Jerome Roos, ROAR Magazine
Last week, the Governor
of Missouri declared a state of emergency and deployed the National Guard to
the St Louis suburb of Ferguson to quell a fortnight of civil unrest following
the police murder of the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. It was the first
time since the Los Angeles riots of 1992, after the severe police beating of
another black man, Rodney King, and the Battle of Seattle during the WTO trade
negotiations seven years later, that the army had been called in to restore
public order within US borders.
But while images of
phalanxes of militarized riot police firing teargas and rubber bullets at
mostly peaceful protesters have captured the attention of the world, the media
circus surrounding the “riot” actually risks obscuring a largely unseen
everyday reality that simmers just beneath the surface. For African Americans,
the real racist violence resides not in the spectacle but in the mundane; not
in the headlines but in between. As Walter Benjamin so pointedly observed at
the height of the persecution in Nazi Germany, “the tradition of the oppressed
teaches us that the ‘state of exception’ in which we live is the rule.”
It should be clear by now
that the Ferguson riots do not appear in a political vacuum. The militarization
of police, the institutionalization of racism, the criminalization of the poor,
the systematic marginalization of African Americans and other minorities, the
rampant intensification of historical patterns of inequality, the spatial
segregation along the lines of class and color, the impunity with which the
forces of the law kill, maim and humiliate the dispossessed — these are all
symptoms of a series of political and economic trends, some long-term and
historical, others more recent.
Clearly, then, what
happens in Ferguson does not stay in Ferguson — and the state of emergency
declared by Governor Nixon merely serves to highlight a social emergency that
has been quietly brewing for decades. Faced with a long, grinding history of
racist oppression on the one hand, going back to the days of slavery and
segregation, and a more recent pattern in police militarization and economic
marginalization on the other, Ferguson has as much to do with long-established
patterns of white supremacism and racist policing as it has with the
consequences of state power and the neoliberal imaginary run amok.
A Global and Permanent
State of Exception
It is precisely in this
confluence of temporalities that the state of emergency reveals its true
colors. Walter Benjamin, before meeting his tragic end as a Jewish refugee from
Nazi Germany, insisted repeatedly upon the centrality of the Ausnahmezustand,
or ‘state of exception’, to sovereign power. Today, the most influential
theorist of the concept is the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who —
building on the adage by the Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt: “sovereign is he who
decides upon the state of exception” — has crafted a refined analysis and a
dystopian vision of the myriad ways in which the state of exception has become
not just a technique of government, but its very logic.
“Faced with the
unstoppable progression of what has been called a ‘global civil war’,” Agamben
writes, “the state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant
paradigm of government in contemporary politics [and] has today reached its
maximum worldwide deployment.” From Fallujah to Ferguson, the similarities run
deeper than the military attire or the heavy weaponry of the troops on the
ground. Both places appear at a threshold of indistinction between law and
lawlessness, order and disorder — a space of anomie in which human life exists
largely at the mercy of the soldiers and policemen who effectively act as a
sovereign power upon it.
Here, in this permanent
and globalized state of exception, the classical division between public and
private increasingly begins to blur. In Fallujah, private contractors were
brought in to keep public order, while the US military — at the expense of the
public debt — made sure to protect private interests around the clock. In
Ferguson, private property is protected from looting while the public is shot
at even while standing on their private porches. America wastes public money
waging foreign wars for private gain, while at the same time allowing private
interests to directly fund local police departments — now armed with the
surplus weaponry of these same wars — to maintain public order at home.
Security becomes the overarching concern of government, even as government
almost always defers to private interests in slashing security when it is social.
Between Democracy and
Absolutism
One of the key features
of neoliberal governmentality, then, is that it insists on combining a politics
of absolute liberalism in world markets with an increasingly authoritarian
paradigm in national government. Even as capital flows freely across borders,
rivers of migrants and refugees are either blocked and diverted or dammed and
detained. Even as the barriers to global commerce are smashed with a religious
zealotry reminiscent of the early crusaders, new walls are erected everywhere
to keep out the dark-skinned and the poor. Even as liberal “visionaries” press
for universal integration, the global reality remains one of systematic
exclusion. Where wealth concentrates in ever fewer hands, where gated
communities mushroom amidst the squalor of a planet of slums, the vaunted
“democracy” of the global marketplace finally meets the totalitarian ambitions
of the nation state. “The state of exception,” Agamben writes, “appears as the
threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism.”
Given this growing
indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism, war and peace, order and
disorder, it should perhaps not come as a surprise that the events in Ferguson
have resonated so strongly in a faraway occupied warzone like Gaza, where the
absolutism of Israeli sovereignty is brutally brought down on life — to the
point where Israel has even determined the exact allowed calorie intake for the
strip’s 1.6 million inhabitants: 2.279 per day, to be precise. Of course,
Ferguson is not Gaza (at least not yet), but there is an undeniable resonance
between the two struggles, and it is not limited to Palestinian solidarity
tweets for Ferguson protesters or practical advise on how to deal with tear gas
and advancing police lines.
Much more than this,
Palestinian/African American solidarity is the explicit subaltern expression of
a recognition that not only the struggle but also the enemy is common. From the
brand of tear gas to the assault tactics of the riot squads, Gaza and Ferguson are
closer than many would feel comfortable to admit. Investigations have revealed
that US law enforcement maintains close ties with its Israeli counterparts, and
two of the four police forces deployed to Ferguson received their training in
crowd control in Israel. Running an occupation is serious business, and US
police departments have much to learn from their Israeli counterparts if they
are to maintain America’s internal spaces of segregation in an era of deepening
inequalities and growing racial tensions.
