Thank you very much. Thank you for the invitation and to James Crosley and also to Chris Keith for hosting and it's really been a wonderful conference and great to hear everybody's papers as well. So what I want to do today is explore the way the public uses of the Bible contribute to acceptance of carcerality in the carceral state in the U.S. This is part of an intellectual and activist move toward prison abolition. So as James said, I am involved on the ground in political organizing. I've been doing police and prison organizing since 2000 and so I've been very much influenced by people like Angela Davis and the group Critical Resistance who are working toward prison abolition and trying to raise consciousness about prisons as a form of slavery and as a form of racial oppression. The carceral technologies I'm concerned about though today go beyond prisons and include control tactics like walls, surveillance, policing, neighborhood watch and even debt. With respect to imagining change, as we discussed yesterday, it has become painfully clear in the U.S. that rational argument is not what can make a political difference. So perhaps affect theory can provide a framework for thinking about what drives commitment to the carceral state. Of course incarceration is economic and of course it's racist but it's also emotional or more precisely affective and meaning that it's not necessarily just a conscious emotional response. Carceral strategies work two ways. For some they install fear, a sense of already culpability, surveillance and constraint. For others they create safety and for some people maybe even most people they do both. People can feel surveilled and vulnerable and still feel glad for the police state or still call the police or still hope that people get locked up. When the Bible is used in relation to this two-way strategy of control, carcerality is pitched as somehow comforting. Scripturalized surveillance and securitization create the effect of being known, a sense of interiority, a kind of stillness or cessation of motion. The movement inward is like a paternalistic homecoming, a guilty swaddling or an atoned ensconcement. What I want to do today is show how the Bible contributes to this theopolitical inwardness that affirms carcerality. The movement toward interiority and inaction can be tracked through scripturalist citations in the public sphere and in prisons. Three texts are prominent with respect to walls, prisons, surveillance, interiority, debt and other forms of constraint. They are the book of Nakhnia Maya about the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Wall, Psalm 139, the psalm of surveillance and Leviticus 16 which describes the ritual of the scapegoat. And these are three that I've pulled together. There's obviously other texts that circulate, but I want to show how they're working in this sort of inward motion, a motion that slows and stagnates. Before I get into these texts, let me say a brief word about affect theory and about where we're at with U.S. prisons. So affect theory is about as much about motion as it is about emotion. And this may seem like an odd fit in relation to prisons because prisons are very much spatially oriented, but I do think that it's helpful for thinking through some of these issues. I'm not going to take you into a long discussion of affect theory, but just enough for you to see where I'm coming from. So with respect to motion, Spinoza, who is the great granddaddy of affect theory, famously says that emotions are, quote, affections of the body by which the body's power of activity is increased or diminished. So things affect the body and it might be things, people, contemplation of things, imagination of things, start movement in the body. Negative emotions, says Spinoza, are produced by things or contemplation and imagination of things that will decrease the body's power of activity and persistence. And positive emotions are produced by things that increase the body's power of activity. And readers of Spinoza have often pointed out that there's a connection here to political agency and also to self-preservation. So Spinoza calls the will to persist conitus. People therefore pursue those interactions, emotions, and thoughts that, quote, increase or assist the body's power of activity. Following from Spinoza, scholars and philosophers have explored how motion in bodies creates political potentiality. People like Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massoumi, Aaron Manning, Catherine Stewart, Lauren Berlant, and many, many others. As you probably know, it's a bit of a wave in the humanities right now. And it's sort of taken over from psychoanalytic modes of thinking. And at the end of the talk, I want to come back a little bit to psychoanalysis because I don't think we're done with psychoanalysis yet either. In contrast to thinking about how affect can increase power of activity, I'm considering how potentiality and movement are stifled, effectively, by carceral technologies. If there is motion in carcerality, it is a moving in inward towards small spaces and interiorizing and slowing. Movement and power of activity is constricted through surveillance, walls, prison, debt, and even death. Now, of course, I'm not flat-footedly suggesting that movement is good and stillness is bad. But forced constraint and turning inward at the behest of a higher power is producing a political and national pathology. Carceral affect reduces power of activity, and it could be said to stall movement and ethics overall. So just to bring you up to speed where we're at in the U.S. with prisons, the U.S. is still the largest incarcerator in the world with five percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's prisoners. You'll see this statistic floated a lot. It's now widely recognized that people in prison are disproportionately black and brown.  