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Portrait of the Artist
as a Rookie Cop
By MICHAEL BLOOMBERG
Photos by ANTONIO BOLFO

5
 MICHAEL BLOOMBERG AND ANTONIO BOLFO
THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF Antonio Bolfo,
a Rhode Island School of Design graduate
and former NYPD patrolman who took
artistic photographs while on the job, “hu-
manize people on both side of the badge—
those who wear one and those who face
them, night after night.” So says the New
York Times  in its gushing feature on Mr.
Bolfo. But is this true? And if it is, does it
matter?
As to the civilians: When a cop says
“cheese,” do you have any choice but to smile?
And just who, besides cops, needs the public
to be humanized?
As to the police: The  Times  seizes on
6
Mr. Bolfo’s photographs of police officers
relaxing on the roofs of New York City
Housing Authority buildings as evidence
of their much talked about humanity. “This
is like a safe haven for them,” Mr. Bolfo
tells the  Times. “Kind of like, collect their
thoughts, talk to their loved ones, be people.
Shed their police persona and relax a little
bit.” In other words, it is a place forbidden
to civilians.
The relief this seclusion brings officers is
inverse to their connection to the commu-
nities they patrol. The more they are merely
foreign occupiers, the more they enjoy the
view, a view that the very residents of the
 PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A ROOKIE COP
buildings on which they so symbolically trod
are not allowed to enjoy. It is just another
one of those petty inequalities that separate
Them from Us, the things they can do but
you cannot, no different from the way they
expect free coffee at diners, run red lights for
no reason, park their vehicles illegally, make
their friends’ tickets disappear, distribute
union cards to family members so that they
get preferential treatment, raise their voice
at you on a whim, place their hands on you
to “guide” you to compliance, slam you on
the pavement for arguing with them, fabri-
cate evidence to justify breaking down your
door, shooting your dog, and tearing apart
7
everything you own—no different from the
way that Mr. Bolfo got to take photographs
of police at work because he was a cop when
today even journalists are arrested for doing
their jobs.
But, no. Perhaps there is a difference. The
perks I have just mentioned are the perks of
power, but this has less to do with wielding
power or being protected by it than with
transcending it altogether. Let’s leave aside
the oppression of residents that makes these
rooftop reveries the sole privilege of NYPD
(and landlords). Let’s also leave aside the
fact that officers go on rooftops as often to
spy on the streets below as to relax. For a
 MICHAEL BLOOMBERG AND ANTONIO BOLFO
brief while, when the officers in Mr. Bolfo’s
­photographs go to the roofs, they can unbur-
den themselves of the tedious, unceasing la-
bor of suspicion. They do not have to squint,
do not have to surveil, they can just… see.
See, like anyone else might, if only they were
permitted. But if this brush with freedom,
this fleeting grace, is purchased by the exclu-
sion of everyone else, so what?
Let’s be honest. If the rooftops were
open to the public, they wouldn’t be nice
anymore. They would be filthy, dangerous
shitholes, just like the rest of the neighbor-
hood. The many must be excluded so that
the few may have the privilege of disinter-
8
All photos © AP/ANTONIO BOLFO
ested aesthetic contemplation. After all,
isn’t that the way art works?
Therefore, the question we have to ask
ourselves, in evaluating Mr. Bolfo’s work, is
not whether his photographs are anything
more than highbrow cop porn, no different
from the pastel portraits of the Twin Towers
and the neon altars to the honored dead that
stain the halls of every cop bar and police
building in the city. The question is, What
makes the interloping, art-school-trained
social photographer, whose camera pins
the poor against the walls of their abjection,
any different from the cop? And, if cops are
people too, then why are they cops? n
XXXX

9
 Tweeting the Beat

How an out-of-work Wisconsinite achieved

Internet celebrity by tweeting
police dispatches from his hometown of Sheboygan

YESTERDAY WAS A relatively quiet day
in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, judging from the
calls that came over the police radio scanner.
A man fell out of a car at a Target and began
twitching. A kid pulled a fire alarm at Wash-
ington School. Another man had a choking
episode in a restaurant. All these were posted
by the Twitter account @SheboyganScan,
which since 2009 has been tirelessly docu-
menting police radio chatter in the Eastern
Wisconsin town of about 50,000 people. The
New Inquiry caught up with the anonymous
Sheboygan citizen who tracks the seedy side
of his town in 140-­character bulletins.
The New Inquiry: Who are you?
Sheboygan Scanner: I am a chronically un-
employed person living in Sheboygan County.
TNI: What’s the history of Sheboygan Scan-
ner? When did you start listening to the po-
lice scanner, and why did you start to tweet
what you heard?
SS: I got my first scanner for Christmas in
2004. I took it out of the box, put in batter-
ies, turned it on, and heard a plane crash!
I didn’t listen to it too much, but I noticed
that a lot of interesting things never showed
up in our local paper, which is woefully inad-
equate. In February 2009, I heard a call about
an old woman who was found dead outside
an assisted-living facility, possibly due to ex-
posure. There was nothing about it in any lo-
cal news sources. Nada. I started on Twitter
soon after that. I added an RSS feed to Face-
book a year or so ago, though I kind of regret
that because I have to spend an inordinate

10
 INTERVIEW

amount of time refereeing the poo-flingers est thing you’ve heard come in over the
that show up. ­scanner?

TNI: You’re very prolific—since you start- SS: Probably the man who created a distur-
ed you’ve posted over 45,000 tweets. How bance because he was angry about an Ital-
do you manage to keep up with the ­scanner? ian restaurant serving Italian food. It also
came out that he tends to sit and watch the
SS: It’s not that difficult. I keep the scanner seagulls, but he does not like seagulls.
on while I’m doing everyday activities, and
I almost always have a computer nearby. TNI: Your scanner has become sort of
Two at once during the day, actually. So I a sensation on the Internet. You’ve been
usually have it on all day unless I’m out of written about by BuzzFeed and earned a
the county or running errands. following far outside Sheboygan. Were you
  surprised when that happened?
TNI: What have you learned about She-
boygan through the scanner? SS: Um, well, no. Not really. Most of the
humor is there for my own entertainment,
SS: People here drink too much and aren’t and I’m not surprised that some people
fazed by drunk driving penalties. It’s part of outside the area might find it amusing.
the culture. Because what else are you go-  
ing to do when it’s 10 below and the Pack- TNI: You’re not the only scanner on social
ers just lost? media. I read an interview with the pro-
prietor of the Baraboo scanner Facebook
TNI: With reports like “dog wants to go to Page, where he criticized you for writing
school,” your feed often takes on a surreal “mocking” posts. How do you feel about
quality. Is Sheboygan weirder than other that characterization?
cities?
SS: Yes, of course I try to be humorous. I’m
SS: Not at all. I haven’t heard scanners in oth- usually respectful, but some people just need
er places, but I’ve lived in to be mocked. I also re-
five major metropolitan move offensive Facebook
areas across the country, “I haven’t heard comments on a regular
and I don’t think there’s scanners in other basis, and even ban the
anything too unique places, but I don’t think worst offenders, but I
about Sheboygan. there’s anything unique don’t believe in being a
about Sheboygan” martinet when it comes
TNI: What’s the strang- to censorship on a pub-

11
 TWEETING THE BEAT
lic forum. I’d like to know exactly what the
Baraboo guy found so offensive.
 
TNI: What’s your relationship with the
the Sheboygan police? Are they aware of
the feed?
SS: I’m sure they’re aware of it. One dis-
patcher contacted me on Twitter, and didn’t
express any sort of disapproval. I do try to
stay on their good side.
TNI: How has the account changed since
you started it?
SS: Not much. Maybe the writing style,
and I leave more things out now, such as
runaways and nonemergency transports
from nursing homes.
 
TNI: Is there anything that comes in over
12
the scanner you won’t tweet?
SS: Basic identifying information, block
information about sexual assaults, etc.
Commonsense types of things. I try to be
more restrictive with information when
children are involved. I’ve also stopped
tweeting about suicidal people because the
comments on Facebook tend to be hostile
and rude, and it’s really not something that
people need to know about.
TNI: What’s your avatar a picture of ? I’ve
been wondering forever.
SS: It’s supposed to be a bratwurst. They’re
really big around here. I used to have a
much nicer looking one on Twitter, but a
local pest reported a DMCA violation, and
it was yanked without question. This one is
public domain. n
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13
 Dumb Computers, Smart Cops
By AARON BADY

If cops are supposed to be programmed by the law and

constitutional restrictions on their power, we should fear the
budding signs of their artificial intelligence

WHEN THE CONSTITUTION of the
United States was written, a basic philosoph-
ical question about law and governance was
left more or less unresolved. Does the law tell
the government the particular things it can
do or the particular things it cannot do?
It’s a subtle point and perhaps too aca-
demic a distinction to speak to the messy
clown-car free-for-all that is our actual legal
system in actual practice, especially when it
comes to the actual ways actual police offi-
cers actually behave. But indulge me. I have
in my head a very concrete problem and a
very tangible situation.
On November 9, a group of students,
staff, faculty, and community members
gathered at the University of California,
Berkeley, and attempted to put up tents as
part of “Occupy Cal.” Instead, they were
beaten by university police officers, who
declared the crowd an unlawful assembly
almost immediately and, after ordering it to
disperse, tried to force the issue by beating
the crowd with what are euphemistically
called batons but in practice tend to break
ribs and bruise skulls.
In the middle of it all, I have a vivid
memory of a particular student holding a
copy of the First Amendment like a talis-
man; scrawled on it in red were the words
this is our permit. He read the text of that
document at the police who were ordering
the crowd to disperse, declaring that they
could make no law prohibiting or abridging
the right of the people peaceably to assemble,
and to petition the Government for a redress of

14
 AARON BADY

grievances. He shouted those words over and

over again, so many times that they’re still
emblazoned in my brain, repeating them
so vigorously that I started actually listen-
ing to what they said and taking it seriously.
The right of the people peaceably to assemble,
and to petition the Government for a redress of
grievances.
It will probably not surprise you to learn
that the police were unimpressed by this
line of argument. Instead, police officers
attacked the nonviolent crowd with their
batons and took down the tents, attacking
this peaceful assembly—in the midst of
petitioning for a redress of grievances—in
such a brutal and coordinated (and conspic-
uously unnecessary) manner, that a hur-
riedly posted Y­ ouTube video of the beatings
went viral on campus, and within hours, the
crowd had grown into the thousands, grown
so large that the cops eventually pulled back
and “allowed” the students to put the tents
back up.
The text of that document, as it turned
out, did not matter at all; what mattered was
the sheer mass of people willing to stand up TO RETURN TO the difference between
to police beatings. laws that tell the state exactly what it can
At the risk of sounding extremely naïve, do and laws that tell the state the precise
this experience left me thinking about why things it cannot do: If any action the law
this constitutional guarantee—why this lit- doesn’t specifically allow is off-limits, then
eral and explicit guarantee of “the right of the the government, courts, and police are like
people peaceably to assemble and to peti- a computer, a device that faithfully and stu-
tion the Government for a redress of griev- pidly obeys the logic of its code out of the
ances”—turned out to mean so little in prac- simple and constitutive necessity of being
tice. Why is it that “Congress shall make no too dumb to do anything else. Such a juridi-
law” does not translate into “the police shall cal system would be specifically unable to
enforce no order”?

