Deep Thoughts: on state violence (there's plenty of that about - it's what's basically wrong with the world)

The Centrality of State Violence: A Review Essay
Books discussed: Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America by Kristian Williams (Soft Skull 2004), Forced Passages: Imprisoned Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime by Dylan Rodriguez (University of Minnesota Press 2006), The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media by Lila Rajiva (Monthly Review Press 2005).
By Steven Sherman

"The Bush administration has served a powerful reminder of the importance of the exercise of armed might to the maintenance of ‘order.’ After all, Bush and his neoconservative congeries have proven far more eager to invade countries than negotiate more free trade pacts."

The most popular theories of power among the academic left tend to deemphasize the use of physical coercion in favor of highlighting the use of ideas and images to compel obedience to a social order. Additionally, these theories tend to highlight the way everyone is implicated by modern forms of power. Most famously, Michel Foucault described a movement away from punishment inflicted publicly on the body to the surveillance and control of the soul through discursive production within the hidden abode of institutions such as the prison or the factory. Followers of Foucault, therefore, typically focus on discourse, and the production of normalizing categories as the way power is exercised. Most uses of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony explicate the common sense understandings of the world and resistance to them, rather than the exercise of power through brute force. Similarly, theories of ‘the spectacle’ argue that the pervasive images of the mass media have undone a sense of historical time in favor of a false sense of novelty as the deluge of commodified images and texts almost immediately obsolesces. In one way or another, all of these theories foreground the role of ideas in the maintenance of the contemporary social order (implicitly, any theory that does so also offers a major role for intellectuals who can cut through the delusions and reveal a different way of knowing, perhaps helping to explain their popularity in academia). Compared to the use of ideas, the exercise of physical violence by the state--kicking the homeless and telling them to move along away from wealthier areas of the city, shooting or torturing political dissidents, police brutality, etc--appears marginal, indeed, almost self-destructively crude. The use of ideas is subtle, demanding intellectual work to be undone; by contrast, state violence is so apparent that its overuse will generate rebellion and illegitimacy.

The Bush administration, if nothing else, has served a powerful reminder of the importance of the exercise of armed might to the maintenance of ‘order’ (i.e. inequality). After all, Bush and his neoconservative congeries have proven far more eager to invade countries than negotiate more free trade pacts. Perhaps this is the context in which the three books discussed below should be understood. Although only one directly addresses the violence of the Bush administration, all highlight the continued centrality of state violence. The use of violence by states has not given way to discipline, surveillance, spectacle, hegemony, however useful those concepts are for many things. Indeed, the practice of state violence has in some ways intensified and been refined. Unlike the way power is generally said to work in the concepts described above, state violence is not generalized across the various boundaries of society. Instead, it is inflicted far more intensely on some groups than others. Indeed, it is productive of the boundaries that constitute contemporary inequality. Dylan Rodriguez’s Forced Passages explores the ‘prison regime’; Kristen Williams’ Our Enemies in Blue considers the police, while Lila Rajiva’s Language of Empire looks at torture in Iraq. Notwithstanding the diverse subjects, all would agree that the extreme violence of their subject matter is not best understood as ‘abuse’ or a ‘failure’, but as symptomatic of the goals of the larger project. The torture at Abu Ghraib did not undermine the democratic and liberatory goals of the US in Iraq. The creation of ësecure housing unitsí designed to totally isolate and control prisoners in the US does not betray the goal of rehabilitation. The militarization of the police is not simply a disturbing trend borne of right wing hype. Instead, these dimensions of state violence should be seen as the culmination of a political, even ‘civilizational’ project on a global, national, and local scale. That project entails the production of race/class hierarchies. Those at the bottom of the hierarchies not only need to be controlled (lest they revolt), they also need to be reminded of their place in the hierarchy. Similarly, the exercise of power reminds those at the top of their power.

Rodriguez’ method is to explore the significance of the contemporary prison regime by looking at the works of ‘imprisoned intellectuals’, a category that may include those who were politicized before being incarcerated as well as those politicized by the incarceration experience. For the most part, he does not systematically unpack a particular writer’s work. Instead, he impressionistically lifts thoughts from many different thinkers, some of whom (such as George Jackson and Angela Davis) are likely to be at least vaguely familiar to readers, others, such as Viet Mike Ngo, much less so. Their writings provide something of a tonic to his at-times lugubrious post-colonial prose. Here is a sentence by Rodriguez chosen almost at random: “The punishment of people imprisoned resonates beyond any isolated effects on individual bodies, reaching beyond the juridical terrain of the laws codifying this coercive production and defying the alleged containment of the prison’s interiority.” By contrast, here is George Jackson: “Theyíve been ‘killing all the niggers’ for nearly half a millennium now, but I am still alive. I might be the most resilient dead man in the universe. The upsetting thing is that they never take into consideration the fact that I am going to resist.” In any case, the use of texts by the ‘imprisoned intellectuals’ bears little resemblance to a survey of, say, political scientists and sociologists writing about globalization. That is because the existence of these texts themselves is an achievement of resistance against the prison regime. Similarly, Rodriguez’ text contains many traces of his unusual effort to collaborate with incarcerated writers. Because such efforts are surveilled and sometimes disrupted by the state, this is not analogous to, for example, anthropologists who work closely with activists to make sure their voices are accurately represented in their texts. The effort to collaborate with prisoners, like prisonersí radical writings, constitutes resistance against what Rodriguez sees as the goal of the prison regime: the isolation and destruction of black/brown people, particularly the ‘incorrigible’ ones who resist this logic.

