The Guardian/Ghassan Hage: Caging people to dominate them is a sign of weakness, not power

The Guardian

Opinion
Caging people to dominate them is a sign of weakness, not power

By Ghassan Hage

When humans use caging techniques in the pursuit of domination, they should be accountable for any resulting loss of life

Fri 5 Jul 2019 23.00 BST
Last modified on Sat 6 Jul 2019 06.46 BST

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A man behind bars

It started with a mundane observation, but one made possible by years of being attentive to, studying and writing about human-animal domestication relationships.
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I was walking my dogs to a park not far from my house. To do so, I have to cross the main road. On the other side was a man who had his dog on a leash. My dogs are trained to stop at the pedestrian red light without needing a leash. The green light appears with a rattling noise that they recognise as a sign to get ready. I say “Go!” as an extra prompt and they cross. When this happens, I not only believe that unlike many others I don’t need a leash, I also feel superior to them.
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That day, things were no different. I looked at the man and his leashed dog coming towards me and immediately felt that sense of superiority. But for the first time, I started thinking about the significance of that feeling: Why on earth? “You’re so ridiculous,” I told myself. Nevertheless, it was still a pleasing sensation to realise I was in full control of my dogs without the need for physical restraints.
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From almost out of nowhere, the words Regarde! Sans mains! popped into my consciousness. Here I was – a kid riding my bike “with no hands” for the first time, and screaming for my friend to watch me. My unconscious mind was inviting me to make a link between the two situations. The lines from a French-Belgian song from the early 90s intrude into the mental mix: le bonheur c’est comme faire/ du vélo sans les mains (Happiness is like riding / your bike with no hands).
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My mind was racing: what was it about dominating your surrounding without using your hands that made it so enjoyable? Was I touching a dimension that was the essence of power and control? I started thinking of the unlimited, mundane, everyday joy the remote control device has brought into our lives. Despite being scientifically explainable, does not the sentiment of power generated by the remote control to affect things at a distance have its genealogy in the sentiments generated by the practices of magic and voodoo? I curse you and you develop a fever. I put a pin in this doll and I paralyse your arm. Regarde! Sans mains!
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The more I thought about and researched this, the more I became convinced that the idea of a domination that does not require excessively visible physical restraint was a dimension of all fantasies of domination. It is certainly at the heart of our most common understanding of domestication as a mode of dominating other natural species. Unlike “capturing”, which needs visible restraints such as cages, and “taming”, which involves easing an individual of a species from a state of being caged to coming under human control without a cage, “domesticating” involves species reproducing themselves as always being ready to accept the state of domination they are born into without being caged: sans mains!
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So what is it about this proliferation of cages and the process of caging in inter-human relations today, such as the rise in incarceration, the caging of refugees, building walls to mark borders, gated communities and so on? If invisible domination is a sign of strength, is this proliferation of visible cages a sign of weakness? A sign that the invisible modes of domination that kept the dominant in power and made the dominated “know their place” are no longer working? That the dominant have lost all legitimacy, and need more and more hands-on modes of control to maintain their rule? If so, this can only be a hopeful sign of the decline of the powerful.
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There is, however, a more sinister explanation and it is probable that the two go hand in hand. One of the earliest design problems in the history of caging presented itself in bird cages, and had to do with the over-visibility of the cage. Birds in highly visible cages, where the bars were too thick, for instance, kept trying to break free by flying straight into them, and ended up hurting themselves and dying. Technically then, the history of refining cages is one of creating something strong enough to ensure the encaged does not break free, while also ensuring that this search for strength does not result in a more “in your face” over-visibility that creates a highly claustrophobic feeling of “encagement” in the encaged.

This technical problem is very old: if you want the caged to live as healthy a life as possible in their cages, you aim to avoid such over-visibility. If you don’t care about them experiencing such claustrophobia as a result of over-visibility, it means you have no interest in them staying alive. When the caged die, it cannot be a case of “Oops, we didn’t know”.

Those who erect such death-inducing cages have to assume responsibility for the resulting loss of life. Today, as we witness Aboriginal deaths in custody, asylum seekers immolating themselves for finding their caging intolerable, people dying while trying to break free from claustrophobic national borders behind which they are kept against their will, we also face the fact that the caging of mainly black and brown people has become a racist technique of extermination. Those responsible for legitimising and deploying such a technique need to be held accountable for the impact of their actions.

    This is an edited extract of a keynote address presented at this week’s Technologies of Bordering conference at the University of Melbourne.

    Ghassan Hage is a professor of anthropology and social theory at the University of Melbourne


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Topics

    Deaths in custody
    Opinion

    Indigenous Australians
    Human rights
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comments (11)

This discussion is closed for comments.

    Guardian Pick

    Have you ever been locked up? Or caged for wont of using your description? Had your freedom taken from you and all your possessions, what little you had on your person, confiscated only to be then told to remove all your clothes while a number of officers watched on? Once exposed and approved given prison issue garments and continued down the assembly line that is entry processing. But it doesn't even start there. It starts from the very second t…

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    CaptainFlacid
    23h ago
    13 14

    Guardian Pick

    Arresting article, makes the psychological underpinning of the west's assignment of vermin status to others clear. As I make my way through city suburbs with residential concrete towers (of questionable construction standards), I think we are all in the process of being caged by our economy, paying way over the construction cost for a box stacked on other boxes with chicken runs down below for the illusion of free-ranging. I've just come back fro…
    Jump to comment
    hsc111
    1d ago
    5 6

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