Month: August 2026

A Visit to Bronzefield:
Notes on Control and Becoming-Chlorophyll

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Crossing London by train, Amu’s parents and I chat merrily on the way to the quiet commuter town of Ashford.

The summer heatwave has not yet abated. Everywhere, grass has browned due to a “flash drought”. I am looking down at the dust kicked up by my feet, half wanting to apologise to the grass that’s been through enough, when Amu’s Mum points out the sign that reads HMP / YOI Bronzefield. We are already here.

Turning a corner, I recognise Bronzefield immediately from photographs and videos of protests during the hunger strike. My first thought was “Foucault was right” — a constant internal mantra when I was a frequent visitor to HMP Foston Hall. I have not had that thought in a while. All prisons are amorphous institutions – each one is different, with its own nuances, rules and regulations; each also echoes every other institution you can think of.

Bronzefield is “modern”, at least to my eyes — deceptively so. It reminds me of a library, a port, a hospital. It has all the generic fixtures of some sort of government building or public service. The irony, of course, is that Bronzefield is run by Sodexo, a private company, and has an entirely anti-social function. Like all prisons, it is an abomination.

For the next few hours, I will not be able to stop myself from comparing HMP Bronzefield to HMP Foston Hall. I became so familiar with the latter, visiting once a week (sometimes more) over a six-month period. That experience changed something within me drastically. I became accustomed to it, and then suddenly, I didn’t have to be there anymore.

The last time we were there was 27th February 2026. A bail hearing was held at the Old Bailey, throughout which I held my breath. When the judge proclaimed that bail was to be granted to the Moog 4, Nic – one of the four’s prison support buddies – and I went directly to Foston Hall, jumping on the first train to Derby from King’s Cross. We arrived in the evening – the first time I had been outside the prison after sunset – and stood in the rain for two hours, waiting for their release.

I recall this anecdote for Amu’s parents as we wait to enter the visit hall. The staff at the front desk are all smiles and far more personable than their northern counterparts. But we all know how much this system plays with the emotions of those doing whatever they can to support the incarcerated. I tell them about how the prison kept phoning me on that wet February night, repeatedly seeking confirmation that I was there to pick up Juno. Each time, they would offer to open up the family centre, so we weren’t stood out in the rain. They never did. After two hours, I was soaked through. It felt like one final ‘fuck you’, one final gaslight lit.

At Bronzefield, everything feels so much more relaxed. The waiting area is like that of a modern hospital (compared to Foston’s decrepit, underfunded atmosphere). But the sullen faces of other visitors are a familiar sight. The searches are also nowhere near as invasive as I was once used to, and the staff seem far less high on their own power. My photograph and finger prints are taken on entry, and perhaps it is for that reason that they pat everyone down more lightly, rather than stopping just shy of a cavity search, as they did in Derbyshire.

Bronzefield’s visit hall is enormous, like a sports hall at an inner-city school. The ceiling is high, the chairs are comfortable, the tables large. We are spaced out from other prisoners’ friends and families. Screws are not breathing down our necks. The staff are not heavily uniformed, with keys and handcuffs clattering on their waistbands. There is a café, which sells real food and serves real coffee. I can pay for it with a bank card, instead of a bag of loose pound coins.

There are first-timers, like myself, who muddle up the protocol. I arrive into the hall roughly five minutes after Amu’s parents. I suddenly realise that they don’t know what I look like. We’ve never met in person before and have only spoken a few times on the phone.

Clearly, I don’t look like many of the other visitors. Amu points at me immediately from 25 metres away and grins from ear to ear. When I arrive at their table, they give me a big hug, and flatter me: “I only realised before you arrived that I didn’t know what you looked like. I just said to myself I’ll look out for the person who looks really cool.”

It is an exchange that reminds me of the first time meeting Alan in Foston Hall’s pre-visit holding pen. Alan with the cool clothes and the amazing hair dyed three or four different colours. I think Alan was the first person to say hello that day – I felt shy – but we laughed at having already clocked each other with a look that said: “Eccentrically dressed queer person? You must be here to visit a direct actionist…”

The two-hour visit flies by, as they often do, with all four of us talking politics like we’re sitting in a pub on a Saturday afternoon. It’s a delightful visit, but I am caught off guard by how deflated I feel when it is over. Whereas visitors were the first to leave at Foston Hall, it is the prisoners who stand up first at Bronzefield. Amu is nonchalant about it all. We’re just friends, and new friends at that, but I feel an urge to linger and drag out the goodbye.

A range of emotions surge up in me like bile. It’s like there’s a wooden box in my stomach, which I haven’t opened in a while, and when the door opens to let the prisoners back out of the visit hall, the draught blows off a layer of dust and reminds me that the box is there.

My body had forgotten what it is like to have the journey in and out of prison be a part of its routine. Amu is not Juno, but my body does not know how else to respond. There was no hard goodbye, no lingering embrace, no stolen kisses, no tears, no heartfelt reassurances, no repeated I-love-yous. The only thing that remains the same is the deeply held wish that these rotten institutions would crumble. I wish they would free them all.

It is only on leaving Bronzefield that it really hits me. We talk about the prison system for some of the walk back to the train station. Prisons are not places that hold deviants; they are themselves deviant. We talk about the lack of any clarity on the rules, the arbitrary nature of its regulations, the way that you never end up talking to a staff member with any of the responsibility or authority you expect. Everything is always someone else’s job. Every problem is someone else’s problem.

