Name: Simon Huber Student Number: Thesis for the completion of the RMa Cultural Analysis
Supervisor: Hanneke Stuit Second Reader: Joost de Bloois
Introduction
1
Chapter 1: The underrepresentation of Oz’ ambiguity
5
The ideological function of unrealistic hyper-violence
5
Queering in Oz
7
Oz’ mise en abyme reflection on the representation of prisons
9
Chapter 2: A History of Power Operations in EmCity
16
Accumulating mechanisms
16
Control and Spectacular Mechanisms in EmCity
22
Prison in a Control Society
25
Chapter 3: Prison culture and collective resistance
29
Prison Culture
29
Disrupting contained culture
32
Unruly dissensus in Oz
36
The Build-up 37 The Riot 39 The Aftermath 45Conclusion
49
Works Cited
53
Appendix A: A List of Relevant Characters
56
Introduction
The object of my thesis is the prison drama Oz. The series deals with an experimental unit set up inside Oz, fully named Oswald Maximum Security Prison. The unit, called Emerald City1, is run by college-educated liberal Tim McManus2 who believes he can reform the inmates of this unit and offer them a better life. To do this, EmCity does not match other representations of prisons, which provide an image of a dark and dirty place dominated by steel bars. Instead it is a clean and well-lit cell block filled with clear glass pods and a spacious communal space. As such, it offers a new view of the prison. Oz ran from 1997 to 2003, totalling 56 55-minute episodes. It aired as the first hour-long drama on HBO, a premium cable TV-network. Unsure what kind of drama they wanted to make, they allowed the creator Tom Fontana full creative freedom. Additionally, HBO was not dependent on income from advertising, which allowed Fontana freedom from the constraints of the easily offended advertisers. This meant he could freely show all the violence, nudity and vulgarities he wished. As a result, most of the series' reception focused on Oz’ over the top shock value.
I take the series’ new outlook up in a different perspective. The prison has already been taken up as a place where power operations concentrate in their most extreme manifestations, and as such has functioned as a model for how these power mechanisms operate throughout society. Most notably of course by Michel Foucault in his seminal work Discipline and Punish, which will feature heavily in the second chapter of my thesis. Since then, Gilles Deleuze has proclaimed that prisons, like all environments of enclosure, are in a general state of crisis, only waiting for the last rites to be administered. This had led to a shift in attention towards other loci of power operations. However, prisons have not died, the era of mass incarceration3 in the United States following soon after Deleuze’s proclamation. I then once again take up the prison as a model for how power mechanisms operate. However, I do not propose that prisons have stayed the same since Foucault used them as model for the disciplinary mechanism. This is why I will focus on the imaginary prison unit EmCity as presented in Oz, as it internalizes into the prison many of the new power mechanisms Deleuze proposes in his short but provocative article. My central questions are then: What kind of prison
1 In continued reference to the Wizard of Oz, Emerald City is where the Wizard of Oz resides. He is of course famous for not really having any magical powers, but deriving his power from pretending he did through an elaborate set of visual and auditory tricks. An additional reference of the name Oswald is Russell Oswald who was Commissioner of Correctional Services during the Attica Prison riot in 1973, which is heavily referenced in the riot at the end of season one.
2 For full descriptions of each of the characters that figure in this thesis, please refer to Appendix A starting at page 56.
3 The explosion in incarceration rates was already well under way when Deleuze published the text in 1990, with a rise from 503,586 citizens incarcerated in 1980 to 1,148,702 in jail at the time of publishing. Since then, the numbers have continued to increase, to top out at 2,307,504 in 2008. They have remained relatively stable ever since.
does Oz represent? Which power mechanisms operate here? And what can the way in which its ambiguous inmates behave mean for our thinking on how these power operations can be resisted?
My thesis has a dual relevance. First, for understanding the continued extreme numbers of incarceration in the United States. The most recent numbers, from 2015, indicate that well over two million people remain incarcerated there. With a new law and order president they could very well be going up, as they have in other parts of the world4. To understand this continuity, we have to look at the place the prison takes in contemporary society, where power acts upon mobility and through enclosure simultaneously. I will do this in my second chapter, in which I discuss the integration of Oz in broader circuits of power. Second, I believe the series to have a very strong metaphorical power. In line with traditional characteristics of the prison genre, i.e. “the promise of an unfiltered, raw, and realistic perspective on criminality, systems of authority, and the socially marginal” (Wlodarz 66), many academics have tunnelled in on the question whether Oz is ‘realistic’. Instead I focus on the metaphoric quality of the series, leaving realism behind, instead focusing on what could feel real. Here I am indebted to Monika Fludernik’s concept of the carceral imagery to denote what viewers who most likely have no experience of being in prison imagine being in prison is like. In her article on the carceral imaginary, she traces through history the metaphors used to either describe prison through other places (prison is hell, entombment etc.) or that use prison as a source domain (marriage is prison, my job is jail etc.). Fludernik argues that these metaphors feed directly into the way we as a society imagine prison to be, congealing into a ‘carceral imagery’. As our imagination feeds into our opinions on the subject, the metaphors and the imagery they solidify into must be the object of critical examination. She notes how most literary metaphors pose prisons as sites of ‘uncanny familiarity’: at once terrible places of extreme enclosure and violence, coupled with “the placid attractions of the familiar space of domestic seclusion” (23). The inmates in the same metaphors are set up as a victims worthy of our sympathy, but without real agency. She notes how these tropes function to construct prison as a fantasy world, familiar enough to engage with, but filled with criminals who have to undergo terrible injustice and thus deserve our sympathy. By letting this dual paradoxes of homely-hell and criminal-victim play out at a safe distance in an ‘exotic heterotopia,’ the fundamental ambivalences in our imagination of prisons are resolved without us having to fully engage with our “real-world emotions” (24). I believe Oz refuses to do exactly this. It lets the ambivalence fester, offering no real resolution so as to keep us engaged. Yet, the violence figures along with the nearly exclusive setting of all action within the four walls of Oz to transfer the
4 An example of incarceration rates rising after Deleuze proclaiming the death of prison is Turkey, where the incarceration rate, the amount of people locked up per 100.000 citizens, has doubled since 2006. Many countries fall into either of these two trends, either stabilizing or going up since 2006. Some countries, like the Netherlands, have seen a falling trend. The Dutch incarceration rate has dropped by about 52% since 2006. <www.prisonstudies.org/world-prison-brief-data>
sensation of permanent enclosed precariousness onto us, especially if we binge-watch it5, so that we cannot remove it into an ‘exotic fantasy world’. This transferred ambiguity is what I believe many viewers recognize when they call the series ‘real’6. Where most metaphors Fludernik notes seem either cliché or privileged: if I was in prison I could finally focus on myself, I could finally start really working out, finally write that book, I think that Oz’ ambiguity disturbs these metaphors. By being familiar in a different way, by representing the inmates as subjects to some of the same power mechanism that we experience in watered down form, Oz can function as a model for imagining how we would experience and deal with the power operations represented, living out some of the violent fantasies that result from a permanent sense of enclosure and precariousness.
