...... 26 I.IV Relating the Deterrence Debates to the Production of Geographic Knowledge ...... 30 II. Non-positivist Geographies and Capital Punishment ...... 32 III. Prison Geographies ...... 36 Chapter 3: Situating Knowledge and Developing Epistemology in Human Geography ...... 40 I. Early Epistemological Approaches in Human Geography and Two Debates ...... 41 I.I Disciplinary Survival and the Beginnings of Positivism ...... 42 I.II The Lion and the Mouse Squash Bug ...... 46 I.III Debates Over the Geography of Crime ...... 54 I.IV (Misplaced) Debates Over the “Real” ...... 66 II. The Last 25 Years of Radical/Critical Epistemological Approaches in Human Geography ...... 82 II.I Lessons in the Movement of Radical/Critical Geographies ...... 85 II.II Moving Toward Fluid Epistemologies in Geography ...... 95 III. Developing a Fluid Epistemological Approach: Processes of Analysis ...... 104 III.I A Dialectic Mode of Thinking and Knowledge Production in Geography ...... 104 III.II Fluid Geographical Epistemology: Approaching the World from Multiple Vantage Points ...... 113 Chapter 4: The Spaces of Capital(ist) Punishment’s Political Economy ...... 124 I. A Historical-Geographical Material Analysis of Capital Punishment Spaces ...... 127 I.I Marx’s Understanding of Capitalist Society from a Materialist Perspective ...... 131 I.II Material Technologies and Spaces of Capital Punishment ...... 151

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II. The Formal Political Economy of Capital Punishment ...... 207 II.I Reanimating Capital Punishment Space – Banking the Living-Dead ...... 208 II.II The Contradictions of Killing Them, Killing Ourselves ...... 214 II.III Differentiation, Valuation, (Class) Consciousness, and the End of Capital(ist) Punishment ..... 220 Chapter 5: Conclusions ...... 224 I. Meaning of Research ...... 224 II. Contributions to Geography ...... 225 III. Future work ...... 227 Bibliography ...... 230

Table of Figures Figure 1 Dialectic Dissertation Organization ...... 9

Acknowledgements

This work is dedicated to my grandparents, Francis and Patricia Smouse, both of whom provided me, from an early age, with substantial encouragement and support. Their enthusiastic interest in my learning and work was ever-present, and their experiences and stories activated my geographic imagination at a young age; some of Grandpa Frank’s self-made maps were likely the first maps I ever saw and his stories of trans-oceanic travel some of the first I remember hearing. Though I cannot share this work with them, I hope that the spirit of their shared journey from East Liverpool, Ohio, to points all over the world lives on in all that I do.

I wish to thank my advisor and committee chair, Dr. James Tyner, for many years of conversation, guidance, and support, and for always encouraging creativity. I wish to extend thanks to the members of my committee, Dr. Christopher Post, Dr. Joshua Inwood, Dr. Joshua Stacher, and Dr.

Babacar M’Baye for their patience and insight that helped me think critically about this work. Finally, I wish to extend my thanks and deep appreciation to Dr. Kevin Floyd who, while he could not serve on my committee, was instrumental in offering thoughtful criticism on several initial papers that came to be this work. I will not soon forget his incisive teaching that pushed my thinking in new directions.

I am endlessly thankful for the support of my family; my parents, brother, aunts, uncles, cousins, niece, and nephews. To my partner, Amanda, whose encouragement has been unwavering, I cannot say thank you enough. To Figgins, Juniper, and Cubby, who always make home a place of fun adventure. To my friends, colleagues, and mentors—Alex Peimer, Stian Rice, Bradley Austin, Dave Stasiuk, Mark

Rhodes, Michael Allen, Andrew Shears, Dr. John Sharp, Dr. Lawrence McGlinn, Dr. Jo Mano, Tim and

Christie Ivancic, Jeff and Ashley Sedorovich, Steve Hill, Liz Travis, Colin Mills, Casey Hickey, George

Correa, Sokvisal Kimsroy—thank you all for your endless comradery, conversation, and joy.

Chapter 1: Introduction

In a 2007 interview, Jerry Givens explained a specific aspect of his work, one that deviated substantially from his typical everyday labor, with the following statement: “to make that transformation from corrections officer to executioner…it was hard…you have to get away from yourself. You have to eliminate yourself.”1 For nearly two decades—from 1982 to 1999—of his 25-year career as a correctional officer in the Commonwealth of Virginia’s department of corrections, Givens worked to “eliminate” himself 62 times as he carried out his duties as the state’s executioner. Of course he still physically executed 62 people—by electrocution until 1994 and then by lethal injection until

1999—but his statement alludes to the separation or distancing required in making the killing of capital punishment work.

The critical aspect of distance, in terms of nearness and connection between human actions and how they affect other humans, is on display again in Givens’ 2016 remarks about changing labor requirements upon transitioning between technologically distinct modes of execution. While the preparatory work before both electrocution and lethal injection executions is divided amongst a small group of corrections officers on the execution team, the work of the executioner, which Givens performed, changed significantly. He describes how operating the generator which powers the electric chair requires merely “a button you push once and then the machine runs by itself” and how that contrasts with beginning an execution by lethal injection. “I had this syringe in my hand,” he says, “and [I was] pushing the chemicals into that man’s arm, and I started to feel more [emotionally] attached than I

1 The following account of Jerry Givens’ time working as Virginia’s executioner is derived from the following articles and interviews: (Brumfield 2016; Shulleeta 2015; Givens 2013; Avila, Harris, and Francescani 2007).

1 did just pushing that button…I could actually see the chemical going down the line and into the arm and see the effects of it.”

Givens is far from alone in describing the labor of killing through capital punishment in contemporary America. Strategies of disengagement, routinization, division, and distancing are ubiquitous in terms of the labor processes in death chambers (Osofsky, Bandura, and Zimbardo 2005). “I close my mind to what the inmates have done. It is easier to work with it in that way. I prefer to be in denial than to let everything come to the surface,” one anonymous execution team member says of his work experience (2005, 388). Another suggests repetition is key to execution, saying that “the process has become very routine and the next day is easy. It should be that way. The job is something that must be taken care of. It is a duty of my job that has to be done” (2005, 388–89). Division amidst the many labor processes further diffuses the relative engagement with killing as two anonymous execution team members explain: “we each have a small role on the team. We carry out a job for the state. The press and victims are watching. We have a certain duty and do it as efficiently as we can” and, “it’s not up to me to say yea or nay. That’s for the judges and juries. I’m not a part of the deal-making process. I’m here to do the job. I’m assigned to do it and have the job to do” (2005, 379 and 385).

What these statements, and those by Givens, suggest is that to produce the end result of state sanctioned execution—a production process that results in quite literally a human body devoid of life— workers must negotiate both the immediate material consequences of their labor and the abstract knowledge of their productive activity. Simultaneously these workers invest themselves fully in the mundane physicality their tasks require of them and imaginatively disassociate that physical work from the social and spatial relational contexts in which they labor. Throughout this simultaneous process these laborers conjure imaginative geographies that place them in the death chamber at the behest of

‘the state’ and its judicial laws—a supposed all-encompassing system of which they are merely one cog set in motion by the far-off “deal-making” of judges and juries. This dialectic between the knowledge

2 required to do work and the knowledge of that work’s result—how workers operate to repeatedly produce the death of other humans—reveals much surrounding the tension between distance and killing, and moreover, the spaces produced to facilitate it. But it suggests at much more in terms of questioning how the death chamber as a productive location for the labor of capital punishment is situated within a broader political-economic system replete with specifically located labor processes and social relations. This leads to a series of foundational questions. How has the phenomenon of capital punishment developed and transitioned in conjunction with changes in the capitalist mode of production? What is the function of human labor power in the killing of capital punishment and how is labor power spatially distributed to make killing work? How has the relation between humans and technologic development altered the ways in which capital punishment functions? Within the value structure of this capitalist social formation, how are some human beings worth more once they are killed than if they were alive? How do the changing spatial arrangements of capital punishment facilitate killing in terms of the relation between modes of production and alienation?

To begin to explore these questions I utilize, in part, the methods of historical materialism, which have a long tradition of utility in examining both phenomena of political economies, and the knowledges that produce and transform those same political economies. Crucially, however, while historical materialism has typically examined the changing ways in which humans produce and have access to the necessities of life, this dissertation inverts that focus. Here, the inversion of historical materialism, through the initial development of a fluid geographical epistemology, facilitates the examination of how humans have produced and have access to the means of politically formalized, judicial killing known as capital punishment. In this way, historical materialism is put to use to understand not how humans reproduce ourselves, but how humans kill ourselves through the geographic mobilization of the means of production. In doing so, I suggest that not only alternative means of mobilizing the means of production could lead to the end of capital punishment but that the

3 discipline of geography and a geographic way of knowing the world can be fundamental to producing a non-killing world.

Capital punishment has been an infrequently studied phenomena within human geography.

Initial attempts at tackling the presence of capital punishment in society came in the form of positivist studies that mapped execution throughout the United States (Harries and Cheatwood 1997). Following years of relative inattention after those initial studies, the phenomena reappeared in the pages of geographic journals in the mid-2010s. This time spurred into existence by a small contingent of human geographers concerned not only with political geographies of violence within capitalism, but also with effective critiques of the status quo in academic, geographic research and the ontological ability of human geographers to effectively assess, critique and change the world (Heynen 2015; Inwood 2015;

Inwood and Barron 2015; Kobayashi 2015; Tyner and Colucci 2015).

Critically, this renewed study of capital punishment not only questioned the process itself, but also questioned—at least implicitly, if not directly in some cases—the epistemological approaches of human geographers at large and the direction of productive activity in the discipline. This questioning opened a figurative door for this dissertation. It allows my productive activity in this dissertation to both explore and go beyond a simple empirical analysis of capital punishment itself, or analysis of the representations of capital punishment, and instead examine the structural conditions that lead to the readily observable patterns and representations of capital punishment. In undertaking this process, there is fruitful possibility to examine knowledge production within the discipline of geography.

Subsequently, this dissertation investigates the interrelated political economies of capital punishment and knowledge production, both in the material spatial context of sites of execution and in geographic, academic literature. My analysis of these relations proceeds through an epistemologically fluid dialectic approach that examines both the circuitous material and abstract commodities that cycle through capital punishment space, and the state of knowledge production in geography about the issue,

4 practice and process of capital punishment. This dual focus has allowed me to simultaneously produce knowledge about the formal political economies of execution processes within capitalist social formations, and produce an understanding of the epistemological processes that have directed the discipline’s engagement with capital punishment and other social issues through positivistic and more radical/critical approaches. Consequently, in both directions of this dual focus, I can therefore explore the relations between the material and abstract distancing of alienation and the market logics that undergird processes of differentiation and valuation within societies operating through a capitalist mode of production.

As a result, this dissertation is both about and not about things, at least not in the traditional sense of things (Foucault 1972, 47–49). As I have explained, this dissertation will examine discrete and interrelated material aspects of the various things that happen during the process of capital punishment in political economic terms. In short, this is a historical materialist account of capital punishment. It is an account that takes seriously the notion that both capital punishment and its spaces are produced knowingly by humans and their activity. Therefore, what this dissertation also is, is an examination of the produced knowledges that form both the political economy of capital punishment and the discipline of geography. It is a historical materialist account of these knowledges because, perhaps contrary to conventional thinking, knowledges do not emanate from and reside outside of human materiality. The material interactions humans have with the world around them develop and critically situate the production of knowledge. Those resulting knowledges have lasting material consequences in both the development of social relations and their own material spaces of diffusion printed out on paper with ink or appearing as digitized pixels. Studying the materiality of knowledge and ideas has its place here because it is through the human record of situated knowledges that contradictions and interstices appear as points of leverage and contestation (Foucault 1972, 151, 155–56). By critically understanding where these points of leverage and contestation appear we can, as geographers, better know how to

5 creatively direct our work of producing knowledge in the effort of human liberation and social justice

(Ince 2012; Inwood 2007; Peet 1978c). As critical scholars concerned with the state of the earth and humans on it, if we can learn where things are and why they appear there, then we can best direct our efforts to change them.

It is in this spirit that this dissertation also addresses the state of knowledge production in geography. Of chief concern here is the development of epistemology in the discipline, and more specifically the somewhat recent articulation by Noel Castree of a need for more active reinterpretations of Marx’s dialectic method in geography so as to resolve contradictions and tensions between so-called radical and critical geographies (1999a, 1996a). As various debates—which I discuss in detail in subsequent chapters—within non-positivist geography demonstrate, there remains today little unity amongst non-positivist geographers in terms of how to produce knowledge and how to make and use that knowledge to address and change the world’s many pressing social and environmental issues.

Building on Castree’s work which illuminates ways forward in terms of dialectic Marxist approaches, I incorporate knowledge producing apparatuses from both post-structural and anarchist/pre-figurative thought to develop an analytic framework of fluid epistemology for this and future work. This framework revolves around three dialectic steps—developing dialectic methods through a process of abstraction that is also focused on the production process of knowledge; embodying the ever evolving need to readjust one’s material relations; diffusing this embodied, reflexive dialectics collectively to produce knowledge of ourselves—to produce what I intend to be fundamentally geographic, un- alienating politicized language. If this sounds like a desire for a more cohesive, cooperative, and coproductive (radical progressive) geography, it is.

As a discipline, geography, in many ways which have only recently been “rediscovered,” has a strong foundational tradition in collective action, mutual aid, and progressive thought (Ferretti et al.

2017; Keighren 2018b, 775–76; Peet 1975a). The internalization of a discourse of radical and progressive

6 geography by some geographers means the potential for a shift in consciousness of those who produce geographic knowledge is possible through reproduction and expansion within and beyond academia.

This means there is potential for new geographies of a different collective consciousness, and, moreover, that the world can be transformed in imaginative un-alienating collective ways through the production of geographic knowledge. What must be reproduced are geographies developed through a value system that has at its base the promotion of difference, collective action, and progressive thought.

Because “geography is…an ‘imagined community’ with its own foundational myths and progenitors,” we can make it what we want (Keighren, Abrahamsson, and della Dora 2012, 307).

Geographers decide what we want to emphasize from our past, to produce in our present, and our future to be, and we adjust those things based on our readings of past geographies and how we want them to influence our collective consciousness in the present. From there, we produce geographic knowledge that shapes and directs what and how our geography is. Just as this dissertation is, in large part, an examination of the production of geographic knowledge in no way precludes this dissertation as produced geographic knowledge itself. Studies about the production of knowledge are just as much produced knowledge in themselves, which means this dissertation is open to all the contingencies and contextualities that befall any attempt at knowledge production, geographic or otherwise.

Therefore, the purpose of this dissertation is twofold. On the one hand, capital punishment is explored through a geographically based examination of its political economic development and condition. On the other, it explores the possibility of using multiple epistemological approaches symbiotically to elicit previously unexplored connections between seemingly disparate bodies of geographic literature, so as to execute a critique of the continued practice of formal capital punishment.

In this way, the result of this dissertation is as much a contribution to geographic thought, as it is to the study of the phenomena of capital punishment itself. These dual purposes serve to both highlight the academic concerns of the research and knowledge producing process, and examine the political

7 economic factors which drive these same processes in academic geography and in the development of changing modes of capital punishment. With the overarching directions of the dissertation explained, I transition in the following section to a broad outline of the following four chapters.

I. Chapter Summaries

The general thought behind the organization of this dissertation derives inspiration from several sources, but two in particular. To a lesser extent the non-linear form of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel

The Dispossessed is influential in my thinking, however, the dissertation itself is not strictly organized non-linearly. Short passages from The Dispossessed begin chapters two, four, and five as a way of hopefully drawing attention to larger themes that connect between those chapters. To a greater extent the process of dialectic abstraction influences the form this dissertation takes. Dialectics and the process of abstraction feature prominently in chapter three, and there, Bertell Ollman’s work is examined in some detail. Ollman explains a series of non-linear steps in the process of dialectic inquiry and refers to these steps as the “dance of the dialectic” and even provides a helpful diagram in one of his works

(2003, 169). The basic outline of this “dance” or dialectic process, starts with (1) taking steps side-to- side, or left and right, and returning each time to your starting point; then (2) taking one step backward;

(3) taking two steps forward; (4) taking one step backward and then one jump forward to land on a

“higher level.” The steps are repeated “to “deepen” analysis.” The four steps to the process are labeled in order: “Analyze; Historicize; Visionize; And Organize.” In many ways, it feels as if, with this dissertation, I have gone through these steps at both the scale of the whole dissertation and at points within each of the chapters (see figure 1).

Figure 1 Dialectic Dissertation Organization

For example, in the first two sections of chapter two I analyze the condition of geographic and some non-geographic academic literature that deals with the subject of capital punishment. Here, I assess the epistemological and ontological foundations upon which these past treatments of capital

9 punishment are based. In doing so, I interpret the statements and discursive linguistic strategies used to variably qualify the limits and supposed impacts of the work as explained by its producers through an extended deconstruction. In a third and final section of chapter two, I examine the present condition of the prison/carceral geographies sub-field. In several instances I briefly detail ideas present in this body of geographic literature that will be used later in chapter four to connect the process of capital punishment to the carceral spaces in which is occurs. Close attention is paid to the issue and process of differing modes of knowledge production throughout this chapter. Following Ollman, this chapter could be understood as a first step where I move ‘side-to-side’ in examining the situation of my present work.

As I explained earlier in this introductory chapter, this dissertation has two interrelated directions, and chapter two begins the discussion on capital punishment. The third chapter begins, in earnest, the examination of the development of epistemology and knowledge production through the history of geographic thought. Chapter three could be understood as having two larger sections which correspond to Ollman’s second and third steps: to historicize and visionize. Section one of chapter three covers early epistemological approaches in human geography and two debates over processes of knowledge production in the discipline that speak to issues over how capital punishment has been studied to this point in geography. This first section is divided into four sub-sections that cover these issues. Consider this first section of chapter three as ‘taking one step backward’ so as to better understand the preconditions of both the geographic knowledge presented in chapter two and the project of this dissertation itself. Sections two and three of chapter three each contain two sub-sections and serve to both articulate the movements of thought in the last quarter century of ‘radical/critical’ geography and provide space where I develop a framework for a fluid epistemological approach. These objectives of chapter three allows us to situate the current work of this dissertation within the epistemological development of geography and envision ways forward in terms of geographic knowledge production.

With the framework to produce an analysis of capital punishment now in place, I begin chapter four by reorganizing the process of knowledge production, recalling the state of geographic knowledge produced about capital punishment that was deconstructed in chapter two. This is an instance where, both at the scale of the whole dissertation and at the scale of simply chapter four, I both continue and restart the dialectic steps Ollman has explained.

At the level of the dissertation, in calling back to the substance of chapter two I take one step backward with the purpose of situating the direction of chapter four, and by the end of the chapter, as it transitions to chapter five, I “finish with a jump” as another level of abstraction becomes accessible. At the level of chapter four—which is divided into two sections, the first of which has two sub-sections and the second of which has three sub-sections—the recollection of the deconstruction and explanation in chapter two provides for a basis to repeat the dialectic steps again in terms of examining capital punishment from a historical-geographical materialist perspective. Therefore, in section one of chapter four I begin with analyzing how Marx discussed the phenomenon of capital punishment and how he conceived of capitalist society within which capital punishment is embedded (step 1: to analyze). I then examine the transitioning modes of capital punishment in concert with developments in the capitalist mode of production by examining the spatial and temporal movement of execution—throughout close attention is paid to the impact of technology and labor (step 2: to historicize). I transition from section one to section two of chapter four by envisioning new ways to interpret capital punishment and its meaning as one of many processes of capitalism (step 3: to visionize). Section two of chapter four is a beginning in envisioning formal capital(ist) punishment by examining the phenomena through a reinterpretation of Marx’s concepts of dead labor and alienation. Here, I situate capital(ist) punishment within the indifferent abstract logics of capitalist valuation to envision the end of capital(ist) punishment

(step 4: to organize).

Finally, chapter five offers several ways forward and new questions from the level of abstraction now reached. First, I offer my observations on the process of producing this dissertation and where it has gone. Second, I articulate several contributions I feel that I have made to the discipline of geography, both in terms of advancing the study of capital punishment and examining the state of geographic thought and epistemological development. Finally, I suggest avenues of future work based on the new questions and possibilities I have observed since reaching the end of chapter four.

Chapter 2: Geographies of Execution, Capital Punishment, and Prisons

“But I’m luckier. A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist can’t hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.” (Shevek in, The Dispossessed - Le Guin 1974, 265)

More traditional dissertations and research papers often contain chapters or sections early on in their body that thoroughly assess previous literatures that deal with the subject of the research. This, of course, requires that there be a bountiful previous literature on the subject of one’s research. In terms of previous work on the subject of capital punishment in the discipline of geography, the record is scant.

This is one reason (but not the only) that this dissertation proceeds with a decidedly less traditional structure, but one that should not seem completely alien. Chapter two has a number of noticeable and traditional conventions, but it will also diverge considerably at points. One of those points is what immediately follows.

The first section of this chapter features an extended deconstruction of positivist, geographic approaches to “execution” and capital punishment. Because there is not a voluminous body of literature where the subject and discipline intersect, I find it necessary and justified to proceed in this manner. As will become more clear in chapter three, it is important, on the one hand, to thoroughly assess what work has been done like in any other literature review, and on the other, to not just leave this assessment be once it is complete, but to build from it in order to develop a transformative literature, of which this dissertation is also a part. From deconstruction comes immeasurable possibilities. Thus illuminated is the importance of producing knowledge about the production of knowledge of a given subject; in this case capital punishment. So begins chapter two.

I. Positivist Geography and Execution

As I allude to earlier in the first chapter, capital punishment in geography has been an infrequently studied subject. Like many broad subjects in the discipline, it was first undertaken through positivist approaches, but not until the late 1980s and 1990s by geographer Keith Harries, mostly, and one time co-author and criminal justice scholar Derral Cheatwood (Harries 1988, 1992, 1993, 1995;

Harries and Cheatwood 1997).

This was well after the positivist revolution of the 1960s and subsequent critiques of it, which appeared almost immediately and have persisted until the present (all the while positivism has maintained its hold as the dominant epistemological approach in the discipline). The Harries and

Cheatwood book, The Geography of Execution: The Capital Punishment Quagmire in America, is, for the most part, a compilation of some of Harries’ (1995, 1993, 1992) and Cheatwood’s (1993, 1988, 1985) previously published works, adapted and reframed, occasionally with updated data while featuring the addition of introductory and concluding chapters. It is this book, given its position as something of an overarching summary of their work, that will be the focus of this section.

The process of their work and the conclusions they draw from it have two consequences where this dissertation is concerned. First, it highlights two related issues in terms of how and why geographic knowledge about crime and capital punishment specifically, is produced. And second, it opens up the possibility for a broader discussion about the production of geographic knowledge in general. With the remainder of this section, I will explore the first consequence through an extended deconstruction, and an exploration of the second will begin the third chapter.

I.I How Positivist Studies of Capital Punishment Happen (and their Limitations)

Harries and Cheatwood’s work, including the book in question, can be broadly characterized as empirically based studies on the geographic dimensions of crime and punishment. Each scholar approaches these subjects with a positivist social-science epistemology. They generate tables, charts and maps that connect and display patterns between execution in the United States and a host of other demographic, legal, and geographic variables. For example: the historical regional variations in execution (1997, 17); between state corrections systems, prisons and executions (1997, 41); homicide rates and execution (1997, 60); race, gender and execution (1997, 71); deterrence of violent crime and execution (1997, 94); life-without-parole sanctions as an alternative to execution (1997, 109).

They stress an “emphasis on the integration of geographic and historical perspectives” in addition to “the visualization of data and analysis” in their study of capital punishment. “Indeed,” they say, “we could scarcely do justice to the geographic viewpoint without translating information into maps, just as the temporal dimension is often best presented with the aid of various time-based charts.”

Their “integrated spatio-temporal view,” aided by tables, charts and maps, they claim, gives their analysis “a fresh approach” (1997, 15).

Throughout, Harries and Cheatwood (1997, xiii) rely on the “Espy file” as the principle source of execution data in the production of tables, charts and maps. Fully titled, Executions in the United States,

1608-1987: The Espy File, is an attempt—started by amateur researcher M. Watt Espy in the 1970s—to create a dataset of all executions in the United States since the arrival of colonists to what is now the

Commonwealth of Virginia.

Harries and Cheatwood indicate that updates to the data between 1987 and 1997 were included in their book, and they refer to the dataset as both a “comprehensive” and “incomplete” record of executions (1997, 17). Additionally, they express that they exclude records from the first 178 years of the dataset in their analysis only because “census data were not available until 1790” (1997, 18). From there, their work proceeds in typical positivist fashion wherein the pair spin conclusions about crime,

15 and the state of execution and capital punishment from the essence of the data. And while, yes, they acknowledge the incompleteness of the file, and eliminate a portion of it from their study, issues with the data and its collection go deeper.

Various, often serious, coding problems exist in the Espy file (Blackman and McLaughlin 2011).

These manifest in terms of issues with the classification of crimes, demographic information about perpetrators, and even the listing of individuals as executed when they had, in fact, not been (2011,

217). To be clear, I am not suggesting that Harries and Cheatwood should have been aware, in 1997, of the details of what Blackman and McLaughlin would publish in 2011. It is important, and scientifically astute, to understand, like Harries and Cheatwood do, that the data they are using is unfortunately incomplete and that certain portions of it should not be included in their analysis. What the relation between Harries and Cheatwood and the issues in this data demonstrate is the longstanding assumptions that practitioners of positivism hold about how to go about knowing the world. This is a subject I will return to after detailing the various issues with the Espy file.

Despite updates to the Espy file since 1987—including a significant one in 2008—issues arise with missing notable executions, which suggests that less notable executions are missing in even greater numbers. Underreporting of Native American executions, specifically, is noted as a persistent issue with very few executions appearing in the record for states in the western United States as America’s imperial project, fueled by manifest destiny, spread westward (Blackman and McLaughlin 2011, 221).

An additional issue with the file is its reliance on just the sentencing of an individual to death to be counted among the executed, rather than requiring the additional, though quite important, detail of any proof that the sentence was ever actually carried out (2011, 218–20). Blackman and McLaughlin suggest this was particularly at issue in reporting on executions prior to the mid-1800s when the commutation of death sentences was rather common, occurring in as many as a quarter of all death sentences handed out—often in cases where whites murdered Native Americans, and when slaves were

16 sentenced to death but their owners were reluctant to see their property destroyed. What is more, the file lacks consistency in its assessment—and therefore its inclusion or exclusion—of executions of dubious legality, which reflects the underlying issue of the legality of any executions. Often these occurred in hastily established “people’s courts” that the state either outright condoned, or conveniently ignored, and local communities considered legal (2011, 220–21). It is strongly suggested that executions of dubious legality often occurred when individuals or groups from non-white populations were accused of crimes.

All this suggests that, along with numerous basic coding errors that impact the data, the Espy file, which Harries and Cheatwood, and others use to produce empirical studies on capital punishment in the United States, seriously over reports executions of (mostly) white people, fails to account for the state sanctioned executions of indigenous populations, and at times both over reports and under reports the execution of African American slaves. This does not even begin, however, to account for additional issues with the process of collecting data on state sanctioned executions in a country and continent that, since colonization in the early 1600s, has often turned a blind eye to the extrajudicial killing of non-white populations. In such cases, it can be reasonably argued that despite the extrajudicial nature of the such executions (like mass lynchings and the massacres and mass executions of indigenous populations) they are just as much sanctioned by a state that takes action through their inaction in undertaking any meaningful measures to prevent them or bring their perpetrators to justice. Since colonization, the Western states that have governed the continent have operated through overtly racist epistemologies that have allowed them to arbitrarily condemn and punish or ignore otherwise synonymous human actions through the enforcement and non-enforcement of law. This is the underlying basis through which the state acts through its inaction, and the United States operates through the governmental legacies first developed in Western Europe. All this demonstrates the intertwined development of racialized punishments and capitalism.

While Harries and Cheatwood do indicate that the file is incomplete and that they removed a portion of the data, the part they did utilize is not immune to the issues Blackman and McLaughlin describe. Additionally, and more poignantly in terms of this dissertation, Harries and Cheatwood bypass any broader discussion on the strengths and limitations of measurement and data collection—especially in terms of the collection of crime data (c.f. Mosher, Miethe, and Hart 2011) and crime’s dubious connection to levels of violence in America (Zimring and Hawkins 1999). This inaction, that operates through their chosen epistemological process, greatly influences the foundations upon which their conclusions are produced. They take the data as given; that it is reality—or at least sufficiently representative of it so that as it is manipulated and analyzed it could be conjured as truth—without a thorough assessment of its veracity, to the extent that any data can be purely honest. By neglecting to meaningfully engage with the issues in the dataset itself they conveniently skirt any notion of the politics of data collection and the politics of negotiating data’s meaning. The study is void of any moments of reflexivity or acknowledgments of positionality.

As such, this calls into question the entire process of attempting to empirically record what counts as execution through capital punishment in North America, and any project that seeks to draw more-than-surface level conclusions from such records. Here, it becomes prescient to note that Harries and Cheatwood’s work is far from the only project that operates in this way (Baumgartner et al. 2016;

Heise 2013; S. Phillips 2012; Cohen and Smith 2010; S. Phillips 2008; Poveda 2006). While there is some hope for nuanced uses of empirical evidence where capital punishment is concerned (Unah 2011), numerous studies, well after Harries and Cheatwood’s and Blackman and McLaughlin’s work, will continue to take data (including the Espy file) at face value in their production of knowledge.

These issues are broadly reflective of five related issues Robert Bohm (2001, 26–27) identifies with positivist theories of crime that are used to conceptualize and analyze it. First, that within the positivistic production of crime theory “overprediction” occurs where too much crime is accounted for

18 and proposed theories oftentimes cannot explain exceptions because assumptions are made that large populations “respond similarly to the same biological, psychological, and especially sociological factors.”

Bohm provides the example that theories that suggest crime is caused by poverty often overpredicts causality yet cannot explain why many poor people do not commit crimes. A second issue is identified in that positivist theories “generally ignore the criminalization process,” and take definitions of crime for granted, due to the typical separation of the study of crime from theories of “the law and the state.” In a third instance, issues arise from beliefs in “normative consensus” where “positivist theories assume that most people agree most of the time about moral values” or termed another way, that there exists in reality agreement over what is right and wrong, good and bad. A significant issue appears here in that such a worldview “leads to a blind acceptance of the status quo” in that it disregards how fundamental values held between different populations may be synonymous or conflict at a variety of scales because there is a built-in indifference to the existence of multiple socially constructed realities. This leads to a related fourth issue: that positivist theories retain a “belief in determinism” in that it is assumed that the

“choice of action is not free but is determined by causes independent of will.” This causes positivist accounts of crime to “assume that human beings only adapt or react” while ignoring the reality that human beings create, produce not only “new social arrangements” but also “new ways of thinking.”

Thus, the presentation of “crime” can occur in an “absolute” way that “makes rational planning and control [directed at certain populations] logically possible.” A final issue is “the belief in the ability of social scientists, including criminologists, to be objective or value-neutral in their work.” Bohm states rather directly that “assuming that an “objective reality” exists independent of their perception of it, positivists often fail to understand that what they know is a product of how they interpret what they observe” because how humans conceptualize themselves relationally is very much dependent on one’s

“cognitive apparatus…past experiences” and various, always changing social contexts in which one exists. With these issues in mind, what complicates matters further—bringing us, conveniently, to the

19 second consequence—is that geographically based, empirically produced knowledge about capital punishment is rarely reflective and reflexive enough to give readers any sense why the production of such knowledge continues to happen. And therefore, we see the replication and reproducibility of contradiction.

I.II An Attempt at Understanding Why Positivist Studies of Capital Punishment Happen

At first glance, Harries and Cheatwood’s work on capital punishment is simply an attempt to discern and describe the spatiotemporal patterns of the phenomena. And if such a brief gaze is where analysis ends, then the authors certainly succeed in providing some sense of what the patterns of a number of executions in the United States are like. In short, they provide the when and where of United

States capital punishment (at their given moment in time). But that cursory look misses the (seemingly unending) knots in which any author of such a study must bind themselves when attempting to both justify and distance themselves from their participation in the activity of knowledge production—a common exercise amongst those producing positivist studies on human phenomena.

While Harries and Cheatwood’s work bringing the subject of capital punishment to the discipline is fine (as described above), regardless of any extended deconstruction, it does provide a starting point for an illuminating conversation about how and why geographic knowledge is produced. Now that I have attempted to explain how this geographic knowledge about capital punishment was produced, I proceed in trying to discern, or at the very least question, why it was produced. For that, I will begin by assessing the discursive strategies Harries and Cheatwood use to contextualize their empirical account of a geography of capital punishment in the broader relation between academic work, public opinion and policy decisions in the United States. That, in turn, leads into a discussion of the unstable and often mystified foundations upon which scholars employing positivist approaches to human (geographic) phenomena build their arguments for producing knowledge. Such mystification, as we will see, obscures

20 the dual uses of empirical knowledge, for whomever controls understandings of truth arbitrates what truth is and is not.

From the outset Harries and Cheatwood (1997, 1) acknowledge the uneven geography of capital punishment—that it is practiced differently in different places in the United States and that these variations are an issue in policy debates at national and state levels. They take things to an international level as well, describing the United States’ “dubious distinction” as being one of only a few remaining

“First World … developed nations” to retain the practice, even if it is not employed on a scale to that seen in “Iran, China, or Nigeria” for example.

Harries and Cheatwood (1997, 2) describe “developed nations” as having conceptualized capital punishment as a “human-rights issue” while “developing countries” are behind in their understanding of this “advanced position.” In turn, they suggest that this context of comparison is not “directly comparable” to the United States because such “less developed” countries “use capital punishment as a political weapon.” The logical extension of Harries and Cheatwood’s contention is that, in their mind, there is nothing overtly politically incisive about the continuing practice of capital punishment in the

United States.

They do this while describing the high rates of public approval for the practice throughout the

United States, saying that the “broad renaissance of capital punishment may result from recent initiatives in the United States Congress and pressures on politicians to “do something” about violence, perceived by many to have reached crisis proportions” (1997, 3). Writing in the late 1980s and 1990s the authors indicate (1997, 7–9) that public opinion in favor of the death penalty was at an all-time high since surveying began in 1936. While the near 80-percent favorability rates of the time have gone down since, contemporary surveying indicates that a majority of Americans remain in favor of the practice

(Jones 2017).

Harries and Cheatwood (1997, 10) submit that the high approval rates among the public and political officials represents a significant discrepancy between the United States and other “developed countries” regarding capital punishment and thus, “a geographic perspective of the issue is illuminating.” They contend that this perspective, which illuminates the high degree of “place-to-place variation in execution” suggests the end of “the constitutional right of equal protection under the law.”

This contention is squarely at odds with their earlier supposition that the practice of capital punishment in the United States is without political ends. But the continued contradictions only begin here.

In a subsequent section, Harries and Cheatwood (1997, 10) describe the “basic decision about the existence and use of capital punishment” as an “inescapably moral one” before saying that some questions about capital punishment can be answered empirically. Using their examples, some of these questions are: “whether it does or does not deter crime or brutalize society, whether it is justly and responsibly administered, and whether it can incapacitate without error.” They say the proceeding book

“addresses some of these empirical questions” and that it is their hope that the answers they provide assist individuals or a society to “make more informed decisions about whether they are “for” or

“against” capital punishment.”

But in a curious twist, they are quick to remind the reader that “no data, whatever the quantity, can resolve or abrogate the fundamental moral choice that must be made regarding the use of capital punishment.” Doubling down, they proclaim that whatever their conclusions are regarding how capital punishment happens in the United States that “these conclusions never answer the question of whether we should execute.” It would seem then, that on the one hand Harries and Cheatwood want a more knowledgeable public to make “informed decisions” about whether to kill or not, and on the other, they throw up their hands suggesting people will ultimately decide for themselves, through their morality, regardless of their breadth of knowledge.

But, yet again, they fight back against the proclamation they have just made, saying, that their empirical material will hopefully lead to more “reasoned conclusions” as it “reflects different cultures of both politics and violence” in the United States that lead to capital offenders being executed or not executed simply because of their differential geographic distributions (1997, 11). And later, suggesting that their work examines the question of capital punishment through the “dual filters of space and time” in an attempt to provide some foundation to “review public policy,” they again suggest such analysis could be influential for the wider public. They state that despite such efforts, the “reality” is that the issue of capital punishment is more so influenced “by emotional public responses and political pandering to those responses” where candidates for political office appear to compete for influence in terms of “who can promise the most severe punishments for criminals” (1997, 14).

Such analysis of the social and political context of their work simultaneously places it on a pedestal of great influence while also conjuring it as lacking any relevance to those who they assume could benefit from it but who would only refuse it out of some perceived and inherent societal nihilism.

In terms of positionality, Harries and Cheatwood establish themselves and their productive activity as some figurative “beacon in the darkness,” set on an unending loop bent on beaming “the truth” in all directions—if only the world would consume it.

For Harries and Cheatwood, the question and explanation of where they stand on the continued practice of capital punishment comes next, and, naturally, their stance materializes out of the abstract.

They explain: “in case it is not obvious already, our research and reading have led us toward an anti- death penalty position…in the social sciences it is virtually impossible to “prove” anything, the weight of evidence accumulated long before we put pen to paper suggest that capital punishment could not be clearly shown to deter violence, the attribute most hoped for by the public and one that we assume to be its strongest selling point, along with revenge and elimination or its euphemistic synonym, incapacitation” (1997, 15).

Continuing, they are quick to note that “the presence of error and high dollar costs tends to make capital punishment both morally and economically indefensible” before remarking on their positionality once more, so that readers can take their “beliefs and preconceptions into account.” After explaining that they submit to the notion that no science or social science is “value-free” they state clearly that, “we present our analysis in what we believe to be a straightforward way with no attempt to select only information that would bolster the “anti” cause” (1997, 15).

Throughout Harries and Cheatwood’s introduction to their work they demonstrate a propensity for stumbling upon the “natural” questions about capital punishment as if they fall from the heavens.

They use data that is equally abstract—and fundamentally incongruent with the phenomena of execution in North America as we saw earlier in section one—in an attempt to answer them. And, they suggest that such answered questions provide blossoming and fruitful knowledge from which individuals and society at large may pick and choose in their contemplation of the continued practice of capital punishment. Only to arrive at the equally abstract determination that nothing they have produced can help anyone answer whether they should kill through the state; inherent in this determination is the assumption that—for whatever “emotional” reason they never explain—society is apparently disinterested in such knowledge.

If Harries and Cheatwood are so certain that the answers to their empirical questions will do nothing to answer the “question of whether we should execute” for anyone—a question they suggest is fundamental to society—then why produce work asking and answering them in the first place? This point becomes all the more prescient when attempting to discern how the pair construct the meaning of their work. According to their words, it simultaneously contains the potential to influence our collective understanding of the issue, but exists as something we are bound to ignore anyway. This constructed meaning is all the more perplexing to square with their assertion that it had been (apparently?) obvious

24 all along that their work had influenced them in moving “toward an anti-death penalty position” (1997,

15).

If their work truly pushed them in the direction of such a position, why could it not also influence the society the pair have so little faith in? Furthermore, how are we to square their assertion that this abstract empirical work influenced them at all, when earlier in their explanation of their work they contend that any decision about capital punishment is fundamentally a moral one and therefore any conclusion derived from the empirical work would “never answer the question of whether we should execute” anyway (1997, 10)? If that is so, then by what possible means did it move them

“toward” their current position?

Their use of “toward” suggests movement—that they were once of some other belief—and their either-or presentation of opinion on the question of whether or not to execute suggests a binary.

Are we to assume they once believed we should execute, and then their enlightenment through knowledge production pushed them “toward” (but not to) the other end of the binary? If such a process did occur—and, if we are to take the replicability and reproducibility of such empirical work seriously— then why are Harries and Cheatwood so determined that if those in society sought equal enlightenment through the reproduction of (their) work, that they could not also be moved? Or is such an enlightened movement possible for only Harries and Cheatwood, and their like, who claim to create and therefore know truth through positivist knowledge?

So, which way is it? Is it possible to construct a coherent empirical study that remains “value- free” about a question that is “inescapably a moral one?” According to Harries and Cheatwood, that inescapably moral question of whether we should execute or not is the only question that ultimately matters. Yet, through a dizzying array of contradictory qualifications, they (try and quite clearly fail to) distance themselves as far as possible from it in their vapid attempt at (non)persuasion.

And what, among many things, they obscure in doing so, is that their preferred positivist epistemological approaches are just as useful for producing influential information that suggests the need to question the continuing practice of capital punishment, as it is for producing influential information that suggests the need to continue and even increase the practice of capital punishment.

And such empirical evidence, some say (Sustein and Vermeule 2005), could even be (without at all suggesting that it should not be) used to make a moral argument that capital punishment should be a fundamental requirement of American life.

I.III The Questionable Uses of Positivist Empiricism

Citing recent (to them in 2005) empirical studies on the relationship between murder rates and capital punishment, Cass R. Sustein and Adrian Vermeule (2005, 706) suggest that when sentences of capital punishment and executions reach a certain (high) frequency, the deterrent effect of the practice not only exists but is substantial. While they spend the next several pages of their paper qualifying the empirical results—often suggesting that opponents of capital punishment could certainly poke holes in the evidence—they go on to suggest that even reasonable degrees of doubt over deterrence effects should not doom capital punishment if there is the chance that it will save a significant number of lives.

Ultimately, they double-down on this idea, saying, “it is possible that capital punishment saves lives on net, even if it has zero deterrent effect” by “incapacitating those who would otherwise kill again in the future” (2005, 715–16, emphasis in original). They add later that those who object to capital punishment and believe any evidence of a deterrence effect is irrelevant, believe “they are operating in accordance with a freestanding moral principle.” They continue, suggesting that such people will not be pleased at the proposition “that their moral judgements are instead a product of some kind of cognitive error,” something the Sustein and Vermule say they cannot discount (2005, 740).

While Sustein and Vermeule continue, saying that it is not their goal to render a judgement on the validity of the empirical evidence, they do proceed to lay out an argument for the continued, and even increased, use of capital punishment assuming that the practice does have a deterrent effect.

Critically, they ask those who may doubt the empirical evidence—with no mention of those who may doubt the assumptions inherent in their use of the evidence—to imagine the moral question of capital punishment, if they were in a situation where “life-life tradeoffs were actually involved” like in a hostage situation where authorities are authorized to “use deadly force to protect the lives of innocent people”

(2005, 716).

Later in their argument (2005, 739; 745) they use, specifically, the geographical dimensions of the empirical evidence (Shepherd 2005) that suggests there is a successful deterrent element to capital punishment and thus proclaim a need for it. They begin by describing that at a “national-level” how

“each execution saves eighteen lives, on average” and relay that the most recent studies categorize three types of states in the United States: where “capital punishment deters very strongly,” where there it has “no deterrent effect at all,” and where the practice has “perverse effects, slightly raising murder rates.” According to the authors, the “pronounced deterrent effect of the national average” exists because “where capital punishment does deter, it deters powerfully.” They decree, based on Shepherd’s

2005 study, that there is a “threshold effect” where in “states that execute very few people, capital punishment either has no effect or even backfires” in terms of “brutalizing” society, “while in states that execute a larger number, there are large deterrent effects.”

This regionalization, Sustein and Vermeule say, does “not at all” undermine their thesis that capital punishment could and should be morally required in the United States because they “hold no brief to promote [it] everywhere, at all times and places.” Continuing, they say, “where capital punishment is a powerful deterrent, we have suggested that states may well be morally obligated to adopt it” and where it is ineffective the “obligation disappears.” And it’s this geographically based

27 empirical evidence, apparently, through which the pair fully determine their view on the subject. Their faith in the truth of the geographical evidence abounds as they distance themselves from “retributivists” who “might continue” arguing for the practice on alternate grounds “if future work were to overturn the recent evidence that capital punishment deters.” They, however, would quickly overturn their view on the subject because they “see no inherent moral necessity for capital punishment if it produces little in the way of benefits in the protection of human life” (2005, 745). The pair’s faith in their regionalization of (supposed) deterrence effects carries a distinct air of symptomatic spatial determinism.

For Sustein and Vermeule, then, it would seem their only concern is the protection of the

“unjustly killed” when they set their gaze upon the state in concluding that “unjustified killing is exactly what capital punishment prevents” and that “if deterrence occurs, a government that settles upon a package of crime-control policies that does not include capital punishment might well seem, at least prima facie, to be both violating the rights and reducing the welfare of its citizens—just as would a state that failed to enact simple environmental measures promising to save a great many lives” (2005, 749).

The empirical studies Sustein and Vermule depend on were all almost entirely conducted by economists doing econometric studies (Bohm 2011, 158). Joanna Shepherd—whose work Sustein and

Vermule utilize the most, especially in their geographically based arguments—testified on the topic of capital punishment and deterrence before the United States Congress in 2003 (quoted in Bohm 2011,

158; from Donohue and Wolfers 2005, 793). During her testimony, Shepherd relayed that there is a

“strong consensus among economists that capital punishment deters crime” and that “studies are unanimous” on the subject. According to Bohm’s account, when she was asked by the chairperson of the committee about equally empirical work that suggests the exact opposite conclusion—that capital punishment has no deterrent effect whatsoever—she said, “there may be people on the other side that rely on older papers and studies that use outdated statistical techniques or older data, but all of the

28 modern economic studies in the past decade have found a deterrent effect. So I am not sure what the other people are relying on.”

As Bohm (2011, 159) goes on to explain, subsequent analyses of those econometric studies point out many of the same flaws that invalidated initial research that suggested a deterrence effect in the 1970s. Particularly, these newer econometric studies are critiqued from an empiricist perspective over their replicability issues (Donohue 2016, 58; Donohue and Wolfers 2005). Donohue and Wolfers

(2005, 844) also explain that the issue of the production of flawed studies in the 1970s was secondary to the issue of their use in policymaking. Those studies, at the time, “breathed new life” into the pro-death penalty movement, and were seized upon to advance the goal of broadening capital punishment’s scope in America well before “the validity and reliability of the work had been fully explored.” Donohue and

Wolfers (2005, 844–45) lament that this phenomena of rushing “directly to the legislative forum” with studies that “seem to support a favored policy position” but have not been through “the full process of scientific inquiry and validation” is an ongoing issue. They relay that they see “potential dangers” in these actions when such studies later become “utterly discredited” but “continue to influence policy” nonetheless, while the empirical processes needed to reverse course remain both arduous and time consuming.

But Donohue and Wolfers (2005, 843–45) also levy criticism towards Sustein and Vermeule for their “cavalier” use of these econometric studies in producing a moral argument for the increased use of capital punishment. Particularly, they question Sustein and Vermeule’s (2005, 715) contention that it is unreasonable to levy legitimate questions that doubt the deterrence effect out of precaution when such doubts “ignore evidence of severe harm” that crime and murder cause. Donohue and Wolfers (2005,

843) suggest that through their reassessment of the data that Sustein and Vermeule—and others who, like them, attempt to use empirical evidence to make a case for more capital punishment—question

“what is known and knowable about the impact of the death penalty.” And later they call for those who

29 would rush to use empirical evidence of a deterrent effect to reassess their “thinking that we can start down a path of greater reliance on the death penalty today and then turn away from it if the evidence later proves that there is no effect (or even a pernicious effect)” (2005, 845).

I.IV Relating the Deterrence Debates to the Production of Geographic Knowledge

As the conclusion of the prior section demonstrates, Donohue and Wolfers only keep their critique of Sustein and Vermeule at the level of empiricism. From their perspective, Sustein and

Vermeule, and others making evidentiary arguments that capital punishment produces meaningful deterrence effects in populations, remain misguided only in their use of questionable empirical procedures and methods, and their unwillingness to accept the questionability of the knowledge produced by that approach resulting evidence. The critique does not reach the level of epistemology.

That is where we may take a step back and consider how this debate can be used to reflect on knowledge production in geography, broadly, and knowledge production about the geographic dimensions of capital punishment, specifically. Here, is a curious phenomenon regarding the production of knowledge based on empiricism.

What allows Sustein and Vermeule to extrapolate from positivist, geographically based empirical evidence about the deterrence effect to the point of producing a forthright argument for the requirement that the state continue, and in some cases practice more, capital punishment? What disallows Harries and Cheatwood from extrapolating beyond the positivist, geographically based empirical evidence (about the illusion of deterrence, among other things) they produce to make even the slightest of arguments for or against the state’s continued practice of capital punishment?

