# GUEST WRITERS ESSAYS 09 /// Becoming Fugitive: Carceral Space and Rancierean Politics by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

picture: Still image from Jacques Tati’s Playtime, a similar shot to the opening sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (see rest of the essay).

This week’s guest writer is Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, who blogs at South/South and who is also a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. In her essay, Becoming Fugitive: Carceral Space and Rancierean Politics, she gives a vision of the political aesthetics and the aesthetic of politics based on  the reading of French philosopher Jacques Rancière.
As an introduction, I would like to quote Walter Benjamin who stated that “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.” Benjamin was in fact, defining fascism as the introduction of aesthetics in politics. Fascism, in this essay, is not quoted but the police state is targeted in a contemporaneous world that can be said – as Eric Hazan puts it- to be engaged in a global civil war.

Becoming Fugitive: Carceral Space and Rancierean Politics
by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

The police regime is endowed with the power of ordering space. This text meets at the crossroads of space, policing, and visual perception, in terms of how I articulate a Rancierean aesthetic dimension of the political and political dimension of the aesthetic. Jacques Rancière is a useful and rich source for this tripartite investigation because in the course of his writings, aesthetics is not only about art, and politics is not only about the state. Politics, as laid out in Disagreement, is that which always takes a stage and takes a theatrical formation, putting ‘two worlds in one world.’ This staging often overturns sense-making at the level of language alone, relying also on microlevels of sensation and sense-making (we inherited the word ‘aesthetic’ from the Greek aisthēta ‘perceptible things’). In Dissensus, Rancière gives mention to artistic works that focus on matters of space, territories, borders, wastelands, and other transient spaces, matters ‘that are crucial to today’s issues of power and community.’ To provide a framework to the concern with visibility and emancipatory politics, my bifocal reading takes into account (1) the work of the police, seen in near vision, and (2) the work of politics, seen in distant vision.

Circulation and the Sensible

I deliberately choose the word fugitive in the title but it would also be appropriate to say ‘outlaw.’ In modern usage, an outlaw is someone who has broken the law and remains at large—a fugitive of the law who flees the scene of crime. Historically speaking an outlaw is someone deprived of the benefit and protection of the law, since the state can choose to ban a product or a person from its protection (e.g. outlawing a drug, an outlawed terrorist group). If you traced the notion of security (sine cura or without care—you are without care for yourself because the police or state care for you) from Plato to Seneca to Machiavelli to Benjamin and so on, it would disclose someone both deprived of the state’s care as well as someone who trespasses the legal system.

There’s also a sense of degradation that is coterminous with this figure of a degraded outlaw in a degraded space (Rancière’s ‘wastelands and other transient spaces’) so far removed are both from genuine concern for collective action or citizenship. The loaded term “degradation” is derived from the Latin etymon de (down, away from) and gradus (step), commonly associated with a lowly or destitute state, or a decline in intellectual or moral integrity. But I am most concerned with the implicit movement involved in de-grading—going or wandering—and how this relates to Rancière’s use of circulation in the police order. In other words, outlaws run, they are almost defined by their movement—but Rancière might say that the movement and circulation of the space in which they run is already a circulatory lattice, or in the nightmares of Hollywood, a matrix.

Thesis 7: Politics stands in distinct opposition to the police. The police is a distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible) whose principle is the absence of the void and the supplement.

In this matching of functions, places and ways of being, there is no place for any void. It is this exclusion of what ‘is not’ that constitutes the police-principle at the core of statist practices. (Dissensus, 36)

In this law of distribution, the police divide up the sensible. (One might question Rancière—and I certainly would—about whether the absence of the void in this schema is as total as he claims.) It might sound clunky to restate it this way, but what is at stake is a division that defines the modes of perception in which it is inscribed. The spatial formation closest to this description and one I will pick up again shortly is the grid. What follows from this is an invocation of the void, with Rancière reminding us that the police regime disavows ruptures, seams, sutures, gaps because the police is a horizon or landscape of continual continuity. It hates cleavages or what Rancière calls bringing politics into being by separating it from the police.