So it really is a social oppression and a social warehousing. There's also a pretty widespread recognition that sentencing is disproportionate. So white people are charged less for more aggravated crimes than black and brown people are charged, more for nonviolent drug crimes. There is a large prison, a large private prison industry as well, and this contracts out facilities and beds. It also contracts other services like transport, telephone services, parole services. Most prisons are federal and state run, but the private prison industry is a billion-dollar industry, and it really also contributes to the mode of thinking of prisons as a kind of money-making enterprise. And just very quickly, this is just the difference between federal and state prisons. So you can see that federal prisons tend to have more drug charges, or state prisons tend to have more violent crimes. So in the Obama era, there was a bipartisan push toward modest reforms on incarceration, and I will stress that these are moderate reforms. In 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder issued guidance to allow leniency on mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders. So mandatory minimums are a kind of thick sentence that it's written into law, so if you do something like say 10 grams of LSD on your first offense, you get 10 years. And so these don't at all take into account context or violence or perhaps prosecutors often go for the highest sentence that they can get because they want their numbers to go up, because they want crime to look like there's a tough-on-crime policy. And so this guidance, and as you may know in the U.S., a lot of law is actually enacted through executive guidance. So there may be laws on the books, but the executive will say, well, you know, you don't really need to pay attention exactly to that. So Holder issued this guidance that... Oops, I didn't... Oh, I do not want to do any of that. Very low preview. There we go. So when Holder issued this guidance, it meant that prosecutors were not to use mandatory minimum sentences if it was a first-time offense, if it was nonviolent, and if it involved a small amount of drugs. So this resulted in a 14% drop in the federal prison population in the last five years. And there was legislation to come. It had made its way through community and was on to the legislative calendar. And whether or not that's going to get taken up at this point, it's actually kind of doubtful. With the election of Trump and the appointment of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, these reforms are all on rollback. Less than a month ago, on May 10th, Sessions issued guidance that reversed what Holder had done. And he urged prosecutors to seek mandatory minimum sentences again. And while an Obama era directive had said that the Federal Bureau of Prisons would no longer contract with private prisons, Sessions reversed that as well. And he also is notably on board with Trump's wall project and increased targeting and deportation of immigrants. And of course, the increased targeting of immigrants has a promise to be very good for private prisons because they typically are the ones that get the contracts for holding for the detention of immigrants. So Sessions and the Department of Justice are pursuing two carceral strategies in Trump's America. One, the re-vigoration of the devastating drug war and two, increased detention and deportation of immigrants. And both of these obviously extend far beyond prisons. So at this point, I'll move on to the biblical texts. Sessions and Trump are both huge proponents of building the U.S.-Mexico wall, which by the way already exists. Although designed to keep people out, the wall is carceral in the way that it symbolizes things like surveillance, border guards, immigration and customs enforcement, which is ICE, the increased ICE raids, detention, deportation and vigilante groups. And this is really notable in the community where I live, which is a high immigrant community with a lot of undocumented workers. And people have to look out their window every day before they walk out of the house because they are worried that the ICE, who are often undercover, will be waiting for them. And that does happen. And this is all since the election. Notably in terms of space, the wall interiorizes. Wall rhetoric is nativist, as we'll see in a moment. And it's also comforting to its proponents in that it creates a sense of interiority and American-ness. In terms of motion and the imagination of motion, it reduces movement coming in from the outside. And it affectively produces the conflicting movements of threat and safety. And this of course largely depends on one's own positionality with respect to law enforcement. But even those of us who are, you know, safe and we have white privilege, we still, you know, I'm an activist, I've been in jail, I still, I'm an immigrant, I feel it. You know, I don't feel it as strongly, certainly as many others. But I also benefit, being a professor and a homeowner, from some of these carceral