“Those who live by the spectacle will die by the spectacle.” Jean Baudrillard
The last few weeks of student-led protests against the ideologically blunt and financially reckless Tory-Liberal Democrat cuts and the massively short-sighted, brutal and regressive cuts to third level education in particular may well have marked something of a turning point in modern British history. They have won back the power of political protest that was seemingly lost after the defeat of the anti-war marches in 2003. Tony Blair’s smug platitudes about spreading democracy in Iraq saw it dissolve domestically in a sea of bitterness and apathy. The last few weeks have seen people learn once more, indeed seen school children and students teach us, that people do have power and that political protest can be effective. But if these protests have rinsed the smile from Cameron’s face and applied the defibrillator of dissensus to the heart of British democracy they also raise questions about the strategies of protest adequate to a police régime reared on football hooliganism and ‘event management’.
The first question that needs to be asked is what these protests serve to do. Primarily they provide a symbolic representation of opposition to the Tory-Liberal Democrat government and its neoliberal policy agenda. This symbolic opposition can be broken down in to two further sets of roles which I would rather clumsily refer to as ‘ideological’ and ‘affective’.
The ideological role of the protest is to reframe the situation in which the government poses its policy. By powerfully signalling mass opposition pressure will be put on the government’s ability to implement policy and a leverage created with which to prise open the coalition government. Further, it creates an opportunity for the public to rethink government policy especially those uncertain of it, those in support of it and those merely otherwise unengaged. In both cases this ideological role is directed outward from the protesters, at the public and at the government. The affective role of the protest is rather directed inward and allows the ties within the opposition to be built and strengthened and for militancy to be cultivated. This is not of course to suggest that signalling symbolic opposition to the government can be or indeed should be the only goal of protest movements but whilst the UK is ripe with potential energy at the current juncture the movement currently lacks the strength, support and crucially any coherent vision for a wider reformulation of the state, economic policy or the organization of social structures. To say this is not to doom the movement to mere protest or longer term irrelevance. On the contrary any viable alternatives will arise through and build upon the current protest movement and the politicization it has produced, if not entirely then at least in part.
Despite the fact that both the ideological and affective roles of this symbolic protest are crucial the strategy of concentrating masses in defined spaces in order to produce a spectacle of opposition is revealing its limitations in the context of the UK’s policing régime and strategy needs to be rethought. The standard form for modern symbolic protests has been to gather a concentrated mass of people in a defined space to produce a spectacular opposition. Of course such protests work to disrupt the daily functioning of the streets and hence economic and other activity but the main aim is to produce a semblance of ‘the people’ visibly standing in opposition to the government or its policy. This relationship between concentration and spectacle leaves protests vulnerable to the police containment strategy known as ‘kettling’ which so easily re-symbolises legitimate opposition as violent disorder.
Part of the problem of approaching police kettling is that the phenomenon has not been fully understood. Although it may at first seem the grossest form of numbskull territorialisation it is in-fact a more complex spatial strategy that works precisely within the same logic of concentration and spectacle as symbolic protest. It is important therefore to unpick the logic of the kettle in relation to symbolic protest. I would argue that the kettle aims to achieve two seemingly contradictory results simultaneously: to restrain and incite the crowd. Likewise it works on two simultaneous terrains, one the physical sites of protest and the other the virtual terrain of the media landscape it seeks to shape. The relationship between these two pairs of aims and terrains must be kept in mind.
First of all the kettle aims to restrain and mute the crowd. At the most basic level the kettle establishes a spatial container which restrains the protest by keeping the crowd in a specific site and hence limiting the disruption they can cause, the damage they can do to property and the scope of their threat to ‘public safety’ and ‘public order’. The kettle further aims to mute the crowd by wearing down their energies and holding them until they have been subdued with the passage of time. If these two aims concern the specific day of the protest the kettle obviously plays a longer-term and more repressive role in trying to put people off future protests. By making the kettle so unpleasant and boring (something that should work particularly well in certain weather conditions – very cold, very wet or very warm) the hope is that people will be put off ever protesting again hence limiting the work the police have to do implementing government policy.