The Ghetto as an Open-Air
Prison Camp
For Agamben, the state of
exception finds its topological expression in the camp, which “delimits a space
in which the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not
atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical
sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign.” For those on the wrong
side of the war on terror, the camps are called Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay.
For African Americans, the camp is prison — or, increasingly often, the labor
camp. If current incarceration trends continue, one in three black males born
today can expect to spend at least part of their lives behind bars. While only
12 percent of the US population is black, African American males make up 40
percent of the total 2.1 million prison population. More black men are in
prison today than were enslaved before the Civil War in 1850.
As the state of exception
becomes generalized, however, the boundaries between inside and outside begin
to blur and the two gradually blend into one another. Bit by bit, the logic of
the camp spills over into society at large. Gaza, which has been described even
by UK Prime Minister David Cameron as an open-air prison camp, is perhaps the
clearest contemporary expression of this phenomenon. But similar (though much
less extreme) processes are afoot in the US and elsewhere, as spatial
segregation becomes the hallmark of the neoliberal urban geography. Today, the
ghettos of Detroit and the outer neighborhoods of St Louis, like the townships
of Johannesburg and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, increasingly take on the
form of open-air prison camps, in which the police permanently act as temporary
sovereign, and in which poor blacks — and male youths in particular — are
simply considered free game for the racist fantasies of white officers.
Patterns of Neoliberal
Segregation
The contemporary nature
of the ghetto and the slum as open-air prison camps is closely connected to
deepening patterns of racial inequality and spatial segregation. Far from
abolished, in many respects segregation — cultural and material alike — has
only deepened as a result of the neoliberal restructuring of the economy. Not
coincidentally, the state of Missouri, the city of St Louis and especially its
restive suburb of Ferguson are among the clearest examples of these patterns of
neoliberal apartheid in the US today. In 1970, only 1 percent of Ferguson’s
inhabitants was black. By 2010, that share had risen to nearly 70 percent. The
transformation of the town’s racial composition can be ascribed to a white
exodus — partly the result of a collapse of the working class as a result of
de-industrialization, with white workers moving away from the Midwest
“Rustbelt”; and partly the result of an influx of cheap credit drawing a
seemingly upwardly mobile white middle class out towards the suburbs.
As housing prices fell,
black residents moved into the neighborhood, and pre-established local
inequalities (between rental homes and self-owned properties, for instance)
were only further accentuated. Meanwhile, the taxable base of local government
eroded, leading to reduced budgets for public services and law enforcement. The
Ferguson police department, of course, remained almost exclusively white, with
obvious consequences for the black newcomers in the neighborhood: according to
FBI data, 92 percent of people arrested in Ferguson on charges of “disorderly
conduct” are black, while African Americans account for 86 percent of all
vehicle stops. Far from protecting the peace, undertrained and overarmed police
officers now consider it their job to keep a marginalized population in check
through continuous harassment and accusations of petty crime. These are all
mechanisms of social control.
In neoliberal America,
questions of race and class have thus become nearly impossible to disentangle,
and it is precisely at the intersection of the two that the neoliberal
counterrevolution has struck African American families extra hard. Economic
data shows that the gap in household income between blacks and whites has not
been reduced since the end of de jure segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, while
wealth disparities have only been deepened by the housing crisis of 2007-’08
and the subsequent recession, which affected African American households
particularly badly (not least as a result of the racial profiling in Wall
Street’s predatory lending practices). Today, 45 percent of black children grow
up in areas of concentrated poverty, and the schools they attend are more
segregated than they were in 1980. As class disparities are accentuated, so are
the deeply intermeshed racial inequalities.
The Destituent Power of a
Political Riot
For African Americans,
therefore, the state of emergency has always been a permanent one — it did not
start with the shooting of Michael Brown and it certainly will not end with
Governor Nixon withdrawing the National Guard from Ferguson. What is different
this time around is that the people rose up in defiance of the police murder of
yet another young black man, and chose to answer the legal violence of the
subsequent police crackdown with an extra-legal violence of their own.
Suddenly, their mundane acts of everyday resistance coalesced into a collective
act of refusal, giving rise to a political riot. And it is precisely this
combination of broad-based peaceful protest with a refusal to respect the
violence of the law that has instilled such fear in the halls of power.
The reason the
authorities fear Ferguson is, first and foremost, the risk of “contamination”
(or what we would call resonance). As the Rodney King riots of 1992 showed, a
single spark can quickly set ablaze the dessicated prairies of America’s
supposedly post-racial urban constellation. But there is a deeper reason why
the authorities fear Ferguson, which is that sovereign power — which stands at
once within and without the legal framework, capable of both enforcing and
suspending the rule of law — cannot tolerate the existence of a pure form of
violence outside the law. As Walter Benjamin noted in his Critique of Violence,
“the existence of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence,
furnishes proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of
unalloyed violence by man, is possible.” The fear, then, is that this local
uprising could reveal a latent revolutionary potential in the very belly of the
beast.
But even if this revolutionary
potential is never fully realized, the movement towards it does appear to
embody what Agamben would call a form of destituent power — a power that stands
completely outside the law and that, by acting to dismantle sovereign power
rather than to reform it, has the capacity to diminish the ability of the state
to resort to violence and, in the final analysis, to abolish the cycle of
law-making and law-preserving violence altogether. “On the breaking of this
cycle maintained by mythical forms of law,” Water Benjamin once wrote, still
full of hope, “on the suspension of law with all the forces on which it depends
as they depend on it, finally therefore in the abolition of state power, a new
historical epoch is founded.”