Although Rodriguez endorses the notion that imprisonment rates have skyrocketed in light of economic restructuring and consequent unemployment, his more original contribution is to link contemporary imprisonment to the longer history of American racism. It is not well known, for example, that the Thirteenth Amendment, which famously rendered slavery and involuntary servitude unconstitutional, actually makes an exemption as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted’. For Rodriguez, America continues to be a white supremacist society which of necessity must produce a black/brown ‘other’ it sees as inferior and uncivilized and to whom it must demonstrate its power. He ties the rise of the current prison regime to the racist appeals of such law and order figures as Barry Goldwater, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon. Thus he finds Foucault’s theory of incarceration--that it deploys surveillance and micro political discourses to normalize subjects for participation in bourgeois society--inapplicable. The point of the prisons is not to reform the inmates but to destroy them. Poor health care, horrific conditions, sadisms petty and gross, should be seen in this context. Imprisonment marks a rupture from the experience of life in ‘civil society’, because the use of force and the denial of any freedom are consistently foregrounded. The liberal demand to abolish the death penalty, while leaving the larger structure of incarceration intact, thus misses the basic point. The death penalty is simply the most extreme and public aspect of a much more general process.

Through this general optic, Rodriguez highlights a number of processes--the attack in the early seventies on the BLA (Black Liberation Army) who continued their struggle within the prisons, often by producing texts as imprisoned intellectuals; prison education programs, which try to constitute prison writing as a self reforming activity rather than an act of resistance; Davis and Jackson’s theory of the prison as indicative of incipient American fascism; the secure housing units (SHU) which act as giant technological experiments in psychological isolation and degradation. What tends to stay with the reader, more than coherent theories of power in the prison, are details like the liberal administrator of a prison education program who had prisoners disciplined (i.e. put in solitary confinement) for demanding an Asian studies course, thus disrupting the liberal facade of such programs, the museum display case for the rifle used to kill George Jackson, or the fight Ramona Africa and MOVE prisoners had with prison officials over whether table scraps could be fed to seagulls (whose nearby food supplies had been poisoned by pollution). In the final chapter, Rodriguez suggestively compares contemporary imprisonment to the “middle passage” which brought Africans across the Atlantic to be slaves in the Americas. The experience of the middle passage was not simply to transport labor, or even to instill discipline in that labor; it was also to affirm the position of the slaves in the emergent global racial hierarchy. The continuities with the contemporary prison regime should be clear.

In his historical survey of policing in the US, Kristian Williams also highlights linkages to the long history of American racism. Our Enemies in Blue follows two tracks. On the one hand, it documents the historic role of the police in maintaining white supremacy, supporting capitalists against workers, and repressing protest. On the other hand, he traces the institution through twists from being an agent of ‘machine politics’ in cities, through professionalization and unionization, through the recent emergence of the police as an autonomous political force (it is worth noting that although there is no love lost on the left for the police, one virtually never hears the police denounced as a political force--usually leftists argue that corporate America dominates the political parties and leaves it at that). Neither narrative offers much grounds for optimism or illusions about the police’s role. If the police are less likely these days to shoot wildly into crowds or chaotically crack heads, it is because the means of social control have become more sophisticated, rather than because the goal of ‘maintaining order’ (i.e. existing social hierarchies) has been abandoned.

Williams locates the first moves towards modern policing in the US in Southern cities, such as Charleston and New Orleans, which were apprehensive over the prospect of slave revolts. Laws that instructed patrollers in Charleston to ëuse their utmost endeavor to prevent all caballings amongst negroes, by dispersing of them when drumming or playing, and to search all negro houses for arms or other offensive weapons..í bear an uncanny, not so coincidental resemblance to the practice of contemporary policing of ghettos. As the police developed in tandem with urban industrial America, they acted as instruments of political machines which dominated city politics, and employed their resultant political strength to run extortion rings and other enriching practices. This began to change with the progressive assault on machine politics, which demanded ‘professionalism’, including higher educational standards for police, and greater bureaucratic centralization. But Williams identifies police unions as a more potent force in producing an autonomous police force. Not really a part of the broader unionization movement in the US, police unions cemented an alliance between those at the top of the police force and officers against outside interference, and helped them lobby city governments for improved wages and larger arsenals. More recently, the police have emerged as an autonomous political force that can shape municipal politics. Trends of militarization and community policing have expanded the capability and sophistication with which the police can act.

