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Dissertation for Royal Holloway PIR Department

Keeping the Peace: The Kettle, its Functions and Effects in an Age of Consensus

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Will Horner

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Many thanks given to Nathan Widder and Doerthe Rosenow both for their insight and advice.

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Image © JonCartwright

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Abstract: We must avoid looking at the kettle simply as an act of force.To write it off merely as an act of state violence or police brutality wouldonly scratch at the surface of its uses, functions, effects and goals. We mustinstead understand the kettle as being embedded in the power relationsthat comprise modern society, which run between the state, thecommunity, the protester and the police. The questions we should really beasking are: what is exceptional about certain protests that legitimise theutilisation of the kettle? What are the power effects of the kettle? What isthe wider context in which recent protests and instances of kettling haveoccurred, and what might be their relation to the development of kettlingas a police public order tactic? Drawing on both Foucault and Rancière Iwill argue that the modern condition of post-democracy monopolises theact of politics within the institutions of government because of the threatthat it poses to consensus. As a result a narrow definition of protest isdrawn that limits legitimate protest to that which does not disruptconsensus. In light of this anti-political state, kettling is the procedureapplied to instances when a protest becomes political by disruptingconsensual order. Therefore kettling is the very act of containing politicsitself.

Introduction

It is the perverse irony of the kettle, that to be in one is to feelfree. To be precise, it is to be highly aware of your imprisonmentwithin a cage of florescent yellow bars, but at the same time theeffectual abandonment of the space by the agents of the law, the actof ceding, temporarily, a space for the eruption of politicsengenders a feeling of autonomy as well as collective identity andpower. To be in a kettle is to feel both free and not free. It’sclear that traditional arguments that place emphasis on rights andlaw will be inadequate to truly understand the phenomena of thekettle. Instead we should look at it through a Foucauldian (1978)understanding of power relations, which see power as operating onboth micro and macro levels in a multiplicity of directions, as wellas with the insight of Rancière’s understanding of politics (1999,2010): as a rupture that shatters disciplinary society’s consensualorder. As is implied this essay will combine Foucauldianunderstanding of disciplinary society (1977) and Rancière’sunderstanding of the order of the police into a coherent

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understanding of a society that seeks to reproduce the uneventful –consensus.

It is worth now outlining exactly what my object of analysisis. The kettle, or kettling, is the name of a police public ordertactic more formally known as ‘corralling’ or ‘containment’. The actis to enclose the majority of protesters within a tight (orabsolute, to use a Metropolitan Police term) cordon, regulating whocan and cannot enter, and often closing access all together for anumber of hours. The use of this tactic is a relatively newphenomenon, and has been practically pioneered by LondonMetropolitan Police. It has gained considerable attention andcontroversy as a result of its use, particularly at the anti-cutsdemonstrations of 2010/2011. The name is a metaphor, for thecontainment of heat within a domestic kettle. The meaning of themetaphor is open to interpretation; it can be seen as an attempt tocontain heated situations of violent disorder; or as a process thatboils the tempers of those contained within. This is in part thesource of its controversy, because it could be seen as creatingviolent disorder. It also raises questions about the right toprotest, and whether kettling is an infringement on that right. Inchoosing to focus theoretical insight into a particular mechanism ofpower in a concrete context, I am adopting an approach which owesmuch to the situated methodology of Coleman & Tucker’s DiscipliningDissent project (2011). An approach which utilises Foucault’s notionof an ‘ascending analysis of power’ (2003: 30), which seeks to studyhow power functions in localised instances and builds upwards.

It will be argued that the phenomenon of the kettle iscomplex. The questions we should ask are: what is exceptional aboutcertain protests that legitimate the utilisation of the kettle?What are the power effects of the kettle? What is the wider contextin which recent protests and instances of kettling have occurred,and what might be their relation to the development of kettling as apolice public order tactic? The answer I provide is that aFoucauldian and Rancièrean understanding is necessary to comprehendthe true nature of society. I will use the term (borrowed fromRancière) ‘post-democracy’1 (1995: 98) to describe society in a way

1 “Exhibition in place of appearance, exhaustive counting in place of imparity, consensus in place of grievance – such are the commanding features of the current correction of democracy, a correction which thinks

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that is both disciplinary and a-political.2 Post-democracy is anunderstanding that reconciles Foucault’s understanding ofdisciplinary society with Rancière’s understanding of the order ofthe police. Creating a unified understanding of modern society thatsees discipline and the order of the police as striving for the samegoal: consensus. Moreover, post-democracy is apolitical, even anti-political, because consensus reduces politics to the management ofcompeting interests, the job of politicians, something that occursin parliaments. But this is a delusion, what post-democracy callspolitics is simply an act of policing. It is anti-political aspolitics must be understood à la Rancière, as a disruption in theorder of consensus. Protest therefore is an act of politics, whichcreates aesthetic disagreements about the counting of the parts ofsociety. Kettling is therefore understood as an attempt to literallycontain politics, preventing or mitigating its effects.

The essay will be structured as follows: in the followingsection I will a give an analytical account of Foucault’sdisciplinary institutions and society, grounded on his understandingof micro and macro-power. Next I will focus on why it is importantto introduce Rancière’s understanding of politics to Foucault’sdisciplinary society, prior to providing an analytical account ofRancière. The third section will focus on this new understandingpost-democracy – the condition that creates the necessity of thekettle. The final section will apply my understanding of post-democracy to a situated study of kettling in the UK: from itspremiere use in 2001 to the anti cuts protests of 2010/2011 arguingthat the kettle serves to contain politics understood as an act ofdissensus.

Foucault, Power and Disciplinary Society

The best place to start with an analytical outlining of Foucault’soeuvre is to answer ‘what is power?’ There are two parts toFoucault’s answer to this question: power and resistance, and power

of itself as the end of politics but which might better be called post-democracy” (Rancière, 1995: 98).2 Rancière uses the term to indicate what he also called the managerial state and consensus democracy. I use the term according to my own understanding, which does not reject Rancière’s understanding, but builds on it and which seeks to align it with Foucauldian disciplinary society.

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as being divided into micro and macro power. It is worth alsooutlining what it is not, or what Foucault develops his conceptionof power against. In Society Must be Defended (2003) Foucault outlinestwo understandings of power, the first is the Juridical, or‘contract-oppression schema’, the second is the ‘war-repressionschema’ (Ibid: 17). The first is an understanding of power thatequates it with a commodity; a possession that can be acquired aswith acquiring a political office, it can traded, abdicated andusurped. It is a conception that Foucault says is shared by bothLiberalism and Marxism. The second is an equation of politics to thecontinuation of war; Clausewitz’s axiom is reversed. Power is seenas domination, ‘Power is essentially that which represses’ (Ibid:15). This second understanding is also referred to as the ‘inversionof Clausewitz’s aphorism’ or ‘Nietzsche’s hypothesis’ (Ibid: 16). Itis also, Foucault says, an understanding of power that he initiallyapplied, but, along with the juridical understanding is inadequate.

‘Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared,something that one holds on to or allows to slip away’ (1978: 94),in this Foucault is rejecting the juridical, liberal and Marxistnotions that see power as a commodity, ‘power is exercised frominnumerable points, in the inter-play of nonegalitarin and mobilerelations’ (Ibid). Power is not a title, position, or domination, itis a ‘multiplicity of force relations’ that are exercised betweensubjects; the object of ‘ceaseless struggles and confrontations’(Ibid: 92); it is the crystallization of power relations intostrategies whose general embodiment is ‘the state apparatus, in theformulation of law, in the various social hegemonies’ (Ibid: 93).Power is everywhere because it emanates from everything, not becauseit is all dominant, therefore resistance is not a space free frompower, a vacuum of refusal, a ‘position of exteriority’ (Ibid: 95).It is the adversary of power, the target of power. It is presentwherever there is power because resistance exists as a multiplicityof knots in the power network. Each moment of resistance is uniqueand occupies a particularly localised place, a heterogeneoustapestry of insurrections that flash and burn up in the night.Evidently, as Foucault says, there is ‘no single locus of greatRefusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law ofthe revolutionary’ (Ibid: 95-96). Does this mean there are no greatruptures or massive overhauls? No, it is the ‘strategic codification

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of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible’(Ibid: 96).

