In this chapter I have presented a set o f ' snapshots' of the affective world o f the police subject. As 1 have already indicated, this is not intended to imply that each individual police officer has identical emotional responses to the world. This thesis rests on a discourse analytical framework in which individual subjects are to a great extent a product o f available interpretive repertoires (see section 3.3.1). The analysis focuses on the paranoid interpretive repertoires themselves, and how individual affective bodies move within them, not on individual psychopathology. What 1 have been describing, therefore, are the emotional patterns which appear at a relatively abstract level within police occupational culture. I have also tried to give some sense of the tension between the fluidity and fragmentation of that culture, and the common responses to this
fragmentation.
The repeated patterns are
1. Attempts to split' the world into very clear categories of good and bad. Hostility is then directed towards these bad objects' and mechanisms'.
2. Such hostility is generally expressed in terms of moral condemnation, expressions o f disgust, hostile humour, and fantasy or real violence.
3. The hostility often seems to be derived from anxieties about losing control (of territory, o f youth, o f the unemployed, and so on).
4. There is a background of a very dark and pessimistic vision o f the world in which danger and threat comes from everywhere.
5. 1 have suggested that the anxiety about complexity and fluidity in the world, and the sense of impending disaster, is derived both from the police officer's basic mandate to order the world, but also that this is inseparable from projected anxiety about complexity and fluidity within the police subject itself. What the police subject is most afraid of losing control of is itself. It cannot bear complexity within, yet has no choice - the resulting despair is projected outwards in a paranoid suspicion o f complexity and difference in the rest of the world.
What I am describing here is a cultural paranoia'. In an article called Paranoia and the Dynamics of Exclusion' Edwin Lemert argued for a break with the idea of paranoia as a disease-state o f the individual.31 He argued that changes in environment and social situation could create paranoid dispositions in people without any special character structure. What, he asked, was the social context of patterns o f behaviour and communication such as delusions, hostility, aggressiveness, suspicion, envy, stubbornness and so on. He argued that paranoia and associated exclusion, o f the paranoid individual, was a result o f unbearable strain placed on "reciprocating behaviours with attached emotions".
Lemert argues that human cooperation requires a grounding o f trust and that trust is a function of communication. If trust breaks down, as in the process described above, then communication breaks down and becomes "dilapidated or paranoid" Flows o f information break down, perceptions of the other' become
distorted and suffused with suspicion and hostility. It is not that the paranoid is "deluded" in believing that other people are conspiring' against him. The problem is that the creation o f mistrust has cut off much o f the communication which might give him some sense o f the actual dimensions of such 'threat'. The result is a growing tendency to become "deluded" regarding these dimensions. All of this finds echoes in the relationship between the police and many o f the communities they police. In particular, as I pointed out in chapter 1, the police operate under a rule o f universal incredulity. It is their job to mistrust.
But while Lemert makes it clear that paranoia can, and should, be analyzed at the social level, missing in his account are:
1. Firstly a sense o f the emotional force o f such paranoid encounters. Paranoia is not just a state o f communication, it is simultaneously an affective form. In Lemert's account there is no sense o f the anxiety, suspicion, fear, and anger that make up these relationships. A social theory o f paranoia must locate it not only in communication and interaction but also in the body and its forces, the emotions.
2. Secondly, my purpose in not to analyze an individual's paranoid relationship with the group, but to analyze an abstracted institutional subject's paranoid relationship to the wider society. It is necessary, therefore, to fin d a way o f theorising the police as representative o f the paranoid cultural pole o f a
Dionysian dialectic' being constantly played out in the modem world.
The following three chapters will explore various ways in which these theoretical problems might be approached.
Notes
1 One exception to this is N.G.Fielding and J.Fielding, ' Police Attitudes to Crime and Punishment', British Journal of Criminology. Vol.31, No. 1, Winter 1991.
2.See for example H.Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. Hogarth Press, London, 1975, chapter 5.
3The concept of closure' provides a good example o f what I mean when I say that studies o f the police can tell us much about ourselves. It seems clear that the pleasure taken in 'closure' is a phenomenon common to most of us. Examining the role of this pleasure in police occupational culture should suggest useful questions which w e may ask about ourselves.
