Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) protestors continue to face police brutality. Now is an excellent time to think about the meaning of the institution of the police, and especially its relation to the political. In Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière describes these categories, based on a close reading of Plato’s Republic, as well as numerous other classical and contemporary texts. The difficulty of developing a theory of the political and of democracy cannot be overestimated. Rancière’s work is exemplary in this regard. The following is a basic description he gives of the logic of the police, and of their function, compared to those of the political.
The police enforce “patterns and procedures of ruling that are predicated on a given distribution of qualifications, places, and competencies” (53). This (re)enforcement is anti-political, because true politics negates the status quo. It is the exposure of a rift in society, a dispute within a hierarchy; and in this dispute there appears a re-distribution of social space. Democracy is a form government based on rule by the people, by anyone, regardless of qualification. And because there is no ultimate qualification, power is just temporary, “borrowed” from the people. In order to effectuate a change in power, political conflict is absolutely necessary; political conflict is thus the sine qua non of democratic government. Therefore if the police prevent political action in a democracy, then, paradoxically, they both reinforce and undermine the government, since while they are protecting the current governmental regime, they are also undermining democracy itself, the foundation of that government. The police are there to stifle democratic impulses.
“Police interventions in public spaces consist primarily. . .in breaking up demonstrations. . . .[Their] slogan is: ‘Move along! There’s nothing to see here!’. . .[They] assert that the space for circulating is nothing but the space of circulation. Politics, by contrast, consists in transforming this space of ‘moving-along’, of circulation, into a space for the appearance of a subject: the people, the workers, the citizens. . . .It consists in re-figuring space. . .It is the instituting of a dispute over the distribution of the sensible” (37). If we are to experience a democratic moment – the anarchic reframing of the sensible – then “power must become political;” that is, it must be challenged, disputed, loosened. And “for that to happen the logic of the police has to be thwarted by the logic of politics” (53).
Look at the photos from #OWS. The aesthetic features are virtually the same as any other protest, worldwide. Police line the streets, watching protestors march, waiting for them to cross the line, literally and figuratively. What police accomplish by giving protestors a specific space in which to protest is the “purification of politics [which] is actually its eviction.” It is a portioning of the sensible into categories which follow a mandated, authorized logic. This logic is what politics itself is meant to disrupt; “the political” is a superfluous “extra” part of social life that shows itself in acts of defiance against an official order.
Democracy in particular is a paradoxical form of government: those who govern have no particular qualification to govern; their qualification is the absence of qualification. They are “unqualified” precisely because in a democracy there is no one particular thing that qualifies someone to govern – whether age, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, intelligence/knowledge, or wealth. The obvious difficulty with this is that modern, actual governments want stability, rather than democracy. They have trouble thinking like the #OWS protestors and their supporters. They have trouble understanding how workers councils and general assemblies work. They have trouble understanding the sense of what all those luminaries who inspired revolutions had to say about running a democratic government. But it’s understandable that governments today don’t think these alternative forms of government are possible. They are stuck, like the rest of us, with huge, militarized nation-states and multinational capitalism. And this is simply unsustainable, at least if we want to avoid dictatorship. That is why what’s happening at #OWS (and around the world) is so important. People don’t really want reform. They want massive change. A revolution. The protestors in this photo put it best:
And so looking at the way the protests are going, one has to ask, why are the police resorting to violence? Perhaps this is because the democratic impulse is too strong. It is humiliating, in a way, to be with the police, watching democracy unfold in the streets and standing on the sidelines, allowing it to roll by; the police are in the absurd position in which their job is to watch the negation of their function. They are there to watch others reject the very purpose of the police, to watch protestors thwart the smooth functioning of the status quo. They are being told to obey orders that threaten their very existence. Sometimes this absurd inactivity becomes too much. Sometimes the contradictions become unbearable, and one’s purpose must be defended, even if it means resorting to violence and making illegal arrests en masse.
