The images of the Gardai’s horse charge or their over-zealous use of the baton (knocking a young woman out cold and bloodying the faces of others), being used on peaceful student demonstrations has a chilling effect. We are unaccustomed to seeing our Gardai in the same light as (the very often violent) Italian or French police forces. We are unaccustomed to Garda cavalry charges past the Shelbourne. To me, it brings back the memories of the 2009 Financial Fools march in London and some of the ensuing police violence, which lead among other things to the death of the bystander Ian Tomlinson. After that day, myself and a colleague penned this piece for Critical Legal Thinking. I was asked to republish it here which I think is appropriate.
We must remember as the country goes to hell in a hand-cart, that there is a fundamental rift between the government and the people. When the good times roll, the contradictions of society are seen only by the excluded; those at the butt of racism, the poor or the unemployed. While the Tiger roared, the majority denied the contradictions, both political and economic. The rising tide seemed to lift (almost) everyone. Now, as the contradictions of the Tiger era are rendered in stark view, as the state very clearly demonstrates the identity of the ‘national interest’ with the developers’ financial interests, everyone begins to understand the contradiction between the state and the people. The people must be sacrificed in the name of the market; ‘We have lived beyond our means’ and so ‘we’ must pay…. In this context the people, and here I mean ordinary people rather than the idealised sovereign people of the Constitution, will become increasingly unruly. The tensions demonstrated peacefully on the streets by the students in November will become louder and more insistent. When a section of the people claim to be the totality in order to change the state of the situation and rupture the political situation, it is the job of the police and army to repress these voices.
15/04/2009, London
Much has been made in recent days of the violence of the police at the financial fools day G20 protests. In particular the manner in which police officers struck and pushed Ian Tomlinson and a number of others while policing their ‘kettle’. However, perhaps we are getting it wrong when we try to find the ‘bad apples’ in the police and call for the Independent Police Complaints Commission to investigate any incidents of violence (Guardian Video Archive of Police Violence). The problem is that we have forgotten what the role of the police is. To jog our memory, we could look to Walter Benjamin’s seminal Critique of Violence, but Antiphon has done this better than we could though in a different context. Perhaps, then, it is better to follow the less well-known text by the French surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille on this issue.
In ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, Bataille describes two structures or orders in society: the homogeneous and the heterogeneous. Homogeneity ‘describes societies structured by production, rationality, specialization, organization, conservation, predictability, and preservation. For Bataille, these terms characterize modern Western bourgeois society, which excludes anything that does not conform to its homogenous structure’ (Goldhammer, p169). In other words Bataille sees ‘rational’, risk-averse liberal society as fundamentally structured by the ‘making-safe’ of the world (homogeneity). It is clear that we should not read homogeneity in a multicultural sense where it corresponds to ethnic sameness. Rather Bataille’s insight is much deeper. The hallmark of liberal society is the contract which establishes a general equivalence amongst men and things. Thus, commensurability amongst elements of a contract is the key here. ‘Depending on whether the state is democratic or despotic, the prevailing tendency will be either adaptation or authority. In a democracy, the state derives most of its strength from spontaneous homogeneity, which it fixes and constitutes as the rule’ (Bataille, p139).
Homogeneity is to be distinguished from heterogeneity. Where the former is focused around a certain common law or measure under which all are commensurable, the latter is bipolar – combining both repulsion and compulsion. ‘[Heterogeneity] encompasses everything that is unproductive, irrational, incommensurable, unstructured, unpredictable, and wasteful.’ (Goldhammer, p169) Politically, heterogeneity is associated with the disordered, the violent and that which is subject to taboo. Thus, where the rule of law and capitalist forms rely on the possibility of common measure or homogenous order, the heterogeneous is disordered by nature. Importantly for us here, police violence, the ad hoc violence of the fascist mob or revolutionary violence are all heterogeneous. Bataille divides the heterogeneous into two: the imperative and the subversive. The imperative or sovereign heterogeneity is constructed in a hierarchical manner with authority stemming from ‘above’. There are two instances of this imperative heterogeneity: on one side the violence of the police who patrol the borders of liberal homogeneity; and on the other side the fascist or monarchist state which relies entirely upon the whim of the leader/king. We need not delve into the fascist use of imperative heterogeneity, nor the revolutionary ideas of subversive heterogeneity, we only want to see Bataille’s idea of police violence. He argues that modern liberal states set the heterogeneous violence of the police and army to work defending the boundaries of the rational homogeneity. The boundaries of the commeasurable must by policed, but this policing is by its nature external to that homogeneity. Sovereign violence hides behind the rational/legal façade of liberal states. We must not forget the true meaning of the definition of the state as that which holds the ‘monopoly of violence’ in the territory. The truth of ‘the monopoly of violence’ is landed at the blunt end of a police baton or cosh.