Why can Sustein and Vermeule go to the extent of claiming, with conviction, that the geographic distributions of the capital punishment and the deterrence effect should result in the requirement of continued and increased state killing? Why can Harries and Cheatwood only float listlessly back and

30 forth between claiming the usefulness and non-usefulness of their geographic evidence for influencing policy and public opinion, while carefully and sensitively remaining as “value-free” as possible in the presentation of their work?

What forces allow Sustein and Vermeule to strut their productive activity about, while Harries and Cheatwood must shrink back in an attempt to hide behind a (seemingly) endless series of qualified truths inherent in the process of their productive activity? Sustein and Vermeule can be clearly seen in their work, but Harries and Cheatwood?

Herein lay the consequences of attempting so-called “value-free” knowledge production and research about human phenomena. Namely, that should one attempt such an endeavor—subjecting oneself to the strictures of a dogmatic and pervasive positivism—one must retain the appearance of remaining value-free at the risk of compromising one’s ability to communicate anything remotely meaningful about the subject of one’s research.

Sustein and Vermeule say, forcefully, that the specific geographic distributions of crime and capital punishment in the United States dictate the requirement of the state to kill and kill more. Harries and Cheatwood (can only) merely suggest, vapidly, that the geographic distributions of crime and capital punishment in the United States could perhaps cause, in the ideal scenario, the questioning and possible reformation of the practice. As wholly different as these two positions of productive activity appear on their face, they, nonetheless, are arrived at through a synonymous epistemology: one that requires nothing more than the maintenance of the status quo; the maintenance of a society where empirical methodologies reign without a thought as to their epistemological or material consequences.

The epistemological assumptions that allow for the development of Sustein and Vermeule’s knowledge production are the same as the assumptions that force Harries and Cheatwood into a figurative corner when it comes to making authoritative claims based on their production of knowledge.

And so, the question arises: what is the limit of usefulness of empirical studies focused on human phenomena? And, where is that limit in the discipline of geography?

There is a degree of importance in knowing the when and where patterns of capital punishment, or whatever other subject, in the United States. Such descriptions can prove valuable in some contexts.

But, should we exercise caution in continuing down similar nomothetic paths of generalization in geography? If such paths quickly reach their limits in terms of their explanatory power, then what?

These questions direct us towards the larger discussion about the production of geographic knowledge in the discipline as a whole because there are other epistemological approaches used to produce knowledge in the discipline. An extended conversation on this topic will begin chapter three.

But before we move there, it is important to situate this dissertation within what other work has been on the subject of capital punishment in geography. That will appear in the next section, followed by a brief discussion, in a third section, on the burgeoning field of prison geographies. The following sections appear as a more traditional literature review might.

II. Non-positivist Geographies and Capital Punishment

After Harries and Cheatwood’s pioneering foray into bringing the subject of capital punishment to geography in a substantive way, there was a lengthy gap until the next thorough engagement. With the exception of Blomley’s (2003) article connecting the violence of law and private property rights to a brief discussion of capital punishment, it was not until a special issue in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies (Inwood 2015; Heynen 2015; Tyner and Colucci 2015; Inwood and Barron 2015;

Kobayashi 2015) that the subject reappeared in earnest. In Joshua Inwood’s introduction to the special issue, he highlights the uneven and unjust geographies of capital punishment in the United States while making clear how those geographies reflect larger issues of injustice and inequality.

The papers in the special issue are in many ways a significant departure from Harries and

Cheatwood’s work, especially in terms of their epistemological approaches. And thus, a significant contrast is evident in the approach this group of scholars take in situating their work within the discipline and beyond it. As Inwood (2015, 1059–60) makes clear the origin of the special issue was the execution of Troy Davis on September 21st, 2011 in Georgia shortly before the Southeast Division of the

Association of American Geographers meetings in Savannah, Georgia, held just a short distance away from Davis’ old neighborhood. The proximity of the execution to the conference proceedings spurred the panel discussion that led to the special issue—specifically, the last minute, rather impromptu assembly of the panel was the result of Inwood, James Tyner, and Nik Heynen exchanging messages on the subject only a short time before the conference began. As Inwood (2015, 60) states, “the murder/execution of Troy Davis…speaks to the larger issue of (in)justice and (in)equality in the United

States” and it continues to serve as a call to “engage in critical scholarship on the death penalty” and

“create the conditions necessary for the end of executions in the United States.” Consequently, Inwood says, “this special issue is a political issue.” Those remarks reflect the approach of the contributing scholars as one concerned with social and political justice; nothing about the papers that make up the collection is apolitical. And the desire of the contributors to make an impact, politically, on the structural conditions of society that allows capital punishment to continue is but one concern identified by the group.

A dual concern of the special issue is, as Inwood (2015, 1060) relates, a hope that “this special issue is a first step for geographers to think through the death penalty in the US alongside the contributions critical scholarship can make in illuminating the role capital punishment plays in US society.” Like I have discussed in the introductory chapter and earlier in chapter two, geographers—for whatever reasons—have been largely silent on a number of pressing social issues, including capital punishment, while scholars in other social sciences have produced voluminous literatures on such

33 subjects. But this curious silence, however, is not reflective of the discipline’s significant engagement

(led by a sizeable group of so-called radical and critical geographers) with the politics of classicism, racism, sexism and their associated inequitable geographies. Just as this dissertation is an attempt at advancing a geographic engagement with the issue of capital punishment, it is also an engagement with this curious silence (outside of this special issue) of radical and critical geographers on an issue that, on its face, appears to be a ripe and bountiful avenue for analyses. Therefore, this dissertation is a logical extension of the sentiments laid out in this special issue; it is, if nothing else an attempt to bring the issue of capital punishment—and hopefully by example, other similar issues—to the discipline of geography.

In terms of epistemological vantage points, each of the scholars variably operates through nuanced Marxist and post-structural approaches, with deference to both critical economic arguments and critical race theory. In particular, Kobayashi, Heynen, and Inwood and Barron, contextualize capital punishment within America’s history of racism and white supremacy. Kobayashi (2015, 1118) details the uneven geographies of capital punishment at a variety of scales, from local to international, noting that lives are cut short “in a country where the circumstances of geography lead to decisions over who will live and die.” Inwood and Barron—along with Heynen—also refocus their attention, at times, back on the discipline. Inwood and Barron (2015, 1114) say that geography should be central to investigations of capital punishment that “expose the ethnoracial consequences” of the practice and “expose the justice system to critical scrutiny” especially given the discipline’s growing attention on prisons.

Heynen (2015, 1080) says, emphatically, that “an antiracist people’s geography must certainly be a part of how” the continued development of an abolitionist politics directed at capital punishment are created. Heynen (2015, 1072–75) is very clear about the discipline’s past, and its potential future, in terms of its capacity to call up “spatial logics of consciousness…at an immense scale” to confront the

“racialized history that continues to prevail in allowing” capital punishment to happen. For a “truly

34 antiracist people’s geography” to form, Heynen says, the discipline must be more reflective and contemplative considering that “silence hides abuse” and that should geographers continue “to be silent about the geographies of justice writ large or the geographies of capital punishment more specifically” dire consequences could result. From the spirit of Heynen’s words emerges a poignant question: if geographers continue to be silent about such fundamental matters of life and death (of which capital punishment is but one among many such matters), then what does that communicate about the discipline at large and the critical mass of so-called radical and critical geographers?

Tyner and I (2015, 1084–86) take a different—and more circuitous, at least by initial appearances—path in our critique of the relative silence of geographers on capital punishment. It is one that connects directly to concerns over the production of geographic knowledge highlighted in the previous section of this chapter. And, it suggests that the issue of capital punishment in the United

States is as much about class and the relation of the population to the sovereign as it is about any other of the myriad inequities that plague the United States and the discipline’s (in)ability to address them.

First, we problematize the parallel executions of Davis and unabashed white-supremacist Eric Brewer, who confessed to the murder of an African America man in Texas. Due to his confession and clear evidence, there were no doubts over the knowledge that Brewer had killed. For Davis, however, knowledge that shed doubt over his guilt was abundant throughout; his guilt remains elusive (see

Inwood and Barron 2015, 1100–1102; and Inwood 2015). And yet, the state killed both men all the same.

The juxtaposition of these two cases highlights the misplaced “temptation to debate capital punishment on the bases of knowledge—or ‘truth’—and of guilt and innocence” (Tyner and Colucci

2015, 1084). To focus only on those executions where there is clear doubt—thereby ignoring others—is an exercise in the promotion of the “underlying knowledge (or science) that permits the taking of life” through capital punishment and whatever other means the sovereign state employees as it kills (Tyner

35 and Colucci 2015, 1084). Such arguments—often taken up by those approaching life and death through the calculation of positivist and otherwise subsumed epistemologies—valorize the production of knowable truths and their capacity to direct the state’s use and dis-use of life and death practices, such as capital punishment.

It is through such charades of truth production and dissemination that scholars who are subsumed by their attendant epistemologies debate the continued use of capital punishment—as evidenced in the first section of this chapter. Such debates do less than nothing in terms of questioning the practice of capital punishment itself. Instead, they operate solely through the presumption that capital punishment—and other life and death practices the state commands—should be continued, should the sovereign’s ability to know fully guilt and innocence be perfected. Life and death matter not in the bleak, unceasing Sisyphean process of producing knowable truths. After all, the ontological position of positivism places verifiable, measurable facts above all else—that includes human life.

Implicit in this argument—and hopefully made explicit in this chapter—is that the attempted perfection of knowledge is an exercise in triviality, for it is an unattainable goal that only allows the state to kill in the meantime (forever). It is an exercise that geographers of radical and critical persuasion would do well to confront within the discipline in their attempts to push the discipline—reflecting

Heynen’s sentiment—towards a people’s geography directed at abolishing those material practices that lead to classicism, racism, sexism and all manner of inequalities. What portions of the remainder of this dissertation attempts to show is that there are indeed other, useful and purposeful, ways of knowing and producing the world around us that do not rely on vapid epistemological idealisms that demand we live out value-free, wholly neutral existences.

III. Prison Geographies

While the study of prisons within geography is a relatively recent development (Martin and

Mitchelson 2009; Turner 2013) it has grown quickly and covers a wide variety of issues. Geographers have studied prison construction in the context of its economic and social impacts in both rural

(Mitchelson 2011; Bonds 2009; Lawson, Jarosz, and Bonds 2008; Bonds 2006; Che 2005) and urban settings (Mitchelson 2012; Dahmann 2010; Peck and Theodore 2008; Gilmore 2008; Gilmore and

Gilmore 2008; Gilmore 2007). Borders, boundaries, inclusion/exclusion, containment, mobility, prison design, detention, and incarceration within the context of prisons, both within the United States and internationally, has seen recent engagement from geographers (Peters and Turner 2018; Moran,

Jewkes, and Turner 2016; Loyd, Mitchelson, and Burridge 2013; Moran, Pallot, and Piacentini 2013;

Mountz et al. 2013; R. J. Smith 2011; Loyd, Burridge, and Mitchelson 2009; Sibley and Van Hoven 2009;

Nemeth 2009).

Additionally, the recent work of Dominique Moran (2014, 2013, 2012) has been influential in its discussion of the body and time/space in the context of incarceration, and how the prison ‘moves’ beyond its actual physical boundaries through the movement of people between now blurred prison boundaries. Likewise, Karen Morin’s (2018, 2016a, 2016b, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c) recent work details violence in US prisons while incorporating discussion of state-space, masculinity, prisons as tourism and heritage space and sites of living memory.

While the prison geographies literature has already traversed a rather diverse range of subjects,

I see at least two related areas in which this proposed research can build upon and extend what has already been done. First, considering Moran’s work, utilizing the process of capital punishment, which happens within the physical boundaries of prisons, to discuss the inter related flows of people and commodities in and out of death row could likewise blur the boundaries that separate capital punishment from society.

Secondly, Morin’s (2013c) discussion of incidences of direct violence within prisons is one of the few times within the prison geographies literature where direct acts of violence are addressed, in this case through a case study of a supermax prison in Pennsylvania. Morin also addresses several aspects of direct violence on death row in both human and animal contexts (2018, 2016a). In conjunction with

Moran’s fruitful inquiries, using examples from the direct state killing (violence) of people through capital punishment may allow for a more cogent academic engagements with banal, ‘everyday’ violence and the social issues which are at their root; something geographers have been implored to do with increasing frequency in recent times (Tyner and Inwood 2014; Tyner 2012; Inwood and Tyner 2011;

Tyner and Inwood 2011).

While geographers have remained largely silent on the issue of capital punishment, the issue has received considerable attention in philosophy, sociology, and criminology (Derrida 2013; Sarat and

Shoemaker 2011; Sarat 2002; Garland 2010, 2007, 2005a, 2002; Zimring 2003; Zimring and Hawkins

1986). With the prison and carceral geographies literature, capital punishment has yet to feature as a substantive area of inquiry. This dissertation research fills a gap within geography by connecting this literature from beyond the discipline, and its tradition of a scholarly treatment of state sanctioned executions, to a geography of capital(ist) punishment that borrows, at times, from fundamental concepts in carceral geographies. Carceral geographers, concerned with prisons and what happens in and around them, have done less to regularly connect their work to Marxist political-economic philosophy to address how capitalism functions through incarceration. In this way, this dissertation also seeks to advance more direct Marxist-oriented explanations of the political economies of violent processes inherent to incarceration. Several studies, however, have begun to make these connections and I build on them in chapter four. The ways in which Nick Gill and co-authors (2018) examine, in a recent paper, the circuits of capital to move commodities through prison space, and Mendieta’s (2004)

38 work connecting the coterminous development of racism and capitalism to transitioning institutions on

America’s landscape, both prove to be quite useful.

Chapter 3: Situating Knowledge and Developing Epistemology in Human Geography

“There is no “right way” to think historically and comparatively about capital punishment (or about any other subject for that matter). There are multiple vantage points, multiple perspectives, and multiple interpretations, each of which is more or less useful, more or less appropriate, more or less persuasive.” (Garland 2007, 439)

We can expand the subterranean tensions between the few studies on the subject of capital punishment in geography, into a larger conversation about the state of knowledge production in the discipline, specifically where it concerns human geography, or geographic work that addresses human spatial phenomena. While an exhaustive exploration of all epistemological approaches in human geography is well beyond the scope of this dissertation, I will endeavor in the first section of this chapter to engage approaches relative to previous work on capital punishment in the discipline, as detailed in the first two chapters.

These epistemological approaches are positivism, a somewhat (meaning at sometimes more so than others) structural Marxism and post-structuralism. I begin with the tensions between positivism and Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s, before proceeding to how these tensions manifested in the development of so-called radical and critical geography. This second area covers the fracturing of radical and critical geographies as increased specialization occurred within non-positivist human geographies throughout the 1980s and 1990s. These two areas of disciplinary history are highlighted by an examination of contentious debates from the time periods over how and why to do certain kinds of geography. Next is an assessment of the analytical possibilities present in Marxist, post-structural, and anarchist/prefigurative geographies in the context of renewed, radical ‘Marxist’ geographies since the mid-1990s. Concluding the chapter is an explanation of the analytical processes (and ‘methodologies’

40 should that term be more palatable) in this dissertation as situated within the contemporary paradigm of a renewed, radical ‘Marxist’ geography.

I. Early Epistemological Approaches in Human Geography and Two Debates

The history of geography may appear to some observers as somewhat convoluted with its numerous philosophies, approaches and debates over how to do, and what it means to do, geography, and then, by extension, what counts as geography. Innes Keighren (2017a, 644) notes that the project of narrating the discipline’s many “disciplinary and discursive histories” has been contradicted “by an expanding range of empirically rich, contextually aware work that shows geographical thought and practice to be, always, constructed, contingent, and contested.” In this way, it is exceedingly difficult to pin down what exactly the histories of epistemological approaches in the discipline are and how they have developed—they will, invariably, be constructed based on the contingencies of my place and training within the discipline and certainly open to contestation. Keighren (2017a, 638–39) borrows from John K. Wright’s (1925, 1926, 1947) work in contextualizing his report on the history and philosophy of the discipline. Wrapped up in Wright’s ‘geosophy’ was a conviction, Keighren says, that a history of geography should include all manner of “ostensibly objective and…evidently subjective” geographic thought, knowledges and imaginations, no matter who produced them, or by what means

(see also Keighren 2005).

Geosophy, by dint of its consideration of any and all possible geographies, makes geography at once leveled and open to all people and things, and therefore makes any thorough explanation of what geography has been a problematic enterprise. Keighren (2018b, 7) offers additional insight into the process of trying to explain the wide array of geographical thought, saying, “for all its moments of apparent coherence and consensus, geography’s history is one defined by plurality.” Poignantly, he reminds those with the shared goal of articulating any history about the discipline should focus not on

“definitiveness but nuance” because “our task is not to agree [on] a particular narrative, but to disrupt established accounts and to find new ways of telling our stories. Progress in the history and philosophy of geography is defined by revealing and reveling in geography’s messiness, complexity, and relativism”

(2017a, 644–45). But there is purpose in the mire of the discipline’s history, at least for those rarely satisfied with the status quo. For “the discipline rarely feels more vital than when contemplating its past” Keighren (2018b, 7) reminds us; we “remind ourselves of the good and bad in who we are and in what we do, to see in our past both cause for regret and reason for hope” as we transform the discipline through our productive capacity.

Articulating and characterizing modern developments of geographic approaches to knowledge production is an endeavor which is potentially fraught with hang-ups, stumbling blocks and pitfalls. But, building on Keighren, I suggest that the purpose and meaning is found more so in the process of articulation rather than in however exactly the result would appear. The purpose is in exercising one’s productive capacity, because therein lays reformative potential.

I.I Disciplinary Survival and the Beginnings of Positivism

Considering the development of knowledge production within geography outside of dominant modes of production within the socio-political contexts in which they are embedded is rather ill advised.

Indeed, these contexts within which disciplinary regimes of knowledge production are embedded greatly influence the modes and possible limits of knowledge production, and often challenge more normative and generalized versions of disciplinary histories. This notion is not unprecedented (c.f.

Barnes 2016, 2015, 2001; Harvey 1984; Barnes and Curry 1983). Anglophone geography in the United

States and United Kingdom has developed from its imperial roots through state-capitalism and reformed itself at various times as dominant discourses within state-capitalism have shifted. For the purposes of

42 continuing with this chapter, I will focus primarily on dominant modes of knowledge production in the development of geography in the United States.

While this section will deal with the emergence of positivism in geography and the response to it from initial Marxist geographies in the 1950s and 1960s, the seeds of that interaction were planted earlier in the discipline’s history. Prior to the early 1950s (mostly human) geography was nearly completely regional in scope—and this regionalism persisted throughout the decade and into the 1960s, though it waned—while physical geographies shared much in common with early work in geology.

Indeed, Nevin Fenneman (1919, 7) was clear in his decree about what should make this early geography

“necessary and inevitable” in the scramble for disciplinary relevancy amongst the physical and human sciences in the academia of the early 1900s. For Fenneman, the study of areal differentiation “belongs solely to geography” and “it may be well to add in plain English that the one thing that is first, last, and always geography and nothing else, is the study of areas in their compositeness or complexity, that is regional geography.” “Without regional geography,” Fenneman continues, in a statement that would come to characterize the direction of the next forty-some years of geographical inquiry, “there is no reason why geography should be treated as a separate branch” of any other related discipline. Regional geography, and its attendant areal differentiation, would make geography systematic and allow it to stand on its own two feet.

Fenneman saw this need for relevancy as a matter of vital survival, and in his plea for geographers to heed his call to “develop our domain” rather than waste time “fortifying our border” against other disciplines, he turned to an examination of terminology and Darwinian metaphor (1919, 8–

10). The study of the totality of regions and their many inter-relations would set geography apart, and discriminating against, for example, the use of geologic terms in geographic writing merely deferred efforts of real self-preservation. This deference to a misguided (linguistic) purity that emphasized nonuse at the expense of needing to “make the truth clear,” Fenneman (1919, 9) argued, was

43 symptomatic of a discipline that was “less than diligent” about cultivating its own domain. And the price it would pay, should geography not turn fully towards an areal science-based regionalism, would manifest in its inability to do anything “which the world needs and which no other science can do”

(Fenneman 1919, 9, emphasis in original). Fenneman believed in geography; wanting a “free trade” between “the sciences” despite the boundaries scholars often guarded between them. He emphasized doing what “the world needs” and what no other discipline could do would mean for geography.

Appealing to the notion of the survival of the fittest, he said, “let there be among sciences the same struggle for existence and law of survival that Darwin found among species. Then every field of study that answers to an intellectual need will have due recognition” (1919, 9–10). Indeed, Fenneman (ibid) wanted geography to evolve not like “weak” animals that required “special provision” to “evade the jaws of their competitors” and survive—like the “encased” turtle or oyster who “puts up a good defense but is weak on the offensive” or the “squash bug” that “owe[s] their safety to a peculiar flavor or odor”—but as a discipline with a carnivorous “strength like the large mammals.”

Fenneman’s contestations indeed manifested in a regional turn (Hartshorne 1939, 1955) and the survival of geography, but paradigms shift, and it is there where new possibilities emerge. As changes in the United States socio-political context of the state-capitalism of the post-World War II era coalesced,

Fenneman’s most apt survivalist metaphors—made in the context of doing the work of producing relevant and relatable knowledge for the “intellectual need” of the moment—would become fully realized.

Depending on which texts (among the many and more than I will cite here) one consults (N.

Smith 1979, 358; Berry 1993; Barnes 1994b, 2001; Sheppard 2001), they will explain that in various capacities the phenomena of positivism in geography begins at its earliest in 1953 and at least in earnest by the later part of that decade. In large part, the movement of the discipline towards positivist epistemological modes of production were a response to the discipline’s variable usefulness (Stone

1979; Harris 1997) and influence during World War II—indeed, there was a lack of influence in terms of its perceived usefulness for the United States government and its war effort (Ackerman 1945). This led to an identity crisis for the discipline that had material and abstract consequences, considering geography’s institutional weakness given its “lack of clear intellectual terrain and set of goals” at the time (N. Smith 1987, 167). Where regional geography once set the discipline apart, its practitioners now were unable to “convey to nonspecialists” why it should be considered an “independent pursuit” when it was variably “defined so broadly that it was virtually all-inclusive or so narrowly that it had little raison d’être” (N. Smith 1987, 168–69).

The general ineffectiveness of regionalism in geography to support the kinds of knowledge required to satiate the state’s “intellectual need” was cause for crisis in the discipline. The crisis needing a fix, that a burgeoning interest in geographic “science” was ready to step in. In the context of the Cold

War—where social sciences, conducting state-conceived and funded research, became “practical and applied” as “methods, theories, disciplinary practices and epistemological standards changed radically”—this new geography would hit its stride (Barnes 2015, 127–29).

This emphasis on a geographic science was one that sought to create “laws and hypothesis” that could be “confirmed or disconfirmed or…reduced to the status of no longer satisfactory approximations” through a renewed focus on methodology and methodological process (Schaefer 1953, 226). This reconceptualization of geography and its purpose assumed that (natural) laws were what governed spatial distributions and it was the object of geographer’s study to discover them by discerning their abstract variables. Spatial distributions were no longer thought of as unique to their regions, rather, they were something that could be reducible to an abstract concept, and thus explained through a totalizing scientific, often mathematically or statistical based, law. In short, it became in vogue to study the relations between and spatial distributions of objects, rather than just objects themselves. For

Schaefer (1953, 240), and others leading the revolution (Burton 1963; Berry 1964, 1971, 1993; Curry

1967; Bunge 1979a; Gould 1979), this was a rejection of the regionalism of the past forty years as it was viewed as “permanently and systematically…narrow” and thus fundamentally limiting.

Schaefer—in form, much like Fenneman before him, but not in kind—was concerned that the potential rejection of “the search for laws” in favor of the “mere description” of regionalists in the discipline threatened to doom it to a real and figurative “geographical isolationism” (1953, 249). As academic reproduction plodded onwards the nomothetic turn won out and it privileged “the construction and testing of theoretical models” with the tools brought by “mathematization” in a geography that had “undergone a radical transformation of spirit and purpose” (Burton 1963, 151). It was this turn towards mathematics that reinvigorated an otherwise staid discipline—the quantitative revolution was indeed a new dawn for geography; a bright future signaled, one that would, by all appearances, allow the discipline to “cultivate its own strength” like the carnivores do, rather than

“encase itself like the oyster or cultivate the peculiar flavor of the squash bug to avoid being eaten”

(Fenneman 1919, 9). But appearances can be deceiving or, more aptly, utterly useless. For, no matter how many ounces of increasing strength are accumulated and displayed, strength is of little consequence when deep seeded peculiar flavors and odors accumulate all the same.

I.II The Lion and the Mouse Squash Bug

Initial responses, critiques, and oppositions to the discourses of positivist geography formed relatively quickly and came from geographers labeled behavioralist, humanist, and Marxist, and later feminist, structural, post-modern, post-structural, and anarchist. As Trevor Barnes (1994b, 1022) says,

“much of the criticism” from scholars at the time of the quantitative revolution was about “its applicability in…rendering political and social conflicts, [and] representing the affective traits of humans.” Marxist geographers of the time critiqued positivist geographies for its inability and unwillingness to address inequitable and often violent state-capitalist practices—in short, the material

46 consequences of positivist knowledge production. For the purposes of this dissertation, we will proceed with the contradictions in the language of the quantitative revolution before discussing different criticisms of the quantitative revolution and the work it produced by early Marxist geographers.

The dominant, large-mammal-esque “strength” of this new positivist epistemology brought to geography a crucial and incisive set of linguistic assumptions that—at the time and still today (Barnes

2014)—have significantly influenced how geographic knowledge is communicated. Barnes (1994b,

1026–27) outlines that the quantitative revolution in human geography began “with the use of bivariate” and inferential statistics, and that “as a set of practical techniques, quantitative methods continue to be widely used” while remaining “the object of research” for some scholars. According to

Barnes, when reading the “programmatic statements” of the early practitioners of quantitative geography their goal was to “construct a logocentric system” and mathematics-based quantitative methods provided the means. When these geographers applied mathematics it was with the assumption that “its order fundamentally mirrored the order of the world;” thus revealing their belief that the world and its people, about which they produce knowledge, exist as part of an organized universe, thus limiting the questions they would ever imagine to ask about the world. And wherever they (thought they) saw chaos, the language of quantitative science was there “to impose order on the world” (Barnes 1994b, 1037).

This mode of knowledge production whose object was to “assert that there is a realm of certainty that lies beyond language” quickly became institutionalized in the historical context of Cold

War academia (Barnes 1994b, 1037, see also 2015; Johnston 2000). And, this widespread institutionalization, Barnes suggests, operated through the underlying assumptions of the particular logocentric project of quantitative geography—which, like any logocentric project, operates through signs required to signify produced knowledge. The institutional reification of the particular logocentric processes of quantitative social science and geography manifested in the dialectic character of the

47 statements made by its practitioners. This dialectic emerged in their contradictory stance towards language and writing in the production of their knowledge.

Barnes (2014, 50–51) shares an anecdote from the correspondence between social physicist

George Zipf and astro-physics colleague John Q. Stewart. There, the pair deride social scientists who

“unfathomably” prefer “written sentences to strings of numbers,” castigating them with the label,

“verbalist.” Zipf even suggested to Stewart that verbalists not be shot “with blank cartridges.” Zipf and

Stewart, and their work, would have great influence over early developments in geography’s quantitative revolution that emphasized applying “mathematical formulae” to large data sets in the search of “predictable empirical patterns,” through collaborations with geographer William Warntz

(1964; see also Barnes and Wilson 2014). Warntz (1957, 420), similar to Zipf and Stewart, wrote that

“subjective description, however delightful to contemplate, no longer continues to satisfy a small but growing group of scholars in geography” and instead suggested that the discipline’s approach should be one that followed the ”inductive-deductive investigation” found in other branches of science. He goes on to suggest that current geographers are “consistently ‘outwritten’ by nonprofessionals who have journalistic skill coupled with imagination and ingenuity” and that “doubly blest is the scientist who is capable of good writing” because the geographer who is, and “admits the importance of quantification and the appropriateness of statistical methodology,” is “the best answer” to “the embarrassing questions which have arisen during the current debate” over geography’s inclusion in the curriculums of higher learning institutions.

In a second example, Barnes (1994b, 1021–22, 1027) points to Mathematics and Geography by

John P. Cole (1969), written in the midst of the quantitative revolution, for its simultaneous ardent reliance on and rigorous dismissal of written language. Cole annotates a regionalist text by Stamp and

Beaver (1947) on wheat production in Great Britain, pointing out, in exacting precision, every instance where he believes he sees “imprecise verbal statements,” “verbal uncertainties,” “neglect of …

48 meaning,” and “tentative conclusions” that “leave the reader still wondering why wheat is grown where it is” and simply “left to deicide for himself [sic] to what extent the lengthy verbal description…achieves what it sets out to do.” Cole’s project, Barnes (1994b, 1027) writes, “was to extirpate any ambiguity or uncertainty by using quantitative methods” in examinations of the world.

Barnes explains that these quantitative methods offered the possibility of “being the most logocentric system of all” because mathematics “virtually dispended with writing altogether” (1994b,

1027). By using Cole’s statements, and those from others spearheading the quantitative revolution

(Harvey 1969; Bunge 1966; Burton 1963; Garrison 1956), Barnes (1994b, 1027–29) identifies “five underlying features” that provide “mathematics with the certainty required to be a final vocabulary” for the discipline. These features are the capacity for producing a universal truth, logical inference, objectivity, the simplification of reality, and a precision and efficiency of an unambiguous and unencumbered consciousness.

Mathematics provided a crucial differentiating capacity from “everyday language” because

“mathematics is the need for precise definitions, rather than approximate ones. The distinction is between the emotional and factual” (Cole 1969, 154). Such systems “provide an objective and universal language for discussing geographical problems” (Harvey 1969, 179) that could organize geography in line with the other favored disciplines of the state in the Cold War context. As the United States emerged into the increasingly globalized post-World War II world, mathematics offered a clear and logical mode of expression that was unencumbered by vagary, and palatable and useful for special interests (c.f.

Harvey 1984, 4–7). By grace of its quantitative methods, positivism offered—and indeed still offers!— interested human geographers the means to produce a final solution to the problem of expressing their productive activity.

The contradictions in the examples Barnes provides demonstrates on the part of scholars from geography’s quantitative revolution what appears to be an obsessed repulsion with written language.

And so contradictions arise in their distaste for written language per se, with little apparent realization that their preferred mathematics is a system of language itself and what that means. Both, and all, forms of spoken and written communication are signifying systems bent on logocentrism no matter how reflexive. The privileging of one’s system over another belies the value judgements inherent in the practice of certain forms of knowledge production.

Anyone determined to produce knowledge and express it is beholden to logocentric projects.

What differentiates insidious—no matter how banal—from empathetic ones is the degree of discomfort one allows through the acknowledgement of one’s positionality. This concerns, significantly, consciousness. And so, any project of knowledge production that outright rejects or otherwise ignores notions of positionality—these would include, especially, ones that claim totalizing objectivity, finality and certainty—perpetuate signifying modes of expression that carry with them totalizing socio-political positions that grossly privilege specific differentiations of race, gender and class over others. Given such a realization, the formations of language one uses in one’s production of knowledge matters greatly.

If it is not clear already, not only is there no disorder in the world that the imposition of quantitative methodology and its language can indeed order, but there is also no order in the language of mathematics itself, despite the many qualifications and justifications occasioned by its proponents.

Instead, there is merely the order of institutional and governmental authorities who arbitrate the reproduction of certain knowledge producing practices (see Bauder 2006)—and that order is, above all else, a choice.

The contradictory discursive strategies of totalizing positivist epistemologies are still in use today, purveyed by decedents of the original quantitative revolution through the institutional legacies of the Cold War academic context, now refigured in the landscape of the neoliberal university—they are still produced and perpetuated, knowingly and unknowingly, in geography classrooms, faculty meetings, advising appointments, and journals (Barnes 2014; Jassal 2014; Radice 2013; Bauder and Engel-Di Mauro

2008; Purcell 2007; Castree 2006b, 2006d; Johnston 2000). This begs the question: is there any real difference between a lion and squash bug or are they both strong but stench-ridden all the same? The answer is both affirmative and dissenting, in keeping with the dialectic character of the human experience: all systematic bodies of knowledge carry with them peculiarities because of the language necessary to communicate and thus bring them into existence. But the material consequences of reproducing certain knowledges without concern for their contradictions, are often immense. Which brings us to the initial rejection of the quantitative revolution and positivism in geography, and the beginnings of a Marxist geography.

David Harvey (1972, 1974, 1975, 2008), Richard Peet (1969, 1970, 1975b, 1978a, 1979), and

William Bunge (1973a, 1973b, 1974, 1977, 1979b; see also Colenutt 1971; Horvath 1971; Stephenson

1974), among others (Stea 1969; Jarrett and Wisner 1969; Morrill 1969; Blaut 1970; Horvath 1970;

Morrill 1970; Wisner 1970; Walker 1972; B. M. Wilson and Jenkins 1972; J. Anderson 1973; Hurst 1973;

Massey 1973; Olsson 1974a; see also Peet and Harvey 1974), were vociferous in the late 1960s and

1970s in their rebuke of positivist geographies and their want for a geography that did not work at the behest of the state and global capitalism, and their attendant institutions. In many ways, this shift in the discipline reflected the unrest throughout the West in the late 1960s, spurred by mass movements directed at worldwide political and economic repression, support for the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War (see Swyngedouw 2000, 42–43; Peet 1985, 1977).

The founding of the journal Antipode at Clark University in 1969 was a principle catalyst in the project of producing new geographical languages and pushing the discipline in alternative directions. In doing so, it provided a location for new geographic knowledge to flourish. Organizers of the journal write that their purpose is “radical change – replacement of institutions and institutional arrangements in our society that can no longer respond to changing societal needs, that stifle attempts to provide…a more viable pattern for living, that often serve no other purpose than perpetuating themselves” (Stea

1969, 1). For these geographers, the object of knowledge production was to change society, not simply observe, test, generalize, and create theories about how society operated.

Peet (1969, 3–5) articulated that this new approach to geography could “build new theories of the way things should be…truly based upon the precepts of equality and justice” that are persuasive and convincing “proposals for change both within and outside the discipline.” He acknowledges the difficulties inherent in the objective of “shattering and then rebuilding the structure of conventional opinion” in a majority indifferent and complacent society “lulled by exposure only to a synthetic reality” and a geographic discipline “run by conservatives” that “make no impact on public opinion” and “who in any context other than the immediate are all for ‘democracy.’” Peet finds this paradox all too common, where “in an unbearable world we have managed to find comfortable academic holes out of which we occasionally peek for a tut-tut here and a pitying glance there, or a mutter about safe issues—like environmental pollution (who isn’t against it?).”

Harvey (1972, 6–7), who had himself been trained in the “comfortable academic holes” of the quantitative revolution, and authored one of its seminal texts, Explanation in Geography (1969), made an abrupt about-face and was explicit in his description of the counter-revolutionary nature of the discipline after the quantitative revolution. He describes how the quantitative revolution had “run its course” while experiencing “diminishing returns” due to the disconnect between the “sophisticated theoretical and methodological framework[s]” used by quantifiers in geography, and their “ability to say anything really meaningful about events as they unfold around us.” Harvey continues, writing, “there are too many anomalies between what we purport to explain and manipulate and what actually happens.” This disjuncture between geographic thought and modes of knowledge production in the discipline and the “emerging objective social conditions” of the time, Harvey argued, made the discipline not only “ripe for overthrow” but made necessary “a revolution in geographic thought.”

Harvey (2008, 10–13) reflected on the relationship between the productive activity of geographers and the thought behind this activity in the introduction to his 1973 book Social Justice and the City. In particular, he examined the relation between “linguistic solutions” and “solutions of human practice” in the evolution of scientific enquiry and knowledge production. Here, Harvey explains that effective studies of socio-spatial conditions are conscious in their understanding that social process and spatial form are simultaneously abstract and material. In explaining that knowledge production based on verification “cannot be separated from social practice in general,” he goes on to write that,

“verification is achieved through practice which means that theory is practice in a very important sense.

When theory becomes practice through use then and only then is it really verified.” For Harvey, these distinctions connect the project of producing spatial theory within geography to the concrete objective of challenging and changing the status quo in society. This signals the new radical geographer’s movement away from a conservative “philosophical idealism” and “towards a materialist interpretation of ideas as they arise in particular historical contexts.”

Finally, Peet and Harvey (1974) bring this new historical materialism to bear on the discipline itself. They do not mince words about the state of “radical” Marxist geographers working in “one of the more conservative disciplines” in a 1974 editorial in Antipode titled From this Spark will Come a Blaze. In many ways, they define the new logocentric project of a historical materialist “radical” geography. Here, the pair make the connection between the material and abstract, and the academic and activist, clear, and demonstrate the salient consequences of knowledge production, writing:

“the vast majority of us are teachers and as teachers we are workers involved in the production and distribution of ideas, facts and techniques. But as radicals…we find ourselves teaching ideas generated by people subscribing to ideologies antithetical to our own. In teaching geographical ideas we inevitably find ourselves disseminating bits of those dominant ideologies which we abhor, and whose structures many of us are dedicated to overthrowing. Hence we ourselves are the unwilling tools of capital. We ourselves help to perpetuate capitalist culture. To correct this situation, it is our main duty as teach- workers to struggle for control of the means of producing and distributing ideas. We must build, instead, means of production based on socialist values, radical analyses and the lessons of revolutionary action. More concretely, we must criticize conventional ideas, expose their weaknesses, biases and utility to the capitalist order, and must produce alternative and more persuasive theories based on the radical

53 paradigm. This does not mean that we should not also engage in other activities, like community organizing…such activities should conform to the set of political ideas which generally guide our research and teaching. We must be consistent in the various spheres of our activities.”

Recalling that every attempt at knowledge production brings with it the difficulties of logocentrism, when Barnes (1994b, 1037) writes “that there is nothing outside the text; our truths are only those that we write to ourselves,” it is not a dismissal of the material world that a cursory reading would suggest. It is, instead, a reminder that just because someone or something may be different in some arbitrary way from ourselves—for example, someone who may prefer written sentences to strings of numbers—that an appropriate action is not to shoot “with blank cartridges” or otherwise and ask questions later. It is a reminder to think before anything, especially when faced with the material consequences of our actions. What is truthful is the ideas we choose to subject ourselves to and the material consequences of those choices. How we approach the production of knowledge, the ideas we choose to use when we are productive, has material ramifications.

I.III Debates Over the Geography of Crime

The affront Marxist geographers of the 1960s and 1970s make towards geographers taking positivist approaches at the time set the stage for confrontations and debates throughout the 1970s about how to go about research in geography. These debates often centered around what questions were and were not being asked and the relative relevance of asking or not asking certain questions of one’s research. Marxist, so called “radical,” geographers tended to approach their research questions from a position of a justice-oriented politics, which lent itself to epistemological fields of the day like structuralism. More structuralist-inclined approaches sought to examine underlying material and immaterial causes at the root of various social and physical phenomena. The desire to get at the underlying, root causes of problems in society is synonymous with how geographers interpreted Marx’s explanation of social formations where he articulates the relations between the “base” and the “super-

54 structure” above it, with the base reflecting how access to the basic necessities of life is distributed, and the super-structure denoting laws, politics, and associated values that follow from how accessible those basic necessities are (Horvath and Gibson 1984). Conceptually, then, social formations are made up of dialectically related levels and it is thought that by examining a series of relations within and between levels, explanations for material circumstances can be understood (Peet 1978a, 150–51). This approach to determining causality differed greatly from the epistemological approaches taken by quantitatively oriented geographers, discussed earlier in this chapter, who preferred to remain relatively value-free and politically neutral in terms of their research questions and agendas.

One such debate that played out during this time was over the geography of crime, and necessarily relates to the discussion of the geographic knowledge production about capital punishment found in chapter two. The debate in the pages of The Professional Geographer had two primary actors,

Peet (1975c, 1976) and Harries (1975, 1976), along with interjections from a number of other positivist geographers (P. D. Phillips 1975; Lee 1975; Driever 1976) and Laurence Wolf (1976, 196) who used the discussion to reflect on geographer’s opportunity to “evaluate the intricate and perpetual questions” surrounding the “interrelatedness of” methodologies, choices of research topic, how society operated, and “individual, personal strategy and tactics” in geography. Peet explains that the motivating factors that lead him to produce the review and critique of how “liberal” geographers approached the study of the geography crime stemmed from “two frustrating years of trying to initiate discussion” in sessions on this topic at Association of American Geographers meetings. Specifically, Peet explains that his first attempt to engage with epistemological questions “was simply cut off by the chairman of the session.”

In his second attempt, after Yuk Lee’s presentation of his paper, he writes that he “asked when the geography of crime would go beyond descriptive statistics into an analysis of causes” but that Lee did not respond (1976, 96).

At the beginning of his review of Harries’ (1974) book The Geography of Crime and Justice, along with a number of papers presented at Association of America Geographers’ meetings in the early 1970s by Lee, Frank Egan, Phillip D. Phillips, Yee Leung and Lionel Lyles, among other AAG paper presentations,

Peet explains that it is the participant’s unwillingness to engage in the consequences of their epistemological approaches that inspires his critical work. He begins with the premise that “geographers have a legitimate desire” to make geography “useful” but that the important question geographers must ask their collective selves is “useful for whom and for what purpose” (1975c, 277). Peet notes later that despite their written responses, for Harries, Lee, and Phillips, the question of to whom their work is useful remains “largely avoided” by the trio (1976, 96).

As the details of this debate unfold below through an extended deconstruction, I suggest that it is useful to keep in mind how the debate echoes Harvey’s (1972, 7) summation earlier in the decade of the similarities and differences between the approach of the quantitative revolution to those Marxist approaches that critiqued it. Noting that positivism and Marxism have much in common, Harvey writes that “they both have a materialist base and both resort to an analytic method. The essential difference of course is that positivism simply seeks to understand the world whereas Marxism seeks to change it.”

To add to Harvey’s assertion, expressly for the purposes of the following examination, there appears to be another crucial difference between positivism, and structural and post-structural epistemological approaches. That is, those who utilize positivism in their productive activity appear to be rather actively disinterested in reflecting upon the assumptions that are foundational to that epistemology, whereas the use of structural and post-structural—to perhaps a greater extent—epistemologies appears to actively encourage one to confront how exactly one arrives at knowledge at all.

After providing his central question described above, Peet draws parallels in his critique between the discipline’s beginnings—where early geographers focused on “exploration, description, mapping and cataloguing” operated as tools for the imperial projects of Western states—and the

56 current state of “liberal geographers” who consciously and unconsciously conduct research that serves the interests of the capitalist state. The object of the review, he says, is “open debate” with such geographers who are interested in “social problems” in Western capitalist states, asking them, “do you know the political consequences of what you are doing? If so, can and will you defend your actions against a radical critique?”

Peet goes on, explaining that positivist knowledge production about crime addresses merely the surface level manifestations of crime, and therefore neglects the deep, inner contradictions of the social and economic systems that cause crime to occur. Such studies “must consciously be designed not to deal with cause, but on with the management of effects. And in face by “managing,” that is, ameliorating, suppressing or shifting the incidence of, these effects, such work disguises cause and prevents an emphasis on changing cause.” This, Peet argues, is the means by which unconscious, or outright insidious, positivist geographic knowledge production becomes “useful geography” for the state and capital: by obfuscating the causes and contradictions of social problems.

After explaining that current positivist geographies of crime are really just a “geography of lower-class crime” Peet (1975c, 277–78) suggests that there is likely no mention in contemporary geographies of crime of “upper-class, middle-class or “white-collar” crime” because there are “few statistics” in existence on that type of crime. Which leads him to ask, “because [white-collar crime] is not accurately measured it cannot be analyzed?” and consider how such a discussion “misses…the whole question of who collects social statistics and for what purpose.” Peet articulates that nearly all the literature within the sphere of the geography of crime deals in the spatial measurement, mapping and correlation of various types of lower-class crime. He explains that Harries’ work is “at least, honest enough to admit that such work may aid “in the control and understanding of crime”” and that well trained positivist geographers “can help design therapeutic programs” for designating more effective police patrol patterns and police facility locations. Harries’ work is summarized as productive geographic

57 activity that will “increase the efficiency of police” helping them catch more criminals by placing police in areas of high-crime and thus outright stopping, or deterring crime. Peet refers to this mode of knowledge production as doing “nothing basic towards solving the problem” of crime, as it operates through banally “liberal” and “superficial” means.

According to Peet, Harries makes one attempt at a “general explanation of the causes of crime,” describing it as “an interesting example of how the liberal mind becomes sidetracked, eventually ending up on the side of “law and order.”” Harries, Peet writes, “argues that the geographic approach to the causes or cure of crime may be divided into three elements: description, analysis and prediction.” For

Harries, descriptive mapping is used to “develop hypothesis” about crime’s causes based on the relations “between changes in crime patterns and changes in law enforcement activities.” Peet refers to these causal relations as “superficial” while referring to causes for crime, such as “sharp income gradients in cities which reflect basic inequalities in capitalist societies.” Peet describes Harries’

“prediction” element as one that “predictably” merely forecasts “where crime is most likely to occur,” and therefore assists in the organizational efforts of urban policing. Such studies by “liberal geographers,” Peet (1975c, 279) repeats, simply move in step with prevailing “ethos” about “the study of social problems, an ethos which developed in support of the existing political system.” In short, Peet is explaining how studies of crime from a positivist epistemology merely focus on the control of crime, which is all the “ethos” of the capitalist state requires, because it is averse to the expenditures that would be required from confronting the inner contradictions that cause crime to occur.

Moving away from the particulars of contemporary studies of the geography of crime, Peet

(1975c, 279) begins addressing the means by which the state and capital use the productive capacities of institutions, like the university and its laborers, to “protect itself against the dialectical process of inner contradiction and eventual destruction.” While the capitalist state “turns out a tangle of problems which rip and tear at the fabric of social life,” it conterminously “generates layers of protective explanations,

58 diversions, and agents of suppression to slow down the rate of internal destruction.” In this way, Peet argues, the capitalist state enlists the produced knowledge of positivist academics to move the onus for social problems “away from contradictions in the system and onto aberrant individuals or recognizably different ethnic or age groups who…are not well meshed with the system.”

This is in line with the broad objective of the positivist social sciences which seek to establish laws, theories and descriptions of the general and normal relationships between humans the world around them. By establishing general theories and laws that can be denoted as objectively truthful— therefore containing and creating reality within and outside themselves—the positivist social scientist produces a baseline reality from which to differentiate. Aberrance from this baseline reality swiftly falls under the gaze of the state and capital as something which must be ordered and adjusted through various means of governance.

Peet emphatically calls attention to geographers (often unwitting) complicity in this means of governance, writing that professors cannot continue to be “rubber-stamp automatons” in the “think tank for this protective bureaucracy” that the “modern state” needs to “manage its manifold problems.”

Beneath the “guiding hands of the research grant and the ladder of academic power” positivist academic scholars produce knowledge with what they believe is “bits of neutral fact which are built into similarly politically neutral theories.”

It is here that Peet (1975c, 280) reminds Harries, and anyone else who happens upon his review, that “there is no such thing as a politically neutral theory” and that the decision to believe or disbelieve this in either support or obstinacy to the state and capital as one produces knowledge is “up to the individual researcher.”

Given its most generous read, Harries’ initial response to Peet could be summarized as casually dismissive; given a less generous read, Harries’ response falls in the arena of sarcastically obtuse and

59 predictably naïve. It is most likely that the response falls somewhere within that range, acknowledging the potentially spurious nature of characterizing polemic strategies.

After noting his discomfort in being characterized as playing “the role of unwitting handperson of the monopoly-capitalist oppressors,” Harries (1975, 280) begins by musing as to why Peet chose to single out the geography of crime, rather than other areas of study in the discipline, “unless the fact that most of its literature can be contained within one footnote,” which he suggests, “makes it a convenient subject for a brief critique” before citing the fact that Peet curiously failed to include “the most control- oriented work in geography to date” on crime. Harries suggests Peet’s “model” that connects crime to the capitalist state is simplistic to the level of comparison of the model coming from the “political right that advocates “locking criminals up and throwing away the key.”” According to Harries, Peet’s understanding of the causes of crime are “grossly oversimplified” while explaining that he believes that the “political consequences of what geographers do are negligible.”