My first chapter engages with academic work already done on Oz. I separate the academics into two camps. The first is populated by theorists exclusively concerned with the gruesome depiction of violence in the series. I argue that they become stuck between a criticism of the series’ ‘unrealism’ on the one hand, and their wish that all inmates depicted on TV would behave like model citizens on the other. The second camp reviews the series more positively, recognizing what Oz does in terms of ‘blurring’. Their reviews have, however, not extended far beyond paying attention to what it does in the progressive depiction of homosexuality and an erotically laden depiction of the male body. I try to extend on their thoughts, by discussing S04E09, in which a TV-crew enters EmCity to film a short segment for a show. The show in a show method creates a contrast between Oz and other series portraying prison that highlights the sincere diversity and blurring of expectations Oz accomplishes through engaging with characters who strike double figures throughout.
In the second chapter I trace the prison through the thought of Foucault and Deleuze. I place the prison at the centre of their theoretical conflict over whether the different ways in which power is exercised are of a successive or additive nature. After setting the terms for the debate, I will engage with several scenes throughout the series, as this is a slow development. I argue that Oz shows the way different power mechanisms enhance rather than exclude each other, functioning together to create the prison we see in Oz. This is explicitly against Deleuze’s assertion that the prison and its disciplinary mechanism will disappear. Instead I will show how ‘control’ as he theorized it as a power operation becomes integrated into EmCity and simultaneously Oz becomes integrated into a broader ‘control society’.
In the third chapter, I come to the core of my argument, now fully enabled by the two previous chapters. The first chapter enables me to look past Oz’ violence and its presumed effect on the
5 A reviewer notes in comparison between watching it on TV and from DVD: “Oz is so emotionally taxing that it's tough to watch more than one episode per sitting.”
<www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/23843/oz-the-complete-sixth-season/>
6 I stay away from the words realistic or veracity, as Oz does not depict a realistic prison; it is an imaginary project suggesting what could be real.
viewers in terms of demonizing the inmates of Oz. The second enables me to complicate Rancière’s concept of ‘dissensus’ by intersecting it with the introduction of ‘control’ as an additional power mechanism. His proposed program for disrupting the current unjust hierarchical ordering of society by the speaking up of a marginal group that is not expected to speak in a political sphere or way, fails to fully take account for this new mechanism. The principle of dissensus remains tied to a disciplinary way of thinking that tried to order society into larger, homogenous groups. Instead, the control mechanism, by ascribing the much lower-scale identities suggested by Oz, pushes its subjects to compete with themselves, other individuals, and by virtue of this mechanism adding onto the disciplinary, within and between the groups set up by the disciplinary mechanism. A close reading of the riot at the end of season one shows how this mechanism has to be overcome first, even before any speaking up as a collective marginal group can take place. Overall, it is too easy to focus just on
Oz’ over the top shock value, which features so prominently and takes on a wider range of meanings
than the show’s critics suggest. I believe the ambiguity allows intense sympathy to be had for the inmates, as often people can feel subject to similar power mechanisms, albeit in much lighter and less violent form. The show thus adds a critical note to our carceral imaginary.
Chapter 1: The underrepresentation of Oz’ ambiguity
Even though relatively little has been written on Oz, dealing with the subject does have to start with embedding my words within a discussion of what has been written about the series. Two themes dominate. First, the camp that argues that the ‘hyper-violence’ of the show serves, within its media-context, to legitimize the current brutal prison-industrial complex. The primary academics in this camp are Elayne Rapping, Bill Yousman and Brian Jarvis. In the other camp the focus is on the representation of hyper-masculinity in an enclosed homosocial environment with rampant incidences of both violent and consensual homosexuality that contribute to a queering of this hyper-masculine spectacle. To discuss this focus, I use an article by Joe Wlodarz and a book chapter by Georges-Claude Locoge and Valentin Guilbert. I continue the work of this second camp by extending the blurring beyond queering. I close read S04E09 in which the staging of a show within a show reflects the dilemmas in making a drama series about a prison. The ethical dilemmas intertwine with the difficulty of making the show entertaining through foregrounding violence and sex, while giving an impression of how boring prison time feels.
The ideological function of unrealistic hyper-violence
The authors in the first camp seem to prefer an inversed Manichean divide to counteract the ‘hegemonic’ idea that all prisoners are evil and all prison staff is good. As such, they become stuck between exhibiting an ironic wish for an equally unrealistic representation by critiquing Oz for its lack of realism, incorrectly claiming it represents a hegemonic Manichean divide. Rapping’s reflections on Oz through a comparison with prison films shows this most clearly. The critical potential of the prison genre in Hollywood film for her is that the confusion between what is “sheer brutal punishment” and “what passes for ‘correction’ […] is viscerally clarified” (82). The most striking difference with television series like Oz is that after these ‘men of dignity and worth’ are exposed to the uniformly brutal system, their “salvation, or symbolic significance, is rooted in their deep bonding with other human beings, whether prisoners, supporters, or attorneys” (86)7. In the films, the inmates are in the end fundamentally good humans, capable of bonding, who just made a small mistake and were immediately exposed to homogenously bad conditions and evil staff.
Beyond the obvious unrealistic implications of inverting the Manichean divide, the question arises why we would need such a clear divide in the first place. Why would we need representations
7 Rapping foregoes for one example among many others the story-arc of Carlo Ricardo, one of the new Latino inmates from season three. The first time his family visits, nearly all of his relatives come. Over the course of the season however, in subsequent visits they one by one drop off, claiming sickness, inability to get off from work, or that it hurts them to see him there. His increasingly no-show family members are framed as the main cause of him slowly losing his sanity over the course of the season, until in the end he is stabbed.
of such heroic inmates in order to indict an unjust system? Is it not even more powerful in the metaphorical sense I described above to have deeply flawed people on both sides of the institutional divide, to ask audiences to sympathize with them, and to see the injustice of the system through their eyes? Rapping’s difficulty in dealing with Oz’ refusal to ‘viscerally clarify’ becomes painful in her discussion of the staff members. Indeed, from her point of view, it is a “strange logic” that we are supposed to identify with the staff because they are the “good guys” (93) in spite of all the horrible things they do. If indeed we take a dichotomous view this does result in fraught expectations. These troubles disappear if instead we see the series as ignoring this divide, expecting us to identify or at the very least sympathize with all characters despite or perhaps because of their serious flaws. Rapping’s unreal demands on how fictional inmates should behave block a more comprehensive understanding of the series.
