Humanism is structured by American heg

In fact, the notion of American globality I have begun discussing here already exceeds negri and Hardt’s formulation to the extent that it is a global racial formation, and more pointedly a global mobilization of a white supremacist social formation (read: a united States of America formed by the social-economic geographies of racial chattel slavery and their recodification through the post-13th Amendment innovation of other technologies of criminalization and imprisonment). The US prison regime’s production of human immobilization and death composes some of the fundamental modalities of American national coherence. It inscribes two forms of domination that tend to slip from the attention of political theorists, including Negri and Hardt: first, the prison regime strategically institutionalizes the biopolitical structures of white racial/nationalist ascendancy—it quite concretely provides a definition for white American personhood, citizenship, freedom, and racialized patriotism. Second, the prison regime reflects the moral, spiritual, and cultural inscription of Manifest Destiny (and its descendant material cultural and state-building articulations of racist and white supremacist conquest, genocide, and population control) across different historical moments. to invoke and critically rearticulate negri and Hardt’s formulation, the focal question becomes: How does the right of the uS-as-global police to kill, detain, obliterate become voiced, juridically coded, and culturally recoded? the structure of presumption—and therefore relative political silence—enmeshing the prison’s centrality to the logic of American globality is precisely evidence of the fundamental power of the uS prison regime within the larger schema of American hegemony. In this sense the uS prison regime is ultimately really not an “institution.” rather it is a formulation of world order (hence, a dynamic and perpetual labor of institutionalization rather than a definitive modernist institution) in which massively scaled, endlessly strategized technologies of human immobilization address (while never fully resolving) the socio-political crises of globalization. The US prison regime defines a global logic of social organization that constitutes, mobilizes, and prototypes across various localities. What would it mean, then, to consider state-crafted, white supremacist modalities of imprisonment as the perpetual end rather than the self-contained means of American globality? I am suggesting a conception of the prison regime that focuses on what cultural and political theorist Allen Feldman calls a “formation of violence,” which anchors the contemporary articulation of white supremacy as a global technology of coercion and hegemony. Feldman writes, the growing autonomy of violence as a self-legitimating sphere of social discourse and transaction points to the inability of any sphere of social practice to totalize society. Violence itself both reflects and accelerates the experience of society as an incomplete project, as something to be made. As a formation of violence that self-perpetuates a peculiar social project through the discursive structures of warfare, the US prison regime composes an acute formation of racial and white supremacist violence, and thus houses the capacity for mobilization of an epochal (and peculiar) white supremacist global logic. This contention should not be confused with the sometimes parochial (if not politically chauvinistic) proposition that American state and state-sanctioned regimes of bodily violence and human immobilization are somehow self-contained “domestic” productions that are exceptional to the united States of America, and that other “global” sites simply “import,” imitate, or reenact these institutionalizations of power. In fact, I am suggesting the opposite: the US prison regime exceeds as it enmeshes the ensemble of social relations that cohere uS civil society, and is fundamental to the geographic transformations, institutional vicissitudes, and militarized/economic mobilizations of “globalization” generally. to assert this, however, is to also argue that the constituting violence of the US prison regime has remained somewhat undertheorized and objectified in the overlapping realms of public discourse, activist mobilization, and (grassroots as well as professional) scholarly praxis. Here I am arguing that it is not possible to conceptualize and critically address the emergence and global proliferation of the (uS/global) prison industrial complex outside a fundamental understanding of what are literally its technical and technological premises: namely, its complex organization and creative production of racist and white supremacist bodily violence. It is only in this context, I would say, that we can examine the problem of how “the Prison” is a modality (and not just a reified product or outcome) of American statecraft in the current political moment. It is only a theoretical foregrounding of the white supremacist state and social formation of the united States that will allow us to understand the uS prison regime as an American globality that materializes as it prototypes state violence and for that matter, “state power” itself through a specific institutional site.