Melz Owusu is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology. This extract from their book Undisciplined: Reclaiming the Right to Imagine (Polity Press November 2024) is reproduced by kind permission of the author and Polity Press.
Melz's research delves into unconventional methods of knowledge and truth generation, diverging from the conventional evidence-based approach to knowing. Melz explores avenues such as spirituality, embodiment, storytelling, and the erotic in their quest to understand how knowledge and truth are created and sustained.
They have been widely recognised as an influential activist in the UK – actively involved in movements such as Black Lives Matter UK, Decolonising the Curriculum, and LGBTQ+ visibility. Melz is the founder of the Free Black University, a project that offered radical courses of study to Black Communities.
The Possibility of Another World
My first degree was in Philosophy and Politics. There was a Philosophy class that I took during my second year of study that I often come back to; it was a part of a module in Advanced Logic. The class posed the question of other possible worlds. These other worlds were conceptually offered by the lecturer as other canonical models. That there is a possibility that various and infinite worlds exist beyond our perception and ability to quantify. Further, that the canons or laws that govern these worlds both in the natural world and by way of philosophical principles, may be entirely different.
I was fascinated.
It brought a new possibility into my personal world, the idea that everything could be entirely different. It was probably not the aim of the lecture, but it played a significant part in reshaping my relationship to activism and the change I longed to see in the world. Rather than believing change is limited to this canonical model, what may happen if we move to anchor other possible canonical models, specifically focused on foundational philosophical principles that govern our minds, bodies, and how we relate to one another, into this physical world? If those worlds have the possibility of existing, then there is equally a possibility that this world could be reshaped and reformed from its very core. That it no longer must just be about reforming this system, it became about creating entirely new worlds and visions of freedom that are not anchored to what is considered ‘possible’ within our current canonical model. The ‘impossible’ became possible.
We are collectively shifting into new dimensions and understandings of collective liberation and freedom. The old paradigm of reforming the system through the pleas for small justices within archaic and oppressive systems are falling away. Instead, abolition has become a part of the collective consciousness. This was no clearer than during the uprisings of 2020 that erupted across North America, the United Kingdom, and in pockets across Europe and the rest of the world. After the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, there was an outpouring of abolitionist education through social media. I was a witness to, and was a part of, the discussions during the summer and autumn months of 2020 as abolitionist rhetoric became a part of the collective conversation, and the freedom dreaming that was being explored on a mass scale was ever expanding. The abolitionist step to call for the defunding of the police, a phrase popularised by the Black Visions Collective, who are a radical Black LGBTQ+-led organising group based in Minnesota (Wortham, 2020), was discussed on mainstream news channels across the world (Levin, 2020; Zaru and Simpson, 2020; BBC News, 2020b).
It felt as though we were standing at the gateway of another world. A possibility that existed beyond what we are educated to believe is achievable, it felt we might be able to shape and create new worlds. For me, abolition is the demand for a new world. It is not simply the call to end the prison and policing systems, or any other harmful institutions. It is a call to entirely reshape and recreate the world from its foundations. Nothing can be abolished in isolation; the implications of the end of any system require us to rethink and reshape the world as we know it.
Abolition is about beginnings, not just endings.
What beauty and possibility may erupt in the wake of the endings? What may be birthed through the fertile ground the abolitionist movement lays down? In the seminal text Are Prisons Obsolete? Angela Davis (2003) offered us an evaluation of the abolition of the prison, firstly by contextualising it in the rich history of abolition for African Americans from slavery to Civil Rights. She demonstrates that what at the time many would have considered impossible to change, such as the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow, are now no longer enshrined in US law, and so in a similar way we might collectively imagine a world beyond the prison. In this she argued that we must reimagine society as a whole and begin working towards that societal transformation to reach the place of rendering the prison obsolete.
Since then, we have had an emerging school of critical literature which places attention on the prison as a site for which abolitionist dreams can and must be realised (Gilmore, 2007; Kaba, 2021). Here, I take the prison as the critical location that it is, but importantly also as a metaphor, as a fungible tool through which we may deepen our understanding of all within the world outside of the physical location of the prison that incarcerates and controls. As such, through the lens of the prison we can understand the ways that we are disciplined and controlled within ‘free’ society.
This is explored in Steven Dillon’s (2016) contribution to the edited volume Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex wherein he explored the concept of freedom and unfreedoms with trans prisoners through the art of letter writing. The prisoners whom he refers to as C and R recognise ‘the free world as intimately connected to and constituted by the prison, and further that free world is anything but free; rather, it is an extension of . . . unfreedom’ (p. 196). He goes on to explore that the prisoners see death as freedom as opposed to release back into the ‘free’ world. Steven argues this is the epistemology (knowledge system) required to fight against formations of power that exceed the boundaries of liberalism. By this, Steven is suggesting that we not only must fight against the Prison Industrial Complex and render the institutions of prisons and policing obsolete – but we must also challenge the liberal epistemology that suggests any of us living outside of the prison’s gates are free at all. What Steven’s work here, as well as in his Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State (2018), offers is the understanding that prisons shape our relationship to our own subjectivities as ‘free’.