Power has a ‘double conditioning’ (Ibid: 99) effect in the sensethat it operates in two levels. Also referred to as a ‘micro-physicsof power’ (1977: 26), Foucault divides the effect of power relationsas being divided into ‘microscopic’ and ‘macroscopic’ levels. Thetwo levels are immanent to one another but not homogenous.Microscopic relations operate at a constitutive level, ‘they operateon the plane where individuals are constituted’ (Widder. 2004: 422).Macroscopic power relations are those that ‘hold betweenprecariously constituted subjects and it is on this level that powercan be understood as a possession’ (Ibid: 423), as the right toexercise a power of over someone else. It is the grounding of micro-power that enables macro-power, the more obvious power, to enactitself. Macro-power is the ability of the judge, the police officeror the psychiatrist to exercise control over subordinates, but itrests on the context of meaning of their subject positions that ismicro-power. The main drive of Foucault’s work is to show the ‘modesof objectification which transform human beings into subjects’(1982: 208), this is largely then the study of micro-power, sincemicro-power relations are the study of the constitution of subjectsthough ‘modes of objectification’ such as disciplinary practices,which as we shall look at in more detail further on, ‘operateprimarily at this constitutive level’ (Widder. 2004: 423).

This view, which expands the active realm of power intoomnipresence, leads to the linking of power and knowledge. Foucaultunderstands discourses as ‘power-knowledge relations’ (1977: 27).Foucault posits that ‘in every society the production of discourseis at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by acertain number of procedures’ (1984: 109). These procedures includeprohibition and rejection on grounds of reason and madness, but alsoa third which is becoming more significant, and is graduallysubsuming the other two, that is the will to truth. Not so much aconcern with truth and falsity, the will to truth wills ‘a certainkind of truth – or perhaps better, it wills that the world conformto a certain image of truth’ (Widder. 2004: 419). In contrast topre-platonic dialogue that truth was the speech of the powerful, theability to inspire or dominate, post-platonic dialogue has developedhistorically contingent ideals of truth and falsehood that see truth

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as being that which is free of power, in a sense purified of power.The will to truth’s effects on discourse are to compel it ‘to tellthe truth independent of any attachment to power or to a powerfulspeaker’ (Ibid). The modern will to truth, the procedure whichcontrols discourse is therefore self-deceiving, because as Foucaultsays:

We should admit rather that power produces knowledge [...]that power and knowledge directly imply one another; thatthere is no power relation without the correlativeconstitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge thatdoes not presuppose and constitute at the same time powerrelations (1977: 27).

History therefore, and the development of any knowledge, arenot without forces driving them. It is too easy to misunderstandhistory as a continuous process, a gradual development of universalorigins and ideas. This Foucault says – the idea of history as the‘concrete body of a development’ with its ‘soul in the distantideality of the origin’ (1984b: 80) – is something only ametaphysician would seek. Genealogy is the tool Foucault borrowsfrom Nietzsche, in order to understand the nature of power relationsin society, by explaining the development of modern institutionswith a feeling of historical sense – the rationalities that hidbehind them, the play of dominations that caused them to be.

Genealogy as a part of Foucault’s general project is focusedon ‘how we might formulate a general conception of the relationsbetween the constitution of a knowledge (savoir) and the exercise ofa power’ (1991: 150), but it is methodologically tasked at doingthis by studying these instances in their ‘concrete forms’ (Ibid:151). This explains the already mentioned concept of an ‘ascendinganalysis of power’ which Foucault utilises to study concreteexamples and how they are ‘invested or annexed by global phenomena,and how more general powers or economic benefits can slip into theplay of these technologies’ (2003: 30-31).

Through such an approach Foucault (1977) develops hisunderstanding of disciplinary society. The will to truth withinmodern procedures of subjugation seeks a particular kind of truth –that is purity. Discipline is a ‘particular modality of power thatproduces particular kinds of subjects through positing and enforcing

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optimal modes of individual conduct’ (Coleman & Tucker. 2011: 399).Subject binaries are created, with one side taking the form of‘normal’ and the other ‘abnormal’, thus the binary is hierarchical.The modern institutions of society exist to enforce these identitiesthrough disciplinary micro-power practices. Thus the prison operatesto enforce criminal/law-abiding subjects, the mental hospital –sane/insane etc. The irony of disciplinary practices however istheir ultimate failure – a ‘normal’ individual is never found,instead new forms of delinquency and abnormality are revealed.However, considering the number of disciplinary institutions oneindividual will pass through, and the existence of criminaldelinquents who have ‘already passed through a myriad ofinstitutions supposedly designed to correct them, how could it everbe said that power aimed to normalize individuals in the firstplace?’ (Widder. 2004: 421). The normalization of individuals neveroccurs, instead disciplinary practices seek to manage. rather thaneradicate abnormality.

What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies inEurope since the eighteenth century is not, of course, thatthe individuals who are part of them become more and moreobedient, nor that they set about assembling in barracks,schools, or prisons; rather that an increasingly betterinvigilated process of adjustment has been sought after –more and more rational and economic (Foucault. 1982: 219).

Any collective revelation that disciplinary practices are failing toeradicate delinquency always brings with it the call for increasedand stricter disciplinary practices, thus there is a constantexpansion of disciplinary institutions into more sectors of life.

Rancière and the End of Politics

Foucault when read politically can often appear as somewhat of anenigma. It is not a simple case of assigning Foucault to aparticular political tradition – indeed; he would consciously rejectsuch an attempt. He has been treated with complete confusion whenattempts have been made to contain his ideas within a politicalframework. As he puts it:

There have been Marxists who said I was a danger to WesternDemocracy – that has been written; there was a socialist whowrote that the thinker who resembled me most closely was

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Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. I have been considered byliberals as a technocrat, an agent of the Gaullistgovernment; I have been considered by people on the right,Gaullists or otherwise, as a dangerous left-wing anarchist;there was an American professor who asked why a crypto-Marxist like me, manifestly a KGB agent, was invited toAmerican universities; and so on (1984a: 376).

But this failure to assign a political label to Foucault is not thefailure of his philosophy to be consistent or focussed enough.Foucault has self-consciously avoided linking his thought with anypolitical ideology warning that ‘there is a very tenuous “analytic”link between a philosophical conception and the concrete politicalattitude of someone who is appealing to it; the “best” theories donot constitute a very effective protection against disastrouspolitical choices’ (Ibid: 374). Indeed, it would be wise to avoid theappropriation of Foucault’s thought by any one political unit, lestactions be committed in his name that he would have opposed. Themislabelling that has occurred is, in a sense, the self-inflictedeffect of his work – resisting definition in a world that insistsone must be definable. Foucault has always maintained that ‘whatinterests me is much more morals than politics or, in any case,politics as an ethics’ (Ibid: 375). The goal of his work has been theexposure of power relations, shining a light on locations thought tobe devoid of power, exposing institutions thought to be benign,revealing the insidiousness of power. The ‘problem of powerrelations’ (Ibid: 378), as he puts it, is the target of his gaze, andwhile we must concede that he has done the most to expose it thereis something missing in his analysis as to the precise character ofthese power relations.

Rancière express it like this:

There is [...] a multiplicity of forms of power exerted infamilies, tribes, schools, playgrounds, teams, workshops,churches, offices, barracks, prisons, etc. There is amultiplicity of patterns of power borrowed from them that areused as instruments of state power. Now the question is: towhat extent is state power the same thing as political power?(2009: 118).

