ABSTRACT
Conventional legal theory tends to presume a certain calm, an atmosphere of peaceability in which legal relations might unfold. This atmosphere is usually imperceptible, becoming apparent only in the most exceptional moments when the order itself is disrupted. This chapter focuses upon this sense of ‘public order’, but to do so it eschews the case law and legislation on riots and protests. Instead it describes the twin tracks which help produce this atmosphere of public peace: (1) the immanent management of bodies and (2) the transcendent sovereign pacification of the collective subject of politics (the people). The first part therefore deploys the old sense of ‘police’ as an immanent socio-legal ordering. The chapter suggests that we must look beyond the securitisation of protest that we have seen in the recent years. The deployment of increasingly effective techniques of control is only one way in which disorder is managed. More important are the techniques that intervene to prevent disorder before anyone actually takes to the street. This I call the management of turbulence, and it takes place through minute intervention in normal life. On the transcendent plane, democratic sovereignty must appropriate the authority of the people as it speaks in the constituent moment, but it must simultaneously differ from the violence and turbulence of revolution. It does this by deferring revolt, holding it out as the promise of a future that must never be allowed to arrive. Liberal constitutionalism seems to say: ‘The people have spoken, and if there was tyranny, they could again speak.’ At the same time as this deferral or promise of constituent power is made, the state that is constituted in the process begins its police activity to immanently ensure such a promise could never be fulfilled. In this sense the immanent and transcendent are collapsed into one another, becoming inseparable. The chapter identifies ‘public peace’ as a shared affective state, a collective sense of order and calm regularity. It is produced in and by law, in sovereign glorification and police ordering.
