"Non ci avrete mai come volete voi!"

("You'll never get us where you want us!")

The debate over rationality and relativism is one consistently employed in anthropology as it seeks to undermine received opinion and popular discourse by explicating either the rationality of what "seems" irrational, or by defending the possibility of "irrationality" by consigning it to its own (relative) context.^[2] What is interesting in this exploration of counter-cultural forms within a liberal-democratic State is that the dichotomies of rationality and irrationality are constantly under scrutiny and refigured as legitimate or illegitimate in a number of different ways. Indeed, as Etienne Balibar has pointed out with reference to the Los Angeles riots after the first Rodney King trial in 1993, "we say that a certain kind of violence is self destructive or irrational, because we feel it eludes the logic of power and counter-power" (2002:135). The imperative for protesters to rationalise their actions grows as "irrationality" maintains itself as the primary rationale behind the limitation of political activity. The "internal logic" of protest is a possible route to be taken, and yet protest exists within, indeed challenges, a web of political relations, and as Henrietta Moore points out, "an emphasis on the internal logic of... systems brackets off the possibility of understanding how such systems are used and situated in defined historical contexts" (1989:2). The context in which the protest unfolds is one that involves a number of actors--the police, the media, governmental policy and the public, and so "rationalising" protesters in order to legitimate their existence neither accounts for their context nor for the power that is involved in defining "rationality" per se. As anthropology has repeatedly shown, the game of rationality is one whose rules are written in a particular, and powerful idiom. And the legitimating of protest within a democratic nation-state is a gesture articulated in that idiom of rationality. As Bourdieu has pointed out, "The culture which unifies is also the culture which separates and which legitimises distinctions by forcing all other cultures to define themselves by their distance from the dominant culture" (1991:167). We might explore then, how being forced to define themselves in the face of the already legitimated and rationalised State might augment and convolute the act of protesting itself. What is at stake, and so what is under scrutiny is the symbolic capital that defines rationality and implements the containment of irrationality by force.

On May 2nd 2000, after the defacing of the statue of Winston Churchill and an afternoon of protest in Parliament Square, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair announced that, "there is a long tradition that people in this country are entitled to demonstrate lawfully, but that right should not be abused in this way... this kind of thing cannot happen again. There is a right to demonstrate, but responsibly and within the law" (Guardian 2/5/00); and sure enough, on the 1st of May 2001, the policing of the annual Mayday demonstration was one of the most extensively planned and executed operations the capitol had seen. What must be read from the Prime Minister's own iteration is the precariousness of civil liberties. The "entitlement to demonstrate lawfully" begs numerous questions about the implications of unlawful protest, about what constitutes the "responsibility" described and who has the semantic power of naming the legitimate from the illegitimate. For anthropology, the crucial aspect of this is the ambivalence between the Law and the people, the rational and the irrational. An analysis of the ways in which people understand, relate to, negotiate with, and subvert the formal language of public order, in more idiomatic, nuanced and contestational voices seems to highlight a deep equivocation towards the structures of politics and the state apparatus.

A wide range of groups had spent the year (dis)-organising multiple actions all over the city that would culminate in a rally at 4pm in Oxford Circus. The press had spent since March publicizing the potential "riots"; and politicians, "peaceful protesters" and London Mayor Ken Livingston, once famous for his support of the miners' strikes in the 1970s and 80s, announced that peaceful protesters should stay away. There would be a "zero tolerance" approach to "troublemakers." Indeed a number of protesters recalled instances throughout the day when police officers attempted to discourage them from attending the 4pm rally. A woman in her mid-twenties recalled one officer as having said, "I think it would be better if you went home, there are people here today who want to cause trouble and you wouldn't want to get tangled up in the violence, would you?" This represents the precarious position of the "right to demonstrate" when it is woven into discourses of violence and legitimacy.

