- Email: [email protected]
State reason and state affect
Political Geography 51 (2016) 89–91
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Political Geography j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s e v i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / p o l g e o
Commentary
State reason and state affect Keith Woodward * Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 550 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53703, USA
A R T I C L E
I N F O
Article history: Available online 2 February 2016 Keywords: State reason State affect Policing research
Mat Coleman’s intervention on contemporary policing research presents a dire picture for those who study state oppression, exploitation, and marginalization. On the one hand, qualitative social science research on policing is regarded with increasing suspicion by officers and their managers, placing officer–researcher relationships on the verge of a virtual Ice Age. On the other hand, quantitative approaches, which are regarded comparatively favorably by the state, sometimes give rise to statistical fogs that obscure statist racism and other structural prejudices. And yet, despite their rich differences, Coleman asserts that both of the “accepted social scientific tools that we have at our disposal, and which are subject to peer-review, stumble in the face of the cruddiness of police power.” These observations offer something more nuanced than the usual epistemological anxieties over messy materialities that map poorly onto rigid statist legal abstractions and our own critical imaginaries. And their politics stretch beyond implicating our methodologies, their findings, and limitations as bulwarks that reinforce raison d’état, or ‘state reason.’ Indeed, our “accepted qualitative and quantitative approaches to studying the police,” Coleman explains, “constitute, rather than problematize, the blue wall of policing, or ‘state power in blue’” (my italics). Not only do our ways of going about researching police not draw us closer to our subjects, they serve to keep them at a distance. State reification, power, and violence benefit from such quirks in our methodologies, which potentially aid in rendering invisible, rather than revealing, localized police dysfunction and systemic racism. Against this, Coleman interrogates the absence of a critical, methodological language capable of describing the uncertainties that haunt policing practice, policy, and governance. Seeking strategies for bringing these to light, he first locates the backbone of state reason’s exculpatory force in the Fourth Amendment’s ‘reasonableness’ con-
* Tel.: (608) 262-0505; Fax: (608) 265-3991. E-mail address: [email protected]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.01.005 0962-6298/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
dition for search and seizure. In particular, a 1996 Supreme Court decision stipulates that “the Fourth Amendment’s concern with ‘reasonableness’ allows certain actions to be taken in certain circumstances, whatever the subjective intent” (cited in Coleman, italics in the original). This and related rulings form a principle of sufficient state reason, if you will, that operates by bracketing the intentionality of state agents in favor of a generalizable model of ‘reasonableness.’ Against the slippery situatedness of material conditions, that is, the state embraces transcendent conditions for a ‘sufficiently reasonable’ legal view from nowhere. This introduces a gap between the authority of state reason and the grounded practices of state agents – a convenient spacing that sometimes obscures even the most explicit instances of discriminatory policing. One consequence of this maneuver is that the principle of sufficient state reason does not ward off but rather introduces ‘not-knowing’ as a constitutive element of policing and policy. Confusion plays an active role in how policing – with its many ‘intentional’ and ‘unintentional’ effects – happens. Within this scene, the raison d’état becomes a mechanism for distributing and navigating uncertainty within the transcendent legalities and immanent limits of policing. That is, notknowing is enrolled as an element in a broader system of statist strategy. Like the state, our methodologies frequently presuppose their own system(s) of sufficient reason as a strategy for navigating the gaps of ‘intentionality’ between observable practice and critical explanation. This makes it an ideological cousin to state law’s presupposition and privileging of transcendent abstractions. Indeed, what Deleuze and Guattari call “State science” ( Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 362–65) are works of explanation that leap such gaps by placing observations under the purview of the discipline, the Subject, the group – that is, by “imposing its form of sovereignty” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 362) upon its ‘objects.’ Articulating relevance by glossing over gaps and uncertainties, those inquiries draw their force from the reasonableness presupposed by the methodology. Like state reason, they also introduce gaps over which sufficient reason pre-
90
K. Woodward/Political Geography 51 (2016) 89–91
