It is day 25 of the California prison hunger strikes.  How is the state of California responding to the largest hunger strike in its history?

The Governor of California, Jerry Brown, is on vacation in Europe.  He has not issued a statement about the 2013 hunger strikes.  He has not responded to questions from the media and the public about the death of 32-year old Billy Sell, a prisoner who was found dead in his cell at Corcoran State Prison on July 22.  Nor has he responded to the claim that Sell was participating in the hunger strike and had requested medical treatment prior to his death.

How has the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) responded to the strike action?  In a recent blog post, I listed some of the retaliatory measures taken by the CDCR against hunger strikers.  These include administrative segregation, disciplinary write-ups, freezing cold temperatures, and the withholding of medication, canteen items, yard time, and even liquids.

The CDCR has also issued formal warnings to hunger strikers that “You may die, even after you start to eat again,” and that “Now is the time for you to think about what medical care you want when you are no longer able to talk to health care staff” (CCHCS Mass Hunger Strike, Fasting, & Refeeding Care Guide, PE-2)

They have warned hunger strikers that, unless they sign an Advance Directive and a Physician’s Order for Life Sustaining Treatment (POLST) indicating that they do not want medical care when they are no longer able to speak, they may be force-fed: “If you go into a coma or your heart stops, you will get all the medical care needed to try to save your life, including CPR, food, and fluids” (PE-2).

While couched in the bioethical language of care and respect for the autonomy of the “patient,” such policies work to absolve the CDCR from any meaningful sense of responsibility for the survival and well-being of hunger strikers.  In effect, they give these protesters two options: consent to be force-fed, or consent to die.

At what point does a prisoner on hunger strike become a “patient with prolonged fasting” and a candidate for “Patient Education/Self Management” (PE-2)?

In order to answer this question fully, we would need to tell a longer story about the process by which a person who is convicted of a crime and sentenced to serve time in California gets “validated” as a “gang member,” “gang associate,” or member of a “Security Threat Group.”  We would also have to analyze the relationship between these “Security Threat Groups,” and the “clients” that the CDCR claims to serve in its vision statement:

The overarching vision is to end the causes and tragic effects of crime, violence, and victimization in our communities through a collaborative effort that provides intervention to at-risk populations and quality services from the time of arrest that will assist our clients in achieving successful reintegration into society (emphasis in original).

Can the same person be a client, a patient, and a security threat?  Can a security threat also be encountered as a person, by which I mean a relational Being-in-the-world?

For this article, I will set aside these larger issues of personhood in biopolitical times in order to focus on the tension between the subject positions of “a prisoner on hunger strike” and “a patient with prolonged fasting.”  I want to suggest that  these subject positions imply different political temporalities.  This is not just an abstract philosophical point; at stake are the concrete possibilities, and the foreclosure of possibilities, for (bio)political life and death.

A hunger strike is a political act.  It is, more specifically, the political act of someone whose voice has been excluded from the political realm.  In his brilliant analysis of the 1981 hunger strikes of political prisoners in Northern Ireland, Allen Feldman argues that the strike action – which resulted in the death of Bobby Sands and nine other prisoners – was both a “corporeal protest against injustice” (219) and a way of “transcrib[ing] biological time into epochal time” (225).

The prisoners, whose status had been de-politicized and criminalized by a colonial penal system, used their bodies as weapons and sites of resistance against state power:

From the moment we entered the H-blocks we had used our bodies as a protest weapon.  It came from an understanding that the Brits were using our bodies to break us.  It wasn’t just a prison movement.  We began to identify with the oppressed all over the world.  That’s how full the circle had become.  There was more entailed in it than the five demands.  It wasn’t just to get us out of the conditions we were living in.(Feldman, 1991: 232, emphasis added)

This transformation of the body into a site of resistance and of global solidarity – even in the isolation of a prison cell – issued in a new “‘temporalization’ of history” (233).  The Dirty protest and the Blanket protest had been going on for years, with no promise of resolution.  But the hunger strikes created a situation in which the body made things happen, a situation in which time was of the essence.  The hunger strikers used the vulnerability and mortality of the body to force open an eschatological time in which the status quo could not be maintained indefinitely.