The separation and juxtaposition the prison offers as a comparative site of unfreedom in ‘civil society’ services the implication that those outside of the prison’s gates are ‘free’. Yet, as stated, this freedom is a fallacy, and therefore the prison produces a dichotomy that essentially legitimises the unfreedoms we experience outside of the prison’s gates. In turn, this limits our ability to imagine freedoms beyond the confines of the modern world because the epistemology of the Liberal State tells us we are already free. In a similar vein Joy James (2013) offers, in her conception of Afrarealism, a mode of thinking that critiques Black philosophy from a Black feminist and womanist standpoint on its ability to conceptualise freedom that, ‘in fantasies of democracy, the enslaver rescues the savage from barbarity, and the abolitionist saves the savage from the enslaver. Afrarealism sees both forms of “salvation” as captivity’ (p. 125). These offerings demonstrate that freedom is not just a question of material reality; it is also a question of consciousness.
Freedom and Consciousness
We cannot mobilise towards freedom if we are not conscious of how unfree we truly are. Historically the concept of freedom is a contested category – philosophers, politicians, historians, activists, sociologists, and indeed the general population have debated and complexly considered what it truly means to be free. The question of freedom is a conversation that every person has a stake in. Western philosophers of the liberal tradition have offered some of the most influential (read: dominating) conceptualisations of freedom with regard to how we construct society.
John Stuart Mill (2016) offers the concept of liberty as freedom from constraints on the basis that this freedom from constraint does not infringe on another’s liberty. Isiah Berlin (1969) develops this and argues John’s conception of freedom is negative freedom and there is also positive freedom, which pertains to a person’s ability to act freely and take control of their own life. Both approaches to freedom are deeply entrenched in the individual as a product of Western individualist thought.
As mentioned, Steven Dillon (2016) offers that C and R, from their positionality within the constraints of the prison cell, do not consider release back into the ‘free’ (read: unfree) world as freedom, even though within a country governed by Western Liberal Democracy they should conceivably have greater access to both positive and negative freedom to live out their lives as they so wish. Though instead the only freedom C and R can conceptualise is in the afterlife. We are often taught to hold freedom comparatively – what I mean by this is that the comparison of the prison vs. the free world teaches that by comparison we are free. Also, that freedom is something that the individual can largely gain alone and maintain alone by virtue of personal responsibility.
The zeitgeist of modern freedom is arguably to be financially free; the internet is inundated with videos, articles, and think-pieces on the topic. Still, the age-old adage of the wealthy remains that ‘money does not bring about happiness’. So, can we be truly free if we are not happy and fulfilled? Connection, community, love, safety, belonging, are arguably some of the key tenets of living a fulfilled life, though all these experiences require others and cannot be fulfilled as an individual alone. As such, freedom should not be held comparatively – e.g., prison vs. the free world, poverty vs. riches – instead, I argue it should be held complexly. We should hold freedom with an open heart – by this I mean that to believe we can offer something as expansive and spacious as freedom a definitive definition is to misunderstand the concept of freedom altogether. This incongruity is a demonstration of a knowledge system that cannot cope with uncertainty and has an insatiable colonising desire to know.
To aim to define freedom is to counter-intuitively place it within linguistic chains, to pull and package something that should, by its very essence, be free. The effervescence of freedom should be embraced not controlled or captured. With this, holding freedom with an openness that extends from the heart allows us to understand it is an ever-expanding concept which offers us the right to recognise that we are allowed to imagine freedom beyond whatever parameters are offered to us. Hence, we may become as free as our consciousness of both our current freedoms and unfreedoms allows us to be. For if we can imagine and conceptualise a sense of freedom beyond our current conditions, we are developing in consciousness through the eye of our imagination.
Undisciplined offers considerations and a framework for the contemporary consciousness movement that is very much underway. This consciousness movement challenges what is considered freedom. It pushes us to deepen our awareness of the oppressions that are normalised when placed in contrast to what can be perceived as greater unfreedoms such as the dichotomy between the prison and the ‘free’ world. There is nothing free ’bout the ‘free’ world. The contemporary consciousness movement reminds us that all knowledge is created, truth is created, what is possible is created. In this vein we can, too, then create knowledges and philosophies that offer us lines of flight out of the constraints of Western Liberal Democracy and into different possible worlds. This consciousness movement reminds us that alternative realities, different ways of being, are both possible and necessary. It is a deeply spiritual movement and recognises that all the work begins with the self, but a self connected to community and land.
Undisciplined gives language and form to some of this consciousness-raising and philosophical work of liberation that is being done in the contemporary world as well as offering ideas on how to deepen this consciousness raising. We explore beyond the materiality of abolition and delve into what philosophies and knowledges we must become conscious of, not only to bring forth new visions of collective freedom, but also to sustain such a world.