We can return to the outlaw’s degradation of the law. Imagine that the law is a sensory fabric (Rancière: ‘fabric of the sensible’), and the fugitive has pulled a thread or left a hole, as we glimpse in this startling passage from Derrida’s ‘Force of Law’ essay:

The admiring fascination exerted on the people by “the figure of the ‘great’ criminal,” (die Gestalt des “grossen” Verbrechers), can be explained as follows: it is not someone who has committed this or that crime for which one feels a secret admiration; it is someone who, in defying the law, lays bare the violence of the legal system, the juridical order itself. One could explain in the same way the fascination exerted in France by a lawyer like Jacques Verges who defends the most difficult causes, the most indefensible in the eyes of the majority, by practicing what he calls the ‘strategy of rupture,’ that is, the radical contestation of the given order of the law, of judicial authority and ultimately of the legitimate authority of the State that summons his clients to appear before the law. (Bold emphasis is mine.)

Two observations here: the first is a proto-Rancierean notion of disidentification. You secretly admire the person who has disidentified themselves from the police regime or juridico-legal order or state. Second, in laying bare the sheer violence of this order and moving away from it (de-gradus), the grid or matrix that was there to begin with is revealed. To paraphrase both Rancière and the French litigator, becoming a fugitive involves disidentification and a strategy of rupture.

I think that Thesis 7 (the police) and Thesis 8 (politics) are sibling commentaries on the spacio-legal order so I have paired them here.

Thesis 8: The essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space. It is to make the world of its subjects and its operations seen.

Police intervention marks itself not only in interpellating individuals (Althusser’s ‘Hey, you there!’) but something that appears so obvious we generally do not notice it at first: ‘Move along! There’s nothing to see here!’ From the perspective of visual studies one could add: We (the police) are the ones who can see, but you must keep your eyes forward and move along. Politics, in contrast, is involved in transforming the space of circulation into a space for the appearance of a subject, and making subjects (Rancière: ‘the people, the workers, the citizens’) appear. I pause to note it because this is not the commonsensical understanding of visibility. Politics involves the appearance of a claim or dispute over how the sensible is distributed while the police regime demands that you keep on moving, without the pensiveness necessary to make a claim.

Carceral Formation in Hitchock

I want to introduce some film stills and sequences within this discourse of the ordering of space in carceral formation, specifically the grid or lattice I mentioned earlier as a modular space that is already ordered.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the photographer and newly wheelchair-bound Jeffries (James Stewart) watches his Greenwich Village neighbors through a pair of binoculars. Significantly, his proxy in the film is Thomas J. Doyle, an old friend and co-pilot during Jeffries’ World War II days, now a lieutenant police detective. One object of Jeffries’ daily viewings is the songwriter he watches intently, framed by Hitchcock in a gridded window.

In fact, one need not look very far in Hitchcock’s universe for these carceral forms. Look at the opening credit sequence of Psycho, designed by Saul Bass:

Here is another Saul Bass design for the opening credits of North by Northwest. Notice how around the 00:37 mark in this clip the thick outlines of the grid dissolve into the window frames, at once deflecting the prison-like vertical and horizontal lines and augmenting the reflection of the city onto the building’s glass surface.

The glossy, mirrored surface of the glass acts as an uninterrupted sensory fabric, in contrast to the strategy of rupture that follows Roger O. Thornhill (Carey Grant), a Madison Avenue ad executive, as he flees from a case of mistaken identity that threatens to kill him.

But we can move beyond material grids into structures of surveillance—beginning with one of its first systemic modern uses with profound implications on the present day—that relied on less obvious forms of visualizing criminalization.

Suffragette Surveillance—Policing Beyond the Grid

In the first decade of the 20^th century, Scotland Yard detectives procured their first photographic cameras, which they to covertly follow suffragettes. It is no surprise that the verb ‘surveil’ is synonymous with following; the women’s circulation to and from their homes and loci of political gathering were duly tracked. The pictures were compiled into (gridded) ID sheets, much like how we still imagine police photo profiles today despite advances in digital storage, for patrolling officers.

We can infer from their oblivious gestures and facial expressions that the women did not appear to know, at least initially, they were being secretly photographed. However, the photos from the National Portrait Gallery in the UK reveal one significant exception.

Evelyn Manesta (No. 10), one of the Manchester suffragettes, apparently ‘refused to pose for a picture [so] a guard was brought in to restrain her in front of the camera.’ The arm wrapped around Evelyn’s neck was removed upon special instruction to the photographer  so that the photo would appear ‘less controversial.’

The violence of surveillance could not be made more visually intelligible as in this instance of a phantom ghost arm—later removed via whatever means of rudimentary Photoshop were available at the time—that physically restrains the police subject.

Is there ever a way out of the grid? Thesis 7 delivers an emphatic no, however, the celebrated crop duster sequence of North by Northwest provides an unparalleled opportunity to visualize strategies of rupture beyond the so-called unavoidable void.

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