Similarly tunnelling on realism, but focusing purely on hyper-violence is an article Bill Yousman wrote in 2013. In it he revisits Stuart Hall’s theory on the encoding and decoding of ideological signs. He reports interviews he held with several ex-inmates, where after a plethora of general questions about prison conditions he presented them with clips from Oz. His biased intention seems to be to find oppositional readings that can prove the unrealism of Oz (199) through looking how the inmates decode these clips, fitting it into Halls model of acceptant, negotiating or oppositional readings of the intended messages. Two things should be noted before reproducing his findings, however. Although the inmates he interviewed are representative of actual race proportions in United States prisons (199), Yousman does not report in what kind of prisons the inmates he interviewed were incarcerated (207). This comes back to bite him in one of the sub-conclusions, as the ex-inmates suggest a lack of diversity in the depictions of prisons (209). The interviewees stress that in the infamous prisons that dominate media images, like San Quentin or Corcoran, the situation is more like the one depicted in Oz. Their responses suggests that they instead spend their time locked up in less violent prisons. Second, Yousman gives no overview of the clips selected for his interviews. However, the excerpts of the interviews in the article suggest that he mostly showed some of the most violent incidents to his respondents. However, even these hyper-violent scenes hardly succeed in convincing the respondents that Oz is unrealistic, leading Yousman to suggest that even if you are part of the subgroup that the media depicts ideologically, you can still be fooled by hegemonic depictions (214). Despite the inmates not identifying with the subgroup that is depicted, this conclusion treats the ex-inmates as easily fooled victims of a hegemonic ideology, rather than investigating why they find the show to be realistic.
Much of the work done on Oz, like an earlier article by Yousman on which he based his biased intention, lacks severely in close readings of the series itself, resulting in quick condemnations
on the basis of the most eye-catching, i.e. the most violent, incidents as well as blatant faults in descriptions8. A notable exception to the lack of close-reading in this camp is Brian Jarvis. Nonetheless, even he neglects engaging with the critical interludes offered by Augustus Hill, which are similar to the function of the Greek chorus in theatre and thus highly relevant to any interpretation of the series. Instead, Jarvis considers these “as entirely secondary to the spectacle of violence” (7). This reflects onto his incomplete conclusion that, lacking serious social critique, Oz is ultimately disappointing, reverting to “flirting with fascism and fatalism” (20). Easily read as fatalism, the inability for McManus, or indeed anyone within Oz, to achieve anything might, however, just as well be read as an indictment of either the principle of the prison itself, or of the influence of Governor Devlin, who insists on taking away as much as possible from the prisoners. It is especially the interludes that suggest these readings over an interpretation of the series as an elongated flirtation with fascism, even if the interludes often do take a fatalistic tone. Even Jarvis then, like the other academics in this camp, underrepresent the full ambiguity of Oz. It is my integration of the interludes and the way the series’ form suggests a consistent ambiguity in prison culture that lead me to a different conclusion than Jarvis.
Queering in Oz
Jarvis’ critique that Oz is nothing more than a fascistic, hyper-masculine portrayal of prison life can also be relativized by looking at the second major strain of work done on Oz, from the perspective of queer studies. These scholars are far more positive about Oz’ critical potential than the authors mentioned above. They note the sincere diversity in homosexual relations, ranging from rape to true love. Moreover, these romances are coupled with storylines that ‘queer’ male characters, like when O’Reily contracts breast cancer and struggles with the ramifications on his identity. In a more comprehensive close-reading than that of Jarvis, Wlodarz notes how this extends into the genre-blurring that Oz accomplishes, especially after the first season, in which the series combines the characteristics of a prison aesthetic with many of the characteristics of a soap opera. In reviews this nets Oz the nickname ‘Melrose Prison’ after the already long running soap opera Melrose Place (62). Wlodarz suggests that this perhaps unexpected hybridization, after the very ‘manly’ first season and the soap opera qualities of the later seasons, contributes to a destabilization of gendered, racial and
8 Rapping is perhaps the worst example of this. In a short paragraph on a supposed race bias within the series calls the Latina doctor Gloria Nathan African-American (91). In another, she attacks the show’s creator for only paying lip-service to criticism of the criminal justice system. She proves this by showing how Fontana cited an Amnesty International report which contained an example where COs put rats in inmates’ cells, and then goes on to claim: “[In Oz] it is not the prison staff who are shown committing the atrocities cited by Amnesty international; it is the inmates themselves” (88). This would be a valid point, if the rat in the show was not put in Saïd’s cell by COs.
classed norms (95). The genre-confusion then contributes to the ambivalence that authors like Rapping struggle to account for, with Oz at once representing hegemonic hyper-masculinity and sincere queerness. The series, as Wlodarz suggests, fails to provide a hegemonic unambiguity through “a certain disavowal of affect in order to shield male bonding narratives from the threat of homosexuality [in the homosocial space of the prison]” (77). The hyper-masculine in the series becomes reframed not as a reiteration of a hegemonic norm, but as a nervous over-the-top compensation for inmates not feeling at home in their prescribed identities.
A chapter by Guilbert and Locoge in an anthology interrogating influential representations of social deviance shows how Oz makes use of physical masculinity as a prison trope to introduce further ambiguity. Traditionally building up muscles, the masculinity they are talking about here, functions as a means of both reasserting control over your own body and virility as well as providing safety in often violent conditions where a bigger physique translates into more power (69). Oz complicates this by giving these bigger physiques extensive erotic overtones, usually reserved for the female body. This introduces a deep ambivalence in the show’s representation of homosexuality, that is as Guilbert and Locoge say “never dealt with lightly, and several points of view are always provided” as the show does with all difficult themes (69).
However, as Wlodarz notes, the queering of prison identities is the only incidence of ‘blurring’ that has received proper academic attention, whereas the shows criticism of easy identity politics, not to mention its indictment of a barbaric prison system, has even within gay media received too little attention (95). This is a shame for those other storylines in which people struggle with their ascribed identities, as the examples of the troubled Jefferson Keane, who struggles to leave his Homeboy identity, or Jaz Hoyt trying to distance himself from the Bikers, suggest. This is something I will correct in the coming chapters to come to a comprehensive view on the show. In the second chapter I will reflect on the ascribed identities as a result of changes in McManus’ policy to intensify identitarian competition among inmates, to in the third chapter describe it as an obstacle to be overcome in collective resistance.
In line with these queer theorists, I want to shift the focus away from the problematic hyper-violence and hyper-masculinity that the first camp stresses, toward the consistency and relevance of the ambivalence Oz portrays in most characters. Beyond the most eye-catching incidents, Oz provides plenty of reflection on the unjust prison system as it is currently organized, and even on prison as a concept. My first close-reading will be of S04E09, in which not only the criticism of the prison system is obvious, but the episode’s format as a show in a show brings it into direct contrast
to contemporary reality-TV like Lockup9. This contrast highlights both similarities between the two and what Oz adds to these popular representations of prisons. An underlying difference between the two is that Oz as a drama-series can through switching of perspective and through flashbacks reveal underlying motivations to the acts visualised. This benefit is amplified by the ability to follow the same, albeit fictional, inmates for a long time. This allows for character development that the set-up of the self-encompassing episodes of Lockup precludes.