Power is not by nature political. Power, even if it is in the handsof politicians, governments, revolutionaries or despots is not by

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its nature political. What is the character of power relations? Thisis where Rancière can enter. It is clear from what we understandthanks to Foucault that disciplinary power, which is not poweritself, but ‘a possible procedure of power’ (1984a: 380), has theaspired effect, through a process of totalizing and individualizing,of normalizing societies into definable groups, it is the case that‘normality’ is seldom found, but that nonetheless is the goal.Disciplinary society and the later totalizing conception – biopower– are power relations characterised by an attempt to createconsensus and reproduce the uneventful. For example, in reference tothe university Foucault says it ‘stands for the institutionalapparatus through which society ensures its uneventful reproduction’(1977a: 224). This ‘uneventful reproduction’ can be understood notsimply as the task of the university, but of disciplinary society ingeneral. That is the particular that Rancière can fill in. Becausehe is primarily concerned with elaborating how society is governedby a logic that seeks to order society consensually, suppressingwhat he sees as true politics. Foucault exposed the power relationsbut Rancière explains how not all power relations are the same. ForRancière, the power relations emanating from the state, whatFoucault would call disciplinary power, are referred to as the orderof the police, and as I will go on to explain are anti-political.But it might be said at this point that Foucault was not sopessimistic when explaining power relations. He explained resistanceas the necessary counter-power, presenting plenty of opportunitiesfor it to disrupt any order. Power relations after all are notstrictly one way, they are constantly in flux, and it only needs theslightest touch to flip them completely.

This is certainly true. It is not my aim to criticiseFoucault. However there needs to be more elaboration on thecharacter of power relations. Disciplinary power is just onecharacter, there certainly are others. What about thecharacteristics of the power of the protest? We have still yet toexplain what is so threatening within certain protests tonecessitate the intervention of the kettle. What is thecharacteristic of the power relation produced by the kettle? Protestcannot be understood simply as resistance in the Foucauldian sense,as a counter push within power relations. It has a political elementto it, which causes it to be significant, which disrupts the orderof consensus. Bear these things in mind now as we proceed through

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the key tenants of Rancière’s thought. We will begin by studying theunderstanding Rancière has of the contemporary notions of democracy,politics and the police. Before showing how society is characterisedby an order of the police, which pursues consensus to the effect ofexcluding the social body from political activity.

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The ‘democratic paradox,’ as Rancière calls it, is the foil for hisown understanding of politics and democracy. As he puts it:

The contemporary way of stating the ‘democratic paradox’ isthus: democracy as a form of government is threatened bydemocracy as a form of social and political life and so theformer must repress the latter (2010a: 47).

In other words, democracy can be divided into social democracy – theneeds, aspirations and requests of citizens – and democraticgovernment – ‘the principles and procedures of good policy,authority, scientific expertise and pragmatic experience’ (Ibid). Theformer, democracy as a social activity is the idealistic view ofgovernment for and by the people, it’s an encroachment on theaspirations of democracy as government. It can lead to an excess ofpolitical action that becomes a hindrance to democratic governmentas it attempts to consider and include the opinions of all. Goodgovernance therefore becomes the ability of democratic government tolimit democratic social activity.

As Rancière says, this notion may seem exceptionally cynicaland ‘paranoid, but it is perfectly consistent with a whole trend ofthought which, for the last 20 years, has equated democracy with thereign of narcissistic “mass individualism”’ (Ibid: 48). Thedevelopment of political-philosophy that has heralded both the ‘endof politics’ and the ‘return of politics’ exhibit a similarrestriction of politics to government. The ‘end of politics’ issimply ‘a return to the normal state of things – the non-existenceof politics’ (2010: 43). The Fukuyama-Hegelian conception is thedelusion that sees the goal of politics as being the end of dispute– consensus. The ‘return of politics’ (as Rancière calls it, the‘European Heidegerian-Situationist version’ (Ibid)) besides theobvious suggestion that it posits – that there is a particularsector that is the proper locale of politics – means also that therole of the social in political action is finished. The dual

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interpretations of the ‘end’ and ‘return’ of politics ‘both producethe same effect: an effacing of the concept of politics itself’(Ibid).

This ‘buffoonery’ is a misinterpretation of the way in which‘the relation between the political relationship and the politicalsubject gets interpreted; that is, in the assumption that there is away of life that is “specific” to political existence’ (Ibid: 28). Itis not however confined to these interpretations, it is a ‘viciouscircle that characterises political philosophy itself’ (Ibid).Whenever political-philosophy asks itself the question it was alwaysthere to ask: ‘what is the most legitimate political organisation?’it is immediately at fault. The radical notion that is a part ofRancière’s work is that the legitimate act of politics is that whichhas no legitimacy. In seeking an arkhē (a theoretical principle forthe distribution of capacities, positions and powers) on which thelegitimate right to ‘do’ politics should rest, it seeks those whosenature it is to rule. ‘Politics, in a nutshell, comes to be seen asthe accomplishment of the way of life proper to those who aredestined to it’ (Ibid). Rancière spends time to show this notion inAristotle.

Aristotle sees three: the wealth of the smallest number(oligoï), the virtue of excellence (aretê) from which the best(aristoï) derive their name, and the freedom (eleutheria) thatbelongs to the people (demos). Taken on their own, each ofthese attributes yields a particular regime, threatened bythe sedition of others: the oligarchy of the rich, thearistocracy of the good, or the democracy of the people. Onthe other hand, the precise combination of their communityentitlements procures the common good. But a secret imbalancespoils this pretty picture (1999: 6).

The question for all involved then becomes, ‘what does the freedomof the people bring to the community?’ (Ibid: 7). Any attempt to seekand arkhē for political action comes to this conclusion, that owingto certain characteristics, some have a right to rule and aparticular regime suited to them. The second conclusion is that thedemos, are only considered a group because what they share is thatthey have nothing in common, in other words they have no legitimacyto rule. ‘The supposed purification of the political, freed fromdomestic and social necessity, is tantamount to the pure and simple

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reduction of the political to the state’ (2010: 28). Such areduction of politics to the state is the exclusion of the demos,such an exclusion is the exclusion of politics itself. Politicalphilosophy therefore is the attempt of philosophy to rid itself ofpolitics. This may seem complex at first, it may even seem simple –the exclusion of the demos is obviously anti-democratic. But inorder to fully understand what Rancière means we must understand twokey terms he uses: politics and police. The exclusion of the demosis not anti-democratic in the common sense, it is anti-political,the exclusion of the demos is the work of the police.

What can be thought of specifically as politics? To thinkthrough this specificity will force us to distinguish it fromwhat normally goes by the name of politics and for which Ipropose to reserve the term policing’ (Rancière. 1999: xiii).

There is a common ground shared by the words policing andadministration. Both words hint at a similar act and occupy a sharedspace in our minds that concerns words that refer to themaintenance, management, oversight, and continuation of aparticularly configured system. It is with this shared meaning thatRancière uses the word policing to refer to what has hitherto beenunderstood as politics. The assignment of roles, offices, powers,places; the organisation, distribution, ranking, hierarchization ofpower; the aggregation of consent, public opinion, contractualobligation; the institutions, town halls, council offices,parliaments of government. These are the things considered to definepolitics. But they are not concerned with development, progression,or alteration – indeed it is not their function to be. They are moreconcerned with the perpetuation of the system in which they areembedded, thus they administer it, they police it. The police, asRancière calls it, is not to be misunderstood as the institution ofpolice officers, agents of law and order, the police is the termRancière uses for a particular logic and the bodies of itsenforcement. The police is in essence a particular ‘distribution ofthe sensible whose principle is the absence of void and supplement’(2010: 36). The distribution of the sensible is the ‘generallyimplicit law’ (Ibid) that divides up the social order into those tobe counted as parts of the social body. Rancière’s work is a‘systemization of a thinking of politics in terms of “distributionof the sensible,” of polemics about the visible and the sayable,

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about who sees and who does not see, who speaks and who makes noise,etc’ (2009: 115). It defines who can partake according to theirinclusion within a count of the society. It can be referred todifferently, as a ‘partition’ (2010: 36) of the sensible, which hasa double meaning: it can be understood, on the one hand, as thatwhich ‘separates and excludes; and on the other, as that whichallows participation’ (Ibid). The police is a particular distribution ofthe sensible and its essence is to eradicate void and supplement andcreate a unitary understanding of the places, divisions andfunctions of the social body. In order to do this the police mustposit ‘groups tied to specific modes of doing’ (Ibid), but in thisprocess no space is given to the demos, what can be their functionother than to be free? ‘It is this exclusion of what “is not” thatconstitutes the police-principle at the core of statist practices’(Ibid).

