Review: Illan Rua Wall, ‘Law and Disorder: Sovereignty, Protest, Atmosphere’
(Dis)ordergam: The Order of Disorder
Review of Illan Rua Wall’s Law and Disorder: Sovereignty, Protest, Atmosphere (Routledge, 2020), 222 pages.
Abstract
Illan Rua Wall’s Law and Disorder is organised in a formal symmetry with four parts of five chapters circling around four points: law’s order and disorder, popular disorder and order. It moves from the affects and the public order apparatus of sovereignty to the political technology of the crowd with its patterns and grids responding to law’s order through popular disorder and violence. Wall’s strategy is to move outwards, from order to disorder, from the sovereign to the people, from constituted to constituent power.
Reviewed by Costas Douzinas
Law and Disorder has an unusual structure for a highly theoretical, passionately political and strategical book. It is organised by two opposing observations and unfolds along two structuring strategies. The observations: the law organises and guarantees social order. Law’s mission, indeed the foundation of the common law, is the maintenance of the Queen’s peace, the limitation or elimination of popular violence and of its staging, unrest and disorder. The law mobilises popular affect to create order out of disorder. Yet the law itself is both physical and psychological law-preserving violence. Its violent disorder as well as the general or restricted ‘state of exception’ protect the social order and pacify popular disorder. On the other side, the people develop and deploy technologies of resistance that respond to law’s violence and disorder. When popular disorder becomes constituent power, it may lead to a new law. If law’s violence preserves the social order, popular violence founds new orders.
Now to emplotment and structure. The book’s chapters are short, organised around brief vignettes of sovereign splendour or resisting unrest and eclectic theoretical reflections. The events narrated move from London to Ireland and Egypt, Chile and Hong Kong. The theoretical snapshots from Gabriel Tadre to Georges Sorel and Gustave LeBon and from Edmund Burke to Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler among many others.
The book performs its content in two contrasting ways. The first is this fast-paced tour d’horizon of places and ideas, a fast-paced journey. The chapters mimic a multitude’s progress. They remain unique in their plurality, a multiplicity or ‘motley crowd’ of singularities acting in common. The chapters imitate the disorder of the title.
There is a secret order in the disorder of the fast-moving swarm however. Law and Disorder forms a semiotic square organised around four points: law’s order and disorder, popular disorder and order. The swarm of chapters conceal a formal symmetry. It has four parts of five chapters each with the second two mirroring the earlier. The first presents the way sovereignty mobilises popular affects to establish its order. The second sketches the apparatus of public order and the Queen’s peace. The third traces the political technology of the crowd’s order, its patterns and grids, otherwise known as the Queen’s disorder: ways in which crowds arrange people and create patterns and grids. The last mirrors the first: if the sovereign shapes the crowd’s indeterminate affects towards its order, the multitude in a state of unrest responds by developing indignation, anger and enmity towards the state and responding to law’s order through popular violence.
The plot moves symmetrically. The first two parts set the scene by presenting the technology of power. The third and fourth sketch the technology of crowd and resistance. In this sense, Law and Disorder forms a grid or chessboard. According to Rosalind Krauss, the grid is the ‘emblem of modernity’. Its organised flatness provides ‘the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the spread of a single surface’.[1] It works both centrifugally and centripetally. The grid can move outwards opening to the world, abandoning the rationalisms of sovereignty and disclosing new radical possibilities. Or, it may contract inwards allowing a reassembling into new and unexpected combinatories. Wall’s strategy is to move outwards, from order to disorder, from the sovereign to the people, from constituted to constituent power.
Law’s order conceals sovereign disorder. People’s disorder responds and mirrors law’s order. This is an academic book with something out of George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. Let me turn to four themes that crisscross Law and Disorder.
One and Many
Two camps organise political philosophy. The first follows the philosophy of One and unifies the ‘people’; the second promotes the ‘multiple’ and the philosophy of the Many. Thomas Hobbes, the father of the dominant tradition places the unity of sovereignty and state, Leviathan as ‘mortal God’ – at the centre. A population becomes a ‘people’ discursively through the ‘we’ of the American Declaration of Independence or the ‘sovereign nation’ in the French. Without the state organization, the united people would not have come into existence. But this people is a squeezed, desubstantialized entity, a purely formal figure without social characteristics, a legal fiction.
The heretical tradition of the ‘multitude’, on the other hand, hails from Machiavelli, Spinoza and Marx. [2] The many are not united into One and do not mimic God. On the contrary, the constituent power of the multitude lies behind modernity and politics. For Machiavelli, the historical process develops through the strength and passion of the multitude augmented by struggle. Spinoza posits the infinitely expanding cupiditas (desire) of the multitude a ’democratic living god,’ as the determination of politics. For Marx, the multitude becomes living labor; its constituent power is the productive force that creates every social form.
Yet for the sovereign the multitude is ‘unuseful’. The ‘motley crowd’ comes together and acts without unification. The many remain unique in their plurality. They are a material entity, a multiplicity of singularities acting in common. Unlike the people or the nation, the multitude cannot be unified except in action. When different people come together and co-ordinate their strength and desires, a political subject emerges in the temporariness and tension of the togetherness of singularities. It is the strength of the multitude, not their unification that reproduces society materially can radically change it.