Oz’ mise en abyme reflection on the representation of prisons
Nonetheless, so as to give the readers of this thesis an impression of the usual progression of an episode before delving into specific scenes in later chapters, my close-reading here will deal with the events of only one episode chronologically, discussing all major scenes. Not only does this give insight in the way the episodes are structured, it also enables me to make a theoretical point about how the passage of prison time is represented. Despite only focussing on one episode, Oz’ set-up as drama series allows for the two further themes to appear: sincere and diverse motivations for violence alongside the impact of the usual bias in media depictions that portray the inmates as inherently violent. Before starting with the close-reading, I will briefly sketch the narrative context within which the episode takes place. It is the first episode of the second part of the fourth season. At the start of the first part, Querns was appointed as administrator of EmCity. Warden Leo Glynn gave him the explicit job description to keep violence, and the media attention this brings, to zero. Querns is free to achieve this in whatever way he wants. Querns allies himself with Adebisi. He is given free reign over EmCity, as long as he vows to be nonviolent. Swiftly, most whites, both inmates and Correctional Officers (COs), are moved out of EmCity and replaced with blacks. It becomes a drug-fuelled paradise of sexual debauchery with Adebisi as king. Saïd is allowed to stay. Over the season he tries unsuccessfully to put an end to the new situation. In the end Saïd plots to leak videotapes that Adebisi made of the current situation to the media, hoping that that will bring an end to things. In his attempt to acquire the videotapes, however, he ends up in a struggle with Adebisi that climaxes in the latter’s death. The return of violence means the end of the Querns administration and consequently McManus is reassigned to EmCity.
The episode opens like all others with a compilation of shots from previous and coming episodes, cluttered together around themes10 all interspersed with shots of the show’s creator Tom
9 Lockup is a prison documentary series that follows two or so inmates per episode. The episodes are self-encompassing, with an introduction and a recap at the end, so that the entire story takes only about 45 minutes.
10 Chains, orange jumpsuits and barbed wire; Praying intermixed with shots of a shakedown; shot of someone stabbed in the neck; light going on in EmCity, followed by images of inmates playing chess/cards and eating in the cafeteria, playing basketball, Keller and Beecher wrestling (clothed); boxing match, ending with someone
Fontana having Oz tattooed on his upper arm in graffiti style with a tear drop. Like every season premiere, it opens with a short introduction by Hill on the name of the show and a suggestion of life in Oz. In this one he describes the structured life in Oz as the lights in EmCity turn on and the common area fills with people. The prison routine is divided into four parts: eating, sleeping, working and free time. He notes that it is a joke to give a man who is locked up free time, as there all still all kinds of regulations to follow11. Next he goes into how inmates use this free time, some to better themselves (reading, exercise, praying), others to plot (the theoretical significance I will come back to in the second chapter). A lot of the time, however, they just watch television.
He concludes with “yes, television keeps us busy, keeps us happy” which is the set up for the rest of the episode. A TV-producer, Lisa Logan, comes into Oz to do a television special “inside one of America’s toughest prisons”. She briefs the staff in a meeting, explaining the layout for the program, which is very similar to the first episode of Oz: an overview of the routine, following an inmate on his first day, then the shows presenter Jack Eldridge spending a night with an inmate in a cell. She claims her goal to primarily be showing how difficult the jobs of the staff are, while at the same time “kick[ing] ’60 Minutes’ [i.e. the competition for viewers] in the ass”. Her framework clearly fits into hegemonic depictions of prisons: the staff are good people whose sacrifices must be showcased, while the fascinatingly violent inmates will be a vehicle for outcompeting other shows.
Warden Glynn addresses the inmates in the cafeteria, warning them to behave: “when the cameras are gone, I’ll still be here”. Nonetheless, after lights out the inmates are shown discussing their plans for dealing with the TV-crew. Saïd intends to draw attention to prison conditions. His pod mate Arif is worried. He is afraid the circumstances of Adebisi’s death will come to light and be used to cast a negative light on the Muslims. O’Reily specifically tells his mentally disabled younger brother Cyril to duck out of sight when the cameras point to him and hints at some history between them and Eldridge. Oz presents them as agents in their own representation, although there plots will mostly be thwarted by Logan’s ambitions.
knocked out; images of the drug trade coupled to drug-sniffing dog during shakedown; Muslims playing drums combined with images of inmates communicating via mirrors in solitary, bringing of food in solitary; a few violent shots (O’Reily killing Keenan with dumbbell, bloody prisoner in corner of cell, inmate falling down elevator shaft); shots of inmates with particular greetings (handshakes); four different state executions as the nervous music comes to an intermediate climax; shots of unrest and violence (inmate with shank combined with CO clearly suffering); shot of Keane’s girlfriend naked, Alvarez masturbating; Keller and Beecher
smooching in shower; CO Howell fellating O’Reily while he holds onto her pigtails; CO Lopresti having sex with Shirley Bellinger behind a curtain on Death Row; Drag-Queen cheerleading during basketball match; shots of inmates fighting, restless, followed by the S.O.R.T. team coming in to restore control, S.O.R.T. team training; more images of fighting (riot in cafeteria/new Homeboy initiated in gym by being beaten up by other Homeboys); rat released into Saïds cell in solitary ; white curtains close in a pod (Adebisi’s in season four who was the only one allowed curtains in his cell), heavy metal cell door in solitary closes on inmate.
11 Perhaps Hill’s remark could be construed as a general remark about ‘free time’, as we on the outside also have regulations to follow. However, the regulations in prison are of course much more intense, so that here we already find a difference in intensity, rather than the two worlds being absolutely different.
The TV-crew coming in is first filmed from the prisoners’ perspective, which becomes conflated with an objectifying male gaze directed at Logan through nasty comments by new inmate Omar showcasing his masculinity. Omar has been selected as the inmate to be followed on his first day. He immediately pleads innocent to the camera, as the visual style switches back and forth between Oz’ usual style and raw camera footage made by the TV-crew, a habit which continues through the rest of the episode. The head CO of EmCity, Sean Murphy, immediately provokes Omar by calling him a ‘mutt’, which results in a first, mostly verbal conflict acted out in front of the cameras.
Murphy gives further background information on EmCity to the cameras, stressing that here “the prisoners are given a lot more leeway than the rest of Oz”. Logan asks Murphy to bring Beecher for a preliminary interview. Beecher is confronted with some of the things he has done, framed by Logan asking “Is that what it takes to survive?” He replies: “I’m not the man I was. Or maybe now I’m the man I always was and never knew,” he haziness of his response highlighting his difficulty in communicating his motivations for violence in response to such a loaded question. His interview is cut short when a fight breaks out between Poet and another inmate, a customer, in the common area and the cameras immediately switch onto this. Next up is an interview with Keller, who mocks the crew. He only responds to a question about homosexual activity, explicitly making the distinction between love and sex, asking which one the crew is curious about. They naturally focus on the second. The crew is then taken to Unit B12, which Murphy introduces as your typical cellblock, matching nine other cell blocks in Oz. Schillinger, who is in Unit B, is next up for interview, in line with the continued focus on the Schillinger, Beecher and Keller story. Logan tries to provoke Schillinger, ignoring how he wants to present himself, instead focusing on the story. A Homeboy interrupts the interview and calls Schillinger a pussy, leading to another fight in front of the cameras. Narratively, the story returns to Omar’s entry into prison, creating confusion about whether the interviews were either earlier or later while in a consistent timeline the TV-crew stayed with Omar the whole time. Not much else happens before the day ends, as the TV-crew films lights out. Murphy, McManus and Glynn discuss how things are going so far. Glynn comments “I don’t care if the prisoners look bad, I just don’t want us to,” aligning himself to hegemonic depictions of prison. All in all, the first day of filming takes up about twenty minutes of show time.