5.The term "dirty work" comes from E.C.Hughes, Good People and Dirty Work', in E.C.Hughes, The Sociological Eve. Chicago, Aldine, 1971.
6. This affective attachment to the abstracted image' of the uniform is discussed in section 5.2.1 of Chapter 5.
7. J.Habermas. The Theory o f Communicative Action Vol 2 - Lifeworld and System: A Critique o f Functionalist Reason. Heinemann, London, 1984.
8. For excellent discussion of the historical origins o f the idea o f "the dangerous individual" see M.Foucault, The Dangerous Individual', in L.D.Kritzman (ed), Foucault: Politics. Philosophy. Culture. Routledge, London. 1988.
P Pasquino, Criminology: the Birth of a Special Knowledge', in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govern mentality. G. Burchell et al (eds), Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead. 1991. This will be explored further in chapter 7.
9. The concept o f the "transitional zone" comes from the work of the Chicago School' theorists Clifford Shaw and Henry Mackay. The "transitional zone" is supposedly characterised by a transient population (often poor immigrants), with a fragmented cultural tradition, impersonality, lack of informal social control, and general "social disorganisation". C.Shaw and H.Mackay, Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Chicago University Press, 1942.
10. Police comparisons between categories of "police property" and animals are particularly apparent in the case o f ethnic minorities but are not restricted exclusively to them. Smith and Gray for example note the existence of "a notorious council estate known to the relief as 'the rat farm'”. D.J.Smith and J.Gray, Police and People in London: The PSI Report. Gower, Aldershot, 1985, p352.
11 It could of course be argued that this is in fact the way that members of the black community view the police. Firstly such an assumption would involve committing oneself to the same paranoid vision of a homogenous and universally unsophisticated "black community" which the police officer holds. It would also involve committing oneself to the paranoid and essentialist vision o f belief and attitude as static and one dimensional as opposed to fragmented, dynamic and contingent. It may well be that some members of the black community view some police officers in this way, some o f the time. It may even be the case that a few of them might actually articulate their current feelings in language similar to this officer's. In general however the beliefs and practices o f the black community' (whatever that is) are dynamic, multi dimensional. shot through with antagonisms, and driven by shifting patterns o f affect. In other words they are similar in character to the beliefs and practices 1 am seeking to determine in the community of the police. The question in this case, however, is not what precisely do the police believe' but how do they feel.
12.This latter criticism and dismissal o f evidence as unreliable applies probably equally to ethnic minorities other than "Afro Caribbean”. Indeed the Smith and Gray's work for the PSI arrived at precisely this conclusion in relation to the Asian community. Smith and Gray, op cit, pp407-409
13.One suspects there are profound gender issues implicated here. This is an area which has been explored most fully by Klaus Thewcleit. K. Theweleit. Male Fantasies. Polity Press. Cambridge. 1987.
14.This notion o f sacred space' is one which has arisen in discussions with Peter Jowers. It obviously figures strongly in the works of Durkheim, Mauss and Bataillc but has disappeared from most contemporary sociology. In terms of a sociology o f affect the idea that space is differentially invested with collective feeling is obviously crucial.
15. The nature of such connections between dirt ambivalence and immorality is discussed further in Chapter 5, section 5.3.1.
16. C.Steedman, Policing the Victorian Community. London, Routledge, 1984, esp pl40-43
17 Bittner's own definition of what the police deal with was "something that ought not to be happening and about which someone had better do something now!”. 'Florence Nightingale in Pursuit of Willie Sutton: A Theory of the Police1 in H. Jacobs (ed) The Potential for the Reform o f Criminal Justice. Sage, 1974, 30. The whole of this excellent article pursues the them of the police as violent controllers of social trouble’.
18. R.Reiner, The Politics o f the Police. Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1992, pp 131-132. 19. J.Q.Wilson first described such cultural differences in his seminal work Varieties of Police Behaviour. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massechusetts, 1968. See also S.Jones and M.Levi The Police and the Majority: The Neglect o f the Obvious’, Police Journal, vol. LVI, no.4, 1983.
20. E.M.Lemert, Paranoia and the Dynamics of Exclusion’, in Human Deviance. Social Problems, and Social Control. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1967.