strategies. So there's this two-way sort of push and pull between threat and safety, especially for people who are not, like those who are under attack or under threat or really under threat, and they don't feel that safety necessarily, but many people have that sort of dual response. Now the scriptural figure that is used to authorize the wall is Nehemiah. And I'm grateful to students who, after the election, brought these examples to me. In the church service before Trump's inauguration, the very first conservative, sorry, not the very first, the very conservative Texan minister of first Baptist Alice Robert Jeffries gave a sermon that compared Trump to Nehemiah. And so we were talking about wall rhetoric. You know, it's in the Bible yesterday. Well, here it is. He said that he said, when I think of you, President-elect Trump, I am reminded of another great leader God chose thousands of years ago in Israel. That man was Nehemiah. And he says in the next bullet there, God instructed Nehemiah to build a wall around Jerusalem to protect its citizens from enemy attack. You see, God is not against building walls. So there's this conflation here between terrorism with the language of attack and immigration for economic reasons. We have a little, yes, a clip of him talking to Fox News. Can you make it big? So Mexicans, all of them are evil doers. They need to be quiet about the wall that Trump is trying to demand that they pay for.  And it's also very anti-Catholic. So thinking about some of the stuff that was talked about yesterday in terms of a kind of Protestantism and the way that that fuels certain kinds of politics. Jeff Sessions is also referred to Nehemiah in a speech about immigration while he was still an Alabama senator. And here you can really see the nativist rhetoric. And it's the top one. And then we have a lawful system of immigration for the nation state that we serve. And I know, and we've had economists come and testify on before our committee, that's Harvard, Professor Boros, the world's leading expert on it, that you bring in more labor than we can absorb. Poor people have their wages go down. Poor people have their job prospects go down. Things are going good out there for the American people. And one of the reasons is that the extraordinary, unprecedented rate of immigration into our country, particularly in lower skills, and it's harrowing good and decent people who need to be able to raise a family, take care of their children, and they're not able to do so effectively. And I believe we can do better on that. I know that we can. You know, I recall Nehemiah returning through the roof on the asphalt, we used to go home and came and let him go. And he went home, it's a little bit of a humorous joke, I don't know, it's like, to do what? To build a wall. He went to build a wall in Jerusalem, and he wanted to keep the people in, you know, give me a break. I'm not sure what the joke part was, but you see that the people loved it. So just a tiny bit of scratching reveals that in the U.S., descriptions of political leaders as Nehemiah has a long history. Their tradition of Nehemiah Americanus has been documented by historians like Sackman Berkovich, Ulrike Brunot, and James Patterson. Puritan Cotton Mather calls John Winthrop Nehemiah Americanus in his biography of Winthrop. And Patterson documents the trend during the American Revolution, many preachers use Nehemiah to think about defending the colony against Britain and also France and Catholicism. George Washington was called Nehemiah by preachers of his day. More recently, Jerry Falwell used the figure of Nehemiah defending against San Blatt and Tobias to encourage people to defend against the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. There's also a group, Patterson points to this group, called the Wall Builders, headed up by this fellow David Barton, which seeks to bring the U.S. back to its founding biblical values, quote, unquote, founding biblical values and strengthen Christian civic engagement and they take their name from Nehemiah. This group is also very conservative in other ways. It's very pro-life, homophobic, and Islamophobic. And they often reference the speeches of Jefferies. So there's this larger sort of movement, a kind of biblical understanding that walls are good, that it's feeding into certainly helping Trump out. In Trump's America, borders walls and the accompanying surveillance and policing is very alarming. And I want to highlight that wall rhetoric is not only about defense, it also interiorizes. The wall is pitched as bringing comfort to regular Americans who are safe within its confines. Whiteness is implied as well. Latinx people are kept out by the wall, just as Arab and Muslim people are kept out by the travel ban. This carceral logic of interiority is intensified further in prison, which adds another level of interiority, constraining many of the resident Black and Brown people into a smaller space. Between the border and prisons, we can see a trend toward producing a white middle. So the make America great again is really in some ways a racial move and carcerality is helping this to function. So one of the biblical texts that got me thinking about a biblically produced value on interiority in the U.S. is Psalm 139, which valorizes surveillance. It makes a couple of key appearances in the history of carcerality and U.S. slavery, and the text itself models the affective threat, release, known interiority, and