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Surplus populations are back on the political agenda. With the rise of automation technologies and the advent of the hyperflexible 'gig economy', millions of individuals across the post-industrialised world will likely become supernumerary or consigned to low-quality jobs in the service sector. Neoliberalism signalled the abdication of the state's responsibility for ensuring full employment and providing high-quality employment. However, criminology has largely forgotten the central roles played by both in preventing the spread of social pathologies. Against the logic of neoliberalism, what is needed is a state capable of counteracting the formation of surplus populations, or an anti-surplus state. A second New Deal would enact infrastructure investments and re-embed superfluous populations into meaningful employment relations. Following Bourdieu's criticism of a scientistic 'flight into purity', criminologists should adopt the lessons learned by Sweden's interwar social democrats and advocate policies capable of preventing the augmentation of social superfluity. ; Norges forskningsråd 259888 ; publishedVersion

Bourdieu's anthropology of the state can be interpreted as a form of political theology, premised on a panentheistic conception of the state, which is transcendental to social reality while simultaneously being lodged in all social matter. The state is a Leviathan that imposes a horizon of meaning beyond which social agents rarely, if ever, move. The anthropologist must transcend the doxic structures of the state by engaging in a labor of anamnesis, enacting a bringing-to-consciousness of the invisible and occluded operations of the state in its deployment of symbolic power, which serves to naturalize a series of dominant (yet arbitrary) categories, concepts, and representations. Bourdieu's ontological vision can be summarized in the concise formula, 'state = society = God.' A guiding methodical imperative for sociologists of the state-as-divinity is extracted from Bourdieu's lectures on the state: the Deus Absconditus Principle, which mandates detecting and uncovering the veiled divinity of the state in all aspects of social reality. It is the task of the anthropologist to channel, interpret, and challenge the panentheistic state.

Bourdieu's anthropology of the state can be interpreted as a form of political theology, premised on a panentheistic conception of the state, which is transcendental to social reality while simultaneously being lodged in all social matter. The state is a Leviathan that imposes a horizon of meaning beyond which social agents rarely, if ever, move. The anthropologist must transcend the doxic structures of the state by engaging in a labor of anamnesis, enacting a bringing-to-consciousness of the invisible and occluded operations of the state in its deployment of symbolic power, which serves to naturalize a series of dominant (yet arbitrary) categories, concepts, and representations. Bourdieu's ontological vision can be summarized in the concise formula, 'state = society = God.' A guiding methodical imperative for sociologists of the state-as-divinity is extracted from Bourdieu's lectures on the state: the Deus Absconditus Principle, which mandates detecting and uncovering the veiled divinity of the state in all aspects of social reality. It is the task of the anthropologist to channel, interpret, and challenge the panentheistic state. ; Norges forskningsråd 259888. ; publishedVersion

In recent decades, many scholars have invoked the concept of penal populism to explain the adoption of "tough on crime" measures and a wider politics of "law and order" across the post-industrialized world. But scholars who invoke the concept often betray an implicit commitment to its twin ideology—penal elitism—the belief that penal policymaking should not be subjected to public debate and that matters pertaining to crime control and punishment should be left to experts or specialists. The doctrine contains four key properties: isolationism; scientism; a narrow notion of "the political"; and a thin conception of "populism." Isolationism involves creating buffers around arenas of social life—including criminal justice systems—to remove them from what is held to be undue democratic influence. Scientism is the overvaluation of scientific reason and the dismissal of a public believed to be emotional, irrational, or exceedingly simplistic. Politics conceived narrowly limits "the political" to that which takes place within the formal political system, ignoring the wider notion of politics as the exercise of symbolic power in everyday life, which extends far beyond the political system as such. The thin conception of "populism" ignores the fact that populism is an ideology promising to protect the public from harms of neoliberal capitalism that nevertheless fails to offer a plausible alternative to market rule. In this article, I argue that in place of either penal populism or penal elitism, academics should engage in democratically grounded practices to reverse harsh justice by including the public in a reformulated politics of punishment. ; Funding was provided by Norwegian Research Council (Grant No. 259888). ; acceptedVersion

Following a series of transformative political and legal battles, California's overcrowded prison system has moved in the direction of moderate decarceration. A softer stance on punishment means that thousands of previously ineligible inmates serving indeterminate sentences are now being considered for release on parole. Drawing on ethnographic observations of twenty parole hearings in one California men's prison, this study outlines how rehabilitation has come to be enmeshed in a logic of punitivity, as parole commissioners subject inmates to an individualizing gaze that misrecognizes the socially embedded nature of their performance. Parole commissioners are tasked with assessing dangerousness, deploying a multifaceted conception of risk that combines formalized actuarial instruments and evaluative judgments to form the inchoate and contradictory notion of "insight." Inmates are expected to demonstrate this if they are to be released, but what is insight? Parole boards assume that it is a valid indicator of future behavior and probable recidivism, and parole commissioners posit that successful inmates will be capable of demonstrating authentic remorse and insight, unimpeded by the constraints of an austere and dangerous carceral environment. However, the discretionary criteria established by the penal system are limited by the deleterious living conditions established by this same penal system. ; Norwegian Research Council. Grant Number: 259888 ; acceptedVersion