When we condemn one or other police officer for excessive use of force on the financial fools day protests, we define police violence as the exception. We try to pick out the bad apples. However, the reality of the police is exactly the opposite. Heterogeneous violence is the precisely the mode of the police. Their violence is the rule not the exception. The problem then is that of normalisation of oppression. Whilst the death of Ian Tomlinson has thankfully caught the unflinching eye of the national media (something that would not have happened a decade ago, before the advent of video camera-equipped mobile phones) it presents the police with an obvious scapegoat within their own ranks. It will be interesting to see what happens to the officer in question, and it should not be surprising if he is hung out to dry whilst we are told the problem has, therefore, been solved. But the problem remains. There is nothing exceptional about the assault on Tomlinson.
We should not forget the words of Commander Simon O’Brien, a senior officer within the Metropolitan Police, in the run-up to the protests: “we are up for it”. This is the almost tribal language of mob thuggery, emanating not from a lone rogue, but from a senior member of the force who carries considerable responsibility. Evidence of a more deeply rooted and planned agenda of violence has also been indicated by suggestions in the media that the police employed a ‘designated hitter’ system. This entails one officer (who conceals his identification number and possibly also – as in the case of the assaulter of Tomlinson – his face) being charged with the task of the most aggressive and violent tasks, minimising the chances of successful complaints being made subsequently.
In a pre-eminently biopolitical move we have interiorised the logic of state. We accept surveillance as a matter of course, increasingly the idea of detention without trial for 28 days, and ID cards are being normalised. At some point the slow creep of the limitation of rights bring us to what, nearly thirty years ago, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthes called soft totalitarianism. Zizek too has written on the phenomenon of post-political totalitarianism. He warns of the risk that we only associate totalitarianism with the historical artefacts of Stalinism and Nazism whilst failing to recognise our own political impotence in a society that evangelises consumerism and ‘choice’. Is it too melodramatic to use the word totalitarianism, what precisely is a police state?
I was there on April fools day. Frantically pushing away from the police as they herded us towards some side street, the sweaty fist of an officer in my back, the lash of a baton across my leg. This was police violence. This was unexceptional police violence. If these were just ordinary citizens then it would have been a grievous assault. What made this entirely unexceptional was the fact that it was the police. The police are authorised to be violent. They are authorised to protect the boundaries of homogenous society. This is what we must learn from the Greek insurgency of the last few months. The murder of Alexander Grigoropoulos before Christmas in Athens sparked riots not because it was one bad cop with an over-eager trigger finger. The Greek students and kids saw what we cannot, that police violence is all around us and we should not, must not stand for it.
If we find a number of bad apples in the police, then they are independently to blame – the solution is easy. However, if the problem is with the police themselves, if the issue is the very authorisation of violence at the hands of the police, then the solution cannot be simple. The problem is societal. In fact the problem is society itself and this would demand radical analyses and radical solutions.
Texts
Bataille, G ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism,’ in Visions of Excess (Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 1985)
Goldhammer, J, The Headless Republic, (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2005)
“here I mean ordinary people rather than the idealised sovereign people of the Constitution” Or perhaps the idealised ‘working class’ of the evangelical left-wing movements?
@Eoin. There are very clearly two senses of the people which are quite distinct. The people of sovereignty and the common people. Rousseau is quite good on this, for him the people is pure because it is the suffering common people. It is not yet inculcated in power. More explicitly, for a very basic version of this, see Canovan’s little primer book on The People (Key Concepts Series, Polity Press), or in a more complex fashion Agamben writes of the division, but I don’t have the reference to hand (I seem to remember it is in the little book called Means Without End).
The working class is a very different concept, the students for instance would not fit the traditional Marxist definition. They lack both the connection to production and the consciousness. Nevertheless, there has been much in the last 30 years that attempts to escape the essentialist problems with the proletariat (see Laclau or Negri). So no, they are not the same thing at all. But thank you for the suggestion.
