[D66] Bourgeois modernity gives us the monster and the police

[R.O.]

https://www.radicalphilosophyarchive.com/issue-files/rp185_commentary_neocleous_monster_and_police.pdf

The monster and the police
Dexter to Hobbes
Mark Neocleous

‘The police view their position as marking the boundaries of the social 
order’, notes Peter Manning. They seek to stand ‘between the higher and 
lower, the sacred and the profane, the clean and the dirty’.10 
Constantly ‘treading water in human waste’,11 the police see their task 
as keeping the streets clean from the ilth of humanity. The ‘clearing 
up’ of crimes is associated with the ‘cleaning up’ of the streets. ‘The 
idea that crimes can be cleared up reasserts a belief in a world where 
disorder can be brushed away to restore structural purity and where 
incongruity can be cleaned up to re-create a perfectly ordered 
universe.’12 This is why the same ethnographies constantly note that 
police officers routinely speak of members of what they see as the 
criminal, dangerous and miserable classes as ‘social dirt’, ‘slag’, 
‘polluted’ and ‘scum’.13 The dirt in question is connected to the fact 
that the same persons are regarded as ‘refuse’, ‘waste’ and ‘garbage’. 
The police regard themselves as ‘as a kind of uniformed garbage-men’, 
just  like  the  monstrous  serial  killer  but  in  the  garb  of  the 
state:  taking  out  the  trash.  (And  if  we  take  Foucault’s 
reference  to  the  figure  of  the  ‘villain–monster–madman’  seriously 
  enough  we  might  add  that  people  considered  mad  were  once 
dealt with by being placed into ‘loony-bins’.)

Bourgeois  modernity  gives  us  the  monster  and  the  police.