What is politics then if it is not what most consider it tobe? Politics is a rupture in the symbolic order of the police. Anevent in which politics presents itself is an event when thetotalising count of the police is disrupted by the presentation of agroup that has not been counted: ‘Politics exists when the naturalorder of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part ofthese who have no part’ (1999: 11). ‘Politics exists simply becauseno social order is based on a nature, no divine law regulates humansociety’ (Ibid: 18), so it the absence of any arkhē for ruling thatcreates political moments. Politics is the rejection of thelegitimacy of any group claiming to be legitimate rulers, notbecause they are perceived as illegitimate but because there is nolegitimacy on which to ground any rule. Thus, politics is therejection any arkhē. Democracy for Rancière ‘is not a politicalregime [...] it is the very regime of politics itself’ (2010: 31),democracy is the institution of politics itself that ruptures theordered consensus of the police: ‘Democratic action is the form ofaction which carries out the disruption of any ultimate legitimacyof power, or, if you turn it on its positive side, the affirmationof the equal capacity of anybody’ (2000: 120). It is the shatteringof the image of society as harmonious and inclusive, without void orabsence – which the police strives for – that causes politics tohappen. In this sense politics is an aesthetic moment as it createspersepctival disagreements surrounding the inclusiveness of society,as Rancière puts it: ‘I speak of an “aesthetic of the political,” to

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indicate that politics is first of all a battle aboutperceptible/sensible material’ (2010: 11). In essence Politics isanother way of interpreting what is sayable and who is visible:

Two ways of counting the parts of the community exist. Thefirst counts real parts only – actual groups defined bydifferences in birth, and by the different functions, placesand interests that make up the social body to the exclusionof every supplements. The second, ‘in addition’ to this,counts a part of those without part. I call the first thepolice and the second politics (2010: 36).

This ‘in addition’ is important, because it helps us tounderstand the place of the demos; the demos always takes asupplementary role. It is the addition to the already counted partsof the social body that the police either overlook, conflate,suppress or ignore. It is the nature of politics to count thosewithout part. For Rancière, the people are not a homogenous whole,they are divided by (miss)counts. It is impossible to form a unitaryidea of the people because if the nature of politics is contestationand disagreement, then the ‘people’ are always divided, eitherincluded or excluded, blessed or damned. Therefore Rancière puts hisunderstanding of the people in opposition to Hardt & Negri’sunderstanding of the Multitude (2006), which is an attempt to form ahomogenous, without divisions, understanding of the people inopposition to Empire (2001). Rancière says ‘the people, for me, isthe name of a political subject, that is to say a supplement inrelation to all logics of counting the population, its parts and itswhole’ (2010b: 85). Politics is the act of bringing to light thesevarious parts and that are excluded: ‘What better way is there toexpress that the first and foremost at stake in politics are thelines of division defining inclusion and exclusions’ (Ibid: 90). Thesocial body therefore is always riven with divisions. The Multitudeis a concept that ‘manifests a phobia of the negative, of anypolitics that defines itself “against”’ (Ibid), its attempt to createa unitary form of the people results in a fear of divisions thatexists within any social body.

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The notions we began with that dealt with the ‘end’ or ‘return’ ofthe political are a facet of political philosophy that is relatively

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new. They embody the essence of consensus thinking, and obviouslyare the politico-theoretical fallout of the collapse of the SovietUnion. They perceive this historical moment as the resolution of adivided bi-polar world into a unified mono-polar. This momentpresented the birth of consensus, the ultimate consensus. Thus, ‘ForRancière, institutional governance, [...] in the last decades havebeen characterised by the implementation of “consensus democracy”and the implied “end of politics” in Western societies’ (Rosenow.2011: 4). Rosenow uses Rancière’s term the ‘managerial state’ todescribe the nature of consensus statist practices to, firstly‘reduce[...] the people as political subject to the population,implying that the people is considered nothing but the sum of theparts of the social body,”’ politics being reduced to the managementof interests between these parts, and secondly the ‘managerial stateequates “good” democratic politics with a governing authority thatis based on scientific expertise and pragmatic experience’ (Ibid). Imaintain that this understanding of the modern state is correct, butuse the term ‘post-democracy’ to describe it. The term post-democracy Rancière uses himself to describe what he also calls themanagerial state or consensus democracy. Yet I use it to indicate acombined understanding of disciplinary society, the managerial stateand consensual police logic.

This raises the questions: what common ground is there betweenFoucault and Rancière? For one thing they are both concerned withhow systems of power limit what can and cannot be consider visible,or can be an actor, or a subject, or a true discourse. As Rancièresays: ‘The idea of the partition of the sensible is no doubt my ownway of translating and appropriating for my own account thegenealogical thought of Foucault – his way of systematizing howthings can be visible, utterable, and capable of being thought’(2000: 13). For Foucault it takes the form of exposing the ways inwhich disciplinary modes of conduct come to develop, for Rancière ittakes the form of exposing how the distribution of subject places isdriven by the concept of consensus. In addition he says ‘Foucaultuses the term biopolitics to designate things that are situated inthe space that I call the police’ (2010c: 93). Biopolitics is inpart the study of the body as the target of power, it’s locationwithin a system of totalization and individuation. The order of thepolice is the distribution of bodies in places and functions, thus

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there is a common ground shared by the two, namely the ordering ofthe social body as comprised of bodies.

The point at which Rancière diverges from Foucault is on thequestion of politics. The point is that Foucault never developed theunderstanding of politics that saw it as different to the exerciseof power. ‘[Foucault’s] conception of politics is constructed aroundthe question of power, [...] he was never drawn theoretically to thequestion of political subjectivation’ (Ibid). Power was redefined ina way that extended its definition to included institutions and thesubjects of power, as well as posing that power can function inmultiple directions, and not simply from the top down. Foucaultstudies particular distributions of power relations, ways in whichmultiple power relations have congealed around a particularsystemization, but politics, in the Rancièrean sense, is thedisruption of these particular distributions of power relations.Foucault’s understanding of resistance is useful to understand theway in which power relations work in two directions – never simplyfrom the top down – but doesn’t properly provide a conception thatoffers the possibility for the disruption of these power relations.Rancière does, which is of course politics.

The Present Condition: Post-Democracy

So, this is where we have reached: (1) it is thanks to Foucault thatwe can perceive how modern society is disciplinary, driven by thedesire of the will to truth for pure identities society attempts toregulate the behaviour by positing norms and deviations, through amyriad of institutions power relations enact processes ofnormalization through either reward or discipline; (2) Rancièreshows us that what has hitherto been referred to as politics is inreality policing, administration of consensus, society is apoliticaland when politics does occur it comes as an event that ruptures thepolice distribution of the sensible; (3) in light of Rancièreanthought, Foucault’s conception of disciplinary society can be seento have common ground with the order of the police, it’s strivingfor normality through disciplinary practices can be seen as anenforcing of consensus; (4) Resistance for Foucault, can be seen asPolitics for Rancière, therefore it is not simply a counter power,but a rupture in the order of the police; (5) post-democracy

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designates the condition in which power relations within societyfunction to maintain consensus.

In order to fully explain the function of the kettle then wemust understand the theoretical context that the kettle operates in– Post-democracy. For Rancière ‘“post-democracy” [...] does notdesignate a period of history after the “end of democracy” [...]; itdesignates the logic governing a set of discourses and practiceswhich turn democracy into its contrary’ (2009: 116). Post-democracyis the condition that can explain the Kettle. There are sixcharacteristics of post-democracy which explain why the kettle hasdeveloped.