And here is where Harries bestows upon the reader his positionality; the vantage point from which he conceives his productive activity. “My position is this,” Harries (1975, 281) writes, “if geographers of any political persuasion wish to influence the criminal justice system in such a way as to make it more humane, more equitable, etc., then the best strategy is to work with the appropriate authorities and to seek to effect change from within by presenting arguments to show that there may be better ways of operating. I can think of no reason to apologize for a concern with control.” This is where one reading the debate is confronted with a contradiction that appears endemic to positivism and those employing it. Taking Harries at his word regarding his belief in the apolitical nature of geographer’s activities, how does he then proceed from his position of producing geographic strategies to effectively police and control crime for authorities within criminal justice without remotely acknowledging that such activity is demonstrably political? Harries’ approach to his research is one that is ambivalent to the political nature of a concern towards controlling crime, rather than addressing any causes of crime.

According to Harries’ logic, and by extension the logic of positivist science, the producer of knowledge maintains the ability to go about one’s work without a thought towards its use, for political purposes, beyond those imagined by the researchers themselves. Here, from the vantage point of the positivist, there is merely concern for the exchange, and attendant benefit, of produced knowledge from researcher to “the appropriate authorities.” There is little apparent concern for how institutional authorities will put that knowledge into action through use or disuse.

This contradictory dynamic between the researcher’s productive activity and the transfer of the resulting produced knowledge to institutions again appears when Harries describes the “applied geography” direction he chose to take in his book, The Geography of Crime and Justice. He describes wanting to produce a text “with which many students could identify,” one that would demonstrate how

“the development of geographic skills…might lead to employment in the research divisions of metropolitan police departments or regional criminal justice planning agencies.” Harries contrasts how he, like “many other geographers” feels a “moral obligation to draw the attention of students to employment possibilities” centered around the “control” of crime, with Peet’s “presumably…moral obligation to call me to account for failing to link crime to monopoly capitalism.” Presumably, Harries feels more strongly about creating opportunities for already privileged university students to materially benefit from gaining knowledge with which to enter an industry focused on the control, adjustment and imprisonment of those less fortunate than themselves, and thus exacerbating inequalities, than reflecting for any amount of time on how such an education merely perpetuates existing inequitable social relations. It is impossible for Harries to have the capacity for pre-cognition, but his next series of statements are eerily prescient given the development of the criminal justice system under an expanding neoliberal state and modes of policing, detainment, and ubiquitous surveillance systems in recent years. Harries suggests that he is perplexed over the prospect of reading “anything particularly sinister” into his desire to reproduce geographers of crime for employment in police departments. He

61 dismisses this potential future, writing that he does not believe “such geographers” could go on to help

“create a ghastly new battalion of goose-stepping, jack booted graduates, who will learn to optimize spatially the harassment of oppressed blacks.” Given this rather imperious approach towards the reproduction of certain knowledges through students—and the great and lasting potential for this reproduction’s negative externalities—it is difficult to separate such an approach from how such instruction has so clearly coalesced around the development of the zero tolerance, neoliberal surveillance state bent on the differentiation, criminalization and incarceration of sub-altern populations

(Derickson 2017; Loyd, Mitchelson, and Burridge 2013; K. Mitchell 2011; D. Mitchell and Heynen 2009;

Crampton 2008, 2003, 1995).

From here, Harries (1975, 281–82) writes that Peet’s critique and “proposed research strategy baffles” him, lacks “cogency,” relies on a “flimsy straw man” that amounts to assertions that are “usually heard in introductory methodology courses,” and that “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Peet did not read The Geography of Crime and Justice very carefully.” Over 40 years later, trite and demeaning are two adjectives that come to mind upon reading the end of this response, considering that the lines of assessment drawn by Peet have become rather normative in the interim.

Phillips (1975, 283–84) begins his response to Peet similarly to how Harries ends his; first suggesting that Peet’s questioning of the inner contradictions of the “liberal geographers” approach to productive work “is based upon political ideology” and he “will not debate the merits of this ideology, as it is a matter of faith.” The immediate explanation of a desire to not engage with the brunt of Peet’s assessment of the work in the geography of crime belies the brevity of Phillips’ response; apparently

Phillips has no “political ideology,” or the willingness to entertain any questions about what work on the geography of crime is used for and by whom. He goes on to suggest that academics have little to no control over what happens with their research, writing that, “scientists and scholars have, unfortunately, never had much success in controlling the use of research: witness the development of

62 the atomic bomb.” For Phillips, the implications of one’s work is, simply, out of one’s hands. This brings to mind a question: assuming that indeed a scholar has no control over the use and implications of their work, but they are conscious of how their research is used and do not appreciate the ends to which it is used, why continue such work? In Lee’s (1975, 285) likewise brief response he notably misunderstands

Peet’s use of an example that describes how Dallas, Texas had as many murders in one year as all of the

United Kingdom. Peet writes that such a comparison suggests that “there is obviously something very seriously wrong with (un)social life in Dallas,” and “relevant hypotheses” that connect “different social and economic structures to the type and quantity of crime” are possible and academically fruitful. Lee cannot seem to square that Peet has suggested a “potentially interesting geographical problem” presumably based on the crime statistics collected by the very same “people in power” who collect them “in their own interest” that Peet has “violently attack[ed].” Lee writes: “if Peet did indeed have specific hypotheses that he does not wish to share with his fellow geographers, we wonder if he could avoid employing the “traditional” geographical analysis of which he disapproves” after claiming that

Peet “failed” to explain at all how “radical geographers would study crime.” At least one oversight Lee seems to make is that simply by making such a geographical comparison at all—a comparison that by all indications is indeed a novel one—Peet is demonstrating what a more critical and radical approach to the geographies of crime would look like. Another potential oversight is that Lee neglects to acknowledge that Peet does indeed ask where a geography of “white-collar crime” is and therefore provides any interested geographer who reads his critique with the initial spark from which to proceed down an alternative path of study in terms of geography and crime. While Peet certainly does not spend a great deal of space in his short commentary detailing a radical geography of crime, the claim from Lee that Peet never explains how radical geographers might begin to study crime appears to be, on the face, without merit.

While Peet did not go into great detail about how exactly a radical geography of crime would be triangulated in his initial commentary, that is exactly what he spends a portion of his subsequent response, published one year later, doing, but not before assessing the responses from Harries, Phillips and Lee (1976, 96–100). In reminding readers that the three responses failed to meaningfully engage with his central question on who exactly finds these “liberal” studies of the geography of crime useful,

Peet displays the contradictions inherent in the assumptions of positivist epistemologies in terms of the use and collection of social statistics. Peet says that anyone who has worked on questions of crime, or other social issues, knows that government collected statistics only scratch the surface of these problems, and more importantly, only conform of “official definitions of the basic terms used” (1976,

96). These limitations in the data, Peet suggests, appear because it has been collected based on the subjectivities of “already-established, officially accepted theories” about how and why these social problems exist. While such data is important, Peet writes that researchers are “not forced to rely entirely” them, and that such statistics “should be approached with extreme cynicism and skepticism” because they unquestionably reflect the political position of the state and its governmental interests.

Peet concludes that, “research should not be structured entirely around official data, unless what is wanted is official theory.”

Here is where Peet brings his discussion of the political consequences of one’s epistemological approach back to bear on the geography of crime, and the implications of productive activity in this sub- field. Reminding us that Harries suggested that his discussion of the questionable collection of social statistics was “merely repeating what everyone knows from introductory methodology courses,” Peet levels the question, “but when will you practice what you teach your students?” Peet explains that in

The Geography of Crime and Justice Harries mentions early on that “official crime statistics should be viewed with extreme caution” before proceeding to construct virtually the entire book around a series of official government sources. He concludes that “the function of liberal, quantitative geography” must

64 only be “to confirm, behind the disguise of “objective,” “scientific” research, slightly modified versions of existing, official theory” (1976, 97).

A second question Peet identifies from the three responses is one he refers to as the differential approaches to “effective political action” from “liberal” geographers and radical geographers. Peet writes that Harries’ articulation of his, and other “liberal” geographers, desire to work within the criminal justice system to positively change it, pursuing the “respect of established professionals” so as to ameliorate the risk of “intellectual compromise,” is an “excellent statement of the liberal position” and no doubt one that is “made with the very best intentions.”2 From here, Peet articulates his version of the “radical position” on what “effective political action” is. It is one that recognizes that “continually trying to modify a basically inhumane system…will never achieve very much, for this system, with its basic flaws, generates problems more rapidly than they can be cured.” Poignantly, Peet writes that “if one is sincere about wanting real change, one must not make intellectual compromises, but head for the cause of the problem” while reminding readers that such action requires “a long-terms personal commitment to fundamental change.” Peet advocates for bypassing “hierarchical power structures” and the “professionals which the establishment respects and establishes” in favor of attempting to “reach the mass of the population” by connecting the radical position of effective political action with pedagogy. By virtue of the academic’s capacity to speak and work with “hundreds of people each week,”

Peet says, teaching is one of the few productive arenas within which “the movement for social revolution” can realize “the basic changes which serious analysis shows to be necessary.”

The Harries/Peet debate over the geographies of crime discussion reflects the larger discussion of what Marxist geographers are critiquing after the quantitative revolution. They take issue with the presumed apolitical nature of positivist studies and how this politically neutral work merely produces politically useful knowledge for states and capitalist enterprises seeking to extract surplus value

2 Recall my more detailed discussion of Harries’ points on this topic from earlier in this section.

65 wherever possible. While at the surface level the debate may seem merely polemic, under the surface, the discussion operates, disciplinarily speaking, at the level of epistemology in a public way. This happens as the debate is effectively public, and consumable by interested geographers through its printing in an academic journal. As produced knowledge turned material work through its publication, the disciplinary politics of knowledge production are made immediate and lasting. Here we see a prime example of the (attempted) disciplining of productive scholarly work—termed another way: the policing of the boundaries of acceptable geography. Such policing of boundaries demonstrates to those entering into, and already participating in, academic labor how to do geography; how to go about directing one’s production of knowledge.

I.IV (Misplaced) Debates Over the “Real”

Beginning as early as 1974, scholars began examining the languages of positivism and the

Marxist approaches (sometimes labeled ‘structuralist’ because of the perceived imbalance between structural causes and human agency within capitalism) that critiqued it in geography (Olsson 1974b) and what constituted an actual radical “socialist” geography (Dear 1975). Later in the decade, similar assessments of why radical geography was being ignored and what it’s future might look like appeared

(G. L. Clark and Dear 1978), and were met with rebuttal (Peet 1978b). These examinations of the revolution in geographic thought pushed the discipline towards relativism almost as soon as it began, foretelling what many refer to as the “post-modern” turn in geography during the 1980s. This led to a fractured human geography (Gould and Olsson 1982; Dear 1994), where increased specialization and incomplete readings of increasingly diverse areas of research became the norm (for an initial but surely and necessarily incomplete list see: Duncan and Ley 1982; Dear 1983; McDowell 1983; Graham 1988,

1990; Gibson 1991; Peet 1992; Graham 1992; Peet 1994; Reynolds 1994; Barnes 1994a; Peet 1996a;

Dear 2001).

Trevor Barnes and Michael Curry (1983, 468–69) characterized this movement early on. They describe the general ethos of the discipline’s view of the relationship between epistemology and what counted as geographical questions and research, writing that geographical work of the time rested “on an a priori determined philosophical standard” where geographers adopted “a philosophical position” and then “the epistemological standards implicit to that position” would be applied “to geographical questions.” In their assessment, for geographers of the time, if any knowledge did not conform to the standards they chose to employ, then it was “not knowledge at all.” This applied to positivist and non- positivist approaches alike and was, in their opinion, a “regrettable” and “unnecessarily limiting view” towards what constituted geographical knowledge at the time. Specifically, Barnes and Curry lament that these current trends in academic geography suggest that any work done there “is cut off from a type of work that is potentially interesting and accessible to a wider audience.” This amounted to what could be termed a general essentialism in human geography throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, where it was assumed that humans can only “know” the world in certain ways. Too often, Barnes and

Curry write, geographers of the time fail in producing more widely accessible knowledge because they have begun “deciding what constitutes valid knowledge before engaging in that work of informing us” and thus have already “set their stage” for their failure in actually informing anyone beyond small academic niches. This leads to geographers and other social scientists deceiving themselves and others by refusing to recognize the validity of knowledge and work that arises from beyond “their own narrowly defined areas of inquiry,” believing that they have “privileged access to objective knowledge” while “setting up a priori standards of what constitutes knowledge” at all (1983, 481).

Barnes and Curry offer as an antidote, an argument for more humility and open mindedness that is grounded in a contextualism that builds upon both an analytic hermeneutic and a dialectic hermeneutic in its rejection of essentialist interpretations of the world (1983, 468–69). The contextualist approach to knowledge recognizes that the world is a highly varied place and knowledge produced

67 about it must accept, rather than seek to diminish this. Essentialist approaches seek to organize and reduce the variability of the world in an attempt to make it knowable, whereas contextualist approaches assess how the concepts of knowledge and understanding occur and are practiced, therefore acknowledging the unpredictable complexity of knowing the world. Significantly for geography and geographers taking a contextualist approach, “knowledge acquired in our everyday lives is not necessarily inferior to that found in scholarly work; it is merely different.” Because the means of knowledge production and acquisition is leveled and open to all—since we all produce merely different spatial knowledges as we operate in our everyday worlds—any knowledge becomes “not only valuable, but…also communicable and replicable” (1983, 469). Here, simply existing as human means geographic knowledge can both be produced, expressed, and understood by all who allow themselves the latitude to operate in such a way.

Like Barnes and Curry, Harvey (1984, 4–7) takes a similar stance in describing this time in geography. He wrote that, after the initial critique of positivism some 15 years earlier, this time in the discipline was one where “external pressures and internal disarray” led to fragmentation and a drive towards “far narrower professionalization.” He explains that the more the discipline moved in this direction, “the more its method has coalesced into a monolithic and dogmatic positivism and the more easily the parts could be absorbed into some cognate analytic discipline.” This, by the early 1980s according to Harvey, has diminished geographers’ ability to produce “knowledge in its spatial aspect.”

Geographers slowly lost the ability to produce popular geographical knowledges, for the masses, at the expense of increasing specialized knowledge and techniques that were merely of use for special interests like the government, the military and the corporation. Harvey (1984, 7) is rather direct in this sentiment, writing that “geography is too important to be left to geographers. But far too important to be left to generals, politicians, and corporate chiefs. Notions of “applied” and “relevant” geography pose questions of objectives and interests served. The selling of ourselves and the geography we make…is to

68 participate directly in making their kind of geography, a landscape riven with social inequality and seething geopolitical tensions…There is more to geography than the production of knowledge and personnel to be sold as commodities to the highest bidder.”

Harvey (1984, 6–8) notes, specifically, the need for anti-positivist geographers to coalesce in the production of their work around a common, critical political language so that communication amongst the diverse array of such geographers does not break down. He stresses that, “the intellectual task in geography…is the construction of a common language, of common frames of reference and theoretical understandings…Positivism undermines its own virtues of objective materialism by spurious claims to neutrality. Historical materialism, though appropriate, is too frequently held captive within the rigidities of some political orthodoxy that renders windows on the world opaque and substitutes subjectively conceived political fantasy for hard-nosed objective materialism. Under these conditions the construction of a common discourse for describing and theorizing becomes a tough task.” It is clear that for Harvey, an emphasis on language is equally important to a focus on historical materialism if geography is to develop as a discipline that can challenge and change the status quo of social relations in the world. For geography, a common and critical political language appears to be the key for the transformation of the discipline into one that genuinely works with and for the betterment of the earth and its people, rather than at its behest.

It should be noted, before we continue, that geographers of both Marxist (Harvey) persuasion, and post-structural (Barnes and Curry) persuasion identify movements in the discipline, and react to them similarly while detailing that how geographers went about producing knowledge at the time diminished and limited any potential political impact it could have. Considering both near coterminous arguments together, Barnes and Curry seem to provide the ‘grammar’ of a more politically incisive knowledge production in geography, while Harvey seems to point towards whom this produced knowledge should be directed, by whom and why the possible consequences of doing so, in terms of

69 social relations, are so vital to all those who inhabit the world. They make nearly similar arguments for revised modes of knowledge production in geography that would both simultaneously solve the discipline’s communication problems and open up the discipline’s productive potential in a populist way from different, but not dissimilar vantage points. It appears the only thing left to discern is how to go about producing a coherent political language for communicating this new geographic knowledge in a replicable way.

But that did not happen immediately, and perhaps still has not; as the specialization increased, there came incomplete readings of work in the growing array of human geographical approaches, which led to arguments from essentialist positions over what counted as “real” knowledge about the world.

Or, as is the case in the following debate over landscape, disagreement over the “reality” of research subjects themselves, let alone any knowledge produced from engaging them. It’s the fragmentation and syphoning off of the diversity of the discipline that appears preferential, and indeed characteristic of a discipline dominated by positivist approaches not only to the world and everything in it that often form the subject of study, but also to the conceptualization and perpetuation of disciplined geographic knowledge in academia. It is clear that the increased fragmentation is advantageous only for those institutions operating through positivism.

Roughly 10 years after Harvey, Barnes, and Curry made their observations and arguments for the direction of non-positivist geographies, the limiting nature of approaches to geography came to fruition in the debate in question here. It begins with Judith Walton’s (1995) response to two book reviews of notable post-modern works of the time, that perhaps contain some, but indeed a debatable, degree of post-structural analysis, by Don Mitchell (1993) and Richard Peet (1993).3 The two works

Mitchell and Peet reviewed are Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of

3 For a different debate on some of the points in Writing Worlds from Peet, see (Peet 1994).

Landscape, an edited volume by Trevor Barnes and James Duncan (1992), and The City as Text: The

Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom by James Duncan (1990).

In Mitchell’s review of Writing Worlds (1993, 474), he establishes that he detects the authors creating two parallel theoretical universes: one where there may or may not be “brute reality” and the other—a “world of text, discourse, metaphor, and language”—where there is only the post-structural notion of “intertextuality,” which is a place “where “what is true is made inside texts, not outside them.”” Establishing the crux of his review, Mitchell indicates that such a position gives the authors a

“theoretical position…that is untenable at best and politically stultifying at worst.” He notes with frustration that since he believes this position denies connections between how “reality and language interact, that what must be theorized in geography “are the complex interactions of materiality and ideas” because “words and discourses are tethered to the world by powerful social actors.” Ultimately,

Mitchell (1993, 475) concludes that the denial of any connection between the ‘intertextual’ world and the “organizing systems” of reality voids any basis upon which to attempt “social action and movements towards emancipatory or progressive change.” Mitchell writes that such as position “situates” the majority of the edited “collection in a radically relativist tradition of postmodernism.” Disciplinarily speaking, he is concerned about how carefully geographers are considering how discourse and the reality of landscape relate in terms of how humans experience them.

Peet levees similar criticisms at Duncan’s The City as Text, though they are directed more so at notions of reality, while likewise advocating for theorization and scholarship that does not mystify class relations and their inequitable externalities. Duncan, according to Peet, was “an early critic of structural

Marxist geography” (see Duncan and Ley 1982) who focused his analysis on texts and literary theory, which Peet suggested “may…abstract from the material processes through which people recreate their worlds and distract attention from the class/gender/racial systems by which societies are organized and landscapes reproduced” (1993, 184). Peet suggests that this abstraction serves only the continued

71 mystification of social relations, rather than revealing anything about the landscapes and relations therein that such post-modern analysis claims to provide. Throughout, Peet provides examples of where

Duncan’s work sidesteps opportunities to examine class struggle and inequitable social, economic and political relations. He concludes that in Duncan’s use of intertextuality, texts are nonrepresentational of reality—they “do not express real world social experience”—and relate only to other texts, in a cycle of interpretation of textual relation. While Mitchell suggests that similar work is part of a “relativist tradition of postmodernism,” Peet describes Duncan’s approach to cultural geography as an “elitist idealism” reminiscent of the discipline’s early days in service of imperialism (1993, 187). Mitchell and

Peet share the observation that such work exists on an abstract plane and never moves to a level of real materiality.

At issue for Walton (1995, 61) is Mitchell and Peet’s charge of “idealism” in their reviews, which she says is leveled the post-modernists’ “claim that culture and/or landscape can be seen as a text(s).”

According to Walton, this label is misleading because “they represent a recrudescence of a misguided idealist/materialist philosophical debate within geography; and…they create a red herring, a distracting line of argument that diverts attention from more productive critiques of the authors’ works.” As evidence, Walton explains that these works are not idealist merely because they share little in common with traditional idealist works in human geography, which claim to not need theories to understand the world because all that is needed is to reconstruct the thought behind actions that are taken. Walton says that Duncan and Barnes, conversely, welcome theoretical approaches “to representations of time and place” as they want to display how humans and environments act upon one another and how ideas are modified by material and nonmaterial “texts.”

Curiously, for someone defending so-called post-structural approaches, Walton (1995, 62) proceeds to explicate “working definitions of idealism and realism, in disciplinary context” before continuing with her rebuttal. All the more confounding is that this seems to run counter to how the idea

72 of “the text” and intertextuality were being put to use at the time in the humanities and social sciences more broadly (see Mowitt 1992). This, along with the series of examples Walton selects from the reviews and examines through much of her response, suggests she is operating through a realist/idealist binary; such an essentialist binary that should be the focus of criticism from those employing post- structuralist approaches, or at least claiming to. Throughout the rebuttal, concern over this binary dominates and Walton fails to address the explicit concerns in both Mitchell and Peet’s reviews: that in each case, both works do not address inequitable social relations and the dire material circumstances that perpetuate them; the work, instead, further conceals them. In their view, the materiality of social relations is lost in the scholar’s emphasis on examining the process of “reading” a landscape through the means by which one uses literary theory to read a text. For Walton (1995, 63), and by extension Duncan

(and to a more questionable and perhaps lesser extent given a reading of Barnes’ contributions to

Writing Worlds), the object of their approach to articulating and understanding space is that

“landscape” is to be understood “as a text” metaphorically—hence the “metaphor of landscape”—and this implies a “multiplicity of meaning, polyvocality, intertextuality, and lack of authorial control, attempts an elision of the dichotomy between ideas and materiality.” From this distinctly post-modern perspective, (but one that appears to be hardly post-structural) the concept of landscape remains at the level of the abstract.

Responding to Walton’s points, Mitchell (1996, 94) notes early on that her reply was indeed useful for providing the potential for creative thinking that is “fully grounded…in the political and social contexts that define the world in which we live.” For example, it offers concerned geographers, and those outside the discipline, a meaningful venue that lays out the terms—the terms being, “issues of representation and materiality, texts, and social relations”—with “which debate over landscape now seems to pivot.” These terms, Mitchell writes, “are clearly on the agenda in human geography (and elsewhere)” and he believes there is “no better or important lens” through which to examine “these

73 issues than “landscape.”” Should this debate fail to spur discussion on creative ways to politically asses the spatial organization and relations of social life, Mitchell says geographers run the risk of losing out on “our most important job as academics: providing a critical (and fully politically charged) perspective on the social processes that make the world in a manner that helps our students and others in our communities both to understand and to act.” Crucially, Mitchell signifies the reflexivity post-modern geographers of the time appear less willing to concede, when he suggests that “we can thank, inter alia,

Jim and Nancy Duncan (1988, 1992) for showing so forcefully that geographers, especially those like myself who work within historical materialist traditions, have not paid enough attention to the materiality of representation.” In many ways, Mitchell’s statement portends a revised approach to

Marxist geography that appears at roughly this point in the discipline’s history—and it is this time period which will be the focus of the next section of this dissertation. Ultimately, Mitchell (1996, 96) emphasizes the importance that future work figure “out how landscapes work, as both physical “thing” and as representation” while appending that this process of work in geography “is a process that is simply too complex to capture in the single metaphor of textuality.”

Peet (1996b), in his response to Walton, spends much of the beginning elucidating the contradictions between her response and the works by Duncan and Barnes that she is defending, in terms of their assessment of what is real and what reality might be. Keenly, he points out up front that

Walton claims that Duncan’s work pursues “a very realist goal” built on conventional understandings of

“scientific realism” that believes strongly in the notion of a physical world beyond what we construct in our minds, before displaying where Duncan and Barnes suggest the contrary: that “there is no pre- interpreted reality” (Peet 1996b, 96). It is this contradiction that forms much of Peet’s assessment of the actual idealism of the ‘landscape-as-text school’ in human geography—a discussion which he pursues in service of presenting the idea that it can be problematic to view anything about the world as absolute,

74 like how this school of thought in the discipline appears to suggest that everything about the world can be understood as text.

Eventually, Peet arrives at a similar discussion point as the one Mitchell explains in his response.

Latching on to Walton’s claim that such criticism from Marxist geographers is reflective of an

“impoverished materialism,” Peet stresses the need to be open minded when new political and theoretical notions of scholarship appear (1996b, 97–98). He suggests that “being “open-minded” entails a critical synthesis” where the scholar should consider new ways of thought, and use insightful aspects of these new ideas in symbiosis with “basic positions that have shown their validity in practice” from one’s past approaches and work. Peet concludes his response by providing an example of this

“critical synthesis” approach that he calls “a materialist post-structural analysis.” In his example, Peet explains that a materialist post-structural analysis understands that social, economic and political institutions have textual qualities among many others, and that all of these qualities manifest both materially and more abstractly in different contexts. Crucially, he writes that “the discursive formations guiding the physical reconstruction of landscapes are aspects of the regulative powers of geo-historical formations; landscapes are the spatial surfaces of discursive/regulatory regimes…the signs in landscapes may be read to reveal material social relations and material contexts.”

In Walton’s final reply to Mitchell and Peet, she suggests that the two ‘schools of thought’ still operate through an “ontological dualism” where each believes that there exists an entirely separate physical, material world, from a world made up of ideas, which constitute representations, texts, and language (1996, 98). The identification of a supposed ontological dualism in Mitchell in Peet’s respective responses is curious, and I suggest that instead, Walton is misidentifying, and thus mischaracterizing, their arguments. On the point of (mis)characterization, the examples I have provided from each of the responses in the immediately preceding paragraphs displays, quite directly, the reflexivity of Mitchell and Peet to coherently incorporate an understanding of the importance of representation into their

75 work on landscape. On the point of misidentifying how Mitchell and Peet understand the nature and operation of reality—their ontological positions—it is clear, from my reading at least, that they are not proceeding through a stark dualism, as is suggested, at all. Rather, it appears clear that the differentiations Mitchell and Peet are making between materiality and ideas is merely for the purposes of expressing the dialectical operation of reality. This dialectic is clearly seen in the examples they provide of what amounts to a ‘materialist post-structuralism’ where, in their interpretation of landscapes, they move back and forth between the changing physical aspects of landscape and the more abstract discursive representations of those changes as they examine changing social relations. It is clear that Mitchell and Peet, through processes of abstraction directed at material and immaterial aspects of landscapes, arrive at their holistic understanding of them that incorporates both aspects of landscape and discursive formations about and of landscape. From this misidentification of the operation of historical materialist geography, I will now proceed to articulate a series of observations about how this debate played out that speak to the various issues, in terms of knowledge production, within the discipline at the time. These issues, as we will see in subsequent sections of this dissertation, remain pertinent in terms of the development of geographic thought from the 1990s through the present time.

First, Walton’s reliance on set definitions, especially in terms of her discussion on idealism and realism, in a disciplinary context is suggestive of binary thinking in which one operates through essential categorization. Things with stable definitions emit essences. For Walton to establish set, working definitions of idealism and realism in geography is to practice the project of disciplinarity: the process by which knowledge is labeled, categorized, stabilized, neutralized, separated, encircled, cut off and incorporated into a realm of related work. As an example of how labeling within a discipline of knowledge does this, we need look no further than the debates from this section and the last. Walton

(1995, 61) finds it “funny how old (and tiresome?) debates in geography never die, they just find new battlefields,” as she discusses how the landscape-as-text school understands Mitchell and Peet’s

76 historical materialist analysis to be “realist.” Yet, roughly two decades earlier Peet—and his very same historical-material approach—was being derided by Harries for his apparent wanton “idealism.” All the while Harries counterposed this “idealism” with his own, ‘more useful and relevant’ perceived

“pragmatism,” which we can understand from the ‘applied geography’ school as a desire for ones work to have “real” world applications (read: realist). Scholars carry with them, through their epistemological approaches, their own inner contradictions. That is where statements like Harries’ assertion that his productive activity is “pragmatic,” as opposed to Peet’s “idealism,” reveal that he is blind to the idealist assumptions of positivism that allow its purveyors to wistfully operate as value-free and politically neutral scientists turned automatons. It is again on display when Walton decries the “realism” of Peet,

Mitchell, and others, while ignoring the very real inequitable social relations and material conditions— relations and conditions that Mitchell and Peet make the very focus of their critiques—that are mystified by Duncan’s work that she is defending.

In both cases, Harries and Walton (along with Duncan, inter alia) are attempting to expand their own or neutralize the expansion of certain modes of thought and knowledge production within geography by placing figurative boundaries around what certain modes of knowledge production can result in. For Harries, this type of performative disciplinarity was commonplace: it was typical of the time in geography for those using positivism to effectively police scholarly work in attempts to scrub the discipline of perceived blemishes, thus carving out more space for the legitimacy of “applied” geographic knowledge. But for Walton, and Duncan, such a similar practice some twenty years later presents some serious contradictions given their claims to the use of literary (and by extension social) theory and the openness and inclusiveness that it implies.

To operate in such an essentialist way runs counter to any post-structural notion of social theory, especially those espoused at the time, where notions of textuality were being forwarded to explain how texts could form the basis of anti-disciplined knowledge (Mowitt 1992, 24–26). Rather, the

77 focus on binaries and oppositional definitions suggests that the landscape-as-text school in geography operated through a post-modern mode of analysis that was hardly concerned with the possibilities of how notions of intertextuality could inform radical and revolutionary modes of knowledge production within and beyond geography. Instead, it appears that this highly specialized school of thought was more concerned with simply carving out a disciplinary niche for itself.

This leads to a second and related disciplinary observation from this debate. This correspondence reveals the theme of the misreadings and incomplete readings of subdisciplines by subdisciplines during this time in geography. First, Mitchell and Peet display their incomplete understanding of what epistemological approach the landscape-as-text school is deploying when they describe it as post-structural. Rather, building off the previous observation, Walton and the post- modernists she is defending, do not deliver on the object of post-structural analysis either in her commentary on Mitchell and Peet’s reviews, or in their studies of landscapes. The object of any actual post-structural analysis, recalling the direction of work by Foucault and Barthes in particular, is in demonstrating and laying bare the contradictions of the language systems of political and cultural institutions so that the inner, self-rationalizing processes of these systems of exploitative social relations may be deconstructed and reformed materially in wholly different and equitable ways. Problematically, these faux-post-structuralists, led by Duncan, utilize metaphor analytically as they apply the means by which literary theories assess texts, to landscapes. These metaphorically dependent analytical methods, while ostensibly beginning at the level of materiality, remain in the abstract once analytical processes commence, and do not again reach the level of the thought-concrete. Walton and Duncan instead merely offer vapid post-modern assessments of cultural landscapes that remain palatable in a discipline dominated at the time, and still today, by positivism and that which it has subsumed, precisely because they have yet to escape the academically comfortable allure of binary, undialectical thinking. There, binaries are but a fruitless trap; in form and function no different than the La Brea Tar Pits.

Mitchell and Peet’s general reading of the post-modern school of landscape studies at the time is indeed correct in my opinion—that their work does nothing but mystify inequalities and social relations. And rather humorously, Mitchell and Peet’s reading is indeed more post-structural than either seem to initially understand in their respective book reviews or subsequent responses. But, in the spirit of this observation on the incomplete and misreadings of the time, the assertions of these post- modernists should not be taken as representative of the possibilities of the use of post-structural social theory. Mistaking this particular mode of landscape study as post-structural is not instructive of what post-structural social theory can bring to geography, and more specifically Marxist geographies. To illustrate this point, we need to briefly examine assertions in human geography in the decade prior, which leads to the third related observation.

The first portion of this observation begins in the immediate context of Harvey, Barnes, and

Curry’s disciplinary analyses mentioned at the beginning of this section, where in the early 1980s

Duncan and Ley (1982) produce the initial assessment of what they term a “structural Marxism” in human geography that they believe to be overly deterministic. Crucially, their assessment cites repeatedly where early Marxist geographers in the 1970s utilize Bertell Ollman’s decidedly dialectical understanding of Marx’s theorization (Duncan and Ley 1982, 33–35) but relies on an explanation that these same geographers were influenced by Louis Althusser’s decidedly more deterministic interpretation of Marxist theory to actually foist their argument (Duncan and Ley 1982, 32, 34–35, 41–

47). Yet, they do not demonstrate where the Marxist geographers in question use Althusser’s structural

Marxism in their work—it is unsurprising that they could not, because Marxist geographers did not use

Althusser (this statement derives from my own readings of originary texts in Marxist geography, some of which are cited in this dissertation, and is supported by Castree 1994, 36–37). Thus, the incomplete reading both of and within radical and critical geographies in the 1980s was spurred forward.

The second portion of this observation addresses the landscape-as-text school’s own misinterpretation of the literary and social theory used to form its epistemological approach. Curiously, this actually post-modern geographical movement of the 1980s and early 1990s appears to employ the post-structural analytic tool of intertextuality apolitically. By dint of their use of intertextuality in isolation—apparently, and frankly amusingly, outside of the context of its development as an analytic process—their work eschews the very political genealogy of the concept, and therefore neutralizes this analytic tool’s capacity to work in very incisive socio-political means.4 For example, Duncan and Duncan

(1988) spell out rather directly their non-contextual understanding of intertextuality, which came to define the “landscape as text” school in geography. First, Duncan and Duncan (1988, 118–19) quote a short passage from Barthes’ essay ‘From Work to Text’ (1977) that describes how the reader of a text is somewhat like someone who walks through a valley observing their surroundings. They claim this passage and its analogy demonstrates how the “web-like complexity” of texts “resembles landscapes in many respects” making “the text metaphor even more convincing than traditional or popular notions of texts” because, in their reading, a “plurality of meaning [is] achieved by a text” through analogy. Their assessment of this passage, and Barthes’ articulation of intertextuality, is that “the concept of intertextuality here is interesting, as it is a non-individualistic concept, emphasizing the anonymity of discourses or texts; yet it is also nonsocial in that it posits an autonomous intertextual realm of interacting texts divorced from the historical, social, and political processes by which interpretations of text are negotiated, contested, and maintained or transformed.”

The notion that Barthes’ work generally, and intertextuality more specifically, is somehow a

“nonsocial” concept, unconnected to “historical, social and political processes” is rather blatantly questionable, and belies a serious non-understanding of the context of Barthes’ work and the

4 Further clarification of this point will become apparent in the third section of chapter three where I attempt to reread and thus reinterpret Marx’s dialectic thought. Therein, the political motivations at the foundation of Barthes’ work and the form it takes should be clearly read into this work.

80 development of post-structural social theory. Post-structural social theory is far from the nihilistic and relativism-inducing epistemology it is often painted as (May 1994). Rather, by acknowledging the instability of meaning and making clear the relations between work(s) and text(s) that connect various works through the relations of productive activity, the analytic tool of intertextuality maintains significant capacity as a means of political, governmental, and disciplinary analytic criticism. Indeed, a brief examination of Barthes’ early influences from the Frankfurt School, his interest in cultural politics, and subsequent early works reveal the very clear political motivations of his scholarship (2012a, 2012b,

1972). Through lines from this early work are regularly and easily drawn to later points in his career where intertextuality comes to the fore, and beyond (Bittner 2017; Stafford 2017a, 2017b; D. Smith

2014; Calbérac 2011; Allen 2003; Sharp 2002); even Barthes demonstrated this of himself (2010, 145).

What counts as “real” research about what kind of “real” world around us? Whether sometimes explicit, and often in the implicit background, such a question characterizes the roughly twenty-year stretch of time from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s in human geography. In many ways, such misplaced debates over the reality of any number of aspects of the discipline is a specter that still haunts it. This can be seen in more contemporary arguments over how best to go about putting geographic knowledge to use in critiquing global capitalism from more radical geographic perspectives, to small- scale but no less significant intra-departmental squabbles over funding for graduate students, for example, and therefore by extension, why types of knowledge production a given department seeks to create and promote.

The two debates described in this section reveal two themes about the larger realm of epistemology within the disciplinary history of geography. The first theme is that scholars emphasizing positivist approaches have been consistent and dogmatic in their (gatekeeper-esque) policing of geographic thought. The second is that opposition to positivist approaches has been anything but universal or consistent, with various critiques not only being leveled at positivism, but also between

81 approaches critical of it. And while it could be said that, for example, Peet (Peet and Hartwick 2002) softened his stance somewhat towards post-structurally inclined approaches in geography some years afterwards, critical and radical human geography still remains fractured and fractious (Ackelsberg and

Breitbart 2017; Harvey 2017; Pickerill 2017; Springer 2017b; Wainwright 2017; P. B. Wood 2017; Clough

2014; Gibson 2014; Ince 2014; Mann 2014; Springer 2014a, 2014b; Waterstone 2014), not to mention the discipline more broadly (Rose-Redwood et al. 2018; Domosh 2017; Rose-Redwood and Smith 2016).

How exactly to go about revolutions in terms of how we create the material world around us in other ways, and in terms of how we suggest critical analyses of capitalism, patriarchy, and racism demonstrate influential revolutions in geographic thought remains uncertain.

But that has not stopped concerned geographers from trying to make the direction of revolutionary imperatives more certain. What immediately follows in the next section is a brief discussion of the varied history of critical and radical geography in the context of what could be termed a renewed Marxist geography. In many ways, this dissertation is situated within this development of a renewed Marxist geography, which began roughly in the mid-1990s. It built off radical and Marxist traditions from the response to the quantitative revolution while incorporating radical and critical approaches from social and political theory broadly and post-structuralism more specifically.

II. The Last 25 Years of Radical/Critical Epistemological Approaches in Human Geography

The prior section works through the development of geographic thought in the discipline by examining early Anglophone geography, and since the 1960s by means of detailed analysis of two debates. The debates were just two of many in those decades but they demonstrate both the particular disciplinary ethe in play at each time, and the ways in which geographers have gone about delimiting how and why we think and write about producing knowledge about the world. Both debates float around the notion of what exactly non-positivist geography is or should be, while the specter of a

82 dominant (but not unified) positivism is in one case at the forefront mediating knowledge production

(Harries/Peet) or in the background producing knowledge, and a world, radical/critical geographers are busy understanding and preoccupied with arguing over how best to understand it

(Walton/Mitchell/Peet). There has rarely been much agreement within the discipline about what critical-non-positivist geography should be called, let alone what it is and if there is anything particularly generalizable or stable about it at all.

As this section progresses we will explore further discussions over the ‘is and should be’ area.

But for now, on the point of non-consensus over what to call this kind of geography and how so inclined geographers imagine and express what it is they are doing, Tim Cresswell (2013, 10–11) reminds us that

“the problem with words we use every day is that, for the most part, we tend to think we already know what they mean.” Many such geographers do not spend much time (often, but not always, for good reason; (see: Chatterton 2008)) at all considering or questioning how they refer to what kind of geography they do and how, when they do indeed describe their work, it reflects expanded understandings of what it means to do geography. Cresswell’s discussion about the difficulty of writing about theory in geography is illuminating here in terms of the words we choose (consciously, and at times unconsciously) to demonstrate, explain, characterize, describe, and convey in writing, speech, and any other communicative means, who we are and what we do. On the one hand, Cresswell (2013, 9) says, “writing, at its best, is an exercise in democracy. It is about sharing ideas. If the idea is not clearly expressed, it cannot be shared.” On the other hand, “some ideas are simply difficult. No matter how clear the writing the idea will remain difficult.”

The tension Cresswell identifies between some writing in geography that may appear poorly explained and articulated, but through specialized language is just merely difficult—and the need to operate through specialized language but simultaneously be clear, so as to maximize its democratized shareability—runs parallel to many of the concerns and issues that led to the two debates chosen in the

83 prior section. Simply, it appears that the disciplinary history of geography is fraught with difficult language explaining challenging topics—occasionally obtusely written, but not always—wherein it appears that all too often there is an unwillingness to “listen,” reassess and reflect, and internalize meaning.

Recently, Simon Springer (2017a) has taken up Cresswell’s articulation, along with keeping the discipline’s fraught history with reading and writing in mind, to propose a “geopoetics.” As he articulates his geopoetic understanding of earth writing, he seeks to “undiscipline” geography in order to free geographical imaginations from the tensions inherent in communication. Key here, is that Springer establishes that to alter one’s communication about the earth is to make a political choice. Similarly,

Mona Domosh (2017) recently organized a forum published in the Annals of the Association of American

Geographers on “radical intradisciplinarity” that brings together two geographers in dialogue working in similar thematic areas but who arrive at them from different subfields in geography that come with their own often particular episetmologic assumptions. While acknowledging the discipline’s diverse history of

“knowledge making” where geographers are often unable to “speak the different “languages” of the natural and human sciences, nor are they all trained in the various tool kits needed to conduct geospatial or discourse analysis,” Domosh explains the promise of the forum and dialogues. She writes:

“geography’s intradisciplinarity is radical…both in the historical sense of being at the root of the discipline and also in its challenges to the structuring of the academy’s traditional forms of knowledge production and circulation and the potential that offers for innovative thinking” (Domosh 2017, 1).

Clearly, how geographers imagine the direction that the wider discipline should work in, and the utility of communication between highly varied subdisciplines is at the forefront of scholarly concern today. What comes next is a discussion of how this dissertation fits within the still developing renewed

Marxist approaches to geography and how such a situation requires an attempt at articulating renewed discussion on the relations between (fluid) epistemology, knowledge production and language.

II.I Lessons in the Movement of Radical/Critical Geographies

While section one of this chapter dug rather deeply into the details of two debates in order to speak to shifts in geographic thought, this section will instead be more direct and general in describing what has led up to the last quarter century of radical/critical geography, and that time period itself. In their historiography of radical/critical Anglophone geography in North America, Linda Peake and Eric

Sheppard (2014, 314) establish the consistent use of the combined “radical/critical” moniker to describe non-positivist geographies of specifically Marxist, post-modern and post-structural type that have arisen since 1986. They mark this year as “the turning point when radical geography in Anglophone North

America became reframed as ‘critical’.” The new so-called ‘critical’ geography was typified by a “cultural turn” where, informed by increasingly fashionable post-modernisms, inequalities beyond class and political economy were given prominence (Peake and Sheppard 2014, 318–19). But Peake and Sheppard also point out this shift could be considered just a return, in terms of subject matter, to the early days of radical geography, which always covered a diverse set of ideas (2014, 308–14). Indeed, debates through the 1980s and early 1990s (of which the Walton, Mitchell and Peet exchange was one of many) hinged upon binary questions, such as “structure versus agency” in explanations of capitalist society, and critiques of Marxist geography’s materialist spatial theories from post-modern informed theories, like structuration (Cumbers 2009, 465–67).

Nonetheless, the new ‘critical’ geography found a mainstream academic acceptance that initial radical geographies had not, as new geographic journals and conferences appeared covering feminism and race, among other topics. Though the mainstream acceptance of ‘critical’ approaches did little to erode the neoliberal positivist stranglehold on academia more broadly (Peake and Sheppard 2014, 320).

This led to what Castree (2000b) described as “academicisation” in geography, where ‘critical’ scholars,

85 as part of an academics-wide shift, became more focused on professionalization, to improve one’s career standing, rather than activism directed both outward at the world and/or inward at the increasingly constraining academic system. From the mid-1990s through the 2000s, similar sentiment to that expressed by Castree was pervasive as geographers increasingly reflected on the political impotence of the ‘critical’ movement in the discipline (Barnett 1998; Castree 1999b; Johnston 2000;

Castree and Wright 2005; N. Smith 2005; Bauder 2006; Blomley 2006; Castree 2006b; Hudson 2006;

Purcell 2007; Bauder and Engel-Di Mauro 2008; D. Mitchell 2008a). Blomley (2006, 88) highlights the easy replicability of ‘critical’ scholarship in geography which appeared as a result of mainstreaming and allowed for the shift from activism to academicisation. He identifies that less “reflexive” ‘critical’ geography “veer[s] dangerously close to a paint-by-numbers formula.” Blomley outlines the formula thusly: “1) summon up righteous wrath at an oppressive relation (usually involving some clearly marked

‘Other’), 2) demonstrate the way space/ideology produces 1, 3) deftly puncture dominant power relations (perhaps through an invocation of Lefebvre), 4) reveal the existence of resistance and opposition (albeit latent), 5) conclude by a pious appeal to progressive/emancipatory/liberality alternatives, without specifying these in detail.”

There was response to this rising ‘critical’ movement, however. In one area, seeking to push outside of the mainstream in the discipline, were a few short-lived grassroots attempts by academics to organize ‘people’s geography’ projects directed at making geographic knowledge useful for “ordinary people” (Peake and Sheppard 2014, 320). Foreshadowing a new phase of radical geography, Peet (2000,

953) espouses a need for “philosophical hybrids” along with a “recommitment to…radical political values” focused on knowledge production with “social relevancy” because those in academia should not have “reluctance to speak for others” in the face of “the terrible injustices visited still on the world’s most vulnerable populations.” By establishing the collective need for radical social change, Peet suggests that in “theoretically and practically” confronting contemporary “social and cultural issues” radical

86 geography justifies its existence. Indeed, a second area in which there was significant response to

‘critical’ geographies was in the form of a renewed Marxist geography. While this second area could be understood as directed more inwards, towards how and why those in academia settle upon the work they choose to undertake and their approach to and explanations of it, it is no less important an endeavor (Castree 2006a, 2006c; D. Mitchell 2004; Castree 2000b, 967–69, 2000c; see also Alderman and Inwood 2019a, 2018b).

The renewed Marxist geographies sought to be more fluid and less obviously orthodox in their focus on economic and class issues within capitalism. Ray Hudson (2006), in particular, argued strongly for the continued importance of the Marxian critique of political economy in geography, as opposed to

‘critical’ economic studies of the decade prior to his writing that were more focused on social and cultural questions. But Hudson (2006, 376) is quick to note that he is not advocating for a return to some singular, unified and orthodox Marxist approach—the one often arranged as a straw man by detractors from ‘the Left’ in geography—but one focused on open synthesis in its critical analysis where the idea that Marxism is a “closed dogma” is rejected.

Indeed, Hudson argues for the importance of the renewed Marxist geography which began in the mid-1990s where its key characteristic was emphasizing the connection of historical materialism to dialectics. Pointing to a singular moment in which a renewed Marxist geography is kicked into gear simply is not possible, much like how it is equally fallible believing that there is any singular, unified

(read: essential) ‘critical’ geography, Marxist geography, or anything else. Nonetheless, the general timeframe can be triangulated in the mid-1990s. This was a time when, for example, Don Mitchell

(1995) called into question the discipline’s understanding and use of ‘culture’ and suggested no longer granting it the ontological status provided by work in traditional cultural geography or in the work of the

‘cultural turn.’ Instead, he suggested a reconceptualization of culture where it is instead understood in its material development through systems of production within society. In this time of increasing

87 critique from various ‘post-‘ approaches in geography, Harvey (1996) responded much like Mitchell.

Indeed, he set as his objective in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, “to show that historical materialist enquiry infused with dialectical understandings can integrate themes of space, place, and environment (nature) into both social and literary theory” (1996, 46). He ads to this, noting that there seems to be much difference “between invocation of space, place, and environment (nature) as convenient metaphors on the one hand and integrating them as historical and geographical realities into social and literary theory on the other.” He goes on to suggest that hopefully such a theoretical intervention as his has “a transformative effect upon the terrain of theory, but also opens up a terrain of political possibilities.”

For Harvey (1996, 46–57), a direct and more explicit explanation and usage of dialectics can demonstrate the importance of his historical-geographical materialist approach that is reflexive in its use of social theory. In short, a direct engagement with dialectics is the means by which Marxist geography renews its valuable critique of capitalism within the discipline. Harvey was certainly successful in producing a retort for Marxism to critical voices from the anti-Marxist ‘critical’ geographies.

