Deadly Symbiosis: Rethinking race and imprisonment in twenty-first-century America
Loïc Wacquant

A new Boston Review is out, and its theme is Crime and Punishment. I don't know who Loic Wacquant is, but more importantly, I don't know what the hell kind of name Loic Wacquant is. It sounds foreign, which is always good. My dad would probably point out here that my affinity for foreign evaluations of America is a sign of intellectual carelessness AND anti-American sentiment. Which reminds me tangentially of a nifty little tidbit from Clifford Geertz. In the Introduction to his Local Knowledge, Geertz quotes some guy named Bernard DeVoto, who said of Margaret Mead's And Keep Your Powder Dry, "The more anthropologists write about the United States, the less we believe what they say about Samoa."

(ii) The rate of incarceration for African Americans has soared to levels unknown in any other society and is higher now than the total incarceration rate in the Soviet Union at the zenith of the Gulag and in South Africa at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle. As of mid-1999, close to 800,000 black men were in custody in federal penitentiaries, state prisons, and county jails—one male out of every twenty-one, and one out of every nine between twenty and thirty-four.1 On any given day, upwards of one third of African-American men in their twenties find themselves behind bars, on probation, or on parole. And, at the core of the formerly industrial cities of the North, this proportion often exceeds two thirds.

[...]To understand these phenomena, we first need to break out of the narrow "crime and punishment" paradigm and examine the broader role of the penal system as an instrument for managing dispossessed and dishonored groups. And second, we need to take a longer historical view on the shifting forms of ethno-racial domination in the United States. This double move suggests that the astounding upsurge in black incarceration in the past three decades results from the obsolescence of the ghetto as a device for caste control and the correlative need for a substitute apparatus for keeping (unskilled) African Americans in a subordinate and confined position—physically, socially, and symbolically.

In the post-Civil Rights era, the remnants of the dark ghetto and an expanding carceral system have become linked in a single system that entraps large numbers of younger black men, who simply move back and forth between the two institutions. This carceral mesh has emerged from two sets of convergent changes: sweeping economic and political forces have reshaped the mid-century "Black Belt" to make the ghetto more like a prison; and the "inmate society" has broken down in ways that make the prison more like a ghetto. The resulting symbiosis between ghetto and prison enforces the socioeconomic marginality and symbolic taint of an urban black sub-proletariat. Moreover, by producing a racialized public culture that vilifies criminals, it plays a pivotal role in remaking "race" and redefining the citizenry.

posted by neel master at 2:53 AM

Goffmania has begun to get complaints. Well, not complaints exactly, more like demanding comments. These comments point out an unattractive feature of the site: despite our stated adulatory purpose, we seem more often than not to be thoroughly self-obsessed. We don't even have that many Goffman links to give balance to our consuming pretension.

We confess that the idea of calling this site Goffmania had as much to do with the discovery that the title could be reasonably extrapolated from the adjective "Goffmanian" as it did with any unique interest in Goffman. I mean, don't get us wrong, we love Erving Goffman. We did actually read the The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It did, for a brief period, blow our minds. But the sorry truth is that we could have just as easily called site "Kuhn-mania." Even "Garfinkel-mania." But neither of these titles is nearly so terrific as Goffmania. So, please, please forgive us. We're a fraud. But we're keeping the name.

And if you're a new visitor to Goffmania, you might say, hey, what's the big deal? But, dude, check out the archives. I torture myself at night, wishing that we had only realized then how beautiful we truly were.
posted by neel master at 2:46 AM

David Lodge Thinks...
Salon.com Review

Review of Thinks... by David Lodge
from the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulated Behavior Quarterly

It was cognition at first sight
Guardian review

I just finished reading this novel; it was my first by David Lodge (although I got a few pages into Changing Places six months ago.) The book's primary concern is an affair between two English university professors: an arrogant and charming professor of Cognitive Science and a visiting novelist teaching a Creative Writing seminar. Lodge's writing is agile and funny, and he delves deeply and effectively into the polymorphic world of consciousness studies. His preservation of the Snovian Two Cultures dichotomy is the only thing that gives me a little trouble. I think there are people who study cognitive science problems with sensitivity to both the mathematical structure of consciousness stuff and the phenomenological nature of being stuff. I think Hubert Dreyfus is one such person. He is a Berkeley philosopher whose research into artificial intelligence is deeply informed by his knowledge of continental philosophy. I managed to dredge up this copy of his essay Intelligence Without Representation. Hopefully, more Dreyfus links will be forthcoming, but I have no time to do them now.
posted by neel master at 4:05 PM