A Hill interlude. Like always, the interludes substitute for something like a commercial break between different parts of the show. Hill is shown as one image spread across nine TV’s in a square grid, twice removed then from the show’s viewers. As he talks about watching news programs on TV, he reflects on how the different networks present the same story differently. Visually, the centre
12 Unit B matches common expectations of prisons better: dark, overcrowded, dirty and dominated by steel bars.
screen turns to black as he says “ABC leaves out a fact”. As he says “that CBS makes a big deal of” all other screens turn to black while the centre turns back on. Similar visual tricks lead to his conclusion: “I figure if I catch all ... versions, maybe combined, I get a little taste of the truth”.
New day starts with count13 as inmates are shown appearing from their cells, Omar visibly fiending for some heroin. O’Reily gives him some drugs, in exchange for a favour to be called upon. The scene switches to Poet in the hole. He calls it hypocrisy that he is locked up, while the COs and staff run free for what the Adebisi situation turned into. Even with Murphy there, he points Logan towards the videotapes. Logan immediately calls Eldridge, saying she found their story for the show. Poet’s desire to have the hypocrisy revealed is immediately transmuted into a story. Logan wants to interview O’Reily and Saïd again, creating further confusion for the viewers as the implied previous interviews were not part of the episode, this time without COs present.
Although Logan was supposed to do at least a few days of preparatory work before Eldridge was supposed to come in, we jump forward in time. Eldridge comes in to interview O’Reily. O'Reily from the start of the interview keeps hinting at an earlier time they met, but Eldridge does not recognize him. Next, Saïd is interviewed, who is under the impression the interview will be about his political work. Instead, the first question immediately focusses on Adebisi, visibly taking Saïd off guard. Eldridge suggests that talking about Adebisi highlights one of the prison conditions: ‘brutality, senseless violence’. Saïd nonetheless tries to move on to the larger issues, claiming fundamental civil rights abuses. Eldridge keeps pushing for the tape, which prompts Saïd to end the interview early. Logan tries to intercede and suggests Saïd tells the story of Adebisi first before moving on to prison conditions. Saïd retorts: “And then which part will be aired?” which Eldridge patronizingly laughs off. Less naïve perhaps than Poet, Saïd refuses to participate in a scandal, that would make injustice seem like an exception rather than systematic.
Informed by Murphy, the Warden decides to destroy the tapes to avoid the truth coming out. Even so, the Warden manages to convince Eldridge the Adebisi story is not worth pursuing, to Logan’s frustration. The resulting conversation between them, held in the lobby with their faces quite closely zoomed in is worth quoting at length:
Eldridge: There are people who do things for malicious reasons. This prison is full of them. I don’t think Leo Glynn is one. He’s uh... imperfect, but he’s not incompetent. Logan: That is no reason not to expose what happened here. A man died.
Eldridge: Yeah, from all appearances, a bad man.
13 Every morning after lockup and every night before lockup, the inmates are ‘counted’. They stand in lines in front of their cells while a CO passes by calling them out by their inmate number.
Logan: Oh, you’re making judgments now? What, Simon Adebisi’s life is not as important as the Pope’s?
Eldridge: Don’t get high and mighty with me. I’ve brought presidents, serial killers, corporate giants to their knees.
Logan: And now’s not the time to go soft.
Eldridge [walking off]: I’m going home. Big day tomorrow.
Logan: [angry] You’re making a mistake, Jack. Letting this story go is a fuckin’ mistake! Eldridge: Yeah, probably, but you know, every once in a while, even a newsman has to
have a heart.
The discussion highlights the dilemma’s in engaging with prisons: how do we humanize the inmates without vilifying the staff while simultaneously making a good story. Logan and Eldridge are only concerned about the latter two, as Logan’s defence of Adebisi seems to be only hollow words to justify making a good story. The shift of ‘heartlessness’ from Eldridge, who is heartless because he does not even pay lip service to Adebisi, to Logan, who’s motivations are called into question when she refers to it as a story, confronts viewers with the ambiguous character of taking an interest in prisons and their inhabitants as neither is interested in humanizing the inmates.
The second interlude expands on this. In total darkness, Hill now without being shown on TV opens with “journalists are supposed to be impartial”. As he opens with “However” the image reverts to him being shown on nine gridded TV’s. As the camera zooms in he comments how even when the journalists try to be impartial, by their physical reactions we can see “what they really think about the person who they’re reporting on”. He fames Walter Cronkite, the journalist, for his poker face, never showing what he was thinking. So, he concludes, “while he was telling the truth, he was also lying to the camera. That’s genius”. The relation between realism and impartiality is broken in this interlude. Instead it is better to lie to the camera, as in a drama series, to show ‘the truth’, which is a good story without dehumanizing the inmates or vilifying the staff.
As we return to prison, we see O’Reily playing Omar’s ‘hyper-masculinity’ to push him into attacking Eldridge in his pod at night, suggesting Eldridge disrespected him and might hit on him at night. An assistant producer reveals to Eldridge, and to us the viewers, the reason for O’Reily’s plotting. In a piece on urban gangs twenty years ago, Eldridge interviewed the O’Reily brothers, making them look brutal and heartless. As Eldridge and the producer enter EmCity, the perspective switches to Omar and O’Reily. Omar flips out too early. He tries to attack Eldridge but is held back by the COs. He pulls out a shank but gets overpowered by the S.O.R.T. team coming in.
Glynn and McManus try to convince Eldridge to postpone sleeping in a pod with an inmate, but he remains overconfident. With Omar in the hole, he chooses to spend the night with Cyril. As Eldridge introduces himself, Cyril has a confused flashback. While Eldridge struggles to keep an interview going, Cyril reveals he has not taken his medication today. The confused flashbacks continue, showing the report interspersed with images of their mother crying after having seen it. The flashbacks enrage Cyril as he blames Eldridge for giving their mother cancer. He knocks down Eldridge and continues hitting him while screaming “you gave my mama cancer”. The S.O.R.T. team comes in and takes him away, while Logan comes running to check on Eldridge. His first instinct is to ask whether she got it all on tape.
A last Hill segment follows, again twice removed, about the power of the media “to lay the bare truth before the eyes of the public”. Ironically, a news report is shown on the TV in the EmCity common area as well as the Warden’s office, detailing Eldridge’s injuries from a ‘brutal beating by a convicted murderer’, after calling it a ‘ratings stunt that backfired’. It further informs that despite Logan’s objections, the segment will not be aired.
Of course, the episode is a somewhat atypical episode, as no one gets murdered. Three themes stand out. First, Oz throughout couples the bias in media reporting as a result of the direct association between higher ratings and screening violence and sex, to the impact this bias has on the inmates. The bias is the focus of Hill’s segments, although it explicitly drives Logan’s decisions throughout. The impact becomes clear in Saïd’s frustrated refusal to cooperate and additionally through the lasting impact of the uneven report Eldridge did on the O’Reily brothers twenty years ago. By sounding these notes of criticism, Oz once again showcases ambiguity. The gory violence and explicit sex are the most eye-catching features of the series, giving in to the desire for high ratings. The attention-grabbing by these features is however immediately employed to integrate criticism and the creation of sincere interest for the characters.
