Law and Disorder

Sovereignty, Protest, Atmosphere

Illan Rua Wall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000298031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Focusing on the moment when social unrest takes hold of a populace, Law and Disorder offers a new account of sovereignty with an affective theory of public order and protest.In a state of unrest, the affective architecture of the sovereign order begins to crumble. The everyday peace and calm of public space is shattered as sovereign peace is challenged. In response, the state unleashes the full force of its exceptionality, and the violence of public order policing is deployed to restore the affects and atmospheres of habitual social relations. This book is a work of contemporary critical legal theory. It develops an affective theory of sovereign orders by focusing on the government of affective life and popular encounters with sovereignty. The chapters explore public order as a key articulation between sovereignty and government. In particular, policing of public order is exposed as a contemporary mode of exceptionality cast in the fires of colonial subjection. The state of unrest helps us see the ordinary affects of the sovereign order, but it also points to crowds as the essential component in the production of unrest. The atmospheres produced by crowds seep out from the squares and parks of occupation, settling on cities and states. In these new atmospheres, new possibilities of political and social organisation begin to appear. In short, crowds create the affective condition in which the settlement at the heart of the sovereign order can be revisited. This text thus develops a theory of sovereignty which places protest at its heart, and a theory of protest which starts from the affective valence of crowds. This book's examination of the relationship between sovereignty and protest is of considerable interest to readers in law, politics and cultural studies, as well as to more general readers interested in contemporary forms of political resistance.

Part I

Affective sovereignty

Sovereignty appears. That is where we start. Something or someone appears as sovereign. They stand in for an entire apparatus, embodying that authority, that metaphysics. Around them a web of relations is gathered. In the Western tradition, these relations are understood through various metaphysical terms: majesty and dignity adhere to the sovereign body and radiate outwards; glory and splendour are produced for the sovereign by political and economic relations. Once staged, these concepts become more than the sum of their theological associations. They are freighted with aspects of the performance. They can no longer be considered in isolation but require an understanding of the ways they resonate. These moments of appearance give tone and texture to the sovereign order. The aim of this first part is to focus on ways in which sovereignty is staged in order to generate particular affective relations. In the coming chapters, we look to four moments where citizens encounter sovereignty. Each sovereign encounter shows that the styles of sovereign appearance (its aesthetics) are crucial to the transmission of its sovereign affects. Sovereign aesthetics are supposed to generate affective encounters, making sovereignty meaningful for the public.

This part will introduce the idea of sovereign affects and the government of temper. We will see the atmospheres of national mediation, a zombie royal wedding, the image designed to stop a revolt and a governmental apparatus for the management of morale. Each chapter also introduces a different methodological approach to the question of affect. In the first chapter we see the materiality of affective atmosphere. This helps us to explore the idea of affective communication. In the second chapter we see the manner in which the genre analysis of events can help us think about affective expectations, and indeed how the affective scripts might be disrupted. In the third chapter we will see the manner in which affect escapes, in particular engaging with the ‘autonomy of affect’ thesis. In the fourth chapter we examine an affective apparatus designed to manage popular affect. This fourth chapter also introduces a difference. Instead of taking a contemporary example where sovereignty is staged for the populace, it investigates an important moment of the government of affects. The distinction between government and sovereignty is important for this book as we have seen already in Burke. Sovereignty reigns but cannot govern, where government is a form of power without transcendent authority. They operate together, all the while remaining different modalities of power. Sovereignty deploys majesty, dignity and splendour. It seeks to evince affects of loyalty, love and awe. But the government conducts populations; it manages and orders. It intervenes in the life of the population where sovereignty stands above. This is an important distinction which we will continue to return to throughout the book.

1
Atmospheres of sovereignty

In which we introduce an affective account of sovereignty – the state attempts to protect its spaces of national mediation – atmospheres are analysed as the affective tone of space – we meet Teresa Brennan’s account of the materiality of atmospheres – and think about the manner in which atmospheres can be created or managed.

On a windy evening in the spring of 2008, a group of eighteen largely white, ‘nerdy libertarians’ arrived at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. Each one of them inserted earphones and began a silent disco. We get a good sense of their dancing from the first of two videos posted by ‘freethejefferson1’ on YouTube. The camera quickly picks up a gathering of graceless gestures by the rear wall: a balding man in a tee-shirt bounces around; a tall ungainly man wearing a sports coat gesticulates wildly, while others bob more carefully, hands moving this way and that. Soon the park rangers arrive and begin to disperse the dancers. The second video is largely made up of the conversation between a park ranger, the man shooting the video and Ms Mary Brooke Oberwetter – who would later take the case to the District Court. The ranger insists: ‘You saw the sign: Quiet!’ Oberwetter responds that they were being quiet because it was a silent disco. So the ranger shifts tack: ‘You were Dancing in here. That is disorderly’. The conversation continues until the ranger loses patience. After a number of warnings, he arrests Oberwetter and escorts her away. She was detained for five hours and later cited for an unauthorised demonstration and interfering with an agency function.

