The Performance of Violence

Dr Jacques Valentin

The act of protest is often as simple as the placement of bodies in specific space, in this much it is a
performance. Unlike therefore the more subtle modes of control deployed against everyday life, the
policing of protest deploys a similar logic to that of protest itself in its tactical contestation of
representation and space.

In the system of punitive power the 'crime' of dissent is not merely a crime as such but rather a
crime against sovereign power, it contains what Foucault terms a 'fragment of regicide' and hence
attracts the excessive surplus revenge of sovereign violence in which illusionary 'universal' laws can
be transcended for the spectacle of sovereign violence. This excess of force is the matching and the
overwhelming of its own shadow, a fighting of performance with performance, a combating of the
sublime aesthetic of surging human power manifested in the raging mob with sublime aesthetic of
massed, uniformed ranks of armoured police. It is the meeting of performative protest with
performative punishment.

That is not to say these actions, protest or punishment, are in some way unreal, rather that they are
performative in so much as they contest the placement and representation of bodies in space. The
performance of sovereign power combines legitimising discursive practices that constitute the
recipient populations as already always prefigured by their allegedly 'violent' intentions. In the
violent acts perpetrated against them, these populations are punished as the embodiment of their
fictional metonymic forms and hence absent as bodies in themselves in the eyes of the law.

All totalitarian systems define themselves against their 'other': that which they exclude but that is
always therefore figured symbolically within them, constituted as the enemy within: the jihadi, the
'red under the bed,' the 'violent minority of hardcore anarchists and ultra-leftists hijacking the
intentions of a peaceful majority'. In the constitution of those arrayed against them as extreme, the
voices of power seek to symbolically occupy a fictional 'middle-ground' of hegemonic discourse
whilst justifying the undertaking of extreme measures in order to defend it.

These terms need to be examined. The fear of contagious unrest produces in authority a closing
down of imagery and a clustering around certain discursive narratives which define the limits of
representation and hence politics. These tropes of stage-managed and selected images reveal the
face of dissent to the societal imaginary and in doing so simultaneously conceal its heterogeneous
power, blanketing and screening out difference and transgression in order to formulate an effective
narrative of otherness upon which power can performatively enact its punishment. As these tropes;
the fire-extinguisher wielding anarchist, no less so than invertebrate so-called leaders; come to stand
in representationally for the autonomous bodies of dissent; so the heterogenity of the peoples of that
movement can be homogenised, signified and punished. This is the logic that leads to the collective
punishment of kettling. The politics of crisis constitute a perpetual state of exception in which
dissensus is cast as both within and without of the law, it metonymically transgresses the law by
way of its substitute identity and therefore it is prefigured to an extent as outside the law, such that
the police can deploy tactics that shatter any claim to a universalised legal framework. The crises of
terrorism or banking collapse enable states of exception that leads to anti-democratic privatisations
and ultimately to such vicious devices of punishment and control as Guantanamo Bay. It is a
similar logic of exception that enables mounted police to charge aggressively into crowds of trapped
school children.

The aesthetic performative of excessive police force is the attempted re- and pre- signification of
protest as criminal and thus a vindicating of its exceptionality. The protester is prefigured as guilty
and thus the 'legitimate' target for a dose of batton and boot merely by performatively placing their
body into that politicised space. The enclosing ranks of police officers aesthetically reinscribe the
visual power of bodies united and in occupation of a given symbolic space as violent criminals
against whom all possible measures might be taken.

The gesture of resisting aesthetic reification through constant performative resignification and the
attesting to the transience and site-specificity of the body insists that politics is not a closed book,
indeed is not a book at all but an open responsibility and a perpetually incomplete project rather
than one that can by foreclosed, ordered and packaged off into a substitute representation of yes or
no, of red, yellow or blue.

In the words of Ranciere, this 'ethical dissolution of aesthetic heterogenity goes hand-in-hand with a
whole current of contemporary thought in which political dissensuality is disolved into an
archipolitics of the exception and in which all forms of domination, or emancipation, are reduced to
the global nature of an ontological catastrophe'

The liberal equation of violence against property and violence against the person forms another
substitutionary discursive trope in which the mirroring opposition and yet excessive overflowing of
police violence can be performed in response to a few broken windows. It is therefore through this
performance that an event's context can be re-inscribed by the forces of control in order to justify
these 'exceptional' means, the concealment of the very real violence of private property itself and
the police force who's primary role has always been its defence.

In the general conditions of everyday society many people pass through a phenomenological
experience their day in an array of cinematic delusions that blur the border between ‘real’ and the
‘fictional’, 'action' and 'representation'. The spectacle of politics has frequently left many, even
many of those directly involved, relating to their experience as though through a filmic fiction:
mediated by the internalised distance of representation, occluding the participant viewer from
events. However in the process of direct action, more ‘articulation’ than ‘expression’, the
experience of unfettered and embodied physical production of action melts the perceptual mists of
these ordering forces like a sunburst of energy, empowerment and the encouragement to fight and to
keep fighting.