sides. But what if, instead, the contingent character of the materials under interrogation anchored the explanatory power of methodology (and, by extension, the state power it currently constitutes)? Rather than a principle of sufficient reason, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that state law – particularly as it finds expression in practices of jurisprudence (Deleuze, 2011) – and site-specific methodologies demand instead a “principle of contingent reason” capable of addressing the messiness of material relations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, 93). By ‘contingency,’ they are not concerned with pure, chaotic ‘randomness,’ but rather the accidental character of proximity: a spatial logic, a ‘geophilosophy.’ If the principle of sufficient state reason is accomplished by forging a gap between material conditions and reasonableness, a principle of contingent reason must insist upon their inseparability. Reasonableness, in other words, arises as the inescapable situatedness of materiality: it is immanent to the rich, dynamic materiality of its situation. Given the state’s tendency to distance itself from the intimacies of qualitative research in favor of the abstractions of quantitative findings, it may seem strange to speak of the raison d’état and a principle of contingent reason in the same breath. However, we should recall that the ruling in Graham vs. Connor (1989) already places the state’s most intimate mode of material social relation – use of force – under the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness criterion (see: Woodward & Bruzzone, 2015, 547). While training in the escalation of use of force takes its guidance from the Fourth Amendment, its grounded deployment frequently slips the bounds of transcendent reasonableness, fleeing into the murkier realms of officer habit and intuition, not to mention fear, anger, and confusion. These latter elements, which might easily be gathered under the conceptual umbrella of ‘affects,’ introduce a large degree of uncertainty at the center of policing – just as they do in research methodologies. Consider also that force is a fundamental mode of inter-body affectivity involving gradients of amplifying and diminishing pressure, degrees of imprecision, and the erratic variations of two interacting dynamic bodies. In this key area of the production of state effects, where the state expresses its supposed license on violence, the intentionality of its agents are illegible precisely because their affective relations – due to the level of dynamic interactivity – tend toward indiscernibility and uncertainty (Woodward, 2014). The application of force is always somewhat veiled because it exceeds not the enrolled bodies, but the subjects who would think themselves the transcendent masters of those bodies. At first glimpse, affect would appear to drag us further into the problem of producing constitutive uncertainty in the service of state power. However, a key difference rests in how affect’s complexities are described: through the dynamic, forceful interaction of bodies. What we can understand of affect is registered in its proximate situatedness, in its intimate interactions, and its differential variations. That is, in its contingency. Affect demands a differential language capable of speaking to the particularities (forces, bodies) that constitute its expression. Broader explanation is simply too baggy to give a ‘reasonable’ account of its constituent elements. It is precisely this aspect that speaks (and in a very obvious way) to why our methodologies need to be differential if they are to ward off efforts to veil modes of oppression. Consider an anecdote that appears in political theorist William E. Connolly’s Neuropolitics. Two Baltimore police officers arrive up at a Johns Hopkins graduate student party and put the partygoers through a series of arbitrary exercises, making them march up and down a flight of stairs until one student finally complains. The officers select her for arrest and seat her in the patrol car in front of the house, where she remains – visible to the others – for another twenty minutes. “It seemed to the revelers,” Connolly continues, “that the cops were inviting them to protest so that new members could be added to the arrest list” (2002: 30). Later, Connolly suggests that he can read and feel their continued anger and panic:
The choreography of the event colors fear of the police and anger against them into the texture of perception. It takes a toll on those who were there and on others who hear about it as it spreads. Now some students tread more carefully in the presence of the police. Indeed, one’s approach to authority in general may be colored more darkly as this event merges into one’s implicit memory bank (Connolly, 2002, 31) In this tale, the state apparatus enrolls the partygoers in a variety of confusing affective positions, several of which are not only matters of coersion or Althusserian ‘hailing.’ Rather, they involve the workings of actual and potential force relations: the appearance of two armed men, the fatigue of moving up and down the stairs, the arbitrary restraint and detention individual bodies. These continue to express themselves afterward, when the tale draws the tellers and the listeners into further affective state relations of panic and impotent rage. If Connolly’s students were traumatized by the encounter and one unjustly burdened with legal fees, his retelling seems to suggest that they were unaccustomed to police harassment (a further affect of the situation was its surprising uniqueness). As Connolly suggests in his analysis of the situation, thinking critically about affectivity in policing demands that we ask crucial questions about how both the differential use of force and the promised threat of force introduce diverse modes of affectivity into different communities. It is here that racialized difference in statistics and demographics makes a difference in thinking about the role of contingent reason for affective methodologies. In effect, their responses to the event must be read in proximity to a range of other situated affective relations: In what part of Baltimore does this party take place? Are these Johns Hopkins students Baltimoreans? Are