‘All organizing is science fiction’: Abolition in the Surrounds

Abstract

Alongside this exercise, we read four pieces of science fiction in which the authors imagined processes of justice in other worlds or at other times. In the stories, we encountered complicated accountability processes, re-education programmes, peaceholders, and voluntary therapeutic interventions – all attempts at practical speculative resolutions to the violence and brokenness of contemporary criminal legal processes. These exercises were intended as a way for us to trip up our commonsense assumptions about the infrastructure of safety and justice, to open our imagination towards entirely different ways of doing justice, dealing with brokenness, and comporting and structuring our relationships with each other. Crucially, the exercises were ways for us to experiment with living different processes and relationships of justice in the present. When AbdouMaliq Simone calls abolition ‘a movement toward disproportion, beyond calculations of suitable measures’ (2022: 24) it is this setting of the speculative in motion that he recognises in abolitionist work – a deliberate, improbable recalibration of the terms of the present, and of the size of the space and capacity we have to improvise on those terms. In his recent book The Surrounds, Simone’s long attention to the moves and formulations of urban majorities is put in service of discerning an urban experience – a ‘territory of operation’ (2022: 28) – he calls the surrounds. The urban surrounds, he tells us, are those processes and territories that are Book review forum