1) Post-democracy is so because it presents an image of consensus, consensushowever is at all times a fallacy, any consensus merely hides a dissensus. A personwithin the kettle at the G20 protest put it like this: ‘Behind thescreen of liberal freedom and democratic ‘normality’, a silent warwas raging through the institutions and the codes of law’(Policante. 2011: 458). As we know modern society is characterisedby systems of power relations, but it was Foucault’s project toexpose them, as the notion that ‘benign’ institutions such as themental hospital, school, or workplace are places of dominating powerrelations is still a novel one today. Policante, one of thecontributors to Coleman & Tucker’s Disciplining Dissent project, uses ahelpful term when understanding the nature of what can becharacterised as ‘systemic violence’ (Ibid); he calls it ‘normalityas catastrophe’ (Ibid: 463), as opposed to the consensual conceptionof ‘normality as peace’ (Ibid). Normality as peace is in a definitesense the understanding of consensual post-democracy that sees themaintenance of everyday life as the maintenance of harmoniousmanagement of an ordered social body. Normality as peace andconsensus both serve as a facade, which disguises the unequalordering logic of the police. Normality as catastrophe and dissensusboth understand society differently, as one ordered around systemicviolence which disenfranchises the demos of their ability to presentaesthetic disagreements, and therefore alter their environment.

2) Post-Democracy, owing to its consensual organisation, is at all times fragile,balancing at the edge of the precipice of its own disintegration. The order of thepolice is the particular distribution of the sensible which seeks tocreate an image of society without void. The arkhē on which it rests

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is one that ties subjects to functions. Thus all the parts ofsociety that are accounted are designated a particular place andfunction. Subjects are tied to places, partitions are drawn betweenthe areas subjects can inhabit. Thus workers have only time forwork; students are only to learn accepted knowledge and reproduceit, and; those whose nature is politics are designated to rule. Thestrict attachment of person to place forms a unified whole,something larger than the sum of its parts. Yet it is only on eachpart being in its correct place that it can function. Hence there isno room for the void of disagreement; in this we can understand itas consensus. But such a consensus is inherently fragile; themachine with a thousand piece is a hundred time more likely to breakdown than the machine with ten. Consensus by its very nature dependson each part being correct. Hence it is always teetering on theverge of collapse. Politics, the eruption of which is the disruptionof the ordering logic of the police, risks at any momentdestabilising post-democracy by presenting an image of the communityin dissensus. As Rancière phrases it:

in making each person the reflection of the soul of thecommunity of energies and rights, consensual logic setseverywhere the boundary between peace and war, the breakingpoint at which the community is exposed to a demonstration ofits ‘untruth’. In other words, ‘disintegration’ (1999: 115).

3) Post-democracy presents the paradoxical appropriation of politics by the state.Democracy has been switched from a system principally understood asthe inclusion of the demos into one in which the demos is seen asthe unnecessary supplement that should be isolated from politics.

Postdemocracy is the government practice and conceptuallegitimization of a democracy after the demos, a democracythat has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute ofthe people and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay ofstate mechanisms and combinations of social energies andinterests. (Ibid: 102).

Post-democracy in its attempt to strive for consensus ‘bindsindividuals and groups together in a fabric with no holes, no gapbetween names and things, rights and facts, individuals andsubjects’ (Ibid: 115), thus the appearance of consensus is the end oftrue politics, because no space is left for the appearance ofdisagreement, of ‘community in dispute’ (Ibid). The task of politics

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is in a sense monopolised by the state. Ed Miliband, in reference toOccupy London Stock Exchange stated in the Guardian that theprotests ‘present a challenge: to the church and to business – andalso to politics’ (2011). It is telling that Miliband doesn’t thinkthe occupation is itself a political act, instead it presents achallenge to real politics – what he considers his career. Treatingthe issues at stake in the protest as matters of importance hestates ‘We cannot leave it to the protesters to lead this debate’,the issues of politics are too important, and the order of consensustoo fragile, to be left to anyone other than a professionalpolitician, someone whose function is politics. He creates thedistinction between protesters and politicians, asserting that therole of the protester is not politics, whereas ‘The role ofpoliticians is not to protest, but to find answers’. Thus we cansupplement Weber’s axiom: the state is the monopolisation of the actof politics, but in a paradoxical way in which real politics isterminated.

4) Man is not a zoon politikon, post-democracy is by its nature anti-political.As Deranty puts it ‘Society is in essence a-political or even anti-political’ (2003: §6). Deranty’s interpretation of Rancière is notat all times congruent with Rancière’s own theories, but hisassertion that Rancière sees post-democratic society as anti-political is supported by Rancière’s own writing. A politicalaction, as Rancière states, is not common: ‘in the final analysis,inequality is only possible through equality, this means thepolitics doesn’t always happen – it actually happens very little orrarely’ (1999: 17). Even though politics, the event that creates arupture in the symbolic order, is rare any society based on‘consensus consists then, in the reduction of politics to thepolice’ (2010: 42), or in other words it’s monopolisation. Again inanother source Rancière states that ‘Consensus mean[s] in fact thecontrary of democracy and, by the same token, the erasure ofpolitics itself’ (2009: 115). Post-democracy can be termed anti-political because the fragility of its basis, and the threat of‘disintegration’ posed by the act of politics, makes themonopolization of politics a necessity. The appropriation of the actof politics doesn’t mean that the utilization of it is increased ina controlled, regulated, state-centred way – it is tantamount to theend of politics, the removal of politics through the exclusion of

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the demos. Post-democracy is therefore anti-political by expungingpolitics from the social body.

5) Post-democracy develops its own understanding of protests, in a way thatregulates its use. Reflection again should be drawn from Coleman &Tucker’s Disciplining Dissent project, in particular their use of theterms ‘community of practice’ and ‘grids of intelligibility (2011:398), the later term borrowed from Foucault (2008: 3). The termcommunity of practice indicates a particular protesting group thatdevelops around a particular issue, the term grid of intelligibilityis used to explain the ‘dominant interpretive frameworks,vocabularies, and general politics of truth’ (Coleman & Tucker.2011: 398) that communities of practice develop in order tounderstand the act of protesting. Furthermore, they conclude thateach community of practice ‘[develops] their own set ofvocabularies, accepted approaches, and priorities’ (Ibid). Post-democracy has developed its own grid for understanding whatconstitutes dissent, in a way in which the role of protest is highlylimited. Protest is viewed narrowly from within the logic of the‘managerial state’ as simply the management of competing interestsby the state. This cannot be considered political protest, in thesense that politics presents a rupture in the distribution of thesensible, this form of protest stays well within the confines ofconsensus, never straying into dissensus. To elaborate consider howRancière states that:

Consensus means that the only point of contest lies on whathas to be done as a response to the given situation.Correspondingly, dissensus and disagreement don't only meanconflict of interests, ideas and so on. They mean that thereis a debate on the sensible givens of a situations, a debateon that which you see and feel, on how it can be told anddiscussed, who is able to name it and argue about it (2003:§4).

So within post-democracy ‘Before problems can be settled by well-behaved social partners, the rule of conduct of the dispute has tobe settled, as a specific structure of community’ (Rancière. 1999:108). Post-democracies understanding of protest is dictated by thisrule of conduct which maintains that protest not disrupt the orderof the police, bu challenging the sensible givens of a situation.

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6) The role of the police is to police the political.3 In Omnes et SingulatimFoucault outlines an early conception of governmentality/biopower bystudying how the role of the police originally developed. Whenstudying the early theorist of the police he notes that the objectof the police was man itself, his life, happiness or otherwise.Foucault says ‘What the police sees to is a live, active, productiveman. Turquet employs a remarkable expression: “The police’s trueobject is man.”’ (1979: 248). Turquet, one of these early theorists,as well as the others of his sort, saw the police not simply as abody concerning crime, ‘Its field comprises justice, finance, andthe army’ (Ibid), the police’s remit is total and one could say ‘Thepolice sees to living’ (Ibid: 250). This time focussing on adifferent police theorist Foucault says: ‘The police, [Von Justi]says, is what enables the state to increase its power and exert itsstrength to the full’ (Ibid: 251), how? By keeping ‘the citizenshappy – happiness being understood as survival, life, and improvedliving’ (Ibid: 251-252). The strength and legitimacy of the statetherefore is founded in part by the police seeing to the lives ofcitizens, ensuring their means to survival. Within a capitaliststate ensuring the ‘improved living’ of citizens can only mean onething, ensuring their productiveness as workers.