However, the degree to which Harvey was successful in actively offering a reinterpretation of Marxism for geography is more so in question (Castree 1999a, 140, 1997, 1996a, 343, 345, 357–58). Castree

(1997, 2080), on the one hand, identifies Harvey’s reflexivity in that he does not suggest Marxism “has all the answers, theoretically or politically” but that his larger disciplinary argument demonstrates that

“the left simply cannot do without the tools of Marxist political economy” among the many new tools brought by critical theory. On the other hand, Castree (1999a, 140) writes that “what is conspicuously absent from the book is a thoroughgoing re-reading of Marx in light the criticisms levelled at Harvey” by other “Leftist detractors” within and beyond geography. Castree then adds that Harvey’s book “reads more as an exercise in enlarging the horizon of Marxism than as one of re-interpreting it in ways commensurate with a world constituted as far more than the sum of capital and class.”

Castree’s (1996a, 357) observations here reflect how he understands Harvey’s articulation of his

“systematic dialectics” as Harvey’s attempt at elucidating “a distinctive and valuable methodological approach to the thorny issue of explaining and representing a capitalist reality of complex, layered and simultaneous processes and events.” Of course, explaining and representing (and ultimately changing— a point for which both Harvey and Castree demonstrate genuine desire throughout their work) the vile conditions of life within processes of capital is necessary in order to understand them and how they change, so as to both enlighten others to pressing social issues and work collectively to right them. In so doing, one must both communicate ontologically consistent and definite instances of exploitation, while simultaneously allow that, when communicating such information to others, others may approach the

(destructive, and hazardous to life) phenomena of capitalism otherwise and from these other vantage points observe, understand, and explain similar and different exploitative instances within capitalism.

Dialectics, Castree (1996a, 357–58) suggests, focused on epistemological concerns over varied approaches to the capitalist world around us, can help reveal and explain this “tension between the explanatory-diagnostic and epistemologically reflexive” aspects of work in Marxist and ‘critical’ geographies—the tension between communicating, categorically, the issues with capitalism, while allowing for the categorization of issues other than the one derived from your epistemological vantage point. Castree questions Harvey’s (and implicitly the work of other classical Marxists) ability to maintain the “creative tension” between his explanatory-diagnostic moments, and his attempts at epistemologically reflexive ones.5 Acknowledging the issues of the time facing Marxist geography (that it was challenged as the dominant radical/critical approach within the discipline) Castree (1996a, 358) explains that given how “feminist and anti-racist” scholars have demonstrated that “theory is both gendered and ethnically inflected, often insidiously and perniciously so,” Marxist geographers must

5 Hence, Castree’s (1999a, 140) statement that Harvey appears to simply ‘enlarge’ the prevue of Marxism with his work, rather than offer re-interpretations of Marx that can work for social issues beyond the relation between “capital and class.”

89 operate with a new “level of epistemological self-awareness” because issues of gender and race cannot simply be tacked on “as if they are somehow ‘external’ to historical-geographical materialism.” Castree concludes—emphatically signaling the need for a renewed Marxist geography—that for “Marxist anticipatory-Utopian visions” to not “become somebody else’s nightmare” then “epistemological reflexivity has to bear an essential relation to political practice.” And in expressing how a renewed

Marxist geography is to reflexively approach the production of knowledge, Castree is direct in writing that “the cognitive value of a dialectical mode of argument will only be as strong as its ability to interrupt its own epistemological bases.” Implicit in Castree’s sentiment is a critique of classical

Marxist’s—including Harvey—inability to reinterpret or reread Marx and see in it and speak to the social issues endemic to capitalism, like racism and sexism, among many others, to the same degree they use

Marx to explain issues of class. Indeed, Marx and Marxist theoretical principles have been used to address issues of race (Wendling 2009, 159–63; Robinson 2000), gender (Vogel 2013; Brown 2012;

Wendling 2009, 155–58; Federici 2004), sexuality (Floyd 2009; Wendling 2009, 164–68; Floyd 1998), and nature (Millar and Mitchell 2017; Burkett 2014; Castree 2005, 2000a, 1995) even while Harvey and others only rarely acknowledge them substantively.

With the challenges of disciplinary debates between Marxist and ‘critical’ geography, and the

“ongoing hegemony of economic and political neo-conservatism…occluding the violent realities of a capitalist world economy behind the anodyne logics of free-market theory” at the fore, Castree (1999a,

137–40) lays out “the theoretical foundations for a renewed Marxian political economy in geography” through a “’both/and’ modality” that offers “a third way between the antimonies” of ‘modern’-Marxist theory and ‘post-‘ theories of “capitalism and class.” In justification for his “deliberately proactive” proposed alternative, Castree writes that while there are positives to the new and more dynamic

“geographical Left” brought by the ‘critical’ movement, its “critique of Marxist geography and…pluralization of critical geographies” have brought significant consequences. Principally, that the

“hegemonic preoccupations” of ‘critical’ geographies are out of touch with contemporary “political- economic realities” and “the time of Left geographical theory is out of joint with the time of social reality.” “Theoretically,” Castree (1999a, 139) writes, “the critique of Marxism” by those in ‘critical’ geography, “has…gone hand in hand with the exploration of theories that take us decisively beyond historical materialism and its geographically variants.” Because the utilization of such theories take geography decisively beyond the concrete of our social reality and into the abstract there remains a clear contradiction within the critical ‘Left’ geographic undertaking. Indeed, Castree identifies this contradiction writing that it centers around “the relative marginalization of that very approach—

Marxian political economy—whose central concern is to make sense of a capitalist space economy that virtually everyone on the geographical Left agrees is real, global and enormously consequential.” As the political ‘Right’ has consolidated ever increasing hegemony over the global political reality, Castree stated nearly 20 years ago that addressing this contradiction should be an urgent endeavor for geographers.6 Castree’s solution for the need to provide “’strong’ knowledge claims” that changes the discursive and material social reality produced by conservative ideology, which also do not “re-install all the cognitive and normative closures and exclusions”7 that exposes Marxism-in-general to criticism from

‘the Left’ is a ‘renewed Marxian political economy in geography’ that has at its center dialectic materialism.

The renewed Marxist geography maintains an ability to make essential statements about the realities of capitalism while simultaneously maintaining an awareness of the ontological bases for such statements through a continued epistemological questioning. While the means of this ‘both/and

6 I should note here that Castree builds his brief discussion of the historical moment and ‘the Left’ in geography’s place in it by working through Neil Smith’s (1998) provocative and insightful viewpoint in Progress in Human Geography titled El Niño Capitalism. 7 Recall here how ‘classical’ Marxian interpretations and approaches, from Althusser for example, are largely responsible for the ‘essentialist’ label and attendant criticism lobed at Marxisms-at-large from a variety of post- modern approaches.

91 epistemology,’ as articulated by Castree (1999a, 152–56, see also 1996b, 47, 49–50, 74–75), following

Postone (1996), are extensive, I sum them up thusly. “Capitalism is envisioned” reflexively by understanding that it is envisioned from within it, but “non-identically with” it—it cannot be envisioned externally from it, nor can it replicate it wholly (Castree 1999a, 152). In order to arrive at and produce such an understanding, one must speak to articulate the very general expansive structures and processes in capitalism—Castree (1998)8 refers to this as the “metatheoretical imperative”—by deploying, “in a way that circumvents epistemological surety and ontological totalization,” “abstract abstractions.” Abstract abstractions, “can identify features common within or between peoples and places, their other differences notwithstanding” (Castree 1999a, 156), thus bridging the need to show

“how the local and the particular is constitutively tied to global and universal processes and relations…thus actively revealing worlds we otherwise could not see” (Castree 1999a, 152). By recognizing that structures and processes of capitalism simultaneously affect multitudes of spaces and scales from the general and global to the particular and local, capitalism can no longer be understood as singular or closed, but rather as open (Castree 1999a, 153). And still, the fundamental contradiction of capitalism—“the global, but invisible, duality of labour”—remains at its center, at all the scales at which it operates, meaning that class, for example, is not singular either. This is what Castree identifies as the paradox of capitalism, that it is “a real and global system” but one built upon “a structure of the heterogeneous.” As such, capitalism and all its characteristics, like class of which it is a part, are open domains of social relations. In terms of class, Castree explains that it is “a domain of social heterogeneity, not unity” because “differences of nationality, gender, sexuality, geographical location and so on are constantly gathered together in the domain of concrete labor and, through the abstractions of social labour and labour time, are forcibly articulated into a global system with a

8 For more detail on the issues facing Marxian thought at this time see Castree (1996b, 45–46), Murray Smith’s (1998) reply and Castree’s (1998) follow up.

92 structured coherence.” Importantly, Castree argues that it is a strength of this open interpretation of capitalism that retains a “strong focus” on the importance of class “as a position of both exploitation and domination” because it “offers a common basis on which erstwhile differences between working people can be negotiated in order to fashion a global political movement against capitalism.” Ultimately,

Castree states that this reinterpreted Marxism for a ‘geographical Left’ struggling to deal with the tension of ‘after-modern critiques’ of Marxist geography provides “a theoretical basis for a revivified

Marxism in geography” but not “a rival to the current preoccupations” of ‘critical’ geographies. Castree writes, “what we need is a new vocabulary to talk about [capitalism and inequality] and a new politics to contest them” (1999a, 154).

A new and cohesive “radical geography” with innovative vocabularies with which to describe, understand, and change capitalism has yet to be produced fully, but nonetheless some in the discipline have moved in such an epistemologically fluid, reflexive direction. Inwood and Bonds (2013) highlight the necessary imperative for anti-capitalist political organizing to work with anti-racist organizing.

Indeed, they write that the useful “heterodoxy” in ‘critical’ geography brings a “theoretical flexibility” already put into practice by activists who understand that “race, sexuality, class, age, gender and all kinds of identities, matter politically” (Inwood and Bonds 2013, 519). They conclude that “the privileging of one approach over another is, in and of itself, politically limiting and not in the interest of reinvigorating a focus on revolutionary alternatives or radical praxis and ignores the fact that capitalism does not exist separately from race and gender.” Their work has continued along these lines since

(Bonds 2018; Inwood and Bonds 2017, 2016; Bonds and Inwood 2016; Bonds 2013; Inwood 2013).

Similar work has proceeded in the discipline in terms of connecting capitalism’s economic inequalities to racism (Derickson 2014; McKittrick 2013, 2011; D. Wilson 2009; B. M. Wilson 2005, 2002, 2000; Pulido

2002) and feminist geographers have done the same in addressing patriarchal social relations in economic terms (Tyner 2018; Werner et al. 2017; McDowell 2008; see also Heynen 2018). Additionally,

93 there has been activity in the discipline—in the vein of Castree’s call for a renewed emphasis on dialectics in geography—directed at conceptualizing (geographic) ideas and their geographic materialities dialectically, like violence (Tyner 2016b; Tyner and Inwood 2014; M. W. Wright 2001b), landscape (Tyner, Inwood, and Alderman 2014; Tyner, Sirik, and Henkin 2014; D. Mitchell 2008b, 2007,

2003a, 2002), labor (Tyner 2014a, 2014b; D. Mitchell 2003b, 2000), the material culture of objects

(Kirsch 2015, 2014, 2013; Kirsch and Mitchell 2004), the politics of consumption (Hartwick 2000), and knowledge production about capitalism (Derickson 2013, 2009).

Perhaps most profoundly, Melissa Wright’s work melds critiques of capitalism and the violence it produces together with more post-structurally inclined feminist and anti-racist critiques (2017, 2014,

2006, 2012, 2001b, 2001a). Early in her career, Wright—writing about exploitative, violent working conditions for women in Mexico—noted how post-structural feminist critiques of Marxism were “helpful for expanding the possible conceptualization of the relationship between [modes of production] and the cheapening of laboring subjects” (2001a, 560). This was because they alleviate “the assumption that the experience of class subsumes other life experiences” and “other forms of solidarity that bolster class positions” can highlight instances where “different life experiences can contribute positively to coalition building across social groups.” Wright writes that she believes this understanding of Marx’s work—one that “emphasizes his view of materiality as in a constant state of production”—creates the possibility for

“post-structuralist views of subjectivity to expand the concept of subversion” because it utilizes Marx’s

“critique of value without circumscribing a vision of subversive agency to a strict allegiance to class politics” (2001a, 561). Since then, Wright has consistently called for fluid epistemological approaches in geographical scholarship directed at social issues. In the context of her work in Mexico, Wright indicates that a blending of Marxist and post-structural approaches is crucial because such issues demand

“moving beyond analyzing crises and moving into the social production of political action, where discourse and materiality blend in the everyday making of social, political and economic life” (2012,

576). Because the world and its various crises exist for people in a convoluted discursive materiality,

Wright concludes that “it is neither theoretically nor politically useful to draw lines around Marxist or feminist or post-structuralist approaches” (2012, 577). As we have seen to this point, there has been little holding together radical/critical geography, but the work of Castree, Wright and others demonstrates a move towards a cohesive criticalness in terms of non-positivist geography, built on the notion of fluid epistemologies. Like Castree (1999a, 154) says, however, “what we need is a new vocabulary to talk about [capitalism and inequality] and a new politics to contest them,” and this new

“vocabulary” or language, I argue, still requires refining in the context of radical/critical epistemologies available in the discipline.

II.II Moving Toward Fluid Epistemologies in Geography

Something of a running theme to this point in my dissertation is the continued problem of identification from anti-positivist geographers. But not in the sense of self-identification, the identification of one’s sub-disciplinary group, or identification of related epistemological groups— though certainly there has been debate over what exactly to call more-radical/critical geographies, and that is a point that will also be touched on briefly later in the next subsection. Rather, this running theme is the problem of how exactly to best express the non-positivist, radical/critical message in geography so as to adjust the direction of the discipline as a whole, and in turn, by extension and expansion, change the world. The word ‘express’ is emphasized because throughout the preceding sections questions and debates swirl around how best to go about communicating the results of non- positivist knowledge production in geography. While the spirit of the wide variety of radical/critical geographies is rarely at issue, the language and form this knowledge production takes, rather, is identified as an area where this disciplinary movement should focus its critical lens. However, as I intend

95 to demonstrate in this section, the radical/critical movement in geography has yet to adequately address (political) language in a substantive way in its ongoing project of disciplinary transformation.

The incohesiveness in terms of a consistently critical language is reflected in a still-too- fragmented radical/critical geography where the use of multiple epistemological approaches simultaneously remains infrequently considered or deployed. This overemphasis on the expedient/utilitarian value of sticking to one, and not exploring multiple merely different but no less effective radical/critical epistemological approaches warps the consciousness of concerned academics, in general, on “the Left” at the expense of their capacity to put their incisive productive capacity into action for change.9 Here it is pertinent to remind us of Harvey’s (1984, 7) words on what a people’s geography bent on changing the “pious universalisms, ideals…ideologies and prejudice” that (still) dominate the earth’s landscapes. Indeed, with a focus on directing action towards “popular consciousness,” he writes that “it must penetrate the barriers to common understandings by identifying the material base to common interests.” Harvey’s statements here should be understood in conjunction with his (and Barnes and Curry, and Castree’s) emphasis on constructing a common language within the discipline which was articulated in the previous section. Of relevance going forward in this section is where Harvey (1984, 8) emphasizes the need to resist the “temptation” geographers may feel in the face of such a project. He describes this temptation manifesting in a backing away from theory altogether and instead a movement by geographers toward “the supposed particularities of place and moment…to a naive empiricism,” where they “produce as many ad hoc theories as there are instances.”

Harvey stresses that such retreat away from theory “is retreat from the challenge to make conscious

9 I stress here the multifaceted nature of what exactly academics can change at all. When one endeavors to change themselves they in turn change what is around them in the world. When what is around them in the world changes they themselves are changed in turn. Our actions towards that which is external to ourselves reflects back upon ourselves. To be less general, academic work contains the capacity to both change the world around us in terms of material alterations outside academic settings, and change conditions and relations within disciplines. Such productive capacity cannot be isolated within specific realms. In short, there is no clear boundary between an “academic world” and the rest of the world “out there.”

96 and creative interventions in the construction of future geographies.” Here is an opportune place where to remind of Castree’s (1999a, 152, 156) call for more “abstract abstractions” and its similarities to the difficult project Harvey identifies. Now, I propose we take a step back momentarily and reflect on this sentiment’s connection to my dissertation—specifically where the topic of the geography of capital punishment is concerned.

Suppose, like Harvey (1984, 8) suggests happens on occasion and probably more often than not, that at some point earlier in my graduate studies I indeed succumbed to such a temptation. Succumbing, whether consciously or unconsciously, in the context of his statement that “the intellectual task in geography…is the construction of a common language, of common frames of reference and theoretical understandings,” or Castree’s similar statement, where social issues and inequalities could be meaningfully articulated, addressed, and altered—recalling here the sentiment from radical/critical geography (Castree et al. 2010), borrowed from Marx’s (1998, 571) injunction that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” What would this dissertation look like?

What would it be if I were still interested in the phenomena of capital punishment but, either through sheer obliviousness or active disinterest, tempted away from any attempt at a conscious and creative political intervention in geography’s capacity as a discipline to produce any knowledge of consequence in terms of addressing social issues and future geographies? Perhaps it would be a study on the areal uniqueness of capital punishment within a specific region? Maybe, since it has been roughly

25 years, the empirical accounts of the who’s, what’s, where’s, and when’s of capital punishment in the

United States articulated by Harries would need an update? The study could be punctuated with the production of new maps GIS-based visualizations and charts containing insightfully unique, yet-to-be- observed in nature, up-to-the-minute spatio-temporal patterns of all possible differentiating demographic characterizations associated with those who are involved in one way or another with the

97 phenomena in question. Perhaps it would be uniquely insightful to understand the lived experience of those on death row by examining how human perceptions, values, and actions shape awareness and agency for the (hypothetical, for the point of this example) prisoner in (the hypothetical, specific location) cell 13, cell block C, at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution in Chillicothe, Ohio where the majority of male death row inmates in Ohio are housed? Maybe a study on the affect, using nonrepresentational theory, of the different discursive strategies of pro-capital punishment political figures and anti-capital punishment protesters as tested through the distribution and collection of mailed surveys could lead to new theoretical understandings of how public awareness of the death penalty is shaped by opposing groups? The study could contain built-in repeatability for each new instance of a protested execution in the United States.

Ultimately, it is unclear what this dissertation would be if I did not have the interests and concerns that I maintain based on multitudes of experiences and my situated knowledges—and it would be rather short-sighted to indicate that there is any real, affirmative difference in terms of the truth- making that any number of variable approaches to the study of capital punishment would result in.

However, I do feel strongly that I would be incapable of carrying out a study on any subject that avoids theory at the expense of attempting to consciously produce knowledge that pushes geography in new directions. To do otherwise would feel like a trite use of time and space—simply the use of space for whatever ends would appear in mind—and appear to be a project without the goal to change much of anything about the world in particular or in general.

And here is where I could diverge into a variety of theoretical and philosophical areas because who is to say how the world should change and why conscious changes should happen at all?

Thoroughly exploring moral relativism is perhaps a concern in this regard, and I could do so through moral geographies (D. M. Smith 2000, 14–20, 154), social justice and geography (D. M. Smith 1994, 27–

33; Barry 2005) or Extreme Geography (Nemeth 1997), but a substantive engagement is outside the

98 realm of this work. Similarly, I could explore and introduce the theoretical notion of a radical positivism built on recent engagements in geography that have problematized characterizations of positivist approaches in the discipline’s past (Bergmann and Morrill 2018; Castree 2017; Barnes 2018, 2009;

Sheppard 2014, 2001; Heynen 2013; Wyly 2009), because even at the time it was recognized that the so- called “quantitative revolution” that brought positivism to geography was more radical in terms of its epistemological and theoretical underpinnings than has been since acknowledged (Wisner 1970; see also: Bunge 2011, 1977). Likewise, I could divert into an extended discussion on the recent appearance of ‘prefigurative politics’ in the humanities and social sciences, as the general tenants of this concept are somewhat related to some of the sentiment I have expressed to this point, and will continue with as this chapter goes on. While an extended engagement is also outside the realm of this work, a brief discussion is pertinent in order to transition to the next section.

Prefigurative politics—originating in studies of radical feminism and other social movements, and further developed by anarchist and anti-globalization scholars—suggests that “the direct experimental actualization of a social and political alternative should be considered as an inherent part of activist practice itself” (van de Sande 2015, 188). In the attempted realization of other futures, “in which people collectively seek to create the relations, practices, and structures that may serve as the basis of a future society, in the present” (Ince and Barrera de la Torre 2016, 11), prefigurative politics maintains three characteristics (van de Sande 2015, 188–89). First, in the aim of creating alternative futures in the present, everyday practices are adjusted with long-term ideals in mind because every possible future is established through direct adjustments in the moment. Second, continuous revaluation and reformulation of long-term political goals is emphasized with the goal being to reimagine the differences between means and ends. Within this political practice, means and ends should reflect one another as opposed to valuing, and thus privileging, certain political means and actions simply because of the resulting outcomes. Building on the prior two characteristics, the third is a

99 continuous (i.e. banal, everyday) inherent experience of experimentation directed at confronting the many varied inequalities of capitalism. Reflecting its eclectic origins, Mathijs van de Sande explains that many would be right in pointing out that there is nothing particularly novel about the practices tied to this recent concept of a “prefigurative politics,” as over the past two centuries, many versions of them have taken different forms.

The relatively new concept of a prefigurative politics has recently found its way into the discipline of geography in the form of a call for Autonomous Geographies focused on creating non- capitalist space (Chatterton and Pickerill 2010; Pickerill and Chatterton 2006); a refiguration of geography’s understanding of the concept of territory through an anarchist approach (Ince 2012); an assessment of urban and public space during protest (Vasudevan 2015); a call for knowledge production by scholar-activists (Derickson and Routledge 2015); an assessment of self-management in organic farming (Ince 2015); an examination of geography’s disciplinary engagement with the concept of ‘the state’ to produce non-state epistemologies (Ince and Barrera de la Torre 2016). But, in particular, two recent appearances of prefigurative politics in geography connects us back to the concerns over the genesis of a shared language of radical geography, raised by Harvey, Barnes and Curry, and Castree.

First is Anthony Ince’s (2014) response to Simon Springer’s (2014a, 2014b) initial, rather loud volley over what radical geography should be. Springer’s contentions were met with boisterous disagreement from a number of Marxist geographers (Mann 2014; Waterstone 2014), eventually including Harvey (2017). Springer asserts that Marxism has dominated the paradigm of radical geography, at least in the modern decades of the discipline. He contends that anarchism10 is more than just some utopian project, but a vital revolutionary process with its own philosophical underpinnings

10 It should be noted here that, just like anything else, anarchism and anarchist geography clearly are not some stable, internally coherent concepts or approaches. They are multifaceted and highly variable, just like Marxism and Marxist geography to use another example; (see Pickerill 2017).

100 that are absent from Marxist analyses of capitalism that “rehash” ideals “that are long past their expiration date,” and that radical geography would do well to reengage (Springer 2014b, 251).

The particularities of the louder portions of the debate are, in my view, best left alone for the time being, in favor of Ince’s more cogent assessment of what the debate means for radical geography moving forward. Ince (2014, 280) heartily welcomes Springer’s focus on establishing anarchism as one of many modes of geographical analysis. However, he is hesitant to accept, and indeed questions that the reason for doing so should originate in the notion that Marxist geographers in toto have, at various times in the discipline’s past, ‘appropriated, defamed and misrepresented’ anarchist ideas. Importantly, he writes that “it may be more productive to consider the ways in which anarchist and Marxist geographers can learn from one another in a spirit of comradely critique.” After establishing how various portions of anarchist and Marxist thought complement the strengths and weaknesses of the other in terms of their analytic, conceptual, and theoretical applications to geographic thought, Ince offers that both could do well to learn from the other. He suggests that the relatively new, revitalized anarchist geographies in particular would benefit to look back on how Marxist geography developed from “modest beginnings” over four decades earlier. Concluding, he writes that “anarchists and

Marxists” in geography “would do well” to avoid “rejecting one another wholesale.” This, after writing that within geography’s diverse discipline, anarchists have many opportunities “to make innovative interventions in the fundamental underpinnings of geographical knowledge” while outside of academic circles “socialists of all persuasions are failing to capitalize upon some of the most intense crises of capitalism, climate and democracy in history.” It could here be suggested that Ince sees great value in a collective production of knowledge from leftist geographers employing multiple epistemologies aimed at the diverse needs of anti-capital activists beyond the university.

Next it is Jenny Pickerill (2017, 255) who also connects us to the sentiment of Harvey, Barnes and Curry, and Castree in her response to the second round of the debate occasioned by Harvey’s

101 delayed response to Springer; specifically where she states that she is “less convinced that we need to spend our energies being contentious within the discipline of geography.” Pickerill asks simply, “what are we fighting for?” while noting how arguments over “how a particular subdiscipline should operate” is “peculiarly academic,” just as the question of how to stop the dominance of capital and capitalism remains nonetheless. But, she writes, “at least, in many ways, Marxists and anarchists can agree on what is wrong with the world” before agreeing with Harvey’s (2017, 249) observation that radical geographers should be focusing how to create space for non-capitalist politics and conversations.

Pickerill adds that radical geographers would do well to direct their energies towards “creating space to experiment in radical alternatives…and critically analyze those experiments” through “the hard empirical work of taking action…critically scrutinizing what works in stopping capitalism” rather than succumb to “ideological posturing.”

Ince and Pickerill reach some rather large scale, and seemingly long-term, goals articulating their prefigurative politics in response to the debate over the direction of radical geography—namely the end of capitalism through the creation of some other form of social relations (one that is not to be confused with some vapid cosmopolitan utopia; see Harvey 2000a). And that being too far a field for this dissertation to travel, here is where I turn their sentiments back on the discipline of geography, but while maintaining a degree of the ideals of prefigurative politics. Indeed, the questions then arise: what shape should the discipline take? In which direction should it focus its productive capacity? How should that productive capacity be expressed so as to elicit change both within the discipline and beyond it?

These fundamental questions of epistemology come into focus, perhaps, when returning to Harvey

(1984, 8) where he writes that “the junction between geography and social theory…is one of the crucial flash-points for the crystallization of new conceptions of the world and new possibilities for active intervention” in the world.

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Indeed, these epistemological questions, and possible connections between geography and social theory, develop through certain social conditions and relations. Degrees of consciousness and alienation impact what conditions geographic knowledge production occur in. Under what degrees of freedom and necessity can certain forms of radical/critical geography be undertaken? This is a question of social consciousness because the material condition of social relations influence types of thought which may be produced—and this is a question I seek to explore in subsequent sections.

Radical/critical geographies contain the liberative potential to critique the capitalist state by looking beyond surface appearances to decipher the myths and contradictions upon which the state and broader social formation is constructed. This can be done by utilizing the analytic potential of dialectics and its explanatory-diagnostic power directed at the world, but also when we direct it back on our epistemologic assumptions (Castree 1996a). Therefore, it is necessary to engage Marx’s philosophy and the (renewed) Marxist geographies that utilize it because this is a means of assessing the material conditions of capitalism as well as the approaches that lead to the radical/critical geographic knowledge produced about it. Importantly, we also must have the freedom to present (through thought, writing, and communication) this critique creatively because the capitalist state recontextualizes itself continually in efforts to ‘fix’ its contradictions; therefore, it is necessary—utilizing the spirit of an experimentally reflexive prefigurative politics—to engage post-structuralist geographies that offer a means of freeing expression. A political theory of the language of radical/critical geographic knowledge production allows us to float purposefully between the material and immaterial, the concrete and the abstract in our political engagement with the spaces of capital. In this way Marxist, post-structural, and anarchist/prefigurative geographies are symbiotic. Their fluid, combined use allows one the freedom of the means and capacity to decipher and reveal the totality of the continually transforming capitalist state and its actions on earth with a focus on changing it through producing other-than-capitalist space.

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III. Developing a Fluid Epistemological Approach: Processes of Analysis

In the following section I outline two theoretical areas that provide a framework for my conceptualization of a future radical/critical geographic knowledge production. First, an explanation of my understanding of dialectics. The second area builds upon dialectics and proceeds in two general directions. Primarily, it is an outline of the fluid epistemological framework for geography developed through and in which dialectics is put into action in combination with approaches for the production of knowledge. Then, I allude to how such a framework may adjust the consciousness of knowledge production by exploring how changing forms of ‘language’ may provide the basis for the politicization of the process of geographic knowledge production.

III.I A Dialectic Mode of Thinking and Knowledge Production in Geography

This section will proceed through an explanation of dialectics and processes of abstraction before I arrive at what appears to be my current understanding of this relation. The discipline of geography has maintained an irregular and variable understanding of dialectics, employing numerous and inconsistent interpretations (Castree 1996a; Elden 2008; Doel 2008, 1993, 1992). A great deal of this uneven understanding is due to the fact that Marx never fully elucidated his process of thought in understanding the capitalist system (Tyner and Inwood 2014, 4); while subsequent scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities have since undertaken numerous, often contradictory, sets of exegeses on Marx’s dialectical methods (Harvey 1996, 46–48). Given that Castree (1996a, 342), Harvey

(1996, 48), Tyner and Inwood (2014, 4–5), and others within geography make use of Bertell Ollman’s work (2003, 1993, 1976) in their use and formulations of a dialectics in geography, I will likewise turn to

Ollman as the grounds for my general understanding of dialectics.

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Ollman (2003, 12) describes “dialectics as a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world.” Tyner and Inwood (2014, 4) explain that this interpretation of ‘reality’ “is counter to more conventional and pervasive epistemologies – of which empiricism is exemplary – that disaggregate the world into discrete and unrelated entities.” These deeply engrained epistemologies in geography and the social sciences that distill potentially unique and otherwise differentiated objects into discrete entities, which “limits analysis to the surface appearance of objects.” Dialectics, however, maintains the capacity to radically reconstitute our understanding of reality through “replacing the commonsense notion of “thing” (as something that has a history and has external connections with other things) with notions of “process” and “relation”” (Ollman 2003, 13). The notions of process and relation replace the idea of singular, stable, essential ‘things’ in that, assumedly,

‘things’ can only be understood based on what they are not:11 as humans discern what this and that

‘thing’ is and is not, these ‘things’ are constantly caught up in relational processes tied to where, when, and therefore how the ‘things’ are. For dialectics, processes of (re)conceptualizing difference is crucial

(Paolucci 2009, 154). Ollman (2003, 13) makes this reconceptualization of reality clear when he writes that “nothing that didn’t already exist has been added here. Rather, it is a matter of where and how one draws boundaries and establishes units (the dialectical term is “abstracts”) in which to think about the world.” It is here where we can dispense with the temporary qualifier “assumedly” in our statement about a reconceptualized ‘reality’ because how one comes to know where and how to draw abstract boundaries around the meaning of things is a decidedly social phenomenon.

Fundamental to dialectics is this notion of abstraction, which is itself an epistemological process

(Ollman 2003, 60; see also Horvath and Gibson 1984). Ollman, building on Marx (1993, 100–102), indicates that this process begins with “the “real concrete” (the world as it presents itself to us) and

11 For a provocative discussion of the productive importance of negation to not only Marxist thought, but to geographic thought, see Mann (2008).

105 proceeds through “abstraction” (the intellectual activity of breaking this whole down into mental units with which we think about it) to the “thought concrete” (the reconstituted and now understood whole present in the mind).” We may understand the process of abstraction as the mode of producing discourse and theory about concrete aspects of our social formations. Significant here is the movement of thought provided by dialectic abstraction: the process of going from concrete reality, to the abstract, then back once more to the thought concrete: the amenable fusion of what we know as ‘real’ with socially constituted discourse about reality. Dialectic thinking operates through illuminating multiple theoretical vantage points from which to view the world. In doing so, it proceeds to open space for analysis that goes beyond what is immediately apparent about reality; beyond surface appearances so as to bring into focus the whole totality of changing and contradictory relations of which we are a part.

The prospect of conscious existence within a whole ever-changing and contradictory world conceptualized in totality is potentially unnerving and unwieldy.12 But, thankfully, this potential existential issue is absolved rather neatly. Indeed, there is solace in an understanding that none of these relations between ‘things’ exist beyond their social production and at any time, given relative degrees of collective consciousness, production of certain relations can all but cease. All one needs are one another.13 With the realization that conscious social production can adjust concrete reality, the question becomes, how can we muster dialectic modes of thinking to transform material relations so as to adjust the relative degree of collective consciousness? Perhaps the answer is to focus on the how of production; how humans produce. If production is a ‘thing’ then it must have a relationally constituted where and when to it: production happens somewhere and most certainly in many places at once. How can we come to understand what could be termed the socio-spatial context of production?

12 For an insightful examination of the dialectical relations between “totality, change, and contradiction” and the “unity of opposites” see: (Rees 1998, 5–8). 13 Recall Keighren’s discussion of J.K. Wright’s work from the beginning of chapter three.

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In order to proceed in a relatable (D. Mitchell 2014) and relevant (D. Mitchell 2008a; Staeheli and Mitchell 2005) way for geographers, in particular, in our subsequent production of knowledge then it would be prescient to explore how we come to know the changing historical-geographical production of things. Heterogeneous material relations form fluid processes, which in turn constitutes ‘things.’

Simply, this means “that relationships are constituted through differences that produce some sort of tension which, in turn, generate a dynamic and become as such the ‘motor’ of historical-geographical change” (Swyngedouw 1999, 94). Like production, other concepts are ‘things,’ including geographical concepts, like space, for example. A whole host of approaches within geography, the discipline, have produced variable “naturalized” and “contextualized” understandings of concepts like space. A historical-geographical approach suggests that, because the process of abstraction is a productive one when seen through from the ‘real concrete’ to the ‘thought concrete,’ then wherever in reality this process occurs the process is coproductive in constituting space for and knowledge of its material existence. For instance, “space-as-a-thing acquires meaning, significance, resonance, even a particular geographical form in and through the multiple relations with which is it [sic] infused and through which it becomes produced” (Swyngedouw 1999, 94). Swyngedouw provides the example of how the “built environment or the cutting down of the Amazon rain-forest is realised in and through socio-spatial processes of appropriation, of capital accumulation, of the imagineering and scripting of space, place, nature and the like.”

A principle objective of the historical-geographical materialist approach, built through Marxian thought, in geography has been “to disentangle the socio-spatial processes through which, particularly – but not exclusively – under capitalism, spatial configurations are produced (in their economic, political, social, cultural and ideological instances) and transformed” (Swyngedouw 1999, 94). Dialectics, as

Castree (1996a, 343) notes, when understood within Harvey’s (2008, 1999, 1996, 1989) emphasized project of historical-geographical materialism, assumes the capability “of reconstructing in thought the

107 real processes operative within capitalist societies” and thus demonstrating its exceptional usefulness in abstracting from spatial relations within capitalist social formations. Harvey (1996) indeed wrote extensively on his interpretation of dialectic principles and their connection to historical-material analysis—it was Harvey’s objective here to widen the political possibilities for Marxian analysis by seeking to transform social and literary theory with a more fully elucidated process of dialectics.14 He lays out his general principles of dialectics, through 11 propositions in his attempt to explore its ontological and epistemological foundations as a process; a process of how abstraction from the everyday events we experience works (Harvey 1996, 48–57).

Harvey’s first proposition is that the dialectic is a process and not a thing in itself; this is a rejection of binary systems of thought that function through mutually exclusive categorization and structuration (1996, 48–49). Principally, Harvey subsumes that dialectical thinking holds the ontological principle that “elements, things, [or] structures” do not exist beyond the “processes, flows, and relations” that encompass them (1996, 49). Relatedly, Harvey’s (1996, 50) second proposition expresses the notion that, while it is difficult to imagine “things” as being anything but “permanent and solid,” dialectic thinking forces one to ask this question about every “thing” or phenomena we encounter: “by what process was it constituted and how is it sustained?” Next, the third proposition suggests that while

“things” and systems appear stable and unproblematic, dialectical thought illuminates the internal contradictions of “things” as they are constituted by multiple processes. Likewise, proposition four suggests that there is a consistent assumption that “things” are “internally heterogeneous at every level.” Thus any “thing” could, presumably, be disaggregated into a number of “things” that share relation at an infinity of levels, or scales (1996, 51–52). Furthermore, if constitutive processes make

“things” heterogeneous, then understanding the internalized processes and relations therein is

14 For a thorough assessment of Castree’s interpretation of Harvey’s presentation of dialectics and his potential motivations for such work see my discussion in the prior section as well as (Castree 1997, 1996a). In particular, note Castree’s criticisms here (1999a, 147), and here (1996a, 343, 357).

108 paramount when seeking an understanding of the attributes of “things.” Yet, Harvey (1996, 53) points out limitations here; chiefly that individuals cannot practically “internalize everything in the universe.”

Rather, humans are internally related, more so, to those things which are more proximate to themselves, thought there is “no fixed or a priori boundary” that restricts the distance where one may begin or end relationally. “Setting boundaries with respect to space, time, scale, and environment,”

Harvey explains, “becomes a major strategic consideration in the development of concepts, abstractions, and theories.” Concerns about issues with contradictory relations at different scales becomes paramount.

The problem of scale continues in the fifth proposition. Harvey (1996, 53) writes that “space and time are neither absolute nor external to processes but are contingent and contained with them.” Here, he provides us with an understanding that processes actively produce space and time, meaning space and time are contingent to processes; they are not externally related and “define distinctive scales for their development.” Relatedly, Harvey communicates in his sixth proposition that “parts and wholes are mutually constitutive.” Therefore, when a “thing” acts upon a system, the system consequently acts back upon the “thing.” Thus a mutually transformative process occurs. This, as his seventh proposition makes clear, destabilizes distinctions between “subjects and objects…cause and effect” or any supposed oppositional binary (1996, 54). Transformative processes, thus explained in his eighth proposition, arise from the internal contradictions between the appearance of difference between “things.” Subsequently, in proposition nine, change becomes a constant. Indeed, Harvey (1996, 54–55) suggests that the apparent stability of systems, then, must be explained. This process of explanation, Harvey (1996, 55–

56) states in proposition 10, is dialectic enquiry, itself a producer of supposed “permanences” and stabilized “concepts, abstractions, theories and structures of knowledge” are “to be supported or undermined by continuing processes of enquiry.” Crucially Harvey writes that “a certain relationship is implied between the researcher and the researched, a relationship which is not construed in terms of an

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“outside” (the researcher) looking in on the researched as an object, but one between two active subjects each of which necessarily internalized something from the other by virtue of the processes that connect them.” The exploration of “possible worlds” becomes “integral to dialectical thinking” Harvey

(1996, 56) writes in proposition 11, because “dialectical enquiry necessarily incorporates…the building of ethical, moral, and political choices (values) into its own processes and sees the construed knowledges that result as discourses situated in a play of power directed towards some goal or other.”

In two subsequent sections Harvey deals with a variety of discourses that develop dialectic concepts, abstractions and theories (1996, 57–59), and how dialectics relates to other non-dialectic systems of thought (1996, 60–62). Harvey distills an abstract discussion of dialectics—building from a

Hegelian conception of dialectics that Marx ultimately transformed—to a series of functional but dissoluble principles for argumentation. He details the functioning of dialectical abstraction and argumentation as a process of constantly adjusting one’s vantage point, kinetically moving society’s understandings of the universe and its phenomena; thus dialectical expression requires multifaceted words that concurrently unify and differentiate in order to recognize relations in totality. Unlike other systems of thought, which are dissociative through their restrictive partitioning of the world around us,

Harvey points to dialectics as a system that allows for the mutually transformative effect of “things” on processes and vice versa.

Through a final section Harvey (1996, 62–68) elucidates applications of the dialectical process through examples from Marx’s use of the process in his assessment of the material state of political economy. Harvey describes in detail Marx’s navigation of the capitalist system, as he adjusts his vantage point to expose the myriad “appearances” and fetishesized forms capital takes (i.e. value is simultaneously commodity and money) in process. Ultimately Harvey (1996, 67–68) expresses the need to view dialectic thought as a set of transformative principles that, through a focus on the (concept of the) ‘material,’ direct their questioning “on how nation states internalize powers (or lose grip on such

110 powers), in what ways they are heterogeneous and internally contradictory, and in what ways these internalized tensions result in the kind of creativity or self-destructiveness which leads to new configurations of activity.”

But, for reasons alluded to in the prior section, Castree goes further than Harvey in his reinterpretation of Marx’s methodological thought and its consequences for processes of geographical thought moving forward (see Castree 1999a, 147, and 1996a, 343, 357–58).15 Capital is not stable.

Rather it exists in a state of constant fluid motion. Ollman (2003, 154) provides for us an important outline for how our modes of producing knowledge about the capitalist system must dynamically keep pace. He writes that “Marx’s method is not only a means of understanding his theoretical statements but of amending them to take account of developments that have occurred since his time. The workings of the major processes that make up life in capitalism must be reassessed, and whatever changes found incorporated into the meanings of their covering concepts.” Ollman explains that in order to maintain an impactful understanding of a changing capitalism, Marx’s thought must be reinterpreted anew since “as with Marx’s own efforts, its practical effects will depend chiefly on how well we manage to capture the structured interdependence of capitalism within its varied parts.” Indeed, Castree suggests a similarly developing relational process, writing that, “in the long run, the cognitive value of a dialectical mode of argument will only be as strong as its ability to interrupt its own epistemological bases” (1996a, 358).

Castree’s indication of dialectics’ ability to have significant explanatory value when possessing the capacity to destabilize its own base illuminates a series of intriguing possibilities for the extension of dialectics into the realm of epistemic knowledge production.

15 Importantly, Castree (1999a, 147) highlights how Harvey’s ‘instincts’ in retaining “the core categories of Marx’s political economy” are correct in the face of a ‘critical’ ‘Left’ in geography, yet he suggests “that it is wrong to assume that Marx cannot be read in non-modern ways” like Harvey does. This, rather clearly, encapsulates the urgency Castree alludes to in the need for new reinterpretations of Marxian thought (read: dialectics)—something Marx, at least in my reading of Marx’s words which are like bats, desired.

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Directed at geographic knowledge production, dialectics allows those producers of knowledge to move or float purposefully between two related epistemological points: both one focused on relations between material subjects and objects of study and the other focused on relations between produced knowledges about those material subjects and objects of study. On the one hand, there is the explanatory, diagnostic capacity of epistemology, where one operates through ontological objectives that require the identification of ontologically stable characterizations about the world. For example, one might see the need to identify issues associated with modes of production and conclude that material inequalities exist by classifying certain phenomena through the identification of distinct class relations. On the other hand, through dialectics, there develops a drive to question the assumptions inherent within one’s own epistemological approach so as to reach epistemologically reflexive conclusions. For example, one might be compelled, therefore, toward the acknowledgement of varied approaches to the world that degrees of similarity exist between differently produced ontologically consistent knowledges—perhaps issues leading to material inequalities exist because of relations between class and (x) or between (y) and race. In this way, a dialectics of epistemology not only presents to us relations between worldly objects but between our conceptualization of ourselves in relation to others’ conceptualizations of ourselves. Thus allowed, through dialectics, is the redistribution of the means of (politicized) knowledge production (c.f. Castree 1999a, 153–54).

Dialectics shows us the world through the pealing back of layers of “naturalized” truth claims— as a means, it places the world’s relations and processes on relative display: materiality’s changing interconnectedness and inner contradiction. At the same time, dialectics appears to play its own part in producing the unfolding, changing and contradictory reality around us. In doing so it reveals ways beyond immediate materiality and its relations, where structured signs float and play to be resolidified, materially, in new ways (c.f. Barthes 1974, 4–5, 16; Derrida 1978, 278, 292). Dialectics: a means of capturing and conceptualizing, in our present worldly condition with our human senses, the constantly

112 changing relations of indifferent exchange, and when directed back upon our own relations, a means by which we, collectively, reconstitute relations so as to direct our materiality toward a multiplicity of different uses.

Here, dialectics, so explained, but what does it mean for me and the direction of this research? I suppose, something in the direction of: dialectics proceeds, directed at once on two fronts toward relations between the materiality of objects in the world, and directed toward one’s own materially grounded conceptualization of relations in the world, frees one’s ability to approach the production and formation of knowledge from simultaneously multiple directions—from a simultaneous multiplicity of reference points. There cannot be originary or distinctly “new” dialectics; there can only be new dialectic ways because material relations are not stable, the precise spatio-temporal form dialectic thought takes cannot be either.

III.II Fluid Geographical Epistemology: Approaching the World from Multiple Vantage Points

I have said much about ‘language’ to this point in my dissertation. This includes my having picked, sorted out and highlighted a number of instances where key figures in the development of geographic thought have either directed dogmatically logocentric systems of communication about the world or suggested the need and urgency for alternative modes of communicating geographic knowledge. Before introducing an initial attempt at triangulating a fluid geographical epistemology, I will briefly endeavor to explain my understanding of ‘language’ as it relates to the production of knowledge.

When I use the term ‘language’ I do so in the structuralist/post-structuralist sense that suggests language systems are a persistent organizational apparatus of social reality (Barthes 2012a, 219–26). In this way, because of processes of production for exchange and the attendant indifference within these processes, language is deeply class-divided and the language systems of mass culture emanating from

113 the bourgeois is the direct expression of ‘the state’ which constitutes a whole host of differentially valuated subjects (Barthes 1986, 100). Language functions as a system of organized signs, and those signs operate dually as signified concepts and signifier sound-images that are observable by our senses

(Barthes 1968, 15–16, 35). The combined signified and signifier that produce signs constitutes the associative total or the sign itself. Oftentimes, what a sign may refer to is other signifieds or signifiers of signs. While in terms of analysis a sign may be divided into its parts, we confront only the associative total of signs as we interact with the world around us. Of course, how we operate in social reality requires us to analyze the form that the language of signs takes in order to determine what is signified, but there is not an ontological stability in what may be signified, rather that is left to humans to decide through their epistemic approaches.

Our epistemologies will influence our understanding of possible signifieds as we interpret signs produced by language systems that organize social reality, today, around exchange relations. 16 If our epistemologies are built upon specialized language systems that are produced through indifferent exchange relations, then the knowledge derived from our epistemologies is subject to a distanced and limited field of possible signifieds. When knowledge is produced through modes of writing from singular and closed epistemologies that are dependent upon specialized language forms, the limited array of possible signifieds appears natural. Therefore, there are significant class divisions in terms of language because inflexible epistemologies limit the formal capacities of writing to signify meaning outside predetermined, preformed (read: tautological) signs. Within modernist, positivistic writing—produced in

16 Consider the following paragraph in the context of Barthes’ (2012b, 20) discussion of language and writing where he suggests that writing contains “the ambiguity of an object which is both language and coercion: there exists fundamentally in writing a ‘circumstance’ foreign to language, there is…the weight of a gaze conveying an intention which is no longer linguistic.” He continues, stating that “this gaze” may “express the threat of retribution, as in political [modes of writing]: writing is then meant to unite at a single stroke the reality of the acts and the ideality of the ends. This is why power, or the shadow cast by power, always ends in creating an axiological writing, in which the distance which usually separates fact from value disappears within the very space of the word, which is given at once as description and as judgement. The word becomes an alibi, that is, an elsewhere and a justification.”

114 service of capitalism—there is a dissociation between the social reality in which humans exist and the language of modernist, positivistic knowledge produced about that world. This dissociation, or distancing between humans and their conceptualization of their materiality plays out in the context of popular inflexible epistemologies—like positivism—because such approaches and their attendant modes of writing (spatially arranging possible signs within language systems) contain means directed at producing continuous destruction and resurrection of naturalized internal contradictions.17 We see this in inflexible positivist knowledge production through the production process of verifiable replicability that is built upon the premise of exchanging the destruction of contemporarily naturalized ‘truths’ for the resurrection and consummate classification of new ‘truths’ which can only be built on the reassemblage of prior ‘truths’ (c.f. Barthes 2012b, 21–22, 38–40). I seek to produce knowledge otherwise, through hopefully less dissociative means. Knowledge that is un-alienating.

Here, I detail my understanding of a fluid geographical epistemology. It proceeds, first, in three parts. I present, in order (but not a particular one) the epistemological foundations and uses of, initially,

Marxist geographies, next, anarchist geographies, and subsequently, post-structural geographies. Here, I have sought to present the foundations and uses in a dialectically relational form so that (hopefully) the connections between the three are noticeably triangulatable. The intention is that the reader, here, would be able to write together the connections. Despite best intentions, one should not rely solely on presumed results. Therefore, subsequent paragraphs in this section are directed at further synthetization of this fluid geographical epistemology.