This becomes evident in the second theme: the diverse motivations for violence that are shown. In a simple formula equating violence and ratings, violence serves mostly to make the inmates seem a fascinating kind of scary, which is enabled by the violence being incomprehensible. Instead, in this episode there is a wide range of motivations for violence. Only the fight between Poet and the other inmate as inherently criminal, inherent to the drug trade that is. The fight between Murphy and Omar as well as the fight in unit B are presented rather as theatrics, as putting on a show for the cameras and the other inmates. The attempted attack on Eldridge by Omar similarly results from a nervous hyper-masculinity, proving that he will not be disrespected nor a target for homosexuals. To the extent that Omar’s attack is a result of O’Reily’s plotting, his desire
for revenge on Eldridge appears human. The only ‘animalistic’ violent incident is Cyril beating up Eldridge, which is however strongly contextualized by his mental disability, exemplified by his yelling out the nearly endearing “you gave my mama cancer” during the beating. While violence thus figures heavily in the series, the additional context provided causes friction when we try to make it represent a hegemonic Manichean divide. Rather some of the incidents invite sympathy.
The incidents figure in an additional way, which brings me to my third theme: the passage of time. A recurrent theme throughout the series is the indeterminateness of time. Although the structured time within the prison is often the focal point (i.e. morning count, lockdown at five, lights out at ten), this does not transfer into a clear structure in the documentation. Days bleed together, get compressed or elongated and sometimes seem non-chronological. This is partly a dramatical consideration, as a show of inmates sitting around, watching TV all day would not spark much interest. The confusion however also transfers a sense of prison time to the viewers. Through the lack in structure in the representation rating considerations become aligned with a trope addressed in the first episode of the series: the routine kills. The time inside has to bleed together otherwise it will bore you, the inmate as well as the spectator, to death.
As becomes clear then, a close reading reveals that while Oz does make use of familiar forms of the prison aesthetic that usually feed into hegemonic discourses of incarceration, these are employed to attract attention to a critical reflection on both the genre-aesthetic and the hegemonic discourse. It offers a much wider image that is easily missed with a lens that merely registers the discourses itself and the way Oz contributes to these as a ‘social pedagogy’. I will show in the next chapters additional ways in which the ambivalence within in the show can be put to productive theorizing about prisons and resistance.
Chapter 2: A History of Power Operations in EmCity
To enable my third chapter, I want to introduce an additional theoretical framework that in the texts discussed above serves only as a side note. For me, however, it constitutes one of the fundamental lenses through which to look at the series: the tension between Foucault’s notion of discipline and Deleuze’s use of control. Typically theorized as successive paradigms in the exertion of power,14 I argue that Oz shows how they are instead mechanisms that exist together, informing and enhancing each other. This chapter will first give a history of these power mechanisms, before introducing the concept of the assemblage that allows for a better view on the multiplicity with which these mechanisms function together. While there are some suggestions of this in the later work of Foucault, I am only able to make these points through a close reading of several key scenes throughout the series that provide insight in both how these mechanisms do figure together in EmCity and how EmCity takes its place in a broader society that has become subject to security/control mechanisms. Together, this integration into broader society and the additive functioning of power mechanisms create additional obstacles and avenues for collective resistance, which will be the focus of my third chapter.
Accumulating mechanisms
To be able to show the additive dynamic between discipline and control, it is important to conceptually separate the different mechanisms and their technologies. This requires a short history of them. Luckily, Foucault himself has provided this in his lecture to the Collѐge de France, which I will refer to in addition to his book Discipline and Punish that offers more detail on the first two mechanisms: spectacular punishment and disciplining enclosures.
Foucault provides us with three forms of the Western penal order: the legal system in the Middle Ages, the modern system from the eighteenth century onwards and the contemporary system (Security 21). Although the latter appeared quite shortly after the disciplinary mechanism, it took until the contemporary moment to become central to new and old penal forms. The legal system is defined by “the system of the legal code with a binary division between the permitted and the prohibited, and a coupling, comprising the code, between a type of prohibited action and a type
14 The mechanisms have been theorized as successive paradigms by Deleuze himself: “[t]he administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods” (Postscript 4). The explosion in United States incarceration rates since Deleuze’s text was first published in 1990 seemingly contradict this, although it could also be called the last convulsion of the system. Both arguments depend on the further development of incarceration rates to be tested and neither is of particular relevance here, as the attention is on how several technologies of power, spectacle, control and discipline, exist together in the contemporary prison.
of punishment” (20). Its technology is the spectacular punishment, a public and often brutal ritual in the full light of day that at once marks the condemned, but also reaffirms through the spectacular act of punishing the sovereignty of the one that punishes (Discipline 34). In the punishment itself the ‘truth of the crime’ is performed, reaffirming the triumph of the sovereign over the condemned in a duel for the truth. In this duel the condemned lost in the moment they confessed the ‘truth’, usually while being tortured (40, 56).
Deleuze holds that in such societies of sovereignty, his name for this system, the goals of the sovereign are “to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life” (Postscript 3), stressing the difference of these societies from the disciplinary societies and the societies of control that followed. Foucault complicates this suggestion noting the corrective intentions in the public nature of the punishment (Security 21) that still resonate in death penalty justifications today. In these justifications, it is argued that these atrocious punishments will hopefully make those inclined to murder think twice, a corrective intention that fits well into disciplinary thinking. Similar blurring occurs in the disciplinary mechanism that is introduced around the 18th century.
Whereas in the legal system the body is punished, the disciplinary system focusses on the soul: “The expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced by a punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations” (Discipline 16). The corrective intentions are no longer limited to the public, but instead focused on the criminal himself. “The disciplinary mechanism is characterized by the fact that a third personage, the culprit, appears within the binary system of the [legal] code, and at the same time, outside the code” (Security 20). This change in the object of punishment brought with it a change in the politics of truth finding. The torturer in the duel is replaced by representatives of modern sciences such as criminology and psychiatry, whose task is to confirm not whether the suspect committed the crime, but: “does the convicted person represent a danger to society? Is he susceptible to penal punishment? Is he curable or readjustable?” (Discipline 21). That this mechanism adds onto the legal system is implicit in the way the questions of the disciplinary mechanism take up the answer to the fundamental question of that system, is this person guilty, as a premise.
No longer is power aimed at reaffirming the potency of the sovereign, but instead at making the ‘convicted person’ once again adhere to ‘the norm’. This is achieved through a mechanistic arrangement in which all of the inmate’s behaviour is visible to the supervisor, while the supervisor remains invisible. This arrangement makes the inmate permanently unsure whether he is being surveyed and hence unsure whether he will be caught if he deviates. This permanent insecurity ideally transforms into the sensation that transgressing is not worth the risk and the subsequent
internalization of the ‘norm’ by continued adherence to it (195, 201)15. In his lectures, Foucault reiterates the primacy of the norm and thus the multiplicity, the mass of individuals to whom the regulations are laid down, over the individual (Security 26). The wish for individual adherence toward a centrally laid down norm, “called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power” (Discipline 198). Individuation is thus only a by-product of the mechanism that tries to enforce a pre-set norm.
