°Unpermitted potential
The device of the ‘protest permit’ has been around for a long time, although it is difficult to reconstruct its history in each jurisdiction. But it is also the case that the ‘protest permit’ has in recent years become more widespread and more publicly contested. As a device, it tends to be coupled with that of zoning, the declaration by the police and the relevant authorities of legitimate ‘protest zones’. As in the case of Woomera2002, the RNC or the Edinburgh anti-G8 protests, such zones tend to be ringed by fences. Where protests overstep the bounds of such, the first task of police is to contain them, to immobilise. But while zoning is put to work when the threat of movement becomes apparent, as the attempt to corral such movement and determine its flows, it is the ‘protest permit’ which does the prior work on the affective disposition of protesters, on their relations with eachother as much as their relations with the state.
If the practice of zoning marks the threshold between authorised and unauthorised movements - and in this sense takes as its model migration law - it is the ‘protest permit’ which produces a permitted subjectivity. It thereby recalls all the distinctions between ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘refugees’ in the form of a distinction between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ protesters which retrospectively sanctions the use of state violence, the suspension of formal legal protections, a copiousness of state power where everything becomes permitted. Indeed, the ‘protest permit’ does not permit protest so much as permit the state to resort to violence. And, to the extent that protesters accept the technology of the ‘protest permit’, they adopt this subjectivity, these classifications and put them to work among themselves and against other protesters.
No doubt there are those who imagine it is a simple matter of pragmatism, and surely it is: there is no shortage of those who approach others as pragma - as things - as a mass who might be organised, directed, moblised, represented. Everyone is well aware that no authority would grant a ‘protest permit’ to a group unless that group could plausibly claim that it is capable of controlling protesters. The ‘protest permit’ would not function were it not for the desire of some to seek to represent, to be able to promise the state that they can indeed do so - or, if the fiction of representation fails (which is, in any case, the aspiration for enclosure) bring marshalls to bear.
In any event, far from signalling the effective power of the state, the ‘protest permit’ and the conflicts around it suggest its weakness (although, ‘weakness’ does not mean the absense of force, but the weakening of its habitual character). For if it has become necessary to reinstate the jurisdiction of the state and its corrolaries within the milieux of protests by way of the ‘protest permit’, then that jurisdiction has already been thrown into crisis, is searching for new techniques through which it might be re-instated, ways to manage this crisis.
Yet before such techniques become habitual, it might be possible to note that the ‘protest permit’ is, at core, the threat by the police to use violence against that - whatever ‘that’ might be at any given moment - which is not ‘permitted’. It is not a threat of arrest for conduct defined in any other law. One is not permitted to do this, at this place, today. It does not have the usual temporal demeanour of law, as the deployment of punitive measures after the act. It is future-oriented. One can walk along this street today, but not tomorrow. It is an a priori, mobile threat of violence against potentiality. Which is to also to say, but with no guarantees, that potentiality is that which exceeds.
{addenda} The Carnival For Full Enjoyment and controlling the “Affected Area”.