Marxist geographies:

17 Consider this paragraph in the context of Barthes’ (2012b, 22) discussion of the revolutionary transformations in writing during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Such a new way of writing, he states, “was the one and only grand gesture commensurate with the daily presence of the guillotine...This writing, which bears all the signs of inflation, was an exact writing: never was language more incredible, yet never was it less spurious.”

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These are the means to produce holistic spatial theories that demonstrate how major parts of the foundational basis of material relations within capitalist social formations function, and therefore explain various processes within societies and states built on these base relations. Using Marxist spatial theory, one is able to produce ontologically stable statements about the condition of social relations in the world. The result is in the production of important empirical knowledge that is built through a rejection of essential categorizations at which point the material world is understood through a series of relations wherein everything is related to everything else, but only once we allow ourselves the latitude to approach material existence from different perspectives, or termed another way: vantage points. anarchist geographies:

These constitute the reflexive, unceasing drive to adjust the material conditions of everyday life so as to put into practice and space the non-exploitative futures that are possible. This results in the development of important reflexive knowledge about the condition of social relations through experimentation between the self and what is beyond the self—that is, experimentation with different spatial forms of social relations—which allows for the conscious connection between immediate everyday moments and long-term ideals, and therefore between material and abstract relations. These prefigurative anarchist politics constellate the everyday methods of producing socially just futures in the present by addressing the everyday material conditions of social relations. post-structural geographies:

These are the language-centric analytical tools with which to deconstruct vapid and tautalogic discourses that simultaneously produce and justify the inequitable socio-spatial relations of capitalist politics and culture while providing the necessary means with which to organize otherwise in producing meaning, thereby activating our collective, embedded imaginative geographies—or said another way, our collective social consciousness. This allows humans to produce useful abstract knowledge that directs conceptualizations and understandings of the relations within and around our collective selves;

116 we come to imagine ourselves as an interrelated collective whole as we continually adjust the vantage point from which we understand what is around us, thereby altering our consciousness.

Connections between these three epistemologies should begin to solidify, but in the case that there remain questions, I explain further. Post-structural geographies are a logical extension of Marxist geographies. With the conditions of possibility inherent within Marxist geographies, post-structural approaches directed at spatial relations provide the means for reimaginings and reinterpretations of the functioning of the capitalist state. As the capitalist state itself is anything but static, those who wish to critique and change it must likewise retain the ability to adjust their examinations of it in their attempts to change the spatiality of social relations. And, through the use of a prefigurative politics, the productive relation between Marxist and post-structural geographic thought can be continually reassessed and reconstituted in relationally productive ways so as to produce space beyond capitalism.

Indeed, based on details of the tensions and connections between Marxist, anarchist, and post- structural geographies drawn out above and earlier, through the interactions between various practitioners within the discipline, the proposed dialectic synthesis of these epistemologies that I have drawn appears to be well grounded. Even so, here I feel a need suture additional connective tissue within the proposed synthesis.18

In Todd May’s (1994, 123) discussion of ethics and the discourse of ethical practice in post- structuralism—an approach that is often misunderstood as nihilist or neglecting the importance of labor—he outlines, building from Foucault, some of the “binding principles of conduct” of the post- structural approach. While some critics believe post-structuralism seeks to dissolve all relations of power based on an understanding that relations of power are strictly negative, in actuality, May

18 Compare to how Castree (1996b, 49) utilizes the term ‘suture.’ He describes that it “signifies the imperfect absence of a former identity or relation, imperfect because some trace of that identity/relation is still apparent, as when a scar marks the site of surgery.” I found this belatedly, after initially writing this section, but find intriguing parallels here in terms of the usage in each instance.

117 indicates, this approach seeks to provide one with rules of law, techniques of self-management, and an ethos that may be enacted with minimum domination. Therefore, May writes, “the question is not whether or not there is power, but which relationships of power are acceptable and which are unacceptable.”

May outlines several ethical principles post-structuralism is committed to, the first being “that practices of representing others to themselves—either in who they are or in what they want—ought, as much as possible, to be avoided” (1994, 130). This principle is directed at an anti-essentialist emphasis on self-determination—May refers to this as “the antirepresentationalist principle” (1994, 131). This principle has two related tenants. First, that “the power to represent people to themselves is oppressive in itself: practices of telling people who they are and what they want erect a barrier between them and who (or what) they can create themselves to be.” Second, that “representing people to themselves helps to reinforce other oppressive social relationships” that are variably disciplinary and capitalistic.

The ethical commitment to this principle, which May indicates is “in keeping with poststructuralist political theory,” exists “at the level of practice” where “some practices are acceptable, some unacceptable” (1994, 132). Explicitly unacceptable practices that “ought not to be engaged in” are

“representationalist” in that they operate as ones where modes of normalization occur that would practice definition that naturalizes. A second related principle is “that alternative practice, all things being equal, ought to be allowed to flourish and even to be promoted” and it is this which “forms the core of the poststructuralist insistence upon difference” (1994, 133). The connection between these two principles is found where May, quoting Foucault (2012), indicates that discourses may explore how they may change themselves by examining and putting into practice ideas and thought that are not germane to itself, while not dictating sources of truth to others. This connection strengthens the second position as it operates by “promoting difference” through an adjustment of our relation to knowledge that allows for the alteration or destruction of some relations of power at some times, so as to go beyond

118 the mere allowance of other practices to exist and grow but rather “encourage their appearance” directly (1994, 135). Here, May poses post-structuralism’s conundrum: that it “needs to offer an account of which differences, which alternative practices, ought to be encouraged and which ought to be discouraged” because “difference by itself is not enough to ensure nonoppressive practices.” While May

(1994, 136–41) does not put it in these precise terms—also but instead arriving at “ethical discursive practice” built on “three central components: factual claims, practice judgements, and claims of value” that direct post-structuralist ethical judgement—the two related principles resolve any conundrum through their relative dialectical relation. That is, post-structuralist ethics built on these principles allow one to maintain and take up progressively reflexive political positions because holding these two principles in primacy demonstrates how the marginalization of one is done at the expense of the other—they are indeed interrelated as political positions held while only adhering to one of the two principles, and not both, breaks down in the face of the other; thus is the ethically based anti-capitalist sentiment of post-structural thought.

Post-structuralism (and post-structural thought) is productive (in the Marxist sense and) in a way radically consistent with the continuous reflexive and materially relative experimentation of a prefigurative approach to the world because it maintains, through dialectics, an internally coherent mode of knowledge production of non-oppressive spaces for difference, and difference that will exist non-oppressively. It provides the means to produce through criticism by ‘giving voice’ to the ethical imperatives of interactive materiality. Barthes (1972, 273) adds significantly to our understanding of this ethic in terms of the relations between materiality, language, and productive criticism when he writes that “we do not choose a language because it seems necessary to us, but we make necessary the language we choose. Confronting his object, the critic therefore enjoys an absolute freedom; it remains only to be seen what the world permits him to do with it.” However, according to Barthes, the freedom with which critical language may be directed at any material objects is subject to two conditions. The

119 first is that on the one hand the critical language that is “chosen must be homogenous, structurally coherent,” and the second is that on the other hand, “it must saturate the entire object of which it speaks.” Critical language must be clear and direct in its engagement with material objects, but also, simultaneously, subject itself to its own internal relations with that object, and Barthes writes that therefore “at the outset, there is no prohibition in criticism, only requirements and subsequently resistances.” The meaning of these resistances provides the foundation for the productive, relational ethic; “these resistances have a meaning, the critic cannot treat them in an indifferent and irresponsible fashion.” Indeed, Barthes concludes writing that those who direct critical language “must on the one hand confront [resistances] (if he wants to “discover” the work), but on the other hand he must also understand that just where they are too powerful, they reveal a new problem and thus oblige him to change critical language.”19

Considering that the object of fluid geographic epistemologies is to produce geographic knowledge about material relations, the form of the critical language that this produced knowledge takes is significant. Returning to Barthes (1972, 275), he, much like the key figures in the development of geographic thought I highlighted, has “often dreamed of a peaceful coexistence of critical languages or, perhaps, of a “parametric” criticism.” This critical mode of language criticism:

“would modify its language to suit the work proposed to it, not of course in the conviction that the sum of these languages would finally exhaust the truth of the work forever, but in the hope that out of these varied languages would appear a general form, which would be the very intelligibility our age gives to things and which critical activity helps, dialectically, both to decipher and to constitute; in short, it is because there might exist, here and now, in ourselves, a general form of analyses, a classification of classifications, a criticism of criticisms, that the simultaneous plurality of critical languages could be justified.”

Dialectically attune language does not flow from specific words or phrases, but rather from the form language takes, and form flows from how we come to know the world—how we interact with

19 Recall here Castree’s criticism of Harvey in that Harvey’s work laying out his dialectic method merely expanded potential for Marxian analyses, while Castree suggested that to resolve the urgent contradiction within radical/critical geography more active reinterpretations of Marxist thought were (and still are) necessary.

120 materiality. How humans interact materially directs the form(s) that humans, objects, and human- objects take (Marx and Engels 1998, 42, 47–50; Marx 2007, 74–75, 1993, 101, 1970a, 19–21). By internalizing the dialecticity of epistemologic existence, critical languages cannot help but take on the form “of a peaceful coexistence.” I see the triangulation of Marxist, anarchist/prefigurative, and post- structural geographic epistemologies as a necessary step in the direction of coordinating the formation of collectively productive, knowledge producing critical languages within the discipline that challenge and reject the passive production and consumption of surface-level and value-neutral geographic knowledge. In an attempt to boil down these relational approaches further, in order to get at how to begin producing and forming reflexive politicized critical languages, I suggest three interrelated, but nonlinear, dialectic steps.20 First, simply, concern oneself with the development of dialectic methods of inquiry and analysis that begin with the concrete, and abstract from there: these will reorient one’s epistemological outlook and provide for the multifaceted construction of knowledge about the world through the conscious embodiment of one’s internal contradictions. Second, once approaching the world dialectically, refocus that approach on the knowledge since constructed and the processes which formed that knowledge; now there are, simultaneously, (always, already evolving) conscious conceptualizations of relations between one’s long term/everyday realities, and one’s material/abstract contextual relations, and now with a refined ability to conceptualize oneself within material relations, one operates through a conscious adjustment of their relations. Third, having developed the means of conceptualizing and adjusting one’s material relations, the collective adjustment of social relations becomes operative through the activation of spatial imaginations,21 in the sense that the way in which

20 Recall my quotations from Ollman (2003, 154) in the last section, specifically his suggestion that Marx’s dialectic method was meant to be readjusted and updated through time, and note, at the end of that page, Ollman quotes Marx (1970b) saying he sought to compel “the frozen circumstance to dance by singing to them their own melody.” Here, also compare to Ollman’s (2003, 168–69) representation of methodical steps. 21 I have chosen the term ‘spatial imaginations’ rather than the more common ‘geographic(al) imaginations’ here so as to remain conscious that not all human interaction with materiality can be sensed in the same ways. The suffixes –graph and –graphy presuppose written communication about the world when attached to geo–. While

121 we present relations to one another in the world—our collective relations—has the productive capacity to alter both how yourself and others conceptualize ourselves in material relation. Here are the means to the collective social organization of producing meaningful knowledge about different and useful

(combined material-immaterial) relations humans share. And, because this is ultimately a collective process, it is functionally and productively un-alienating, and fundamentally geographic.

What does the totality of this articulated approach mean going forward? How do I go about producing geographic knowledge? Knowledge production in geography is replete with over one- hundred years’ worth of varied and messy approaches, processes, and results. How does one best choose a course for their productive activity? What does it mean to be thoughtful and contemplative about one’s own productive capacities within geography, when seemingly so few reproduced academics consider with seriousness the approach and consequent means by which they undertake their productive activity? It seems, increasingly, that geographers are taught to be productive through various methodologies yet often remain ambivalent to (perhaps because of purposefully obfuscative advisement) the epistemological foundations that such methods are built upon. When approaches in human geography are emphasized, and even favored, that ignore questions at the level of ontology and epistemology—in favor of quick methodology, normative analysis and cut-and-paste results—it would seem we have long since reached the academic geography department-as-sausage factory stage of development (N. Smith 2000).22 On the contrary, it would seem that being epistemologically

written communication implies, in most cases, a material permanence (to inscribe or write one must interact with various material mediums that have a degree of permanence within human lifespans at least greater than speech), not all humans share equal sensing capacities. This also means that many variable modes of spatial imagining are possible based on the many useful ways in which humans relate to their materiality. 22 Here, we should be reminded of Harries and Cheatwood, who admirably produce so much that is potentially useful, but, alas, in restricting themselves through their own (likely unconscious) subjectivity say so little. Or, also, the penchant within the ‘critical’ geographies to level rapid-fire, surface-level critiques at the human processes on earth within the context of “academicization” (c.f. Blomley 2006; Castree 2002, 2000b). And, it should be here where we (re)consider these modes of epistemological operation in the context of Barthes’ (1977, 198) discussion of the relations between the academic, research, and language, where he writes that how research is expressed in writing is effected by the epistemic bounding of language that produces it; from there he states that, “such is the

122 knowledgeable enough to be reflexive at all is beneficial. If I can consciously adjust how I arrive at my production of knowledge about the world, and the various assumptions that go along with that productive activity, then I feel that I am meaningfully altering my vantage point in a meaningful dialectical fashion. Of course, this particular outcome might not be a reality for all those who engage ontological and epistemological geographic questions, but nonetheless simply engaging in the first place in a meaningful way could not be construed in any other way than a step toward more conscientious work within a consistently changing world. In order to at once capture and emit change one must see through the illusionary fetishes of rapid-fire knowledge production to refuse the fixity of static and repeatable inquiry that leads to vapid knowledge (re)production.

The particularities of people and places change rapidly as socio-spatial formations organize relations on earth. Harvey (1984, 6, emphasis added) recognized nearly 35 years ago that what is lacking in a geographic discipline dominated by positivism, with an altogether disparate array of other approaches to human geographies in particular, “is a clear context, a theoretical frame of reference, a language which can simultaneously capture global processes restricting social, economic and political life…and the specifics of what is happening to individuals, groups, classes, and communities at particular places at certain times.” As Harvey makes clear, the wide array of critical voices within geography that have appeared since the social upheaval of the late 1960s have yet to coalesce around a common political language of geography. Should geographers outside but also even within positivism, who refuse political silence, indeed coalesce around a mode of political language then the potential to direct the collective consciousness of politically motivated knowledge production towards change could radically reshape human interaction with the world. It would seem that, now, it is time to (try to) do this.

historical role of research: teach the scientist or scholar that he speaks (but if he knew it, he would write—and the whole idea of science, the whole of scientificity would be changed thereby).”

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Chapter 4: The Spaces of Capital(ist) Punishment’s Political Economy

“We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We’ve made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can’t see them, because they’re part of our thinking.” (Shevek in, The Dispossessed - Le Guin 1974, 265)

Here is where we return to the discussion that concluded the first two sections of chapter two, namely, exploring the consequences of positivist geographic knowledge production about capital punishment. As I discussed, the empirical results of such approaches have their uses. But, quite clearly— given the highly variable directions in which Sustein and Vermeule, and Harries and Cheatwood, were able to take their respective conclusions—there are demonstrable linguistic limits to positivist approaches and the nomothetic knowledge they produce. This leads to, in my calculation, a fundamental disciplinary question concerning the production of geographic knowledge about social issues: given these embedded limits, at what point does geography need to produce more such knowledge? I think this general question, despite profound statements on this subject from Harvey and

Peet four decades ago, remains one that is rarely considered within the discipline.23 Following that ideas and concepts do not simply ‘descend from the sky’ or appear in our minds from nothing—that instead they develop from material relations—as geographers we subject ourselves to the boundaries and limits

23 For similar declarations on the development and direction of geographic thought, see Harvey (1972, 10) and Peet (1978c, 119, 130–31). Also see Harvey (1972, 7) where he discusses the productive overlap, in terms of “certain aspects of positivism, materialism, and phenomenology” that can be used to interpret social reality, and writes: “there are…things which Marxism and positivism have in common. They both have a materialist base and both resort to an analytic method. The essential difference of course is that positivism simply seeks to understand the world whereas Marxism seeks to change it.” Harvey continues, contrasting positivist methods of inquiry with the “dialectical method to history” in a discussion that should recall last chapter’s exploration of these epistemologies.

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of epistemic approaches to the world by adhering to the norms of signified language systems, which are derived from understandings of material relations and that direct our analysis of the world. In the language systems of positivism, the data abstracted from the world is made to ‘speak for itself’ as the underlying value system postulates the apolitical, value-free expression of knowledge production.

This underlying value system of the language of positivism holds that the “truth” of the results is bound to an understanding of the process of their production and therefore requires that in its expression nothing other than the communication of this process be demonstrated. Therefore, the process of knowledge production from a positivist perspective privileges methods over ontological and epistemological questions. So, to advance the fundamental disciplinary question posed above: do geographers need to produce more instances of knowledge production where the “facts” of the world are made and ultimately left to speak for themselves?

As the previous chapters outlined, my general answer to this question is a qualified no.

Geographers need not produce more positivistic empirical accounts of the world’s social issues if they merely punctuate their productive activity with description of empirical results rather than drawing necessary and vital politicized conclusions from them that more than merely suggest the possibility for the radical production of space outside the reach of the state and capital. This is in line with Castree’s call for more abstract abstractions directed at both ‘in here’ and ‘out there’ knowledge production. The following chapter continues in this spirit. First, I attempt to articulate a historical-geographical materialist account of some aspects of capital punishment spaces within which the processes and technologies of taking life are put into action. Second, as the state and capital produce and maintain these spaces, the governmental exercise of taking life plays out dialectically as governmental action in a vacuum would be trivial. Here is where capital punishment can be situated (thought-concretized) in the state and capital’s effect on social relations and processes of valuation and differentiation. To begin this process, I begin with Marx.

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Marx only substantively detailed his thoughts on capital punishment twice. First, in an issue of

Neue Rheinische Zeitung on June 29, 1848, which was reprinted as part of The Class Struggles in France,

1848-1950 (Marx 1895, 44–45, 57). This articulation will come into play later in this chapter. The other instance, which forms the basis for the early portions of this chapter, is in an article sent to and published by the New York Daily Tribune (1853).24 As with much of Marx’s writing, his words are open to a variety of meanings and his brief statements on capital punishment here connect to his philosophies articulated elsewhere. In my reading, he does two important things in this treatment of capital punishment in the New York Daily Tribune article, and it is these two things that lead to the two larger sections that comprise this chapter. First, Marx critiques notions of crime, ‘the criminal,’ and punishment developed through Kant, Hegel, and the philosophical school of German Idealism, which gives these concepts essential and determinist characteristics. In doing so, Marx suggests, in contrast to

German Idealist thinking, a materialist basis for these concepts as understood through various social and material relations distinct to capitalism. Second, he meaningfully demonstrates how one may begin to abstract from the relations of crime and punishment in order to produce knowledge about the changing condition of social life within capitalism. In short, he indicates precedent for moving from the concrete aspects of execution and punishment, and abstracting from them, so as to reformulate our understanding of capitalist society, and humanness in that society, in a thought-concrete way. Here, the thought-concrete conceptualization could be immensely meaningful in terms of an understanding of our present socio-spatial reality. Reminding now of Castree’s injunction, and in the spirit of Foucault “at his most Marxist” (Elden 2015) in The Punitive Society (Foucault 2015), consider the writing of this chapter a

“history of the present” landscape of capital punishment (Foucault 1977, 31).

24 It should be noted that though Marx only discussed capital punishment directly on these few occasions, he and Engels often discussed the concepts and practices of crime and punishment within capitalism throughout their works (see Cowling 2008, 3).

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I. A Historical-Geographical Material Analysis of Capital Punishment Spaces

This first section of chapter four builds on Marx’s analysis of social relations based on the materiality in which they are embedded, all in the context of capital punishment. In Marx’s New York

Daily Tribune article, he offers a statement from Hegel (1991, 126–27) on the punishment of crime and criminals as a starting point for considering these concepts, and capital punishment, from a non- essentialist position. Hegel, advancing from a Kantian-idealist conception of history, claims that punishment is the right of the criminal in that any punishment arrived upon criminals is forced upon the criminal’s self. He writes that “human beings should give their consent to being punished” and that “the criminal gives this consent by his very act” (1991, 127). In doing so, Hegel naturalizes and historicizes material acts understood as “criminal” by giving criminality trans-historical character; “the [punishment] which is inflicted on the criminal is not only just in itself…it is also a right for the criminal himself, that is, a right posited in his existent will, in his action. For it is implicit in his action, as that of a rational being, that it is universal in character, and that by performing it, he has set up a law which he has recognized for himself in his action, and under which he may therefore be subsumed as under his right” (1991, 126).

He assumes that punishment is both justified and already embodied within the criminal before the person in question has acted criminally.

Marx’s materialist ontology is decidedly different; instead, crime is something that is produced by the material conditions of social relations. Bohm (2008, 286) adds to our understanding here, quoting

Marx (1998, 59) in The German Ideology writing that “it is evident that individuals undoubtedly make one another, physically and mentally, but do not make themselves.” This statement, combined with

Marx’s critique of idealist conceptions of crime and capital punishment in his short article and Bohm’s assessment of the piece, does much to reveal what could be termed a ‘Marxist interpretation’ of the production of crime, criminality, and consciousness, within the general abstract nature of ‘the death

127 penalty.’25 Yet, neither Marx nor Bohm fully carry out or even really allude to (the need for) an interpretation of or an analysis of the production of capital punishment; how it exists relationally in space and time.26 Marx, and Bohm’s analysis of Marx’s short article, deal mostly in the abstract, critiquing capital punishment from the standpoint of how society uses the process and conceptualizes criminals and the social formation that produces the violent social conditions that create crime. These formulations are quite insightful and will be of much use later—but they do not constitute an adequate beginning point here as they remain too abstract, though in many respects they appear thought- concretized. Marx, however, after describing the issues with the German Idealist’s conceptualization of crime, does provide a brief hint as to where one may begin—from the point of concrete-materiality—an assessment of the production of capital punishment. I see two related points where Marx does this.

The first point comes from a question. Marx (1853) asks, “now, what a state of society is that, which knows of no better Instrument for its own defense than the hangman, and which proclaims…its own brutality as eternal law?” In questioning the condition of a social formation that ‘eternalizes’ its brutal laws, Marx invokes the figure of the “hangman” as an instrument of such a society. I see two related insights here from which we can build. First, a “hangman” or, adjusting terminology, the executioner is human just like the humans killed through various modes of capital punishments, yet it is clear that within capitalist societies, the executioner is reduced to a mere “instrument” of law that is construed to serve the interests of the social formation: something material to be manipulated to generate ends. A second insight rests in the relations of this reduction. The reduction reveals the instrumentation of the executioner within capitalist societies. Here, when the executioner takes up the

25 As I demonstrate through the rest of this introduction to the first section of chapter four, Marx, and by extension Bohm as a contemporary criminologist rereading Marx from that perspective, discuss capital punishment largely through a focus on ‘crime’ within capitalism. However, their interpretations in this regard will be useful in the second section of chapter four, but for now, I will use portions of their articulations to detail more thoroughly a discussion of capital punishment. 26 This is not, of course, to say that it is a failure of Marx, Bohm or anyone else to not have done this. One’s interests take one’s work in a variety of directions but one cannot work in all directions at all times.

128 physical means of state-sanctioned killing within a capitalist society (wielding an ax during a beheading for example), they become a mere extension of those tools; they are reduced to a level synonymous with that of the physical implement itself.27 This instrumental material relation—between executioner and physical tool; between executioner-as-instrument and physical implement as instrumental- extension-of-executioner—embodies the relation between the values of sovereign law and human material relations. This dual relation is built on the justification of the abstract leveling of all humans within capitalism.

If Marx’s question alludes to the objectification of humans within capitalism (Marx 2007, 70–71), then what follows addresses the relation between humans and material implements from the standpoint of the material objects. Marx continues by favorably citing Belgian mathematician, statistician, and sociologist, Adolphe Quetelet, and it is Marx’s use of this work that forms the basis for the second point. He cites instances where Quetelet calculated the probabilities of crime in France and the United States in the 1820s, and Marx notes that in 1929 he “predicted with astonishing certainty, not only the amount but all the different kinds of crimes committed in France in 1830.” Importantly,

Marx shares an extended quote from Quetelet’s (1842) work, A Treatise on Man and the Development of his Faculties, writing: “There is a budget which we pay with frightful regularity – it is that of prisons, dungeons and scaffolds… We might even predict how many individuals will stain their hands with the blood of their fellow men, how many will be forgers, how many will deal in poison, pretty nearly the same way as we may foretell the annual births and deaths.”28 Marx emphasizes the word ‘budget’ here

27 Even in non-capitalist social formations instruments have always been wielded by executioners to enact sentences of death and carry out death penalties, though there are key differences in the modes of the use of these instruments given that the differing material relations within different social formations lead to the production of differing socially constructed value systems. For an example see Foucault (1977, 3–7). For explanations of differing modes of punishment and capital punishment in a variety of times and places see (Bohm 2011, 101, 125; Garland 2010, 70; Miethe and Lu 2005; Sarat 2002, 60; Kronenwetter 2001). 28 It appears Marx pulled sections of this quote from a number of places in Quetelet’s work. And, given that he appears to have been writing in English for publication in the New York Daily Tribune, and translating himself, probably from an original French publication of Quetelet’s book, it is difficult locate precisely where Marx drew these words from using the public domain English translation copy of the book I cite here. This is compounded by

129 in relation to material aspects of institutions directed at the discipline and punishment of humans.

Prisons and dungeons are material structures with walls, cages, doors, and locks made from a variety of materials (stone, metal, wood etc.) designed to confine people—people who may be awaiting the execution of their death sentence. Scaffolds connect us back to the hangman Marx invoked in his earlier question, as they are the wooden, stilted platforms designed for hanging humans by rope and noose. I feel that we can safely reach the conclusion that Marx emphasizes ‘budget’ here to indicate two relations to readers. First, that, rather straightforwardly, material apparatuses of the state’s discipline and punishment infrastructure costs something and since the state taxes their population, it is the population that effectively pays to construct and maintain this material infrastructure. The second and perhaps slightly less straightforward relation is the contradiction present between the first sentence before the ellipses and what comes after it: that Quetelet states that the degree and amount of crime within contemporary society is very predictable. The contradiction centers around the fact that the population within any given capitalist social formation pays for its own discipline and punishment, only to see a very predictable and measurable portion of that population experience state-sanctioned disciplining and punishment, which includes state-sanctioned capital punishment.29 This contradiction demonstrates quite clearly that the ‘laws’ of states that develop within capitalist social formations— which measure, determine, and valuate everyday human material relations and interactions—are anything but natural, eternal, or transcendental. The insinuation is that, within capitalist social formations, if there are entire, physical apparatuses within disciplining and punishing institutions that require continued investment and maintenance, and the social, non-transhistorical phenomena of crime is as predictable as any material phenomena that is not historically tied to any particular social

the fact that Quetelet appears to have repeated himself in this work rather often. Nonetheless, it appears that roughly synonymous translated versions of the quotes Marx uses appear on pages 83, 87, 96, 108 in the version I cite here. 29 For useful explanations of the relations between states, capitalism, population, territory, and everyday life see Brenner and Elden (2009), Elden (2007), Jessop (2007), Kerr (1999) and Painter (2013, 2010, 2006).

130 formation, then there is a direct connection between the production of crime, types of crime, processes of disciplining punishment for deviant transgressors, and the capitalist social formation. Indeed, Marx concludes his short article with a question, probing at the contradiction, asking the reader to draw such connections so as to make the contradiction clearer. He writes: “if crimes observed on a great scale thus show, in their amount and their classification, the regularity of physical phenomena…is there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals to make room only for the supply of new ones?”

Capital punishment has its own specific geography with an attendant political economy, tied up in the material relations between humans and the physical objects of discipline and punishment. Capital produces not only capital punishment itself, but the spatial conditions and material social relations that lead to it and therefore result from its practice. These two points where Marx hints at how to begin an analysis of capital punishment from concrete materiality provide useful starting points. I will begin with his second one—assessing the material objects and implements associated with the confinement and killing of capital punishment, read another way, the material technologies of capital punishment. This, before returning to his first point in section two—the various human relations to these material technologies of capital punishment. Just as this first section of chapter four has already proceeded, it will continue through a Marxist, historical-geographical materialist interpretation of the material technologies, processes, and spaces of capital punishment. Before I continue exploring these material technologies within their processes and spaces in Marxist terms, we must first outline some of those terms.

I.I Marx’s Understanding of Capitalist Society from a Materialist Perspective

Marx’s understanding of capitalism from a historical-materialist perspective originates in his explanations of a number of foundational relations. His perspective can be “read” from a spatially-

131 informed geographical perspective, and in the context of the processes and practice of capital punishment. I have sought to do that here with my reading of Marx and the subsequent explanations of the material technologies and spaces of capital punishment as commodities in process. The initial reading and explanation of the following concepts developed by Marx, which begins here, is far from exhaustive, though I hope to explain what I see as the key concepts to understanding capital punishment spaces and their political-economic relations. Yet I think it is also important to explain that, given what I discussed in chapter three, I find it necessary to not only offer descriptions of Marx’s explanation of the capitalist totality but to also reread and thus offer complimentary interpretations based on the variety of directions in which Marxian thought has developed since Marx produced his ideas. I will quote Ollman (2003, 154), again, where he writes that “it should…be evident that Marx’s method is not only a means of understanding his theoretical statements but of amending them to take account of developments that have occurred since his time…What is required (and has been for some time) is a new intellectual reconstruction of the concrete totality, one that balances its respect for

Marx’s writings with an equally healthy respect for the research of modern scholars…As with Marx’s own efforts, its practical efforts will depend chiefly on how well we manage to capture the structured interdependence of capitalism within its varied parts.” I will start with Marx, as I have already in this chapter, and because Marx directs us to the concrete as the mode of proceeding with arguments from the standpoint of our shared materiality, countering exclusionary, idealist interpretations of the world.

His ideas, however, should not restrict where and how we abstract from them to arrive at a thought concrete understanding of this totality—if his own words are any indication, this was the purpose and plan of his method from the beginning (see Spivak 1990, 96).

Commodities, use value, exchange value

Marx (1990, 125) begins Capital with a discussion of what he says “appears” to be the

“elementary form” of societies built through the capitalist mode of production: “the individual

132 commodity.” He writes that material things in general are “composed of many properties” and

“therefore can be used in various ways” and that material things can become commodities. Potential commodities have a degree of useful qualities in and of themselves but they also have what Marx calls the invented “socially recognized standards of measurement for the quantities” of “useful objects.”

Here is the beginning of Marx’s materialist conception of use value and exchange value. Simply, “the usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value” (1990, 126). This usefulness is not natural to an object, but rather “is conditioned by the physical properties” of it, and it is “independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities.” The exchange value of commodities “appears” as a

“quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind” and “this relation changes constantly with time and place” meaning it is socially produced and contingent. The material qualities of commodities cannot be rendered equal, or “reduced to a common element, of which they represent a greater or a lesser quantity” (1990, 127). Therefore, exchange values are socially derived by abstracting from the physical properties that constitute use values. Only at an abstract plane can commodities be reduced for exchange. “As use-values,” Marx

(1990, 128) writes, “commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value.” Quickly it becomes apparent that his use of the word appears from the beginning is telling, in that commodities are anything but singular or self-contained. Indeed, commodities must be understood relationally—as they relate in an abstract way to all other commodities through a series of relations based in the calculated production of their exchange valuation.

Labor

Here is where labor reappears in our understanding of commodities. Labor turns objects into commodities, and “if then we disregard the use-value of commodities,” as is the case in capitalist systems, “only one property remains, that of being products of labor.” Therefore, if there is a general

133 disregard or indifference to use value within capitalism, it can only be labor for exchange that transforms objects into commodities: exchange value only appears within a commodity when that commodity has “abstract human labour…objectified or materialized in it” (Marx 1990, 129). Indeed, in this case commodities can “no longer be distinguished” by the manner of their “material constituents” because they have been abstracted from, and commodities are, therefore, “all together reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract.” The relation of commodities to human labor—as conceptualized through the dialectic of use value and exchange value—within capitalism has its foundation in an abstracted indifference. The degree of labor contained within a commodity is abstractly measured by the duration of labor required to produce the commodity, the labor-time required for production.

This process of abstraction also tells us that labor is concretized in commodities; that commodities are merely the congealed form of the labor that produced them (Marx 1990, 129–30).30

The value of commodities is abstractly measured through the necessary labor-time required to produce it. In this way, value is calculated as “the labour-time necessary for the production of” one commodity

“related to the labour-time necessary for the production of” another commodity (1990, 130). Rather simply, necessary labor, within capitalism, is the amount of time required to produce a commodity that contains value in exchange. On the other hand, socially necessary labor-time is the labor-time required to produce any use-value given the particular social conditions of production within a society. Here we can see the relation between labor-power and the means of production in terms of (socially) necessary labor-time. The value of commodities remains constant if the labor-time required for production also remains constant, yet the value of commodities is always changing depending on the condition of the

30 Recall the discussion from earlier in this chapter on the “instrumentation” of the executioner within capitalism: how the executioner becomes the extension of the material instrument of capital punishment through sovereign law.

134 means of production as the social organization of labor-time is dependent on a variety of factors.31

Harvey (2010, 20–23) adds to our understanding of socially necessary labor-time and its relation to how use values and exchange values turn into “value” in capitalist society. Use values are the material qualities and quantities of commodities, which are heterogeneous, while exchange values are homogenous as they are a representation of socially developed quantitative calculations of commodities. Therefore, the “value” of a commodity within capitalist society is “immaterial and relational” and only realized once the requisite “socially necessary labor time” has been directed at transforming the material qualities of an object in an abstract way for exchange. This speaks to the abstractions of both commodities as congealed labor-power and labor-power as congealed commodities.32

This abstraction of labor demonstrates the valuative difference within capitalism of labor directed at producing use values (termed concrete labor) and labor directed at producing exchange values (termed abstract labor)—this is the social division of labor. Abstract labor, which is the type of labor characteristic to capitalist social formations, is homogenous as it is measured, and thus valuated, by the abstract construct of time (Marx 1990, 132–33). Wendling (2009, 194–95) adds to our understanding of the relation between time, labor, and socially necessary labor-time in the context of one’s average production. She writes that “once abstract temporality is in place as a means of calculating value, then, with reference to the society as a whole, a temporal norm for producing any given article can be calculated. Producers’ time must conform to this norm, and any extraneous time in either direction must be eliminated if one’s product is to approximate the norm.” The joining of abstract

31 Some of these contextual, in terms of spatial and temporal relations, factors might be, for example: the time and cost of maintaining one’s labor-power; a worker’s skills; levels of development in terms of scientific knowledge and application of technologies; environmental factors; degrees of planning on the part of state institutions. See Marx (1990, 130) and Wendling (2009, 192). 32 Recall here Castree’s signal for a ‘both/and’ reinterpretation of Marxian dialectics; see Castree (1999a, 1996a, 1996b).

135 time with abstract labor (within abstract space, as we will see later in this section) adjusts the consciousness of workers through the production of social norms for concrete amounts of work, based on (arbitrary) quantified degrees of abstract time. Wendling (2009, 169) adds a final nuance to our understanding, saying that since the means of production are always transforming, and thus production happens with increased rapidity, “this leads to a dialectic between the labor accomplished in, say, one hour and the socially necessary labor time that determines this same hour.” This results in the always increasing intensity of work within units of abstract time and speaks to the dialectic or dual character of labor that embodies productive modes of abstract time (see Postone 1996, 291, 298).

Just as the commodity has a dual character—that of use value and exchange value contained in commodity objects—labor has a dual character. First, labor that creates use values, which necessarily must be independent of capitalist society because “use-values cannot confront each other as commodities” because their labor has not been abstracted. And second, undifferentiated forms of labor that have been relatively valued and entered into processes of production for exchange (1990, 131–33,

138, 159–60). It is this dual character to the human capacity for labor that, within capitalism, forces humans to satisfy their material need for food, water, and shelter by exchanging, or selling, their labor

(1990, 163; see also Heynen 2006, 919–20).

Circulation of (labor) commodities and (commoditized) labor

Marx (1990, 247) continues with a reminder that capital is neither trans-historical nor a-spatial .

Rather, capitalism has a beginning in the transition from feudalism through mercantilism. It begins with the production and circulation of commodities, and these processes of the world market begin roughly in the sixteenth century. This transition is most apparent in the confrontation between capital (though capital enters foremost as money made through process) and private property. It is here where we may

136 understand the objectification of money and private property in terms of the exchange values of commodities and commoditized labor.33

Marx elucidates two forms of circulation that differentiate money as money, and money as capital: the direct form of circulation of commodities C-M-C, or selling in order to buy, and M-C-M, or buying in order to sell. Within each form, the middle character mediates the circulation process; thus distinguishing the two opposed phases. Marx notes that within the C-M-C form, money is “converted into a commodity which serves a use-value.” Oppositely, the result of M-C-M, as money is used to buy a commodity and the commodity used to buy money, is focused on exchange value. (1990, 247–49). We can see here that money is the product of exchange when abstracting from the material relations of commodities: it is a means of abstract calculation and valuation.

Marx then introduces for the first time the concept of consumption in explaining the necessary repetitiveness of the C-M-C form of circulation. He notes that as C-M-C begins and ends with the commodity—two extremes—then the end-point commodity as a use-value must exist through “the satisfaction of needs”; consumption is the final goal of this process (1990, 250). As such, C-M-C satisfies needs, or use values. Marx explains that the content of the M-C-M form is based on the ultimate quantitative change between the M at both extremes; citing the illogic of purchasing commodity X for

100 only to sell it for 100, since M has no qualitative difference as a use value in either instance, the logic is to sell for +100. This self-fulfilling logic of abstract exchange values (since this circular process both begins and ends with M in the same form) creates surplus-value (also called valorization), and money in the process of circulation that is capital. The indifferent self-valorization of capital, Marx explains, takes on an “occult” quality, creating itself, moving limitlessly as it abstracts from all materiality

33 The following examples proceed, following Marx, with the letters ‘M’ standing in for ‘money,’ and ‘C’ standing in for ‘commodity.’

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(1990, 251–53, 255–57). Because of the indifference to the qualities of commodities in the M-C-M process, this formula can be reduced to M-M’ (1990, 267).

Sale and purchase of labor-power

Marx (1990, 270–71) describes how the first act of circulation, M-C, may only work if use-value is added to C; this use-value can only be added through work (the labor-capacity of a worker; their mental and physical capabilities) or the selling of labor-power to the capitalist, the possessor of M in M-

C-M. This solidifies labor-power as a commodity, and by extension humans containing labor-power as commodities within capitalism. Labor-power is a commodity to be sold to purchasing capitalists.

As the worker sells labor-power on the market, labour-power becomes a commodity and the worker becomes the source of surplus-value as the worker must consume commodities while at the same time, and in order to, produce them. The worker is “free in the double sense” to sell their labor- power, but only as objectified for the purpose of acquiring wages in order to complete the C-M-C process (1990, 271–73). Through the repetitive C-M-C process, which always terminates at C, the worker is only ever free to sell their labor-power, and always free of or, crucially, without the means to realize their labor-power, the means of production. Critically, Marx denaturalizes the relation of those with labor-power, who sell their labor as their commodity in order to purchase commodities to maintain their labor-power, from those with money who buy labor-power to produce commodities to exchange for money. He writes: “nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production” (1990, 273).

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Next, Marx introduces the notion of social production in earnest. As a worker sells their labor- power in capitalist society, their view of their productive capacity changes: the worker views their labor- power as a commodity which is their property. In terms of social production then, the worker must consume commodities in order to maintain and reproduce her/his labor-power so that it may again be exchanged as property (1990, 274–75). Through this process, the worker becomes alienated from her/him-self as they are objectified in the very commodity-products they consume. This relation manifests as one of the fundamental contradictions of capital: that undifferentiated, abstractly commoditized work to produce commodities for exchange is subsequently exchanged for commodities.

This is opposed to labor-power directed at transforming nature to produce use-values.

Labor processes and valorization

Here is where Marx (1990, 283) begins to detail human agency as it relates to labor processes, and this relates significantly to his conceptualization of the human/nature dialectic in the Economic and

Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (2007).34 As humans confront the materiality of nature in the world around them, they activate “the natural forces” that belong to humans (“arms, legs, head and hands”)

“in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form” sufficient for human needs. Here, Marx identifies the dialectic, writing that “through this movement [a human] acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way [a human] simultaneously changes [their] own nature.” Significantly, this dialectic demonstrates how humans are not inseparable from the world around them, and that the way humans interact with materiality is through transforming it, which requires labor processes. What Marx refers to as “nature” then, has a dual character: it is a simultaneous totality made up of the materiality humans experience with their bodies, and in turn how the experience of materiality shapes and plots

34 It is also here where I could discuss, directly, Marx’s concepts of dead labor and alienation. However, I am choosing to leave more detailed accounts of these concepts until section two of this chapter. In the following descriptions, traces of these concepts should be apparent, while in the subsequent section, recollection of the statements in this section should be readily accountable.

139 out our collective and heterogeneous humanness, or termed another way, our “human-nature.” Human ideas and conceptions about who and what they are (human consciousness), therefore develop from material relations.

As Harvey (2010, 111) explains, Marx’s dialectic conception of human relation to nature as labor process rather directly refutes the “bourgeois” conceptualization of natural, stable categories, like the

“clear separation between “man and nature,” culture and nature, natural and artificial, mental and physical, and in which history is viewed as a titanic struggle between two independent forces, humanity and nature.” This places the concept of “value” (and, I will add, value’s conceptual sibling “difference” in an absolute sense) strictly within the historic development of the social formation known as capitalism.

We can see here clear links to Marx’s other work developing his “materialist conception of history” through an understanding of the labor process’ connection to the production of surplus value as a critique of essentialist philosophy that espouses an innate humanness that develops independently of material relations, which suggests that consciousness develops independently from materiality (Marx and Engels 1998, 42; Marx 1993, 100–102). If human consciousness is tied to the material ways in which we interact with the world and other humans around us, and the ways in which we interact with the world and other humans around us is caught up in (read: disciplined and ordered by) the abstract labor process within the social formation of capitalism, then this social formation—with its attendant, socially produced “value” systems—will have a profound effect on human consciousness. The ideas humans are able to conceptualize are tied directly to the ways in which they value the material interactions they ave.

Because there is an indifference toward use value within capitalist social formations, labor processes, and thus production, that is directed producing exchange value is valued. In other words, because of this indifference, the process of turning money into the commodity of human labor-power, to in turn generate more money is valued—it is also a necessary means of survival from the standpoint of workers who must sell their commoditized labor-power for money in order to purchase the

140 commoditized means (food, water, shelter) of sustaining their labor-power. Money has no means of its own outside of circuits of abstracted exchange that valorize its existence—in these circuits, labour- power is made equivalent to calculated amounts of time that are represented by money. To produce a new commodity value, the commodity of labour-power must be exchanged; this is the production process of commodities, “the unity of the labour process and the process of creating value…the unity of the labour process and the process of valorization, it is the capitalist process of production, or the capitalist form of the production of commodities” (1990, 304). This statement by Marx can be summed up by the following statement wherein the case of any of the three times the word “commodities” appears, any one of them could be ‘commoditized labor-power’: commodities absorb the value of other commodities used to produce commodities.35 This dialectic of the production process that Marx constructs demonstrates the contradiction of the position of worker within capitalist social formations: that workers are simultaneously producers and consumers of commodities. It is this relation that is simultaneously an underlying contradiction as the source of surplus value and exploitation. Once workers labor beyond the necessary labor time required to reproduce themselves (acquiring enough money with which to satisfy their needs of food, water, and shelter) through the consumption of commodities, any labor directed at production for exchange beyond this point generates surplus value for the capitalist who bought the commoditized labor-power. As such, living labor (the worker as a commodity containing labor-power) reanimates, through the production process, the past absorbed value that has crystalized in a commodity, so that it can be exchanged, thus valorizing the abstraction of

“value” in commodities. Living labor, through the manipulation of its means of production, is the only commodity that can create new (exchange) value (1990, 314–15).

35 To play this statement out in full consider the following three sentences. Commoditized labor-power absorbs the value of other commodities used to produce commodities. Commodities absorb the value of other commoditized labor-power used to produce commodities. Commodities absorb the value of other commodities used to produce commoditized labor-power.

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Constant capital, variable capital, and fixed capital

Marx’s concepts of constant capital and variable capital build on the labor process and the valorization of exchange relations. Indeed, he writes that “in presenting the different parts played by the various factors of the labor process in the formation of the product’s value, we have in fact characterized the different functions allotted to the different elements of capital in its own valorization process. The excess of the total value of the product over the sum of the values of its constituent elements is the excess of the capital which has been valorized over the value of the capital originally advanced. The means of production on the one hand, labour-power on the other, are merely the different forms of existence which the value of the original capital assumed when it lost its monetary form and was transformed into the various factors of the labor process” (1990, 317). Here we see the capitalist’s indifference to use value, as both the means of production and the labor-power of the worker are equal in the process of and valorization of exchange; the worker relates to their labor-power as a an exchange value, while for the capitalist, it is a use value, a means to an end (Marx 1993, 305–6).36

Given this relation, capital that “is turned into means of production, i.e. the raw material, the auxiliary material and the instruments of labour, does not undergo any quantitative alteration of value in the process of production,” and therefore can be called “constant capital” (1990, 317). Put another way, constant capital is the past labor congealed within commodities that are transformed through the means of production in current production processes. As we have already detailed, labor-power

“reproduces the equivalent of its own value” during processes of production, but also “produces an excess, a surplus-value” which varies given the spatially and temporally contingent “nature” of the socially relative abstract value of commodities existing in processes of exchange. This is “variable capital.” Constant and variable capital exist within consistently mobile relations because the values of

36 Reflect on the indifference of this relation, which is characteristic of capitalist social formations, in the context surplus value, surplus populations, and necessary labor, which is discussed in section two of this chapter.

142 past labor absorbed by and concentrated in objects of capital cannot be realized or reanimated without variably abstract value of labor-power there to interact with its materiality. When the labor-power of variable capital is there to work to realize the value embedded within constant capital, we can understand this relation as fixed in place, or fixed capital. But this relation is not permanently fixed within space and time.

As Marx explains, the value of commodities is determined socially by the abstract quantity of labor contained within it. He writes: “if the amount of labour-time socially necessary for production of any commodity alters…this reacts back on all the old commodities of the same type, because they are only individuals of the same species, and their value at any given time is measured by the labour socially necessary to produce them, i.e. by the labour necessary under the social conditions existing at the time”

(1990, 318). The relation of constant to variable capital is materially contingent upon the value at which labor-power in the abstract may be exchanged in order to enter into production processes with the means of production. At certain times and places, more or less workers will be required and able to alter varied degrees of commodity objects. This constantly adjusting dialectic relation describes the variable fixity of capital and labor; capital fixes its relation to labor, and labor fixes its relation to capital based on the relative surplus value that results from production processes in different places at different times. In this way, capital is productive through the production of abstract equivalencies: the joining of abstract labor to the means of production within the relational contexts of abstract time and abstract space.

Capital produces spaces in which to fix or solidify the relation between commodities of constant and variable type. Within the capitalist social formation, this is the means of spatial organization.

Capitalist social formations and spatial organization

For the continued existence of capital, modes of interacting with materiality must be conceptually consistent (so that humans can understand them) with the abstract relations identified by

Marx within capitalist social formations. That means that ways in which capital fixes itself in space and

143 time must present the appearance of logical consistency in the face of the contradictions present within and inherent to its various self-valorizing processes. It is here, building on the concept of fixed capital, where we may turn briefly to the disciplining processes required to fix variable capital in relation the means of production. To do so, I begin with an explanation of how to understand this spatial relation that is endemic to capitalist social formations in a material way and abstract from it.

To begin, Henri Lefebvre (1991, 49) introduces the concept of abstract space in the context of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and here we can see the coterminous development of abstract space with the abstraction of social labor, which I detailed earlier in this section. But, before we continue with an explication of abstract space, we must start with materiality and abstract from it, which leads us to Lefebvre’s conception of social space in general.