confined safety that I have been discussing. The Psalm famously draws the links between surveillance and omniscience and between omniscience and interiority. And I got interested in this Psalm because of its very frequent citation in the pro-life movement, especially verse 13, you knit me and the womb, which is taken as evidence of the personhood of the fetus. But the Psalm is also very much used to instill surveillance and to imagine disciplinarity in the Foucaultian sense of the term. So just a quick example, kind of humorous. Franklin Graham, who's Billy Graham's son, very conservative, more conservative than Billy, even recently tried to keep Middleton on the occasion of her lawsuit with the paparazzi for taking pictures of her naked. And he used Psalm 139 to do so. He says, you know, she should know there's cameras everywhere, but she shouldn't be taking her top off at all because God's watching. And then using Psalm 139, you know, God knows everything. There we go. On a more serious historic note, you may know that Psalm 139 is actually linked to the Panopticon. It appears as the epigraph to Bentham's outline of the plan of construction of a Panopticon penitentiary house, which was published in 1790. And the verses, which you see there in italics, are not actually in order. There's verse 3, verse 11, and then verse 10. And this citation is not commented any further by Bentham, who was in a vowed atheist, but it's obviously drawing this analogy between the Omniscient God and the Omniscient Central Tower. It also really emphasizes paternalistic rightness of the law, especially with using verse 10 out of order and putting it last, this idea that your right hand will lead me. This is one of the few remaining, or it's just closed, Panoptic prison in the U.S., it's in Stateville, it's Stateville Prison in Illinois, and it was closed because it was just untenable. It was super loud, and the ventilation was terrible, and there were lots of cockroaches. So it's just been closed. Now of course the U.S. prison system, it does not really begin to grow until after slavery, when freed slaves could be arrested for loitering or for not having contracts for employment, and then they could be put back to work in prisons and chain gangs. So you probably know this, but it's worth repeating, the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution allows for slavery as punishment for a crime. U.S. prisons are notorious for making people work and paying them very low wages, like 25 cents an hour. The really good jobs might get a dollar an hour. So it has really been critique for being a modern form of slavery. Prior to the emancipation of slaves though, slaves were taught religion through catechism, and here's one that appeared in a Southern Episcopal paper in 1836, and telling Lee Psalm 139 appears in this catechism. Where is God? Everywhere. How much does God know? God knows you. Can you hide yourself from God? No. So the use of this slum in the context of slavery is very sinister, and there's a racialization here in surveillance. And though the subtext is obviously negative and obviously policing, the surface seems very nice, reassuring even.  And this is again a kind of paternalism that we see in Bentham's citation as well. The text of the slum itself is a prototype for the conflicting positive and negative affects, and I am suggesting is characteristic of U.S. carcerality. Biblical scholars like Yair Mazor and Carolyn Pressler have recognized the tension between threat and salvation in surveillance. As Pressler points out, surveillance resolves into trust largely because of the womb imagery. Affectively, the poem insights movement and then stillness, producing for the hearer a sense of threat and alleviation of threat. The poem imagines the physical pressure and fragmentation of surveillance, and then it relieves that discomfort by imagining interiority, security, and visibility. I'm not going to take you in detail through the poem, but just give you a couple of examples here. The first part of the poem shifts from fragmentation to possibility and back again. It's as if the body is first compressed, then spun centrifugally apart, and then finally being caught and being brought back under God's control. And the poem uses many double entendres and that create this ambivalence, and these are lost in translation, so to think a little bit with Christina. So in verse three, you search out my path and my lying down. Zara, the verb that is used, is really more almost always means to scatter. So it's more negative than you might think. Or the first verb in verse five, usually translated, you hem me in, really is usually translated as to lay siege. So it's as if God is laying siege on the poet. But the second part of the lines render these ambivalence terms more benign and positive. So in verse three, the Zara, the scattering, is made softer with Sakhan.  And after, if in verse five you get this siege and the heavy hand of God, verse six lifts that weight. