UC Berkeley

Contemporary social-scientific research about law, punishment, and state power is characterized by analytic plurality. This was not always the case, as recent decades have seen a shift away from the reign of grand theoretical traditions to a proliferation of coterminous approaches. And yet, in some important respects this analytic plurality continues to stand on common grounds. To state this in general terms, most prominent approaches for the study of law and punishment presume a singular world in which difference can always be included, and they thereby consider all that exists as empirical phenomena that can be linked to one another and ultimately placed within the same picture. This ontological starting point also forms a shared “here” for established social-scientific research on law and punishment, or what Sara Ahmed (2007) calls a “zero-point of orientation.” I suggest that this shared starting point positions and its numerous variations, however different or contested they may be amongst themselves, typically stand on the same side of the color line. The alternative ontology that emerges from the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois helps me explicate this statement as well as to consider alternative starting points from which to explore law and punishment. In general terms, Du Bois’s sociology recognizes the possibility of unreconciled ontologies, indeed of two or more “separate-yet-adjacent worlds” that may refuse assimilation. Accordingly, Du Bois’s ontology opens up ways for treating difference as something that may refuse to be included, and thus as articulating alternative grounds from which to see, think, and act amidst unreconciled worlds.

The color line, for Du Bois, is that which separates different worlds that maintain a hierarchical yet intimate relations. One central aspect of these relations, from the standpoint of the white world, is the relentless attempt to translate and include what cannot be included. This process of unilateral translation degrades the people and realities that exist on the other side of the line so as to make them legible for the white world and thereby sustain a “one-world world” (Law 2015). The tenacious attempt to “include” thereby becomes a thrust to enclose, arrest, and degrade. Through this process, the white world labors to produce whatever does not fit its ontological infrastructure as nonexistent, namely, as incapable of being on its own terms in any legible way, as being real only insofar as it exists for the white world and within its designated frames. Du Bois denotes this function of the color line in terms of the veil which, from the perspective of Black folk, can be likened to a “thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass” that mediates them to “the world” (1940, 130-131). This operation of the veil has many similarities to colonial vision that strives to assimilate “uncharted territories” by transforming incommensurability into difference: while the former calls for recognition of alternative starting points and thus decenters the world of the observer, the latter is made into something that can be included within the known and settled world.

In this dissertation, I draw on and extend traditions of thought and practice that recognize and respect difference as something that cannot be included and, in so doing, sidestep the dominant sociological syntax and its shared “here.” Among others, the present work is oriented by the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Black feminism, Saidiya Hartman, Walter Benjamin, post-colonial and decolonial thought, Sara Ahmed, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s work on the borderland/le frontera. From these alternative grounds, I extend Du Bois’s notion of the color line in treating it not strictly as a line, but, more capaciously, as a liminal space or a borderland that extends between unreconciled ontologies.

Empirically, the dissertation focuses on penal supervision in a progressive setting precisely because of the ontologically liminal position of supervision. Indeed, unlike custodial institutions that dislocate people and isolate them in a space of total control, supervision typically proceeds via mediators that traverse the liminal spaces that extend between the world of the law and the worlds of people and communities. And yet, dominant approaches for understanding supervision remain tethered to the prison as an analytical mooring point, a fact that encumbers our ability to conceptualize one of the most foundational challenges of supervision, namely, its continuous encounter with realities that cannot be included in the world of the law. Relying on 3.5 year of ethnographic research, combined with forty (40) in-depth interviews and content analysis of documents, objects and technologies, I explore the liminal and bi-directional dynamics of supervision. Proceeding from a Du Boisian ontology, I ask: What does penal supervision do in the face of unreconciled ontologies? What does is it mean to think of supervision as operating through the color line? How does supervision operate in and through the liminal spaces that extend between the world of the law and the worlds of supervised people?

In general terms, I suggest that exploring supervision as a liminal institution allows us to foreground two of its interrelated functions: that of seeing and that of acting across ontological difference. Respectively, I consider two related aspects of the relentless process that imperfectly arrests and transforms what it cannot comprehend: epistemic closure and ontological closure. I therefore consider penal supervision as an undertheorized yet significant world-making institution, which, from a standpoint that recognizes ontological irreconcilability, also means it is a world- destroying institution. Indeed, in the process of enclosing people and realities for the world of the law, supervision invades and breaks apart homes, subjectivities, and networks of care and support. This world-making and world-destroying functions of supervision may also help explain its rapid expansion in times of rising ontological anxiety. As “the world” seems to be falling apart, supervision is one primary institution for fixing in place what refuses inclusion. And yet, my inquiry joins a longstanding tradition that explores how insistent refusals to be enclosed in someone else’s world abide and sustain abolitionist imaginings even in the midst of interlocking forms of world-destroying violence.