While no further action was taken by the park rangers, Oberwetter took the case to the District Court for the District of Columbia. Among other things, she sought a declaration that the actions of the park rangers violated the First Amendment of the US Constitution – protection of free speech. The court in Oberwetter v Hilliard and Salazar dismissed her claims, finding that the Park Service was entitled to place restrictions on speech because it was a non-public space for the purposes of the First Amendment.¹ Oberwetter’s case has little precedential significance. It is an uncontroversial reaffirmation of classic US free speech doctrine. But, it does contain a beautiful moment of insight into the staging of sites of sovereignty. The case concerns the conditions of encountering sovereignty. From it, we can begin to draw out the affective conditions of staging sovereignty. It highlights the atmospheric spaces where sovereignty is mediated and made present to a public. This chapter introduces atmospheres, which will become one of the crucial sites for both sovereignty and, later in the book, for the social and political potential of the state of unrest. The aim here is to introduce a material account of affect, underlining the manner in which sovereignty can operate affectively from the background.

FIGURE 1.1 Alex Grichenko, ‘Thomas Jefferson Memorial’, public domain.

The space of the Jefferson Memorial was not ‘public’ for the purposes of the First Amendment. It was a special enclave, distinct from the public space of the parklands and sidewalks around it. As such, the jurisprudence explains that the Park Services were entitled to place certain restrictions on speech, so long as they were reasonable given the purpose that the regulations sought to effect. The key function of the Park Service’s intervention was to protect ‘an atmosphere of calm, tranquillity and reverence’. The court explained that the state is entitled to protect the atmosphere in which the dignity and majesty of the state are made present. This makes sense for as long as we do not think too hard about what the court means by ‘atmosphere’. But if we do pause on it, the trouble begins, because atmospheres flummox us. They seem so obvious in one’s lived experience: the electrifying gig, the tension-filled room, the cosy winter’s evening before a crackling fire, the football stadium during a local derby – or the atmosphere of majesty and dignity at a national monument. When they are at their most intense, atmospheres are palpable. But once we place them into our traditional epistemologies, they seem to evaporate. A good place to begin is with the leakiness of bodies, things and environments.² Objects are not self-contained entities; they interact. Imagine yourself, for a moment, in a forest or a rubbish dump: the smells of timber, damp and vegetation or the sour tang of human detritus, sharp and foetid. These smells come from objects rotting, decomposing and decaying, a process of chemical interaction whereby molecules are released into the air. We become conscious of this sometimes as smell, but most of the time we do not consciously perceive this fug. That does not stop it from affecting us, changing our bodies in ways that we may or may not be attuned to. From the polluted smog of the industrial city to the ‘atmospheric purity’ imagined by air-conditioning manufacturers,³ we are constantly interacting with organic and inorganic molecules that make up ‘air’. Teressa Brennan asks us to go further here. She argues: ‘If I walk … into the atmospheric room … and it is rank with the smell of anxiety, I breathe this in’.⁴ The smell that we sense here is a material event.⁵ We identify particular molecules exuded by those (organic and inorganic) bodies around us. And we make sense of it as anxiety. That is to say that it changes our body, and we decode this change of bodily state as the feeling of ‘anxiety’. What is important here for Brennan is that this is not simply a symbolic identification, a thought about being anxious. It is a bodily communication. The affects exuded by others communicate with our body as we enter the room. Our pulse quickens, we become more alert, we feel slightly queasy as our body begins to produce adrenaline or other hormones. In other words, the molecules exuded unwittingly by those anxious bodies around us facilitate a non-linguistic communication with our bodies. Thus when we sense the anxiety in the atmosphere in the room that Brennan describes, we are making sense of the ‘smell’ but also of our own bodily reaction. In this account, atmosphere is a sort of communication of matter, a shifting emanation from and to bodies and things. It is a material occurrence and not simply a subjective event.

Alongside this idea of a molecular fug, we can also think about the way that space conducts atmospheres. The cathedral and the stadium, for instance, seek to conduct bodies in very different ways. In the cathedral, the building seeks to silence by way of its grandeur. It conveys enormity, transcendence and the transience of human existence by dwarfing the body. The stadium on the other hand reverses this affect. It encourages collective noise and chants; it pits one crowd against another, stirring up feelings of enmity. One crowd must out-sing the other. There is enormity and grandeur here as well, but it is very definitely for the crowd. The stadium is a place where people go to worship themselves and their avatars on the pitch. In both, the orientation of the space itself is important. The stadium faces one crowd against another, as they circle the pitch. A cathedral orients the worshippers below the altar and the pulpit on high. Beneath, they are promised transcendence, a transcendence captured as the height of the roof above seems to capture the heavens. But we must also think about the state of these spaces. The cathedral is darkened, musty, with shafts of light illuminating the enormity. The stadium on the other hand is filled with brilliant white light (natural or artificial). Even away from the amphitheatre bowl, the corridors and passages will have a bright and clean light. Both spaces conduct the bodies that fill them to produce the molecular fug. In turn, the production of this molecular fug intensifies the spatial dynamics.

These are old spaces of atmosphere. They show us that people have been planning and building for atmosphere before it was named as such. But one of the first contemporary architects to make atmospheres the centre point of his practice was Peter Zumthor. At the heart of Zumthor’s practice is the rejection of ‘representational architecture’ where buildings tell stories or are functionally...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Prologue: Sovereign aesthetics
• PART I Affective sovereignty
• PART II The apparatus of public order
• PART III The crowd and the people
• PART IV The enmity of unrest
• Conclusion: Notes from the tumult
• Bibliography
• Index