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, so high. So there's a stretching, a sense of bodily aspiration. The dynamic shifts again in verses seven to nine in a variation that spins the body in the opposite direction from potentially positive bodily motion to dispersion and destabilization. So you get this, apparently I have a heavy hand. So you get this potentially neutral question, where can I go from your spirit? And then it quickly moves into the threat of flight and pursuit with Barak. And in verse eight, if I ascend to the heavens, it's quickly followed by, if I'm spread out in Sheol, you are there. So followed by disintegration. So the movement and fragmentation in the first part of the Psalm is then ameliorated in the second part of the poem. And this second part amplifies the sense of God's vision. And at the same time, it creates a sense of security through the language of creation and interiority. The poetic shifts might, to a Spinozen reader, suggest a diminution of bodily activity and therefore negative emotion. And yet the language of creation, gestation, fixity, renders a kind of stillness and security. We get the womb, creation, containment, permanent, fixity and chosenness, all of which are validated by God's vision. Surveillance and interiority are something of a boon. And movement in the poem is kind of threatening, maybe a little bit exciting, but it's a threat that's resolved through God's vision and interiority. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this last part of the poem, but its aggression is very interesting to me. The security that's produced through the alleviation of threat in the first two parts of the poem results in hatred towards others.  He's done recently. So this movement in the poem, I suggest, is not unlike that of the border wall. There's a movement from the outside to the inside. It's a shift from expansive movement into contained space and a very small space at that. And where I'm moving here is that the US seems to have a love affair with interiority. And you see this a little bit with what you were talking about, Joe, about the sort of stripping down in simplicity. Although I do think walls are very important here. You see it in cursorality. And I don't really have time to develop this fully right now, but you can see it in the extensive political discourse built on the fetus. The fetus represents the true white inside, which is also innocent a time before sinfulness. This brings me to my last scenario, which has to do with biblical teaching inside prisons on atonement. Debt and indebtedness enter the equation here, which also has to do with movement. Debt could be said to slow people down. As people are literally moved to situations of containment, they are also saddled with literal and figural debt that effectively contributes to their immobility. Now the Bible is very frequently taught in prisons, and I will reference my own observations. The women that we are involved with in the writing workshop, we sort of cooperate. We've done it for many years, and we bring students in, and they co-learn with the women inside. And many of them, once they hear that I'm a biblical professor, want to tell me they're taking divinity school. They really believe in the Bible, and I just have to sort of skirt those conversations, because I don't want to take the Bible away from them. It's a survival tactic, and yet I see it as a kind of... It seems very damaging. People will often say, it's good that I came to prison, now I'm getting my life on track, Jesus is helping me to get my life on track. And so the teaching of the Bible in prison really ends up validating the fact that people are inside. And the reason the Bible is taught so much in prisons is because prison ministries have been actively promoted, and they have proliferated since 2001, under the direction first of Jeb Bush in Florida when he was governor, and then George W. Bush in Washington. So these programs, they take a variety of forms. They could be weekly Bible studies, and then there are also separate housing units called God Pods that have better food and more freedom. And there are even full faith-based prisons. So Florida has three full faith-based prisons, and about 12 faith-based dorms. One of the best known and largest faith-based prisons is prison... The ministries is a prison fellowship, which was begun by Chuck Colson of the Watergate scandal. So after he went to prison for Watergate, he realized that prisons aren't good, and he had a conversion experience, and he began this big ministry. So here is the description of a prison fellowship Easter service at the notorious Rikers Island jail complex for New York City. The account tells of the positive response of the men inside to Christ's atoning sacrifice. We opened our Bibles to Leviticus 16 and visited the celebration of atonement, where a priest laid his hands on the goat's head and placed the sins of the people there. We envisioned the walk Jesus made carrying the sins of every human to the cross and away from us, a holy scapegoat, given freely for each and every one of us. I asked the men if they wished to place their sins upon Jesus, have him pay for them, and experience real freedom. What a wondrous miracle it was to watch 83 inmates stand up and say, yes, I need forgiveness, I will follow Jesus. Now if we spend some time with this particular teaching, we will see that it rhetorically produces both spatial and somatic affect. It fosters acceptance of incarceration and emphasizes a notion of debt. Let's reconstruct the event. Imagine, there you are incarcerated on Rikers Island. Because it's a jail, you're most likely waiting for trial. The average stay is about 57 days, but some people get lost in limbo and are there up to three years. So there you are waiting for a longer sentence, and here come these nice people with their Bibles. Let's turn to Leviticus 16. So Aaron is to take a bull