Bleaching the public sphere clean

Jules Boykoff, author of Beyond Bullets, described this cleansing work as it now appears in London:

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the London riots. In the wake of last summer’s destruction and the flurry of finger-pointing about who was to blame, London’s Metropolitan Police launched what they called “Total Policing.” A peculiar brew of creepy branding and wishful thinking, “Total Policing” has always been freighted with fuzziness — no one’s quite sure what it really means.

But with the recent outburst of political activism during London’s Olympic moment, Scotland Yard’s hazy notion has come into sharper focus. In the Olympics-induced state of exception, “Total Policing” means total paternalism plus political preemption.

A state of exception will come into being when a sovereign power places itself beyond the rule of law in order to achieve a self-given goal. Those subject to the state of exception can only hope that the exceptional moment is brief, peaceful and warranted by the situation at hand. They must depend upon hope, as mercurial and ineffective as hoping may be, because they will lack the legal means for opposing the imposition of the state of exception. The act of the sovereign in this instance is decisive. A frivolous declaration of a state of exception can be a milestone on a path that ends in a dictatorship of some kind.

Thus to the skeptical mind, a state of exception always appears specious. Besides being a component of a strategy meant to avoid state failure, there never ought to be a situation a government uses to justify imposing a state of exception.

Does London’s total policing project amount to a declaration of a general state of exception? I believe it does. According to my interpretation of Boykoff, the total policing idea results in the use of the government’s police powers to suppress dissent and to create an image of an orderly, happy and well-integrated society. It creates an image which occludes the complexity of London’s social and political situation. The image thus created is that of a Potemkin Village. The Olympic reality as lived by the majority of the spectators and viewers is akin to a Disney World, a place defined by light, magic and excellence.

Related articles

• London 2012 protests: heavy-handed policing is an affront to rights | Wail Qasim (guardian.co.uk)