Stuart Hall has identified the Welfare "scrounger" as a "folk-devil" (1980:6) in discussions regarding the "efficiency" of the Welfare State. The power of the "scrounger as folk-devil" is that it may exist within a rhetoric in praise of the potential capacity of the welfare state when, in fact, its clandestine presence can be mobilised as a way of dismantling the structure. A similar narrative can be read from the delineation being made by the police between the violent and the non-violent protesters on May Day. Here the "folk-devil" is the violent protester: One newspaper published an article that began, "specialist firearms teams are being drafted in to police this year's May Day demonstrations in the City of London over fears that rioters armed with samurai swords and machetes will infiltrate the protests" (Observer 22/04/01). Another, that a building in Brixton, southwest London, had been the site of the "drilling of about 500 rioters in preparation for attacks on police during the protests" (Telegraph 29/04/01). In such ways, the extensive policing of the demonstration was legitimated to the protesters themselves by recourse to the "folk-devil" of the infiltrator. The fact remains that only the police had the discretionary power to determine the authentic (peaceful) from the faux ami. Thus authenticity is bound to an allegiance to the criteria of (peaceful) legitimacy. As Hall notes, the presence of the folk-devil enables the primary discourse to become one of the "problem" of weeding out the deserving from the undeserving, (with an emphasis on the potential undeservedness of all), rather than of the crucial and more complex problem, "in democratic class societies, of making the formal rights of the powerless practically and materially effective" (Hall 1980:6). So whilst the police were monopolizing the discourse of the "legitimacy of peaceful protest," this was enabling a much more repressive policing of the very same "peaceful protesters" of whom the police spoke. It might be worth exploring also, perhaps, the figure of the police who, for protesters, are rarely the focus of protest, but repeatedly its own "folk devil"--the cops, the fuzz, the pigs, scum, the bull, any number of variations. A discourse which the police themselves are familiar with. The website for the Mounted Branch of the Metropolitan Police describes how, in demonstrations, "hostility" can "soon swing towards police if they seem to try to prevent any unlawful intentions of the crowd" <www.met.police.uk/mountedbranch>. A comment that eludes a recognition that, for protesters, violence against the police is, if not in self-defense, certainly not incidental. It seems that Walter Benjamin was entirely right in suggesting that "violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law" (1978:136). So, whilst the "folk-devil" acts on both sides of the police line, the power that underwrites their mythologies is incommensurably biased. This discourse can at least be traced back to the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980's. Talking on BBC Newsnight after the historic clash between police and picketers in Orgreave, Yorkshire, Mrs Thatcher demanded that "the violence and intimidation we have seen should never have happened. It is the work of the enemy within." This inversion of a conspiracy theory divisively sanctions the State's violence as protective and corrective. Almost twenty years later a very similar political tack was being taken.

May 1st was drizzly and cold and a number of those who attended the demonstration were indeed keener than ever to show that their protest was a peaceful and so legitimate one. "I am not a terrorist" read placards and posters. "This is a peaceful protest" read still more. What are the effects on the protest movement itself when so much energy is spent in articulating its own rational legitimacy? Drawing on Weber's classic definition of the State as having the "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory" (1948:78), Michael Taussig adds that the State can only maintain its monopoly of legitimated violence by also monopolizing the rationality of this force (see Taussig 1992). This is useful in beginning to understand what appears to be the protester's imperative to rationalise their actions. Posed against the rationalised policing of the demonstration, the protesters could apparently only be antonymic actors-- irrational, illegitimately violent and so on. So, whilst the "right to protest" is widely accepted, the reality seems to show that the embellishment of this abstracted understanding demands a considerable effort of self-legitimating articulatory practices by the protesters.^[3] The scope of this problem is in part because of the historical role of the police as being "the preservers of public tranquillity." The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 testifies to this, as Robert Peel defines the primary role of the police as "keeping the peace," undertaking tasks that an ordinary citizen would; and this historical phrase was resuscitated by Lord Scarman, in part to justify the policing of the Brixton uprisings in 1981. Indeed, as Phil Scraton observes, after picket-line violence in the policing of industrial disputes in the 1980's, the Command and Control Police headquarters was opened with the demand that: "The job of the police is... to uphold our own self-imposed rules" (Scraton 1985:8).