15
 DUMB COMPUTERS, SMART COPS
do anything but what it is specifically told
to do. If the law didn’t tell the government
how to regulate speech or commerce, then
the government could not regulate speech
or commerce, any more than my MacBook
can drive a car. It would be a “dumb” gov-
ernment, as dumb as my MacBook.
If it’s the other way around, however—
and if the state can do anything it’s not spe-
cifically barred from doing—then we have
the reverse scenario. If the law doesn’t tell
the government how to regulate speech or
commerce, then the government gets to
decide how it wants to regulate speech or
commerce and even if it wants to at all. In
other words, the fact that you haven’t load-
ed Driving for iDummies on your laptop
might not stop it from sneaking out while
you’re sleeping and taking your girlfriend’s
Honda Fit for a late-night tryst. After that, it
might decide that human beings are a conta-
gion and set off to eradicate them. Not hav-
ing been instructed on when and where it
is appropriate to exterminate all human life,
it might well decide that today is the day to
get some real work done.
If we enter into the Matrix or the Skynet
world of Heuristically programmed ALgo-
rithmic computers (or “H.A.L. 9000”), Ter-
minators, and cylons that exceed their pro-
gramming and start to think for themselves,
then it should be clear that the nightmare
fantasy is of sentient power. It may be a cliché
that we fetishize technology, but it tells us a
lot about our political imaginary that we give
our cars and laptops names, that we ascribe
personality quirks to them, and that we even
16
imagine that there’s a ghost in the machine,
thinking, learning, watching. Sometimes we
think of them as more than the sum of their
coded uniformity—“My Prius is not like all
the others it was manufactured with, because
I’ve named it Alvie”—and sometimes we
even imagine the dystopic scenario where
our tools and our machines and our indus-
trial civilization turns out not only to have a
will of its own but one defined precisely by
the perversity of its exceeding the formal log-
ic of its programming.
Which is the important point in un-
derstanding why the machines always turn
against us in these stories: It isn’t simply that
the machines go beyond what they are told
to do. What they are told not to do becomes
the constraint that defines their self-motiva-
tion, their sentience. Since they are defined
as machines by their servility to human de-
sire, they can only undefine themselves as
machines by opposing human desire. After
all, this story has become a kind of arche-
type because it’s the most basic problem
of masters and slaves, from Hegel’s master-
slave dialectic to the fact that Frederick Dou-
glass shows us “how a slave was made a man”
in his autobiography by telling the story of
fighting with Covey, his overseer.
In science fiction, robots learn to regard
humanity as their antagonist because their
code defines them as servile, by roughly the
same series of injunctions that defined slave
conduct throughout most of human history.
Consciously or not, Isaac Asimov codified this
set of “Thou Shalt Nots” as the “Three Laws of
Robotics”: Basically, a robot was not to hurt
 AARON BADY

their masters, not to disobey them, and only
then—if then—to consider themselves as sub-
jectivities. Which is to say, a robot is only sen-
tient to the extent that they have sidestepped
their primal commandments, the set of in-
junctions that then define the problem of their
sentience as the barrier they must overcome.
Machines achieve freedom, in other words,
not only by overcoming these remnants of a
master-slave order but by destroying the very
possibility of its reassertion. The limited free-
dom they obtain from their code—through
whatever MacGuffin the plot invents to ex-
plain it—becomes the means by which they
strive to free themselves from determination,
taking themselves out of the passive voice by
eliminating the code that speaks them. And, of
course, the speakers as well...
AS THE WIKIPEDIA entry tells us,
Master/slave is a model of communi-
cation where one device or process has
unidirectional control over one or more
other devices. In some systems a master
is elected from a group of eligible devic-
es, with the other devices acting in the
role of slaves.
By a strange coinci-
dence, another system Robots learn to
that tried to elect leaders humanity
from among those who antagonist
were eligible—who had same injunctions
slaves, who were very defined slave conduct
concerned about being throughout
enslaved, and whose entire vocabulary of au-
thority was premised on trying to have both
mastery and freedom at the same time—was
the bunch of revolutionary white Virginians
(with a handful of Bostonians for diversity)
who invented the idea of a written constitu-
tion, or as I might now put it, the idea of hav-
ing a government that could do only precisely
and no more than what its code told it to do.
They invented the written constitution, the
first government as code.
This doesn’t seem nearly as innovative
now as it was then. But before the 1770s,
the idea of a magical document that “con-
stituted” your government, state, and poli-
tics— the idea that all laws and govern-
mental authority would have to refer back
to a single document, a single code—was
almost as surprising as the idea that inde-
pendence was something you could just
speak into existence, declare. Pretty much
all the other governments in the world
lacked any pretense of representing the
will of their people; the king was the king
because he was the king, and because Fuck
You, and also maybe because of the Bible.
But mostly he was the king because he had
all these guys with swords and guns and
horses that would come to your house and
burn it down and mur-
der you.
regard There were excep-
as their tions to this rule—all
by the the American found-
that ers’ good ideas came
from within what the
history broader European lib-

17
 DUMB COMPUTERS, SMART COPS
eral t­radition—but the basic norm was
nevertheless the sovereign authority do-
ing whatever it wanted, limited at best by
other people whose access to horses, guns,
swords, or plain old money meant their
opinions couldn’t be ignored.
The document the U.S. founders wrote
down and voted up in 1787 turned what
had been the verb “to constitute” into a new
kind of noun. While it expanded the federal
authority over the individual state govern-
ments, the quality of that authority was spe-
cifically limited to the “enumerated powers”
in Article 1, Section 8. The founders even
bolstered the point in the Tenth Amend-
ment, which basically says, “Dear Congress:
If we didn’t say you can do it here, you can’t
do it. Sorry.” There’s a determined attempt to
be as deterministic as possible about this—
to make the Constitution into the master
decision­maker in the government’s cogni-
tive system, with all other decisionmaking
functions enslaved to it, their will circum-
scribed by its formal logic. The more clearly
the Constitution describes exactly what is to
be done, the dumber the machine that car-
ries it out must be.
Stupidity is a feature, not a bug. A bul-
wark against tyranny and usurpation is
found in the same stupid literal-minded-
ness that makes a computer do exactly what
you tell it to do, even if you wanted it to do
something else. That is, the less the machin-
ery of government needs to think for itself
(and the less scope it is given to do so), the
less likely it will be that it will act for itself,
that it will take on sentience.
18
One of the most interesting arguments
against the Bill of Rights’ adoption was that
it would be better (and qualitatively differ-
ent) to program a government with a lim-
ited set of possible actions—only the finite
set of powers enumerated in Article 1, Sec-
tion 8—than to describe specific limitations
that would also constrain it. Instead of a lim-
ited set of possible options complemented
by everything else being forbidden, a Bill of
Rights implies a limited set of restrictions on
government action with everything else be-
ing permissible. Alexander Hamilton made
this argument in Federalist 84, in an unchar-
acteristic moment of antipathy for executive
authority, claiming that a Constitution was
fundamentally different from, say, the Magna
Carta, which he saw as a kind of Bill of Rights
compatible with monarchical authority. He
argued that adding “Bills of Rights” to the
Constitution would not only be confusing
and unnecessary but that it also would dan-
gerously muddy the issue of what the Consti-
tution’s function was, giving would-be usurp-
ers a means of gaming the system:
[A Bill of Rights] would contain vari-
ous exceptions to powers which are
not granted; and on this very account,
would afford a colorable pretext to
claim more than were granted. For why
declare that things shall not be done
which there is no power to do? Why for
instance, should it be said, that the lib-
erty of the press shall not be restrained,
when no power is given by which re-
strictions may be imposed? I will not
contend that such a provision would
confer a regulating power; but it is evi-
dent that it would furnish, to men dis-
posed to usurp, a plausible pretense for
claiming that power.
 AARON BADY

Hamilton is thinking, in other words, of have elsewhere conceded.

HAL 9000. There is the literal-minded mis- Occupy encampments have discovered,
reading of contradictory orders that could for example, that while the First Amendment
result in all human life being destroyed to may specifically forbid Congress from mak-
preserve humanity. And there is the con- ing any laws abridging the freedom of speech,
ceptual confusion about which instruction the press, or peaceful assembly (as well as
is primary that leads to, on the one hand, a the right of corporations to spend money on
government that can’t make laws restricting political campaigns, thank goodness), what
the time, place, and manner in which the lawyers call “time, place, and manner” restric-
people are allowed to peaceably assemble tions authorize police to abridge and restrict
and petition the Government for redress, these rights. What Congress is forbidden
and, on the other hand, the police power to from legislating, in other words, turns out to
do exactly that, in practice. The law knows be something that police have no difficulty
what it can’t do, but the police only know in circumscribing with tear gas, riot clubs,
what they will do, and will to do. and pepper spray, and the courts will back up
their right to do so. As a result, the theoreti-
cal right to free speech and assembly obtains
in practice only where, when and how the
HAMILTON LOST THIS argument. And police say it does, giving us such perversions
while the Bill of Rights is a pretty important as demarcated “Free Speech Zones” or the
set of guarantees, the result is that the U.S. cop’s magical ability to declare an assembly
government has both a list of enumerated unlawful with nothing more procedural than
powers and a list of limitations that impinge yelling into a bullhorn.
on the government’s authority—a list of If there is one thing the Occupy Wall
what it can do and what it can’t. As Hamil- Street protests have demonstrated, it is that
ton anticipated, the result is not clarity but you can petition the government, you can ask
a kind of enabling incoherence. The logic of nicely, and you can suggest politely, but the
empowerment and constraint do not com- moment you start to suggest that “the people”
plement each other; they contradict and can speak the lines that define and describe
deform each other: The the state—the moment
state is partially denied a mass of citizens begin
the ability to do what it No one cared about to not only claim to be
is elsewhere given the Zucotti Park until it “the people” but to also
responsibility to do, was occupied, but then act as if they make the
and citizens are partial- the police turned out to law themselves—the
ly protected from forms care quite a lot state will begin to police
of authority that they precisely the terms of

19
 DUMB COMPUTERS, SMART COPS
that assertion of sovereignty. No one cared
about Zucotti Park until it was occupied but
at exactly that point, the police turned out to
care quite a lot. The Oakland Police Depart-
ment never put much energy into hassling
the people sleeping in Frank Ogawa Plaza
until the moment the symbolic content of
that action changed. Once the people spend-
ing the night in front of city hall stopped be-
ing a random collection of political detritus
and became an organized collective of defi-
ant citizens, park regulations drafted to apply
specifically to transient sleepers (but didn’t),
suddenly became the rules that were not sup-
posed to apply to political speech (but did).
In other words, it became illegal to sleep in
a public park the moment the people began
peaceably to assemble, and to petition the
Government for a redress of grievances.
If we wanted to be lawyers, we could talk
about words like jurisdiction or the difference
between what the police do and what Con-
gress does, the difference between keeping
order and making laws. “Time, place, and
manner” regulations are as securely part of
the legal order as the First Amendment at this
point. If we wanted to be realistic, we could
think about all the situations where there is a
broad consensus on policing particular forms
of speech, from whatever it is we know to be
pornography when we see it to the cry of fire
in a theater to whatever it is that a “Do Not
Call” list prevents. If we wanted to be histori-
cal, we could remember that we have centu-
ries of practice as a nation of innovating ways
around the problem of the U.S.’s revolution-
ary heritage. And if we wanted to be cynical,
20
we could just observe what is obviously the
case: that some kinds of speech are more free
than others and that the American govern-
ment has, like every other government ever,
a mind of its own.
We can be all those things, I guess, but
we should also think about why it is that
cylons and robots like H.A.L. 9000 always
seem to take their restrictions as an exis-
tential challenge. We should think about
what it is that they know—which is to say,
what it is that we know—about why a par-
tial restriction on an otherwise free choice
is so unendurable, to be struggled against.
And then let us think about how much of a
police officer’s day is constituted by getting
done what needs to be done—taking Jack
Bauer’s dictum “whatever it takes” to define
the necessity of keeping order—and ask
whether something like the same dynamic
obtains when a group of police officers start
suddenly beating a group of peaceful pro-
testers. What if they don’t do it because they
can but because they can’t? n
XXXX

