Abandoning the
notion that police are the strong arm of the law, the bobbies on the beat, and instead taking up the Foucauldian
conceptualization of police as a public health apparatus ensuring the stability of a
population, let us examine a recent collective policing enterprise in the Black
River, Vermont region.
Last
month the NGO Black River Action Team coordinated various public and private agencies
in order to monitor the e.coli levels at Buttermilk Falls, a popular swimming
hole outside Ludlow, Vermont, itself a popular tourist destination. BRAT allied itself with various funders
(Okemo Mountain Resort and Kiosko) in order to generate the operating capital
needed to perform water tests at Endyne Labs, a nearby private laboratory. These water
tests are then posted on a sign at the head of the short walk-in trail to the
falls where any swimmer can read the conditions and decide whether or not it is
“safe” – based on EPA standards and guidelines for “full emersion,” i.e.
swimming – to swim in the river. Here then we have numerous private and public
actors. Okemo, Kiosko, Endyne Labs: private. Environmental Protect Agency:
public. And then there is BRAT itself, the hybrid entity whose undecidability
between private and public gives it the ability to coordinate a collective
policing endeavor. What should we call this endeavor, The Buttermilk Falls Police
(BFP)?
One might ask, so what? What is at
stake here if not the health of a population? The BFP is a collective endeavor
to secure the health of a population at a common gathering point, which,
interestingly enough, is a location of leisure. To secure that health, BFP not
only operates as detailed previous, but also through its ability to get a
population to conduct itself in a specific manner seemingly on their own. To be
successful, signs produced by BFP – those posted e.coli levels – must not only
be read immediately prior to swimming or not swimming (to state the obvious)
but also that members of the population recognized the signs as signs and then, more importantly, trust them as verified by standards of "public health" vested in the entity "Endyne Labs." Generated by Endyne's aura of veracity such credulity ensures that potential swimmers in turn freely opt to follow the police’s (in)directive. An internalization
of a model, deliberative conduct occurs here: Low levels? Dive in! High
levels? Hit the chlorinated town or resort pool.
But there is another side to this as
well, the tones of which resonate with much writing on rural government at
least since the beginning of the Romantic period. Ranging from George Crabbe’s “The
Village” to Hardy’s Wessex Novel to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, from Joseph Ritson's radical
antiquarian to William Morris’s socialist merry old England to Raymond Williams
country proletariat, novelists and theorists alike have viewed similar
intrusions into once non-policed activities as destructive of desired
precedents. The Buttermilk Falls policing clearly fits such a reader: a
location and activity once “outside” a certain regime of policing now clearly
within the ken of The Police.
Let
us slow down a moment, though. The issue isn’t that the swimming hole,
its participants, or their conduct were once free from policing and are now policed.
The swimmer and his/her like were always subject to police, if only in the
local knowledge operative at the moment of any decision (Swim? Not swim?) based on observations of water flow or clarity and framed by preexisting conceptions of what those observations "mean." And these alternative modes of policing don’t
stop operating because BFP has moved in. To understand BFP naively is to see it
as monolithic: “The State is foisting its power onto the lives of free subjects
via the EPA” or “Neoliberalism is taking over the lives of free subjects via
capitalism ventures like Endyne. Rather, what is occurring in this case is a change in the balance
of regimes at a single location. Non-BFP policing operates upon a population, but aren’t tied to collective enterprises between public and private
entities orchestrated by a hybrid entity like BRAT or even codified through a regime of veracity based in a set of scientific practices. In short, what we witness with the Buttermilk Falls signage is the
transition into a neoliberal mode of police, one marked by collectivization
between private and public entities, the formation of alternative “grammars”
(how one knows that the water is “safe” and what “safe” even means).
Coda:
The comportment
of the critic here to his/her object of inquiry should not be “neutral” in any
naïve manner. One cannot say that he/she should approach this emergent police
endeavor without judgment. But that doesn’t mean a critic should be as partisan
as a Williams or a Ritson, even if it is maintained reflexively as Donna
Haraway. Rather, one must be agnostic faithfully. For example: the approach to
BFP above sets out agnostically: Here is the emergence of this thing, BFP, and
this is what that thing does. However, the purpose of such a critical effort is
to make salient the contingency of BFP, methodologically something visible in
the contrast and conflict between alternative regimes of police at a single
location, or, more interestingly, as they coexist in the same location and with
shared populations. Contingency is crucial to this project because it allows
the critic to evaluate the object of inquiry and provide the discursive,
conceptual, practicable opportunity to imagine alternatives. This is what the
humanities (could a more flawed a name be given to this discipline?) can and
should offer. We can not only document the operations of “police” and other
government operations but also test the conditions for alternative practices of
policing or, more broadly understood, “government.” Now comes the oft repeated
mantra: We have done a good job with the first, documenting and contesting
liberalism, neoliberalism, colonialism, biopolitics to name only a few of the
more fastidiously delineated modes; we have not done an adequate job offering
alternatives. The humanities (or whatever we will call ourselves) must get its
utopian verve back.