The imperative to rethink the police in Weberian terms (as the politically legitimated agents of State order) is evident, so that social disorder may be seen not as antisocial but as an affirmation of the posse, that is the politically autonomous (literally "having power") movement of resistance (see Hardt and Negri 2000:407). And as a challenge to the claim that the democratic State represents the interests of its own subjects, this testimony from May Day:

A man in his mid-twenties, with a slight Irish accent and a scarf acting as a balaclava, spoke these words to a small crowd of police and fellow demonstrators in the roundabout of Elephant and Castle on the morning of 1st May 2001. The police responded with professional silence and the protesters with supportive cheers. In the first section of "instructions" for mayday monopoly, available on the Internet or free by sae, there is a section called, "how to subvert the game" and it is precisely this sense of subversion of roles that is elucidated in this speech. Appropriating from the police the warning that "we don't want no trouble" not only articulated the action as a nonviolent, non-confrontational one, but also posited the police as spoiling for a fight. Without being outrightly accusing, the demonstrator had positioned himself as a free, democratic, rational and righteous political subject, an attempt to reclaim the rationality of his actions against the spectre of violence.

Whilst it is too much of a generalization to discuss different protests (industrial disputes/anti-Nazi rallies/ environmental campaigns/anti-capitalist actions) under the same bracket of "protest," there is one respect that intersects all of these protests as well as football hooliganism, and that is the official police line. Indeed it is despite not because of the differences in these movements that police action responds with the invocation of the same laws of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act and the Internal Security Act. It is useful, then, to trace changes in policing and amendments to the laws that arise in a particular context and yet are subsequently the general and fundamental structures of law and order.

In legitimating this cross-contextual implementation of laws, Hall describes a process of "convergence" (1978:224) which can be both the real or ideological connection of different signifiers. We might cite the repeated use of the "anti-capitalist rioter" as our example, a process of denomination that smuggled in an ideological convergence as the reality of the Mayday protest. Hall describes how, "by resignifying the issue... [anti-capitalism] in terms of a more familiar and traditional, nonpolitical [rioting] problem; that is by translating a political issue into a criminal one--thereby making easier a legal or control, rather than political, response from the authorities," (1978:224).

The same process of de-politicisation through convergence is, arguably, at work in the emphasis on the "carnival" or "theatrical" element of protest (will be discussed in more detail later). In April 2001, The Times newspaper reassured its readers that, "despite being tarnished with a reputation of lawlessness and violence, the anti-capitalists argue that their demonstrations are held in the original carnival spirit of Mayday, as by protesting against multinationals, which have a hand in destroying the rural environment, they are looking back to Beltane's anarchic pagan roots" (20/04/01). It is true that a defining characteristic of contemporary protest, especially the Mayday protest, has been the "theatrical" and Dionysian "subversion of the game" (see "Mayday monopoly rules" Appendix 2). However, this also works to delegitimise political critique. When "anti-capitalism," as manifest in a demonstration in the commercial centre of the capitol city is identified by the media as a proto-religious movement to protect the rural environment, the State need not respond by engaging with the political, and increasingly economic critiques being made. Moreover, the second, politically resonant significance of Mayday as a day of protest--the commemoration of the Chicago Event in 1886, and a demonstration for Workers' rights--is diminished in this kind of festival framing. Situating May Day 2001 in the dual discourses of "riot" and "carnival" cunningly circumvents the politics of the demonstration, which becomes (violently or theatrically) a "purely spectacular rebellion" (Debord 1983:59).