As the kettle aims to restrain the crowd it simultaneously seeks to incite them. By making the kettle unpleasant and by limiting the protester’s freedom of movement as such the police aim to provoke an angry and violent response from the crowd. As Richard Seymour has noted this tactic is based on the assumption that the protesters can be broken down in to two basic groups: reasonable ‘peaceful’ protestors and unreasonable violent ‘anarchists’. The aim here is to identify, isolate and arrest the ‘trouble-makers’ so that they are punished both making an example of them and putting them off further engagement in protest. But the crux I would argue is not to produce violence in order to produce arrests but to produce violence itself. By inciting the crowd the police guarantee a violent spectacle that will feed the media’s addiction to violence, which always makes a news-worthy story.
This brings me to the second pairing in the logic of the kettle, i.e. its operation across the physical terrain of the protest site and the virtual terrain of the media coverage. The kettle of course seeks to divide the space of the city into spaces inside and outside the kettle and to isolate and manage disorder within a defined site in order to maintain it elsewhere. But what needs to be understood is that this spatial strategy of physical containment is also a media strategy which seeks to concentrate the spectacle of violent protest into a defined space precisely for the media. Thus the physical terrain of the kettled site is marshalled to produce violent spectacle for media consumption. It is a type of siege that lets the police appear under attack. The kettle thus needs to be understood as a form of media strategy deployed by the police to delegitimize protests and re-symbolize legitimate protest as unlawful ‘riot’. The kettle attempts to cast opposition protests as such as radical, violent and in need of police repression, whose brutality is legitimated by this same spectacle of student violence that the kettle aims to facilitate.
It should be noted of course that as with any system of ordering the police are not fully in control of the kettle. Kettling is not an immobile state but a dynamic process which is playing its aims against each other and against the unpredictability of the crowd. The lack of police control over the kettle was seen last week at the protests in London against the increase in student fees on December 9th. A greater number of the crowd were incited than had been expected and hence the assumption of a simple division into the peaceful and the violent members of the crowd began to dissolve. It should be noted that this greater level of violence from the protesters was in direct response to the growing violence of the police who have made kettling an increasingly brutal exercise in coercion and terror. At one level this increase in police violence from the very beginning of the December 9th protests can be seen as a police strategy to increase both tendencies they seek to elicit from the crowd – restrain in avoiding future protests and a spectacle of growing student violence. On the other hand it is testimony to the fact that the police are losing control of this game and are following the greater ingenuity and growing militancy of the protest movement with the rather pathetic reliance on horse charges and truncheon assaults. Crucially of course the police violence itself plays into the hands of media spectacle and despite the best efforts of the BBC, Sky News and even supposedly supportive media outlets such as The Guardian to cast the protest as a riot the totally disproportionate and provocative brutality of the police’s own actions have shone through.
Despite this it is clear that a protest strategy based on concentrating spectacle walks straight in to the trap the kettle sets – not simply in terms of the physical site of the protest but of the virtual terrain of the media spectacle. A new spatiality of protest, a new geography of opposition is needed that can prevent spatial containment becoming the medium for a media spectacle that delegitimizes protests at the same times as it legitimizes government policy and police brutality.
This is not to say that there is no room for symbolic protest as it appears to be the only level at which opposition can effectively operate in the current conjuncture. Further it is not to say that there may be the need for more large-scale concentrated protests in the near future, in which case preparation should be made for turning a kettle into a camp and hence turning containment back against the police, laying siege from the inside out. However, if concentrated spectacle is the only trick up the protesters’ sleeves it is sure to meet an increasingly violent that can be repeatedly re-symbolized in delegitimizing spectacles. It would be unwise to rely on the growing sympathy of either the media or the public as more beatings are meted out (something which the BBC’s disgraceful interrogation of Jody McIntrye, filmed being dragged from his wheelchair by police during the protests on December 9th, lays testament to). We may like to think such a change would occur but relying upon it would be to give a free-hand to the police and the media. Rather the initiative the protestors have thus far had over the police needs to be maintained.
