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3. Prison Iconography: Regarding the Pain of Others
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50 3 Prison Iconography Regarding the Pain of Others The image, the imagined, the imaginary—these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes : the imagination as a social practice. No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is elsewhere), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people), and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals ) and globally defined fields of possibility. This unleashing of the imagination links the play of pastiche (in some settings) to the terror and coercion of states and their competitors. The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order. But to make the claim meaningful, we must address some other issues. —Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 1996 This chapter sets out to make some of the above claims “meaningful ,” but with special regard to Appadurai’s qualifier: That in order to reveal the cultural work of the imagination, particularly in relationship to punishment’s pain, we must first “address some other issues.” Most of those issues pertain to our approaches and theoretical contexts for the study of representation—for how we both pursue and explain this work. Prison Iconography 51 The study of representation in criminology remains a field of thought preoccupied with its own justification and the pursuit of a clear articulation of the reasons why we should take cultural texts, images, and performances seriously—related, no doubt, to the challenge of the humanities more generally in their critical work. The notion of the imagination as an “organized field of social practices” and complex form of work, as a negotiated mode of agency embedded within intricate and dense media structures and economic conditions, points to the manner in which the production of desires, subjectivities, terror, and coercion sit center stage to issues of representation generally but also with an important specificity to criminology. In other words, it is criminology specifically which must assume certain theoretical obligations with regard to issues of representation —particularly the limits of representation where images of crime and punishment, pain and death largely proliferate. In this chapter, I explore this task through a discussion of conventional and emergent ways in which to understand the representation of punishment in relationship to penal spectatorship. I conclude with a discussion of the specific roles that both images and spectators have to play in a larger discussion of the politics of penal representation. In the main, criminology assumes particular trajectories in its discussions and debates surrounding the justification and meaningfulness of image work. In an articulation of the classic constructionist position, criminologist Ray Surette argues, “[P]eople use knowledge they obtain from the media to construct a picture of the world, an image of reality on which they base their actions. This process, sometimes called ‘the social construction of reality,’ is particularly important in the realm of crime, justice, and the media.”1 Communications scholars Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton represent a more contemporary take, insisting that the media is no longer something separable from society. Social reality is experienced through language, communication and imagery. Social meanings and social differences are inextricably tied up with representation . Thus when sociologists call for an account which tells how life actually is, and which deals with the real issues rather than the spectacular and exaggerated ones, the point is that these accounts of reality are already representations and sets of meanings about what they perceive the “real” issues to be. These versions of “reality” would also be impregnated with the mark of media imagery rather than somehow pure and untouched by the all-pervasive traces of contemporary communications. 2 [54.166.234.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:52 GMT) 52 Prison Iconography Such a framework emphasizes the tension within which much of the work of cultural representation in criminology is done. In the first account, reality is measured against a mediated “picture” which in turn shapes social action and crime policy—there is a discrepancy between “reality” and popular knowledge, what Stuart Hall refers to as...