But in the same way, it is also humiliating to be a protestor, corralled by the police, watching as the police negate the reason for your protest, watching them reduce the meaning of this Event to a predictable, managed aspect of an illegitimate governmental arrangement, one which you’re attempting to change. I imagine the contradictions mount in the minds of many protestors who turn to violence. Frankly, I’m not sure what to think of this. If we believe in a true politics, if we want to be faithful to the idea of universality, then should we not reject the authority of the police outright? Should violence not be a legitimate form of demonstration, if that violence is directed against the police of the ruling regime?
Kulturkritik 
So I have been thinking about this issue of the the police and the democratic people, and it is especially interesting since the #ows protests have been trying to advertise themselves as allies with the police.
“The police are the 99% too,” “Police, join us,” etc.
However, police violence turned out to be the best ad campaign for the movement at large. Media dissemination of police violence rallied widespread support and mainstream coverage to the cause.
The police have functioned as allies in disguise. Here is an interesting aside, the Occupy Portland movement is 1)extremely popular here, and 2)wrought by internal conflict. Consensus at occupy Portland GAs is neigh impossible, and even if consensus is met, a few people will disobey. An example is when the city wanted to open up a road that had been part of the “camp.” Most people said sure, “citizens like ourselves need to drive through this space,” however, a few die-hards blocked the path for hours to prove their defiance.
And why? The Portland authorities have been insanely cooperative, from individual policemen and women right up to the mayor.
Without an antagonism, the movement cannot gain traction and unity. While the praxis is non-violent, the movement needed to identify an enemy. “Hegemony and Socialist Strategy” by Mouffe and Laclau is a book that argues, very well, that a political unit can become the largest and most cohesive when it defines its exclusions rather than defining its projects. #ows is a case in point. For the protest to work “we the people” need an Other to oppose, whether it is the police or the 1%. Aren’t the police right now, qua antagonist, a necessary foil to the democratic People? As you argue, without civil disobedience there would be no political Subject.
One can’t think outside the box until one knows whats in the box, and one cannot break outside the status quo unless there is an enforced status quo. The police are playing a part. They are not on the sidelines, they are the podium and they are the megaphone by means of which the #ows message is delivered.
However, the police do not have to politicize what they are doing. They are in “riot control,” mode, they are maintaining law and order because someone has to keep the peace. It could be argued that while they are enabling politics, the police are merely performing a service from their perspective. I do wonder if there will come a day in these protests when police stop seeing what they do as instrumental work and begin to take sides, but that is a ways away. The truth is that we don’t want our policemen and women to quit en mass and join the march. What about the rest of NY? They have a job to do, and right now, that’s all they are doing.
Very good point. However, although #OWS needs an Other to oppose, they also need to deliver a message of inclusion: while the 99% are opposed to the other 1%, they are still part of the 100%, along with their enemies in the 1%… They are saying to the 1%, “you’re doing things wrong; this is who WE are,” where “we” is everyone, not just the 99%. They’re going Universal, speaking for everyone, and yet, as you say, challenging an Other — a hopefully very visible and antagonistic Other, like the police, so they can “gain traction.” I don’t really know what to think about the responsibility of the police, or what their role “should” be, or whether an politically engaged police force even makes any sense. It’s confusing.
I’m actually astonished at the brilliance of the leaders down in Zuccotti Park. Their slogans and strategy, their knowledge, everything. It’s beautiful. The 99% thing is great. They could have used any number of other slogans. But making is a percentage sends a very powerful message, all wrapped up in the simple packaging of the “%.”
To play Devil’s advocate, I think you may be projecting a bit onto the OWS protesters regarding their ultimate aims. When you portray them as wanting a paradigm shift (which perhaps they do), you cite their opponent as a system that puts stability above democracy, exemplified by the nation-state and the international system of capitalism.
