Seven Red

So she related my deeply conflicted answer to babygirl’s question “Daddy, what’s police?”I was able to manage only “Er, they’re people who…er…um…help you when you’re in trouble?” I felt like Mr. Rogers. Lying ass Mr. Rogers.

But it’s a good goddamn question, actually. In Virno’s latest book, he sets up the classic formulation from Carl Schmitt: those who oppose the State form believe that human nature is fundamentally “good” (which is to say, it tends toward community and cooperation); those who support the State form, from conservatives, to liberals, to authoritarians, believe that human nature is fundamentally evil (that is, it tends toward conflict that must be resolved at the level of the State). From the former perspective, “police” is an unnecessary appendage that serves to protect a privileged class; from the latter, it is the “thin blue line” that separates us from the bellum omnium contra omnes, or, at the very least, the serial killers and other “predators.” The unmistakable ideological work of all those “detective” shows clearly resides in their characterization of human “evil,” and the “natural” justification of police and the State form. (On a side note, why is it that every murder show involves the line “Even these seasoned detectives were shocked by the grisly scene!” Just once, I want the detectives to say “The scene, while awful, was fairly banal and run-of-the-mill, as far as multiple stabbings deaths go…” And don’t even get me started on the total bullshit that is the “science” of sociopathology, with its laughable “brain scan” evidence that has about as much legitimacy as phrenology, or Lombroso’s taxonomy of the criminl face. In any case…)

One could imagine other relationships between politics and nature: first, support for the State form that begins with an assumption of fundamental good. If cooperation and community inhere in something like a “state of nature,” however, the State form becomes superfluous, like hatching an escape from a prison that you’re not in. This is not to say that something like this isn’t what actually happens: it’s easy enough to imagine a prison and an escape, and that might be precisely what happens. But Virno sets up his question around the last of the possible permutations: can there be an opposition to the State form that begins from the assumption of evil, or an ontology of the human that tends toward what he calls intra-species aggression? To put it another way, must acknowledgement of fundamental conflict end in the establishment of the State and the police. This is, indeed, the question for any serious anarchism (it’s also why “love” is off the table), and it’s actually what never really gets answered in Hardt and Negri’s work, which tends toward a belief in fundamental goodness of “the monstrous flesh” of the Multitude, all creativity and love – if it weren’t for those damn capitalists! If anything, only libertarianism really takes a crack at the problem, however inadequate and incoherent its solution: it retains a sad but productive confusion between conflict and community, and thus imagines a non-state community that must, nevertheless, be mediated through a (fundamentally coherent and efficient) market. Neither position really tackles the problem of conflict without the State.

So, what’s police? It depends. It may have to be invented. In any case, at least part of the very complicated answer that I’ll have to work out with babygirl over the years must involve the images in this video, and not only because I have an almost irrational attraction to the image of a tear gas canister being heaved back at the police line from whence it came, no matter how theoretically or practically “inept” that might be. Two images, then: first, the crowd scattering from a tear gas canister, then its emergence back into the air, smoking; second, the heroic individual standing down the tanks in Tiananmen Square. As a figure for something like “resistance,” I’ll take the first over the second every day of the week. They share a lot in common, to be sure (that is, dialectics). But at least the first doesn’t reproduce the individual as the main site of power. Every time I see it, I fall in love. A different kind of love. Plus, I really dig the song.

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