I remember Deleuze’s essay on societies of control. Yes, Foucault was right, he says. But not only do enclosures echo each other’s modes of operation, they also echo each other’s crises:

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure — prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors — scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door.

In light of these new forces, disciplinary structures have given way to more controlling structures. If Foucault was right about how all enclosures echo each other, then Deleuze was right when he emphasised that modern society is less about discipline than it is about control. After all, if British prisons were disciplinary institutions, you would expect the rules and regulations to be concrete and hard, demanding obedience. On the contrary, no one knows the rules, no one will tell you the rules, and the rules are always subject to change. That is control.

William S. Burroughs’ “The Limits of Control” is the key to Deleuze’s argument. I think about it often as well:

I control a slave, a dog, a worker; but if I establish complete control somehow, as by implanting electrodes in the brain, then my subject is little more than a tape recorder, a camera, a robot. You don’t control a tape recorder — you use it … All control systems try to make control as tight as possible, but at the same time, if they succeeded completely, there would be nothing left to control. Suppose for example a control system installed electrodes in the brains of all prospective workers at birth. Control is now complete. Even the thought of rebellion is neurologically impossible. No police force is necessary. No psychological control is necessary, other than pressing buttons to achieve certain activations and operations.

When there is no more opposition, control becomes a meaningless proposition. It is highly questionable whether a human organism could survive complete control. There would be nothing there. No persons there. Life is will, motivation and the workers would no longer be alive, perhaps literally.

It is telling that England so often remains the prime example for writers concerned with these sorts of contradiction, as the laboratory for imperialist control:

All modern control systems are riddled with contradictions. Look at England. “Never go too far in any direction” is the basic rule on which England is built, and there is some wisdom in that. However, avoiding one impasse they step into another. Anything that is not going forward is on the way out. Well, nothing lasts forever. Time is what which ends, and control needs time. England is simply stalling for time as it slowly founders.

The same contradictions of control, if unfettered, give rise to fascism always. Fascism, Burroughs notes, is similarly a kind of total control that may well undo itself, but also capitalism, which is more generally a measured system of control. “Force, once brought in, subverts the power of money”, he writes. Capitalism is expansionist, and when it can expand no longer in terms of its ideological advance, it turns to militaristic expansion and the cycle of warring over territories, where brinkmanship — another kind of controlling gesture — gives only the illusion of expansion. One step forward, one step back, one step forward, one step back…

Burroughs argues that “no modern industrialized country has ever gone fascist without a program of military expansion. There is no longer any place to expand to — after hundreds of years, colonialism is a thing of the past.” This is only half true. The reality of colonialism’s end is felt in all attempts to newly colonise space as the final frontier. Here on earth, colonialism continues to flirt with its own impasses when concerned with the brinkmanship of markets. New technologies arise, which demand new space and new resources to be developed. Old territories are emptied and then reoccupied. Lines shift across maps in accordance with new demands.

Israel is an exception, perhaps — the final, truly colonial endeavour. Those who oppose it or expose it find themselves in control’s rotten core. It is not for nothing that these enclaves of apartheid and militarism are so often referred to as “laboratories”; techno-colonialism prefers to conduct its experiments out of sight, in far-flung places that lack scrutiny, covered over by layers of neoliberal propaganda. Soon enough, their new methods and technologies of control return to us. Those who would dare draw the public’s attention to this secretive system are tellingly locked away out of sight for years.

Burroughs concludes:

I don’t mean to suggest that control automatically defeats itself, nor that protest is therefore unnecessary. A government is never more dangerous than when embarking on a self-defeating or downright suicidal course. It is encouraging that some behaviour modification projects have been exposed and halted, and certainly such exposure and publicity should continue. In fact, I submit that we have a right to insist that all scientific research be subject to public scrutiny, and that there should be no such thing as “top-secret” research.

By the time we reach the station, we have all descended into silence. I reflect on how difficult it has been to regain control of my own life, not knowing what to do with it now that the pressures of supporting someone incarcerated are less demanding. But there are, of course, many others who need support — not only prisoners, but also those who continue to find themselves on the front lines of prison support.

So much has changed for us, although it is hard to see that change sometimes. This time next month, it will be one year since Juno was first arrested. That means it will have been six months since they were bailed. The time spent outside has passed far quicker than the time inside. Those first six months lasted forever. The six months after have been a blur.

For all that has changed, I realise that I still have so many feelings left unresolved. Proximity to prison is a trauma. It is very different to the experience of being inside. In fact, not knowing what the world is like on the other side of the heavy locked doors is part of the ordeal. I am not yet over it. The system’s disarray infects each person who comes into contact with it. On leaving Bronzefield, I realise just how disarrayed I remain.

Amu Gib is an amazing writer and thinker. Their incarceration has not stopped them from working. Hidden out of sight, they undertake their own research projects, exploring what they call a “material literacy”. They write in a manner that is post-structuralist without the explicitly philosophical baggage. They understand how structures intersect, and how objects are promiscuous. Indeed, matter becomes a vehicle for linking life- and death-machines, blurring all lines between nature and culture.

Amu is chlorophyll. “To be a chlorophyll- or a photosynthesis-machine, or at least slip his body into such machines as one part among the others”, Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus. Amu slides across processes of production and sifts through what is lifeforce and deathforce. Mechanisms of control and domination are made more visible in the process of writing photosynthetically.

Amu and I recently started working together on their materialist writings. I have been transcribing and editing some of what they write, in order to find a home for it on the outside. The first text we worked on has been published by the Landworkers’ Alliance. You can read it here.