A spatial strategy is needed for protest that avoids the possibility of concentration and containment and the type of media-friendly guerre en forme seen recently. It is time to return to Deleuze and Guattari, to Debord and the Situationists, to Lefebvre, even to Tiqqun and Hakim Bey and to take them seriously (perhaps for the first time). A form of protest is needed that places dispersal over concentration, mobility over stasis and perhaps even disruption over symbolism. If multiple smaller mobile groups were to simultaneously occupy key strategic sites and disrupt vital processes the momentum of symbolical opposition could be maintained without the police being able to herd opposition toward spectacle. The crowds could continuously move between temporary occupations to ensure the police are divided and chasing but to refuse them the pleasure of pitched battle. Imagine multiple small groups (perhaps numbering from 50 to 1,000 depending on the site in question) emerging at once to occupy government buildings, banks, constituency offices, party headquarters, shops, airports, train stations, tubes, buses, corporate office towers, Scotland Yard, Buckingham Palace, monuments, museums, universities, schools, roads and streets before dissolving and regrouping again – and not just in the centre but across London and not just in London but across the country.
This is not a novel suggestion of course and such civic swarming has already successfully occurred during the protests on November 30th when police gave futile chase to small bands of protestors across London’s snowy streets and again on December 9th when some who escaped the kettle temporarily occupied the National Gallery and ran amok on Oxford Street (and around the royal carriage). However, this strategy needs to be developed and spread so that small isolated clusters can become a ‘swarm’ (developing an alternate terminology of protest is also an urgent task). Such a strategy presents some serious planning and logistical challenges but a rough organizational frame can be provided by the numerous groups involved in the protests from student’s unions, groups in occupation, political activist groups and artists’ collectives and so on. The ability of those involved in the protest movement to work together has already been proven and there are ready made frameworks for realizing such a new spatiality of protest. Of course the police will be preparing for this strategic shift and are not as heavy footed and slow witted as some would like to believe. Therefore preparation has to be made for their attempts to coral crowds in to numerous smaller kettles and perhaps to more violently attempt to block protesters’ passage. The aim must be keep evading the nexus between containment, violence and spectacle, to avoid concentration and to keep moving. The police will of course as always have the law on their side and as there is no way for such forms of protest to be sanctioned there is likely be a greater number of arrests if protesters are caught. A step outside the kettle will be a welcome step outside the law and the consequences must be followed through even if we can’t yet know ‘where’.
Dear Sir,
Brilliant article. I agree 90% with it. I agree with the need to disrupt in many positions at the same time, a possibility now open by the use of what I call “counter/spaces”; that is virtual spaces such as Twitter, Facebook. These counter/spaces, brought into the hegemonic space (in mobiles phones, palm pilots, Iphones, etc)have allowed protesters to avoid kettling in one occasion (by coordinating their actions using Gmaps, social networking, text messages).
The 10% with which I don’t agree is where you state that this approach is a novel one. I am thinking about the “piqueteros” of Argentina and their tactics of urban disruption in small groups. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piquetero
Piqueteros have been using these tactics for years and they have been very successful in producing maximum disruption.
The tactical possibilities opened by the use of counter/spaces to coordinate action such as Piqueteros’ are enormous now. Hopefully this will be used to play against the hegemonic powers and not just to feed some more spectacular images to the media (always willing to disqualify violence before thinking about the reasons that generate it).
Best wishes,
Interesting stuff.
