Self-alterations of mind, body and senses of relation in Confinement 

Tamara Kohn

‘Self-alteration’ tends to be understood in association with ideals of freedom, space, choice and mobility. In this presentation I consider how self-alteration (as well as these ideals) might be understood from a position of extended isolated captivity.  I will introduce you to one man who has spent thirty years in solitary confinement in a high security prison in the US who I have communicated with regularly for over six years.  Our epistolary exchanges will be shared and analysed to expose our mutually exposed interior and ever transforming worlds through the pursuits of a range of creative, intellectual, spiritual and bodily practices: art and painting, reading, astral projection, ‘Universal Mind’, and the philosophy and practice of martial arts. 

Studies in men’s prisons have often focused on hypermasculine processes of self-alteration through the overt sculpting and maintenance of muscle mass in protective demonstrations of bodily control.  Such transformative body work and posturing is interpreted as a signal to others of the capacity of aggressive action in the context of a culture of disrespect and deprivation (cf. Yvonne Jewkes).  Such self-‘growth’ (literally, of muscle) sits alongside what Erving Goffman has powerfully (but etically) described as the ‘mortification of self’ in prisons and asylums through meaningless tasks, what he has called a ‘disculturalisation’ process that strips selfhood and perpetuates states of powerlessness (where any alteration of the self is thus necessarily degenerative). In this presentation, however, I wish to reveal another very important missing layer of self-alteration revealed only from the position of the individual ‘inside’ who works in other ways on their body and mind through, for example, martial arts and yoga training, meditation, reading, watching documentaries, crafting, and writing essays, poems and letters, and who interacts meaningfully with others’ ideas even in the darkness of solitary confinement.  The ‘quiet’ and ‘private’ interior growth stimulated through creative and educative practices and repetitive training in body/mind skills are less about demonstrating potential control and power over the ‘other’, and more about increasing control over the evolving ‘self’, stimulating personal or ‘spiritual’ mobility, resilience, and resistance, and honing an interior sense of worth and potential.   

That possibility needs to be explored, I argue, from the inside, in order to challenge broad public presumptions that ‘selves’ caught for decades or lifetimes within these places either decay and ‘rot’ there (deteriorate), or ‘do time’ (stagnate), and are thus bereft of hope, creative growth, and human value. The state of the prison and the mechanisms of control and punishment that are produced within it are most threatened by any bodies that contest this expectation.  This is why my friend is still placed in solitary confinement – indeed, his voice, sharing his practices of self alteration, is far more dangerous and powerful than any fist and why we need to hear it.