Donatella Della Porta's edited volume, The Policing of Protests (1998), describes how the police respond differentially and to some extent subjectively depending on the claims being made by the protesters. Whilst this is true, what underpinned multiple experiences of the Mayday 2001 events, was the invocation of section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. This clause was written into the law ostensibly in order to prevent minor football disturbances, and gives the police powers to "stop and search in anticipation of violence." [4] Importantly then, whilst the arguable subjectivity of individual police action is a significant characteristic of contemporary policing of protests, there is an important trajectory of law that traverses multiple and differential sites of action, creating a singular and hegemonic police response. This "transposition of frameworks," writes Hall, "not only depoliticizes an issue by criminalizing it, but it also singles out from a complex of different strands the most worrying element--the violent one" (1978:224).

Perhaps of most concern here, like the "folk-devil", is the divisive effect that the "escalation" process has on the protesters themselves. Whilst it is precisely the rhizomatic diverse aspects of the anti-capitalist movement that have been the most celebrated, in order to legitimate their space by claiming its rationality, the more liberal-democratic of the protesters increasingly differentiate themselves from the "violent" faction. As the autonomous Marxist-zine Aufheben points out, it is Naomi Klein who writes, "the political messages about widening economic disparities and the brutalities of free-market globalization were drowned out by the sound of shattering glass," as she describes the last hours of the 1999 "Carnival Against Capitalism" in London (1999:445). An even more ominous differentiation was quoted in the Guardian by a protester who said, "there is violence orchestrated by the Turkish communists who turn up at these events looking for trouble, but the police don't seem interested in infiltrating them" (18/04/01). The ease with which the same discourses recur in diverse articulations is striking, and this particular example suggests that the rhizome politics of anti-capitalism have little interest in allying with the organized Left, nor in recognizing Mayday itself as originating in the kinds of struggle "Turkish communists" might be engaged.

It seems that the movement itself consolidates the precariousness of its image, perched always on the brink of violence. The rootlessness of the movement, whilst a positive characteristic, also, then, seems to risk fragmentation along the very fault lines constructed by the "System" it is challenging. Alternatively, a blanket and somewhat hollow "agreement" was described by a number of protesters. "I don't condemn any tactics at all," admitted a member of one of the largest "anti-capitalist" groups. "If someone wants to do whatever, then I'll support them in that. I am not going to criticise how they choose to deal with the situation" (interview on Mayday). Because the movement lacks any pre-legitimated critical space, there is a lack of space within which to develop a politics without fragmenting the precarious unity built along new lines of alliance. What grows from this chimera of consensus is what Adorno has described as the "trauma of unity and unanimity" (1998:282). "Whoever criticises," writes Adorno, "violates the taboo of unity, which tends toward totalitarian organisation. The critic becomes a divisive influence and, with a totalitarian phrase, a subversive" (1998:282).

Critique, then, is largely depoliticized, because the space in which to engage over the theories as well as the actions, is reduced to a game of alliances in specific protests, as the need to distinguish the real protester from the subversive, in the face of the police, precludes critical dialogue. The differentiation's made outside of the protesters are often the very same ones that recur "inside" and paralyse the possibility of a political critique that is not viewed as purely divisive. A slightly different manifestation of this "de-politicisation" on Mayday 2001 was the extensive reference to the "incidental" people "caught up" in the police operation. A number of people, in emphasizing the "heavy-handedness" of the police, described the "tourists" and "passersby" who were also surrounded by the police in Oxford Circus. This, too, was an aspect taken up in many of the subsequent news reports and on-line discussions, as an exclamation of the irrationality of the strategy. However, what it circumvents is the unanswered call of those people who had "chosen" to be there. A critique of the forms and manifestations of power that are employed toward people who are politically engaged is upstaged by the drama of "the public" extras who mistakenly were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Indeed, whilst a number of those I interviewed were keen to identify themselves as "just normal," "not really political" people, the distinguishing of the irrational "protester" from the rational "public" is a process repeatedly used in order to legitimate police action, under the auspices of "preserving public tranquillity." The Scarman report of the Brixton uprisings in April 1981 is a revealing document in trying to understand some of the official perceptions of the relationship between the police and the protesting public. Lord Scarman first offers a definition of a riot as

What is interesting here is that the police can only really be the "anyone who opposes them" and, in their action, the "rioters" must cease to be "person(s) of reasonable firmness and courage."