In his late lectures, Foucault developed the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia, a courage to speak the truth in the face of danger. While not entirely uncritical of the notion, Foucault seemed to find something of an ideal in the political and aesthetic ideal of franc-parler, of speaking freely and courageously. Simultaneously, the post-1968 political valorized the ideal of parrhesia, or "speaking truth to power": parrhesia seemed inherently progressive, the sole preserve of the left. But a cursory inspection of the annals of Nazism and fascism shows that these movements also aligned themselves with parrhesiastical modes of expression. The fragmented, disparate strands of today's neo-fascist revival, too, are closely imbricated with the notion of speaking valiantly in the face of supposed orthodoxies: in many ways, the preeminent parrhesiasts today are found on the neo-fascist side. This points to an essential weakness in the concept of parrhesia, particularly in terms of its value and valence as a strategy for the political left. Perhaps it matters less how we speak—being caught up in language games—than what policies and programs we enact. Žižek's plea for a renewed dogmatic orthodoxy and Chesterton's criticism of heresy offer ways out of the parrhesiastical trap. ; publishedVersion

The Arab body has long been a focal point of literary, political, technological, and military interventions. The state of otherness attributed to the embodied nature of Arab identity has made it a key locus of social domination as well as, more positively, a springboard for fresh takes on social domination far beyond the particular social suffering of a single social category. By engaging in a close reading of Kerouac's On the Road in tandem with an autoexperiential account of sociopolitical developments targeting Arab corporeality in the post-9/11 era, this article demonstrates the contradictions and potentialities of social suffering. To be a bearer of an Arab body is to be the on the receiving end of a whole host of societal suspicions, social anxieties, modes of surveillance, military incursions, and, more generally, deployments of negative symbolic power. But this state of domination turned corporeal also makes for a potential site of freedom, a vector for new solidarities with other groups and categories turned alien and other.

Where is the pain in exceptional prisons? A new generation of prisons produces unusual 'pains of imprisonment' which scholars of punishment are only beginning to catalog. This article brings the reader inside the social milieu of Norway's 'Prison Island', a large, minimum security ('open') prison. Here inmates live in self-organized cottages and enjoy relatively unrestricted freedom of movement. But even under exceptional conditions of Scandinavian incarceration, new vectors and modes of punishment arise that produce 'pains of freedom', a notion drawing on Crewe's historicizing examination of Sykes' concept. Serving as an addition to conventional sociological conceptualizations of prison pains, the 'pains of freedom' can be classified into five sub-categories: (1) confusion; (2) anxiety and boundlessness; (3) ambiguity; (4) relative deprivation; and (5) individual responsibility. Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with 15 inmates, it is shown that freedom is occasionally experienced as ambiguous, bittersweet or tainted. These new pains may be indicative of what is in stock for clients of future penal regimes in other societies.

Norway has long been considered to be a bastion of social democracy due to its strong, protective, decommodifying welfare state. However, with the recent rise of neoliberalism and right-wing populist politics across the West, this Northern European society has gradually shifted from Keynesian Fordism to a moderate form of neoliberalism. This political-economic pivot has also resulted in a transformation of what Foucault termed biopolitics: a politics concerned with life itself. In early 2019, leading politicians in Norway's centre-right coalition government placed the problem of the declining fertility rate on the national agenda and framed the problem of biological reproduction in ways particular to their political-ideological perspectives. The Conservative Party discussed reproduction in terms of producerism, or the problem of supplying the welfare state with labouring, tax-paying citizens. The Progress Party emphasised ethnonational exclusion, engaging in racial denigration with the aim to ensure the reproduction of 'ethnic Norwegians'. The Christian Democrats highlighted a conservative Christian 'right to life' topos amidst growing secularisation and pluralism. All three parties signalled a turn from traditional social-democratic ideologies. Neoliberalism has proven to be malleable, able to fuse with a wide range of biopolitical programmes including moral exhortations, ethnonational exclusion and religious discourse to approach the problem of reproduction. However, this post-social-democratic approach generally is unwilling to provide material security through large-scale social expenditures and universal welfare institutions, preferring instead to address the 'hearts and minds' of the populace. Consequently, the fundamental cause of sub-replacement fertility—the gradual proliferation of ontological insecurity—remains unaddressed. ; publishedVersion