Thanks Illan. I guess my comment was meant as a throwaway remark after I saw some posters about NAMA and FF. It particularised the working class and avoided catch-alls like the people, the community etc. I take your points and your references, so thanks.
As for the reversion to distinctions between socialism and actually-existing socialism, the connection to ‘production’ would depend on what is being produced but I think we might differ on that broader point. Remembering the “fundamental rift between the government and the people” is near impossible in an Irish context. This is signified by the rapidity with which the protesters were marginalised by the USI ‘leadership’.
On production, yes absolutely if we are going with Negri or others then immaterial production is the crucial, so the students are the Multitude. They are the productive subject. But I take the 1968 French Communist Party’s reaction to the student revolt (i.e. utter rejection) to be typical of a traditional Marxist position.
I don’t know if I understand your second point. I would agree with you if you are querying the over-simplification of government/people. As I take you to mean it is precisely not the Government, but rather that broad range of interests from many trade unions through to IBEC and the developers, that perpetuate the There Is No Alternative ideology. I was trying to put it in stark political terms, questioning the idea of representation in representational democracies. But I take your point.
I agree with the theoretical arguments made but not with the point in the introduction that we are unaccustomed to seeing the Gardaí as violent… Shell to Sea, May Day protests or the €40 million paid out in civil actions against the Gardaí in the last decade. Police brutality is a continuing reality in Ireland, not the exception.
Yes, you’re probably right. Although I think they are only learning the levels of violence that are expected from their French, Greek and Italian counter-parts. But I take your point entirely.
I think the thing in Ireland is is that, in my opinion, police violence was a feature throughout the 20th Century (Heavy Gang, deaths in custody etc)in a private sphere but in the last few years it has been happening in more open, public settings. Although as I type that, the H-Block riots in Dublin in the 1980s come to mind, which were pretty brutal. Nope, back to my original point :-/
Sorry, but am I the only one to have seen “peaceful” protesters pelting the Gardai with rocks, particularly those on horseback, near the Corner of Merrion Street and Row ever before the Gardai charged or battoned anyone. There is ample UTube footage of the Eirigi etc grouping in front of the Department of Finance throwing missiles at Gardai, long before any blow was struck in response. A bit of balance is a good thing.
Firstly, no I have not seen any rocks? Plackards and plastic cups, certainly, but not rocks. It would be good for you to post these videos. Secondly, it might be good to supplement this piece with the various accounts of the march, particularly the Independent piece cited above. These compare the police response to the students to other recent protests. Thirdly, you seem to treat the students as a collective entity; one person throws a stone, therefore the Gardai can kick the shit out of everyone and anyone. I would suggest this is an error. Finally, you seem to have missed the point of the piece: the point is not ‘they started it’, but that police violence is by its nature an authorized violence. It is a critique of that rather than an exercise in blame.
” The Gardai kick the shit of everyone around” is a gross overstatement. The Garda seem to be dealing with one specific element of the crowd, specifically, the Eirigi group and those with them, on Merrion Street and Row. Here is the YouTube video. Looks very much like rocks, amongst other things, to me, at the start of this video.
Finally, I fully grasp the point of your piece. My simple point is that it is of the ” pie in the sky when you die” variety. The simple point is this. The peaceful march, which I was witness to with a colleauge, was hijacked by radical left wing republicans intent on violence. They unlawfully occupied the Department of Finance, pelted the Gardai with rocks and other objects, then have the poor grace to complain when they are delt with forceabilly. In fact, I think the Gardai were rather restrained. Of course then they have pseudo legal tracts like this discribing it as “the job of the police and army to repress these voices”. They were not “voices” they were provocative thugs intent on causing trouble. The USI promptly distanced themselves from Eirigi and the others causing trouble on the day.
So while you might, pseudo intellectually, discribe this as “voices”, I and most others, would describe it as the Gardai actually protecting our human rights. Protecting the working/travelling public in the area on that day from a criminal republican element who have no other wish than to cause mayhem.
This polemical piece, in my view, is the very thing that makes human rights, and it’s application, so undigestable to the majority.
As regards the first point that is not what I said. I said that just because one person throws a stone, does not mean that the Guards can kick the shit out of everyone. It was a point against your argument. I didn’t say that the Guards did kick the shit out of everyone and anyone.