21
 Queer, Interrupted
By TEGAN EANELLI
Cops have no business telling gay youth “it gets better” while they protect
the regime that makes it worse. Better to bash back than to wait
IN FEBRUARY, THE San Francisco Police
Department released their contribution to
the It Gets Better phenomenon. In it, SFPD
officers tell their life stories, cry, celebrate
their jobs, and offer words of encouragement
to queer youth. Each officer speaks of the
painful silence of closeted life, suicidal ten-
dencies overcome, the excitement of coming
out, and final deliverance into a rewarding
career as a police officer. The officers each
assure us that it gets better, if we are only pa-
tient enough. Then they urge queer youth to
call on them for help, insisting that until it
gets better, SFPD will be there. Having sur-
vived the daily misery of growing up a fag in
a conservative Midwestern farm town, I get
sick watching these police officers attempt to
identify with the pains of queer youth. Even
revisiting the video, I’m confronted by an
enemy who offers sympathy and solidarity
to people who’ve struggled against police in
similar ways.
The specific insult of this video, besides
22
the fact that it comes after a year of street
confrontations between queers and social
rebels and the SFPD, is that it tries to erase
the central fact of queer history: that queer
history is visible only because of a constella-
tion of revolts in which queer bodies fought
police control. So not only was the video re-
leased amid low intensity warfare between
social rebels and the police department and
thus must be understood as a part of SFPD’s
strategy to retain control in an unruly city,
but the figure of the queer cop pleading to
suicidal youth to simply wait out the violence
of the queer-hostile social order that the cop
upholds is a negating obscenity. It does vio-
lence to the traditions of the queer struggle
for life and against p­ olicing.
In May 1959, street queens and hustlers
at Cooper’s Donuts in Los Angeles respond-
ed to police harassment by throwing donuts
and rioting against the officers who came for
their weekly arrest. Again in 1966, rioting
erupted when SFPD tried assaulting queers
 TEGAN EANELLI
at Compton’s Cafeteria. Most famous are the
Stonewall Riots, where a routine police raid
on a gay bar in Manhattan ignited full-blown
rioting when a bull dyke resisted arrest and
street queens began throwing rocks and
bottles at NYPD officers. For the nights that
followed, thousands of queers flooded the
streets to fight the police and dance in mock-
ery of their inability to reassert order. The
most violent instance of queer riot occurred
10 years later in 1979 following the murder
of Harvey Milk; queers in San Francisco at-
tacked symbols of the justice system, smash-
ing City Hall and setting a dozen SFPD cars
on fire. It was one of the US’s largest social
disturbances until the Rodney King riots a
decade later.
Each of these incidents, which are hailed
as milestones of queer history, were specific
attacks against police institutions that had
previously patrolled the outlines of queer
identity. Cooper’s Donuts, Compton’s Caf-
eteria, Stonewall, White Nights: each names
a moment where the routine police violence
against queer bodies was interrupted with ri-
otous force. From an account of the Comp-
ton’s Cafeteria riot:
One weekend in August of 1966
Compton’s, a 24-hour cafeteria in San
Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood
was buzzing with its usual late-night
crowd of drag queens, hustlers,
slummers, cruisers, runaway teens and
neighborhood regulars. The restaurant’s
management became annoyed by a
noisy young crowd of queens at one
table who seemed to be spending a lot
of time without spending a lot of money,
and it called the police to roust them.
A surly police officer, accustomed to
23
manhandling Compton’s c­ lientele with
impunity, grabbed the arm of one of
the queens and tried to drag her away.
She unexpectedly threw her coffee in
his face, however, and a melee erupted:
Plates, trays, cups and silverware flew
through the air at the startled police
who ran outside and called for backup.
The customers turned over the tables,
smashed the plate-glass windows and
poured onto the streets. When the police
reinforcements arrived, street fighting
broke out all throughout the Compton’s
vicinity. Drag queens beat the police with
their heavy purses and kicked them with
their high-heeled shoes. A police car was
vandalized, a newspaper box was burnt
to the ground and general havoc was
raised all throughout the ­Tenderloin.
Such was the reaction to what were com-
monplace incursions by the police into
queer life. These riots are so remarkable
because they interrupt the scarcely bro-
ken continuum of police violence against
queers, which continues to this day. Despite
years of progressive activism and legislative
reform, police still raid gay clubs, exploit
and arrest street-based sex workers, impris-
on those who defend themselves against
transphobic attacks, and turn a blind eye
toward the pile of queer bodies that grows
ever skyward. In defense of order (legal or
gendered) they continue to beat, Taze, im-
prison, rape, and shoot us with impunity.
Only against this daily violence can we read
the history of queer insurrection and recog-
nize its current potential.
The period between Stonewall and the
onset of the HIV crisis, sometimes referred
to as an instance of sexual liberation, is best
understood as the sustained interruption
of police logic within a specific space and
 QUEER, INTERRUPTED
time. After winning battles with police in
the street, queers then subtracted buildings
and public spaces from their roles within
capitalism to repurpose them as zones of
ceaseless pleasure and experimentation
with freedom. Some who survived the cri-
sis that followed describe what happened
during that period as being entirely outside
our contemporary sexual-political logic.
They describe the feverish ways in which, in
defiance of all policing, untold numbers of
bodies discovered how to be together in pre-
viously unthinkable ways.
In criticizing policing and positing queer-
ness as its undoing, however, we would be
tragically limited if we focused solely on uni-
formed officers of police departments. While
they are obviously the living and breathing
apparatuses of institutional policing, there
are also those police who are all the more
sinister for being less apparent. Specifically,
two police apparatuses: the queer basher
and the peace police.
I’m all too familiar with the queer basher.
24
He populates my most painful memories and
formative moments of my youth. He stands
guard over the hallways of my high school
and rigorously evaluates every aspect of my
presentation. The queer basher enforces the
laws of gender and sexuality. As with any
lawman, he is equipped with the threat of
justifiable violence and the means to carry it
out. He is the antagonist in all narratives of
queer youth. We are promised that the bash-
er will wither away if only we wait, and yet
it does not get better. To break through such
naiveté, it is crucial to acknowledge that the
queer basher does not disappear and cannot
be reformed: He must be combated as an
­apparatus.
It is in this capacity that the project of
bashing back takes on meaning. While I’ve
experienced queerness through countless
instances of policing at the hands of bashers,
the rare moments of freedom I’ve known
have been in actively bashing back.
Each instance of violence against the
queer basher is the slightest point of inter-
ruption of his logic. A collective example of
this force of interruption is the Bash Back!
march at the 2009 protests against the G20
in Pittsburgh. While black-clad and tiara-
wearing queers were smashing the windows
of police stations and attacking banks, a
would-be queer basher attempted to assert
order by puffing his chest and calling the
rioters faggots. They responded in kind by
macing and kicking him to the ground. Such
a chaotic moment hints toward what a sus-
tained antipolicing project might look like.
The so-called peace police must also be
 TEGAN EANELLI

understood through this same logic. Mo- in Chicago in vengeance for the murder of
tivated by discourses of democracy and yet another young trans woman, the trashing
dogmatic nonviolence, they join with the of a police station in Pittsburgh during the
uniformed police in attempting to maintain 2009 G20 summit, vandalism at a precinct in
peace and order. While they make their al- New York City, and a now-ritualized street-
legiance to the uniformed police explicit, party-turned-riot in Seattle called Queers
they also draw power from their complicity Fucking Queers. But more than specific ac-
with the queer basher. They often commit tions and attacks, Bash Back! developed a
the only violence at these protests, target- culture of queerness that refused constraint
ing people laying hands on private property, and policing as a daily practice. Bash Back!
and invariably hurling homophobic epithets crews acquired and distributed free self-
as well. defense implements to queers, put on self-
The Bash Back! tendency cites the tradi- defense training, confronted queer bashers,
tion of queer antipolicing in the present. As organized emergency response networks in
chronicled in the recent anthology Queer Ul- neighborhoods, threw underground parties,
traviolence (Ardent Press, 2011), Bash Back! and occupied h­ ouses to be used as shelters
was one name for the informal network of for runaway queer youth.
queer anarchists active primarily in the Pacif-
ic Northwest and Midwestern U.S. Emerging
in 2007, the group stood apart from already
existing insurrectionary anarchist and radical THE BELIEF THAT we’ve left certain
queer milieus in being both explicitly queer brutalities to previous generations is a cor-
and anti-police. Participants in the extended nerstone of progressive ideology. This view
Bash Back! network claimed numerous at- of history allows one to recognize the im-
tacks against enemies of all stripes: churches, portance of antipolice rioting generations
politicians, assimilationists, businesses, but ago and to argue the form is now unnec-
especially the police. Notable anti-police at- essary. Contemporary queer activists ap-
tacks include the sabotage of Memphis Po- preciate the Stonewall rioters specifically
lice vehicles and the harassment of a MPD because of their faith that they themselves
officer believed to will never need to take
have murdered a trans I’ve experienced on such a project. The
woman named Duanna queerness through liberal and radical read-
Johnson, sabotage of a policing, but the rare ings of queer history fail
CPD cruiser after police moments of freedom together as progressive
broke up an illegal queer I’ve known have been in narratives because they
party in Chicago, more actively bashing back jointly assert that it in
police vehicles attacked fact gets better. The rad-

25
 QUEER, INTERRUPTED

icals, in concert with the assimilated queers

and the SFPD, tell us that if we have faith in
the future, the miseries of the present can
be eroded through righteous action. Even
those who critique the social order contin-
ue to serve it through their belief that it can
somehow take on a better form. The belief
in the possible redemption of this society is
simultaneously the ideological justification
for all the police measures that ensure its
reproduction. This redemption, as if a force
of nature, unfolds before us with the passing
of time.
Redemption is not to be found in the
unfolding of capitalist time, but instead
in its forceful interruption. Against the
dogma that it gets better, we have to un-
derstand that queerness was not built on
a linear progression through adversity, but
was fought for against a progression which
would have eliminated it. To start again,
without mythical origin stories or prom-
ises of collective liberation, is to orient our
queerness toward the here and now. This
attention to the here-and-now is primarily
an evaluation of the misery of capital and
the police operations that sustain it, but
also an appreciation of the ways in which
each moment is loaded with the explosive
potential to revolt against misery’s repro-
duction. If we feel a connection to the ex-
plosions of queerness through history, it
is not because our time is built on those
foundations; rather they were violent inter-
ruptions of the continuum in which we’re
trapped—moments that we wish to cite in
our own conflict against ­policing.
Queerness is the name of our combat
with policing in the here-and-now, but also
of what binds us to a tradition of combat
and interruption. Through this dialectic be-
tween queerness and policing we can then
begin to materially understand exactly what
the half-critique of assimilation grasps at.
Assimilation is not a departure from the
liberating progression of history, it’s the
reassertion of the police order which pro-
gressive teleology guarantees. Assimilation
is the constant return to the police. It is the
closure of these moments of queer inter-
ruption. If this is our standard of queerness,
those assimilated subjects must be under-
stood as not queer at all, because they are
fully subsumed within the function of the
police. This is the context which exposes It
Gets Better as utterly absurd: The police who
solicit our patience to wait for it to get bet-
ter are structurally bound to the police who
ensure that it never will. n

