Apophatic Anthropology in an Age of Carceral Fragmentation: Abolitionist Possibilities

“You’ve got to stop trying to help people and only worry about yourself,” I told Ray as he sat in jail after being arrested for a violation of parole. Since his release from prison, Ray had been trying to piece his life back together, but nothing was working out as he’d hoped. He lived on the street, struggled to find consistent work, had persistent mental and physical health issues, and most troublingly, had consistent run-ins with police. Despite these difficulties, Ray found joy in the relationships he had built with other unhoused people. Though he had very little, Ray practiced radical hospitality, seeking to encourage and share with those in similar situations. When he was arrested, he was visiting a woman whom those on the street called “Scary Sherry” because of her erratic outbursts. He had wanted to let her know that he recognized her value and worth as a human, but the police showed up unexpectedly and arrested Ray because of an outstanding warrant. In response to my advice, Ray shook his head, rejecting its individualism. For him, limiting his relationships to other people to avoid the eye of the police wasn’t worth it. He asked pointedly, “What’s the point of living if I can’t help people?” 

This paper interprets my advice to Ray as emblematic of an American carceral logic that fragments people and communities at every point, and it perceives in Ray’s question an apophatic anthropology that recognizes an infinite human relationality, which challenges these fragmentations. The essay claims that Ray’s relational insight opens up abolitionist possibilities, arguing that it rejects final decisions about one’s raced, gendered, and classed essence, resists the neoliberal reduction of infinitely relational beings to self-interested individuals, and challenges attempts to punish wrongdoing through forced removal from communities. 

The essay has two parts. First, it shows the system of carceral fragmentation to be the product of an essentialist anthropology. It takes as its starting point the Foucauldian view that American prison systems operate from a carceral anthropology that makes certain bodies appear as essentially criminal and worthy of punishment. That American police and criminal courts construct essentialist criminal typologies that disproportionately condemn race, gender, and class minorities is well documented. The result is communal and individual fragmentation. Police patrol poor, majority Black and Latinx neighborhoods more heavily than middle-class white neighborhoods, seeking not to prevent harm to citizens but to preserve the already fragmented raced, gendered, and classed social order (see Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism and Loïc Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor). Criminal courts use coercive plea bargaining techniques that force defendants to act--and thus to think of themselves--as neoliberal individuals who must minimize risk of legal exposure (see Nicole Gonzales Van Cleve’s Crook County). Finally, prisons remove these always and already raced, gendered, and classed individuals from their communities, thereby hindering the possibility of repair of harm and reintegration into society (see Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? and Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ’Til We Free Us). 

The second part of the paper proposes that a Christian apophatic, non-essentialist anthropology destabilizes the carceral anthropology of fragmentation. Though they write in different social contexts and deploy various metaphysical frameworks, apophatic theologians from antiquity to the present agree that humans are correctly understood only in reference to their relations to an infinite divinity. Both the thirteenth-century German Lebemeister Meister Eckhart and the twentieth-century American mystical theologian Howard Thurman recognize that union with an ineffable God entails the incomprehensibility of the human. Moreover, because, for these thinkers, God is the ground of all things, one's union with God opens the human to infinite relations to divine, human, and non-human others. Shedding apophatic theology’s traditional neoplatonic framework, contemporary process theologian Catherine Keller charts pathways for unknowingly conceiving the human in its infinite relationality. Informed by Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum and Judith Butler’s relational ontology, Keller insists that because “I” am implicated in all things, then neither “I” nor anyone else can say who “I” am. Ironically then, apophatic anthropology performs its own anti-essentialist fragmentation, shattering the facade of a nameable human essence. 

This apophatic insight has several abolitionist implications. First, apophatic anthropology rejects any final declaration of one’s criminal essence. On an individual level, a recognition of infinite relationality means that humans ought not be condemned solely on the basis of what they have done. Because humans are always becoming, the possibility of change–or in theological terms, repentance–is ever present. On a social level, recognizing human beings as infinitely relational means that a criminal defendant cannot be found guilty without implicating the web of raced, gendered, and classed legal and political policies that make them what they are at a given moment. Thus, in an apophatic anthropological framework, a declaration of Ray’s guilt would require an account of the ways in which the neoliberal social order makes him guilty. 

Second, apophatic anthropology resists any use of infinitely relational humans in neoliberal economic calculation. Contrary to the ubiquitous practice of plea bargaining–which reduces defendants’ thinking to a self-interested calculus about minimizing their legal exposure–apophatic anthropology emphasizes repair of harms perpetrated. Confessions of wrong-doing attempt to repair communal rifts, not make them wider. Thus, in an abolitionist social order, Ray’s relational impulse would be celebrated as part of his reintegration into society, not disincentivized.

Finally, in opposition to the system of racialized mass incarceration, apophatic anthropology resists any attempt to separate individuals from their communities. As Thurman, writing in the age of Jim Crow segregation, understood, the infinite relationality of human beings means that even those who have committed the most vile acts ought not be separated from their communities. Proponents of restorative justice like Davis and Kaba have long recognized the necessity of drawing together perpetrators and victims of harm in order to facilitate restitution and communal repair. 

Ultimately, apophatic anthropology necessitates the collapse of the system of carceral fragmentation and the construction of a system of relational repair. In this vision, Ray’s recognition of infinite relationality overcomes my carceral individualism.