Lefebvre (1991, 26–27, 30–31) notes that foremost, space is a product that is derived from the social relations of production within a social formation. Because space is a social product it is dependent on relations for its production. Lefebvre (1991, 27) writes that “social space will be revealed in its particularity to the extent that it ceases to be indistinguishable from mental space…on the one hand, and physical space…on the other” and indicates that social space is neither a series of materially sense- able objects, nor a pre-ordained empty “void” that can be filled with things, “and that it is irreducible to a ‘form’ imposed upon phenomena, upon things, upon physical materiality.” As I discussed earlier, humans interact with the world around them, which includes other humans, in material ways. In doing so they enact their labor-power and in this process transform the material world around them and themselves. Indeed, space exists as a dialectic; simultaneously understood and produced through the relation between human materiality and human conceptions of their materiality (Lefebvre 1991, 38–39).

Thus, every society or social formation has a (socially and contextually changing) mode of production that produces spaces as humans interact with and adjust to their understanding of their materiality. These changing spaces have their own spatial practice, produced through appropriated

144 space, wherein society has put something of itself into its produced space(s). Therefore, the spaces of a particular society will be reflective of the particular kinds of labor that are valued within that particular mode of production. Thus, social space will be organized in such a way so that social labor is placed in its appropriate place and that these places are specifically organized to allow for the continued appropriation of space.

In that abstract space relates to abstract labor we must understand abstract labor. This concept can be understood in the transition to capitalism, where previous to capitalism there was always labor in general (absolute labor), now under capitalism and the indifference to use value because of the fetishization of exchange, the (often variable) labor that goes into the production of commodities must be rendered equal in an abstract sense. For instance: how is the work of a chief executive officer at

Exxon/Mobil and a cobbler made equal? This is done within capitalist social formations through the use of time; eight hours of labor by both the CEO and cobbler is rendered equal in the abstract, regardless of the concrete demands of the work within those eight hours. Another way to understand the process of the production of abstract anything (like time, space, and labor; the examples we have seen so far)—the idea that anything material can be reduced to the level of a commodity within capitalism—is through an understanding of fetishization in the Marxist sense. As we have seen throughout this section, within capitalist societies processes of exchange are given primacy. Since processes of exchange rely solely on the production and movement of commodities, it is the movement of an object-as-commodity to abstract levels that gives objects “the mysterious character of the commodity-form” (Marx 1990, 164).

And this “mysterious” abstract form the commodity maintains is the simple result of “the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves… [and it] reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers” (Marx 1990, 164–65). It is clear that a commodity is merely an idea of “value,” a concept that

145 captures a physical, material relation between physical, material things. This is what Marx refers to as

“fetishism”—the immediate attachment of abstract, exchange value based ideas onto the material objects of physical relations. As Marx (1990, 165) writes, “fetishism…attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.” Said another way, fetishism is the production of ideas that only exist through the production of commodities for exchange, thus objectifying human labor.

This is where Marx details the homogeneous character of human labor in the abstract, and labor-power is reduced to the level of commodities (1990, 166–68, 172–75). Indeed, Marx (1990, 176–

77) states rather directly that for humans within capitalist societies use values may be of banal interest, but do “not belong to us as objects” because “what does belong to us as objects, however, is our value.

Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values.”

Much like abstract labor and time, abstract space within capitalism facilitates the production of commodities in the abstract relations of exchange, and thus is commodified itself. No longer would productive activity be directed and spatially organized solely around the process of the reproduction of use values in objects and continuation of social life. Rather, space is now subject to the abstract leveling of processes of production for exchange. Castree (2001) provides a cogent positioning of (abstract) laborers and (abstract) space within capitalist societies by drawing connections and avenues for possible critique between commodity fetishism, geographical imaginations, and imaginative geographies. Castree

(2001, 1521) begins by borrowing from Allen Pred (1998, 153) in providing a Marxist interpretation of fetish, writing that “fetishism is…“a selective non-consciousness” and defetishisation an injunction to re- cognise.” Selective non-consciousness connotes the subsumption of labor to the logics of capital and therefore the subjection of all material things “at some or all stages of their sociospatial biographies” to logics of “accumulation for accumulation’s sake” within markets. As production occurs, “capitalist commodities take on a value-form: that is, in their irreducible specificity they become implicated in a

146 decentralized, transnational process of labour-value expansion this is peculiarly abstract.” By defetishizing our understanding of the relations that lead to various commoditized value-forms, we come to see capitalism as “less a self-sufficient ‘system’ and more ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’—each with their own sociogeographic trajectory” (Castree 2001, 1521). Imaginative geographies come in to play when attempting to represent the various sociogeographic trajectories of commodities. Castree (2001, 1522) identifies three questions fundamental to deconstructing and critiquing capitalist fetishes: “What does a commodity represent? In what does the sociality of the commodity consist? Who, what, and where are ‘crystallised’ in commodity bodies?” Rather than any possible answers to these questions one might discern, Castree suggests that it is “more productive to see a Marxian critique of the fetish as posing—rather than answering—a most radical and troubling question” that demonstrates an important “understanding of sociospatial representation.” Accordingly, that question is, “how is it possible for critics of global capitalism in the early 21st century to name—to draw social and geographic boundaries around—the sites commodity fetishism ‘hides’ when those sites no longer exist sui generis? Where, in other words, does the unseen sociality of commodities actually lie?” It would seem the answer lays somewhere in the notion that we must confront spatial non- consciousness so as to ‘re-cognise’ a great variety of material relations (c.f. Soja 1980, 208, 224–25).

The relation between fetishized non-consciousness and the meaning of abstract space contributes to our understanding of capitalist landscapes by revealing the criteria, often derived through objectified knowledge production, that render certain spaces equal, in the abstract, to others, based on productive activities organized spatially around exchange relations. This obscures and mystifies the concrete differences between, for instance, labor that happens in schools, factories or prisons. All the labor done in these places is equal from the standpoint of the degree of labor-power required to transform a thing into a commodity that can enter the market on equal footing with other commodities because of capital’s indifference to any relation that does not realize the exchange value of

147 commodities. If the fetishized value residing in constant capital is rendered through its relation to itself in abstract space, how then is abstract space structured so that variable capital may be fixed but fluid, constantly in productive relation to constant capital?

In order to maintain the abstract uniformity of calculative production processes, capitalist social formations rely on various socially construed and fetishized logics of government to direct the organization of variable capital within abstract space. While concerns with abstract uniformity and organized variable capital in abstract space are particular to capitalist social formations, any social formation relies on some form of socially established governmental logics to organize people and objects spatially. Regardless, then, of the particular social formation, logics of government take the

(immaterial) form of norms and laws. When norms and laws are agreed upon within a social formation they operate to direct human interaction with the materiality of one another. The material interactions between humans is productive in that it influences and changes collective human consciousness. When human interaction deviates from the governmental logics shared within a social formation, and thus transgresses them, there are produced new means by which to adjust human relation to materiality. We can understand these means as productive processes of punishing and disciplining. To influence humans materially, punishing and disciplining processes require material techniques that must be practiced. The practice of these techniques takes place in spaces, and so particular locations become punishing and disciplining places—sometimes connected other times not. There are no “natural,” a-historic spaces of punishment and discipline. Rather, any such spaces develop contingent to modes of social organization and therefore develop and evolve based on what is valued within the norms and laws of particular social formations. Here, we are concerned with the productive processes of punishment and discipline within the historically contingent spaces of capitalist social formations. Marx (2007, 67, 1993, 711–12, 1990,

481, 490, 549–50) and Foucault (2015, 145, 196, 1977, 194) contribute to our understanding of the

148 productive processes of the material techniques of punishing and disciplining humans within capitalist social formations.

In a very general sense, capitalist social formations consist of a series of institutions, set in particular landscapes, that has as their focus the reproduction of docile workers who, once the point in abstract time is reached that they have earned enough money to satisfy their material, reproductive needs, they will be able to effectively utilize their labor-power beyond what is necessary to them. That results, as I explained earlier, in the production of surplus value and the valorization of the labor and production process itself. These disciplined relations of production can be understood in spatial terms in that as surplus value production and valorization occur, these processes allow for the production and appropriation of (more) abstract space, in which the abstract leveling of commodities through exchange may continue, expand, and transform in response to changes and crises in the capitalist social formation.

The changing and transformative qualities of institutions in response to changing modes of production within the capitalist social formation are indeed illuminating. In a very general sense, schools are institutions designed to produce disciplined humans, and the modes of disciplined schooling, and concomitant punishments enacted as corrective disciplining measures, have changed in order to be in line with the requirements of circulating capital. This is because as modes of production transform over time and space, the disciplining of labor-power in line with those transformations must also occur.

Schools are designed to translate humans to work in factories (increasingly focused on service based activities) and other capitalistic institutions in a such a way that they are readily willing to sell their labor-power and labor beyond the point which it is socially necessary.

In another example of changing institutions, Eduardo Mendieta (2004) details the political- economic transitions from plantations to ghettos to prisons in the context of institutional racism, which explains the changing conditions by which differentiated bodies are punished and disciplined in line with

149 the values of capital. In the case of each institution, racist logics of government direct and evaluate the capacity for labor-power of non-white bodies. The developing prison geographies of the United States offers a particularly keen insight to the appropriation of abstract space within capitalism. Ostensibly, prisons as institutions within capitalist social formations exist as space focused on punishment and discipline that results in the rehabilitation and correction of humans who inadequately and irresponsibly utilize their labor-power. The particular abstract space of the prison presents itself as the corrective for failures elsewhere within the landscapes of productive capitalist relations, at least outwardly. This is the prison’s fetishized surface appearance; a space focused on reforming the qualities and capacities of those in it.

What this appearance obscures are the relations of commodification, exchange and production within and beyond prisons that result in the accumulation of labor-power inside prison walls. In such a way, material prisons themselves merely become the concrete extension of, more recently, educational facilities or cubbicled offices, or in terms of relations in the past, like Mendieta explains, plantations and ghettos. In all these institutions, the focus is on (re)aligning commodities in motion with productive labor and production processes of exchange. If certain humans in capitalist social formations are unable to be properly productive in relation to an otherwise responsible society, there are institutional measures in place within prison landscapes, that constitute the wider ‘penal state’ (Peck 2003), that function to assure that there is somewhere they can meet their abstract potential for labor-power.

Capital punishment is just one of many punishing and disciplining practices that plays out in prison space.

What follows is a materialist read of the development of the technologies and spaces of capital punishment, and their subsequent commodification. To do this, I will begin with a discussion of the transitioning of the material technologies of capital punishment in terms of the gradual transition between the political-economic social formations known as feudalism and capitalism. This necessitates,

150 first, an explanation of more feudal technologies, and the spatial implementation of capitalist punishment technologies that replaced them, which will center around feudal punishments in France and the implementation of the guillotine. Next, I will discuss the technologic improvement of hanging from feudalism to capitalism in terms of the increasing prevalence of the logics of science, medicine, anatomy, and capitalist efficiency in its practice. This requires a discussion of the centralization and privatization of capital punishment, which was facilitated by hanging, and the subsequent decline of hanging as a popular mode of execution in the Anglophone world, which in turn leads to a brief discussion of the rise electrocution and lethal gas in the United States. Specifically, this brief discussion examines both how these modes of execution build on capitalist notions of efficiency and advances in science, in terms of medicine and anatomy, for which hanging laid a foundation, and how these modes produced a continually intensifying distancing effect as the ways in which humans materially experience, and thus consciously understand, execution becomes estranged. From here, I transition into a more extended discussion of lethal injection as a mode of execution that builds on this both/and distinction produced by the transition from hanging to electrocution and lethal gas in the United States.

I.II Material Technologies and Spaces of Capital Punishment

In the opening pages of his notable work Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977, 3–7) details two instances of modes of punishment. First, the public torture and execution of Robert-François Damiens in late March 1757, in Paris, France for the crime of regicide—he had attempted to murder Louis XV roughly three months prior. And, second, a time-table written up in 1837 by Léon Faucher “for the

House of young prisoners in Paris.” Each account details means of punishment and discipline relative to their historical-geographical contexts.

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In the case of the public torture and execution, a number of material instruments are mentioned.37 In what follows, I will describe the execution of the sentence—the sentence reserved for regicide was for the condemned to be tortured, drawn and quartered, and in this case burnt on a stake afterward—with a focus on these material instruments: a holding cell and a torture chamber in a prison,

“boots” and eight wedges, a cart, a scaffold with restraints, a brazier (a steel pan for holding lighted coals), steel pincers, an iron spoon and a number of pots, ropes, knives, harnesses and whips for six horses, chopped wood logs and straw to burn, torches, and a wooden stake. To begin, Damiens was removed from his prison cell early in the morning on the date of his execution and brought to the torture chamber in the prison. There, his feet and legs were encased in “boots” which were wooden apparatuses formed in the shape of boots containing metal plates with spikes on the inside. Eight wedges were driven into the spaces between the body and “boots” at regular intervals to increase the pressure on the legs and feet. Then, a cart carried Damiens’ body from the prison cell to the Place de

Grève in Paris—a site that could be described as the City Hall’s main square38—where he would be affixed with simple rope restraints on each appendage to the scaffold. He was made to hold the knife with which he committed his crime against the sovereign king and Sulphur burning in the brazier was applied to the hand by the executioner. Next, the executioner took up the steel pincers, especially made for the occasion of this execution and already heated in fire, and tore away pieces of muscle from the arms, legs, and torso. Then, the executioner used the iron spoon to draw molten lead and wax, and boiling oil from heated iron pots to douse the wounds. Ropes were then tied from each arm and leg to the harnesses on four horses; whips were used to compel the horses to pull in opposing directions. After

37 Some details of this account are also taken from Bohm (2001, 13). 38 This square was a significant political meeting place throughout the past several centuries (Tilly 2000), especially in the context of economic changes and the expansion of capitalism throughout the 1800s (Harison 2000). In the 1830s the square was a regular meeting place for the unemployed seeking “casual day labor” and eventually the word grève came to mean “strike,” as in a collective labor stoppage directed at forcing employers to increase wages, in French (Reddy 1979, 205–6). Before the transition to popular rule in France it was is this square “where fireworks displays were staged to celebrate births and deaths in the royal family (Garland 2010, 83).

152 roughly one hour of drawing without being successfully quartered, two more horses were added to pull on the legs, one on each. Still without success, the executioner cut at each of the limbs with a knife until the horses pulled each one free. Then, the limbs were retrieved and placed, along with the torso, on a stake in an enclosure near the scaffold. Straw and logs were placed around the stake and lit with a torch and burned for nearly four hours. The execution lasted in total, from the time Damiens was taken from his cell to when the embers had nearly cooled and officers from the royal court and a “detachment of archers” finally left the square, roughly 16 hours (Foucault 1977, 5). The crowds that viewed all or portions of the execution were numerous, and observers attest that Damiens was able to view his own body repeatedly throughout the process and was likely still alive when the torso was burned on the stake.

In the case of the time-table for prisoners, modes of punishment are directed in decidedly different fashion. Here, the entire day is planned out in accordance with the time of day, even with adjustments for the changing hours of daylight in the winter and summer (for our purposes here I will just detail the summer schedule). First, we see the general outline: prisoners are to wake at 5:00 a.m. and their full day will encompass a total of nine work hours and two hours of instruction/education, with portions of these times allotted for meals and recreation. The day ends at 8:00 p.m. Prisoners rise from bed and dress at the sound of a drum-roll. At the sound of a second drum-roll they must make their beds, and at a third drum-roll they line up and walk to the prison’s chapel—there are five minute intervals between the drum-rolls. At the prison chapel prisoners are led in prayers and religious readings follow. At 5:45 a.m. prisoners go to the prison courtyard where they wash their hands and faces and receive a ration of bread, before they form into work-teams and head to the prison workshops by 6:00 a.m. At 10:00 a.m. prisoners return to the courtyard to wash their hands and proceed to the refectory for a meal; afterward there is recreation in the prison courtyard until 10:40 a.m. Then, a drum-roll sounds and prisoners form ranks and walk to the prison school. There, classes last two hours, and

153 prisoners practice “reading, writing, drawing and arithmetic” (Foucault 1977, 6). At 12:40 p.m. prisoners return to the courtyard for recreation until a drum-roll sounds at 12:55 p.m. when they form into work- teams and return to the prison workshops by 1:00 p.m., working until 4:00 p.m. Then, returning to the prison courtyard, prisoners wash their hands and form ranks to walk to the prison refectory, where the prisoners eat and return to the prison courtyard for recreation until 5:00 p.m. when they return with their work-teams to the prison workshops. At 7:00 p.m. bread is distributed in the workshops, then for

15 minutes a prisoner or a supervisor “reads a passage from some instructive or uplifting work” and this is followed by prayer (Foucault 1977, 7). Before 7:30 p.m. hands are washed and cloths inspected in the prison courtyard, and prisoners return to their cells. There, at a first drum-roll, prisoners undress, and after a second drum-roll, they get into bed and the cell doors are closed.

Execution Punishment in Political-Economic Transition

These two cases certainly demonstrate different punishments for quite different crimes, but both the material modes of punishment and the modes of presenting how these punishments are carried out demonstrate a transformation of relations. Indeed, what they display is how, in the West,

“the entire economy of punishment was redistributed” as significant socio-political changing relations to examine (Foucault 1977, 7). On the one hand, there are the changing material relations between human bodies and the instrumental technologies of punishment. One the other hand, there is the changing spatial situations within which punishment is directed at human bodies: the relation between the practices of punishment and the material (in terms of humans and objects) spaces in which they play out changes. Each is mediated by a changing sovereign and mode of production, as modes of production coalesce around ‘the state’ while feudal governmental apparatuses slowly erode between 1648 and the

1900s (Garland 2010, 74–75). It is important to acknowledge that changes are rather infrequently abrupt and instead play out more so as gradual transformations—as such the transition from feudalism to capitalism could be said to have taken place over the course of the past five to seven centuries

154

(Federici 2004, 11–12, 61–62). Considering this, it becomes important to conceptualize both places where these two cases of punishment happened as places of work and labor, with each case demonstrating their own forms of labor processes. We can therefore understand the changing places of execution in terms of their changing characteristics as workplaces with their own interconnected political-economic geographies. Today, it is widely understood that the way places of work, and the work done in them, change is intrinsically tied to socio-political processes. Labor/market relations, even during transitioning periods from feudalism to capitalism, “are structured by power relations and institutional forces, and…above all…are social-spatial phenomena” (Peck 2000, 133).

Damiens’ torturous execution was a punitive practice in line with feudal sovereignty, where “a crime, since it was an offense against the sovereign, was at the same time an offense against the ruler himself” (May 1994, 101). Within feudal societies the individual sovereign monarch embodied the rule of law that maintains public order, therefore any criminal acts were conceptualized as direct attacks on the sovereign monarch. The sovereign body, at an individual level, has the right to grant or take material life (Derrida 2013, 40), and so the punishments that lead to taking material life happens at the level of the individualized body. There are three punitive directions that encapsulate this relation, and can be seen in Damiens case. First, is the directive to mangle his feet and legs with the “boots” rendering him unable to move with any expediency. A second is the direction that he must hold the knife with which he committed the crime while the hand is burnt with hot Sulphur. The third is the use of hot steel pincers, specifically produced for this execution, that were used by the executioner to tear away flesh from his limbs and torso. None of these punitive directions were intended to kill him outright, but rather they were carried out in a processional way in moving toward a culmination. In this way they were ritualistic and reflective of his crime. He had run past the guards on his way to stab Louis XV as he was getting into his carriage. Hence the three specified punishments directed at immobilizing his legs, functionally weakening his hand that held the very knife he used to stab, and finally, tearing away the

155 muscles needed to activate his body with a specially made instrument for the occasion.39 The specially made steel pincers, in particular, reflect an aspect of this execution that is decidedly proto-capitalist, in that this particular instrument was produced for its use-value given the specific punitive relations. In terms of punitive practices that are made to publically reproduce the relations of the crime itself, like the scalding with hot Sulphur of the hand holding the knife, this likewise demonstrates the focus on the use-values of punishments particular to crimes, and not generalizable. To the on looking crowds this mode of punishment is specific to Damiens, yet is a spectacular, public demonstration of the body as the target of punitive sovereignty that, through the production of protracted pain and ultimate death, sought to discipline conduct. From the vantage point of the sovereign, it was the execution-in-public- space aspect of the punishment that was meant to turn these particularly individualized punishments into something generalizable to the population that consumed them. Under feudalism, the abstract threat of asserted sovereignty through severe, public, bodily pain and death was meant to deter unwanted conduct. Thus, as the site of sovereignty is transferred in the West from individual monarchs to stateified populations who, at least in theory, maintain governmental rights in common (Elden 2007), modes of punishing deviant behavior that runs counter to values held in a given social formation. Values maintained within social formations are dependent on modes of production—therefore, we see a transference and transformation of punishments based on the values of feudalism into and to punishments based on the values of capitalism.40

39 These punitive measures—the use of “boots,” the burning of appendages, and the use of pincers, are not unique to this execution, but the manner in which they were directed at the body, in this case, are. This speaks to the gradual transformation of modes of production reflected in changing modes of punishment and execution: these three modes of punishment are generalizable to a degree, because they were used on a number of criminals, but how they were put to use in each case differs. The ways in which they are used in each case is specific. 40 I use both transference and transformation here to communicate that from roughly the 1600s when it is identified that capitalist states first began developing, through the early 1800s, feudal and capital social formations blended and institutions, processes, and practices of governance seen in capitalist societies were built on the foundation of similar relations in feudal societies.

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Foucault uses these two cases to demonstrate this transference and transformation. In each case, the concept of ‘criminality’ is tied to sovereign control over the dominant modes of production within the social formation. How the sovereign establishes and controls the material relations between human bodies and the means of production dictates the necessity for different modes of punishment which would in turn lead to differing disciplinary outcomes. According to Foucault (1977, 8–11), the transition to a capitalist social formation brought change to two processes of punishment that were characteristic of the ‘punishment-body relation’ in feudal societies. The public spectacle of the body, and the emphasis on physical pain within the body were no longer characteristic of the punishment- body relation, and the removal of both processes from punitive processes was sought. Foucault (1977,

11) writes that, “from being an art of unbearable sensations” in feudal societies, “punishment has become an economy of suspended rights.” Here, punishment becomes directed at reforming individuals as part of the population as a whole, rather than directed at specific individuals, hence the regimented and generalizable prisoner time-table from Foucault’s example. The suspension of one’s rights requires their sequestration or removal from public space, and it is the sequestration of undisciplined bodies that removes the processes of spectacle and pain from punitive processes, while simultaneously disallowing penalized individuals from entering into exchange relations by selling an abstracted amount of their labor-power (Foucault 2015, 71–72, 208–9). Indeed, Foucault (1977, 9) elaborates that within capitalism, punishment becomes “the most hidden part of the penal process” and that this has four consequences. First, this sequestration removes punishment practices from the everyday lives of the population, which causes punishment to exist, for many, only in “abstract consciousness.” For many in the social formation, they can only observe from a far the removal of one’s access to waged labor.

Second, “its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity.” This relates directly to the third consequence, in that “it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime” from the vantage point of the

157 sovereign. And, the fourth consequence deals with the changing site of disciplinary authority given that

“the exemplary mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms.” Here, as the process of punishment- directed-at-producing-discipline changes, so too does the site of justice. For example, in Foucault’s two cases, in the first justice is the responsibility of the sovereign who operates by materially instrumentizing the executioner to direct the sovereign’s sentence upon the body of the condemned, while in the second justice becomes the responsibility of the penalized who must reform themselves by disciplining their material relations in line with, for example, the abstract prison time-table or whatever other means of self-readjustment present themselves.

These general penal changes are reflected in execution as capitalist punishment in that “the execution no longer bears the specific mark of the crime or the social status of the criminal; a death that lasts only a moment…an execution that affects life rather than the body” (Foucault 1977, 12). Foucault cites two moments from the development of French law displaying the parallel changes to executions and the new site of sovereignty held in common. First, from Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the politician and physician who hoped new more ‘humane’ forms of execution would lead to the eventual end of the practice, who wrote in 1789 that “crimes of the same kind will be punished by the same kind of punishment, whatever the rank and state of the guilty man may be.” And second, from article three of the French Code of 1791, “every man condemned to death will have his head cut off.” Foucault describes the “triple signification” of the new law in 1791, which appeared conterminously with the development and eventual use of the guillotine, as establishing “an equal death for all…one death per condemned man, obtained by a single blow…and punishment for the condemned man alone, since decapitation, the capital punishment of the nobility, was the least shaming for the criminal’s family”

(1977, 12–13). Accordingly, “the guillotine, first used in March 1792, was the perfect vehicle for these principles” in that it reduced death “to a visible, but instantaneous event” where material interaction between executioner-as-appendage of law and the criminal’s body was reduced to a mere moment,

158 which left the executioner to “be no more than a meticulous watchmaker” (Foucault 1977, 13). With a turn to democratic-capitalist rule, processes of execution had to embody these new social relations that were, to a degree, more egalitarian. Beheading, which was once a penalty reserved for nobility, was now accessible to the masses. And this new machine maintained two improvements over decapitation devices from feudal times, like the Halifax Gibbet, the Scottish Maiden or a simple ax or sword used with a wooden block. First, was the collar, which was similar to a pillory and kept the condemned individual’s head in place and stopped the person from moving; second, was the guillotine’s oblique blade which sliced more consistently than an ax or sword (Kronenwetter 2001, 15).41 As a transitional mode of execution, the mechanizations of the guillotine served the movement from feudal sovereignty to sovereignty, or way of governance, produced by state capitalism ideally. Daniel Arasse (1989, 90) explains that three characteristics of feudal deaths due to executions were “the production of a certain quantity of suffering; a juridical codification of the suffering to be produced; and the incorporation of the suffering into a ‘punitive liturgy’.” The technologic process of guillotining, coinciding with the installation and expansion of capitalistic exchange processes, absolved the first two characteristics by incorporating them in the third. In practice, guillotining produced a new “punitive liturgy” through changing the socio-spatial relations between executioner-operating-as-sovereign, the condemned subject, and the material implement of death, which both maintained a stigmatizing significance for the subject and spectacularized the values of the social formation that imposes it. As it functioned,

“mechanical decapitation removed all trace of social differentiation in the production of suffering; but the ceremony surrounding the decapitation was most certainly” ritualistic (Arasse 1989, 90). The

41 Past decapitation devices did not have a mechanism for holding the head in place, which meant an executioner’s assistant would often have to hold the body in place. Additionally, this allowed for the condemned to move and the blade to hit elsewhere on the body besides the neck, resulting in prolonged executions. The first guillotine was built by a carpenter for the cost of 5,500 francs and taken to Bicêtre Prison-Hospital where—a week before it was first used in public—it was tested in the courtyard on three corpses, and after successfully decapitating two with the oblique blade and failing on the third with a crescent-shaped blade it was approved by the state’s head executioner (C.-H. Sanson 1876, 1:262).

159 guillotine’s implementation replaced “the individual quota of suffering by a quantity of painless deaths, whose cumulative effect was to deprive each individual will of its particularity” (Arasse 1989, 90). With the appearance of the guillotine as the dominant material apparatus of the sovereign’s right over life we see the production of the population in the abstract and as subject to the state.

As the new equal-access capital punishment, that meant a leveling of executioner with the executed, and all other citizens, through the mechanizations of the guillotine. As Derrida (2013, 199) said, “the guillotine…both allows one to avoid soaking one’s hands in the blood of one’s fellow men and that, by the same blow, puts an end to the bourreau who becomes an executioner, basically a civil servant. The bourreau is repatriated into civil society.”42 The guillotine changed the status of the head executioner in France from an outcast who did the bidding of a sovereign king, and therefore holding a social position higher than most, to a citizen with equality and rights the same as any other subject

(Arasse 1989, 120–21). Indeed, Arasse explains that in the 1780s, prior to the construction of the guillotine, there was debate over whether executioners should have to stand for election, with those in favor of the change away from the hereditary transference of the position arguing that someone whose responsibility it was to apply the law should be judged as a citizen equal to and by his peers (see also: C.-

H. Sanson 1876, 1:248–49). However, it was the public “theatre” of the scaffold and other use-value oriented punishments that maintained the executioner’s differential and decidedly unordinary social status prior to the guillotine. In 1792, conterminously with the implementation of the machine, executioners were allowed to stand for election. Arasse (1989, 121) writes that the use of the guillotine confirmed the “ordinariness” of the executioner who, with this machine, “was required to show his skill at a single point of the execution—strapping the victim to the board—and his speed in performing this

42 A footnote from the translator explains why “bourreau” is left here in the English version: “The noun bourreau, ordinarily translated as executioner or hangman, is from the verb bourrer, to strike. In addition to designating the state-appointed executioner of death penalties, it has a more general extension: torturer, taskmaster, cruel or sadistic person. Before the Revolution, the bourreau and his family were social pariahs. For reasons explained here by Derrida, the term will be left in French when the difference from “executioner” is pertinent.”

160 was the only criterion by which he could be judged on humanitarian grounds.” Rather than the theatrical and hours long spectacles of the past, now, in conjunction with the efficient guillotine, the executioner acted merely as its mechanical appendage. Indeed, “strength, decisiveness, and agility were the only qualities necessary in the executioner” as more people were executed in the 1790s the executioner ceased binding them to the scaffold beneath the guillotine which “speeded up the operation and avoided a cruelly extended delay for those sentenced” (Arasse 1989, 121). Here, Arasse quotes from an account of an execution at the time which describes how the head executioner carries the condemned up the scaffold by the left arm, with an assistant on the right arm, and another on the legs, and “in a flash” the condemned “was lying face down” below the machine. The account of this expedient regimented process stands in stark contrast to the torturous death of Damiens and others like him, and even in contrast to the mass asphyxiation hangings of the lower class for lesser crimes where bodies would be left hanging or gibbeted and watched over for extended periods (Kronenwetter 2001,

13–14). That the executioner and his work, aided by an efficient machine with which to kill, could now be assessed in terms of his humaneness based on his material actions represents perhaps the utmost paradoxical existence within capitalist society (Arasse 1989, 121). It is a paradox, one that leads to discourses like we saw earlier with Sustein and Vermeule, saturated with contradictory positions taken up by those who wish to maintain the place of state sanctioned killing in this social formation. Two factors, however, played out with the guillotine in France that made this transitional period of transition not completely smooth for the instrumentized executioner of the state. It was that despite the executioner having reached a level of social equality, the guillotine itself had not and this was manifest in two respects. First, the state did not provide for the maintenance of the guillotine initially; it was the responsibility of the executioner after the state provided its traditional “maintenance fee” on an annual basis (Arasse 1989, 122). This tied, from the standpoint of the public, the executioner more directly to its functioning, rather than the state. A second difficulty came with the 1793 passage of a law that required

161 an executioner and guillotine in every department in France (Arasse 1989, 123). In accordance with the new law, over the ensuing decades the state transferred many from the surplus of executioners in northern departments to departments in the south where they were fewer in numbers. The move was met with resistance from the public in the south who both physically and socially ostracized them and treated them with the same prejudices that they leveled against executioners of the past who were taken from the population of local criminals in exchange for commuted sentences (Arasse 1989, 122–23,

179–80). The combination of these two factors coalesced in the occasional improper functioning of guillotines in the initial decades after its first implementation where, even after the machine’s ropes were replaced with a more reliable trigger mechanism that dropped the blade, “inattention, emotion of inexperience could all cause the executioner to transform the spectacle” (Arasse 1989, 123–25). Indeed, tangled ropes, unmaintained pulleys or improperly set-up guillotines caused the blade to drop at lower speeds, necessitating subsequent drops or the manual use of a knife to fully decapitate heads. In these ways, paradoxically, disengagement or detachment from the work on the part of the executioner risked failing to detach head from body. Arasse’s examples make “it clear that the machine’s reliability was by

[the early 1800s] taken for granted, and that any malfunction was to be ascribed to the executioner alone” (1989, 124). This contradiction, Arasse suggests, reveals that the widespread use of the guillotine changed the public’s expectations of capital punishment, and their indignation directed toward executioners came during botched executions of common law criminals revealing developing attitudes of “class solidarity” (1989, 125). Furthermore, this suggests that the population at-large approved of the guillotine as a mode of capital punishment when its political use paralleled their interests.

In the case of the parallel transformation of mode of production and mode of capital punishment, we have just explored the relation between human bodies and the technological instruments of capital executions. Now we can turn to the changing spatial organization of capital punishment—the changing relation between capital punishment processes and their relational situation

162 in social space through the implementation of the guillotine. As a social space of capital punishment the guillotine on its scaffold “occupied a portion of space in the urban fabric at the heart of which its performances were held…the setting of the guillotine was spread or rather strung out in a spatial disposition that called forth two quite different kinds of spectacle: a slow-moving procession and the sudden fixity of the scaffold’s location” (Arasse 1989, 93). The movement of the condemned from the prison to the scaffold often took nearly two hours and the processions were well attended, theatrical affairs. After the initial use of the guillotine in 1792 and the end of the ‘Reign of Terror’ in mid-1794, ‘the guillotine’ moved around Paris to specific locations. A guillotine for “common-law crime remained in the

Place de Grève” during this period, while “the political guillotine” moved to various sites around the city in conjunction with the individual(s) being executed in such a way so as to kill “against a background of connotations meticulously calculated by the authorities” who sanctioned their deaths (Arasse 1989,

104). At the end of the ‘Reign of Terror’ the Place de Grève was used for both types of executions, and so between 1794 and 1832, the guillotine in Paris remained in the Grève, the same square in the center of the city were executions had occurred in past centuries (Derrida 2013, 205). Here, while the mechanizations of capital punishment were adjusted, the practice remained one of public spectacle. In

1832 the guillotine was moved to a less prominent location behind the Saint Jacques gate, near the

Pantheon building (Derrida 2013, 204–6), and later to the entrance of the Grande Roquette prison in

Paris in 1851. This move in 1832—and subsequent moves adjacent to and into prisons—was enacted by politicians to cut down the distance between the place of imprisonment and site of execution out of concerns over the ‘humanity’ of the theatrical processions of the past (Arasse 1989, 94). Additionally, authorities of the bourgeoisie government cited the memory of the sacrifice made by “loyal citizens” who “nobly shed their blood” in the Place de Grève during the 1830 July Revolution that overthrew

Charles X as a reason to remove “the instrument of revolutionary justice” from it (Arasse 1989, 104). It

163 was a move, Arasse (1989, 104) writes, that demonstrates clearly whose interests would be served by capital punishment going forward: “the guillotine…was being depoliticized—it was going middle class.”

When the Grande Roquette prison was decommissioned in 1899 prisoners and the guillotine were moved to the La Santé prison in Paris, and the guillotine was erected and used on a street corner near this prison’s main gate. Public executions continued until 1939 when they were banned and guillotines were moved inside prison courtyards. Derrida (2013, 205–6) describes this process of

“devisibilization” and “despectacularization” with repeated citation of Victor Hugo’s writing on the guillotine’s move away from the Place de Grève in 1832, playing on the multiple meanings of the French word grève which developed from Paris’ central place of social, political, and, as the 1830s progressed, economic life. The prominent square was on the edge of the Seine river, and ‘grève’ became over time

“a word that means ground formed by gravel on the bank of a river or the sea,” and therefore it was used to refer to these particular “banks” and ‘bank’ in a general sense (Derrida 2013, 205). Through the early 1800s the square became a place for the unemployed to meet, and for laborers to go ‘on strike’

(Harison 2000; Reddy 1979) and the word ‘grève’ came to mean a strike or work stoppage. Derrida

(2013, 205) explains that, according to Hugo, to move the guillotine away from “la Grève” displayed a paradox—people observed that the move must mean “that the machine was doing its job badly, that one was hiding it by exiling it and that one day or other, it is as if it itself would have to be en grève…far from the Grève, from the central, visible place, from the heart and theater of Paris.” Derrida (2013, 207–

10) goes on, playing on these connections between Grève and banks to suggest the notion that the sequestration of the guillotine leaves behind in its former place remains, or remainders, which are taken up or collected with interest in mind. In whose interest does the sovereign maintain a right over life and when life ends? This suggests the question: what dividends are to be gained, held in reserve, and by whom, by this move of the sovereign right over life (and death) from the political and economic center of the state to far off crossroads near prisons, and eventually inside them? What it seems to me is the

164 case here is the more thorough production and delineation of capitalist classist hierarchies. Or, more pointedly, in whose class interest does the means of capital punishment serve? Here, the bourgeoisie government banks on the movement of the guillotine away from this central place on its ability, as one amongst many means, to coerce a growing ‘middle class’ into maintaining the status quo. Indeed, over subsequent decades we can see the continued bourgeoisie suppression of working class movements, with the complicity of entrenched and deepening class tensions (Harvey 1979). By adjusting the socio- spatial arrangement of the site of capital punishment, the bourgeoisie authorities sought to demonstrate the capacity of execution to control working class ‘criminality’ (Derrida 2013, 175–78).

The Functioning of Capital Punishment from France to ‘the West’ in General

The examples above from France illustrate the general transition in mode of execution in the

West as state-capitalism developed and spread in the 19th century. European colonizers in North

America likewise brought with them modes of punishment and execution consistent with feudal practices in Europe and similar transitions occurred in the context of the development of the United

States. While the specific transitioning modes of execution may have differed from the examples presented from France, parallel transitioning logics, spatial and otherwise, can be observed in the

United States. Some methods of execution practiced legally in the United States in the past, and which were practiced before and during the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the West, are

“beheading, pressing to death, drawing and quartering, breaking at the wheel, drowning, and burning at the stake” (Bohm 2011, 125). Much like in Europe, Bohm explains that in the colonial Americas governmental officials extended these public executions with various methods, like enclosing corpses in gibbets, which is “an iron cage with bars that permitted easy viewing,” and hanging them in public spaces where citizens “engaged in their daily routines.” In another example, after executions a body might be dismembered and pieces sent to different areas “allowing more people to be exposed to the message being conveyed.” According to Bohm, these execution “enhancements” that severely violated

165 bodies served to add fear in colonial times, and were thought to improve the deterrent effect of the death penalty punishment. Such execution enhancements persisted in the British colonies in North

America despite the 1689 English Bill of Rights which contained provisions against cruel and unusual punishments. In 1791, much of the same language was adopted in the Eighth Amendment to the Bill of

Rights in the United States Constitution, and many of the more extreme methods of torture and punishment were prohibited, though various execution methods have since been routinely challenged based on this amendment (Bohm 2011, 125–26). After 1791 and the establishment of the United States

Constitution it is clear, however, the protections against cruel and unusual punishments were not extended to all people. For example, in South Carolina in 1804, a “slave revolt” resulted in the hanging and beheading of 10 to 12 African American men; in 1805, a “slave revolt” resulted in the hanging of three to four African American men, and the burning alive of one African American woman; in 1811, in

Louisiana, a “slave revolt” resulted in the hanging, shooting, and beheading of 16 African American men

(Blackman and McLaughlin 2004, 51, 2003, 256).43 According to Bohm (2011, 126), the United States

Supreme Court has never explicitly “declared an execution method cruel and unusual punishment.”

Relatedly, in terms of the brief time period between 1967 and 1977 when there was a moratorium on capital punishment in the United States, Derrida (2013, 53) explains that the ruling in the 1972 Supreme

Court case Furman v. Georgia, which was the impetus for the moratorium, the 5-4 slim majority vote ruled not to abolish capital punishment, but that in this case it constituted cruel and unusual punishment therefore violating the Constitution. He explains the “fragile,” “ambiguity” of this decision, saying that “the court did not rule on the principle of the death sentence, but on the cruelty of its

43 Here, it is important to recall sections from chapter two which discuss the difficultly in accessing reliable data on executions from earlier years in Untied States history, however, as that discussion makes clear, it is likely that instances of execution in general, including those that may have utilized more extreme modes of punishment against non-white populations, are likely underreported. An additional note here: Blackman and McLaughlin, in each of the cited articles, also identify a mass gibbeting execution of 22 African American men in what is now Louisiana after a “slave revolt” in 1795, several years before the area became part of the United States.

166 execution.” This meant that state governments that wished to continue killing through capital punishment needed only to revise their laws and execution protocols “to make the death penalty and its execution supposedly less “cruel” and therefore compatible” with the Supreme Court’s ruling and

United States law. In 1976, in ruling on the case Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court validated the revised, less “cruel” laws, and executions began again one year later (Derrida 2013, 54).

These examples at the juridical-legal level of governance over material human action begin and end in the abstract. They center around discourses of what constitutes “cruel and unusual” capital punishment, rather than the continued material practice of capital punishment and therefore its principles as a sovereign material means of negotiating human conduct—principles which Derrida suggests were and continue to be ignored in debates over the death penalty’s continued use. The abstract standards of what constitute any process as “cruel and unusual” is fundamentally dependent on the materially grounded political-social-economic developments of a social formation. As social formations change, so too will the abstract justifications and rationales for various practices as processes in those social formations change. Returning for a moment to Derrida’s discussion on the movement of the guillotine away from the Place de Grève in 1832, he highlights the necessity of examining any social process in terms of its changing spatial political economy. With the move, he states that, what moved away with the material guillotine was feudalism with its specific modes of social control, “the old society with its three pillars, its three columns…the priest, the king, and the executioner” (Derrida 2013, 207). But this change-through-distancing was not absolute because in this process of movement—of a changing mode of production itself in motion—comes an “economy that always proceeds by substitution…this whole economy of substitution or this sublation…plays on, turns round…the little word reste [remains]” (Derrida 2013, 207–8). Here, Derrida, is explaining how the movement of the guillotine, the material means of death, “does not signify the disappearance of order” because “there is what leaves, moves away, disappears…but there is what remains and replaces or

167 relieves, advantageously, what is lost…what counts is the remainder.” Indeed, new but related material means of social order subsume the remains, the physical spaces and relation to humans and human bodies—and this process of subsumption allows new ‘priests,’ ‘kings,’ and ‘executioners’ to advantageously capitalize on now abandoned pillars.

Given the excursions I made in discussing the abstract judicial and legal arguments over how capital punishment is carried out in the United States, I feel that it is clear examining how the process has developed in this way cannot provide an overly fruitful critique of and argument against its continued practice. However, this brief examination does offer—as the paragraph which led to an indication of what remains after subsumtive transitions in social formations and resulting movement and adjustment of the social organization of spatial relations showed—a means to examine and critique capital punishment from the standpoint of its changing material practice. Therefore, I suggest that to more thoroughly understand the development of capital punishment in the United States, it is important to examine its material changes in terms of the changing modes of capitalist production in the

United States as this will illuminate how social relations are differentiated and valuated as they change.

The next section will proceed by examining capital punishment in motion both in terms of its existence as a material practice, and in terms of its relational movement in space, in that it functions as a mode of producing dead bodies reflective of the changing logics of differentiation and valuation.

Changing Modes of Capital Punishment in the United States

Technologies play an important role in human development in terms of how humans interact with the material world around us at both the scale of everyday life and more exceptional levels. “Just as technology is constructed through social relations, society is shaped by this socially produced technology as well, all the way to the dimensions of space and time which serve to bracket human experience,” writes Scott Kirsch (1995, 532), alluding to a dialectic mode of interpreting the relations between technologies, social formations, and space. In the United States and many other states, the capitalist

168 values endemic to such a social formation come into view when technologies are seen “as a mediating force in the production of space commensurate with the processes of production and social reproduction” (Kirsch 1995, 532). As a mediating force between human and non-human actants, understanding how technologies change can provide us with crucial insights into persistent socio- political relations of domination as economic structures are constantly (re)mobilized to fix contradictions and inefficiencies in space (Latour 1990). As new technologies develop and work they transform human understandings of their own material relations, causing humans to abstract from concrete experiences new understandings of what those experiences mean.44 Changes in the experience of the execution of capital sentences are no exception. As we saw Foucault (1977, 73, 104) allude to earlier, as state-capitalism develops and becomes pervasive through the 1800s, there is a desire to

‘soften’ the experience of punishment; to change, materially, how it is exacted on the body and therefore how, also, the experience of that punishment is understood by others who experience it materially. A punishment which was once a spectacle, now instead focuses on punishing “exactly enough to prevent repetition” and so directs the developing knowledges and technologies of capitalist mechanizations on “the principle of economy and the measure of its just proportions” (Foucault 1977,

93). Crucially, this shift in punishment “had, by a sort of twin manifestation, to show the crime and at the same time to show the sovereign power that mastered it; in a penality calculated according to its own effects, example must refer back to the crime, but in the most discreet way possible and with the greatest possible economy indicate the intervention of power; ideally, too, it should prevent any subsequent reappearance of either” (Foucault 1977, 93–94). Thus, the observable changes in the modes of punishment in general, and in capital punishment specifically, come from a concern with the measurement of abstract pain caused through the material process of execution, and making that

44 This is not to suggest, however, that the production of technology occurs uniformly in service to capital, but rather that its development is more nuanced (Latour 1987, 223).

169 abstraction knowable (Banner 2003, 170; Sarat 2002, 72). It is from this perspective—one concerned with the dialectic relations between social formations and the production of space, changing technologies as illuminating capitalist logics of valuation, and the experience of human materiality—that

I proceed through an examination of the transitions between four of the remaining legally authorized modes of capital punishment in the United States: hanging, electrocution, lethal gas, and lethal injection. Death by firing squad remains a legal option in Utah and Oklahoma, but the other four have been the most-used modes of state killing, and thus, because of available material, will receive analysis here.45

Hanging

Hanging as a mode of execution existed in colonial America and persisted as the primary legal method of capital punishment in the United States throughout its early history into the late 1800s with

“at least 70 percent” of all people killed by this means, often in public executions (Bohm 2011, 130).

Materially, legal hangings proceed with ropes or cords placed around a person’s neck and the rope hung from any number of objects, such as trees, bridges, specifically built wooden scaffolds or other structures (Miethe and Lu 2005, 38; Banner 2003, 44–46). These rather simple material requirements, along with the knowledge required to tie a knot, are quite likely what has allowed the practice to persist for such an extended period of time—indeed, it was not until the late 1800s in the United States that there was substantial consideration given to “other methods [that] might be better” (Banner 2003, 44).

During hangings where strangulation was the main cause of death, the execution process was a slow one, in the abstract more akin to the torturous executions of feudal times, where the condemned

45 While fewer than 150 civilians have been executed by firing squad in the United States, it has been a method of execution used by the United States military. The process of capital punishment by firing squad operates with a number of executioners, typically four or five, given rifles with one loaded with a blank and at a short distance each fire simultaneously at a target placed over the condemned person’s heart; the condemned is strapped to a chair and wears a covering the obscures their face (Bohm 2011, 131–32). These details speak to the distancing and dissociation between condemned and executioner made possible by these technologies, and in this way this mode of capital punishment shares much in common with others developed under capitalism.

170 died over the course up to 20 minutes (Bohm 2011, 131). The extended public hangings were thought to be more instructive in terms of deterring crime as they supposedly operated as a “symbol of indignity” and were thought “to be particularly degrading compared with more instantaneous and “honourable” forms of execution, such as beheading and the firing squad” (Denno 1994, 679). These distinctions likely remained from the ways in which class distinctions played a role in punishments during feudal times, where beheading was often reserved for those in the upper class (Kronenwetter 2001, 13). Unlike in

Europe, and especially France, in the American colonies and then throughout early United States history until the late 1800s, carrying out executions was “democratized” in that it had to be carried out by “a diffuse group of amateurs” who were very much of the communities in which they operated, often as local sheriffs, with little experience or training in executions (Banner 2003, 38).

Indeed, by the mid-1800s, the desire to carry out capital punishment in increasingly “humane” ways was pronounced, and focused on two fronts: making executions “painless to the condemned…and less visibly troubling to the spectators” (Banner 2003, 169). Additionally, such developments appear to have been welcomed by the relatively inexperienced local law enforcement officials—who oftentimes worked to pass-off the material responsibility to others with bribes—tasked with carrying out hangings that proved to be increasingly variable in outcome and derided by onlookers for their extended induction of suffering (Banner 2003, 39, 48, 170, 176). Banner explains this contradiction—that there was widespread support for capital punishment, but a reluctance from the public and officials to physically carry out the killing—by describing the “tension between the general and the particular” or what we might understand in historical-materialist terms as between the concrete and the abstract.

Here, we can see a clear contradiction appearing in the abstract, about the materialized practices of execution. In a pattern we will see repeated, through technological developments elsewhere in the capitalist social formation, the processes of producing executions will be fixed and contradiction (at least temporarily) absolved.

