A strand of analysis that has emerged recently, from the intellectual vanguard of bloggers engaged with the budding UK protest movement, concerns the language employed by the police and attendant RSA when it comes to their dealing with democratic participants on the streets.
Dibyesh Anand paints a picture of an operational idiolect that is currently being formulated by the State’s repressive arm who are in a certain galvanised condition, finding their own meanings in response to the most concerted period of resistance for a generation:
“The medicalisation of discourse here is conspicuous. Expressions such as ‘We contain’ or ‘We end the containment through drip feed’ or ‘This is a sterile zone’ gives a sense that it is not people but virus/disease that is being talked about. Protestors are human beings and not diseases that need containment. When ‘containment’ creates ‘sterile zones’ around it, it is terror (there is no other word to describe it when one witnesses young men and women’s face when they are hit with baton or charged with horses and pushed into a confined area by police in riot gear) that is used by the police to create dissent-free spaces.”
Tom Stoppard, in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, reveals the Soviet mental institutions which, long after the thaw, were coldly operating as political prisons into the 1980s. In his examination of the Mary Kay Letourneau case of a woman in the US who slept with an underage boy, Zizek sees this practice as inherent in state medical discourses, which prevents bold and trangressive action from being admitted as an ethical possiblity. Certainly, from my time in the system, it became quite clear to me that the social contours of any given patient would conform to a pattern of deviance. They had often ended up there by means of a transgressive and violent act, and the organic basis of the illness, and the epistemological break in their thinking, could be accorded to the marginal places from which they came. It was often a case of learning the rationality of the institution and being swiftly moved out. Indeed there is a reading of Irving Goffman’s Asylums in which the radical body and mind are neatly fitted to a “career” as a mental patient. The starkest case was my friend Rebecca, who had no apparent organic symptomatology other than being a black woman in love, and was being kept in by a combination of testimony from her abusive former partner and her explosive refusal of the norms of romantic attachment.
With medicalisation comes dehumanisation. In the comments section of this frankly vile police blog, our blue shirted boys freely reduce democratic participants to epithets of effluvia such as wankstains, bell-ends, and scum. As Dominic Fox points out, there are also references to “washing students” with water cannons, the great grimy metaphor for the unclean which went out of mainstream comedy sometime in the 1980s, to now rear itself again with the ominous overtones of cleansing.
Kpunk aptly brings out Foucault:
The plague is met by order; its function is to sort out every possible confusion: that of the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions. It lays down for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death, his well-being, by means of an omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him. Against the plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which is one of analysis. A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear. But there was also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, ‘but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease. The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of ‘contagions’, of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder.
I would also add Sartre, who wrote of dirt, and more specifically “goo”, as being threatening to human ontology because of its indeterminate nature. For Sartre it was a reminder of the fact we will one day no longer transcend matter and again become it, but we might easily map this across the protest interface, that the marked dissent which has exposed the democratic deficit in the UK and galvanised a generation to become post-post-ideological renders the truth of a plasmatic polity, where to remain legitimate those in charge must must literally police the borders of the state, furiously scrubbing out the wankstains and soil, amongst whose number lies Alfie Meadows.