But ask these protesters if they want an end to the nation-state? I don’t think they do. Nor, I think, would most of them sing the praises of autarky or planned economies over the capital system. I have been impressed instead that their objectives are closer to an Eduard Bernstein-esque evolutionary rather than revolutionary model. I’m not convinced that their revolutionary rhetoric is as much substance as style in other words. This isn’t to say that their aims of greater equality of outcome aren’t noble; they certainly are. But I wonder if OWS is properly classified as truly radical in the classic sense of the word.
It’s true that the bulk of the people might not want any more than reform. But I’m stating that the true ideal that they *should* be shooting for is something much more than reform. I think our job is to honor the revolutionary ideals, honor the Cause, rather than focus on the reality of the politics. After all, the movement only began when people were courageous enough to reject the status quo. At some point, the decision to take to the streets was a response to the thought “enough is enough.” That thought doesn’t have any positive content — it’s not clear about what the end result will be; people just knew what they didn’t want, and they were ready to risk that uncertainty in order to destroy a corrupt system. They were thinking big. I think we have to keep that in mind. Whatever it eventually turns into, or whatever it threatens to turn into, the Spirit that the whole movement began with is on a plane of its own. We have to keep reaching, just like the protestors are doing, for the starts, reaching way, way beyond the status quo, even if it’s an impossible goal. The goal is impossible, but necessary. We decide our fate; if we say that in all probability things will end up a certain way, then we won’t take any action to achieve anything else; it’ll be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if we stay true to the revolutionary idea, then we have some chance of actualizing it. And really, this movement did start with revolutionary aims. It started as a radically democratic, anarchic movement. All of the major groups behind it, both before it began, in the beginning, and even today, are radical leftists, more than socialists. They’re true Marxists. And however much it’s “projecting” to say all this, I take full responsibility for that. I’m trying not just to give a description of things, but also a prescription, one which, however, I believe originates with “the people” themselves.
The term “evolutionary” worries me, because it doesn’t seem to rely on any direction — it’s like following the “evolution” of the market; the market will evolve to take care of things, and that’s the best we can hope for, because trying to directly control the economy will only lead to totalitarianism. That’s obviously just not necessarily true.
However, I agree that the end of the nation-state is a bit farfetched. And honestly, I don’t know enough political science to be able to comment on that. I don’t even know very much about this from the perspective of political philosophy. But to be clear, I’m certainly not saying that we need to “return” to a kind of premodern communal living arrangement. That’s not just impossible; it’s backward. (The difference with communism being that it’s impossible, but right).
Rob would probably be better able to comment on this than me… I wish I knew more political science and political history!
Yeah, I’m definitely looking at this from a political history perspective, even more than a political theory / science one. You’re definitely on the right track, I think, when you identify the protean drive of frustration with the system as-it-is that is driving this movement. But such drive is not, speaking historically, typically sustainable. It should, it must, metamorphose into something with a more cogent political ideology that does contain positive content.
I first want to say that i believe the mission of a police force is being misunderstood. The overall mission of the police is to protect society by enforcing the law. Though some actions by members of the police hierarchy perform actions and create policies that are politically motivated, the major actions by the basic patrolmen are in parallel with this overall mission.
Granted, the police cannot suppress a demonstration just based on its message as it is granted by freedom of speech. The Supreme Court, however, has ruled that there is a distinction between message (speech) and action. If protesters act in a way that can harm other people, then the police are obligated by their mission to protect to control the crowd, dispersion being one of the primary tactics used, as once the police get involved with one person, it can very easily escalate to a point where the crowd has to be dispersed and the violent protesters have to be arrested for violating the law (battery, assault, ect.). However, if the demonstrators remain peaceful, then the police cannot do anything to disperse the crowd, as it will be a repression of free speech.
My question is what happened during the protests that forced the police to take such action?
In addition, you mention the possibility of violence against the police as a form of protest, since you claimed that they are a tool of government repression. I say no, primarily on the fact that history has proven that it does not work. In fact, history has proven that it backfires. There have been two terrorist campaigns that i can think of that used this tactic. the end result was a massive increase in government repression, and the population turning against the group striving for reform.