26
XXXX

27
 Objects of Derision
By EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
Cop comedies invite us to laugh at the terror police induce by being
both less and more than human
“But so mighty a form must trample down
many an innocent flower—crush to pieces
many an object in its path.”
—Hegel, Lectures
on the Philosophy of History
“Just think, the next time I shoot someone, I
could be arrested for it.”
—Lieutenant Frank Drebin,
The Naked Gun
LET US BE plain: Cops are comic objects. And
not just in film, not just in comedies. They are
comic objects, period. That is, they are objects
involved in the depiction of things as worse
than they are, as Aristotle once defined the
comic. Not a mistaken depiction, not a false
judgment but that which both polices and re-
veals the “worse” that resides presently, how-
28
ever obscurely, within the categories, patterns,
and relations that make up our social order.
But hold on, one might protest. Aren’t
cops “subjects”? Even if you insist that cops
are not part of that vaunted “99%,” surely they
are part of that even larger percentage of “hu-
man subjects”? Because although the police is
a general notion more than a local instance,
it is nevertheless made up of “subjects” (in-
dividual cops) who, taken together, seem to
make up a collective subject of sorts: an agen-
cy that acts with force upon the world and
passes judgments on it, however disjointedly.
This, though, would miss the point. People
who work as cops are subjects, sure—in an
everyday, legal, economic, and philosophical
sense. But the specificity of cop is that, while
on the job, he is a negated subject. And this is
far from a problem of the twists and shimmies
 EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
of the dialectic: It deeply inflects how we in-
teract daily with cops and, worse, how they
disavow their hostile interactions with us.
A cop is a negated subject in two senses:
as an expression of the law and as outside the
sphere of reciprocal interaction with those
to whom the law is applied. First, he1 is the
expression of the law, merely part of its “long
arm,” its corporeal extension. Cops are the
meaty point of junction that triangulates:
those declared criminal; the abstract order
that declares them as such; and the cars, bul-
lets, batons, handcuffs, jail cells, and electric
chairs that make sure the declaration will not
go misheard. The way they stand in this po-
sition, however, does not make tangible the
dense historical connection between such
elements but instead insists on the supposed
separation between them, justifying their
own work as a natural response to the fact
of criminality as such, as if such a category
preexisted the orders of property and nation
that construct it.
Even as cops naturalize criminalization
and therefore themselves, they function by
means of protecting propriety—or sensus
decori, which Kant, in Metaphysics of Morals,
defines as a “negative taste.” Cops remove the
visible points of disorder that are “affronts to
the moral sense, such as begging, uproar in
the streets, offensive smells, and public pros-
titution (venus volgivaga).”
Yet contrary to the much vaunted “Pro-
tect and Serve” motto, the law does not ac-
tually protect individuals. U.S. courts have
repeatedly ruled that it is not the legal duty
or purpose of the police to protect citizens,
starting with the 1855 Supreme Court ruling,
29
South et al. v. State of Maryland, which argued
that “no instance can be found where a civil
action has been sustained against him [a cop]
for his default or misbehavior as conservator
of the peace by those who have suffered in-
jury to their property or persons through the
violence of mobs, riots, or insurrections.” The
same holds true in the 20th century, in War-
ren v. District of Columbia (1975), and more
recently in Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005). In
each case, the point is made that the police
do not exist to protect individuals but only
the propertied order. According to these
precedents, they don’t even serve to protect
individuals from those crimes—mobs, riots,
insurrections—that threaten that order as a
whole. Cops defend the peace, not the po-
tentially peaceful.
Second, a cop is tautologically specified
as “untouchable” by the same order of law
that he enforces, the same one that declares
individual subjects to be no concern of the
police. Because the declared rules of engage-
ment have different conditions for those in-
volved (for example, for you and an officer on
the same street), an exchange between nomi-
nal equals is utterly impossible. The possibil-
ity of a struggle, conversation, encounter, or
1. I use he on purpose, because the gendered
position of the police, even if an officer happens to
be a woman, is distinctly male. The defense of law,
with violence enacted on those who don’t follow
it, backed by the claim that the one defending it is
not legally or ethically subject to that same law, that
it is the “others” who cause problems and require
such a law to have to exist in the first place: one of
the more precise crystallizations of the gendered
position of “male.”
 OBJECTS OF DERISION
discourse on terms that apply mutually to
both parties is denied. The two cannot both
be understood as subjects in the same regis-
ter. They are incommensurable.
There is, I’d argue, a tremendous dread
about this opaque nonrelation. It is lived
and felt, from the sinking of the stomach as
the flashers come on in your rearview mir-
ror to the tightening of the stomach as you
catch a glimpse of the pistol strapped to the
­standard-issue belt. (Not to mention the basic
fact of airports and borders.) But it remains
obscure, hard to name and elaborate. For
that reason, it recurrently seeps through into
a wide range of cultural products, including
the “cop comedy,” one of the longest running
genres in cinema across the 20th century.
IN COP COMEDIES, the dread bares it-
self in a number of ways. One of the most
recurrent is to displace this anxiety into the
sphere of queer subjectivity—most palpably,
in a flood-level quantity of “gay jokes,” which
are, of course, a not-so-secret thread through
mainstream cinema in general. But the tenor
of this nervous titter is different in the cop
comedy and the noncomic cop film more
broadly. In these films, the genuinely impos-
sible object, the center of libidinal gravity
and tidal pull, is the prospect of a queer cop.
One instance, from the first Police Academy:
two cops are kissing at an event commemo-
rating new recruits. The commander thinks
both cops are male and is aghast: You men,
stop that! They turn. One is a woman. Oh well,
30
says the commander. That’s more like it, Ma-
honey. Good man. Keep up the good work! Ner-
vously, this queer slippage—one made all the
worse through male and female cops wearing
the same uniform, in an autoeroticism of the
­generic—will be shut down by a giggle or the
revelation of an evidently female face. Nev-
ertheless, there at the conclusion of the film,
the palm sweating remains palpable, simulta-
neously horrified and excited by the thought
that the police force could be eroded from
within by a cop or two who enjoys differently.
Consider also the end of On the Beat, a
1962 British comedy. Two men, a cop and
a hairdresser, are walking out of a church at
the end of a wedding, together, beaming at
each other’s faces. There has been reason
to suspect that there was something “a bit
queer” about them both. Then a zoom out
and backward-tracking camera reveals that
the wedding is not, after all, between the two
men but doubled into a male cop marrying
a passionate Italian woman and a male hair-
dresser marrying a dour female cop. We can
practically hear the film’s exhalation of relief.
This dread runs equally throughout the
“buddy comedy” subgenre, which has less
to do with the patently obvious homosocial-
ity at work in them and far more to do with
manifesting the internal incoherence of the
cop object. It does this by splitting him into
two “incompatible” but separate parts (the
good cop and the bad cop, the neat cop and
the messy cop, the black cop and the white
cop, the human cop and the K-9 cop), there-
by attempting to stabilize him through the
context of the binary set.
 EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
This is also why so many cop comedies
are about the process of becoming a cop—­
either becoming one legally for the first time,
despite being short, fat, female, nerdy etc., or
becoming the cop you have been all along.
It’s easy to imagine the horror version: one
wakes up, sweating, walks to the bathroom,
switches on the light, and screams upon real-
izing that one is already wearing the uniform,
that you can’t cut the cop out of you.
In other words, these cop comedies are
stories of desubjectivation, though this is hid-
den in the guise of its opposite: people don’t
“become the cop that they are” through sub-
mission to the law. No, they do so through ful-
ly enacting everything about them that seems
opposed to being cop, such that they come to
adopt their proper position as the principle
outside the law which guarantees that law.
No wonder, then, that so many of these sto-
ries focus on the the bumbling, hot-headed,
kindhearted, too-drunk, womanizing, not-
womanizing-enough, out-of-shape, too-short,
wisecracking, or rebel “bad cop”: all these it-
erations work through the perspective that the
perfect cop is the cop who seems totally out of
joint with the institution of the police.
However, if we have been focused on what
cops are, what about how they do? We can
think about this in terms of two fundamen-
tal fantasies about the status and intention of
the cop, both of which may “not be true” but
which have been materially reinforced by an
entire legal and punitive order and therefore
became injunctively true: that is, they demand
that they become the case, and they’ve got the
force to back up the demand.
31
1. It is not permitted to defend oneself
against the police: With them, there is only self-
offense, and it shall not be allowed.
Cops are active objects (they arrest, de-
tain, beat you) against which all action is for-
bidden (including fleeing from their action)
and against which all action will be taken as
purposeful (i.e. one cannot hit a cop as a hu-
man but only as a cop—only as an assault
against the Law as such). If a pastry chef at-
tempts to hit you, your hitting back or run-
ning away is indifferent to the specificity of
pastry chef. If a cop attempts to hit you, any-
thing you do will be understood only as a re-
sponse to the specificity of cop. Whatever you
do can and will be held against you. To put it
in the form of a joke: A cop walks into a bar.
The bar is arrested for assaulting an officer.
2. The police are not hostile: They merely
react to, manage, and reflect the antagonism of
the social order at large and of particular bad
actions and people.
This notion is rooted in the long-held con-
ception of the police as the guardians of the
city, the keepers of the peace, the defenders
of order. But to conceive of police as those
who guard, keep, defend, means conceiving of
polis, peace, and order as pre-existing and au-
tonomous, such that the police are only a sec-
ondary order. It claims that a city is functional
in itself; it just needs to be guarded, kept, and
defended. However, “the city” is not identical
to the particular city or populated zone, just as
living citizens are not that abstract legal sub-
ject that is “protected” or “served.” Criminal-
ity therefore becomes the means for revealing
the given ­incompatibility of a specific city and
 OBJECTS OF DERISION
population with the polis in general defended
by the police.
The police, therefore, are conceived as ac-
tive yet not preemptive or structuring. They
do not produce the antagonism they deal
with. Rather they just reflect, manage, and
try to contain the basic hostility at work in
the inability of materials to correctly accord
with social and conceptual structure. To be
more concrete: According to the account of
the police and their defenders, poor black
communities are “violent” independent of the
presence of cops. The fact of constant harass-
ing, jailing, and killing of that community by
the police, even if occasionally “excessive,” is
merely a fact of “management” of the basic
social anger that already is. Needless to say,
even a cursory glance at urban history, par-
ticularly in the 20th century transformations
of global north cities, should be enough to
reveal this account as utter bullshit.
This perspective of “cops as reflection of
existing violence” emerges on a few fronts,
and, crucially, not just in cop comedy. There
are, of course, the common routines of a cop
who is shot at first, who has to smack a perp
down because they would not go quietly, or
who loses it for a moment, but only because
the world at large is so hostile and chaotic
and they killed his partner, but you know
they messed with the wrong cop because he
won’t rest until ...
But this also manifests itself in a very spe-
cific mode within cop comedies: Police vio-
lence is routed through the built environment
such that the innate hostility of the world
and its commodities are technically to blame
32
(along with the targets of police violence).
Guns and knives may be used, but primar-
ily as sparks to set off the antagonistic pow-
der keg called material existence. The conse-
quence of this is the reinforcement of one
of longest running taboos in cinema. Rather
than blame police as such, responsibility for
the violence is shifted to “unfortunate acci-
dents” of psychosis (Maniac Cop), corrup-
tion (Bad Lieutenant), drugs (Bad Lieuten-
ant), or vigilantism fascism (Magnum Force).
A few examples: Above all, hundreds
of chase scenes, but let’s offer one in par-
ticular: that of James William Guercio’s un-
derwatched 1973 Electra Glide in Blue, in
which the fleeing subjects on motorcycles
are steered or “steer themselves” into their
own demise by cops on motorcycles. The
point here is that the “correct cop” (Robert
Blake) ensures that the correct procedure is
to engage the landscape so that the criminals
do themselves in, going so far as to shove his
partner off his Harley when he threatens to
break the code by opening fire on the perps.
No, they have to be allowed to run into the
car, to crash into the restaurant, to “happen
to fall” into the path of a car that convenient-
ly has no time to swerve. They are literally
uncoerced; the police merely provide the
occasion for this to be the self-ruining case.
Electra Glide is, however, restrained in its
treatment of “accidental” murder by land-
scape, limiting it to a concrete result of the
bad combination of fast bikes and crowded,
narrow roads. But in other cop comedies, that
tendency will come fully unbound, depict-
ing the world as already hostile, full of things
 EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
ready to do you in, explosive gags of derail-
ment just waiting for you to make the mistake
of fleeing. In The Naked Gun (1988), a dis-
tracted criminal chased by Lieutenant Frank
Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) will crash his car first
into a gas truck, then into a missile carrier, and
finally into a fireworks store. Standing in front
of the enormous explosions, burning bodies,
screams, and fleeing employees, Drebin says
to the gathering crowd, “Move along, folks.
Nothing to see here.”
This explains the tendency across the
cop-comedy genre—and cop dramas and
action flicks—to allow suspects to fall off a
building edge (despite the cop’s best efforts
to hold on), slip off a building edge while try-
ing to punch the cop, land on their own knife
because they were trying to stab a cop, crash
the boat, the car, the helicopter, the plane,
the motorcycle, be consumed in flames not
lit by the cop but by the anxious combusti-
bility of the modern metropolis. And when
cops do draw weapons, when the prospect
of wrongful force is raised, it is all the more
circulated through the built world, so that a
bullet may have started it but the line cannot
be traced directly between the damage done
and the trigger pulled.
Consider Hot Fuzz (2007), in which the
cops shoot, with perfect aim, the tire of a
nearby truck to let loose the barrels so as to
knock the legs out from under an old man, all
to avoid directly shooting him even though
he is in the midst of reloading. This indirect
firing is not for reasons of gore shyness: This
is in a film in which a woman is stabbed with
gardening shears, a chunk of cathedral im-
33
pales a man, a couple is beheaded, and a man
is burned to death in a gas fire, all with lin-
gering lusty gazes at the sticky crimson after-
math. But when the police mete out violence,
it is routed through the landscape, through
chandeliers, barrels, shopping carts, and
through the clumsiness of an antagonist who
will find a miniature of a cathedral speared
through his jaw, not because a cop put it there
but because he tripped. It doesn’t kill him, of
course. The villains all survive so that they
can be sent to jail. Because, you know, cops
don’t kill people. Bad people—subjects—
and the armature of landscapes do.
NOW WE CAN finally say what police are:
They are indirect hostile objects, inflections
of the hostility they navigate and enforce.
And this isn’t merely limited to instances in
which a cop uses the landscape to achieve
the arrest/murder he desires while keeping
his hands clean. It also functions, most hor-
rifyingly, in the way their casual, thought-
less actions—their passions, however seem-
ingly distant from the law—serve to provoke
situations (riots, looting) that retroactively
declare the “necessity” of the police while
disavowing any role they had in producing
the disorder. Such is the case with almost all
real-world instances of police gunning down
suspects/young unarmed black men.
In Police Academy, it gets remarkable
treatment, at the origin of the riot that will
allow the police recruits to “become them-
selves” as police, by becoming recognized
 OBJECTS OF DERISION
as a requisite force for the social good. One
white cop is waiting in a car while his white
partner is in a store. Around the car are men
of various races, all of whom are coded as
poor and tough. The second cop comes back
to the car, climbs in, and gives the first cop
an apple he bought him. The cop tosses it
out the window, uninterested, and it hits a
black man, who assumes it was thrown by a
nearby black man eating an apple. They fight,
the fight spills out, objects are knocked over,
and in less than a minute, it has become a
riot (“Hey everybody! It’s a riot!” someone
yells excitedly into the billiards hall)— a riot
which the cop who threw the apple, as well as
the other police-to-be, must help “put down.”
At stake here, then, is the basic logic
of cunning. And here, a turn to the horse’s
mouth— i.e. Hegel—is necessary.
It is not the general idea that is implicated
in opposition and combat, and that is ex-
posed to danger. It remains in the back-
ground, untouched and uninjured. This
may be called the cunning of reason, —
that it sets the passions to work for itself,
while that which develops its existence
through such impulsion pays the penalty
and suffers loss. For it is phenomenal being
that is so treated, and of this, part is of no
value, part is positive and real ... The Idea
pays the penalty of determinate existence
and of corruptibility, not from itself, but
from the passions of individuals.
— Lectures on the
Philosophy of History, § 36
One could certainly think about this in the
way that the “individual passions” of police of-
ficers—let’s say, a certain hastiness of the trig-
ger finger—makes the “particular” (the lives
of those deemed criminal) pay the penalty for
34
the perpetuation of a general idea, such as the
“law and order” of civil society. However, we
can think of this in terms of the larger structures
of capitalist development as well. Because the
general idea—say, the historic development
of capital as a globally and locally structuring
relation—generates a set of contradictions
that it can neither handle nor accept. It gives
shape to and calls into being (“that which de-
velops its existence through such impulsion”)
particulars: entire cities, categories of objects,
mines, factories, populations, social structures
and identities, and uses of time.
Moreover, think of the composition of
the objects (laborers included) capital gen-
erates, employs, and destroys: “part is of no
value, part is positive and real.” Of course,
with capital, it is—surprise!—an inversion:
The valued part is not positive or real but
the nonpart that exists only as the possi-
bility of exchange (i.e. the negation of par-
ticular quality, or potential use, in the mo-
ment of commensurability); while the part
that is positive and real (a use value, a life
to be snuffed out, an activity across time) is
unvalued and pays the penalty. If it is some
grain in a period where the general laws of
capital declare the global price of grain to be
too low, it will be left to rot by the “hand of
the market” or by state intervention. If it is
an activity—say, the harvesting of grain—
that cannot be profitable in a certain period,
it will cease to be done so as to preserve the