In this role of the police we see two parts of what we havealready discussed – namely the managerial state. Firstly, theattempt of any consensus to create a community without void by tyingsubjects to subject place and functions, in this instance, thelinking of citizens to workplaces – ‘society here is made up ofgroups tied to specific modes of doing, to places in which theseoccupations are exercised, and to modes of being corresponding tothese occupations and these places’ (Rancière. 2010: 36). Secondly,the divide between the social and the political – the social is seenas a realm of enterprising life, and the political (more accurately:policing) as the management of this space. Thus the role of thepolice is in part the enforcement of the managerial state. We canunderstand it as Rancière puts it, as ‘police management of therelations between the state and the social groups and interests’(1999: 108). In part this task must take the form of enforcing a

3 It’s important to stress, in order to avoid confusion, that here I refer to the institution of the police. The agents of law and order, as opposed to the order of the police the term Rancière uses to mean the distribution of the sensible that is tied up with consensus democracy

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state of anti-politics, which comes hand in hand with enforcing thedistribution of the sensible that ties subjects to their places,since it ties the act of government to particular subjects and notthe demos. So the police serve to police the political, ensuring itsmonopolisation is maintained.

For Rancière this act takes a particular form and can becharacterised by the expression ‘“Move along! There’s nothing to seehere!” The police is that which says that here, on this street,there’s nothing to see and so nothing to do but move along’ (2010:37). Rancière uses a good expression to understand dissensus ‘thepresence of two worlds in one’ (Ibid). Politics is that whichsuggests a new understanding of ‘the world’ in a world in which itssensible understanding is apparently already a given. Thus ‘policeinterventions in public spaces consist primarily not ininterpellating demonstrators, but in breaking up demonstrations’(Ibid); they consist in concealing this second world; removing it’spresence as soon as possible, in saying ‘It does not exist! There isnothing but consensus, there is no politics here!’ Thus why dopolice march alongside protests? Their presence is never a surprise,it seems normal, far from out of the ordinary. I hold that thepolice are never at a protest to ‘facilitate the right to protest’,the police serve to maintain public order, in other words,consensus. The police are present at protests in the event that itmight become political.

The Kettle in Action

In a recent review published by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate ofConstabularies (HMIC) of police tactics surrounding the G20 proteston 1 April 2009, one that saw two significant uses of Kettling as atactic, it was stated that; ‘The tactics used [...] such as cordonsand containment [...] are endorsed by the Association of ChiefPolice Officers (ACPO) and are contained in the ACPO manual “Keepingthe Peace”’ (HMIC. 2009: 7). The report continues; ‘It is recognisedby some senior ACPO officers that the tactics in this manual wereformulated in a different era of protest’. Finally, it is statedthat;

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The ACPO ‘Keeping the Peace’ manual gives very limitedattention to policing protest. It is inadequate for the worldthe police are now operating in. Peaceful protest covers awide spectrum of protest activity. At its moststraightforward, it is notified, discussed with police inadvance, stewarded and controlled and organised on the daywith the interests of the wider public in mind. At its mostcomplex, it is not notified or discussed with police inadvance, has no organisers or stewards controlling it and isdisruptive. In these instances, the police are left toarbitrate and deal with the consequences [...]. It requirespreparation for and delivery of a proportionate response(Ibid).

What is being hinted at by this report? Some form of perceivedchange has occurred in recent times. As the report states, theoutdated manual is ‘inadequate for the world the police are nowoperating in’. The comments that containment in particular belongsto a ‘different era’ of policing, a bygone era, are false however.Indeed such an opinion is not commonly expressed; it appears falsewhen we consider that containment in Britain was first used in 2001,then saw a lull until significant use at almost every majordemonstration from 2009 to 2011; it is actually the case thatcontainment is a very new method of policing. This is supported bythe fact that in light of the comments made by the HMIC, the ACPOreport Keeping the Peace was reviewed and updated in 2010. Prior to itsmost utilised period – the student protests of winter 2010 –containment was retained as a police tactic. Its use was clarifiedand refined, and certainly not confined to a section at the back ofthe report for outdated tactics. Instead it was placed squarely inthe centre of the primary tactics police commanders may call upon inthe event of public disorder.

In official discourse ‘Containment is used because police havea duty to maintain public order and the courts have agreed that itcan be used if it is the only way to prevent an imminent breach ofthe peace or one that is already occurring’ (Gomm. 2011). Similarlythe revised Keeping the Peace manual calls it ‘Contingency tactic to beused when alternative tactics to prevent serious disorder, seriousinjury or loss of life have failed or are expected to fail’ (ACPO.2010: 110). It can be considered as a police approach to maintaininglaw and order; preventing acts of mass violence (as compared to an

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individual violent act) such as rioting, or; preventing a breach ofthe peace. It is obviously deployed selectively, not as an everydaypractice of keeping the peace, but it is applied in exceptionalcircumstance, to particular temporal events. Such events are thosethat pose the threat of an ‘imminent breach of the peace.’ Thus itserves officially to stop an event happening that would otherwiseoccur, or events that are already in the process of disruptingorder, thus in these incidences it brings the perpetration ofdisorder to a halt.

There have been many arguments levelled at the officialunderstanding of how kettling functions. Firstly, it is argued thatthe containment of protesters in cold conditions, for long periodsof time, without amenities such as food, water or toilets servesintentionally to create an unpleasant situation, the purpose ofwhich is to discourage people from protests altogether, because ofthe possibility that containment might be used again. This negativereinforcement argument I reject. It’s not that I argue that thePolice are the benign servants of the people, who always do what isbest for them – certainly as I’ve already argued they are the partof post-democracy that along with the juridical system serves toenforce the inequalities of the order of the police. It’s my pointthat this argument works on a miss-understanding, because it seespower in the repressive form that Foucault rejected. A degree ofconspiracy is present in the theory, seeing all power as acting fromthe state and its arms down onto the people, power in reality actsin all directions.

Other arguments against Kettling are that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious circle, a tactic that perpetuates thebehaviour that it tries to stamp out. I’m of course referring toacts of violence. These arguments assert that contrary to officialdiscourse that states that the Kettle prevents imminent breaches ofpeace, or cools the ones that are already occurring, it in factcreates them by trapping protesters in pressurised situations,devoid of amenities, which serve to increase anger and frustrationwhich turns to violence. This argument might have some truth to it.For example take the containment on 9 December in Parliament Square.After the containment of the protest is authorised the logs of thepolice commander in charge show how the use of the tactic is

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regularly reviewed but determined to still be necessary in light ofcontinued violence.

1550—Review containment. To Continue. The level of violencecontinues [...]

1725—Review of containment. There is little change from whenI last reviewed the circumstances of the containment [...].

1842—Authority to deploy into Parliament Square to arrestoffenders [...]; Rationale: The level of violence has notdesisted over the last 4 hours [...].

1957—Containment reviewed—no change in circumstances at thistime [...].

2059—Authorise the clearance of Parliament Square into BridgeStreet. Rationale: The Breaches of the Peace and CriminalActs continue (Allison. 2011: §6).

Yet it isn’t considered by the commander in any of his logs that theimposition of the kettle could be to blame for the continuedviolence. It almost seems as if he is surprised that the kettlehasn’t calmed people down. This adds some weight to the argumentthat the Kettle is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I do not intendto criticise the tactic from this viewpoint either. It’s valid, butnot sufficient. I argue that the Kettle is considerably more complexand serves the condition of post-democracy perfectly – by containingacts of politics.

It is my argument that the kettle is the very act ofcontaining political ruptures themselves. Far from being at aprotest to facilitate the rights of the protesters, the police serveto maintain order – understood as forcefully maintaining consensus.If it is the case that the order of the police is a state of anti-politics; a fragile state that is threatened by displays ofdissensus; the state of which the sole goal of politics is todisrupt, then the kettle is nothing more than the attempt tophysically contain politics. Treated as a harmful disease it isquarantined behind the body of the police as an institution, toprevent its contagious spread to the body politic. Post-democracyitself regulates legitimate protest by positing ‘rules of conduct’for protests to adhere to. These rules define the boundary betweenlegitimate (consensual) protest and illegitimate (political)

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protest. Thus it is only one particular type of protest that iskettled, the political one. It might well be said that kettling is aresponse to violence, not politics; all the instances of kettlingwere applied to protests that were characterised by violence. Inresponse I will say that I’m not denying that violence perpetratedby protesters occurs in the kettle or prior to the kettle. But thisis inconsequential, because in order to be treated as a politicalthreat to consensus one doesn’t necessarily need be violent. In factthere are incidents which I will describe in which non-violentprotesters are also treated by the police as threats to consensus.

