Sentiment, Reason, and Law by Jeffrey T. Martin

Author:Jeffrey T. Martin [Martin, Jeffrey T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, History, Asia, China, Political Science, Law Enforcement
ISBN: 9781501740077
Google: YT-NDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2019-10-15T05:28:16+00:00

Policing as the Curation of Political Will

The world is neither an end nor a means. It is not a telos. It is not for anything. It simply is. Put another way, the anthropological concept of worlding, as articulated by Veena Das (2007) and Anna Tsing (2010), uses the concept of “world” to denote the a priori principle that holds a people, or a “we,” together as the mutual ground of one another’s existence. This draws on the Heideggerian philosophical tradition, in which care is the quality of human experience that grounds being in a sense of world (Hamilton 2013). Arendt developed a political theory on this basis, defining authentic politics as the creativity that emerges from the play of difference-in-unity by which a pluralistic world continually re-creates and renews itself. The metabolism of this process of world (re)production is, in Arendt’s (1958) terms, an entelecheia, a process that cannot be represented in functionalist terms.

The most tangible manifestation of a world is its presence in the shared presuppositions that calibrate the habits of behavior through which a community stands together as the mutual ground of one another’s existence. For example, at the level of language, the existence of a world is inherent in presupposing that other people can hear what you intend to say (Das 1998). To use the terminology of speech act theory: the consequences of speech rest on perlocutionary conditions, and the world inheres in the infrastructural basis of perlocutionary forces. This observation is the point of departure for Justin Richland’s (2013, 217) theory of legal jurisdiction. A court’s decision manifests a world through the “perlocutionary force [that] persists in the silent authorizing move that backs [its] proceduralism with the generalized sovereign force and legitimacy it presupposes.” More specifically, the ongoing creativity of legal activity, along with all the institutional conditions it must maintain to stay active, manifests a world in which modern state sovereignty exists, is powerful, and is structured by the rule of law.

Much of the ongoing metabolic process of world (re)production is done informally, without the kind of formal apparatus associated with law, and without the kind of explicit reflexivity through which legal agents attempt to take conscious responsibility for the world-making consequences of their actions. Ordinary ontological security is generated by instinctive habits, the routine forms of care by which people stand to one another as evidence that the world is indeed as we suppose it to be. It is, in Arendt’s (1958, 79–174) terms, labor not work. Only in the modern world, with the rise of the modern state and its proposal to make security a durable condition, does it become possible to treat security as the object of a professional jurisdiction, like law or policing. But where law is the paradigm of a truly successful profession, policing remains mired in chronic problems defining the scope of its exclusive professional jurisdiction.

This chapter described the contemporary practice of a mode of modern policing that was initially created in the historical context of mobilizational authoritarianism. This

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