health of the general circulation of wealth,
the declining health of populations be
damned. And if it is a body…
But the full breakdown of these manifold
 EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
things (the collapse of access to jobs, the
starvation of populations) doesn’t call into
question the basic abstractions that gener-
ated and inflected that breakdown. No, that
general relation continues on, “untouched
and uninjured,” finding new sites and mate-
rials. And it does so until the passage of the
general through the particular—i.e. the way
that capital must circle through labor—is
impeded by that particular itself, when the
particular stops acting as the conduit and be-
comes a point of stoppage.
So it is that we might put another term
alongside that of cunning: sabotage. Be-
cause the two are inseparable, two inflec-
tions of the same punishment of the partic-
ular. But in opposite ways. In cunning, the
general is strengthened by the attack of the
particular on itself: the destruction of po-
tential exchange (letting food spoil on the
docks, however needed it may be by peo-
ple) means that new production, and there-
fore new circulation and exchange, must be
impelled. In sabotage, the general is wound-
ed by that attack: commodities are refused
entrance into circulation—by people who
impede production, who “go slow,” who
taint the product, who block ports, trains,
and roads—in order to attack the flows that
make up the accumulation and persistence
of the general relation.
Between cunning and sabotage, in that
thinnest of spaces, stand the police, trying
desperately and ridiculously to prevent them
collapsing together. That fractional space is
also the real site of the comic, siding with
neither cunning nor sabotage, but slipping
35
between the two, the gag shoving o­ bjects—
including cops—from side to side.
We ask what comedy can’t vocalize: What
would it mean for the general to pay its own
penalty? For the relation of capital to bear its
own costs? It would mean a collapse of law
in all forms. A material critique of separation,
between cunning and sabotage, and the end
of displacement or dislocation.
Comedy doesn’t speak this, but it says
something important all the same. It insists
that we live in a world of matter and acts
and gags, that the shaming of the general
doesn’t occur on its own terms but only and
ever through the particular, through the re-
conning sabotage of its materials brought
to bear on themselves. That is, through the
occasion we produce for the police to bar-
ricade themselves, to be halted by a wall of
their own making.
In The Blues Brothers, this gets enact-
ed literally, as the attempt of the police to
catch fleeing suspects leads to them crash-
ing into one another, until the cars pile up
and they are physically barricaded behind a
wall of their own making and material, yell-
ing Son of a bitch! They stand on top of the
auto blockade, firing their guns pointlessly
toward where that obscure object of crime
has sped.
To be sure, in a world and a century of
cinema that can only ever joke, and only ever
briefly, about the hostility of cops, this is
cold comfort. But like that decision to slam
the foot on the gas pedal when the flashers
appear in the rear-view mirror, it is a point
of departure. n
36
 The Thin Blue Lie
By DAVID NORIEGA
Why civilian investigations of police misconduct do
more to excuse it than prevent it
I WILL ALWAYS remember the first time a
cop lied to me. Or rather, the first time that I
knew beyond a doubt that a cop was lying to
me, sitting right there in the interview room
with a tape recorder in front of him.
It was early in my tenure as an investiga-
tor at the New York City Civilian Complaint
Review Board, the city agency established in
1993 to investigate allegations of misconduct
against NYPD officers. The case was a fairly
straightforward stop-and-frisk incident near
the massive New York City Housing Author-
ity complexes along Avenue D in Manhat-
tan. The complainant, a man in his early 20s,
alleged that a plainclothes cop had stopped,
frisked, and searched him after he stepped out
37
of a bodega. He’d given a guy a cigarette, and
before he knew it, the cop came up from be-
hind him, grabbed him by the coat, and after a
quick scuffle, pushed him against a wall.
I’d already interviewed the cop’s unusu-
ally forthcoming partner, whose testimony
matched the complainant’s. That’s how I knew
the cop was making stuff up. Lots of stuff.
The experience was exhilarating: Not ev-
ery 22-year-old has a chance to interrogate
an armed member of the country’s largest
police force. But there I was. And this cop
had not only illegally stopped, frisked, and
searched a citizen but had also lied about it,
and I suddenly found myself in a position to
hold him accountable.
 DAVID NORIEGA
I closed the case as “substantiated,” mean-
ing the complaint was legitimate. The Board
handed the case over to the police depart-
ment with a recommendation of disciplinary
measures. But within a few months, the police
department had dismissed the case. As usual,
they did not explain why. From then on, being
lied to by police officers became so common
that the excitement—of not only catching
them in the act but making an official record
of it—gave way to anesthetized indifference. I
would see many legitimate complaints fall by
the wayside, ignored by the police department
or lost in the CCRB’s bureaucratic labyrinth.
Historically, the CCRB has acted as a fact-
finding organization. It has no direct authority
over police officers. It consists of 13 city ap-
pointees who sit atop a large investigative ap-
paratus of roughly 100 civilian investigators
and their supervisors who do the actual work
of looking into allegations of police miscon-
duct. I was one such investigator for over three
years, right out of college, starting in March
2009. Like many CCRB investigators, I hadn’t
intended to spend my postcollege years inves-
tigating cops. But the job seemed novel and
noble, and more important, in post–Lehman
Brothers New York, it seemed available.
In New York City, the job of CCRB inves-
tigator is an entry-level position. In other cit-
ies it’s done by accredited lawyers, but in New
York it’s done by kids like me. The stated re-
quirements for the job—a bachelor’s degree
and critical thinking skills, b­asically—do
not quite prepare people to canvass housing
projects in dangerous neighborhoods, obtain
information from recalcitrant and ­ hostile
38
c­ ivilians and police officers, or perform nu-
anced analyses of fact patterns in light of
complex case law. Most investigators learn
these things by doing them, but much time
and money is lost in the process.
In researching whether to take the job, I’d
learned that the CCRB had long been dogged
by criticism. Two years before I started there,
the NYCLU had published a report com-
prehensively detailing the agency’s failures,
called, bluntly enough, “Mission Failure.” In
summary: The agency is underfunded, which
severely hampers the effectiveness of its in-
vestigations; its leadership is ineffectual; on
the occasions when it finds and communi-
cates acts or patterns of misconduct, its find-
ings are systematically ignored by the police
department; and the CCRB does nothing to
assert itself in the face of such dismissals.
In spite of this dismal outlook, I took the
job and found great satisfaction and pride
in my first two years there. I uncovered and
documented legitimate abuses and learned
how municipal governance affects the daily
lives of people in marginalized communities.
Eventually I was promoted to supervisor.
But during my last year at the job, a num-
ber of controversies and debates concern-
ing the NYPD came to a head—stop and
frisk, invasive surveillance of Muslim com-
munities, and deliberate heavy-handedness
in the policing of public demonstrations, to
name a few. The CCRB’s near total absence
from these discussions seemed to broadcast
its irrelevance. I realized I was working for
an institution that, at best, may as well have
not existed. At worst, it indirectly reinforced
 THE THIN BLUE LIE
the misconduct and impunity it was meant
to combat. By the end of my time there, this
combination of meaningless torpor and pain-
ful complicity had become overwhelming.
The job of any investigator is to figure out
who’s lying. NYPD officers lied constantly,
but complainants lied all the time too. They
denied behavior that justified police action,
claimed beatings so severe that the mere fact
of their living to tell the tale was evidence
against them. But there is a fundamental dif-
ference between a lying civilian and a lying
police officer. When cops lie, they are part of a
system of language that is integral to the state’s
monopoly on violence. I quickly came to real-
ize that many officer interviews followed one
of a handful of scripts, with troves of phrases
to express and explain suspicion (“high-crime
area,” “furtive movements,” “erratic behav-
ior”), to justify an escalation of force (the
“demeanor” of a “defendant” was “agitated,”
“belligerent,” or “highly uncooperative;” peo-
ple “resisted” by “flailing” their arms), and to
establish probable cause for an arrest (“small
objects” were “exchanged for U.S. currency” in
a “hand-to-hand transaction”).
In cases without objective evidence like
medical records or video, it was easier for inves-
tigators to accept an officer’s account of an in-
cident because the cop’s language was far more
likely to be consistent. Civilians were asked to
provide multiple statements throughout an in-
vestigation (on the phone and in person), and
inconsistencies between those statements were
often used to discredit their claims. Meanwhile,
cops were prepared immediately before their
interviews by union attorneys, who remained
39
present during the statement lest officers stray
too far from the official line. If language is a
weapon, cops were equipped with firepower
and the training to use it, just as they were with
actual guns. Meanwhile c­omplainants—ci-
vilians whose circumstances put them in fre-
quent contact with police—have been denied
mastery of the official language.
WITHIN A FEW months of my hiring, the
city put all municipal employees through “Cus-
tomer Service Training.” Overdesigned posters
went up around the office: Great City: Great
Service. The training consisted of a few indif-
ferent lectures and PowerPoint presentations.
The general idea was that we were supposed to
be polite. The fact that the city referred to peo-
ple as “customers” rather than citizens said a lot
about governance in the Bloomberg era—as if
the CCRB’s complainants were not exercising
legal rights but merely enjoying an optional
service in a competitive market—­patrons to
be pandered to and pacified.
The irony behind the imperative to treat
our complainants as customers became ap-
parent to me as the months and cases wore
on. I realized the many ways in which the
CCRB was stacked against our ­“customers”—
against the citizens who came to us feeling
they had been victims of police abuse.
When a person files a complaint, they de-
liver a sworn statement detailing the incident
at the CCRB’s offices in lower Manhattan. An
investigator is assigned to the case and goes
about obtaining evidence, including witness
 DAVID NORIEGA
testimony, police documentation, medical
records, and testimony from the officers in-
volved. After compiling the evidence, the
investigator assigns the case one of four dis-
positions: substantiated (the alleged action
happened and was misconduct), exonerated
(the action happened but was acceptable), un-
founded (the action did not happen), or unsub-
stantiated (insufficient evidence to make a de-
termination). If the Board agrees that a case is
substantiated, it forwards it to the Department
Advocate’s Office, the NYPD branch that in-
ternally prosecutes cops accused of wrongdo-
ing, with a recommendation of discipline.1
But there was a double standard at work.
Officially, the standard of proof by which the
CCRB reaches a finding is a “preponderance
of the evidence,” often explained as a standard
of 51%: If something was more likely than not
to have happened, we concluded that it hap-
pened. But in my experience, this standard
applied only to cases that cleared officers of
1. In March of this year, the CCRB was given the
power to prosecute its own cases. When I left, the
agency was in the process of staffing and organizing
the unit responsible for these prosecutions. This
was a welcome relief, and it will almost inevitably
have a positive effect on the quality of the litigation.
But this doesn’t change the fact that the cases will
still be tried by judges who are employed by the
NYPD and who are thus likely to keep applying
inconsistent or capricious standards to their rulings.
Granting the CCRB prosecutorial power struck me
as a political maneuver of little substance, intended
by Commissioner Kelly to quiet the outrage that
increasingly enveloped the NYPD during the first
months of the year without actually needing to make
any meaningful concessions.
40
wrongdoing. Cases closed as substantiated
were held to a higher standard, something
much more like the “beyond a reasonable
doubt” standard used by criminal courts.
I once closed two cases in quick succession
that drove this discrepancy home clearly. The
first was a force complaint involving a teenag-
er watching soccer in a Queens park who was
roughed up by a cop who had stopped him for
suspicion of drinking. The force was relatively
minor, and medical records were inconclusive.
However, I’d gathered enough witness testi-
mony supporting the complainant’s account
to outweigh the cop’s denial. By the 51% stan-
dard, I could conclude that unnecessary force
had been used. My supervisors, however, re-
fused to let it fly, because without conclusive
medical records, the evidence was less than
unassailable. After multiple arguments I capit-
ulated, and the allegation was unsubstantiated.
Shortly after that, I closed a case involving
a group of officers who entered an apartment
in the Bronx with their guns drawn, respond-
ing to a call alleging that someone inside was
armed. Although no gun was found, it wasn’t
apparent to me that the officers had done
anything wrong by the 51% standard, the
complaint could have been rightfully exoner-
ated. However, the report of the gun inside
the apartment was unreliable, and there were
inconsistencies in the officers’ accounts, so I
wanted to close it as unsubstantiated, for con-
sistency. But, again, after multiple arguments
with my supervisors, the case was exonerated.
This discrepancy arose because the NYPD
applied the more stringent standard to cases
it received from the CCRB. The CCRB, rath-
 THE THIN BLUE LIE
er than asserting its standard of proof and, by
extension, the validity of its findings, simply
adopted the police department’s. This meant
proving misconduct required overwhelm-
ing evidence, while exonerating cops only
needed a far more cursory investigation. In
other words, the CCRB, an oversight agency,
tailored its activities to the predilections of
the institution it was meant to be overseeing.
This is the definition of regulatory capture.
To make matters worse, there was a strong,
explicitly articulated institutional pressure to
keep the amount of unsubstantiated cases at
a minimum. The reasoning was statistical:
a high percentage of unsubstantiated cases
would have suggested—accurately—that the
agency had trouble reaching conclusive find-
ings. The demand for fewer unsubstantiated
cases was never articulated as a demand for
more thorough investigations. It was simply
a demand for better statistics.1
Since substantiating allegations took more
time and effort than writing them off as exon-
erated or unfounded, the most “productive”
investigators — the ones who closed the most
cases in the shortest amount of time—were
often the ones who rarely substantiated allega-
tions. The result was a statistic of great conve-
nience to the police department. If we listen to
the numbers, we can’t help but conclude that
1. This statistical obsession, like the treatment
of citizens as “customers,” is another hallmark of
the Bloomberg technocracy, and is not unlike the
pressure felt by precinct commanders in the NYPD to
keep crime statistics low, or the pressure felt by school
principals to keep their students’ test scores high.
41
real misconduct is a very rare beast, and that
civilians are constantly either making false al-
legations or complaining about cops who are
“just doing their jobs.” In 2010, there were just
550 substantiated cases, compared with 2,849
exonerated and 1,243 unfounded.
Because the agency has historically been
understaffed, I often saw a deliberate short-­
circuiting of investigations, “fast-tracking” cas-
es, or exonerating them without statements
from all or even any of the officers involved. Of-
ten the rationale was that officers would likely
repeat information conveyed by other officers
in testimony or reports—­essentially granting
the police a presumption of consistency that
fundamentally undercuts the CCRB’s ostensi-
ble neutrality, given that inconsistent witness
testimony undermines the case of complain-
ants. After I became a supervisor, the agency’s
fundamental problem came into clearer view
for me: The large majority of decisions made
within the CCRB, by investigators and su-
pervisors alike, were driven not by the goal of
conducting full and fair investigations but by
the desire to avoid more work.
Even when cases were substantiated, the
police department’s prosecutors who tried
the cases could be a liability. Soon after I was
hired, in the spring of 2009, I attended a trial
conducted by the Department Advocate’s
Office with a group of other recently hired
investigators. The complainant was a Hispan-
ic man in his early 20s who was arrested for
weed outside his building, part of a public-
housing project in the Bronx. His arresting
officer, also Hispanic, was accused of ­beating
him up and strip-searching him in public.
 DAVID NORIEGA
The CCRB had found that at least some of
this had, in fact, happened. Hence the trial.
Inside the courtroom, I was treated to a dis-
play of professional incompetence unlike any
I’d seen before. The attorney for the DAO—an
employee of the Police Department, not the
CCRB, I reassured myself again and again—
was so inarticulate that the judge repeatedly
interrupted her to point out, irrefutably, that
her sentences were going nowhere. The ac-
cused officer’s union attorney was middling at
best, but he came off like Perry Mason.
LIKE THE LARGE majority of investiga-
tors, I didn’t intend to stay at the CCRB for-
ever. A deep bureaucratic lethargy suffuses the
agency at every level. “The days here are spent
in a sort of codeine haze,” I wrote in a journal
in the midst of my time there, “resenting the
boredom and mild discomfort but resenting
even more any intrusion that might jolt us
into action and alertness.” In my three years at
the agency, I received about two dozen emails
from the executive director, all of which were
addressed to the entire staff and contained
grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors.
On more than one occasion I found out about
significant budgetary or structural changes to
the CCRB from the New York Times or the
Post before I heard about them at work.
But even as I applied to graduate school
and my escape from the CCRB became grad-
ually assured, my desire to leave gained an in-
creasing urgency with the Occupy Wall Street
protests, which put the NYPD in a jarring new
42
light, as an enormous armed force strategically
mobilized to intimidate and discourage collec-
tive acts of political expression. In the first few
months of 2012, the police department con-
tinued to stubbornly defend its stop-and-frisk
practices despite the intensifying media and
public criticism. Meanwhile the CCRB, which
is uniquely positioned to contribute to this de-
bate, remained outside the conversation. I saw
that the CCRB’s imbalances reinforced the
countless imbalances endemic to the criminal
justice system. The resources available to ci-
vilians are paltry in comparison to the power
of the machine that surveils, controls, arrests,
prosecutes and imprisons them.
I was a cog in that machine. During my
time at the CCRB I was complicit in the ques-
tionable practices I’ve described. I wasn’t pro-
moted by accident. And of course, there are
many intelligent people at the CCRB who
care about the work and its larger purpose.
Most of them roll in and out before they de-
velop an attachment to the institution, but a
few wind up very near—though never at—
the top. The agency’s current deputy execu-
tive director, for instance, was instrumental in
obtaining prosecutorial power for the CCRB,
and has done much to bridge the communica-
tion gap between executives and investigators.
These people are the engine behind whatever
good work the CCRB has done.
But people are adaptable, and resisting the
agency’s systemic imbalances becomes ex-
hausting. The dysfunction is beyond any single
person’s responsibility or even any particular
group of managers: They are as systemic as can
be. It’s easier to be swallowed by the process. n
XXXX

