Police Academy – Conspiracy Theory By Willy Maley
Vaclav Havel’s qualified endorsement of the role of the United States as the world’s policeman raises the spectre of surveillance and control that has vexed civil societies from Plato to Nato. Closer to home, news of the so-called ghost squads investigating police corruption in the CID raises the question of who polices the police, especially pertinent when they appear to have become a law unto themselves, making policy rather than implementing it, and growing indistinguishable from the criminals they allegedly exist to counter. Witness the phenomenon of a backslapping Home Secretary like Jack Straw, trailing in the wake of police initiatives such as Zero Tolerance, praising unelected bodies that answer to no manifesto, but pursue their own lines of inquiry.
measure of ‘a phantom-like violence’. For Derrida the police ‘do not simply consist of policemen in uniform, occasionally helmeted, armed and organized in a civil structure on a military model to whom the right to strike is refused, and so forth. By definition, the police are present, sometimes invisible but always effective, wherever there is preservation of the social order.’ Derrida, mixing paranoia with the paranormal, sees the police everywhere: ‘The police become hallucinatory and spectral because they haunt everything; they are everywhere.’ Elsewhere, Derrida says: ‘There are police and police'. There are thought police, police academics, and a whole cultural constabulary waiting to apprehend Derrida, the scourge of orthodoxy and of the authorities, in all their guises and disguises.
Theory and policing grew up together, and the detective is the perfect paradigm of the critic, hence the popularity of crime fiction among academics, even if they don’t teach it.Yet writers and teachers have cause to fear the police. The idea of police spies goes back at least as far as the fate of Christopher Marlowe. State agents, formal and informal, have always been at work where new thought is breaking out. Modern policing has become increasingly sophisticated with technological advances. Policing the Net is an issue that entails a web of covert operations, a dragnet of electronic plods, accessing e-mail, screening messages, examining sites that might be subversive. In the wake of the BCCI crash, it was revealed that a number of British academics were being paid by the CIA through accounts held at this particular bank.
Derrida wages war against the police, or against the modern practice of policing, and in this he comes close to Walter Benjamin, because the body that most forcefully mixes what Benjamin wants to uncouple in his essay entitled ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921), the two forms of violence, conserving and founding, is the modern institution of the police. Derrida locates Benjamin’s aversion to the modern police force in its pollution of violence and presumption of power: ‘This absence of a frontier between the two types of violence, this contamination between foundation and conservation is ignoble, it is, he says, the ignominy ... of the police. For today the police are no longer content to enforce the law, and thus to conserve it; they invent it, they publish ordinances, they intervene whenever the legal situation isn’t clear to guarantee security.’
Jacques Derrida finds the police quite arresting. They make him apprehensive, since he sees them as the
To hear Derrida on the subject of the police is to eavesdrop on the confessions of a justified paranoiac:
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‘Where there are police, which is to say everywhere and even here, we can no longer discern between two types of violence, conserving and founding, and that is the ignoble, ignominious, disgusting ambiguity. The possibility, which is also to say the ineluctable necessity of the modern police force ruins, in sum, one could say deconstructs, the distinction between the two kinds of violence that nevertheless structure the discourse that Benjamin calls a new critique of violence.’ Thus the police become the law rather than merely serving it: ‘Right away there are police and the police legislate, not content to enforce a law that would have had no force before the police. This iterability inscribes conservation in the essential structure of foundation.’ Derrida endorses Benjamin’s argument that in modern democracies the police degenerate more than in absolute monarchies, because they are not easily or immediately identifiable. They are not so much at the door as on the line, online, all-seeing and perniciously pervasive: ‘By definition, the police are present or represented everywhere that there is force of law. They are present, sometimes invisible but always effective, wherever there is preservation of the social order.’ There is even, Derrida maintains, a police academy, or a policing of the academy: ‘There is a police that is brutally and rather “physically” repressive (but the police is never purely physical;) and there are more sophisticated police that are more “cultural” or “spiritual”, more noble. But every institution destined to enforce the law is a police. An academy is a police ... There is no society without police even if one can always dream of forms of police that would be more sublime, more refined or less vulgar.’
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Policing is something we all do, as critics, editors, and translators. Close reading and its ostensible alternative, contextual reading, are both ways of policing the text. As Derrida frames it: ‘Everything comes down to one of those reading exercises with magnifying glass which calmly claim to lay down the law, in police fashion indeed. – [“close reading”] can always ... become police-like ... It can also arm you against that other (secret) police which, on the pretext of delivering you from the chains of writing and reading (chains which are always, illiterately, reduced to the alphabet), hastily lock you up in a supposed outside of the text: the pre-text of perception, of living speech, of bare hands, of living creation, of real history, etc. Pretext indeed to bash on with the most hackneyed, crude, and tired of discourses. And it’s also with supposed non-text, naked pre-text, the immediate, that they try to intimidate you, to subject you to the oldest, most dogmatic, most sinisterly authoritarian of programs, to the most massive mediatizing machines.’ To paraphrase a famous deconstructive formulation, there is nothing outside the police, and so, while one is entitled to be suspicious and vigilant, one cannot be simply anti-police, and certainly not from the perspective of the university, which is merely another ‘more refined’ law enforcement agency. In our present post-modern culture, PC Plod has a Power PC. No longer the bobby on the beat, or the cruiser on the street, today’s model is the space cadet, the phantom surfer riding on the crest of a crime wave of his own making. (This piece was first written in 1998 by Professor Maley)