* * *

In the tradition of genealogy that Foucault used, we can see thathistorical developments are not simply chance events but the resultof power structures shifting, altering and appropriating changes insociety. In the same vein then it is the modern development of post-democracy, the paranoid adherence to consensus that rejectsdisagreement, which is the rationale behind the development ofkettling. In regards to protest there has been considerablediscourse on its nature of late, with much of the present discussionbeing on how it has changed, developed, been augmented bytechnology. Discussion of network based protest groups,organisations without leaders or rhizomatic activist groups havebecome cliché. This is not to say that these things are false, thatprotest isn’t changing, but we must understand any changing natureof protest either as the effect of the ‘rules of conduct’ dictatedby post-democracy or as an adaptation to these rules in order tobypass them and make easier the emergence of politics. The ‘worldthe police are now operating in’ as the HMIC report puts it is onein which protest can either be ‘stewarded and controlled’ or‘disruptive’. The development of post-democracy can be understood asthe rationale behind the development of Kettling as a tactic. It isthe shift from a world understood as divided to one in which the‘end of politics’ has heralded the purification of politics andconsensus which motivated the movement from a vision that acceptedprotests was a political display of dissensus to one in which itneeds to be contained.

We have discussed already the regulation of protest by the‘rules of conduct’ that must be formulated before the event. The

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direction, size and route of the protest must be pre-ordained andlead by stewards in high visibility jackets, and all this must bepassed on to the police. We might use the Foucauldian term here‘grid of intelligibility’ to understand the way in which post-democracy sees legitimate protest. The post-democratic ‘grid’understands protest as that which the police call an ‘OrganisedDeclared Protest’ (HMIC. 2009: 21), ‘Advance written notification ofpublic processions is required’ (Ibid), its flow must be regulatedand stewarded. It’s nature as an accepted part of post-democracy canbest be symbolised by the fact that in most cases it takes the formof a march from a start location to the centre, hub, power-base, orseat of government – a parliament, a government office, a head ofstate’s residence. At which point the protesters communicate theiropinions in the form of chants or speeches directed at thepoliticians themselves. No other image better symbolizes a vision ofthe managerial state, of politics treated as the government’smanagement of the citizens conflicting interests, for such a protestsays clearly ‘We come to you with our problems, so that you mayresolve them.’

Now it is often the case that the protest organisers must meetwith the police and plan it in conjunction with them, something Campfor Climate Action were invited to do after the kettle of theClimate Camp at the G20 protests (Van der Zee. 2009). It is part ofa drive for more communication between the police and protestersthat has been one of the main recommendations since the HMIC report.For example the ACPO report states that in reference to the‘planning and command of public order incidents’ the police shoulduse ‘Engagement and dialogue [...] whenever possible, to demonstratea “no surprises” approach’ (2010: 11); and ‘Links with communities,groups, event organisers [...] should be established’ (Ibid). We mustinterpret this drive as an enforcement of the rules of legitimateprotest. The more planning and organisation that occurs before theevent means the possibility that an unwelcomed disruption of theconsensus might occur decreases – this is what we should take fromthe phrase ‘a “no surprises” approach’. The HMIC report displaysthis logic well:

Seek to improve dialogue with protest groups in advance wherepossible, to gain a better understanding of the intent of theprotesters and the nature of the protest activity; to agree

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how best to facilitate the protest and to ensure aproportionate policing response. When protesters are notforthcoming to the police, the police should considerinforming and warning the protesters and the public that thismay result in some additional disruption, that restrictionsmay be placed on protesters and that particular tactics maybe employed to reduce disruption and the threat of disorder.(2009: 47)

Thus police planning does a lot to prevent the emergence ofunplanned politics, but it can be the case that a protest, whetherspontaneous or planned, might yet present the emergence of politics.In such a situation it is called on the kettle to contain it.

It is the protest that challenges the ‘givens’ of adistribution of the sensible, that poses the image of two worlds inone, that is political and thus it is also the protest that Kettlingis targeted at. The first use of Kettling in a proper sense4 was on1May 2001 at the May Day Protests in central London. The ‘massprotest - a loose alliance of anti-capitalists, environmentalcampaigners and animal rights protesters - was contained in thecentre of London by a huge police operation’ (BBC. 2001). Theprotest was also part of the Anti-Globalisation movement an‘umbrella term for a group of different protest causes, including,environmentalism, third world debt, animal rights, child labour,anarchism, and anti-capitalism and opposition to multinationals’(BBC. 2001a). The significance of the protest was the challenge itposed to the consensus. The mix of anti-capitalist/anti-globalisation protesters presented politics in the sense that theychallenged the givens of post-democratic order. The kettle on the 1st

May can be considered a proto-type. The term kettle or containmentwere not used (as far as I’m aware) to describe the operation. Itwouldn’t be until 2009 when containment as a specific function ofpost-democracy would begin to emerge.

The G20 Meltdown protest and the Climate Camp in the Cityprotest were two instances of an international period ofdemonstrations in the build up to the G20 meeting on the 2nd April4 There is discussion of earlier occurrences in the UK, for example on the30th November 1999 at an Anti-World Trade Organisation protest in London.But the scale of the event makes it hard to compare to the large scaleKettling operations of the last decade. Also a lack of reliable sources onit made looking at it in detail difficult.

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2009. They occurred the day before in the centre of London and weresignificant for provoking a public debate on the ability of theMetropolitan Police to deal with protests. The G20 Meltdown protestwas the convergence of four marches from different locations. Eachwas to symbolise the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, the red horseof war, the green horse against climate chaos, the silver horseagainst financial crimes and the black horse against land enclosures(Policante. 2011). The operation to contain the protest began at12:30 and lasted until 19:00, after which dispersal of protestersbegan (HMIC. 2009: 23). As Policante, present at the protest, saysreferring to the symbols of the four horseman ‘they embodied thedifferent ocular parallaxes from which to unveil the systemicviolence that, in different ways and in different places, makes ussubjects, but also unites us in a single “war-like matrix”’ (2011:458). The protest, a large association of anti-capitalist, alter-globalisation, environmentalist activist, presented the ultimateimage of a community in disagreement. In the ensuing fallout of thefinancial crisis, the effect of climate change and the continuationof foreign wars the activists presented a clear image, on the foot-steps of the central bank of the UK, of two worlds in one. The worldpresented by the meeting of the leaders of the twenty riches nationsgave the message of harmony and order. But the highly symbolic imageof the protest was one of failing financial institutions, globalpoverty, environmental damage and war. A consensus shattering image.

On the same day the Climate Camp in the City protest occurredoutside the European Climate Exchange. The protest, along with otherprotests organised by Camp for Climate Action, used the occupationof space a form of protest. The protest saw ‘tents, market stalls,banners and bunting set up outside the carbon-trading body’ (BBC.2009) with the intention of remaining in the space for twenty-fourhours. Despite no incidences of violence the protest was kettled at17:00 until 19:00 at which point the eviction of the protest began.Similarly Climate Camp presented a physical act of politics bychallenging the efforts made to tackle climate change. After theevent a case was brought before the High Court by the protesters,arguing that the kettling operation had been illegal. A similarlegal attempt had been brought against the Metropolitan police in2002, surrounding the containment of protesters on 1st May. The casewas rejected by the courts, finding the operation was not arbitraryas it served to maintain peace (Austin v Commissioner of Police of

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the Metropolis. 2009). The case at the G20 protester was initiallysuccessful. As the guardian reported ‘the court heard that officersused punches to the face, slaps and shields against demonstratorswho police chiefs accept had nothing to do with violence’ (Dodd,2011), and the report stated that ‘there never was a reasonableapprehension of imminent breaches of the peace at the Climate Camp’(Moos and McClure v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. 2011:§40). However this decision was later over-ruled by an appeallaunched by the police, arguing that the containment was legalbecause a breach of the peace was possible if Climate Campprotesters mixed with the G20 Meltdown protesters, who had alreadybeen violent (The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis v McClureand Moos. 2011).

