Catherine Kellogg is truly an inspirational and innovative
speaker.
On Wednesday, January 28, Kellogg presented a spirited talk
on the death penalty, solitary confinement, and sovereignty as part of the
Cultural Studies Speaks Seminar Series. She attempted to map the language
surrounding the use of certain terminologies such as “cruel”, “unusual” and
“inhuman.”
She started off the talk with an image from the eighteenth
century of the New Gate Prison in London at the Old Bailey.
“What’s about to happen here?” she asked a room filled with eager
Cultural Studies students and faculty.
“A murder is about to
happen here. What you see are two people about to be executed. I’m interested
in looking at what makes this murder not criminal,”
she stated.
According to Kellogg, acts of violence considered legitimate,
such as the murder she is referring to, happen because of the word,
“sovereignty.”
She then proceeded to narrate the story of a famous hangman,
William Calcraft, an executioner at Newbury who was famous for a kind of
incompetence. Calcraft was incompetent at weighing and measuring the body of
the person about to be executed. Kellogg explained this concept well in the
video below, and talked about how she is interested in examining how
sovereignty and cruelty relate to each other.
Coming from a political studies background, Kellogg talked
about how she is drawn to critical theory and to symptomatic reading.
“There are certain symptoms I want to look at. What are
they? It’s the killing of African Americans with impunity; it’s the missing and
murdered aboriginal women; it’s the CIA interrogating illegal combatants; it’s the
changing carceral logic and the death penalty. I will look at some of them and
all of them,” she said.
Drawing on Thomas Hobbs’s concept of state and power, Kellogg
proceeded to talk about the modern state and how it exercises enormous power
over life and death.
“So what puts a limit on this power over life and death?
What draws a line between legitimate force and illegitimate violence?” she
inquired.
She specifically referred to the language surrounding the
words “cruel” and “unusual.” She stressed that this language came from the 1689
English Bill of Rights and finds itself being repeated in various documents
today such as the Eighth Amendment to the American Constitution and Section
Twelve of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“There’s something about cruelty
that is repeated. In order for it to be repeated, it requires procedure. So
it’s a term associated with evil and circulates in a discourse of morality. I’m
not interested in the moral or religious notion of this term. I’m interested in
its psychoanalytic notion. What is it that Freud was trying to say when talking
about cruelty? For him, cruelty is repetition. It’s habit. It’s ageing,” said
Kellogg.
(A slide from Kellog’s presentation, containing the
single word, “Cruelty.”)
“It is forgotten that the guillotine was introduced in
France and used as a means of execution as a more humane mode of execution- it
was supposedly painless. Its invention and adoption throughout France are
symptomatic of modern or post revolutionary death penalty. It evolved out of an
anesthesial logic. This is apparent in the US where lethal injection was
introduced in 1977 one day after the Supreme Court lifted the moratorium on
executions,” she said.
For Kellogg, the ambiguity of the meaning of cruel and unusual requires looking at the origins of these words. She claimed
that the words come from the 1689 Bill of Rights- a time when the slave trade
was ripe and burgeoning.
“The term was meant to signify the limits of what masters
could do to slaves, what men could do to women, and what it was possible to do
to this new kind of property which was also human and alive,” she said.
The language of cruel and unusual travelled from seventeenth
century England to the new colonies and found itself firmly embedded in the
constitutions of the American colonies.
(Listen to Kellogg talk about the notion of civil and
social death and the logic of punishment.)
Kellogg also brought in another variable into this whole
debacle, which is mass incarceration. She talked about how the US imprisons
more people than any other country, with most of the inmates being African
American. But what about Canada? Kellogg claimed that Canada incarcerates
citizens at rates that are among the highest in the world. In the case of
aboriginal women, the statistics are staggering. Why is there this
overrepresentation? What’s the purpose of prisons? For Kellogg, the answer lies
in how settler colonialism is an ongoing project and is always about the
containment of peoples.
Kellogg further argued that colonialism is in fact
intensifying but so is the power of the resistance to it. She explained that looking
at the renewed resource extraction in Canada can also give one a good picture
of the ongoing colonial project. She claimed that the government is primarily
concerned with indigenous people with regards to their location with respect to the production of wealth.
“So, in fact, the marginality and precariousness of
indigenous life makes it an easy target and yet, it is also this marginality
that makes it an important node in the circulation of wealth.”
Kellogg’s symptomatic reading tells us that even though the sovereignty
of the state appears to be potent, the resistance to it is enormous as well.