In Italy, apart from the more explicitly aggressive confrontations of yesterday, the student movement had already performed last month strategies of simultaneous occupation of key symbolical sites (Coliseum in Rome, the Tower in Pisa, The Mole in Turin and so on) not only producing symbolical opposition to government policies but also attracting praise for the creativity of such a protest, thus gaining important legitimation.
Similarly, although from a different contexts, unemployed workers have staged occupations of abandoned jails (as in Sardinia’s Asinara island where a parody of the Island of Famous has been staged by the unemployed workers to sensibilise public about their condition) or cranes, as has been the case of three ‘illegal’ immigrants in Brescia, who lasted 16 days in the cold and rainy weather and,at least for a fleeting moment, focused national attention to important questions of widespread corruption and exploitation in the bureaucratic procedures to gain permanent visas.
If these tactics would actually prove to be succesfull is yet to be seen. The education reform is going on, the immigrants aren’t likely to get their visa, nor the amnesty they were asking for, the workers are in into their 295th day in the island, coping with freezing temperatures and with no answers yet.
However, keeping in mind the obvious point that traditional protests are not necessarily successful anyway, as Iraqi demos topically demonstrated, these strategies are relevant for at least three key reason:
1: They certainly increase the symbolic efficacy of the protest, adding layers of creativity, unexpectedness and endurance which are more likely to gain a more marked level media attention as well as piercing more deeply and for a longer period in the collective consciousness
2: This unexpected, creative and spectacular character is also likely to attract praise from public opinion and media, both as regards the inventiveness of protest as well as, as in the case of more ‘extreme’ acts, for bravery and endurance — as for the case of the immigrants in the crane, for instance.
3: They are much less exposed to risk of de-legitimation than mass demos. The dynamic, flexible, contained and improvised nature of these strategies, as well as the much smalled numbers of participants, makes them simultaneously more controllable by the participants and less controllable by government forces, thus making it much harder for the police, government, secrete services etc. to employ infiltrators with the task of provoking as well as justifying police repression and media stigmatisation. In Italy this is an especially problematic issue, as the ‘agents provocateurs’ strategy is routinely deployed to manage protests, since the most striking and ruthless instance of the 70s ‘Strategia della Tensione’ (Strategy of Tension) — when dramatic large scale bombings with tens of victims in squares, trains and buildings of major cities, for which initially left movements were accused, years later would be found to have been planned by secret services in collaboration with far right groups — but also in the more recent events in Genoa. After all the former prime minister and president of republic Francesco Cossiga, one year before dying, publicly suggested the current government to use such tactics which he ‘used so successfully’ in the 70s. Moreover, a small pack is at the same time less predictable and less ‘irrational’ than a large crowd, and strategies such as kettling are less likely to succeed in provoking tension — let alone the fact that such singular action of spectacular protest can be carried out simultaneously in different parts of the city, undermining the possibility of pre-planned and coherent action by police itself.
This is of course the optimistic side of it. Compared with classical mass demos, these strategies requires more coordination, commitment and preparation, as well as skills and readiness to risk. However, for all the reason above, they certainly look a promising and fresh alternatives to the peaceful demo/violent clashes dichotomy.
[…] of the Kettle Posted on December 16, 2010 by stuartelden Interesting piece here by Rory Rowan. A couple of excerpts:- if these protests have rinsed the smile from Cameron’s face […]
Many thanks for the comments. I am not arguing that that such tactics are novel as I note, either in the UK or elsewhere. There are many fine examples of such activism already occurring in the current protest movement here as there are many elsewhere. My point would be that the tactic has to become more widespread, more developed and more strategically deployed but larger numbers. This is starting to happen and there is much debate amongst the protesters about such a move.
There are definite logistical and planning challenges involved but many wonderful examples to look to as you point out and there is a new relationship between protest movements in different places due to the web (see the book-shields spreading from Italy to UK in one week for example) and there is a huge energy and will (that I hope the holiday season will not dissolve) there to use the potential frameworks of the organized groups and the tools of new media to make this a reality.