The norm as ethically pre-set disappears in the contemporary power mechanism. With the laissez-faire an idea of a ‘natural’ optimum, now familiar in its neoliberal guise, starts to become the norm. Through statistics we can find this optimum, then define deviants and slowly manipulate them so they become normal. Evens famine and crime are stripped of ethical considerations, “It is what it is” (Security 59), namely merely extreme occurrences. The lens shifts away from individuals and masses towards the population as a whole in a utilitarian fashion; the questions in relation to crime become: “how can we predict statistically the number of thefts at a given moment, in a given society, in a given town, in the town or in the country, in a given social stratum, and so on?” “What is the comparative cost of the theft and of its repression, and what is more worthwhile: to tolerate a bit more theft or to tolerate a bit more repression?” and “Is it worth punishing [the culprit]? … Can he really be re-educated?” (19-20). It moves from a statistical calculation of the probability of deviation and its impact to considerations of relative cost of punishment into a mechanism where there is no longer a simple binary between permitted and prohibited, but instead an ‘optimal’ average between the two. This average is then coupled with “a bandwidth of the acceptable that must not be exceeded” (20-21). The disciplinary mechanism proliferates with the introduction of the security dispositif16, and further questions are added to those of the spectacular and disciplinary
mechanisms.
To maintain this natural optimum, those in power will try to “plan a milieu in terms of events or series of events or possible elements, of series that will have to be regulated within a multivalent and transformable framework” (35), a milieu being “the medium of an action and the element in
15 Simon has argued that through CCTV cameras now becoming widespread this mechanistic arrangement has extended beyond the enclosed institutions of the disciplinary form. However, the database as supervisor suggests a disconnect between the embodied subject and its ‘databased double’ that complicates the interpellation of the subject, suggesting a growing irrelevance of the ‘actual’ subjects (17-8). However, the ‘sudden’ changes in the mesh that modulates mobility noted by Deleuze in his essay on societies of control suggest an unpredictable but nonetheless frequent interaction with these ‘databased doubles’ (Postscript 4). 16 While dispositif is usually translated as apparatus, in his texts Foucault distinguishes between appareil and
dispositif, a distinction lost in the English translation which variably translates both as apparatus or mechanism
(Bussolini 85). First, the term dispositif, by not overlapping with Althusser’s ideological state apparatus, suggests a more distributed sense of power not limited to the state (87). Second, besides its mechanistic and military meanings, dispositif also remains close to a legal meaning, marking the force of the decision, i.e. who is allowed to decide when the ‘law’ is applicable and applied (105-6).
which it circulates” (36). The milieu consists of an interdependent range of variables, like rivers or roads. For the security dispositif, all these variables are open to manipulation. They are connected to the probability of certain events or series of events, like the outbreak of disease or the amount of carts stopping in a town, occurring. Through the manipulation of the variables, the dispositif of security increases or decreases the probability of certain events or series of events occurring to an optimal effect. By enabling or limiting certain variables, forms of circulation can be increased or decreased, so that some events become repressed and others stimulated, while the inherent dangers of circulation themselves are suppressed (93).
For this style of government, only the population as a whole is pertinent. No longer do security mechanisms “convey the exercise of a will over others in the most homogeneous, continuous, and exhaustive way possible” (93). No longer does the government try to completely suppress an event like robbery occurring, nor does it try for the perfect disciplining of criminally deviant groups. Instead, it tries to nullify the effect of the deviance on the level of population. The population becomes a “technical-political object of management and government” (98), a datum dependent on a wide range of variables to be manipulated for optimal effect (100).
Within a wide range of variables that act upon the population, one is deemed naturally invariable and constant: desire. It is postulated, like Smith’s invisible hand, that “this desire is such that, if one gives it free play, it will produce the general interest of the population” (101). Likely Foucault’s discussion of desire here is strongly linked to Deleuze and Guattari’s reflections on the concept in Anti-Oedipus. Allison Ross in The Deleuze Dictionary iterates Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of desire as “a process of experimentation on a plane of immanence” (66). The process in this sentence is the desiring-production. While there is creative experimentation, our future experimentation is in part informed by what we have produced in an earlier moment of experimentation. There is thus a cycle between creative production and being produced by the product of your production (Deleuze and Guattari 6-7). Additionally, this cycle takes place within a social field, in a specific plane of immanence, where a cycle similar to that of desiring-production takes place. As we produce in a social setting, our production is already in part formed by this social setting, while our product contributes to or changes this social setting. A social-production cycle takes place, which always provides “the determinate conditions under which desiring-production takes shape” (Holland 68). As such, the desiring-production within the dispositif of security is limited by the conditions of this dispositif. While the desires may be postulated as natural and invariable, through social-production and desire-production they have already become more aligned to the dominant paradigm.
This is the basis on which Deleuze writes the Postscript on the Societies of Control (1992), which has a far stronger polemical tone than Foucault’s writing or lectures. The manipulation of the security dispositif becomes modulation, circulation becomes mobility. The new words suggest a shift in focus to people rather than Foucault’s interest in the milieu where the population appears as a special variable among a range of others. Because mobility originates in the desiring subjects themselves rather than in the disciplinary apparatus of power, Deleuze argues that one could easily mistake this increase in mobility for an increase in freedom (4). Instead, through the social setting there is a new continuous modulation of our mobility and of our desires. Contrary to the alleged analogous, discontinuous and active power of the disciplinary age, the passive power of control manifests itself continuously across different spaces in contemporary society, constantly reassessing and differentiating its subjects. A coding operating becomes the central technology of this mechanism. The subjects of Control Society become the “dividuals,” divided by the algorithm into differently coded parts. Through making competition between parts, within an individual, but also between differently coded individuals and groups, seem desirable and natural, subjects are controlled. Rather than being part of masses, the dividuals are part of “samples, markets, banks” (5), perhaps pre-empting the currently popular term databases, so that they can easily be found and modulated. The ‘freedom’ suggested by the disappearance of active enclosures of the disciplinary age, is limited by the differentiating coding of our figures. Controlled mobility replaces the disciplinary enclosure.
Whereas Foucault’s theorization of the security dispositif retains a sketch-like character, Deleuze provides us with a clear and consistent, albeit very technical, vocabulary for thinking through this new dispositif. However, Deleuze’s insistence on the successive or mutually exclusive character of disciplinary and control societies obscures how different technologies of oppression can coexist. This is surprising as he also introduced the concept of the assemblage, which allows for discontinuities, inconsistencies and internal contradictions within a social field. As such, it allows for thinking through the messy situations we will encounter in my close-reading, not only in this chapter, but as assemblage theory also allows for lines of resistance that refigure the assemblage, it is also fundamental to the core of my argument in chapter three.