The student demonstrations of winter 2010 presented asignificant rupture in the order of consensus. The presentationgiven by the student and broader anti-austerity protests was one ofultimate inequality. Cuts were being inflicted upon educationalinstitutions, social-services and the public sector. The poorestwere being selected to foot the bill for the financial failings ofthe rich. The thrust of the protests was a message that said it wasthe poorest who would suffer the most. Contrast this with thegovernment’s slogan ‘We’re all in this together’ and we can see atruly evident displayal of two worlds in one. The world of order,equality, peace and consensus, and the order of inequality, silent-war and dissensus. The challenge of politics that the protestspresented was swiftly met by three large scale kettling operations.The first incident was the 10 November march. It began in highcompliance with the ‘rules’ of legitimate protest in following an Ato B route march. But a breakaway attempt to occupy the premises ofthe Conservative Party in Millbank Tower lead to scenes disruption.No kettling took place, largely because the police did not predictanything other than a consensual march, and as a result were caughtoff guard (Lewis. 2010). Following this protests were organised forthe 24 November, 30 November and 9 December, all were kettled almostimmediately.

In all these subsequent kettling operations we see a commondistinction being drawn between the ‘good’ protester and the ‘bad’protester. This distinction refers of course to the ‘rules ofconduct’ already mentioned and to the characterisation that the good

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protesters are peaceful and the bad ones are violent. Policante(2011) spends time displaying in how during the G20 kettle theimages of violence served to obscure the political discourse of theprotesters, instead presenting an image of exceptional violence. Thepanopticon like effect of the kettle is to produce an infiniteamount of image of acts of violence committed by both police andprotesters. These I argue have the effect of reducing any act ofpolitics, by ignoring it as a political discourse and writing it offas a lesser expression of anger. Rancière (1999) explains how inAristotle the distinction between phonē and logos is the boundary hedraws between man and animal. Phonē is sound, simply noise used toexpressed pleasure or pain, satisfaction or dissatisfaction, whereaslogos is the ability to express statements, political notions, ideas.Thus it is the possession of phonē that makes man a political animal.The discourse of images that emerge from the kettle implies thatwithin is politics, outside is consensus; that politics is chaos,consensus is order. This is achieved by forming a division betweenthe legitimate and illegitimate protesters. The legitimate are thosewho follow the ‘rules of conduct’ and stay within the boundaries ofconsensus. The illegitimate protesters are those who break with the‘rules of conduct’. This second category contains the protesters whoresort to violence, but also those who express politics.

If there is someone you do not wish to recognise as apolitical being, you begin by not seeing him as the bearer ofsigns of politicity, by not understanding what he says, bynot hearing what issues from his mouth as discourse(Rancière. 2010: 38).

With the inclusion of the political protester in a categorywith those whom the state can easily condemn (the violent) theeffect is to ignore the discourse of the political protester, tosuppress the speech of the activist. Firstly consider the case ofJody McIntyre, a disabled protester within the Parliament Squarekettle on 9 December 2010. McIntyre was dragged from his wheelchairby a police officer during the protester. In a subsequent interviewwith the BBC (BBC. 2010) the interviewer seems unable todisassociate McIntyre’s self-described aim of seeking to ‘build arevolutionary movement [that] can only happen by direct action onthe streets’ with an intention to cause violence and harm to thepolice. For example the interviewer asks firstly that ‘there’s a

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suggestion that you were rolling towards the police in yourwheelchair, is that true?’ Despite McIntyre’s insistence that as asufferer of Cerebral Palsy, he posed a threat to no one, theinterviewer continues ‘were you throwing anything at the police?[...] shout anything provocative [...] that would have induced thepolice to do that to you?’ Again McIntyre denies being violent orthreatening, to which the interviewer again insists ‘but you do sayyou’re a revolutionary!’ We can also take the case of the arrest offorty activists at an occupation of Fortnum & Masons, during the 26March 2011 demonstration (Malik. 2011). The method of the activists,non-violent occupation and civil-disobedience, falls outside thedefinition of the ordered march dictated by the ‘rules of conduct’outlined by post-democracy. Therefore, we can see their mass arrestas being, not a result of violent activities but the activity ofpolitics. We might also consider the Climate Camp in the Cityprotest, which, as already mentioned was not violent yet was stillsubject to the imposition of a kettle and a forceful and violenteviction.

Conclusions

The feeling that accompanies the act of being within a Kettle is theexcitement of partaking in a true act of politics. To rupture theorder of the police and expose, no matter how temporarily, thedissensus that hides behind consensus is liberating. But I haveendeavoured to show that, in post-democratic society, such momentsof political rupture are often met with the intervention of theorder of the police, in the form of the institution of the police,through the deployment of a kettle. We began by explainingFoucauldian Disciplinary Society, in order that we may perceive thefunctioning of power relations in modern society. This enabled us tounderstand the ways in which power can create systems of dominationthat go well beyond simple force and coercion, but that bind thesubject in grids of optimal behaviour, that is regulated through amultiplicity of institutions such as the school, the university, theworkplace, the police force and the courts.

However the question was then posed: what is thecharacteristic of these power relations? What do they attempt toachieve other than normalization? The answer given was as consensus.

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Reflecting on Rancière’s assertion that power relations aren’tnecessarily political relations, I argued that the characteristic ofFoucauldian disciplinary society was an attempt to reproduce theuneventful – in other words, consensus. Later I argued that thecharacteristic of any consensus is an attempt to prevent theeruption of politics. Beforehand however, it was important to detailRancièrean theory. Beginning with the notions of the ‘end’ and‘return’ of politics, I went on to explain how for Rancière what iscommonly referred to as politics is instead know as policing, or theorder of the police, and that actual politics is the act thatdisrupts the consensual ordering logic of the police, which is thenature of modern society, and is referred to as the ‘managerialstate’, consensus democracy or post-democracy.

My own understanding of post-democracy was one that understoodsociety to be both disciplinary and consensual. Foucault providesthe understanding of society as full of disciplinary powerrelations, but Rancière’s understanding of consensus enables us tosee that such a society is the enemy of politics, and his definitionof politics provided the knowledge to comprehend how protest isthreatening to the consensus of post-democracy, and must be kettled.I outlined six characteristics of post-democracy that explain whykettling is used. (1) That any consensus merely hides dissensus; (2)post-democracy is inherently fragile as it attempts to creates acommunity without void; (3) in a condition of post-democracy the actof politics is monopolised by the government in a paradoxical waythat means it is never utilised; (4) this means that themonopolisation that post-democracy presents is the anti-politicalattempt to end politics; (5) therefore protests, long understood asan act of politics, is regulated and redefined according to ‘rulesof conduct’ which dictate it not disturb consensual-order; (6) thepolice then serve to police the political, by being present atprotest and enforcing ‘rules of conduct’. Should a protest breakthese rules it is the kettle that is used to bring the political actto an end.

The May Day protests in 2001, the G20 protests, and theStudent Demonstrations in the winter of 2010 all presented momentswhen the consensual order of the police was challenged by a protestthat turned political. Thus the use of the kettle during theseincidences can be understood as an attempt to contain politics. In

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response to claims that violence is the real target of the police,we can see the Climate Camp in the City kettle, the treatment ofJody McIntyre and the arrest of the Fortnum and Masons Forty asinstances that reject this assertion. The reason being that thesewere instances of non-violence that nonetheless challenged consensusand as such were treated by the intervention of the police. Thepresence of the police at a protest is to enforce the order of thepolice. Always on standby should the protest attempt to becomepolitical. Should such a thing occur, and the protesters attempt totransgress the monopoly on the right to ‘do’ politics possessed bypoliticians, than the Kettle is often deployed to contain thepolitical rupture and discipline the protest. In modern consensualdemocracy the Kettle is the confrontation between politics and theorder of the police.

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