The threat of police agents is a very real one that should be expected here and there has been suggestions and video footage that indicates such tricks have already been deployed. I saw this done at the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 myself. I think again some reverse ‘ratting’ would do a good job. If some bravery and planning were on offer moles could misinform the police and at least hope to delay and trouble their attempts to stay on top of the protests.
Many thanks again for your comments and it is good to keep this debate going — indeed raging.
Cheers
Rory
Completely true. I misread your article. Apologies!
My only intention was pointing to a proven use of the tactics needed in the UK at present. One that here, due to the access the people have to the mobile web could be even more efficiently used.
I hope to see the student movement associating with other mobile sectors of society though. If they isolate the movement the chances of success will be limited. Today it was announced up to 100,000 cuts in the public sector. There will be cuts all across the economy. Leaders should be reaching out to these people. The movement could be massive. Beyond anything seen before. This is happening everywhere, as Andrea is clearly showing with this and his article in the main body of the blog. Why is this? For many reasons. 1) Counter/spaces allow for a different sort of communication and power or instant organisation. 2) Never so many people have been buggered by so few at the same time (with the exception of the colonies; I should rephrase: never so many people in the urban centres of economic world power have been buggered so much by so few); 3) although the Tory/Dems cuts are representative of a clear neoliberal ideology they are destroying everyone, not only the working class. There are chances of getting rid of this government. My reading is that they won’t stay too long in power. Regardless of the violence they use.
To follow up on Andrea’s comment. I do agree with you that “traditional protests are not necessarily successful anyway”; but they are a good way of grouping elements that might later be willing/able to join non-traditional forms of protest (the efficacy of which depends on several conditions of possibility too!).
Nice to keep the discussion moving.
Best wishes,
F
Thanks for this great article. It goes straight into the spatial logics of protest and performances of inconformity, and I think there is a lot of interesting work that can be done along the lines that you have outlined.
I welcome your call for exploring more modalities of protest that mobilise ‘dispersal over concentration, mobility over stasis and perhaps disruption over symbolism’. Dispersal certainly complicates control, and I think that the architectural history of disciplinary institutions shows a privilege for concentration. However, and despite I don’t doubt that there are many tactical advantages in having mobile, dispersed, always-reconfiguring segments of protest and disruption, I wonder if the underlying form in these modalities of dispersion is consonant with many forms of governance that have been assembled in the last decades, and I am initially a bit skeptical of the dissolution of massive concentrations. Are not massive concentrations a kind of performative instantiation of a resistance to the contemporary distributed-network-oriented imaginary? So, perhaps more dispersed forms of protest could supplement rather than substitute large concentrations (I’m not sure really, just a thought!).
I also wonder whether disruption could become a form rather than a substitution of symbolism. I think that protests are collective ways of articulating expressions of inconformity, and disruption as a mode of protest should be able to exemplify the inconformity in some way. Do you know what I mean? A disruption that can be associated to potentially anything looses the expressive powers of protest. This is why I wouldn’t cast away the symbolic. I like the idea of exploring dispersed disruptions as a way of protest, but I think that maybe this would require some eloquent modes of expression-through-disruption. Just some ideas….
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I think you allude to this in your comments, but I would say that we have a significant prototype of a form of protest which favours dispersal over concetration, being that of the UK Uncut movement. It is interesting, though, to note that although their actions are diespersed, on both the intra– and inter-urban terrain they still manage to fall in the trap of police containment. In a sense I suppose that these actions still cannot fail to resist spectacle (they still contain elements of the old guard protest — banners, megaphones, etc.). Having said that, there has also been some experimentation in UK Uncut actions, trying out new forms of protest that would emphasise disruption over symbolism. I’m thinking, for example, of the the ‘one woman protest’ (http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/blog/lone-protests-against-tax-avoiders)wherein somebody attempts to cause disruption to retail businesses by queueing up to the till and refusing to pay the VAT on the items of purchase. Imagine the disruption this would cause if repeated by 50 – 1,000 people in any given locale. This particular action is, in my mind, akin to the recent denial of service attacks perpetrated by ‘anonymous’ in reaction to the attempts to silence wikileaks. This kind of action also has the advantage of avoiding the spectacle and so, by extension, avoids the geographic problems which sprout up when spectacle is challenged on its own terms. Enacted as a kind of protracted people’s war, the long-lasting effects of repeated actions such as the aforementioned ‘one woman protest’ could achieve a lot.
