Police. Choreographing demobilisation

Abstract

This paper tackles the politics of social control involved in the task of the police, by approaching police as a state institution that operates through and upon movement, and which seeks to transform the political aspect of movement (which Randy Martin defines as 'mobilization') into social demobilization. I argue that police performance is a choreographed performance, and focus on how police benefit from choreography as a language of control. Following Jacques Rancière's distinction of politics and police, I recognize the biopolitical dimension of police by focusing on how police manufactures social consensus by using choreographed movement to repress spontaneous movement. I draw on Randy Martin and André Lepecki in order to argue that movement plays, therefore, a central role in the performance of police: movement appearing to be both the source of police power and their main target. We must look at the professionalized production of acquiescent patterns of movement as a conscious operation of power aiming for demobilization and for the transformation of public spaces of dialogue and dispute into spaces of mobility and circulation. I engage critically with the well-known paper 'Choreopolice and choreopolitics; or, the task of the dancer' by Lepecki, which defines police as a biopolitical logic of relentless circulation while leaving aside other considerations of police that might as well be informed by the scope of performance research: provided that we consider police a practice of the bodies, what are the body techniques that police deploy? How are they embodied? I build upon Erin Manning's concept of ecology of movements to describe the interplay of police officers and protesters as an interface, and to observe how police usually perform on the level of atmosphere distortion in order to overwhelm and disperse protesters.