ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the emergence of the new practices of suppression. As Terry Eagleton points out, the United Irishmen had deployed the aesthetic resistance based on the ‘irreducible state of being impenetrable to all alien Enlightenment rationality’. The magistrate and his men were the first response to a single outrage; the new colonial police force would intervene upon the emergence of a more general state of unrest in the locality. Colonial public order was a mode of exceptionality, a suspension of ordinary legality that could be deployed when the state of unrest appeared to emerge. The police identify certain types of security reasons, such as a public order situation where the sovereign’s right to rule, economic obligations or later the life of the populace is at stake. The public order police force developed new forms of public order training, all aimed at the object-target of the affective life of the colonised populace as it expressed its dissent.