All of this occurs in the context of a society highly unequal along racial and economic lines, with the police actively participating in the maintenance of these inequalities (Williams has little to say about gender or sexual inequality, although the police may have played a similar role here as well). In the cases of racial and class inequality, the shift of repressive power activity from private forces such as the Ku Klux Klan and private security guards to the police involves more a shift in the locus of authority than in the function of the exercise of force. Racial profiling simply offers a more modern name to practices that date back to the Charleston slave patrol; the crime-fighting function, rather than the racism, is the more modern innovation. For the working class, “the law creating the Pennsylvania State Constabulatory intended the new body ‘as far as possible, to take the place of the police now appointed at the request of various companies.’ Whereas strikers had previously had their heads cracked by guards in private employ or police leased to the company, which comes to the same thing, they increasingly had the honor of having their heads cracked by impartial public servants, authorized by the government and paid for by the tax ... [thus] at least some of the costs shared by the workers themselves.” On no small number of occasions, police actively collaborated with right wing vigilantes to repress African Americans or workers.

The history of policing protest presents a similar picture. Williams traces the movement from massive demonstrations of force, employed in the nineteenth century, to ‘escalated force’, in which force was only used as a last resort (although when used, as at the 1968 Democratic Convention, it could turn into a police riot), to negotiated management, where the police work with protesters to arrange for sedate displays of civil disobedience (this last technique was exploded by the WTO protesters in Seattle, who refused to settle for a managed display of dissent). All these techniques, however varied in the amount of force deployed, seek to neutralize the impact of protesters. Additionally, the many efforts of the police to spy on and infiltrate movements are noted. Far from the liberal notion of protest playing a role in democratic debate, occasionally disrupted by the excesses of particular political regimes, lies the reality of the policing perspective, deeply suspicious of and trying to undermine or neutralize movements for social change.

The most recent phase of policing is characterized by the seemingly contradictory impulses of militarization (with its increasing firepower and increasingly sophisticated capacity to deploy massive numbers of officers) and community policing (in which the cops learn to get along with the communities they are embedded in). Williams reconciles these differences by arguing that both are shaped by the philosophy of counterinsurgency; efforts to nip potentially disruptive movements in the bud. Communities are enlisted as the spies and collaborators of the police, while recalcitrants face the spectacle of the SWAT team. Those hoping to transform American society should note that the police are now far more sophisticated in their understanding of social movements than they were in the sixties with their obsessive focus on ‘outside agitators’.

The final text to be discussed here, The Language of Empire by Lila Rajiva, moves us away from the US criminal justice system and instead to occupied Iraq. The text focuses on the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. Yet there are clear continuities between the violence enacted there and that described by Williams and Rodriguez. Most notably, the function of the violence described in all three texts is usually obscured in a fog of ideology that renders sacred the perpetrators, except for those who cross over some line and cause embarrassment to the respective institution, ‘the bad apples’. Rajivaís text focuses primarily on how the torture of Abu Ghraib was understood--both in terms of how it was explained to the American public, and in terms of what ideological strands motivated it. She tends to circle around many answers to any question she poses, not necessarily a bad thing. Regarding the ideologies used to justify it, she notes the presence of both a ‘pulp narrative’ that pathologizes the individual soldiers caught on film tormenting Iraqis and a ‘forensic narrative’ that obscures what happens by focusing on legal definitions and responsibilities. The latter concludes with much self congratulation about the continuing durability of ‘the rule of law’. The distinction between an ‘aberration’ of behavior and ‘intention’ is drawn to avoid responsibility. These twin narratives are substituted, in the mainstream media and congressional hearings, for an exploration of the military and imperialist culture which grounded the abuse.

Rajiva also discusses the case of Nicholas Berg, whose beheading knocked Abu Ghraib off the front page of newspapers in the US. Berg was a fascinating character--the passionately pro-Bush son of anti-war activists, who at one point shared an email address with Zacarias Moussai, and who also conducted some telecommunications work at Abu Ghraib. Without being able to resolve the full story, the author makes a compelling case that Berg was far from simply an innocent American murdered by terrorists. Yet this was how his story was played in the media. His murder was a simple instance of terrorist villainy, inexplicable by rational thought, amplified by religious (specifically Muslim) fanaticism. The brutality involved in the beheading epitomized the terrorist mindset, while the torture at Abu Ghraib was the supposed exception to the way Americans usually interact with people. While Abu Ghraib produced pictures (by American troops themselves, for their pleasure), other violence perpetrated in Iraq by American forces is beclouded by claims that Iraqis are prone to rumor and exaggeration, or that sinister forces are manipulating claims of Iraqi victimization.