they white? How many of these students have been subjected to overpolicing in their own local spaces? How many are witnesses to or victims of police violence in their daily lives? How, in other words, have specific modes of state violence crystallized or cathected in the habits and capacities of those enrolled in the specific encounter Connolly details (Woodward & Bruzzone, 2015)? Affective relations, in other words, are fundamentally social, differential, and constitutive of further affective orientations, capacities, and tendencies. City areas and neighborhoods are policed differentially, with officers tending to be loaded into areas where crime is perceived to be higher. As most critical human geographers recognize, these patterns follow patterns of uneven development, clustering in spaces of raced and classed difference. What this means in terms of correlation, as Coleman reminds us, is precisely the question that we must keep open and that state reason would like to jump to a convenient conclusion. What must also be asked about these spaces – and what needs a stronger language for speaking back to the state – is how we should begin to assess the affective dimensions of life lived in the face of the intense police presence, surveillance, harassment, and violence. If affect theory might offer a set of methods useful for exposing state-based oppression of raced and classed difference, without further constituting the ‘blue wall’ of police practice, then the focus must extend beyond the police and their practices. Rather the question of ‘state affects’ must first be put – as Connolly begins to do – to those who are enrolled in affective relations with the state, those who the police training literature sometimes refers to as the “clients” but who are more commonly known as citizens, arrestees, and sometimes victims: the policed. Affects are always differential, always aggregative, and always relational. This means that, even where the state throws up a blue wall, those affected by the policing apparatus will often remain accessible to the researcher. Their proximity to the state, by virtue of their affective relation, offers a surface upon which the state and contemporary policing might reasonably – however contingently – be read.
K. Woodward/Political Geography 51 (2016) 89–91
Conflict of interest There are no conflicts of interest associated with this submission. References Connolly, W. (2002). Neuropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press.
91
Deleuze, G. (2011). Gilles Deleuze from a to z. C. Stivale (trans). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). P-A Boutang (dir). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (trans). New York: Columbia University Press. Woodward, K. (2014). Affect, state theory, and the politics of confusion. Political Geography, 41, 21–31. Woodward, K., & Bruzzone, M. (2015). Touching like a state. Antipode, 47, 539–556.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Political Geography j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s e v i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / p o l g e o
Commentary
State reason and state affect Keith Woodward * Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 550 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53703, USA
A R T I C L E
I N F O
Article history: Available online 2 February 2016 Keywords: State reason State affect Policing research
Mat Coleman’s intervention on contemporary policing research presents a dire picture for those who study state oppression, exploitation, and marginalization. On the one hand, qualitative social science research on policing is regarded with increasing suspicion by officers and their managers, placing officer–researcher relationships on the verge of a virtual Ice Age. On the other hand, quantitative approaches, which are regarded comparatively favorably by the state, sometimes give rise to statistical fogs that obscure statist racism and other structural prejudices. And yet, despite their rich differences, Coleman asserts that both of the “accepted social scientific tools that we have at our disposal, and which are subject to peer-review, stumble in the face of the cruddiness of police power.” These observations offer something more nuanced than the usual epistemological anxieties over messy materialities that map poorly onto rigid statist legal abstractions and our own critical imaginaries. And their politics stretch beyond implicating our methodologies, their findings, and limitations as bulwarks that reinforce raison d’état, or ‘state reason.’ Indeed, our “accepted qualitative and quantitative approaches to studying the police,” Coleman explains, “constitute, rather than problematize, the blue wall of policing, or ‘state power in blue’” (my italics). Not only do our ways of going about researching police not draw us closer to our subjects, they serve to keep them at a distance. State reification, power, and violence benefit from such quirks in our methodologies, which potentially aid in rendering invisible, rather than revealing, localized police dysfunction and systemic racism. Against this, Coleman interrogates the absence of a critical, methodological language capable of describing the uncertainties that haunt policing practice, policy, and governance. Seeking strategies for bringing these to light, he first locates the backbone of state reason’s exculpatory force in the Fourth Amendment’s ‘reasonableness’ con-
* Tel.: (608) 262-0505; Fax: (608) 265-3991. E-mail address: [email protected]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.01.005 0962-6298/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