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An initial technological fix appeared in the case of hangings with the development of chloroform in the 1830s and 1840s, and its subsequent use as an anesthetic during medical procedures. Given these advancements in altering the human ability to sense physical pain, publications in the United States and critics of capital punishment began advocating strongly for chloroform’s use during hangings as a means of avoiding “needless ignominy or cruelty” (Garland 2010, 117; Banner 2003, 170). While anesthetics seem to have been used occasionally during hangings in this period, through the mere presence of such a substance “it became possible to think of pain as something other than an inescapable part of nature” and the scientific production of “new ways of treating biological conditions that had once seemed irremediable” was changing human conceptions of life and death (Banner 2003, 170). With these new attitudes in mind, the highly variable outcomes of hangings became equated with varying levels of apparent pain inflicted upon the condemned. With these connections now produced, attention turned toward the apparent wide range of conditions that could lead to this significant variability; the conditions being the relations between the height the body dropped based on the length of the rope, the rope’s elasticity, the position of the knot relative to the head, the weather, “the tension in the condemned person’s neck muscles, and not least the skills of the hangman” (Banner 2003, 170–71). In these variable conditions, people began accounting for inefficiencies in the hanging process and working through technologies to adjust material relations between rope, scaffold, and condemned body.

Hanging as a preferred method of execution diffused from England to the United States, much like many other political and cultural norms and practices, during the colonial period (Banner 2003, 5;

Robin 1964, 234). By the early 1800s the use of a raised scaffold—where the knowledge and materials for their construction were available—often with a trap door that dropped the body through a platform was commonplace for hangings in the Anglophone world (Garland 2010, 110), and it was in the 1830s that officials began toying with their design in response to observed relational variability (Banner 2003,

171). The object was to both shorten the time until death was achieved and reach death in what at least

172 appeared as painless a manner as possible. As a result of these highly variable conditions, hangings where the body was dropped only a short distance resulted in extended strangulations and drops of a greater distance often resulted in near or total decapitations. Neither outcome was palatable for those involved in the execution or those from the public who observed them (Banner 2003, 176–77).

Adjustments in the distance the body would drop were sought so as to elicit what would later be termed a “hangman’s fracture” where the breaking of the spinal column in or around the neck would cause relatively instant death (Rayes, Mittal, and Rengachary 2011). As the historical work by Rayes, Mittal, and Rengachary (2011, 204–5) explains, adjusting the length of drops in terms of producing an instant fracture was studied in earnest first in Dublin, then part of the United Kingdom, by Dr. Samuel Haughton

(1866) who developed so-called ‘standard’ drop lengths. Haughton explained his reasoning for applying his mathematically based studies on anatomy to the “problem” of botched execution, writing, “it seems to me unworthy of the present state of science to continue a mode of execution which, as at present used, is extremely clumsy and also painful to the criminal” (1866, 8). Haughton’s calculations and preferred distance-to-weight ratio of force exerted on the neck was adjusted continuously over the successive decades and weight-to-drop-length tables were produced (Rayes, Mittal, and Rengachary

2011, 205–6), all while much debate and experimentation ensued amongst medical doctors, academics, and government officials over adjusting the exerted force based on drop length, rope gauge, age and elasticity, and knot design and positioning, among other aspects of hanging design (de Zouche Marshall

1891, 1888; Barr 1888).46 An English government committee formed in 1886 produced a report on the

46 Perhaps most notably in terms of technologic experimentation in England, John J. de Zouche Marshall (1888, 781) published a design for a spring loaded “chin trough” device attached to rope and placed under the chin that would force the head upward and backward, increasing stress on the vertebrae, when the rope was drawn taut by the force of the body dropping. de Zouche Marshall (1888, 780, 782) claimed that the adoption of such a device could increase the pressure required to cause cervical fractures without resorting to longer drops that carried an increased risk of decapitation. Ultimately, authorities were impressed with the device, but did not recommend the adoption of the “mechanical contrivance” on the grounds that it added time in preparing the condemned during the execution process and that there were likely simpler means for achieving the same results. See also: (Rayes, Mittal, and Rengachary 2011, 203–5). In more recent times, there has been a number of articles appearing in

173 most efficient means of carrying out execution “in a becoming manner without risk of failure or miscarriage in any respect” which, after collecting and examining evidence, “made recommendations about the length of drop, improvements in the apparatus, and the adoption of preliminary tests and precautions” (Garland 2010, 110). From this report, the state went about standardizing drop lengths, scaffold design, and rope type. Most notably, these adjustments and refinements were the result of work undertaken and put into practice by head public executioners in England, William Marwood and

James Berry, who contributed profoundly to the efficient implementation of longer drops that more consistently elicited more immediate fractures (Robin 1964, 242–44).47 As a result of their efficiency, working successively in the position from 1872 to 1891, they experienced “exceptional” financial success at this moment of experimentation and transition (Robin 1964, 239).

Indeed, this transition in the technologies of hanging, centering around the ‘long drop,’ and other standardization measures, coincided with several interrelated spatio-temporally significant political-economic developments in the capitalist social formation at large. First, the Capital Punishment

Amendment Act of 1868 moved hangings inside prisons in England, though government officials, at their discretion, still permitted entry for viewing executions, and oftentimes the public could pay for window spots in buildings that overlooked prison yards (Robin 1964, 251). The despectacularization that resulted from this physical movement allowed Marwood and Berry to “experiment” with the wide variety of possible conditions and material relations of hangings, allowing for a more controlled environment, more exact measurements, and eventually “perfected” ‘long drop’ techniques (Robin 1964, 244). Next, developments in English law provided for the gradual decrease in the number of crimes that carried

medical journals that examine the anatomic causes of death in judicial hangings (Hellier and Connolly 2009; Nokes, Roberts, and James 1999; Spence et al. 1999; Wallace et al. 1994). 47 Starting on page 240 of Robin’s text cited here, he provides an extended discussion of the “semantic” challenges of describing anyone person at any particular time through English or American history as ‘the executioner’ for a particular place, since the frequency of work was variable and the executioner’s geographic extent of their employ was also variable. Despite this, as Robin makes clear, specific figures like Marwood and Berry at times rose to a level of social prominence where they would often be described as ‘the executioner’ of an area.

174 capital sentences and the possibility of the death penalty (Robin 1964, 240). This resulted in smaller towns and municipalities no longer finding it economically viable to employ a dedicated executioner.

Finally, throughout the late 1800s there were significant improvements in transportation infrastructure.

Specifically, the development of more geographically extensive railways and decreases in travel time hastened the move away from permanent or even part-time executioners for smaller and more remote municipalities (Robin 1964, 240). This allowed for more experienced and in-demand executioners to effectively service a greater area—indeed, “smaller towns found it more economical to employ one of the executioners by the City of London, and pay him on a piece-work basis.” The city of London executioner before Marwood was the first to have a geographically “rather extensive business,” however with the two previously stated developments having taken a more significant hold by Marwood and Berry’s time, they were each able to make a living solely as executioners.

This confluence of political-economic developments saw the rampant centralization and standardization of hangings. Indeed, the process of ‘discovering’ the drop norm—producing a normalized drop curve through the use of statistical sampling and abstract mathematical calculations centering around the length of rope, and the resultant distance a body would be dropped, and the weight of the body—was one made possible by the spatial restructuring of the political-economic landscape of execution. From the perspective of officials and the public, what needed to be discovered was the middle ground between excessively painful strangulation events and spectacularly gruesome decapitations. This middle ground was found by secluding the event itself inside prisons, leading to the development of abstract measurements the could produce ‘humane’ killings. This, in turn, meant executioners who could consistently produce ‘humane’ killings through their mastery of abstract measures were sought out. Advantageously, with the use of improved transportation networks, these executioners entered geographically wide-ranging exchange relations where they could sell their knowledge of the relations between human vertebrae, rope, and scaffold.

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Experimentation and eventual consolidation through centralization, standardization, and improved efficiency were not isolated to England—these phenomena played out in the United States as well.48 Through similar concerns over the ‘inhumanity’ of public executions continual adjustments were made to hanging processes and the material apparatuses of scaffold and rope throughout the 1800s and into the early 1900s (Banner 2003, 171–77). It was a time perhaps best characterized as one of trial and error in the United States as relatively inexperienced practitioners experimented with the means of hanging, leaving a trail continually gruesome results picked up and exploited by news publications

(Linders 2002, 637). In terms of adjusting the technical means of hanging, a number of mechanical contraptions—often set in motion from a distance through movement of ballasted weights—which could at best be described as overly complex and non-replicable; while they were affective in producing relatively efficient hanging executions, they were little more than technical novelties and still caused many of the same undesirable outcomes posed by simpler means of hanging (Banner 2003, 173–75). In

1905 Popular Mechanics magazine lauded Francis Barker’s invention of an electrically controlled trap door that allowed the condemned, with the use of a simple button attached to the thigh and electromagnet system, to drop themselves to commence the hanging (Popular Mechanics 1905, 712; see also: Banner 2003, 174).49 It was a hanging system Barker invented for his own execution, and which

“was readily accepted by the warden.” Principally, these mechanical contraptions served a contrived purpose in that more often than not their construction was in an attempt to further visibly remove the

48 There appears to be sufficient evidence to suggest that throughout the 1800s there was shared knowledge on the variable practices of hangings and their outcomes based on those practices between the United States and England (Haughton 1866, 8–11). This seems to suggest that the hanging processes directed at improved efficiencies discussed here developed conterminously in both countries. 49 Popular Mechanics, in several other issues, runs pieces on: another hanging execution device in an El Paso, Texas jail, which allowed the warden to simply oversee an automated hanging simply by exiting the room after preparing the condemned, locking the door and setting a timer which opens a trap door (Popular Mechanics 1917, 483–85); the Animal Rescue League of Boston’s “electrical cabinets” used to kill animals so that they “endure no suffering” (Popular Mechanics 1916, 562–64); an image of a long gibbet in Tripoli where 14 “Arabs” have been “hung by the neck instead of shot” in the city’s bread market because it provided “more of an object lesson to the natives” (Popular Mechanics 1912, 428).

176 local sheriffs-turned-executioners from the often unpleasant spectacles—many of these devices, quite publically, put the onus on setting them in motion on the condemned person themselves.

Much like in England, the gradual move away from public executions in the United States facilitated these attempted innovations in hanging. Linders (2002, 616) describes this gradual process of

“privatization” in the United States as “more gradual and varied than in most Western European nations—from Rhode Island in 1833 to Missouri in 1937” (Banner 2003, 154–55, 343–44).50 This meant that throughout this time period, executions were also varying degrees of private where in some states prison wardens and other officials maintained discretion over who could be present and in what capacities. Additionally, this meant hangings of the public, semi-public, and private, held inside prisons, variety occurred in some states within the United States while in other states other modes of execution were being developed or utilized, such as firing squads, electrocution, and lethal gas. The general pattern of this movement into prisons began with northeastern states in the mid-1800s—with the practice completed for states north of the Mason-Dixon line by 1860, along with Mississippi, Alabama,

Delaware and Georgia—while states further west gradually did the same as the country’s population center moved west, and southern states slowly did the same through the late 1800s and early 1900s

(Banner 2003, 343–44; Bowers, Pierce, and McDevitt 1984, 46–47). Several notable exceptions to this gradual movement demand attention here. Both Georgia and Mississippi “reauthorized local officials to conduct public hangings” around 1900 (Banner 2003, 155), though that practice ended in Georgia with the installation of its electric chair at the state penitentiary in 1924 (Bowers, Pierce, and McDevitt 1984,

427), and in Mississippi execution were made non-public with the use of a mobile electric chair in 1940

(Goins 1942, 94), and then centralized with the installation of the lethal gas chamber at the state penitentiary in 1955 (Bowers, Pierce, and McDevitt 1984, 449). In 1901, Arkansas, “giving a clear signal

50 Banner’s account of this gradual privatization of executions cited here states that Connecticut was the first to do so in 1830. Besides this discrepancy with Linders’ account, the patterns described by both authors are analogous.

177 that government officials had differing expectations for” African-Americans, abolished public hangings in the state, except for the crime of rape—a crime for which whites were almost never arrested or prosecuted, and for which “capital punishment was largely limited to” African-Americans (Banner 2003,

155). This racist policy continued even after Arkansas consolidated executions in the state penitentiary with the use of an electric chair in 1913—three African-American men, Owen Davis in 1913, Will King in

1914, and Arthur Tillman in 1914, were executed by hanging by local authorities in the counties where they had been convicted of murder (Bowers, Pierce, and McDevitt 1984, 403–4, 407). Similarly to

Arkansas, Kentucky had abolished public hangings in 1880 but in 1920 reinstituted the practice at the discretion of local officials only for the crimes of rape and attempted rape (Banner 2003, 155). Here,

Banner explains that according to Kentucky politicians, “electrocution inside the state penitentiary…would not be adequate to deter rapists.” Of the nine individuals who were publically executed by hanging after 1920 in Kentucky, eight were African-American (Bowers, Pierce, and McDevitt

1984, 443–44). The last public hanging in the United States was carried out in Kentucky in 1936; the condemned, Rainey Bethea, an African-American, “was charged only with rape (despite having also committed murder)” specifically “so that his execution could be conducted in public view” (Steiker and

Steiker 2016, 25, 2012, 219). Bethea was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky where, Banner (2003, 156) notes, an estimated crowd of between 10,000 and 20,000 watched; the city’s “hotels were so full that thousands had to camp out overnight at the execution site. Hot dog and drink vendors set up near the gallows…before Bethea had been pronounced dead, souvenir hunters tore off pieces of the hood that covered his face.” Press described the event as having a carnival atmosphere; it would be two more years before Kentucky abolished public executions for any crime.

Also like England, in the United States there was a gradual decrease throughout the 1800s in the number of crimes that carried the possibility of execution (Garland 2010, 115–16); however, even as sheriffs and local authorities were increasingly disinterested in carrying out hangings themselves, these

178 coalescing phenomena did not lead to the consolidation of execution services in a singular individual

“expert” who traveled the United States, but for a few regional practitioners hired by state officials

(Banner 2003, 176). Instead, many states gradually centralized authority to carry out executions to the state level, often in the designated state penitentiary, rather than the county or community level between 1864, when Vermont was the first state to make this change, and the mid-1900s (Banner 2003,

176–77; Linders 2002, 615; Bowers, Pierce, and McDevitt 1984, 43; Bowers, Carr, and Pierce 1974).

Garland (2007, 117) explains, more generally, that this movement was “prompted by the growth of state prisons and by the administrative centralization that occurred after the Civil War” where “states increasingly insisted that all executions within their boundaries “be performed under state authority at a single state facility.”” Changing the site of executions to a specific consistent location was aided by the transitioning of modes of execution away from hanging (Bowers, Pierce, and McDevitt 1984), but also in the case of Connecticut, the implementation of an automated gallows in 1894 at the state penitentiary

(Woodbridge 1895; see also: M. Clark 2008) and more broadly an “upright jerker” hanging machine used in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, South Carolina, and Massachusetts (Garland 2010, 117).

Despite these technological advances made in hanging that did improve efficiency, the United

States was perhaps too large and growing too fast for knowledge and full-scale implementation of these changes to diffuse completely; even after delocalization and privatization efforts in states where hanging was used, the method was still seen as too variable and considered inhumane in some places as early as the late 1800s (Garland 2010, 116–17). Garland (2010, 118) poses a provocative question in terms of the transition from hangings to new modes in the United States, considering why the movement to abandon the traditional method of hanging in favor of new methods, like electrocution and lethal gas, came first at the expense of continuing to try to improve it in northern and western states. He suggests the considerable increase in lynching—often, but not exclusively with the use of rope and hanging as these technical implements needed for and knowledge of their use to produce a hanging

179 were readily available—of African American and other non-white people in the South throughout the

Reconstruction era in the late 1800s caused hanging to fall out of favor with government officials in the

North and West (Garland 2010, 118–19, 2005b). Garland cites the over 1,000 reports of lynchings in the

New York Times throughout the late 1800s, and the significant increase of spectacular lynchings that garnered national attention in the 1880s, as motivating factors that pushed New York state authorities in 1885 to begin reviewing modes of execution to find an alternative to hanging. The New York

Commission on Capital Punishment’s report to the state’s legislative body in 1888 alluded to the need to distance state sanctioned killings from those undertaken by riotous mobs, writing: “the strong and general prejudice among cultured or high-minded persons against executions by hanging has undoubtedly been fostered by the multitude of accounts which have been published of such scenes which have occurred, not necessarily connected with the death penalty” (1888, 55). This statement indicates both the commission’s distaste for lynchings and for state sanctioned public execution hangings which were still carried out through much of the United States at this time. Garland (2010,

119) concludes that “it was not that hanging techniques were beyond improvement…it was that in parts of America the social meaning of the noose had been spoiled.”

With these details now laid out, we can see how the steady technological-material development of hanging as a mode of execution as influenced by developments within the capitalist social formation.

The combination of applying scientific methods and capitalistic logics of efficiency greatly influences both the technologic practice itself and the varying spatial distribution of the practice. These developments greatly influenced the social organization of capital punishment as a political-economic practice and laid the foundation for subsequent modes of capital punishment which appeared as hanging was decreasingly used to kill.

Electrocution and Lethal Gas

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Two modes of capital punishment that appeared in the United States in the increasingly industrialized context of the late 1800s and early 1900s were electrocution and lethal gas. This section begins with brief descriptions of each execution process. Then, an examination of the initial implementation of each mode of execution in different parts of the United States. Finally, the section ends with an analysis of the processes and their gradual decline in use through the transition to lethal injection. In the case of the administration of both electrocution and lethal gas to enact state killing, when states adopted either of these methods centralization and privatization in prisons was required because of increased technologic and infrastructural needs.

The process of electrocution begins with the condemned person being led into the death chamber where they are instructed to sit in a chair where belts around the head, chin, chest, legs, and arms fasten them to the chair. “Electrodes are placed on shaved locations on the person’s head and legs” and the electrodes placed on the head have a sponge moistened with salt water to aid with conductivity (Harding 1996, 166). Then the electrical system is activated and an electric current passes between the two electrodes through the body. Typically, two or three rounds of high voltage electricity were used with the periods of time in between filled with the application of continuous lower voltage

(Banner 2003, 194). After this cycle is complete, an attending physician checks for signs of life, such as a heartbeat or other reflexes; in the case that a sign of life is detected the cycle is repeated and the condemned checked again for as many cycles as is needed to produce no signs of life and, ostensibly, death (Harding 1996, 166; Hillman 1993, 747). In the 1990s, for example, Virginia Department of

Corrections personnel describe the electrocution processes, writing: the electrical machine delivers approximately “1825 volts for 30 seconds then 240 volts for 60 seconds. There is a pause of five seconds, then the cycle is repeated. The equipment…is operated for a total of three minutes. The cycle was designed to render the condemned brain dead within the first few moments. The function of the remainder of the cycle is to stop the heart so that a physician can certify that death has occurred”

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(Denno 2002, 257). This contemporary account from state corrections personnel suggests that the voltage and duration cycle is designed to cause a specific series of bodily events (unconsciousness and a stop to heart function) that leads to death, however there is no evidence to suggest any particular pattern of specific voltages leads to such an orderly outcome as described (Denno 1994, 630; Hillman

1993, 747–48; R. K. Wright and Davis 1980; Gardner 1978, 125–26). Rather, the complex patterns of alternating voltages and durations were tested and refined throughout the early 1900s in an attempt to produce two outcomes: the short high voltage periods were an attempt to cause unconsciousness, and the longer periods of shorter voltage in between “were intended to keep the heart, brain, and lungs paralyzed” to avoid burning the body, thus mutilating it, during the high voltage intervals (Banner 2003,

194).

As the adjustments to voltage amounts and duration cycles suggests, and much like with the technical improvements made to hanging, electrocution required trial and error to find the middle ground between causing only unconsciousness and causing death only after burning and damage to the body of the condemned—indeed, experiments were conducted on animals and adjustments made with each successive human execution (Banner 2003, 182–83). The increasing technical demands of this mode of execution required specialized knowledge and in many states that used this method, prison electricians not only built the chairs but also became de-facto executioners as they maintained an understanding of the necessary electrical mechanics (Banner 2003, 194–95). In many states the requirement of specialized knowledge further centralized and privatized executions in state prisons, moving them further both literally and figuratively away from the public at large and the communities in which the alleged crimes of the condemned took place (Banner 2003, 196, 206–7). With increased centralization and the requirements for specialized knowledges, and the diffusion of such knowledge, the process of capital punishment by electrocution became increasingly routinized. Despite the routinization of the process, common mistakes occurred, especially when new or temporary

182 executioners were on the job (Banner 2003, 195). If voltages were too high for too long a duration or implemented with too high a frequency, the body would not be able to cool off; this would result in the electrodes heating up the body causing fires, and swollen and busting tissue (Banner 2003, 195; Hillman

1993, 747–48). Because of the variability in terms of voltages, their particular durations and cooling periods, and conductivity issues which could be dependent on a number of factors—such as the particular condemned individual’s body, the preparation of the saline sponges, the age and disrepair of the electrical equipment—precise cause of death is rarely consistent during state-authorized electrocutions. Possible causes of death range from “asphyxia caused by paralysis of respiration” to

“ventricular fibrillation” of the heart to “heat denaturation of the respiratory centre in the medulla” in the brain (denaturation is the breakdown of proteins in cells due to an external stressor such as heat)

(Hillman 1993, 748).

Two notes from specific moments in the use of the electric chair merit brief discussion in terms of the spatial diffusion of knowledge and site of executions. First, as the use of electrocution as the sole method of state killing spread throughout the United States “prison officials from the later states to adopt the chair traveled to the earlier states to learn how to construct and operate the necessary equipment” (Banner 2003, 190). In 1913, Indiana Department of Corrections employees traveled to New

York and Ohio—the first two states to implement the electric chair in 1890 and 1896, respectively—to make “sketches of electric chairs” and returned to Indiana where “they had Indiana prisoners use the components of the state prison’s defunct gallows” to construct the state’s electric chair (Banner 2003,

190). Second, Mississippi, and for a brief time Louisiana, utilized a portable electric chair from 1940 to

1955 (Banner 2003, 193–94). The initial cost of portable electric chair was $4,000 including the truck that carried it, an electric generator, a switchboard to control the generator, and 600 feet of cable to attach the generator to where the chair would be set up in each county jail’s death chamber (Goins

1942, 94). Former convict, and executioner Jimmy Thompson traveled the state killing condemned

183 individuals for $100 per execution with travel and accommodation expenses paid by the state (Goins

1942, 93). The mobile electric chair ceased to be used when Mississippi installed a lethal gas execution chamber at the state penitentiary and began using it in 1955 (Bowers, Pierce, and McDevitt 1984, 449).

The process of capital punishment by lethal gas developed in a similar manner to that of electrocution. Like electrocution, in many states it replaced hanging, the first being Nevada in 1924.

Colorado and Arizona adopted the method in place of hanging in 1933, and Wyoming in 1935, California,

Missouri and Oregon in 1937, and Maryland in 1955 all followed, while North Carolina (1935),

Mississippi (1955), and New Mexico (1955) all switched from electrocution to lethal gas (Bohm 2011,

135; Banner 2003, 199). Banner (2003, 199) writes that “when most of these states abandoned hanging they jumped straight to the latest technology” and “as a result, the gas chamber was entirely a western and southern phenomena” in the United States. In terms of the initial use of lethal gas in Nevada and its constitutionality vis-à-vis cruel and unusual punishment statutes, one commentator wrote that “if the

Nevada statute, as it stands, is modern and scientific…it should stand as a leader for the future legislation of other States” (Hartmann 1923, 168).

State-killing through lethal gas begins with the condemned being led into a specially built, air- tight room with at least one chair, a well or drain under the chair, and air ducts to push in and draw out air. Prior to this, a member of the execution team has placed a mixture of acid (typically sulfuric acid) and water in a bucket under the chair (Bohm 2011, 135). The condemned is strapped to the chair by members of the execution team who close the door behind them as the exit the chamber. Shortly after they exit, one member of the team activates a mechanism that drops or lowers cyanide pellets into the mixture beneath the chair which causes gas fumes to fill the room (Denver, Best, and Haas 2008, 239;

Bohm 2011, 135–36; Banner 2003, 202). Typically, it took less than two minutes from the time the execution team exited the room before it was filled with gas (Bohm 2011, 136). In the case of

California’s process, the condemned was fitted with a stethoscope over their chest which was connected

184 to a tube which reached outside the chamber, allowing the attending physician to listen to the heartbeat and report a precise time of death (Bohm 2011, 135). The body would be left in the sealed room for a period of time to ensure it was saturated with the gas, even after a heartbeat could not be detected. Then, air ducts pumped out the poisonous air in the chamber, and water was used to flush out the sulfuric acid from the room and body, leaving the room through the drain beneath the chair.

Members of the execution team then entered the chamber and sprayed the body with liquid ammonia to neutralize any remaining gas, before the body was removed. Bohm (2011, 135–36) quotes Clinton

Duffy, “longtime warden of California’s San Quentin prison,” explaining that executioners preferred lethal gas to hanging “because he didn’t feel so directly responsible for the death of the condemned.

Death by lethal gas was more mechanical, which made it less personal.” Bohm (2011, 136) also provides an account of the 1979 execution of Jesse Bishop in Nevada that explains how three members of the execution team each flipped switches simultaneously on a machine that lowered the cyanide pellets into the sulfuric acid beneath the chair, and “only one of the switches was live, so none of the guards knew which one would kill Bishop.”

The process, including the notable pattern of the effects the gas on the body, became one of mundane routine “conducted by prison employees who gained experience with each new person they executed” (Banner 2003, 202). Early on the pattern was clear enough that, for example, Missouri provided attending physicians a form on which “he noted the time each step in the execution had been reached. The steps were so standard that they were printed on the form, with blanks for the times”

(Banner 2003, 202). Here, Banner provides a listing of the form filled out for the 1949 execution of

George Bell, which I have reproduced below with quoted text in italics; even the bodily movements as the condemned asphyxiates are predictable:

Prisoner Entered Chamber 12:01 A.M. Doors Closed 12:06 Pellets Released 12:07 Gas Strikes Face 12:07:05

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Head Falls Forward 12:07:30 Head Falls Backwards 12:07:35 Apparently Unconscious 12:08:10 Muscular Movement Apparently Stopped 12:10 Respiration Apparently Stopped 12:12 Head Falls Forward 12:18 Blower Started 12:25 Chamber Doors Opened 12:44 Body Removed 12:45:10 Pronounced Dead 12:46

Time sheet records for each execution in Missouri were recorded and filed, and the predictability of bodily movements during death-by-lethal gas, and other examples such as the use of a long-distance stethoscope in California and thorough cleansing of the post-mortem body with ammonia, gives this mode of capital punishment a distinctly clinical feel (Banner 2003, 202).

These two modes of execution, electrocution and lethal gas, required different types of knowledge and expertise on the part of the executioner and execution team. Electrocution maintained the need for specialization, which was a carryover from long-drop hangings. Despite the specialized electrical engineering knowledge required, the work of executioner could still be carried out by an experienced election often already employed and working as a regular, everyday electrician at the prison. Execution by lethal gas, on the other hand, required no specialized mechanical knowledge.

Rather, it required simply the discipline to repeat the necessary tasks—from checking the chamber for leaks before the execution to cleaning the body with ammonia afterward—in an orderly repeatable manner. In terms of the work necessary on the part of the executioner or execution team, the process of killing is rendered in abstract time, and the death occasioned and prescribed. With the development of electrical cycles determining voltages and intensity durations, and the implementation of an execution team approach to producing a predictable pattern in the use of lethal gas, both of these methods streamlined the execution process, solidifying its routinized movements through logics of efficiency. It could be said, then, that capital punishment anywhere in the United States played out in an abstractly

186 equivalent way with each successive execution. In these ways, both modes of capital punishment built upon developments in hanging and enhanced them in advance of the adoption of lethal injection.

Electrocution and lethal gas, to a greater extent, increased the literal distance between the condemned and the executioner during the execution process. During electrocutions, the executioner, witnesses, and condemned were all in the same room, but the room had to be relatively large to contain the necessary equipment and provide enough space between the electrified chair and those overseeing the process. Lethal gas chambers increased the distance. While the gas chambers themselves were quite small, they had to be completely sealed and observation was restricted, typically, to only a few small windows that looked into the chamber. This distance was also immaterially enhanced by the specific material ways in which each mode killed. In hangings, the executioner, had to manually place the noose around the neck of the condemned, and then in close proximity to the scaffold, activate a mechanism and the condemned immediately dropped to their death. Material cause and effect, in this case, was both obvious and immediate. The electricity that ultimately killed the condemned was itself invisible— though its effects were seen in convulsive bodily movements—meaning there was less immediate connection between the activities of the executioner operating a switchboard in one part of the room and the reactions and ultimate death of the condemned. This figurative distancing effect was enhanced more so with the use of lethal gas, as clearly nobody else is in the room with the condemned when the lethal gas is released—by all appearances, the gas merely emanates from beneath the chair and quickly fills the room. Additionally, here there is rarely a single ‘executioner’ in the traditional sense. Typically, the prison’s warden oversees the processes and an execution team of several prison staff is required to carry out the various work tasks. Given these requirements, and the sequestration of the condemned at their time of death, it could be said that the execution team work happens entirely ‘behind the scenes.’

Lethal Injection

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In 1972 the United States Supreme Court ruled, after overseeing a group of cases called Furman v. Georgia, that the death penalty was unconstitutional as it violated the Eighth Amendment, which contains the cruel and unusual punishment statute (Banner 2003, 231). The process that led up this ruling came after years of litigation by the Legal Defense Fund’s civil rights lawyers, which in part led to a moratorium on capital punishment beginning in 1967 (Garland 2010, 218–19). Within a year after 1972, however, states began sentencing individuals to death again to test the Supreme Court’s decision of capital punishment’s unconstitutionality, and these death sentences eventually culminated in the

Court’s Gregg v. Georgia decision in 1976 (Garland 2010, 258). This case was one of a group of five cases heard by the Supreme Court in 1976, the other four being from Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and

Louisiana. The Supreme Court’s decision upheld the three sentences from Georgia, Florida, and Texas, while striking down the other two. In so doing, it “declared that capital punishment could be constitutionally valid...so long as their processes for doing so conformed to procedural requirements that the Court deemed acceptable” (Garland 2010, 260). In the years following the 1976 decision states legislatures that wished to continue executions “crafted laws and processes that approximated those of the three state systems the Court had upheld. In the decades since…the Supreme Court has overseen the states’ capital processes, engaging in an ongoing dialogue about the proper exercise of the states’ power to put offenders to death” (Garland 2010, 261). The decision in Gregg v. Georgia reauthorizing state killing, Garland (2010, 261) argues, “marked the start of an effort by the Court to rationalize and civilize the American death penalty” but it was a process that would not have been possible without the

1972 Furman v. Georgia decision “that moved death from the political and moral arena to the constitutional realm” which “in subsequent decades come to have the effect of entrenching the institution [of capital punishment] rather than ending it” (Garland 2010, 219).

It was in this wider political context that the mode of capital punishment called lethal injection came into existence in Oklahoma in 1977. Yet, while it was this political context in which the Oklahoma

188 legislature sought to kill again, its adoption of an as-yet-unused mode of capital punishment was economically motivated. Specifically, the decade long moratorium on executions meant that the state’s electric chair had not been used in 1966 and the projected $62,000 expense of returning it to working order was deemed too expensive (Bohm 2011, 137). Lethal gas as a mode of capital punishment was also rejected give the estimated $300,000 cost of constructing a gas chamber. Implementation of lethal injection, on the other hand, was estimated to cost less than $15.00 per execution (Bohm 2011, 137).

Several states, including Texas, were quick to follow Oklahoma in the adoption of lethal injection as the official mode of capital punishment, and throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and through 2000 when Florida became the last state to adopt this method, all other states followed, with many retaining one or more of the other for methods should lethal injection not be possible (Bohm 2011, 138). Texas was the first state to execution a capital sentence with lethal injection in 1982 (Garland 2010, 118).

The lethal injection itself functions through the intravenous injection of one to four chemical drugs at a dosage designed to stop the heart—the three chemicals most often used are an anesthetic to cause unconsciousness, usually sodium thiopental or sodium pentothal; pancuronium bromide which is a muscle relaxant designed to paralyze the lungs; and potassium chloride to induce cardiac arrest (Bohm

2011, 136–37). Other similar drugs in varying combinations have been used since 1982 and “there is no uniform policy for conducting lethal injections among executing jurisdictions (Bohm 2011, 139). Despite the lack of uniformity there are broad similarities in terms of the ways lethal injections happen in the

United States. What follows are two accounts of contemporary lethal injection execution processes presented with a focus on human interaction with the material instruments of capital punishment.

Throughout, attention is paid to the roles that capitalist logics of efficiency and the implementation of

(scientific) knowledge play in the process of increasingly distancing the work of executing, and those who carry out that work, from object of that work, the condemned body.

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Details of the process of execution in a death chamber can be gleaned from the transcript of a radio documentary broadcast from October 12, 2000 titled “Witness to an Execution.”51 It was produced for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered by Stacy Abramson and David Isay, and it provides first- hand accounts of experiences and processes of executions in the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, in Huntsville, Texas, north of Houston; often the prison is referred to as the “Huntsville Unit.” It is where the state’s “death house” is located and all executions in the state have been processed there since

1924 (Abramson and Isay 2007, 145). Prior to 1924 “men under death sentences were kept in the same county jails they stayed in during their trails, and when the appeals ran out they were hanged by local officials” and it was not until the electric chair was produced and put to use in 1924 that capital punishment processes for the state became centralized in the Huntsville Unit (Jackson and Christian

1980, 3). I will quote several key figures from the transcript, they include: Jim Willett, Warden of the

Huntsville Unit at the time and director of executions; Terry Green, a Captain at the prison and member of the execution team; Kenneth Dean, a Major at the prison and member of the execution team. All three have participated in numerous executions, Green having participated in 31, Willett having overseen 75 at Huntsville, and Dean approximately 120. Willett describes that death house is in a corner of the prison complex and is “a small brick building with eight cells and a death chamber” (Abramson and Isay 2007, 146). Most days, he says it is “empty and quiet” and that “death row is actually located about forty miles east” in another prison; condemned prisoners are transported to the Huntsville Unit’s death house on the day the execution is scheduled, usually early in the afternoon, and are placed in a locked cell. At 2:00 p.m. the condemned prisoner is allowed a phone call, at 3:00 p.m. a “visit with his attorney and his spiritual advisor,” at 4:30 p.m. he receives his last meal. At 6:00 p.m. supervisors at the

51 The following information about the radio documentary broadcast is derived from the following sources, which include a transcript of the show (Gross 2000; Abramson and Isay 2007, 145–52). Some details about the Huntsville Unit’s death house appear thanks to first-hand accounts, interviews, and field work conducted in the late 1970s by Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian (Jackson and Christian 2012, 1980).

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Huntsville Unit receive calls from the “governor's office” and the state “attorney general’s office” confirming that officials should proceed with the execution. From here, two processes play out. The first process is to bring the prisoner into the death chamber and secure him there. The second process involves preparing the prisoner’s body for the lethal injection, which was the particular mode of execution in Texas at the time and still is today, and then administering it. This is all while specific groups of people are moved in and out of and round the death chamber and its adjacent rooms. Below I will detail the first process, then the second, while providing an assessment of the socio-spatial relations that encapsulate both.

Willett unlocks the cell and leads the prisoner to the death chamber where he instructs the prisoner to “sit down on the gurney and then lay his head down on [the] pillow.” At the time when the prisoner lays down on the gurney the restraining straps are undone, and Willett says that “within probably thirty, [or] forty-five seconds the officers have him completely strapped in.” Dean and Green are both members of the “tie down team” at the Huntsville Unit and in their initial comments describe the material actions that begin the execution process. Dean describes the process of affixing the prisoner to the gurney saying, “each supervisor is assigned a different portion--like we have a head person, a right arm, left arm, right leg, left leg. And the right leg man will tell him, “I need you to hop up onto the gurney. Lay your head on this end, put your feet on this end.” Simultaneously while he’s laying down the straps are being put across him” (Abramson and Isay 2007, 146–47). Green describes his role on the tie down team working with the left arm. He states that, “what I do, I will strap the offender’s left wrist. And then there are two belts--one that comes across the top of his left shoulder--and then another goes right straight across his abdominal area.” Dean speaks to the calculated economy of movement mentioned earlier by Willett, also invoking abstract time, saying, “usually within about twenty seconds he’s completely strapped down. Twenty to thirty seconds. I mean, it’s down to a fine art.” Green abstracts from the material process of attaching straps to the gurney explaining that “it’s

191 basically a situation where we just make sure he is secure. That he won’t be jumping up, that he won’t be able to squirm out of the restraints themselves, and that the job can be done—the job being the execution itself.” Dean describes the moments after the tie down is complete, saying, “after all the straps are done [the prisoner] will look at you and they’ll say, “Thank you.” And here you’ve just strapped them into the table. And they look at you in the eye and tell you, “Thank you for everything that you’ve done.” And, you know, that’s kind of a weird feeling.” Both Dean and Green describe the process as a unique job, but one that is just another part of “being a correctional officer” though working on the “tie down team” during executions is voluntary. Green shares a final thought on the process, which transitions us to the second of the two processes when he says, “one thing I am glad of is that we’re not using electric chair. [sic] I don’t think I would want to be part of that. This process here, it’s clinical. The inmate, other than the fact that he’s expired, you don’t know anything has happened to him. And, you know, that’s good” (Abramson and Isay 2007, 147–48).

The tie down process takes less than five minutes and the tie down team leaves after that. At

6:05 p.m. Willett describes how the “medical team” inserts needles to hook up the IVs used for the lethal injection, with one entering each arm; a step that takes “about three minutes” if all goes correctly, which “normally it does” (Abramson and Isay 2007, 148). The medical team leaves the death chamber, leaving just Willett and the prison chaplain, while the prison’s public relations officer escorts various witnesses (families of the prisoner and victim, and members of the press) into two separate, adjacent rooms with viewing windows; this takes no more than a few minutes. A microphone appears from the ceiling for the prisoner to state any last words. When the prisoner is finished with their statement,

Willett, at roughly 6:12 p.m., signals to executioner through the window to a third adjacent room to begin administering the lethal injection. Willett says that the executioner is a member of his staff who directly administers the chemicals, and whose identity is kept secret. Some states use an injection machine that an executioner operates, but in Texas, at this time, the drugs are administered directly into

192 the IV tubes by the executioner using a syringe, all from the adjacent room (Abramson and Isay 2007,

149–50). There are three drugs administered in succession. The first is an anesthetic typically used during most surgeries, the second is a muscle relaxant which causes the diaphragm and lungs to collapse, and the third stops the heart (Abramson and Isay 2007, 150–51). Willett describes that at 6:20 p.m. he (assuming everything has proceeded correctly) calls “in a doctor to examine the inmate and pronounce death” (Abramson and Isay 2007, 152). The doctor uses a stethoscope to check for a heartbeat or a pulse, shines a light in the prisoner’s eyes, and if no signs of life are detected, the doctor declares a time of death which the Willett repeats. Then the death chamber door opens and those inside file out while the witnesses are escorted out of the adjacent rooms and the medical team returns to the death chamber to remove the IVs. Next, the tie down team returns to the death chamber; Green says they “unstrap [the prisoner] and then assist in putting him on the funeral home gurney until such time as he’s wheeled out and that’s the end of the process.” Willett states that “the procedure is almost always over by 6:25, and we’re free to go.”

The next situation that demonstrates some of the material, relational aspects of contemporary execution processes is the case of Frank Thompson.52 After serving as a warden at a prison in Arkansas for five years, in 1994 Thompson interviewed for a job as the superintendent of the Oregon State

Penitentiary in Salem, Oregon. When he interviewed he was asked if could carry out an execution given that sentences of capital punishment were legal in the state, and his position—though at the time of his interview the state had not carried out an execution in over 32 years. Thompson had never carried out an execution, however he stated that he would carry out such an order should it be directed. Roughly 18 months after he was hired and began serving at the state’s top prison he was delivered a death warrant

52 The following account of Frank Thompson is derived from two sources. First, an opinion piece written by Thompson for the New York Times (2016), and second, an interview conducted with Thompson (Judge, n.d.). The interview was conducted by Phoebe Judge for the podcast documentary series Criminal, and any quotes that appear based on the interview appear via my transcription of the audio and elsewhere I summarize portions of the interview for narrative cohesion.

193 from the Oregon governor’s office which dictated that he was “responsible for taking the life of a human being in the name of the public” (Judge, n.d.). The prior execution in 1962 was carried out by use of a gas chamber and since then laws had changed requiring capital punishment by means of lethal injection.

No currently employed law enforcement or government officials in Oregon had ever carried out a death warrant and execution before.

“That meant I had to go in and rewrite the protocols for a lethal injection execution,” Thompson said. “I had to train the staff, including myself. There was no one who had been an executioner. I had to go out and identify someone who was willing to be confidentially identified and perform the execution.

If I had come to Oregon and they had done two or three executions within the past two or three years, I would have called my team together and said, ‘okay folks, let’s get in here and let’s get this thing done.

Let’s get the rulebook out—how did it go the last time, what are the protocols?’ And, I would have had a team of people there to help me pull this off. And if that had been the case, I imagine I could have gone through two, three, four, five executions without it bothering me nearly as soon or nearly as profoundly as it did in having to conduct the first execution for the first time.”

Thompson then describes how he went about writing protocols for a process he had no first- hand experience with. Simply, he went to go watch people be executed, and combined that experience with hands-on learning and detailed historical research.

“A key number of us flew to San Quentin [California] and we witnessed an execution,”

Thompson said. “I flew a colleague of mine from Arkansas to teach me how to administer the lethal fluids so I could train the executioner here in Oregon how to administer the same process. You go to

Texas and tell Texas to ‘send me your protocols.’ And we didn’t want to deviate because Texas was conducting executions quicker and faster than any other state in the country and if we were ever questioned with how did you come up with your protocol…one of the first things I would be able to tell them, ‘well we went to a state that had a history of conducting executions and we used their protocols.’

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So, quite frankly, we pulled from the experiences of primarily Texas and Arkansas to build the protocols for Oregon.”

Thompson describes the process of identifying an executioner and building the execution team as one of the more challenging aspects of the process. He used his past in the military experience— where he was trained to take life—as a starting point.

“I told my assistant superintendent to comb the staffing pattern to come up with the names of as many veterans as we had on staff,” Thompson said. “By definition of the fact that they were veterans

I know they had fired a weapon. By definition I know they had gone through the emotional and psychological process of contemplating and thinking about what learning how to fire a weapon meant.

They had dealt with this whole notion, on a sublevel, of killing somebody. So, the well-being of my staff and some people think this is…doesn’t make sense—but the well-being of my staff actually loomed larger in getting this execution process together, larger than my immediate concern about the person who was to be executed. His destiny was set by law. He was going to be executed. And [it was] my job, to be sure that he would be executed as humanely and as painlessly as possible. And I knew that if I could get my staff through this, the rest would follow course as planned.”

To ease his execution team into the process of killing another human being, Thompson initiated practice routines, and again borrowed from his past experiences.

“We rehearsed over and over and over. And I got that from the military,” Thompson said. “I wanted my staff to be able to perform their tasks detached from the emotions that could become involved. In fact, there was one time I asked them to strap me on the gurney. See, normally they would strap one another, they would take roles and assume the position of the inmate on the gurney and they would tie themselves down or each other down. And during one exercise I asked them to use me as the surrogate inmate to put their minds at ease that I was with them. And I will say…when it came time for them strap me I was never so glad to get up off my back as any time I can remember in my life. And the

195 hour, date and time, I don’t know, but I can remember saying to my assistant superintendent, ‘man, this is not…this is not, what the state ought to be doing.’

“And so, I began sharing with key people—and it was through that meticulous detail—I was sitting in a room with the guy that had been chosen to be the executioner—the one to depress the plunger into the [IV] strand, sending the lethal fluid into the vein of the guy on the gurney. And I’m sitting in the room with a bucket [with him]. We were both sitting on stools, with a bucket sitting between us, and I’m drawing the water into the strand and I’m instructing him to depress the plunger at a rate that, not propelled out of the needle, but at a rate almost equal to that being drawn by the force of gravity, so where it just sort of flows out and is not propelled out. As I was saying those kinds of things to him, I remember that inner feeling that this just doesn’t feel right.”

In the weeks leading up to the execution, Thompson and his staff simulated the entire process repeatedly. This included bringing in witnesses and seating them in the adjacent rooms, simulating the

“phone call from the governor’s office to let them know there was no stay of execution,” they practiced what it “would be like interacting with the press and informing them of time of death and how long it took the inmate to die.” Throughout, Thompson said he reminded staff that they did not need to be involved if they no longer wished to be, but none backed out. On September 7, 1996 Douglas Franklin

Wright was the first person to be executed by lethal injection in Oregon. Besides the difficulties situating the work of the execution team so that the process can be carried out, Thompson’s account belies the importance of producing and diffusing the knowledge of executing in causing the persistence of capital punishment. It is here, through the production of knowledge about how to kill constitutionally for the state, that capital punishment exists most thoroughly in a thought concretized way. And so, recalling

Heynen’s (2015) calls for an abolitionist politics surrounding the production of geographic knowledge about capital punishment, I will conclude this section with the production of knowledge about the

196 material aspects of capital punishment that explicitly politicizes the physical process of contemporary state killing and its capitalist logics.

Moving the Materiality of Capital Punishment Beyond the Death Chamber

These are the material conditions and relations of capital punishment. In the descriptions of the technologies and spaces of capital punishment here, this section has laid out the ‘how’ of capital punishment, the means by which, within capitalist social formations, state-sanctioned punishing and disciplining processes are directed at the result of killing someone. But where do the people who ultimately are punished and disciplined through their killing come from? Who are they and how are they entered into these processes? A general answer is that they come from capitalist societies, the same social formations that occasion and determine the processes that constitute the material relations of their deaths. This means rather simply that the action of execution that constitutes ‘capital punishment’—along with its attendant technologies contained within prison spaces—is by no means self-contained with the physical boundaries and walls, rooms and killing chambers in prisons where the discrete action of killing occurs.

Borrowing from the sub-field of carceral geographies is instructive here as it presents a point where we may re-contextualize capital punishment as a processes that is not self-contained within the death chamber. Carceral geography as a disciplined area of knowledge is directed at understanding various modes of confinement and their spatial arrangements. In so doing, carceral geographers study the social and material circumstances of how living things are confined. Given that confinement is a social phenomenon, any processes of incarceration exist beyond just the specific spaces in which confinement occurs (Gill et al. 2018; see also: Moran 2014; Loyd, Mitchelson, and Burridge 2013; Loyd,

Burridge, and Mitchelson 2009; Moran, Piacentini, and Pallot 2012; Mountz et al. 2013). As such, prisons and other spaces of confinement are very much not self-contained. Instead, they are porous, containing people and objects that move in and out with regularity, and are transformed before and after their

197 presence inside prisons by carceral processes. Given that confinement is a social phenomenon, any processes of incarceration exist beyond just the specific spaces in which confinement occurs. On this point, Turner (2016, 27) explains that prisons are not self-contained—whatever the geographical situations of prisons, there are always “inter-linkages between prisons and society” that “are numerous and complex.” The ways in which prisons are connected to the worlds around them illuminate their porosity. Nick Gill et al. (2018) speak to this idea of prisons-as-porous spaces in economic terms by developing the idea of ‘carceral circuitry.’ They identify the circuits of people, objects, and practices or knowledges, that, pushed and pulled by various structurally embedded exchange relations, move within and beyond prison boundaries. Therefore, it is important to conceptualize both how killing is made to work and how the making of killing work reinforces inequitable social relations within and beyond the death chamber as human consciousness is shaped and altered through the intertwined capitalistic development of the killing technologies and knowledges dialectic.

