VIOLENCE, POLICE, STATE: A Fragment on Benjamin in a Bankrupt Era

Dr. Yollom Ward

“For law-preserving violence is a threatening violence. And its threat is not intended as the deterrent
that uninformed liberal theorists interpret it to be.”

In police “the separation between lawmaking and law-preserving violence is suspended… The
assertion that the ends of police violence are always identical or even connected to those of general
law is entirely untrue. Rather, the “law” of the police really marks the point at which the state, whether
from impotence or because of the immanent connections within any legal system, can no longer
guarantee through the legal system the empirical ends that it desires at any price to attain. Therefore,
the police intervene “for security reasons” where no clear legal situation exists… accompanying the
citizen as a brutal encumbrance through a life regulated by ordinances”

The past five weeks have witnessed the mass arrest of hundreds of students protesting the most recent
and potentially fatal government onslaught on higher education. Arrest as a means to inhibit public
protest through victimisation has been coupled with mass detention without trial, charge or legal basis
in a practice that is euphemistically known as kettling. These parallel processes constitute the latest
and most apparent expression of the violence that inheres in the very heart of our political and
economic system, beset as it is by existential crises. The immediate agent of this violence is the police.
The explicit function of this institution is to preserve the law as it is promulgated by the political class.
The limitations of such an analysis however are unveiled in the reality that besets any attempt to
realise a democratic outcome in the current climate. It has become clear in recent months that what is
at stake is the very meaning of sociality under a government committed to the disintegration of the
possibilities of critical thought central to the study of humanities and social sciences. That this is an
inherently violent process is rooted in its involvement in the role that higher education plays in the life
of the social. Thus “what a parliament achieves in vital affairs can only be those legal decrees that in
their origin and outcome are attended by violence.” (Benjamin). The police is central to this in its role
of dissolving the distinction between the preservation of the law and the enactment de facto of a law
beyond law.
We can see the concrete manifestation of such a role in the twin repressive practices of kettling and
arrest. A brutality emerges in the life of the social not simply through the structural or vital violence on
the part of the state, but in the application of that same violence on the part of the police. This becomes
evident when examining the tactics employed to inhibit, prevent and discourage any manifestation of
refusal or rebellion. It is by now a familiar pattern: a legal demonstration stopped on spurious ground
by a wall of armoured cars and shielded police. That wall appears too at your back. To each side,
concrete and bricks. A kettle.
The particular brutality of such a tactic can be gleaned in the official narratives, which maintain
that the purpose behind such actions is to ‘contain’ any outbursts of public disorder. Such a
characterization belies an aesthetic mirrored in the popular media that characterises, not to say
produces, the violent student whose irascibility marks a contagion in need of containment. In this dual
process of creating the disease and marking out its borders, the police engages in an activity that at
once transgresses its own official purpose and lays the basis for its everyday operation. (As Benjamin
has aptly pointed out):

‘police intervene “for security reasons” where no clear legal situation exists… accompanying
the citizen as a brutal encumbrance through a life regulated by ordinances…’

When the containment of the ugly disease that is protest, disorder and refusal fails, and kettling is
too deemed a failure, the tactic reverts to a more desperate level; one in which the police can be sure of
their authority-giving authority: the power of arrest and the individualisation of the insurgent mass that
refuses to be subdued. For every arrestee there stands one police officer on overtime. The ‘humane’
procedures have been abandoned in favour of individualisation, categorisation and neutralization.