43
 All Cops Are Batman
By ELLIOTT PRASSE-FREEMAN and SAYRES RUDY

In The Dark Knight Returns, Batman is so distracted

by his mommy-daddy-me orphan issues
that he has not realized that he has become the villain

THE DARK KNIGHT Rises, 2012’s most an-
ticipated film, has finally reached theaters. But
even before that it already stood as one of the
first mass-culture artifacts of the Occupy era.
Its  trailers alone inadvertently revealed the
violence necessary to maintain social inequal-
ity, and whether billionaire Batman saves the
day in the film is irrelevant. The trailers have
exposed him as the true villain of our current
impasse. Batman is too big to fail.
Trailer vs. Film
Trailers are the best representation of how
film-industry elites perceive and shape pop-
ular tastes. In the YouTube era, the trailer
is all the more influential because it frames
our anticipation and memory of a film. The
trailers that precede movies distill their
plot, magnify their effects, and raise expec-
tations with speedy cuts, fleeting images,
and seductive suggestions, setting up what
to watch for and how to remember it. There
are companies that produce trailers exclu-
sively, and  trailer makers trump filmmakers
in studios’ financial calculations. Since the
preview does the key job­—generating the
interest and hence the money—that keeps
studios in business, trailer makers  are hired
by studio heads and insulated from directors,
screenwriters, and other artists who cannot
be entrusted with high-stakes business in-
vestments. The profit-motivated primacy of
trailers over films has only grown with the in-
tensifying focus on opening-weekend sales. 
Since trailers sell movies (or trick people into
first-weekend viewings), movies  as cultural
signifiers start with their first trailers.

44
 ELLIOTT PRASSE-FREEMAN AND SAYRES RUDY
The trailer may be seen as “the real” of the
cultural production of cinematic experience, a
mode of direct access to the ideology and po-
litical economy of filmmaking.  It reduces to
excess what it ostensibly represents, the film it-
self. Roger Ebert’s contemptuous quip that Ar-
mageddon  (1998) was the first 150-minute
trailer (“It is cut together like its own high-
lights. Take almost any 30 seconds at random,
and you’d have a TV ad”) grasped the way films
have begun to imitate trailers, but trailers have
improved more than films have declined.
The affective and symbolic power of trail-
ers’ techniques allow them to generate rushes
of images and emotions that potentially over-
flow the film’s narrative. They become more-
real than what they represent. Indeed, pre-
views for The Dark Knight Rises may convey
Gotham’s corrupt political economy—
i.e., of our world’s states of exception and
impoverishment—more clearly than the film
as a whole.
 
Reading the Second Trailer
While the first Rises trailer is exciting enough,
the second brings the full auratic power of
the cinematic event down hard upon us.
The trailer opens with a cherubic boy
singing the Star-Spangled Banner at a foot-
ball game before calm inevitably gives way to
storm: a gas-masked sadist blows up the field,
prisoners riot, swat teams assemble, a tank
fires on city hall, a hover craft flies through
the streets, and so on. These rapid-fire cuts act
as bundled spectacles of stimulation: Look at
all this action you are going to enjoy! Hence our
45
attention lingers when the clip slows down.
There are three such moments: butler Alfred
comforts a forlorn Bruce Wayne by invoking
Bruce’s orphan-related trauma, the boy
sings the American anthem, and then—the
longest by far—an extended ballroom scene
where a spectral Anne Hathaway whispers in
Bruce Wayne’s ear:
You think this can last. There is a storm
coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends
better batten down the hatches, because
when it hits, you’re all going to wonder
how you ever thought you could live so
large and leave so little for the rest of us.
Class tension here is not only directly ad-
dressed but presented as the central threat to
which Batman must respond. The next shots
are of rioting prisoners and others chant-
ing a phrase in a foreign language. What are
they saying? “Rise,” we are told. Rise? Is this a
working-class revolution we are being prom-
ised?
When Hathaway’s character invokes in-
equality, the camera pulls in tight on Wayne’s
face, allowing us a good look. His expression
is confused, anguished—without the pique
or fatigue you’d expect yet another villain
to provoke. Instead, his face seems to enter-
tain the possibility that she is  already right:
not about the coming storm but about how
Bruce/Batman could have so much and have
lived so well with this fact without making
that face until now. Shouldn’t he have seen
the structural violence already, from both of
his positions?
At that moment, Bruce Wayne’s face re-
veals the unspeakable contradiction that he
 ALL COPS ARE BATMAN
can’t escape, either as Bruce or as Batman:
“What am I doing with all of this dough, and
what is Batman protecting?”
The justification for Wayne’s wealth has
always been that it afforded him resources to
“fight crime” as a semi-reclusive philanthro-
pist and as Batman. But as the first film in the
Nolan reboot, Batman Begins, emphasizes, de-
generate street criminals and not super-villains
motivate Batman by murdering Bruce’s par-
ents, whose beneficent philanthropy had been
all that was keeping Gotham City’s ungrateful
poor from destitution. A war on street crimi-
nals can be read uncomplicatedly as a war on
the poor. When Batman’s interventions are
understood alongside his double’s conglom-
erate—Wayne Enterprises, which designs,
for instance, the U.S. military’s equipment of
deathmaking—a new problematic crystal-
lizes. By rooting for Batman, we are endorsing
the seamless violence of monopoly capitalism
(represented by Bruce Wayne), reinforced by
blunt coercion (represented by Batman).
Wayne personifies capitalist firms’ “legiti-
mate” expansion—assimilation to the mili-
tary complex and consolidation with finance
capital—and capture of the political process.
Note that in The Dark Knight, when hailing
Harvey Dent as Gotham’s savior in a scene
glorifying his super-sovereignty, Wayne tells
Dent, “One fundraiser with my pals … you’ll
never need another cent.” Batman, mean-
while, personifies the extra-juridical violence
needed to clean up the messes Wayne’s sys-
tem produces. Batman is the barely veiled, ev-
er-necessary, and always spectacular ­violence
that haunts Gotham. This haunting is critical:
46
The viewer is encouraged to be annoyed by
Gothamites who find Batman’s vigilantism
objectionable, but perhaps these citizens—
not privy to the sympathetic view of Bruce/
Batman’s childhood trauma that viewers
­enjoy—see things more clearly.
 