Following Tyner’s (2011, 28–30) discussion on the distance-decay effect and killing, killing is difficult thing to do, and it is certainly difficult for humans to kill other humans. As with most things, there are both material and abstract challenges that killing another human presents. Generally speaking, the more abstract doing something is the easier it is to do; this is indeed the case in terms of the material distance between two humans where killing occurs. Killing is increasingly difficult at close range where the material and abstract challenges increase with proximity—as opposed to, for example, drone warfare where the killer may deploy explosives from many thousands of miles away. Therefore, since capital punishment remains a fundamental aspect of the American penal system, the question becomes: how is the killing of capital punishment in our contemporary capitalist society made easier—how are the challenges of killing mitigated and the process refined? As we have seen in the empirical examples of the transitions to new modes of capital punishment from feudalism to capitalism, the increased distancing of the executioner-as-implement of the sovereign from the condemned body has been

198 central to the continued practice of state killing. The spatial social organization of the relation between increasing the ease of killing and technologic development can be understood through examining

Lefebvre’s (1991, 344) consideration of machines which draws from Marx. First, he explains that a machine is “a mechanism differing from a simple tool, as from a set of tools brought together in a workshop where both workers and tools are subject to a division of labor.” A machine’s place in capitalism serves to alter human relations in a contradictory way because it “draws energy from a natural source…and uses it to perform a sequence of productive tasks. The worker, instead of manipulating a tool, now serves a machine.” The emplacement of machines in workplaces transforms productive processes by further segmenting labor and existing in a way “organized into an ensemble that is ever vaster, ever more cohesive, ever more unified, and ever more productive.” This is an understanding of technology as co-productive of both a nature external to human materiality and human consciousness—one that suggests that the development of social formations occurs through the ways in which humans exist relative to their material surroundings. Indeed, technology appears as “a process between society and (a socially externalized) nature” that transforms “the boundaries of

‘nature’ within which meaning is constructed” (Kirsch 1995, 535). Prior to the development of the guillotine and the enhancement of hanging techniques under capitalism in the 1800s, capital punishment was enacted through the use of either a single or a series of individual tools. The guillotine, scientific mechanized modes of hanging, the electric chair, the gas chamber, and the lethal injection process each introduce orchestrated machineries to the practice of capital punishment. Successively, they each further divide the human labor necessary to produce a dead body, and call upon “natural” forces to materially produce that death: whether it is the relative weight of the condemned and length of rope to the force of gravity; the generation of electricity conducted and passed through the body; the ingestion of toxic gasses or intravenous chemicals that stop the human cardiac and respiratory systems causing death while the condemned “sleeps.” But of course, as we have seen above, even when these

199

“natural” forces are what is materially acting on the body to cause death, the only way in which they are aligned so as to occasion death is through their organization by human knowledge in social space. The centrality placed upon these “natural” forces which cause death in capital punishment serve to distance the human knowledge and action needed to kill other humans for the sovereign.

This distancing effect brought by the intertwined increasing technologization and implementation of new knowledge systems on capital punishment is enhanced by the conscious internalization of capitalist logics of valuation built on a fetishization of the responsible commodity form.

The so-called ‘responsible’ individual in capitalist society enters into exchange relations to secure the necessities of survival by selling their labor-power, and is thus commodified (Tyner 2016b, 95; Postone

1996, 146, 150). Actions that an individual or group might take that could be termed, in the abstract,

“illegal” given the specific values inherent to a capitalist society and its produced sovereign law, are therefore conceptualized as abstractly irresponsible in comparison to actions of those who congruently sell their labor-power. This connection between abstract (ir)responsibility and (il)legality is tied directly to the privatization of land during the transition to capitalism through the production of the abstract logics of property and criminality (Tyner 2016b, 56). As capitalism developed, the actions of individuals and larger populations with less access to material property, beyond what they possessed in their capacity to sell their labor-power, “were defined more and more as theft” and criminalized (Tyner

2016b, 56). Here, we can see the development of the logics of capitalist responsibility and efficiency.

Those in society who exchange their labor-power for wages with which to purchase the means of survival are conceptualized as productive populations. Conversely, those who utilize their labor-power outside of exchange-for-wage relations (in relations where theft of property occurs or the ability of another person to sell their labor-power for wages in an exchange relation is inhibited) or ineffectively enter exchange relations with their labor-power and therefore variably procure wages-for-survival and resort to other means to acquire them (like those actions mentioned in the prior parenthesis) are

200 conceptualized as non-productive, often criminal, populations, and therefore are redundant, expendable or in need of reform in-line with capitalist value structures. While, ostensibly in the abstract, schools, prisons, courts, and other similar institutions are organized and directed at forming and reforming populations through capitalist value structures and logics, not even all populations understood as “in need of reform” are provided equal access to such institutions. Likewise, such institutions themselves rarely provide equal services, and practices within such institutions operate differently when confronted with populations conceptualized as reformable compared to other conceptualized as redundant and expendable. This reflects capitalism’s indifference to the use values contained in any population’s labor-power and certainly the contradiction displayed in capital’s

“preference” for commoditized populations that are fetishized as productive, if not at least reformable to productivity, as opposed to the labor-power deemed expendable and superfluous in that it does little to facilitate the generation of surplus value (Tyner 2016b, 96–97). Here, we arrive at the notion of surplus populations, which we can then connect to our understanding of the socio-technologic development of capital punishment processes.

Again, following Tyner (2016b, 131–32; 197, 2013) surplus populations can best be understood as those populations in past and contemporary capitalist landscapes who live in variably poor and othered community spaces. These populations are systematically left behind by the value-generative processes of industrial and finance capital, and with unequal access to consistent waged labor and the objects or means of survival, are more susceptible to being caught up within the politico-juridical infrastructure maintained by states. This results in blanket assumptions, often tied to attitudes of indifference that are endemic to capitalist societies, in terms of what ‘criminality’ is, who ‘criminals’ are and where they are from. In short, these individuals are considered both expendable and disposable by capitalist logics of valuation. Thus, the movement of criminals in and out of carceral space, and the execution of criminals in carceral space, is conceptualized either as a social necessity by the wider public

201 or not conceptualized at all given the prevalent indifference toward human life within capitalist societies. Such conceptualizations are therefore held by the very workers in death chambers who are produced by such societies. Simply, prisons and spaces of confinement are porous, containing commodified, fetishized people, objects, and ideas that move in and out with regularity, and are transformed before and after their presence inside prisons by carceral processes.

Therefore, it is important to understand how the social relations within an execution chamber, and the unequal relations of domination and subjugation there, are mediated by the material objects humans interact through and the associated logics and knowledges that come with operating those material technologic objects of capital. Based on the accounts of lethal injection, the work of killing in capital punishment is made abstractly easier today in two related ways. These ways are the routinization of the physical-material aspects of the labor, associated with the hyper-reduction of the work, and the spatial separation and localization of the work. For example, the tie-down team consists of five members, one assigned to each appendage. No single worker must deal with the entire body. There is simply the work of manipulating a single limb in relation to leather straps and metal buckles affixed to the gurney. This both shortens the abstract time needed to complete the work and localizes it. We can see the effects of this division of labor in the comments where corrections officer Green envisions work on the tie-down team as simply securing the prisoner in place; he cognitively separates the physical work of restraining a single portion of the body, from restraining the entire body and ultimately from the rest of the execution process that kills.

The sole focus of the tie-down team is the relation between a head, an arm or a leg and the restraining belts—from the perspective of these individuals, this concrete work is but one practice focused on discrete objects; their overall function in the process of an extended execution is secondary.

The work itself, then, is but an abstraction. In terms of the abstract localization of work, the distance separating prisoner-to-be-executed and executioner also serves to abstract the work involved in

202 administering lethal drugs. Simply, between the body of the executed and the executioner is a wall, a one-way glass window, and many feet of intravenous tubing. The impact of depressing the plunger on the syringe and releasing the lethal drugs is mitigated by the distance the liquids must travel to enter the body and begin working there, on top of the physical barriers separating the executioner from the result of their material actions. If that particular state uses an automated injection machine that activates the syringe, then the work of programming and activating the machine is all the more estranged. The ideas of the division of labor involving the reduction of work to simple, repeatable tasks measured in abstract time, and the geographic separation of workers from the objects of their labor via physical barriers, is knowledge that was not developed within the execution chamber or carceral space exclusively, but rather knowledge that has developed within the structured social and political contexts of capitalist societies, of which carceral space is deeply embedded.

And, this abstraction of the material relations of capital punishment maintains a fundamental, productive relation to how workers in death chambers conceptualize their activity. In every instance, the spatial-temporal relations between worker and prisoner-to-be-executed is minimized at every occasion—the degree of interaction between the condemned and tie-down team, and the medical team is minimal, while the executioner is separated by impassable physical barriers. The only limiting factors in this minimization and distancing is to what degree the social process of producing technologies and associated knowledges from outside carceral space have been put into practice inside the death chamber. Yet, no matter how abstract the material processes of capital punishment become, the completion of the process remains dependent on workers conceptualizing the executed as different enough from themselves to a degree where the workers perhaps see nothing or very little of themselves within the human subject of their work. The abstract reduction of specific instances of labor and the separation of tasks effectively produces degrees of indifference toward the object of labor, but there is additional knowledge brought to the execution chamber by the workers. Those are the fetishized

203 geographic knowledges of sameness and difference reproduced about surplus populations and normative notions of ‘criminality’ within this capitalist society. Here, I will add one more statement from correctional officer Green where he alludes to how he rationalizes working on the execution team— speaking to the indifference of labor in general. He says: “Just another part of doing what I do as a correctional officer. It’s something that the vast majority of the people want done. And so I am one of the few people in the state that is able to play a part in the process” (Abramson and Isay 2007, 147–48).

The more members of an execution team conceptualize their labor as work that is done at the behest of a fully conscious, discerning, and responsibly productive population and enacted against another population produced as ‘criminal’ and thus irresponsibly unproductive, then all the more estranged their labor will be.

Building on Postone’s (1996, 291) notion of “the treadmill effect,” Wendling (2009, 196) triangulations the social relations between humans, material technologies, and consciousness. She describes how notions of a consciously embodied “productive life” are tied to abstract time which

“permeates any environment where the commodity form mediates social relations” and where “activity itself becomes quantifiable and measureable according to a precise scale of minutes, hours, months, or days.” Now, consider correction officer Green’s statements as a member of a voluntary execution team, where all the team members are selling their labor-power for wages; consider that they are at work and being paid, however, the work of killing, in this case, is voluntary. How do these workers have time to do voluntary labor in the process of their workday? A possible answer appears in Marx’s explanation of the creation of abstract disposable time and surplus labor through the implementation of machinery that amplifies the productive force of capital which results in a smaller “fractional part of the working day which forms the equivalent of the worker” (1993, 340; 708). The general implementation of technologies and machines throughout institutions in capitalist social formations mean that workers in general, including those correctional officers on voluntary execution teams, are already working beyond

204 the time that is socially necessary to reproduce their own labor power. And, the implementation of divisions of labor and use of abstract time to divide up actions into discrete timely units further obfuscate and fetishize the material relations between worker and the object of one’s work. Wendling

(2009, 198) explains this fetishized obfuscation, writing, “part of the worker’s vulnerability is that he or she is not given the tools to distinguish when he or she is working to replace his or her own labor-power and when he or she is working to give up surplus value to capital.”

When the execution team does the work of killing, they, unconsciously through their abstracted material actions, reinforce the salience and necessity of producing abstract time and space in which to fix labor-power in exchange relations. Simultaneously, the wage accrued by the execution team for working beyond what is socially necessary “rewards the time for which labor-power has been purchased from someone” and the capital punishment which they inflict on the condemned is “the penalty” that corresponds to a “quantity of liberty” which “is taken as the price of an infraction” (Foucault 2015, 70–

71). Since time in the abstract is the only good possessed within capitalism, what capital appropriates to punish infractions is the time left to live (Foucault 2015, 72), and when the execution team makes killing work in the death chamber, this foremost capital punishment displays capital's foremost means of accumulating of surplus value: the complete control of life through time. The work of killing for the sovereign as capital punishment is always occurring in the abstract time and space where socially necessary labor-time has ended and labor for the production of relative surplus value has begun. As a punishment for ineffectively utilizing one’s labor-power within capitalism, capital punishment that results in death is exceptional both in its valorization of the fetishized logics of the productive/unproductive binary exchange as a technique of differentiation and in its reinforcement of this social formation’s gross indifference to human life and its use values.

As capital punishment is one of many processes that takes place within carceral space, it is very much the case that capital punishment also extends beyond the physical boundaries of where exactly it

205 happens. Simple empirical observation shows us that those who are killed through capital punishment are not all the same nor are they unique; the same could be said for their crimes: how they have transgressed social norms and laws (Harries and Cheatwood 1997). Their similarities and differences come in degrees, and in terms of geography these degrees of difference suggest that, in the United

States for example, those who are more likely to be killed through capital punishment are generally poorer and not-white in terms of race (Inwood 2015; Heynen 2015; Bohm 2011, 278–93; Unah 2011;

Baker 2007; Sarat 2002, 18; Aguirre and Baker 1999). Likewise, the phenomena of capital punishment differs in terms of social class, gender, and age (Bohm 2011, 273–78). From here, there are a variety of possible questions. Generally, do the people who are killed through capital punishment come from similar or different places? To arrive at something of an answer, we must abstract from the concrete materiality of capital punishment and its spaces. Indeed, Foucault is instructive here as he suggests the connections between the material aspects of capital punishment and the capitalist societies that produce the practice in abstract time and space are more than coincidental. He writes: “But the guillotine is really just the visible and triumphant apex, the red and black tip, of a tall pyramid. The whole penal system is essentially pointed toward and governed by death. A verdict of conviction does not lead, as people think, to a sentence of prison or death; if it prescribes prison, this is always with a possible added bonus: death” (2000, 3:419). In many ways, Foucault’s statement suggests that capital punishment is the apex of a broader penal system that is characteristic of capitalist society and infuses human consciousness with outwardly stable categories and differentiations. Foucault (2015, 113) explains how “morality” is made to appear natural and stable through the material exercise of power, writing, “morality does not exist in people’s heads; it is inscribed in power relations and only the modification of these power relations can bring about a modification of morality.” It is clear, then, that articulating and physically altering the inequitable material relations between the sovereign state and the condemned body in socially just ways is the means for ending capital punishment. So-called morality

206 can only be influenced by changing material relations. To change the material relations of capital punishment, and end the practice, humans must change how they exist by refuting capital’s production of abstract time and space.

II. The Formal Political Economy of Capital Punishment

This section works to extend capital punishment ‘beyond’ the bounds of capital punishment space and the literal sites of capital punishment and where those awaiting it are confined. It does so following Castree’s desire for a ‘renewed Marxism’ in geography to employ reflexive dialectics in such a way that more “abstract abstractions” might enhance critiques of capitalist political economy by speaking to the socio-political differentiations which capitalism produces and valuates. Operating through this both/and modality, in this section I develop two more concepts from Marx’s writings, dead labor and alienation, to help us situate capital punishment more thought-concretely as part of this capitalist social formation.

I situate capital punishment in this way through the notion that humans within capitalist social formations are produced vis-à-vis this labor-power as abstract human commodities (Foucault 2015, 145,

196, 1977, 194; Marx 2007, 67, 1990, 271–73, 481, 490, 549–50). This concept builds on the notion of fixing human labor in abstract time and space. The process of this fixity requires humans to subject themselves to the intertwined logics of the state and capital, and operate in a state of docility. I proceed, then, with a question: how are docile human commodities in abstract space put into, and to be understood in, circulation for the production of surplus value and the valorization of the labor process?

To explore this answer we must understand Marx’s concepts of dead labor and alienation. This question and these concepts will be brought to bear in terms of capital punishment as I explore how the efficient and timely production of a dead body valorizes the process of unconsciously submitting to the sale of one’s labor-power for the production of surplus value. Therefore, in a more general sense, I seek an

207 understanding of what the uses of capital punishment are from the standpoint of the sovereign, and how are these uses made palatable or invisible for the populations they effect?

II.I Reanimating Capital Punishment Space – Banking the Living-Dead

Here, I take up Marx’s notions of constant and variable capital as I articulated them in the first section of this chapter and connect them to the concept of dead labor in the context of the work of capital punishment. Marx explained dead labor as roughly equivalent to commodities; as labor-power that becomes embodied in an object as the labor process takes place (1990, 289). Don Mitchell (2000,

761) asks a provocative question, contemplating how we might understand Marx’s explanation of dead labor “in less-than-metaphorical terms.” He asks, “can there be a theory of the geography of commodity production that accounts for labor that is killed, maimed, or assaulted in the course of work. Or is such violence quite literally invisible—in theory and in the landscape?” The work of capital punishment results in death—the production of a lifeless human body. I recast Mitchell’s question thusly: how can we conceptualize the geographies of commodity production that account for labor that kills in the course of the work of capital punishment? To begin to answer this question, I provide an explanation of

Marx’s concept of dead labor, then connect it to his concepts of constant and variable capital in the context of the human-technologic relations found in capital punishment space. I find this process specifically important for, as Mitchell alludes to, the material violence experienced by labor and perpetrated by labor is too often rendered invisible in concrete and representative ways in our capitalist landscapes.

Since, according to Marx, dead labor is commodities within which labor-power is embodied we can see that the concept of dead labor has a dual character in the same way that the commodity exists dialectically. Mitchell (2003b), in a work addressing the political economy of California’s agricultural

208 landscape, challenges the reader to consider more than just the shape and smell, texture and taste of the strawberry. Considering only the surface appearance of the strawberry, Mitchell (2003b, 235) writes,

“says nothing of the labor that makes it; it merely appears as just what it is, a complex biogenetic entity—a berry.” However, as a commodity, as an object, the strawberry embodies the social relations that went into its production. These relations include, the labor involved in cultivating the fields from which it grew; the planting and harvesting of the crops; and the dissemination of the berries to consumers. It is this embodiment of social relations that gives dead labor its dual character in that the work that goes into manipulating the means of production to produce dead labor is reflected back on the human laborer who exchanges their labor-power so that they may reproduce themselves materially to return to work and repeat the production process anew. This is where it could be said that “given capitalist relations of exploitation, the relation between living and dead labor…becomes one where the dead labor dominates” (D. Mitchell 2007, 564). This means the already produced values congealed in commodity objects, which capitalists possess as property, must be activated through the M-C-M process where capitalists exchange wages with workers and direct, and ultimately degrade, the labor-power of the workers at the activation of the exchange values embedded in the capitalist’s commodities; this is the valorization process which leads to the production of relative surplus value (Marx 1990, 251–52,

291–92). Marx (1990, 289) writes that “a machine which is not active in the labour process is useless” unless living-labor is present to “seize on these [commodities], awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real effective use-values.” Marx (1990, 425) illuminates this relation between living labor and the dead labor congealed in machines, writing, “if we consider the process of production from the point of view of the simple labour-process, the worker is related to the means of production, not in their quality as capital, but as being the mere means and material of his own purposeful productive activity.” As a process of valorization, this relation becomes one where "the means of production are at once changed into means for the absorption of the labour of others. It is no

209 longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker” (Marx 1990, 425). More concretely, Marx (1990, 425) writes, “furnaces and workshops that stand idle by night, and absorb no living labour, are ‘a mere loss’ to the capitalist” because “the life- process of capital consists solely in its own motion as self-valorizing value.” This perpetual motion of the means of production and resulting continuous commodity circulation enacted by living labor justifies the continued investment by capitalists in developing mechanized infrastructure. Marx (1990, 302) captures this self-valorizing movement, explaining that the capitalist, “by turning his money into commodities which serve as the building materials for a new product, and as factors in the labour process, by incorporating living labour into their lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorization process, an animated monster which begins to ‘work’, ‘as if its body were by love possessed’.” Ultimately, it is commodities—such as the strawberry, intravenous tubing or wire connecting generator to electric chair—set in motion by living labor that ‘stabilize’ social relations; they are “‘dead labor’, work ossified and made concrete” (Kirsch and Mitchell 2004, 696). Today, Kirsch and

Mitchell (2004, 696) write, “machines…require more than the “dead” labor of machinists or software engineers (that is, other machines) to keep them working, and what is more, they may compel—as conditions and/or as effects—new hierarchies of work to articulate with them and develop around them: dead labor demands fresh living labor.”

Dead labor then, is finished and semi-finished commodities that embody previously exercised labor power. As these ‘dead commodities’ are often sedentary and idle except when they are actively manipulated by living labor. When they are idle, they are not generating value for whatever capitalist entity possesses them as property. The previous labor-capacity that produced that commodity as an object which can be set in motion for the production of surplus value must be reanimated through living-labor. Then, the mechanized dead labor production process realizes the continued use of various

210 commodities by circulating them through a series of exchange relations. The requirement of living labor to reanimate dead labor, thus realizing the previous relation between laborer and commodity, is a significant contradiction through which we may consider dead labor as dialectic. Dead labor is at once both living and non-living; a unity of supposed opposites.

Marx—and by extension Mitchell, Kirsch, and others—establishes an understanding that the labor that produces and embodies commodities—the labor that activates or reanimates dead labor—is itself frequently injured, killed or otherwise degraded in the labor process, hence commodities are repeatedly tied up in a process of becoming dead labor. In other words, living laborers, through the transformation of dead labor, continually become (quite literally) dead laborers themselves. However, we are presented with this unexpected binary between ‘living’ and ‘non-living’ laboring bodies; to counter this supposed binary we must understand dead labor as a relation and this relation is dialectic.

Thus, the liminal figure or threshold object: living-dead labor (Tyner and Colucci 2015).53 That is, those objectified people—most especially the proletariat—who are literally alive (living) but, through their social (re)production in society, are rendered metaphorically dead through vapid inaction, and simultaneously, as in the case of capital punishment, killed through the vapid actions of laborers unconsciously embodying state-capitalist logics. This makes the experience of life in capitalist society

“not one of dying … but neither of living. It is a living death” (Cederström and Fleming 2012, 4).

Taking this explanation of dead labor in concert with constant and variable capital, we can see that the joining together of constant and variable capital in abstract space enacts the production process and results in a dialectic dead labor. Constant capital—as the fixed infrastructure and land of commodities we often term the “built environment” (D. Mitchell 2000, 761; Harvey 1999)—meets

53 I note here that in this instance it should be implied that, just as dead labor is at once the commodity object and the labor that produced the commodity. Therefore, living-dead labor is conterminously commodity, dead and alive; by capitalistic logics, humans are both living material human objects and merely objects possessing the exchangeable capacity for labor-power.

211 variable capital—the living labor bought and moved in contact with the means of production—in abstract space, and in an abstracted amount of time, both produces commodities understood as dead labor which are later realized in subsequent exchanges again as constant capital, and reproduces commodities understood as (living-) dead labor which are later realized in subsequent exchanges again as variable capital. This dual dialectic relation between constant and variable capital and dead and living- dead labor can be seen in the following passages from Marx (1990, 314–15) in his chapter on constant and variable capital. Marx (1990, 314) states that “while productive labour is changing the means of production into constituent elements of a new product, their value undergoes a metempsychosis. It deserts the consumed body to occupy the newly created one. But this transmitigation takes place, as it were, behind the back of the actual labour in progress.” Workers, according to Marx, cannot in the course of the labor process, add new values to commodities without simultaneously doing so through the use and consequent preservation of past values congealed in the commodities that make up the means of production: the value congealed as dead labor in the means of production is valorized while the labor-power of the worker transforms itself into new surplus value. Marx (1990, 315) concludes, writing that “the property therefore which labour-power in action, living labour, possesses of preserving value, at the same time that it adds it, is a gift of nature which costs the worker nothing, but is very advantageous to the capitalist since it preserves the existing value of his capital.” It is in this way that workers are degraded, killed, and enact capital punishments on other humans in the process of their labor which merely reanimates values possessed by capital and the state and which is alien to themselves. Capital and the state thereby manipulate humans-as-variable capital as “living labour for its part ceases to be anything more than a means by which to increase, and thereby capitalize, already existing values (Marx 1990, 988). I now bring these explanations about the relations between humans and state-capital to bear more directly on the issue of capital punishment which fixes certain humans within ensembles of mechanized constant capital and living-dead labor which kill them.

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If constant capital is the infrastructure, built landscape that infrastructure is on, and large immobile machine technology assembled within that infrastructure, we may begin to consider prisons at large and the material technologies of capital punishment as constant capital. As constant capital, the values contained within the technology of capital punishment can only be set in motion and realized when laboring bodies are active them with their labor-power. When this occurs we understand capital as being fixed in place and the production process can begin. With the development of capital punishment technologies—from the guillotine, to hanging, electrocution, lethal gas, and lethal injection—the precise object of labor is increasingly obfuscated through a division of labor. However, the desired result of the production process stays the same: the materially realized production of a dead body, killed efficiently and in a manner roughly equivalent to those that were killed before it. Therefore, in the M-C-M1… process, from the perspective of state-capital, C is the commodity values congealed in capital punishment infrastructure and constitutes the investment of the sovereign capitalist U.S. state in the continued killing of its population. Here, let us return to Kirsch and Mitchell’s (2004, 696) statement on the relation of capitalist machine technology to human labor: “machines…require more than the

“dead” labor of machinists or software engineers (that is, other machines) to keep them working, and what is more, they may compel—as conditions and/or as effects—new hierarchies of work to articulate with them and develop around them: dead labor demands fresh living labor.” Despite outward appearances—especially in the process of lethal injections—no matter how mechanized capital punishment processes have become, the machine technologies of killing designed to spatially distance the executioners from the condemned still require more than the “dead labor” they contain to kill a human body. Humans (who are selling their labor-power to the sovereign in the abstract as a commodity) must consciously activate them and set them in motion by fixing other commodities in the death chamber; this is a fundamental contradiction of capital punishment. That the material process

213 itself, that which takes place in the death chamber is exceptional in its routine and impersonal efficiency, that it is work that begins and ends in the death chamber.

This contradiction is no more plainly apparent than when examining the circuitous commodities that move in and out of the death chamber, fixing themselves there to kill and be killed, and yet leading lives all their own on their way to the capital punishment space of the death chamber.54 Specifically, today, the drugs used in lethal injections must be bought, warehoused, and monitored outside the death chamber by state officials until it is time to execute a death sentence. Like the drugs, the condemned must also be warehoused on death row until it is time to execute. There, they must be brought food and water; their cloths and linens cleaned and returned to them; moved from their cells to meeting rooms to converse with their attorneys and court rooms for numerous appeals: this process often lasts decades.55 The court rooms where the trials and numerous appeals will be heard must be staffed by judges, clerks, bailiffs, attorneys, security personal, janitors, and those rooms are housed within county and state municipal buildings that must be maintained and repaired (Bohm 2011, 187–

201). All this is to say that the execution process is but one process amongst many that bring together a great deal of commodified human and non-human objects inside the death chamber. The circuitous movement of commodities requires complicit actions from many individuals beyond the immediate execution team, for without these extensive labor-power inputs that result in an occasioned death, the dead labor congealed within prison and capital punishment infrastructure cannot be realized.

II.II The Contradictions of Killing Them, Killing Ourselves

54 For reference to the concept of the geographical lives of commodities see Castree (2004, 2001). 55 For reference, consider Chris Philo’s work exploring the accumulation of bodies within institutions and the parallels between prisons and factories (2001), and Harvey (2000b, 97) and Donald Lowe (1995) who describe capitalist accumulation strategies centered around manipulating human bodies as variable capital.

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In the continuing spirit of carceral circuitry and mobility, this section continues extending capital punishment ‘beyond’ the physical boundaries of the death chamber. Thus, consider this section a means of attempting to further thought-concretize our understanding of capital punishment and its geographies. Specifically, this section builds where the last left off, now with a leading question. That is, given that capital punishment requires a vast array of complicit actions from people at work as state officials, how are these actions justified, if they are even acknowledged at all? For possible answers, we must turn to Marx’s theory of alienation and to transition there from dead labor, we pass through

Giorgio Agamben’s articulations on sovereignty and the production of bare life.

Agamben (1998, 142), building on notions of biopolitics developed by Foucault, explains that the

“sovereign is he who decides on the value or the nonvalue of life as such.” In contemporary politics the sovereign is no longer a singular individual, as it was in feudal times, but the collective body-politic of a state, the state’s population living in a defined territory (Elden 2007). Within this population, ostensibly all those lives that constitute it possess the same rights, but, as Agamben demonstrates, not since the since the beginning of political life have all lives been understood as equal, which brings us to the figure of bare life, or homo sacer. Homo sacer is understood as a life inhabiting a threshold position between zoē and bios. Zoē expresses “the simple fact of living common to all living beings” while bios indicates

“the form of way of living proper to an individual or a group,” what we might understand as a collective and politically qualified life relative to concepts like population, territory, and sovereignty (Agamben

1998, 1). In earlier sections I invoked that notion of surplus populations to describe those individuals in a population who are understood as unproductive and irresponsible in terms of how they use their labor- power. It is this population who are rendered bare life and most often are condemned to receive various capital punishments and death, and this is a fate certainly not reserved for those existing simply as ‘bios’

(Tyner and Colucci 2015, 1091). Those who are rendered as bare life exist as “included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is included solely through an exclusion” (Agamben

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1998, 11). This means that bare life could be killed with impunity, merely by being differentiated from bios, as it is the sovereign who qualifies political life. Therefore, it is understood that sovereignty functions through the concept of the “sovereign ban” that kills those rendered as bare life but does not sacrifice them. It is this function of differentiation and valuation that gives the sovereign its legitimacy.

Agamben (1998, 83) explains, writing that “the life caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originarily sacred...and, in that sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty.”

The production and exclusion of bare life bares considerable similarities Foucault’s conceptualization of exclusion as one of four general forms of punishment where it is the sole punishment tactic that results in death (2015, 6, 10–11). Exclusionary punishments, which result in death, function through the termination of one’s abstract time left to live, effectively meaning that those who are killed through their exclusion must exchange their time remaining in political life (Foucault 2015, 72, 218). In this way, surplus populations are produced as criminal and treated as the social enemy; as a transitive figure—an exchanger—whose production reifies the sovereign and its produced knowledges through various capital(ist) punishments (Foucault 2015, 35–36, 219). But, as Agamben displayed, such figures can be killed with impunity; but when are they killed? While they exist in exclusion, such bare life, “once politicized as necessary for the continued accumulation of capital, becomes expendable at the moment when it no longer assists in the circulation of value” (Barkan 2009, 256).56

In an oft replicated statement, Agamben (1998, 115) suggests that “if today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri.” This statement suggests that everyone exists as bare life, and he repeats a different version of this sentiment earlier in his work, writing, “the banishment of sacred life is the sovereign nomos that conditions every rule, the originary spatialization that governs and makes possible every localization and every

56 This, of course, does not mean the material bodies of those reduced to bare life cannot be politicized and used for the continued circulation of capital and production of relative surplus value—as is the case during capital punishment processes.

216 territorialization. And if in modernity life is more and more clearly placed at the center of State politics…if in our age all citizens can be said, in a specific but extremely real sense, to appear virtually as homines sacri, this is possible only because the relation of ban has constituted the essential structure of sovereign power from the beginning” (1998, 111). This second statement from Agamben provides a series of significant qualifiers that suggest the relative exclusion carried out by the sovereign is a productive activity. Since the existence of the sovereign is predicated on the production of differentially valuated populations, the sovereign and surplus populations exist dialectically. This is something

Agamben (1998, 84) suggests when he writes that, “at the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereign.”

Here we may see the dual character of all those that constitute the sovereign (those existing productively and responsibly, in terms of the use of their labor-power, in this capitalist social formation).

Through the production of homo sacer renders this population as sovereign merely through its constructed differentiation from those populations fabricated as homo sacer. Yet, since those who are sovereign exist in this way only through a constructed differentiation, at any time or space through alternative differentiations a different population may become sovereign, thus readjusting those who are bare life: population exists dialectically (Agamben 1998, 177–78). This is illustrated in the notion of sacrifice, which Agamben says is the threshold that produces divisions within society, marking the movement from the sacred to the profane (2007, 74, 78–79). Alex Murray (2010, 125) notes that “the importance of homo sacer is this logic of separation made apparent in one individual, a separation and distinction which reveals itself as constructed and fallible, not as natural and given.” Going further,

Murray suggests that “sacrifice as a threshold activity becomes the point at which separation and exclusion can occur, but it always has the potential to be returned to the sphere of the profane.” What

217 is clear, is the differentiation production of bare life that leads to death is anything but natural and prescribed, rather it is deliberate and occasioned on the part of the sovereign.

This explication of Agamben’s thought makes apparent that the production of a killable subject produces a twofold separation within that which is sovereign: both between population-as-sovereign and population-as-killable subjects, and between the spaces of the sovereign population and the spaces of killable populations, produced through an active exclusion. Here it is whoever is sovereign who decides through appropriated logics of value (through productive activity and the knowledge producing valuation of lives), such as capitalism, whom from within that same society must be differentiated, excluded, and ultimately sacrificed, to justify a specific continued mode of sovereignty.

It is here where we can turn to Marx’s concept of alienation to understand the twofold separation within this social formation which emerges through the process of the production of sovereignty. The theory of alienation has its origins in human being’s separation from their work in the capitalist mode of production in that labor undertaken in this social formation is external to the worker

(Marx 2007, 72). Separation, distancing, and objectification are significant in a relational context, when, according to Ollman (1976, 136), following Marx, alienation consists of four broad relations: worker’s relations to their productive activity, or the productive process; from the product or commodity itself; from other people (social relations); and from the “species-being”, or humanity. In the context of a capitalist social formation within a sovereign state, alienation can be understood as a separation between humans and their (productive) life activities. And it is this separation—bearing a symmetry with fetishized knowledges I discussed earlier in chapter four—that is both responsible for the interrelated structural violence of letting die (Tyner 2016a, 2016b, 2015) and the corrosive logics that define what leading a “productive life” means today (Wendling 2009, 196–98; Peet 1978a, 150–51).

Through this rather broad dialectic of social relations, we can see what constitutes productive life activities from the perspective of the sovereign. Then, we can rather easily parallel Agamben’s

218 exposition of homo sacer with the notion of a sovereignly productive life. Consider how, on the one hand, workers in a capitalist social formation will go about their productive life activities and become alienated (separated) from the process of (e)valuating life, which is fundamental to any productive and sovereign activity. Then, on the other hand, people become alienated from the othered lives which they differentiate and valuate; this includes their own lives, which they must use to differentiate between productive and valued, and non-valued lives, rendered homo sacer. Through this knowledge producing activity, both forms of life are now fetishized commodities, because they are objectified as the focus of productive activity. The production of differential hierarchies requires the production of knowledges, and within capitalist social formations, that production will occur with an emphasis on exchange value relations and with an indifference toward use value relations. With the production of surplus populations complete, there are two additional relational distancing effects. First, through the production of differentiated others and their exclusion, capitalist society becomes increasingly separated from those subjects who could potentially be killed or let die as bare life. Next, capitalist society, through its understanding of this productive differentiation, becomes alienated from its ability to understand itself as sovereign, and thus, understand that its exclusionary productive activity justifies its place as arbiter over life, which it does not realize it possesses.

These four ways of alienation, now tied to the concepts of surplus populations and bare life, can be envisioned in stark relief in the context of the death chamber, with an understanding of this capital punishment space as situated within its wider social formation. For all its automation, and extended network of circuitous commodity chains that cycle objects, knowledges, and human bodies through the death chamber to kill, none of these processes are fully self-perpetual. Conscious human inputs are required at every step. In the course of their collective work: correctional officers can refuse to volunteer for work on execution teams; physicians can reject participating in executions to officially certify death; pharmaceutical sales representatives can decline negotiating the sale of lethal drugs to

219 states that use them for lethal injections. These are just several instances where conscious actions during labor processes result in death and reveal widespread indifference in the course of capitalist work. Indifference is at the heart of the commodity/use-exchange value dialectic. This dialectic relation is at the center of the consciously material ways in which humans relate both to material objects and other humans. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to suggest that, with capitalist social formations, indifference is at the center of the human-to-human relation, and at the heart of the human-species being relation, which illuminates our understanding of our collective humanness.

II.III Differentiation, Valuation, (Class) Consciousness, and the End of Capital(ist) Punishment

As the conjoining of the concepts of bare life and alienation suggest, the production of differential hierarchies within capitalist social formations is fundamental to how and to whom punishments are carried out. Ollman (1976, 202) explains that the fourfold ways in which “alienation in the means of production finds expression in all areas of…life” and is therefore “not solely an economic phenomena.” This is where we can understand class, or any other differentiating hierarchical socio- political structure, as a value relation, in that “the form in which they appear, are not only the fruits of capitalist production; they are as well part of what is meant (or can be meant) by ‘capitalist relations of production’” (Ollman 2003, 203). The capitalist relations of production result in commodities and consequently the human internalization of a logic of indifference. These alienated human relations have dire consequences in terms of human consciousness, and human ability to conceive of themselves and take action collectively in relation to other humans. In short, Ollman (1976, 208) explains, humans “do not know themselves and others as social beings whose needs demand mutual cooperation but as private and competing entities, an anarchistic galaxy of selfish worlds.”

This, of course, does not mean that humans exist in isolation even if they operate through a fetishized ‘personal life’ where they believe very few or none of their actions affect anyone else; this

220 means consciousness, above all, is a social product (Marx and Engels 1998, 49–50). That humans experience this alienation which makes producing meaningful material connections and feelings of mutual solidarity less possible proves to be prohibitive for ending the practice of capital punishment in the United States and elsewhere. This means that humans are alienated in their social lives, because, despite the appearance of separation due to divisions of labor, humans cannot help but exist socially and therefore, engage politically (Ollman 2003, 212). As we have seen in this chapter, the extent to which those humans working in a death chamber engage politically is only apparent in their subjection of their labor-power to the arbitrary direction of the state. Just like class, and other concepts that emanate from the capitalist social formation like the mystical ‘value,’ the state is simply another abstraction in political life that “exercises power over [humans] when expressed in the real institutions of government—in legislatures, executive agencies, courts, political parties, constitutions and laws”

(Ollman 1976, 213). And, the state is meant to mediate collective human relations—how access to the necessities of life is distributed, for example—based on, at least in the context of a democratic-republic, like in the United States, based on some notion of equality for all. Yet, “the state is based on a spurious equality of man, in this instance, his common citizenship” (Ollman 1976, 213) which is but an abstraction—something that can be granted or taken away by rule of the sovereign. The material establishment or termination of capital punishment is not different.

In 1848, in the midst of a revolution in France and revolutions throughout Europe, Marx connects the establishment and termination of the abstract death penalty law, and the subsequent material capital punishment that follows it, with differential calculations and evaluations made by the ruling bourgeoisie class (1895, 44–45). He writes: “the Provisional Government, for its part, once it was compelled to proclaim the republic, did everything to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie and to the provinces. The bloody terror of the First republic was disavowed by the abolition of the death penalty for political offences…The bourgeois republicans of the National amused themselves by exchanging

221 monarchist names and costumes for old republican ones. To them the republic was only a new ball dress for the old bourgeois society. The young republic sought its chief merit…in winning the right to life and disarming resistance by soft compliance and non-resistance” (1895, 45). Derrida (2013, 175) synthesizes

Marx’s words here, stating that “whether the death penalty is maintained or abolished, one can always decipher in these two policies…a class reflex or interest, the calculation of an economy, whether or not this calculation is conscious, and an economy that always puts in place…the proper of property, capital, and labor.” What is clear is that any establishment or termination is done so with a particular conscious class calculation in order to protect the lives and property of those whom the sovereign deem productive and responsible. Here, we can envision how arbitrary hierarchical structures that classify forms of life based on a capitalist mode of valuation, results in the occasioned killing through the work capital punishment of those individuals produced as superfluous. If the knowledges used to produce classifications of life forms persist in producing alienated life, then occasioned killing will persist.

Consequently, it would seem at this point that it is not enough to seek merely the end of the death penalty and capital punishment. As we can see, the legality and illegality of the material practice itself does not ensure its end. Rather, if one is to genuinely seek the end of the practice one must also eradicate the social formation, with its system of abstract valuation, that places it materially on the landscape and places its logics, however immaterially, in our consciousness through ordering our material lives, work, and relations. This thinking follows Heynen’s (2015) call to radicalize the production of geographic thought about capital punishment around a term borrowed from W.E.B. DuBois called

“Abolition Democracy.” Here, it is important to recognize that capital punishment is a practice embedded in interconnected “racist, capitalist and gender relations” and any hope for ending this practice lays in the systematic and collective dismantling of our present social formation (Heynen 2015,

1069). Capital punishment is but another mode of production that drives humans apart in fundamentally geographic ways, and how the process of capital punishment plays out speaks directly to

222 the very spatial ways in which humans have been pushed away from one another. Acknowledging that this phenomenon can be recognized for its overt and plainly obvious geographies should not be the culmination of what the disciplinary knowledge of geographers can contribute. Rather, fighting against and changing these spatial logics of estrangement must be geography’s cause.

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Chapter 5: Conclusions

“What are you getting at?”

“Well, this. That we’re ashamed to say we’ve refused a posting. That social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate—we obey. We fear being outcast…We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice.” (Takver and Shevek in, The Dispossessed Le Guin 1974, 265)

I. Meaning of Research

I ended the last chapter by alluding to how the reproduction of alienated life is fundamental to the continuation of capital punishment specifically, and capitalist punishments and state violence more broadly. As divisions and disruptions produced in this capitalist social formation widen and reconstitute already present fissures humans are pushed further apart in both material and abstract ways. This diminishes the potential for both material and discursive collective action and mutually beneficial knowledge production amongst heterogeneous populations. It is in these ways that I see the importance of geographic thought in terms of identifying the alienative aspects of capitalist life, and developing strategies to overcome them in order to produce more socially just futures through the development of collective consciousness. If the object is to change aspects of the world, so as to produce more socially just futures, then focusing on the contradictions of the capitalist social formation—of which the process of alienation is fundamental—seems apropos. The ability of radical/critical geographers to address issues brought on by the process of alienation appears to be substantial given its exceedingly spatial dimensions—at least in my estimation given my research since undertaken and presented here.

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In two recent publications Harvey (2018, 2014) addresses deepening and ubiquitous alienation as a particularly incisive contradiction facing the present capitalist social formation. If we consider collective consciousness as an antidote to pervasive alienation, then addressing the ways in which we produce and share knowledge about the world, with consideration to developing socially just collective consciousness’s, then it would seem that here is the catalyst to activating widespread and definitive production of non-capitalist space. While that statement certainly suggests at change at a large scale, more immediately it suggests at the real need and potential to alter the ways in which we address specific social issues—like capital punishment—in terms of how we think and communicate about them.

To trace the persistence of alienative processes to fundamental relations within capitalism, then, we must focus on embedded indifferences in capitalist relations. Exchange relations, and the indifference they produce, is the means by which subjects and objects relate in capitalism and therefore is the origin point of estrangements at large. In this way, alienation is the means by which capital remains in motion.

A focus, by geographers and other concerned scholars, on confronting and changing alienations and indifferences in human-spatial-life offers a means of coalescence. Through the mode of an epistemologically reflexive dialectics—which helps us form our analysis of capitalist phenomena— focused on indifference at large, a common politicized geographic ‘language’ that leads to meaningful disciplinary transformation can be developed.

II. Contributions to Geography

In many ways, I feel that as much as this dissertation is a project of research, it is also what we might consider a dialogue on the ways in which academic knowledge is produced. In a recent provocative piece examining the relations between immanent death in the world and academic dialogue in geography, Alderman and Inwood (2018b, 155) write that, “very rarely are oppressive structures

225 made possible by extremists but by the masses who remain silent or disinterested in the face of violent oppression.” Within academia, they explain, this is all too true and the challenge is how to engage those who are indifferent and “fail to appreciate or stand for justice in the face of obvious inequities.” I feel that this sentiment runs parallel with the ways in which I situated this work in chapter one, specifically where I seek to produce un-alienating geographies. To produce geographies that are un-alienating— meaning that they do not reinforce or reproduce knowledge about the world that pushes people yet further apart—it is my contention that our productive activity and the ways in which we communicate must be through a language that is decisively political.

While there are a great deal of geographers operating through critical and radical epistemologies, too often their resulting political languages are not easily reproducible in the sense that they do not result in a cohesive dialogue against the indifferent and all too often “silent” production of knowledge. Speaking for the need for change is central to political language. Indeed, Tyner (2012) writes that a critical approach to both geographic knowledge about how the ideas of space and place work and about important, often violent, social issues must be political in addressing socio-spatial and institutional processes that produce inequalities. He writes that our geographic knowledge—using the concepts of space and place—must be produced in a way that “remains sensitive to the life experiences of marginalized groups” while promoting “political and social change” (2012, 22). “To be critical,” Tyner continues, “is to be normative; but this requires a deeper sense of reflexivity. Critical scholarship—and critical learning—entails a commitment to change.”

These statements cause a moment of reflection on the second chapter in this dissertation, specifically where Heynen (2015) calls for a more critical approach to geographic scholarship on capital punishment. What is absent—largely because of the limitations prescribed by their chosen epistemology—from the work of Harries and Cheatwood is any grounded, material sense of: where executions happen or the site of the state violence of capital punishment and the transformative

226 movements of the material practices that make capital punishment work. In terms of a contribution to geography, it is my hope that this dissertation is a step in the direction of producing knowledge about capital punishment that does address the historical-geographical material social relations that constitute the spatiality of this particular form of state violence. Secondarily, I feel that there is the possibility that this research presents scholars (of geography or any other discipline) with an organizational framework with which to fundamentally alter the direction of research on whatever pressing social issue with which they are concerned. In keeping with Castree’s (1999a, 1996a) re-reading of Marxian dialectics and his want for more abstract abstractions, I feel that the novel epistemological melding of Marxist, anarchist/prefigurative, and post-structural approaches offers radical/critical geographers a means by which to reflexively consider the process of their productive activity.

III. Future work

In the process of constructing this dissertation research I see numerous instances where I can further develop concepts in general and also more specific lines of research in the future. Certainly, in my thinking, working through the ideas in chapters three and four seem to serve this purpose most expeditiously. In chapter three I sought to produce a framework with which I could produce knowledge, building on Castree’s both/and dialectics, while incorporating aspects of post-structural social theory and prefigurative politics. I feel that a journal article thoroughly dedicated to explaining this framework could be a useful asset for similarly concerned scholars in geography, at the least. I have found that articulating this framework has been helpful in broadening my capacity to produce knowledge and it may have similar effects for others. As a spin-off from this potential direction of future work, the various debates within geography that I spend much space assessing presents another area for work. In particular, I see an article that attempts to reconcile the differences between, and present the

227 meaningful similarities between, various radical/critical approaches in geography as offering useful insight and paths forward in terms of producing knowledge to make meaningful change in the world. In particular, developing further the interrelated concepts of alienation and indifference within capitalism here could provide a means of unifying the discourses of radical and critical geography. Related to these two future research directions, is part of chapter three that I would like to develop further in the future.

That is, exploring the relations between consciousness, materiality, and political language, which would necessitate extended readings of Barthes’ work and drawing connections between it and Marx’s articulations on the process of his dialectical materialism. I am particularly interested in the ways in which Barthes discusses the dialectics of language in the context of the form it takes, especially in terms of how such a dialectic understanding could inform the ways in which we (geographers and anyone else) write and communicate about the earth.

There also appears to be much possibility in extending the historical materialist accounts of transitions between modes of capital punishment presented in chapter four. Examining spatial processes at execution sites given these transition is especially intriguing, as is the potential to work more in the areas of commodity circuits and knowledge economies in the context of lethal injection.

One area in which I did not focus much attention in this dissertation was connections between capital punishment and environments, non-human life forms, and the concept of “nature.” Particularly I am interested in two avenues in this regard. First, there is a long and documented history on the formal criminal prosecution and execution of animals (Evans 2009). This empirical work has yet to be engaged with substantively in the growing animal geographies literature and nuanced interpretations of it from a historical-geographical materialist understanding of the development of capital punishment should be a welcome addition to this literature. Second, I see an opportunity to take lessons from this dissertation and apply them work on the killing of environmental activists who work to protect environments and challenge capitalist extraction and enclosure processes. This second avenue verges into what could be

228 termed informal, extra-judicial capital punishments, where individuals are summarily executed not at the behest of states but at the state’s discretion. In many ways this relates to some work I have already begun as an extension of this dissertation; specifically, beginning to articulate the informal political economies of lynching as a mode of capitalist punishment. Here there is ample space to connect this understanding of lynching with current work in geography that utilizes critical race theory to address violence and justice.

In many ways, I hope this research is recognized as a starting point. There is no definitively correct time for academic research on any particular subject to begin or develop further. However, it seems that oftentimes such beginnings and new developments are long overdue. As this dissertation has hopefully demonstrated, fluid epistemological approaches to work can present concerned scholars with ample latitude in developing knowledge that seeks not only to understand and explain but also to change. By internalizing such collectively conscious understandings of one’s productive activity we can end the practice of or compulsion to, like Jerry Givens and countless others, “eliminate” ourselves from our work.

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