I will use Manuel DeLanda’s (2006) explication of the concept of the assemblage, as it provides a clear image of how these assemblages function and relate to each other in the context of society in more general terms, but also in specific group dynamics. Assemblages are somewhat united entities. They consist of components in relations of exteriority, meaning that a component, for example a person, can be detached from one assemblage and plugged into another (10). Inside assemblages, however, these components are caught up in processes of territorialisation, which
stabilize the assemblage by increasing internal homogeneity and the sharpness of its outside boundaries, and deterritorialisation, which destabilizes the assemblage by doing the inverse (12). Through the recurrence of these two processes the assemblages become associated with populations, being produced by them and producing them, as already mentioned above in the social-production cycle (16-17). These processes take place through both material and expressive components (12).
We should take assemblages as individuals. Though the term is mostly reserved for persons, a person as an assemblage of body parts is only one among a variety of assemblages. Because institutions and all other kinds of assemblages are “unique, singular, historically contingent” they have a similar status as individuals (40). By tracing both their original and continued emergence, their processes of territorialisation and deterritorialisation, one can find individual singularity of that specific assemblage. These common characteristics of assemblages give them a horizontal quality. However, between different assemblages there is also a vertical component, in that higher scale assemblages, encompassing bigger populations, can causally affect other assemblages by providing them with constraints and resources (34). As the inmate is limited and provided for by the prison, so the prison is limited and provided for by society. Through this effect of the higher scale assemblage on a lower scale assemblage, the lower scale assemblages purposed with the same limits and resources become similar to other assemblages on the same scale. So while a prison is a unique and historically contingent result of its own processes of de- and reterritorialisation, it is also similar to other prisons in that society, by virtue of the constrains and resources provided by the very same society.
My aim here is to trace the way the mechanisms of power described above have accumulated in Oz’ representation of the contemporary prison and its population in a combination of processes of de- and re-territorialisation, so as to give an image of what happens to prisons when the constrains and resources offered by society change. This will provide substance to my criticism of Deleuze that we should see it as an additive rather than a successive dynamic, while adding to Foucault’s theory a practical side that reveals in which way the disciplinary mechanisms are transformed, but by no means nullified, by the questions and technologies of the security mechanism. To do this, I will first argue that Oz shows how contemporary prisons are only able to function internally through control measures like dividual modulation on mobility and desires. After that, I will show how Oz confirms the continued utility and necessity of prisons in what we may dub a security dispositif or control assemblage on the societal scale.
Control and spectacular mechanisms in EmCity
This argument requires a different approach in the close reading than I employed in the previous chapter. As it is a much slower history, with control measures slowly being introduced and Oz slowly being integrated into a wider control assemblage, I will discuss specific scenes from across the series. A first interesting moment occurs each time when new inmates are introduced to the concept of EmCity. They are welcomed by the head CO of that moment with a sermon that reveals the balance between discipline and control. In the first episode of the series, for example, Diane Whittlesey explains with an extremely bored demeanour:
In Emerald City we got rules. Got a lot more rules than anywhere else in Oz. Your cell is your home. Keep it clean, spotless. You are to exercise regularly, attend classes, go to drug and alcohol counselling. You are to work in one of the prison factories. You are to follow the routine. We tell you when to sleep, when to eat, when to piss. There is no yelling, no fighting, no fucking. Follow the rules. Learn discipline. Because if you had any self-discipline, any control over yourself at all, you wouldn’t be sitting here now. (S01E01)
The disciplinary intentions are explicit. As we find out throughout the series though, the actual practice in EmCity more closely matches later head CO Sean Murphy’s iteration, given in a preachy tone:
In Emerald City you’re given a lot more leeway than the rest of Oz. But the leeway has a price. We got rules: there’s no yelling, no fighting, no fucking. You’re expected to keep your cells and the common areas pristine. You obey the rules, we’ll get along fine. You don’t, we dropkick your ass to GenPop. (S04E01)
Of these four rules, only those on fighting and cleanliness are shown as being close to consistently enforced. Rather than having to work, the inmates are mostly given the ‘free time’ that I already touched upon in the previous chapter. Inmates spend some of their ‘free’ time doing desirable activities, desirable both by staff and the inmates themselves: reading, exercising and praying. As the introduction of a control mechanism would suggest, however, they also spend a lot of the time plotting, suggesting an obsession with competition rather than resistance. Finally, like already mentioned in the prelude to the episode close-read in the last chapter, they watch television shows, favourites being a hand-puppet show mostly watched for its attractive presenter and later on in the series game shows, of which Deleuze remarks: “If the most idiotic television game shows are so
successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision” (Postscript 4). For Deleuze then, the metaphorical quality of television shows is evident, as it is for the inmates of EmCity, shifting from being played as hand-puppets, to participating in game-shows17. Twice removed, the viewers of Oz are being offered these same metaphors. Once removed, however, we are additionally offered the way the inmates deal with these operations of power, of being played and brought into endless competition with one another, which is the focus of the third and final chapter.
This disappearance of explicit disciplinary reform in EmCity, instead of opting for ‘keeping them busy,’ matches a cynicism about being able to improve all inmates that grows throughout the series. McManus as the head of the unit in S02E02, titled ‘Ancient Tribes’, codes the inmate population of EmCity into ten ‘tribes’, each with four members18. Each group has to choose a representative to sit on a council, where he would have influence in exchange for keeping the members of his group in line. As a control measure, the coded group identities become the framework for competition amongst the inmate population. Even the leaders of the groups, as already highlighted in the first chapter, sometimes have trouble identifying with their ascribed identities, like Alvarez who claims in the series finale: “in Oz you don’t have friends, just people who look like you”. McManus combines this control measure with some disciplinary purposes.
He makes the G.E.D.19 program mandatory for those inmates without a high-school diploma, which means about half of EmCity’s inmates would have to join classes. To get the inmates to actually join, McManus becomes more pragmatic or to say it differently, manipulative. Speaking one on one in the EmCity common area, McManus promises Poet that if he gets his G.E.D., he will arrange for Poet to have a conjugal visit with his girlfriend, to which Poet retorts: “ain’t there rules about this, man?” McManus shrugs his shoulders “Fuck the rules. Deal?” Poet agrees and is shown in class in the next scene. McManus’ approach shows the growing flexibility in the application of the general rules as the series progresses. Poet is the only inmate to succeed in graduating, before only a few episodes later the Governor announces the end of the G.E.D. program.
17 A self-awareness of this is visible in a Hill’s interlude in S02E07, while lions hunt in the background: “Those National Geographic specials, they’re popular here in Oz. All those wild beasts attacking each other. Ferocious lions walking down to the watering hole, brutalizing antelopes and gazelles. How come there’s never a program where the animals get along? Where they help each other?” The remark is followed by the prisoner’s council all coming together to help finance an operation for Rebadow’s grandson, who is suffering from leukemia.
18 McManus’ edict: “the Muslims, the Gangsters, the Latinos, the Italians, the Irish, the Aryans, the Bikers, the Christians, the Gays, and one called the Others [Beecher, Hill, Busmalis and Rebadow]. Each group will have four prisoners living in EmCity, no more, no less. Each group will be equal, each individual, equal”. Adebisi interrupts: “Bullshit”.
19 Officially ‘tests of general educational development,’ G.E.D. programs offer the opportunity for those without a high-school diploma to attain an equivalent degree.