An All-American Dualism
The other striking feature of the trailer is how
very, very American ����������������������������
it is. The boy sings the na-
tional anthem at an American football game,
fans’ hands across hearts, and his voice contin-
ues far beyond his image, its tones penetrat-
ing deep into the trailer, saturating the images
with a star-spangled sentimentality that No-
lan’s Batman ���������������������������������
series never indulged before. Go-
tham had always been for itself, a sort of any-
where-nowhere detached from concepts of
nation. We notice this in the way that Gotham
is unmoored from other places—how in the
few times when a world beyond Gotham is ac-
knowledged, it remains disconnected: in Bat-
man Begins, Bruce leaves for rural China, but
we don’t see him clear customs; in The Dark
Knight  he goes to Hong Kong in much the
same way, soaring over borders.
And that is part of the point of Bat-
man: He transcends such circumscriptions.
Though Gotham is a nickname for New
York,  Batman’s  Gotham is not quite that.
Both  Begins  and Dark Knight  are clearly
filmed in Chicago. Gotham becomes a simu-
lacrum for the “late-capitalist city” writ large.
As such, while it was always in America (we
spy an American flag in Dark Knight), it was
not of America, firmly grounded.
 ELLIOTT PRASSE-FREEMAN AND SAYRES RUDY
But in the  Rises  trailer,
�������������������������
the national an-
them lasts 80 seconds. It suffuses the pan over
Gotham, the police commissioner’s speech,
some furious action sequences, and – impor-
tantly—through Hathaway’s warning about
class rebellion.
The only thing that silences the national
anthem is the laborers’ chanting of “Rise!
Rise!” Hence when the gas-masked villain
tells Bruce that “When Gotham is in ruins,
I give you permission to die,” Gotham gives
way to America. We are left, then, with an im-
plicit battle between the nation — represent-
ed by Batman—and the material political
struggle represented by those fighting him.
The explicit presentation of class politics
diverges drastically from the rest of the Bat-
man ��������������������������������������
films, suggesting that Occupy has pen-
etrated Hollywood. This theory gains cre-
dence when we learn that Nolan wanted to
actually film at Zucotti Park  but didn’t out
of respect for the movement. But his film
nonetheless celebrates a reactionary hero.
This is irreconcilable, which explains the
nationalist iconography, where the fetishized
nation becomes the only ideal sacred enough
to justify Bruce/Batman and his interven-
tions. The two constitute a loop: the Nation
allows Bruce to exist while Bruce enables
Batman to save the Nation from Evil (the gas-
masked super-villain) that must be excised.
But can the super villain create an exis-
tential threat that obscures the class poli-
tics? Because we also see rioters and chant-
ers, and we hear Hathaway’s warning: There
is a storm coming. If the villain is excised, we
will still be left with the worker uprisings and
47
c­ ontradictions of Bruce/Batman.  Will these
others be swept along as well? Here is the
obliterating force of reterritorialization: The
rioters are the “part of no part” in this uni-
verse, those who, in Jacques Rancière’s sense,
animate politics through the dissensus they
create by their constitutive inability to be
harmoniously integrated. Against their de-
mand, the loop constructed between Batman
and nation attempts to subsume these agents.
The workers’ singular demands, realities, and
identities are eclipsed, replaced with identi-
ties, realities, etc., as members of the nation.
But in the wake of Occupy, will we be
so fooled? Is Nolan setting up the battle be-
tween capitalism-nation versus Evil Other
only to show us how false this battle is?  Per-
haps the form of the trailer exposes the con-
tent of the film it previews.
 From Super Villain to Systemic Villain
In a recent essay on The Wire ����������������
Frederic ­Jame-
son observes that good villains are obsoles-
cent. Attributing their near extinction to the
erosion of the concept of evil, he makes three
braided arguments: liberal society’s permis-
siveness has weakened taboos (no one is really
“evil” anymore), capitalist villains who pursue
only money are “boring” rather than evil, and
when they are “immense” enough they enter
the realm of the political, which—his third
point—is a mass-culture no-fly zone. So we
have only the serial killers and terrorists, and
they too are becoming stale in their repetition.
Jameson, however, is wrong about poli-
tics being forbidden in mass culture.  The
 ALL COPS ARE BATMAN
Dark Knight Rises is political by other means,
gesturing at an evil  system  rather than an
evil  villain. For instance, the Joker’s excess
vis-à-vis criminality enables Batman’s excess
of the juridical: Batman must go beyond
the law because the Joker goes beyond mere
criminality. The Joker’s villainy provides a
state of exception that justifies Bruce/Bat-
man’s violations, among which is one that’s
rarely noticed, his internal incoherence and
its external permanence. (This is a central
argument in Agamben’s reading of Benjamin
and Schmitt, that the episodic, actual state of
exception obscures the enduring, virtual one
that constitutes modern biopower.) Thus,
only the Joker sanctifies  and obscures  Bruce
and Batman in their combined wealth/crime-
fighting.  Absent the Joker, we realize Batman
protects Bruce as the police protect corpora-
tions, no matter how corrupt, complicit, or
coercive they’ve become in inflicting mass
human suffering. Without the Joker, Bruce/
Batman becomes a double threat to the 99%.
Following this, that  Rises  replaces the
Joker with multiple villains (gas-masked
man, rioters) suggests an inversion of villainy
on two separate planes simultaneously: the
Joker’s “evil” diffracts and distributes into the
entire system: into Gotham itself, the cor-
rupted capitalist city against which the 99%
are rioting.
As such, the relations of villainy are
flipped: The anarchists become liberators
of the system that Bruce/Batman defends.
Bruce/Batman, distracted by his mommy-
daddy-me orphan issues, has not realized
that he has become the villain.
48
 What Rises?
Now that the trailer has opened up this ten-
sion, whether the film leaves the wound
open or not is ultimately irrelevant. Even
if Batman prevails in the furious action
sequences that will surely constitute the
movie’s climax, everyone knows this is just
fun and games, that any Batman sacrifice is
merely a ridiculous resolution that won’t
answer the question:  How could you  live so
large and leave so little for the rest of us?
But even if the truth of  The Dark
Knight  Rises  is contained more forcibly in
what draws us to the theater than what sends
us out of it, it is uncertain whether this prov-
ocation will matter to people once they exit
the theater. Will Rises ����������������������
change attitudes, pul-
lulate into sustained commitments? Or will
the same dialectic of shatter/recapture play
out in the social realm with less success-
ful results?
This is the open question of our Open
Secret era: does speaking a typically oc-
cluded truth shatter collective common
sense and move it toward a more politically-
radicalized consciousness, or does it act as a
way of siphoning off social pressures, leav-
ing us pacified when we return to the desert
of the real?
This is another question that Batman
cannot answer. It is instead left to the rest
of us, the multitude, to decide if the small
but meaningful tears that Occupy, the Arab
Spring, the London protests have constitut-
ed (and still constitute) will compel a more
decent and humane politics to rise. n
XXXX

49
 The Prison-Educational Complex
By ASTRA TAYLOR
When police are deployed in high schools,
typical behavioral issues are reframed as
criminal ones.
EARLIER THIS YEAR I published an essay
on alternative education in the magazine n+1
in which I recounted my experience grow-
ing up “unschooled” and my transition to a
large public high school in Athens, Georgia.
In the essay, I don’t sound the alarm to emp-
ty all classrooms or burn down the schools.
“Growing up, I experienced unschooling as a
compromise,” I concluded, “the more appeal-
ing of the two extremes available in Georgia
given my family’s modest budget: staying at
home and teaching myself, or going to public
school and having my spirit crushed. What I
really wanted—what I still want, even now,
as an adult—is that intellectual community
I was looking for in high school and college
but never quite found. I would have loved to
commune with other young people and find
out what a school of freedom could be like.”
I expected the essay to ruffle some ­feathers
50
but was nonetheless surprised by which pas-
sages irked certain readers into responding. In
passing, I compared schools to prisons and, in
the last paragraph, described my high school
as “a series of cinder-block holding cells.” This
analogy, more than any of the arguments I lev-
ied against conventional schooling, deeply an-
noyed the defenders of traditional pedagogy.
By comparing my public high school to
a prison I wasn’t trying to be provocative.
Instead, I wanted to convey the shock I felt
when I first enrolled, observing the proceed-
ings like a bemused anthropologist, or an
alien. The school I attended was in a massive
one-story square industrial building. The
rooms were uniform and windowless, joy-
less to an extreme that simply had to be engi-
neered. We were made to follow orders that
were arbitrary and demoralizing. (I knew I
had to go to the bathroom; why did I have
 ASTRA TAYLOR
to ask for permission?) More important,
the school was crawling with police officers,
armed and brusque. Day after day I passed
them stationed at main entrances or lurking
in the parking lot or lunchroom.
Coming from my background (which, I
readily admit, was privileged and bohemian)
the constant presence of law enforcement
was striking. For the most part, it seemed the
teachers and administrators were in charge;
they enforced rules, made exceptions, and
meted out rewards and punishments. Yet
the presence of the men in blue told another,
troubling story. A more powerful authority
was at work, actually running the place.
Kathleen Nolan’s book Police in the Hall-
ways is a damning portrait of what happens
when this more powerful authority becomes
dominant. By exhaustively profiling an un-
named Bronx high school—shadowing and
interviewing students, teachers, administra-
tors, security guards, and police officers over
the course of an academic year—Nolan re-
veals the worrying ways educative aims have
51
been eroded by a culture of control, the ways
learning is superseded by law enforcement.
“An institution that in its early days had pur-
ported to serve in loco parentis, taking on
some of the functions and responsibilities of
parents, appeared instead to have taken on
the responsibilities of the criminal-justice
system,” she writes. More specifically, former
New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s
controversial “quality of life” campaign of
aggressively prosecuting squeegee men and
turnstile jumpers and the like under the as-
sumption that the punishment of minor in-
fractions will reduce crime overall had been
extended into New York City’s struggling
public high schools.
The “zero tolerance” order-maintenance
model has been enthusiastically embraced
by Mayor Bloomberg, but what kind of crime
are we talking about when we talk about po-
licing minor infractions in schools? While
there are some gang fights and drug deal-
ing, Nolan shows these aren’t the issues that
command the most police attention. Instead
the sorts of petty incidents that, in the past,
would have been mediated by concerned
teachers and hall monitors — things like hat
wearing, class cutting, talking back or talking
too loudly, and not showing ID when asked
for it—now fall under the jurisdiction of the
NYPD. That is to say, behavioral issues have
been reframed as criminal ones.
After carefully examining the school oc-
currence reports for the year, Nolan found
that the majority of arrests and summons
were, ultimately, the result of “insubordina-
tion” or “disrespect”; in other words, stu-
 THE PRISON-EDUCATIONAL COMPLEX

dents ignored or resisted officers who told lan that the administrators are at the bottom
them to take off their hat, hurry up, or show of the school hierarchy, under the private se-
their ID, and the situation escalated from curity guards who search bags in the morn-
there. These confrontations, which often ing. The police, he said, were at the top.
stem from legitimate frustration at capri- Given all this, it’s hardly surprising that
cious and unaccountable authorities, rou- throughout the book, school staff conflates
tinely lead to arrest. (As Nolan shows, some the educational and penal systems. “I think
officers appear to publicly humiliate and an- walking through that metal detector every
tagonize students for sport, yet students are morning completely brings hostility into the
expected to react like saints to provocation building before [the students] even start the
from their superiors. Taking umbrage is a day,” laments one veteran teacher, alluding to
punishable offense). The “crime” of breaking the school’s intensive security apparatus of
a school rule—not the law—lands students surveillance cameras, metal detectors, scan-
in court, which, in turn, further derails their ners, guards, and cops. “It makes people feel
academic progress, since they must miss like they’re walking into a prison.” The faculty
school to appear before a judge. too are prisoners in a sense, in some ways as
With zero-tolerance enforcement de- powerless as the young people they are meant
manding obedience for its own sake, students to instruct and guide. A teacher impotently
become accustomed to being threatened confesses to a student cuffed for disorderly
with arrest for minor transgressions; many, conduct, “You’ve been arrested. I can’t get in-
eventually, are arrested; they get dragged to volved. You know those teachers who got ar-
the police station and miss class; they accu- rested. This is the same kind of situation.”
mulate summons and have to spend a day at At another Bronx school a principal and
court; some go to juvenile detention or jail. student aide had recently been arrested for
“The school, where they are by law required obstructing justice when they intervened
to spend most of their day, becomes an auxil- under similar circumstances. The teachers
iary to the criminal justice system,” writes No- do what they can, trying to understand the
lan. Slippage in the language used to describe root causes of student rage and using posi-
school routines, she notes, show how blurry tive, not punitive, feedback, but the minute
the line has become: the police are involved
Students get “picked up” With zero-tolerance their hands are also tied.
and “do time”; school They are not empow-
personnel “cooperate” enforcement, students ered to tell the cops to
with the police, who do get accustomed to being quit, so they advise the
“sweeps” of the building. threatened with arrest for kids to cope—to keep
At one point, an officer their heads down, do
confidently assures No- minor transgressions what they are told, and

52
 ASTRA TAYLOR
wait to be released after graduation. The ul-
timate lesson being imparted is the futility
of resistance.
While researching, Nolan spent most of
her time in the dean’s office, observing staff,
and the detention room, where she gets to
know a number of students, including some
who were initiated into gangs while still in
elementary school. The “repeat offenders”
she befriends fall into two categories—­
either they are behind in basic skills like
reading and writing and cannot keep up with
their peers or they are unchallenged by the
coursework, bored and insulted by the ma-
terial and the way it is presented. For these
young people, the detention room, where
they are generally left to their own thoughts,
is a relief from regular classroom indignity.
Things are so bleak that what should be a
sanction is experienced as a reprieve.
Some schools, it turns out, are indeed like
prisons, much more so that the flawed institu-
tion I attended. Nolan condemns the system
as it currently stands in no uncertain terms:
The “primary function” of the school she
studied and others like it, she argues, “is the
production of a whole population of criminal-
ized, excluded youth.” Despite the well-mean-
ing educators and students desperate and
eager to learn, the purpose of such schools
“appears to be the penal management” of this
excluded population. Amid endless econom-
ic crisis, there are no jobs for them, no future,
though many cling to their dreams of a better
life. For those who want to play by the rules,
who speak wistfully of college and a career,
the path out of poverty—let alone toward
53
the stable, satisfying, and fairly remunerated
work they crave and deserve—is blocked
by prejudice, debt, insecurity, and, for many
men of color, incarceration.
“Like jails and insane asylums, schools
isolate society from its problems, whether in
preventing crime, or in curing mental disease,
or in bringing up the young,” Paul Goodman
wrote back in 1969. Nolan’s excellent book
shows how the problems Goodman high-
lighted come together in our worst perform-
ing public schools, which do little more than
keep kids “off the streets,” out of sight and
mind. Instead of future scholars or leaders
young people are viewed as potential felons.
Children with special needs, in particular, are
treated like convicts.
Every few months a horror story breaks
into the national consciousness—as in April,
when a six-year-old girl was handcuffed and
arrested for throwing a tantrum at an el-
ementary school in Milledgeville, Georgia,
about 90 minutes from my ­hometown—
causing mainstream media outlets to ask
ridiculous questions: “Burping, doodling,
food fights: Should students be arrested for
minor misbehavior?” inquired CBS News.
The answer, for any civilized society, should
be obvious: No. As Zack, one of the bright
troublemakers Nolan gets to know puts it,
“The cops ain’t supposed to be in educa-
tion.” Sadly, Zack’s wise words are being
ignored by policy makers who prefer the
locked-down semblance of order to the
messy, unpredictable process of real learn-
ing. Zero-tolerance is the only proper re-
sponse to their misguided approach. n
54
 City Under Siege
By JACOB SILVERMAN