The fear of the crowd
Revolutions start with a crowd in the streets; in Bastille, the Winter Palace, in the overthrow of the Shah or Ceausescu, Ben Ali or Mubarak. Something ‘miracular’ happens when people gather and grasp the opportunity, the Kairos or timely moment offers.
This is why the fear of the crowd is one of the oldest political emotions of rulers. It is the fear of the material co-presence of bodies, of their common action, of their power to change the world. The rioting mob lurks behind the philosophical attacks on the multitude, that ‘many-headed hydra’ that destroys the achievement of the hard work and conscience of shopkeepers. Liberals know that the multitude has repeatedly changed regimes, constitutions and laws. The fear of revolution lies behind the rejection of the right to resistance and the obsession with public order. But revolutions have happened and will happen again.
European languages record the fear of the multitude in their vocabulary. The relatively neutral term ‘crowd’ is accompanied by a number of negatively charged words which express fear and contempt towards a social category that acts outside accepted norms: ‘mob’, ‘mass’, ‘horde’, ‘throng’, ‘plebs’, ‘lumpen’, ‘rabble’, ‘chavs’, the hoi polloi and the ‘great unwashed’ are some. Some emphasize the physical presence of the crowd, others its dispersed social identity, again others stress its position at the bottom of social hierarchy. The term ‘multitude’ with its positive predication had fallen into disuse; only recently it was revived and acquired general resonance. Modern politics tries unceasingly to eliminate, exorcize or tame the (excesses of the) crowd. But the attempt to declare the crowd finished, passe, barbarous and to ban its appearance always fails. It is the many qua many that create humanity.
The ‘stranger in me’
In July 2011, I was invited to speak at the occupation of the Greek indignados in Syntagma square Athens. I was impressed by the lucky few whose numbers were drawn and were called to the microphone. For most of them it was the first time they had spoken in public in front of thousands. One man in particular was shaking and trembling with evident symptoms of stage fright before his address. He then proceeded to give a beautiful speech in perfectly formed sentences and paragraphs, presenting a complete and persuasive plan for the future of the movement. ‘How did you do it?’ I asked him later, ‘I thought you were going to collapse.’ ‘When I started speaking’, he replied nonchalantly, ‘I was mouthing the words but someone else was speaking. A stranger inside me was dictating what to say.’
Many participants in insurrections and revolts make similar statements. Biopolitical capitalism produces subjects, first and foremost, the free subject with rights and desires, a necessary condition for the functioning of capitalism. Resistance unpicks and re-directs the subject. [3] Revolt lies at the foundation of self, as Adam and Prometheus indicate. For Freud, happiness exists at the price of revolt. There is no pleasure without obstacles, prohibitions and interdictions, without law, injunctions and sanctions. The pleasure principle calls on the self to conform, to obey the law, to fit in the social order. But this accommodation is accompanied by the transgression of prohibitions, the Oedipal revolt against power symbolised by father, sovereign, law. The bans, prohibitions, restrictions help create the resisting subject. Revolt forms an integral part of the pleasure principle. But it is also part of the darker timeless drive beyond the pleasure principle. The return of the repressed trauma forms part of the repertory of resistance.
Atmosphere
Resistance is a fact not an obligation, an is not an ought. It is action behaviour, conduct, first, then ideas. Resistance is the bodily reaction to an overwhelming sense of injustice, the almost irrepressible response to hurt, hunger, despair, an ‘enough is enough’. We don’t resist in the name of justice, equality or communism. Justice or equality survive because we resist. For Louis Althusser ideology and the law ‘interpellate’ the obedient subject. Resisting subjectivity is ‘interpellated’ by the event, the hurt, the unjust actions, the humiliation. The call comes from what one may call the ‘normativity’ or in Illan’s terms the ‘atmosphere of the real.’[4] Resisting subjectivity emerges when the initial call of refusal perseveres in the care of self with others. It is about behaviour not language, bodies not ideas, courage not theorising. As Foucault puts it, ‘there is after all no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself.’[5]
From order to disorder, from the sovereign to the crowd, from constituted to constituent. This is the disorderly order of resistance Law and Disorder analyses and performs. Wall’s book is a scholarly achievement, a manual for dissidents and an almanac of warnings for the state. Apollinaire created the calligram, poems that illustrate their meaning. Wall has created the (dis)ordergram: a book that performs the disorder of order.
[1] Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, October, Vol. 9 (Summer 1979), 52, 51.
[2] Key references in the theory of multitude include Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly Michael Hardt trans. (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Insurrections: Constituent Power and the Modern State M. Boscagli trans. (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (London, Hamish Hamilton, 2004); Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles, Semiotext(e), 2004); Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles, Semiotext(e), 2009).
[3] Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford, Hart, 2000), Chapters 8 and 9.
[4] Costas Douzinas, ‘Adikia: Communism and Rights’ in Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek eds, The Idea of Communism (London, Verso, 2010),
[5] Michel Foucault, ‘Is it Useless to Revolt’ in Janet Afay and Kevin Anderson eds., Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (Chicago University Press, 2005), 266.
Costas Douzinas is a Professor of Law at Birkbeck, University of London and a former Head of Department, Dean of Humanities, Pro-Vice Master and Founding Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. In 2015, he was elected Member of Hellenic Parliament with the radical left SYRIZA party. His books include The End of Human Rights; Critical Jurisprudence; Human Rights and Empire; Adieu Derrida; Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis; Syriza in Power: Reflections of an Accidental Politician and The Radical Philosophy of Rights.