to offer for himself, and then he's to take two goats, and then he casts lots for the goats. One is to be sacrificed, and the other is to be sent out into the wilderness. Aaron is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites, all their sins, and put them on the goat's head. He shall send the goat away into the desert in the care of a man appointed for the task. The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a solitary place, and the man shall release it in the desert. So this is the language of being expelled, of being sent away and abandoned to die. The options are stark. Wouldn't anyone take the option of being given by prison fellowship of staying put and accepting Christ? Notice the movement here. The Jesus goat goes out, and the incarcerated stay in. The effect is to garner consent for being inside. There is an imaginative movement from threat to safety from potential exteriority to grateful interiority. Debt to the Jesus goat ends up modeling a kind of immobility. It's ironic since identification with the scapegoat would be about movement, even escape, but instead Jesus goes out and sacrifice. I'm not going to really get into this, but there's also a whole, in the goat as a zeal, and so there's a whole, there's even some conspiracy theories about the demonic scapegoat. What's really important, though, here is the language of atonement, and this isn't actually a goat, but it's not technically a goat, but you get the point. The religious language of sin and salvation in these programs is based on an economic model of debt and payment. The men are asked if they want Jesus to pay for their sins. In this world view, the incarcerated person is a criminal, a sinner, and can only be reformed by salvation through atonement. Prison fellowship is big on the doctrine of atonement as are many faith-based ministries, and you can look through their mission statements online and see that they all reference the atoning work of Christ. Greg Carey has talked about how atonement theology feeds an ideology, a belief in retributive punishment, and Hollis Phelps has written about how atonement theology, quote, is a theological and moral weight to neoliberalism's own creation of indebted subjects. There's a sense in prison ministry that those inside are extra indebted because extra sinful. Prison fellowship claims, for instance, that, quote, crime is fundamentally a moral problem and a result of rebellion against God. It is secondarily a socioeconomic problem. Now, of course, as Nietzsche noted, punishment itself, such as being in prison, increases a sense of guilt and emphasizes moral indebtedness, so you already have this sort of sense of guilt and indebtedness, and then atonement theology adds another layer. And so spiritual debt is added to debt to society. Miranda Joseph in her book, Debt to Society, argues that accounting metaphors of indebtedness have become part of the way that punishment is understood, and this is basically since Cesar Bakari has influential treatise on crimes and punishment in 1764. He conceived of the social contract as a kind of debt-producing obligation. Law-abiding behavior was a credit paid, and crime was a lapse into social debt. So you get spiritual debt, debt to society, and then added to this, you get literal debt. So the prison industrial complex produces literal debt from restitution fines, which can be up to $10,000 for a felony jail fees, so there are a lot of jails that make you pay for your time in jail while you're waiting trial. There are parole fees, so when you get out, you have more fees that you have to pay. So people go into prison with debts, and then those debts are garnered from their very meagler wages, which they also have to use to buy anything, you know, cigarettes or food that's not disgusting or anything that they want to buy, phone services, et cetera. And then they come out of prison with debt. You can see how this might create a kind of stalling cycle, whereby coming out of prison, being unemployed, stigma, debt. This could cause people to turn to alternative economies that then land them up in prison again.  So it's just really a distressing situation. Debt becomes strongly associated with immobility, both literally and figuratively. It affectively decreases power of activity. Now of course, more generally speaking, debt can be understood as a kind of, or meant to produce mobility, right? People can buy cars, they can buy houses. I mean it does produce a kind of upward mobility and there's a recent issue of cultural, cultural studies, the journal, that looks at debt as a kind of mobility producing. But Maurizio Lazarato has argued it's also very strongly a form of social control, making people infinitely more governable. So debt might provide social mobility for some people, but it's really immobilizing for others. And obviously this relates to class. I want to think about mobility and debt in relation to affect theory as well. So Greg Siegworth and Matt Thiessen talk about credit and debt as secretions. They describe the pursuit of financial liquidity in futures markets as a kind of secreting plasma in their drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's elaboration of secret, secrecy and secretion, which is the content form and expression of secrets. Production of liquidity is a kind of open secret, hidden from the public, but actively producing credit from debt. Transactions of ever-increasing credit and debt operate out of sight