The Critical Theory of Law and Order: Rethinking Conjunctural Analysis

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Thought and Philosophy II

Abstract

In considering the popularity of the politics of law and order today, this paper returns to one of the quintessential problems of critical theory: why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation? This was the problem of tyranny for Spinoza, of fascism for the early Frankfurt School, and of the drift toward law and order society for Stuart Hall. It is necessary to pose this question to the problem of American policing today because it emphasizes particular ideological and political issues around popular turns toward authoritarianism that are neglected in contemporary critical theories of the police and carceral studies more broadly. This paper argues that the tendency in critical theory to use functionalist arguments in identifying the purpose of the police overlooks important political and ideological dimensions of this history. To overcome these, I look to earlier theoretical debates over how to understand the formation of authoritarian societies.

Contemporary critical analysis of the carceral state tends to explain its development as a symptom of how neoliberalism relies on ever-more coercive measures to manage the populations it subjects to increasingly greater levels of domination. In most accounts, the reason for every mutation in American carceralism is invariably the maintenance of racial, capitalist, and patriarchal order. While this is undoubtedly true at a certain level of analysis, functionalist narratives too easily explain the success of law and order in capturing broad popular support by pointing to elite, often media-driven crime panics.

The reflex to explain popular support for law and order through social constructivist arguments is to some degree an effect of the influence of Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis –a book I consider to be the most important work of scholarship on the relationship between the politics of law and order and the conservative realignment of society in the latter part of the twentieth century. Although Hall intended to provide an analysis of the growing support for coercive government in Britain that did not rely on theories of elite conspiracy from above or the natural conservatism of the population from below, he ultimately provided just that. During a terminal crisis of welfare-state capitalism, he argued that the mediating institutions parties, police, and the media exploited the deep ideological reservoir of British nationalism, traditionalism, and racism to drum up xenophobic and racist sentiments to inspire a moral panic around crime.

Yet, the symbolic construction of reactionary ideology only restates what must be explained in the first place: why are people responsive to right-wing manipulation? I find a more compelling answer to this in both the Frankfurt School’s investigation of the objective conditions that structure the irrational character of mass ideology, as well as, the way Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser took up this question in their work. I believe Gramsci and Hall’s treatment of the economic base and political superstructure as relatively autonomous from each other to be particularly productive for thinking about the question of irrational ideological production. Their approach allows for the analysis of periods when a shift in productive forces undermines the material basis for the ruling bloc in a given society, but instead of mechanically leading to a new ruling bloc and economic arrangement, it produces a conjuncture in which the old ruling forces try to manage the breakdown of their authority and to defeat new competitors for rule. For Gramsci and Althusser, a conjunctural crisis of authority can last decades or even centuries without being resolved, during which time the social terrain becomes highly unstable.

Their method of analyzing these conjunctures, “conjunctural analysis,” is particularly useful for studying the punitive turn, because of its emphasis on the formation of a dominant ideology as a material process that does not merely express the interests of the leading economic forces in society, but instead must be politically articulated across complex and contradictory sites of production such as: the church, the school, the family, etc.… This paper argues that while Policing the Crisis was a groundbreaking attempt at producing a conjunctural analysis of law and order, by treating private institutions like the family as symbols rather than material sites of ideological production, its legacy was one of social constructivism. The result of the social constructivist turn is instead of understanding right-wing populism as the result of complex material processes, it has been overwhelmingly understood in terms of symbolic manipulation. In this sense, I call for the contemporary critical theory of the police to return to originating questions of the tradition and to, following Hall, use conjunctural analysis to try to understand why the politics of law and order remains so popularly compelling today.

Author

• Milo Ward, CUNY Graduate Center