A hunger strike is an end game: The lives of prisoners are literally on the line, and the meaning of these lives is raised – beyond the rhetoric of the (bio)political systems that enclose them – by the life-or-death stakes of the strike action.

I don’t want to celebrate this eschatological temporality of the hunger strike; no one should have to expose themselves to suffering and death in order to make their voices heard and taken seriously as participants in public life.  But what remains of public life when hunger strikers (and not just hunger strikers) are treated as patients, clients, and security threats?  Is there a way out of the biopolitical temporality of perpetual management, control, and securitization (which is by no means restricted to the control prison)?  What “‘temporalization’ of history,” and what forms of collective action, remains possible in such a situation?

* * *

It is over thirty years since the Irish hunger strikes, and over thirty years since the emergence of neoliberalism in Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s America.  What has happened in this time?  And what has happened to time in this epoch?

The history, motives, and aims of the hunger strikes in Ireland and California are different, and they must be analyzed in their own terms.  But they share a common strategy in resistance to neoliberal power and biopolitical temporality.  By neoliberal power, I mean (very briefly) the reduction of politics to policy and policing.  By biopolitical temporality I mean a time in which nothing happens to interrupt the relentless expansion of capital, a time without event.

By joining together in collective action, the hunger strikers and their supporters contest the logic of neoliberal biopolitics.  They refuse to adapt to the demands for a docile and “flexible” population. (Let’s not forget that the hunger strikes in California are held in tandem with a work stoppage; and let’s also not forget that inmates receive wages of $.30 to $.95 per hour before deductions.)  They reclaim words like “accountability” from the meaningless double-speak of prison bureaucrats and state legislators for whom this word means little more than “risk management,” i.e., absolving themselves of any meaningful sense of collective or individual responsibility.  They count time in days rather than hours.

But it’s difficult to pull this off.  The temporality of political action does not always intersect with the temporality of news cycles, or even with the attention span of otherwise supportive members of the public.  It’s hard to count time in days when you’re constantly scrolling down a screen.  It’s easier to click “like” than to sit down and write a letter to the warden at Pelican Bay.

And it may be difficult to see how the concerns of a specific, and intensely stigmatized, group of people bear on the lives of everyone in a neoliberal society (or, in other words, on everyone in the world today).  At stake here is not just sympathy or compassion for the poor, suffering prisoners; it is the challenge of grasping what we share in common on both sides of the prison walls, and building on these common interests to build solidarity, to reclaim political life from neoliberal biopolitics, and to renew the temporality of the world.

I will close with the words of Mutope Duguma (AKA James Crawford) in his 2011 statement announcing the first round of collective hunger strikes:

“Therefore we have decided to put our fate in our own hands. Some of us have already suffered a slow, agonizing death in which the state has shown no compassion toward these dying prisoners. Rather than compassion they turn up their ruthlessness. No one wants to die. Yet under this current system of what amounts to intense torture, what choice do we have? If one is to die, it will be on our own terms.

“Power concedes nothing without demand.” 

References

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Vision, Mission, Values, and Goals. Available at: http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/About_CDCR/vision-mission-values.html

Duguma M (2011) The Call. Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity weblog. Available at:https://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/voices-from-inside/the-call/

Feldman A (1991) Formations of Violence: The narrative of the body and political terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Guenther L (2013) Social Death and the Criminalization of Resistance in the California Prison Hunger Strikes. New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science weblog. Available at:http://www.newappsblog.com/2013/07/social-death-and-the-criminalization-of-resistance-in-the-california-prison-hunger-strikes.html

Moqbel SNAH (2013) Gitmo is Killing Me. The New York Times. 14 April. Available at:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/opinion/hunger-striking-at-guantanamo-bay.html?_r=1

Ontiveros I (2013) Negotiate Gov. Brown! How Many More Prisoners Must Die? San Francisco Bay View. 29 July. Available at: http://sfbayview.com/2013/07/negotiate-gov-brown-how-many-more-prisoners-must-die/