in secret. As liquidity pools, debt secretes. If liquidity races toward the future, debt slows people down, sucking them into pooling secretions. That's the image. We can think of prisons too as a kind of open secret. Everybody knows that they're there. They're producing interest for some people and there's an affect to interest as well, which we can talk about in questions if we want. Then it's creating the cesspool of debt for others. An analysis of debt to immobility could also usefully draw on Mel Chen's discussion of racialized hierarchies of animacy. As Chen points out, in the US, linguistics, cultural structures, and ontological imaginations grant animacy, that is agency, purpose, activity, to some social actors more than others with predictably white, free adult men on the top of the hierarchy. Chen shows how racialized or colonialized people, immigrants, and also differently-abled people, are objectified and dehumanized through rhetorical association with things considered less animate than humans, things like animals or vegetables or non-organic matter. So debt, which we are seeing is racialized or can be racialized, can be a block to mobility and even ability to move and to grow. That slows people down, creates immobility, blockages, pockets of impossibility. That is doubly immobilizing for the incarcerated, whether this is spiritual or psychological or literal debt. Prisons interiorize and slow the incarcerated on multiple levels. Andrew Diltz points out in his study of punishment in the US, and this is particularly within US liberalism, the good US citizen is typically figured in legal and political discourses white, male, able, and innocent. So conversely, the incarcerated are disenfranchised, non-citizens often, and in a way they are disabled. So to draw this all together, I've been tracing the kind of... Do I have a slide? No. I've been tracing the kind of interiority and stultification that is produced through borders, through surveillance, and in spiritual teaching and prisons. In each case, interiority is seen as a positive creating safety from threat. Scripture trains people in this affect to see otherness as movement and as potential threat, and to see it ameliorated through interiority and inaction. The effects of this turning inward are quite negative. We see them in exclusion, oppression, or even as we saw simply nativist mediocrity. This inward turning self is self-referential and thought of as chosenness. It tries to shore up national identity and preserve American-ness as whiteness. Ultimately though, I think it produces a kind of democratic auto-immunity, the kind that Derrida speaks about. As a pathology, this continual turning inward and slowing down could be called melancholic. And here's the turn to the psychoanalytic. So remember that for Freud, the melancholic person pathologically incorporates the lost object into the ego, and it's the never loved, never lost, and it becomes part of the ego rather than in mourning where the lost object is let go. In prisons, the never loved and never lost criminalized population is spatially segregated and interiorized in the identity and functioning of the nation. My colleague in Africana studies, Valerie Thomas, often points out just how much cultural ability and talent is locked away, and we do see this in the writing workshop. Women are amazing writers. They're published. They're spoken word artists. They're artist artists. They're amazing. And all of this is cultural talent that is just out of sight, out of mind, caged. So this loss potentially reduces and stalls the nation overall. And this is a bold claim, but it could be one reason that the US is failing as it is. But as we've learned through queer theory, melancholy is not only a pathology. It can also be a site of disruption and an ethical starting point. And Munoz has talked about this. There's some really good work on ecology and queer theory that's worked on this as well. In other words, the lost object can start moving again, perhaps assisting power of activity and thought in a new kind of polity. Public recognition of this loss and its potential could start movement toward new modes of social organization. We might also rethink the figure of the scapegoat as artist Micah Bazant has done in his Miqlat installation in New York. The sins borne by the scapegoat turn into the city of refuge. Now, in the colloquial sense, people in prisons are scapegoated for economic failures. They bear the debt of those making interest on their incarceration. But perhaps the scapegoat could become a figure of freedom. Interiority within the U.S. may be stalled, carceral, and pathological. But in contrast, being sent out from the city might be, as Mary Douglas considers, something good for goats, sent to graze in the border between cultivated land and sunscorched earth. The goat is not hindered by walls, political police surveillance or self-scrutiny. Rather, we could see the goat not as sacrificial, but instead we could see it as being set free. Thank you.


Starting the second semester, the MBA students at the University of Edinburgh have been involved in the operations improvement and management course. The program covers the concept of value, the key performance indicators used to measure quality, management quality systems, and how to develop strategic operations. Strategy, design, control and improvement. These represent words that the MBA students will carry on their journey of fact-making.