dition for search and seizure. In particular, a 1996 Supreme Court decision stipulates that “the Fourth Amendment’s concern with ‘reasonableness’ allows certain actions to be taken in certain circumstances, whatever the subjective intent” (cited in Coleman, italics in the original). This and related rulings form a principle of sufficient state reason, if you will, that operates by bracketing the intentionality of state agents in favor of a generalizable model of ‘reasonableness.’ Against the slippery situatedness of material conditions, that is, the state embraces transcendent conditions for a ‘sufficiently reasonable’ legal view from nowhere. This introduces a gap between the authority of state reason and the grounded practices of state agents – a convenient spacing that sometimes obscures even the most explicit instances of discriminatory policing. One consequence of this maneuver is that the principle of sufficient state reason does not ward off but rather introduces ‘not-knowing’ as a constitutive element of policing and policy. Confusion plays an active role in how policing – with its many ‘intentional’ and ‘unintentional’ effects – happens. Within this scene, the raison d’état becomes a mechanism for distributing and navigating uncertainty within the transcendent legalities and immanent limits of policing. That is, notknowing is enrolled as an element in a broader system of statist strategy. Like the state, our methodologies frequently presuppose their own system(s) of sufficient reason as a strategy for navigating the gaps of ‘intentionality’ between observable practice and critical explanation. This makes it an ideological cousin to state law’s presupposition and privileging of transcendent abstractions. Indeed, what Deleuze and Guattari call “State science” ( Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 362–65) are works of explanation that leap such gaps by placing observations under the purview of the discipline, the Subject, the group – that is, by “imposing its form of sovereignty” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 362) upon its ‘objects.’ Articulating relevance by glossing over gaps and uncertainties, those inquiries draw their force from the reasonableness presupposed by the methodology. Like state reason, they also introduce gaps over which sufficient reason pre-
90
K. Woodward/Political Geography 51 (2016) 89–91
sides. But what if, instead, the contingent character of the materials under interrogation anchored the explanatory power of methodology (and, by extension, the state power it currently constitutes)? Rather than a principle of sufficient reason, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that state law – particularly as it finds expression in practices of jurisprudence (Deleuze, 2011) – and site-specific methodologies demand instead a “principle of contingent reason” capable of addressing the messiness of material relations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, 93). By ‘contingency,’ they are not concerned with pure, chaotic ‘randomness,’ but rather the accidental character of proximity: a spatial logic, a ‘geophilosophy.’ If the principle of sufficient state reason is accomplished by forging a gap between material conditions and reasonableness, a principle of contingent reason must insist upon their inseparability. Reasonableness, in other words, arises as the inescapable situatedness of materiality: it is immanent to the rich, dynamic materiality of its situation. Given the state’s tendency to distance itself from the intimacies of qualitative research in favor of the abstractions of quantitative findings, it may seem strange to speak of the raison d’état and a principle of contingent reason in the same breath. However, we should recall that the ruling in Graham vs. Connor (1989) already places the state’s most intimate mode of material social relation – use of force – under the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness criterion (see: Woodward & Bruzzone, 2015, 547). While training in the escalation of use of force takes its guidance from the Fourth Amendment, its grounded deployment frequently slips the bounds of transcendent reasonableness, fleeing into the murkier realms of officer habit and intuition, not to mention fear, anger, and confusion. These latter elements, which might easily be gathered under the conceptual umbrella of ‘affects,’ introduce a large degree of uncertainty at the center of policing – just as they do in research methodologies. Consider also that force is a fundamental mode of inter-body affectivity involving gradients of amplifying and diminishing pressure, degrees of imprecision, and the erratic variations of two interacting dynamic bodies. In this key area of the production of state effects, where the state expresses its supposed license on violence, the intentionality of its agents are illegible precisely because their affective relations – due to the level of dynamic interactivity – tend toward indiscernibility and uncertainty (Woodward, 2014). The application of force is always somewhat veiled because it exceeds not the enrolled bodies, but the subjects who would think themselves the transcendent masters of those bodies. At first glimpse, affect would appear to drag us further into the problem of producing constitutive uncertainty in the service of state power. However, a key difference rests in how affect’s complexities are described: through the dynamic, forceful interaction of bodies. What we can understand of affect is registered in its proximate situatedness, in its intimate interactions, and its differential variations. That is, in its contingency. Affect demands a differential language capable of speaking to the particularities (forces, bodies) that constitute its expression. Broader explanation is simply too baggy to give a ‘reasonable’ account of its constituent elements. It is precisely this aspect that speaks (and in a very obvious way) to why our methodologies need to be differential if they are to ward off efforts to veil modes of oppression. Consider an anecdote that appears in political theorist William E. Connolly’s Neuropolitics. Two Baltimore police officers arrive up at a Johns Hopkins graduate student party and put the partygoers through a series of arbitrary exercises, making them march up and down a flight of stairs until one student finally complains. The officers select her for arrest and seat her in the patrol car in front of the house, where she remains – visible to the others – for another twenty minutes. “It seemed to the revelers,” Connolly continues, “that the cops were inviting them to protest so that new members could be added to the arrest list” (2002: 30). Later, Connolly suggests that he can read and feel their continued anger and panic:
The choreography of the event colors fear of the police and anger against them into the texture of perception. It takes a toll on those who were there and on others who hear about it as it spreads. Now some students tread more carefully in the presence of the police. Indeed, one’s approach to authority in general may be colored more darkly as this event merges into one’s implicit memory bank (Connolly, 2002, 31) In this tale, the state apparatus enrolls the partygoers in a variety of confusing affective positions, several of which are not only matters of coersion or Althusserian ‘hailing.’ Rather, they involve the workings of actual and potential force relations: the appearance of two armed men, the fatigue of moving up and down the stairs, the arbitrary restraint and detention individual bodies. These continue to express themselves afterward, when the tale draws the tellers and the listeners into further affective state relations of panic and impotent rage. If Connolly’s students were traumatized by the encounter and one unjustly burdened with legal fees, his retelling seems to suggest that they were unaccustomed to police harassment (a further affect of the situation was its surprising uniqueness). As Connolly suggests in his analysis of the situation, thinking critically about affectivity in policing demands that we ask crucial questions about how both the differential use of force and the promised threat of force introduce diverse modes of affectivity into different communities. It is here that racialized difference in statistics and demographics makes a difference in thinking about the role of contingent reason for affective methodologies. In effect, their responses to the event must be read in proximity to a range of other situated affective relations: In what part of Baltimore does this party take place? Are these Johns Hopkins students Baltimoreans? Are they white? How many of these students have been subjected to overpolicing in their own local spaces? How many are witnesses to or victims of police violence in their daily lives? How, in other words, have specific modes of state violence crystallized or cathected in the habits and capacities of those enrolled in the specific encounter Connolly details (Woodward & Bruzzone, 2015)? Affective relations, in other words, are fundamentally social, differential, and constitutive of further affective orientations, capacities, and tendencies. City areas and neighborhoods are policed differentially, with officers tending to be loaded into areas where crime is perceived to be higher. As most critical human geographers recognize, these patterns follow patterns of uneven development, clustering in spaces of raced and classed difference. What this means in terms of correlation, as Coleman reminds us, is precisely the question that we must keep open and that state reason would like to jump to a convenient conclusion. What must also be asked about these spaces – and what needs a stronger language for speaking back to the state – is how we should begin to assess the affective dimensions of life lived in the face of the intense police presence, surveillance, harassment, and violence. If affect theory might offer a set of methods useful for exposing state-based oppression of raced and classed difference, without further constituting the ‘blue wall’ of police practice, then the focus must extend beyond the police and their practices. Rather the question of ‘state affects’ must first be put – as Connolly begins to do – to those who are enrolled in affective relations with the state, those who the police training literature sometimes refers to as the “clients” but who are more commonly known as citizens, arrestees, and sometimes victims: the policed. Affects are always differential, always aggregative, and always relational. This means that, even where the state throws up a blue wall, those affected by the policing apparatus will often remain accessible to the researcher. Their proximity to the state, by virtue of their affective relation, offers a surface upon which the state and contemporary policing might reasonably – however contingently – be read.
K. Woodward/Political Geography 51 (2016) 89–91
Conflict of interest There are no conflicts of interest associated with this submission. References Connolly, W. (2002). Neuropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press.
91
Deleuze, G. (2011). Gilles Deleuze from a to z. C. Stivale (trans). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). P-A Boutang (dir). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (trans). New York: Columbia University Press. Woodward, K. (2014). Affect, state theory, and the politics of confusion. Political Geography, 41, 21–31. Woodward, K., & Bruzzone, M. (2015). Touching like a state. Antipode, 47, 539–556.