Unruly Affects: Attempts at Control and All That Escapes from an American Mental Health Court

Abstract

Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in mental health courts in the San Francisco Bay Area, this article juxtaposes the fixity that defines the legal concept of jurisdiction with the itineracy of homeless individuals judged by criminal courts. I assert that jurisdiction is an attempt at control: by invoking jurisdiction, courts attempt to fix people and objects within time and space so as to yield a narrative of liberal accountability for which defendants can be held responsible. Rather than assume the vantage point of the law, I stick with Harriet, a person who was homeless and subject to a mental health court’s attempt at control. Moving away from the law exposes when state attempts at control fail. Claims to jurisdiction reflect the state’s reliance on control through a particular chronotope of linear time and divisible space. In differently configuring time and space as cyclical and unbounded, Harriet confounds the law’s attempt at control. Further, the state’s invocation of jurisdiction as a concept that fixes time and space produces unruly affects, or coordinates of relation that escape a rule of law presenting itself as rational. Harriet’s relationships with others reflect and enable her escape from state control: they inhabit an affective atmosphere that is produced by the law’s own chronotopic terms, but that reject the individual accountability that the law understands as a product of claims to jurisdiction. In paying attention to missed encounters between Harriet and the court, this article reveals and theorizes moments in which power escapes its own terms and enters a social, deindividuated, affective sphere.

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

“…In contrast to the work on people held captive, a body of work emphasized the ways people themselves are unruly in practices or affect. Cooper () foregrounded the language of “unruly affects” in her examination of homeless individuals in San Francisco who elude US criminal court control, despite legal efforts to contain and render them fixed. As O'Neill and Dua (, 8) argue, “people want out, and they want it now.” Sometimes the unruly or bumptious (Haraway ) is a matter of improvisation and bricolage in relation to divine agency (Bjork‐James ; Elisha ; Friedner ; O'Neill ; Scherz ) or in the face of global capitalism or neoliberalism (Degani ; Gershon ; Hoag ; Ofstehage ; Taylor ; Zhu ), while other times the unruly is a matter of life and death, terror and madness (Burraway ; Luna ).…”

“…A final group of scholars considered how unruly affects can reproduce violence and terror. Cooper () illustrated how homeless people's “unruly affects” and peripatetic wanderings demonstrate the limits of the containerizing legal frame and its logics of liberal accountability rooted in time and space. She theorized precisely that which cannot be contained, those “moments in which power escapes its own terms” (205).…”

“…Captivity has long been central to empire, settler colonialism, capitalist expansion, and imperialism—and the forms of violence and genocide that accompany them—as well as in the anthropological work that examines those themes. In 2018, cultural anthropologists circled around captivity through analytics of enslavement (Lainez ; Wengrow and Graeber ), containment (Cons ; Gershon ; Hamberger ; Stone ), control (Cardoso ; Cooper ), confinement (Besteman, Biondi, and Burton ; Gomez‐Temesio ), compliance (Kazi ), suppression (Berman ; Sen ), constraint (Degani ), concealment (Hackl ; Rakopoulos ), boundary (Elisha ), exile and entrapment (Hinkson ; O'Neill ; Saleh ), and harmony (Yang ).…”

“…In a necessary dialectic, much work considered seepage or failures of containment through analytics of freedom (Furani ), the unruly (Cooper ; J. Fisher ; Scherz , 108; Stoetzer , 302), zaniness (Degani ), play (Rea ), transgression (Muir and Gupta ), porousness (Bjork‐James ), madness (Nuhrat ), rupture or breaking open (Kunreuther ; Kyriakides ; Ofstehage ; Saleh ), queering (Heywood ; Shirinian ), invasion (Sherouse ), excess (Gershon ), or contagion (Kivland ; Luna ; Rubin ; Rubinstein et al. ).…”

Beyond Participation: Politics, Incommensurability and the Emergence of Mental Health Service Users’ Activism in Chile

“…As expressed by Cooper in her ethnography of mental health courts in the San Francisco Bay Area, USA, “The court’s formulation of jurisdiction and its creation of individuated subjects reach an impasse at the moment of the social” (2018:100). In the context of activism, the pre-existence of social bonds provides a foundation for the group to navigate the options of legal identification.…”