Marginality, ethnicity and penality in the neo-liberal city: an analytic cartography

Abstract

This article draws an analytic map of the research programme pursued across my three books Urban Outcasts (2008), Punishing the Poor (2009) and Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (in press). In this trilogy, I disentangle the triangular nexus of class fragmentation, ethnic division and state-crafting in the polarizing city at century's turn to explain the political production, socio-spatial distribution and punitive management of marginality through the wedding of disciplinary social policy and neutralizing criminal justice. I signpost how I deployed key notions from Pierre Bourdieu (social space, bureaucratic field, symbolic power) to clarify categories left hazy (such as the ghetto) and to forge new concepts (territorial stigmatization and advanced marginality, punitive containment and liberal paternalism, hyper-incarceration and negative sociodicy) as tools for the comparative sociology of the unfinished genesis of the post-industrial precariat, the penal regulation of poverty in the age of diffusing social insecurity, and the building of the neo-liberal Leviathan.

Keywords:

• marginality
• ethnicity
• ghetto
• criminal justice
• state
• symbolic power
• dishonour, neoliberalism
• Bourdieu

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains, the Groupe d’Études sur l’Ethnicité, le Racisme et les Migrations, the Institut de Gestion de l’Environnement et d’Aménagement du Territoire, and the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at Université Libre de Bruxelles for their welcome and for their support of this collective enterprise, and Mathieu Hilgers for his intelligence and persistence in shepherding it. I am grateful also to Karen George for producing on short notice a first-rate English draft translation of the original text in French; to Aaron Benavidez and Sarah Brothers for stellar research assistance; to Megan Comfort and Matt Desmond for sharp editorial and analytic suggestions; and to all the colleagues, students and activists who have contributed to the advancement of this research agenda over the years through their reactions, critiques and suggestions at countless venues in multiple countries. Special appreciation goes to Pierre Bourdieu and Bill Wilson, without whose mentorship this work would have never been undertaken.

Notes

1. I argued this point, a long time ago (Wacquant 1989), in the course of a reinterpretation of the political and scientific controversy stirred up in the USA by the masterwork of my Chicago mentor, William Julius Wilson ([1978] 1980), The Declining Significance of Race, as well as in an article calling for the elaboration of an ‘analytic of racial domination’ escaping the logic of trial that construes racialization as one among many competing modalities of the fabrication of collectives (Wacquant 1997a).

2. I use the term ‘race’ in the sense of denegated ethnicity: a principle of stratification and classification stipulating a gradation of honour (declension according to ancestry, phenotype or some other sociocultural characteristic mobilized for the purpose of social closure, cf. Wacquant 1997a) that purports to be based in nature; or else a paradoxical variety of ethnicity that claims to not be ethnic – a claim that, infeliciter, sociologists endorse every time they carelessly invoke the duet ‘race and ethnicity’ that anchors ethno-racial common sense in English-speaking countries.

3. The predicament of lower-class postcolonial immigrants across Europe is that they suffer from the symbolic taint spread by the panic discourse of ‘ghettoization’, which overtly designates them as a threat to national cohesion in every society, without garnering the ‘paradoxical benefits’ of actual ghettoization (Wacquant 2010c, 2010f), among them the primitive accumulation of social, economic and cultural capital in a separate life sphere liable to give them a shared collective identity and an increased capacity for collective action, in the political field in particular.

4. Those who would doubt the relevance of the US workfare regime to non-Anglo-Saxon countries should consult Lødemel and Trickey's book (2001), neatly entitled ‘An Offer You Can’t Refuse’: Workfare in International Perspective. Over a decade ago already, it documented the generalized drift of social policies from the rights to the obligations of recipients, the multiplication of administrative restrictions on access, and the contractualization of support, as well as the introduction of mandatory work programmes in six EU countries. In his meticulous review of two decades of programmes of ‘social welfare activation’, Barbier (2009, 30) warns against sweeping generalizations and stresses cross-national as well as intra-national variations in architecture and outcomes; but he concedes that, aside from fostering ‘cost-containment’, these programmes partake of ‘a deep ideological transformation’ that has fostered everywhere ‘a new “moral and political logic” articulated to a moralizing discourse of “rights and duties”’. For a broader discussion of the political-economic roots and variants of the ‘workfare state’, see Peck (2001).

5. When Michel Foucault (1975) published Surveiller et punir (translated two years later as Discipline and Punish), the international consensus among analysts of the penal scene was that the prison was an obsolete and discredited institution. Confinement was unanimously viewed as a relic of a bygone age of punishment fated to be supplanted by alternative and intermediate sanctions in the ‘community’ (this was the peak of the so-called ‘anti-institutional’ movement in psychiatry and of mobilization in favour of ‘decarceration’ in penology). Foucault (1975, 358, 354, 359) himself stressed that ‘the specificity of the prison and its role as seal are losing their raison d’être’ with the diffusion of carceral disciplines ‘through the entire thickness of the social body’ and the proliferation of agencies entrusted with ‘wielding a power of normalization’. Since then, against all expectations, the incarceration rate has boomed practically everywhere: it has increased fivefold in the USA and doubled in France, Italy and England; it has quadrupled in the Netherlands and Portugal and increased sixfold in Spain.

6. The concept of synergy (descended from the Greek syn, together, and ergon, work) conveys very well the idea that racialization and penalization operate in unison to produce state outcasts, in the manner of two symbolic organs acting together upon the functioning of the social body. When Émile Littré (1877) inserted it into his Dictionnaire de la langue française [Dictionary of the French Language], he traced the notion to physiology and defined it as ‘cooperative action or effort between various organs, various muscles. The association of several organs to accomplish a function’.