Thanks for your article, it has got me thinking about a great deal of things.
Tom
[…] 21 Dec By Rory Rowan and taken from here: http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=1180 […]
[…] Dec 1. Geographies of the Kettle: Fantastic piece by Rory Rowan on recent student-led protests in the UK and the technique of ‘kettling’ […]
[…] — Rory Rowan, Critical Legal Thinking […]
[…] in which groups of protesters are more dispersed and act independently to express their opposition. ‘A new geography of opposition’ has been called for, in which concentrations of protesters are dissolved and dispersed across a […]
Excellent piece. I think we can use this as a starting point for a guide/plan of action/manifesto for the coming year.
[…] The second article is a fascinating essay by Rory Rowan from Critical Legal Thinking, about how activists should respond to the increasing use of kettling as a police tactic to deal with large demonstrations. …it is clear that a protest strategy based on concentrating spectacle walks straight in to the trap the kettle sets – not simply in terms of the physical site of the protest but of the virtual terrain of the media spectacle. A new spatiality of protest, a new geography of opposition is needed that can prevent spatial containment becoming the medium for a media spectacle that delegitimizes protests at the same times as it legitimizes government policy and police brutality. […]
[…] And I believe in parliament, I do believe that the majority of people there are there because they want to fight for the world which they think is best, and that the best way they can do so in small, measured wades through sticky, muggy, heavy beaurocracy. But I also believe that the mainstream media has hamstrung our politicians and society to the point that only the thickest skins make it. And thick skins get used to not hearing things in order to exist. So they don’t hear the cries of the people trapped just metres from their workplace. “[the kettle] is also a media strategy which seeks to concentrate the spectacle of violent protest into a defined space precisely for the media. Thus the physical terrain of the kettled site is marshalled to produce violent spectacle for media consumption. It is a type of siege that lets the police appear under attack. The kettle thus needs to be understood as a form of media strategy deployed by the police to delegitimize protests and re-symbolize legitimate protest as unlawful ‘riot’. The kettle attempts to cast opposition protests as such as radical, violent and in need of police repression, whose brutality is legitimated by this same spectacle of student violence that the kettle aims to facilitate.” Rory Rowan on the brilliant Critical Legal Thinking […]
There is an implementation of this idea in development, please see http://bit.ly/g6DxTJ
All feedback and help in developing this strategy is extremely welcome!
[…] Owen’s point, organised dissent is often far more eminently manageable: as many have pointed out the kettle on the streets is only possible with a mass of people clearly preceding to the same loca.… More widely, killing, banning, containing or otherwise repressing a problematic organisation and […]
[…] McKeown, Len McLuskey, Jonathan Moses, Anthony Painter, Nick Pearce, Laurie Penny, Aaron Peters, Rory Rowan, Paul Sagar, Trevor Smith, John Stuttle, Niki Seth-Smith, Daniel Trilling, Oliver Wainwright. […]
[…] by 43 authors [ed: including an article originally published on Critical Legal Thinking by Rory Rowan]. It asks: Is this the start of a successful movement against fees and […]
[…] D&G back into forms of resistance. The focus on ‘deterritorialization’ has been used to great aplomb by activists and its clear those in the bloc have been reading them– see my earlier post on protest […]
[…] authors [ed: including an article originally published on Critical Legal Thinking by Rory Rowan]. It asks: Is this the start of a successful movement against fees […]