What motivates the US aggression in Iraq? Rajiva offers a number of answers. There is the ‘promethean’ ideology of the Bush administration: “a fascination with advanced technology not only of weaponry but especially of communication and information ... a tendency towards secrecy, covert actions, and the creation of extra legal channels, an emphasis on maneuverability, flexibility, lightness and speed in the deployment of forces, a radical reordering of the military that blurs the line between military and civilian functions ... The embrace of privatization and of operational models drawn from business.” The Prometheans are obsessed with the construction of an information web that can capture everything; at the same time they are focused on secrecy and obfuscation. The blasting of the ‘Barney’ theme song over and over at a detainee locked in a container in the desert is paradigmatic; the humor of the music choice obscuring the reality of the torture.

Crucial as well to their program is the portrayal of Middle Easterners as fundamentally backward, in need of liberation, politically and mentally. “A state that strives for omniscience about populations, a state that seeks and creates gaps or provocations to justify its own limitless expansion, an ideology of a civilizing mission in a barbaric country. How could torture not be the logical outcome?” The torture at Abu Ghraib also resonates with the US special relationship with Israel, the paradigmatic ‘civilizing force’ (aka ‘the only democracy’) in the Middle East, now with many years of experience at making its perceived superiority felt to subject populations, and developing elaborate surveillance networks. Similarly, it is reminiscent of treatment in domestic prisons in the US. Indeed, it is probably futile or counterproductive to identify the origins of any particular repressive tactic. Instead, such tactics circulate around the domestic and international nodes of coercion, with personnel trained at home or abroad making themselves useful in other parts of the system. The latest twist in this is the ‘outsourcing’ of undesired work in Iraq or Afghanistan (or elsewhere) to the surplus of military personnel trained by regimes like South Africa and El Salvador.

Rajiva also highlights several dimensions of gender in the violence perpetrated in Iraq. The male torture victims in the photographs are often displayed in positions evocative of rape, as feminized victims. She suggests an ambiguity as to whether the photos reveal American torture or are themselves part of a broader scheme to humiliate Muslim men. It should be recalled that the photographs were taken by American military personnel largely celebrating what was being perpetrated. On the other hand, although women were among the detainees at Abu Ghraib, and there were reports of women being tortured as well, these received minimal attention in the US media. Liberating women from Muslim backwardness is one of the ostensible goals of the invasion, and reports of abuse of women by US forces would disrupt this narrative. Rajiva also notes the presence of photos that may or may not have depicted the actual rape of Iraqi women, that may or may not have originated in the porn industry, to briefly explore questions around the real and virtual violence and pornography. Photographs appearing on the internet blur the traces of their origins, raising questions about clearly bracketing off some pornographic depictions as based on consent or existing purely for entertainment purposes.

The three books described above paint a grim picture of state violence employed to maintain unequal social orders. The use of such force is not in contradiction to, but is symbiotic with the democratic pretense of US society. Those at the bottom of the hierarchy must be continually degraded, while the threat of annihilation is never altogether removed from the table. A crucial question not really addressed in any of these books is why state violence typically produces few complaints from the wider American public. Even in the case of Abu Ghraib, sustained outrage was not present; the anti-war movement, presumably the most liberal voice on these questions in the US, quickly moved on to focusing on US troop casualties, rather than the brutalization of Iraqis. For the most part, liberal and even Left voices in the US are terrified of being perceived as against the military, unsympathetic to the police, or ‘soft on crime’. The prestige of the repressive forces in the US now has deep roots. A large portion of popular culture affirms the virtue of repressive structures fighting crime, terrorism, etc. Although it would probably require a book length project to understand why this is so, here I will suggest that both fear and vicarious pleasure are employed to secure consent. Fear of terrorists, of crime, of ‘random violence’ is constantly promoted in the US in ways that largely obscure the actual impact of non-state violence, which for the most part victimizes specific groups (young men intertwined with illegal economies, partners of abusers, etc) which the state typically fails to protect. But the fear both creates the perceived need for increases in the repressive forces and ennobles those who serve. US culture also invites the public to enjoy the punishment meted out to those at the bottom of hierarchies in the US and abroad. Partaking in this pleasure demonstrates that one is not on the bottom oneself. Enjoying the spectacle of policing or military occupation reminds the viewer of their position on the powerful side of this divide. Disrupting these narratives of fear and pleasure is crucial to undoing these repressive structures.

(Steven Sherman is an independent intellectual living in Chapel Hill North Carolina. He can be reached at threehegemons@hotmail.com.)