7. Recall that the social and legal assignation to the category ‘black’ in the USA relies on genealogical descent from a slave imported from Africa and not on physical appearance, and that it magically ‘erases’ ethno-racial mixture (which concerns the vast majority of persons deemed black) by strict application of the principle of ‘hypo-descent’ according to which the offspring of a mixed union belong to the category considered inferior. This symbolic configuration, which prefigures the extreme spatial and social isolation of African-Americans in their society, is virtually unique in the world (Davis 1991).

8. The infamous speech delivered by Nicolas Sarkozy in Grenoble in July 2010 offers a hyperbolic as well as outlandish illustration of this logic of symbolic segmentation and vilification through penalization. Concerned to restore his blown credibility on the issue of public safety with a view to the 2012 presidential elections, the French head of state officially declared ‘war on traffickers and offenders’ and announced the appointment of a tough police chief to the post of local prefect. He directly linked undesirable foreigners to criminality (even though the incident that prompted his speech involved only French citizens); he singled them out for the full wrath of the state and prescribed enhanced and overtly discriminatory sanctions by the justice system (proposing, in addition to mandatory minimum sentences, to strip of their citizenship ‘French nationals naturalized for less than 10 years’ if they are convicted of acts of violence towards the police – a measure in direct violation of the French constitution and European conventions). And he launched a police campaign to dismantle ‘illegal Roma camps’ and to expel their residents en masse, aiming to rack up numbers of arrests and provide video footage for the evening television news. This flash of law-and-order pornomania earned France the vigorous diplomatic protests of Romania and Bulgaria, official remonstrations and threat of sanctions from the EU, and wide international reprobation (from the Vatican, the UN, etc.).

9. It is revealing that Bourdieu (1997, 205) evokes the pivotal passage of Franz Kafka's ([1914] 2011) In the Penal Colony, in which the sentence of the condemned is carved onto his body by a torture machine as a grotesque variation on what he calls the ‘cruel mnemotechnics’ through which groups naturalize the arbitrary that founds them. This scene puts us at the point where the material-cum-symbolic spear of the penal state encounters and pierces through the body of the offender in an official act of radical desecration resulting in physical annihilation: the citizen shall exist only within the historical ambit of the law.

10. For a fuller discussion of the internal relationships between these different concepts, which stresses the barycentric place of symbolic capital in its various incarnations, see Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992).

11. A detailed examination of the life strategies of a ‘hustler’ in the predatory street economy (Wacquant [1992] 1998) and of the normative twist and practical stretch that the hyper-ghetto imposes on marriage (Wacquant 1996) are two of the multiple points of junction between these two levels and modes of analysis: in both of those case studies, my chief field informants were also boxers. Likewise, the extended judicial enmeshment of my best friend and ‘ring buddy’ at the Woodlawn Boys Club across two decades provided me with a live analyser of the relationships between marginality and penality in biographical time and at the microsociological scale.

12. This concept has since been developed theoretically and extended empirically across three continents – cf. Wacquant (2007, 2010b, 2010f), the investigations carried out within the frame of the international and interdisciplinary network on “advanced marginality” (http://www.advancedurbanmarginality.com/), and the selective bibliography compiled by Tom Slater, Virgílio Pereira, and Loïc Wacquant (2014) for the special issue of Environment & Planning E on the theme of ‘Territorial Stigmatization in Action’.

13. I adapt here the duality of ‘theodicy’ proposed by Max Weber ([1915] 1946) in his ‘Social Psychology of the World Religions’, which contrasts doctrines that validate ‘the external and inner interests of all ruling men’ (Theodizee des Glückes) with doctrines that legitimize and rationalize the suffering of ‘socially oppressed strata’ (Theodizee des Leidens).

14. It is revealing that the contributions to the symposia devoted to Urban Outcasts (by City in 2008, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Revue française de sociologie and Pensar in 2009, and Urban Geography in 2010) and to Punishing the Poor (organized by the British Journal of Criminology, Theoretical Criminology, Punishment & Society, Critical Sociology and Studies in Law, Politics & Society, Criminology & Justice Review, The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, Amerikastudien, Prohistoria and Revista Española de Sociología) reproduce the established separation between disciplines (with, broadly, urban geography and sociology on one side and criminology on the other, while social work and political science are conspicuous by their absence), and deal exclusively with only one of these two books while omitting the other. The collective book edited by Squires and Lea (2012) is a rare attempt to connect the schema of advanced marginality to my analysis of the penal state, but at the price of neglecting the racialization–penalization axis. The tome assembled by Gonzáles Sánchez (2011) does cover carnality, marginality, and penality, but its contributors typically stay within one of these rubrics rather than connect all three.

15. See Wacquant (2009c) for a fuller discussion of the analytic linkages and biographical ties between ‘The Body, the Ghetto and the Penal State’, and the civic motivations that propelled me to disentangle them.

16. A Bourdieusian approach in terms of the ‘rightward tilting of the bureaucratic field’ (itself caught up in the drift of the field of power towards the economic pole) allows me to chart a middle way between the two dominant and symmetrically mutilated models of neo-liberalism as ‘market rule’ or ‘governmentality’ inspired by Marx and Foucault respectively (see Wacquant 2012 and the seven responses to this thesis in subsequent issues of the same journal).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Loïc Wacquant

LOIC WACQUANT is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique, Paris, France.