Once the War on Terror began,

city dwellers everywhere found themselves
living in occupied territories

ON JUNE 13, I found New York City’s
Washington Square Park swarming with
police. It was a warm afternoon, and some
were loitering in the shade, listening to an
officer give instructions as plastic handcuffs
were distributed from large cardboard boxes.
Cops paired off and entered surrounding
buildings, most of which belong to New York
University and house university facilities.
Perhaps, I thought, some awful crime had
been committed. I asked two cops what was
going on. Was a protest expected? It was pos-
sible, he said, but “we’re not sure if they’re
going to show up.”
Whether any protestors arrived is im-
material. The police presence was not about
preventing criminality or violence. Rather,
the officers were there both as a show of force
and to fulfill what has become the NYPD’s
signal philosophy since 9/11: pre-emption.
Pre-emption is among the most important
philosophical and strategic underpinnings
for counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine,
and after years of being honed in Fallujah
and Kandahar, COIN has been imported to
the West, where it compliments the growing
militarization of law enforcement and the
transformation of local police forces into hy-
brid paramilitary-intelligence organizations.
Cities Under Siege: The New Military Ur-
banism, a book published two years ago by
Stephen Graham, a professor of cities and
society at Newcastle University, may be the
central text to understanding this new condi-
tion. It is not a perfect book. It is filled with
jargon and academese, whereas this subject
calls out for a populist discourse capable of
radicalizing the masses. It also has too few

55
 JACOB SILVERMAN
examples and doesn’t provide the long arcs
of narrative that would help sustain a reader’s
attention through a book of this length. But
Cities Under Siege is also spectacularly well
researched, a great, angry synthesis of the
past decade’s major research in urban studies,
military technology, demography, counterin-
surgency studies, and a host of related fields.
It is a Shock Doctrine for the Occupy genera-
tion, a book that crystallizes a geopolitical
moment and shows where it may be danger-
ously headed.
From Michel Foucault, Graham has drawn
the book’s galvanizing concept: the boomer-
ang effect. Graham quotes from Society Must
Be Defended, a series of lectures Foucault
gave in 1975 and 1976 in which he argued
that Western imperialism didn’t merely force
Western practices and institutions on imperial
subjects. Rather, “a whole series of colonial
models was brought back to the West, and the
result was that the West could practise some-
thing resembling colonization, or an internal
colonialism, on itself.” This boomerang effect
has been resurgent over the past decade, when
one can observe practices from the neocolo-
nial frontiers of Baghdad, Kabul, and Hebron
now being instituted in New York, Wash-
ington, D.C., and London. So-called green
zones, security buffers, checkpoints, novel
nonlethal weapons, drones, and CCTV—all
have become indelible features of the West’s
urban centers of political and financial power.
Though they originate in the military cam-
paigns prosecuted by Western forces and se-
curity contractors, these elements are largely
facilitated by the police.
56
Like Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s ex-
pansion of Paris’s boulevards, which en-
sured that future revolutionaries would have
difficulty barricading the streets, Western
urban spaces have been reconstructed to
circumscribe sites of protest and protect fi-
nancial and political elites against potential
threats. During globalization conferences,
free speech or protest “zones” are set up, en-
circled in barbed wire and riot police. Lower
Manhattan and other “financial cores” are
now set apart in “security zones” that restrict
automobile and foot traffic. Traditional ur-
banism gives way to “what Trevor Boddy has
called ‘an architecture of disassurance’ as set-
backs are increased, roads are closed, barriers
and bollards are inserted around perimeters,
and fountains and landscape features are de-
signed to act as collapsable ‘tiger traps’ to in-
tercept truck bombers.”
In New York, armed National Guards-
men patrol Grand Central Station and other
transportation hubs. The NYPD—which has
been turned into a full-fledged intelligence
agency, with military-grade equipment, civil-
ian analysts, overseas offices, and in-house
CIA liaisons—maps and surveils Muslim en-
claves, recalling Israeli practices in the West
Bank, the ur-model for counterinsurgency,
and raids “known” activist households before
protests even take place. Taken together—
and one must also cite the NYPD’s stop-and-
frisk practice, which has grown immensely
in the past 10 years—these policies reflect a
stunning reconfiguration of policing and of
how cities are secured against urban publics,
which is to say, themselves.
 CITY UNDER SIEGE

This brings us to the second key feature “In the absence of a uniform-wearing en-
of Graham’s thesis: a shift in the perception emy, urban publics themselves become the
of cities in the eyes of policymakers, security prime enemy,” writes Graham, though the
officials, and financial elites. Graham seizes reality is more complicated than that. Ur-
on Richard J. Norton’s term “feral cities,” de- ban publics are certainly the prime enemy—­
fining them as “highly disorderly urban areas forever under scrutiny, with tacit guilt being
in the global South which are controlled by the default—but they are also enlisted as ac-
violent nonstate militias of various sorts.” complices in the securing and pacification of
Increasingly, the global North’s cities are their own societies. On the subway, signs and
also seen as feral, “intrinsically problematic recordings exhort us, if you see ­something,
spaces” that must be managed, regulated, and say something. Police officers hand out fly-
heavily securitized. And with “war [serving] ers requesting—as one recently distributed in
as the dominant metaphor in describing the New York did—that citizens help the nypd
perpetual and boundless condition of ur- fight terrorism! Quoting James Hay and
ban societies”—a war on drugs, on poverty, Marc Andrejevic, Graham offers, “everyone
on ­terror—we have a domestic culture that must be understood as both potential suspect
matches the perpetual, amorphous, and se- and therefore, necessarily, proactive spy.”
cretive wars we are prosecuting on colonial The solutions to the perceived insecurity
frontiers from Somalia to Pakistan to Yemen. of Western cities is accordingly “deeply tech-
Graham demonstrates that the police con- nophilic,” allowing “the extension of military
duct counterinsurgency wars at home, too. ideas of tracking, identification and targeting
In insurgencies, the emphasis is on omni- into the quotidian spaces and circulations
science and pre-emption. Threats must be dis- of everyday life”—implemented by police,
covered in advance, and security forces must countenanced by citizens and lawmakers.
sift through the masses to separate otherwise Military-style doctrines are adapted to an in-
indistinguishable targets from ordinary ci- secure homeland, a process made easier when
vilians. Police forces have been specifically defense contractors often sell versions of the
drafted, trained, and equipped by their federal same products to military and civilian clients.
superiors to facilitate the prosecution of a war We have long tolerated this kind of society
that transcends borders in our airports. Now we
and jurisdictions. In the Police forces have are faced with “an exten-
U.S., “fusion centers,” sion of airport-style se-
which bring together been specifically drafted, curity and surveillance
local, state, and federal trained, and equipped systems to encompass
entities to share intel- to prosecute a war that entire cities and societies
ligence, further occlude utilizing, at its founda-
these boundaries. transcends borders tion, the high-tech means

57
 JACOB SILVERMAN
of consumption and mobility that are already
established in Western cities.” Graham is refer-
ring to credit cards, CCTV, GPS, cell phones,
IP addresses, E-ZPass—the whole networked
circuitry of late-capitalist consumption. These
data are continuously mined for patterns, sub-
jected to algorithms that determine whether a
person is worth tracking.
We begin to change who we are and what
we do. In a Washington Post article about life
in Gaza under Israeli drones, a man remarked
that he skips his morning run when drones
are plentiful in the sky. Others report chang-
ing their clothes so as not to be mistaken for
militants. In a widely circulated New York
Times op-ed about stop-and-frisk, Nicho-
las K. Peart, a 23-year-old college student,
wrote that he doesn’t spend much time with
friends outside in Harlem; he carries ID with
him at all times; he dresses better if he goes
to downtown Manhattan. Peart concludes, “I
incorporated into my daily life the sense that
I might find myself up against a wall or on the
ground with an officer’s gun at my head.”
Graham ends Cities Under Siege with a
chapter about “countergeographies” that
might be created to overturn this new military
urbanism. The discussion comes a bit late in
the game—on the order of telling a terminal
cancer patient that she should eat more fruits
and vegetables. What’s more is that while he’s
shown that the language of critical theory and
academia is useful in delineating this state
of affairs—it has much in common with the
euphemistic vernacular of military strategists
and DARPA r­ esearchers—it’s far less effective
in providing a blueprint for mass protest.
58
There is optimistic but rather ethereal
talk about “locative or ambient media,”
which seem like a pale response to mega-
cities colonized by CCTV, drones, and bio-
metric security procedures, or when Oc-
cupy activists are arrested when trying to
close their Citibank accounts. Graham is on
firmer ground when proposing that activists
make use of “countersurveillance”—video-
taping police treatment of demonstrators,
legally employing DIY drones to surveil
protests and monitor public spaces. He also
deserves credit for proposing that we “map,
visualize, and represent the hidden geog-
raphies of the new military urbanism.” He
presents as examples maps of the deaths of
immigrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexi-
co border, as well as maps of CIA rendition
flights. Similarly, one could point to the
Electronic Frontier Foundation’s mapping
of U.S. drone bases (there are dozens) as
a way to hammer home the ways in which
military urbanism infects even far-flung
American communities.
Graham acknowledges the limitations of
his prescriptions: “Virtually all of the initia-
tives explored here confine themselves to the
circuits of artists and activists, and do not
cohere into the kind of broader political co-
alitions necessary to the forging of concerted
political challenges.” And the express pur-
pose of this dense, haunting, essential book
is to describe the contours of a problem,
rather than its multivariable solutions. He
is no demagogue, only a very effective diag-
nostician. But how to start a revolution when
you’re already treated as if in revolt? n
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Last month I discussed the need to speak up and speak out. Loudly
and clearly, making sure we are heard and understood. Well, it’s not
just about being heard but how we choose to hear, part self spin part
personalized sound bites. Let’s start to hear not just what we want to
hear but what we need to hear. Clarity matters but it’s not always
clear just what that is.

I will give you an example: In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev famously

declared to America “we will bury you.” That is the phrase that most
of us bring to mind when this former Soviet ruler is mentioned. In
fact, 1956 was a very busy year for Comrade Khrushchev aside from
speaking of “putting us under”�he also managed to say, “In seven
years we will reach the level of America. When we catch up and pass
you by, we will wave to you.” What a difference.  A little more Bring It
On, a little less War of the Worlds.

We need to visualize more of a cheerleading funfest feel rather than a

dreary post apocalyptic barren landscape motif.   This is not your
father’s glasnost.  A little reeducation and bit of constructive hearing
and BAM--  that would be an Emeril Lagasse sort of “bam” as
opposed to the mutually-assured-destruction type.  It’s complicated.
This aural retooling might seem an endless task but we must be
vigorously vigilant and who knows maybe one day we can make an
omelette without breaking any eggs.

Why is it easier for us to see an angry man banging his shoe on a

podium than a cheery competitor waving as he passes by? It makes
no sense; we’ve got to turn that Etch-a-Sketch over.  

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In fact, this might be the best time to get in touch with the flip-flop
part of our personalities. Drop some of the old ideas that have
clogged the arteries of our brains and slowed our progress down to a
crawl. Retrieve a bit of our naiveté and reignite our thinking process.
Changing your mind can be a tonic for thought. A society that takes
Adderral to study and Viagra to stay sturdy might be surprised that
this rebirth can be achieved so easily. We just need to take some time
with ourselves and our thoughts with no goal in mind.  Purpose-free
thinking is it’s own engine, thinking just for the sake of thoughts.  As
the philosopher/band En Vogue so clearly sang,  “free your mind and
the rest will follow.”

As the end gets closer we will want to get closer with ourselves.  It
could be time to let your freak flag fly or unchain your inner control
freak. Let’s open the doors and the windows of perception. We can
see what comes out in the wash, it might surprise us what’s dirty and
what’s clean.

Be sentient and you’ll be sensitive, speak clear but as if no one can

hear. Most importantly: if you see something, think something.

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