As regards the stones, I take it you are referring to around the one minute mark? After the Horses were deployed? Which was, contrary to what you asserted earlier (if the Independent is to be believed) after the police had forcibly removed the students with the use of batons, etc. and after the Horses had been deployed. Equally, if you can determine what projectiles are being thrown in that video, your eyes are far better than mine…
As regards your last point, which was, I suspect the reason underlying your posts, Im happy to disagree. I think you are wrong, which presumably comes as no surprise. I think your analysis, while generally accepted, even hegemonic, is flawed. The purpose behind this piece was to challenge that analysis, so it comes as no surprise that it should be repeated back to me.
In relation to your first point. Fair enough is that was what you intended to convey. It did not come accross that way. It was also, if that is what you intended to convey, a rather strange way to communicate it, in that you seem to accept that the Gardai did not, in fact, kick the shit out of everyone around.
Well the projectiles were certainly not plastic bottles and plackards. I think we can both agree on that. They have every appearance of rocks. Secondly, are you seriously telling me that you accept the Irish Independant as any variety of a paper of record?? Please.
Thirdly, if the purpose was to challenge the generally accepted view, you can take it it did not work.
Gavinicus is obviously very biased, if not a pro-police plant. The police clearly use much more extreme violence than they are facing. Protesters didn’t knock anyone unconscious. Several of the actions cited, such as occupying a building, are actually nonviolent. Now of course, if you believe that police have a right to win at all costs, and that they are always right as long as they win, it’s not going to seem a problem that they use violence out of all proportion to that used against them. But this conclusion stems from thinking the police are always right, that just because there’s some official excuse for their violence, it’s somehow forgiveable.
If protesters had knocked a police officer unconscious when he was simply sitting in the street, would people like Gavincus be saying there was nothing wrong with it, that it was a “rather restrained” use of force or that it was OK because the police were violent? Of course they wouldn’t, and the fact that they wouldn’t proves that such people are simply expressing pro-police bias.
Also, read David Graeber’s “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets”. Police are becoming increasingly indiscriminate in their use of violence at major events, they do NOT specifically target “violent” protesters, and their use of violence is not at all “restrained” but instead rather lawless. This is a global phenomenon and has absolutely nothing to do with legality or crime and absolutely everything to do with social repression.
Point 1. Cease being so paranoid. I have posted here before.
Point 2. Extreme violence out of proportioin to what was faced. Fairly sure that more Gardai ended up in hospital than protesters. The story about being assaulted whilst in the Department of Finance is being put about by Eirigi. If you want to take the word of a group of thugs who continioiusly get involved in violence, who refuse to support the Good Friday Agreement and still advocate violence in Northern Ireland, fair enough, but don’t expect anone to take you, or them, seriously.
I don’t for one minute think the Police are always right. Who would. However, in this instance, I am responding to a polemical piece which bangs on about “Garda Violence” without a word about provocation and assault by far left republican thugs. Balance is what is required. There is a Garda Ombudsman’s investigation. If a Garda was overzelous, then fair enough. To baldly state that the entire thing was “police violence” is, however, unbalanced in the extreme.
On a final point, if a gang of thugs illegally invade and occupy my house, your house, a public building (In the sence that it is state owned), or private propery then the Gardai are fully within their rights to forceabily remove them.
Dear Ms Conway,
In relation to your comments on the H-Block rights in Dublin in the 1980′s I presume you are referring to the level of violence perpetrated against the Gardai during that riot. If not, I would suggest you do some further research on the matter. As an academic, you will be familiar with having to back up your thesis statements with hard facts. The aim of the core group of protestors on that date was to break the Garda cordon in front of the British embassy and burn it down. If you every get a chance, please have a look at the RTE footage of the protestors and let me know who perpetrated the violence on who.
Dear Sean,
I’ve done a great deal of research on this topic, including watching that footage, reading the media coverage and speaking to about a dozen officers who were on duty during the riots. There was a general acceptance among them that their response was very forceful and violent, mostly because they weren’t equipped or trained. I appreciate the difficulties on that day, largely because of the lack of riot training, and what the actions of protestors were. My point was that violent clashes between gardaí and members of the public have generally been unusual in Ireland but that that was an exception.