Fairness is part and parcel a biopolitical regime of control

[Allen, “Philoctetes Revisited: WHITE PUBLIC SPACE AND THE POLITICAL

GEOGRAPHY OF PUBLIC SAFETY,” Social Text 68, Vol. 19, No. 3, Fall 2001]

Alongside and in response to these economic transformations (which are deeply rooted in the globalized market), a new geographical politics has emerged: the norm of an open-ended civil sphere with experiential coordinates in public space is currently interdicted by new discursive and practical arrangements of policing, public safety, urban planning, and racial, gender, and class depictions that reify the dual city as an ideological Object . Mike Davis accesses this technological and penal fashioning of the dual city when he identifies the formation of a new urban “scanscape” characterized by social control zones engineered by a combination of urban planning, policing, and advanced electronic technology. In Los Angeles, he identifies a continuum of such zones that are not purely administrative but are underwritten by advanced surveillance technologies and the diffusion of the ideology of gated communities: there are medfly control zones, child molestation control zones, homeless control zones.3 The social control zone is a spatial logic that exceeds its explicit administrative grid and serves to bifurcate urban space into normalized and pathologized spaces. This urban transformation is part and parcel of the globalized economic restructuring of capitalism. The social control zone —the repressive and ideological apparatus of neoliberal economic policies— is not limited to American urban centers; the policing strategies associated with the political geography of the social control zones have been exported to and adapted by Budapest, Cape Town, Guatemala City, São Paolo, and Buenos Aires. Of paramount importance here is the analytic confrontation with permitted sociologies of knowledge , that is, the institutional and political organization of admissible knowledge as a technology of power and as a mode of governance. I refer here to the fabrication of closed systems of space, time, and discourse that govern, limit, and censor possibilities of subjecthood, agency, and citizenship. Expert knowledge systems have been known to aggressively erase everyday life experiences and impose normative zones of silence and invisibility that dehistoricize and render illegitimate the very quotidian structures upon which critical analysis and political practice are built. In many historical instances, such sociological deletions by expert knowledge systems are mere preludes to the application of material violence to now “invisible” persons and populations and to erasable sites of sociocultural interchange. This essay explores a set of public policy knowledge/power practices as structural and material violence against the unhoused. It examines the conditions of possibility that mediate the crafting and deployment of systems of knowledge/power. The structural violence of public policy knowledge/ practice assumes manifold forms of spatial, temporal, material, and intersubjective violence, including: (1) the authorization and legitimation of institutional and interpersonal aggression against vulnerable categories of persons and populations; (2) militarized policing, penological, and criminalization polices; (3) the fusion of custodial systems, practices, and norms of caregiving and technologies of psychic-somatic intrusion and coercion; (4) norms of flexible/provisional citizenship that grant or withhold civic rights and promote civic disablement; (5) the subversion of common rules of law and human rights in favor of bureaucratic proceduralism; (6) rubrics of public safety and social pathogenesis that minoritize and stigmatize special populations; (7) the deployment of bureaucratic formalisms and contradictory catch-22 rules that stratify and limit access to system-controlled or system-prescribed rights and resources; and (8) ideologies of racialized, ethnicized, sexualized, and gendered embodiment as a theater for the crude display and ordinance of power.