Murderous Enthusiasm: The “Exultant Mood” of Police Sovereignty

• In Event: New Directions in Cultural Criminology

Abstract

As specialists in the arts and sciences of bourgeois violence, or the workaday application of state power as might-as-right under the thanatocracy of racial capitalism, the police exercise the ultimate power over life and death. Those licensed this “public authority,” as this paper seeks to demonstrate via various examples, often venerate their violence, glorifying, even worshipping, the absolute prerogative to decide who lives and who dies, who remains free and who will be caged. With this glorification often comes gratification, or an affective, psychic investment in violence and cruelty that reveals itself not only in acts of bloodshed – the swinging nightstick, the firing gun – but in the blue theatrics so often accompanying them as cops boast, celebrate, and stage what Mike Davis once observed as the “exultant mood” of police violence. It is this blue economy of murderous enthusiasm and perverse enjoyment in the prerogatives of police violence this paper seeks to confront, with the primary focus being the cultural, moral, and psychic life of US police forces over the last several decades of the so-called neoliberal theatre of cruelty. The task, then, is to confront what Frederic Lordon dubs the “libidinal sway of authorized violence” as a real dynamic force in the affective life and political dramaturgy of police sovereignty as configured alongside the political economies of “carceral capitalism.” This, then, is to take seriously the dynamic back-and-forth between the political structure of police power and the psychological structure of police desire under the historical ascendancy of the police and prison as catch-all solutions to social problems. Although police desire is in no way reducible to murderous enthusiasm, it would also be a horrible mistake to deny or disavow how the workaday work of violence so often expends itself, and (re)presents itself, as a murderous passion for violence, and often as that “accursed share” that exceeds the oft-cited utilitarian justifications for legal violence as merely necessary, instrumental, functional force.

Authors

• Tyler Wall, University of Tennessee

• Bill McClanahan, University of Tennessee, Knoxville