A double movement evident here is that "rationality" is used both to oppose protest and to force protesters to "rationalise" their actions in the terms of the State. "Rationality" as an epistemological and practical paradigm, which is defined by a particular political group, goes unquestioned. Political protest, as a singular act that is not grounded in a wider movement, as well as in a wider engagement with various political formations, is perhaps consigned always to be caught in this ventriloquising space, because the event does not re-appropriate the sites in which symbolic production takes place.

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner in the 1970"s, Sir Robert Mark, commented that, "The real art of policing a free society or a democracy is to win by appearing to lose" (quoted in Reiner 1998:41). Reiteratively invoking Taussig, the Police Commissioner has exemplified precisely what Taussig, elaborating Philip Abrams, pointed to as "State fetishism" (1992:111), that is, "the State not as the reality behind the mask of political reality, but as the mask which prevents us seeing political reality" (1992:113). Complicit in the constitution of State sovereignty, political subjects are, in this sense, playing a game of the Emperor's New Clothes, whereby they miss "the real official secret" that is "the secret of the nonexistence of the State" (Abrams quoted in Taussig 1992:130). We might recall the instance of the man in Elephant and Castle as one of momentarily divulging this "official secret." The play of policing is a capricious one; what appears is perhaps neither the same nor the inverse of what is "really" happening. The ambiguity of the capacity of the police is always present in the actuality of their "under-enforcement of the law." And in this sense, the performance of protest seems to have moved little beyond Gluckman's rituals of rebellion, as Feldman has noted: "legitimation becomes performative and therefore contingent" (1991:4). The contingency might be discernible in the rhythm of the day's Events, inasmuch as it is here that the temporal thresholds of legitimation reveal themselves--for how long may the street be repossessed?

Yet, in the moment that the line is drawn by the police, the political ideology of "rationality," embodied in the police's "legitimate use of force," has been appropriated. In Turner's terms this would be the redress that merely restores the status quo (not liminal because that implies change). The "folk devil" routine is thus also a tool of conservation, the protest is merely contained as the irrational within the rational. The value of what anthropology can read from the narratives of its subjects may, at the end, only be measurable by the extent to which ethnography is matched by politically engaged intellectual work, be it on the threshold of confrontation or after the event. Only here can theory begin to shape and support subaltern groups as well as the State. As Adorno demands, "Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway. As long as it doesn't break off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility... Open thinking points beyond itself" (1998:222-3). We might then, take our guidance from the civil disobediants, and not so easily let our thinking and writing be gotten where the thought police want it!

Notes:

2. See for example Jarvie 1984, Evans-Pritchard 1976, Hollis & Lukes 1982.

3. "We are only terrorists because they've called us terrorists," commented one protester of Mayday. This draws our attention to the rhetoric's of alliance which have been at work in the current "War Against Terrorism." Since the "Terrorist" attack on the World Trade Centre, New York on 11th September 2001, the domestic articulation of "fear" and "terror" manifest in the rapid implementation of repressive laws, (such as the Internal Security Act), the prohibition of certain groups, curtailment of freedoms in the name of "security," and the possibility of arrest on "suspicion" ever more strengthened. Another notable consequence to the "threat" of terrorism has been the call for "citizenship classes" to secure an allegiance to "British values" and expunge the "enemy within." Strikingly, Hall (1978) noted the convergence's between internal policing and international politics in the Conservative government of the 1970's. As Hall explores and as the current political climate suggests, "terrorism" is a critical and frightening instance of the use of racist ideologies in proscribing political critique--see Hall (1978) and Hutnyk (2000). See Chomsky (2002) for a detailed analysis of these themes, with direct reference to September 11th. Further, Gianfranco Sanguinetti's polemical exegesis of the relationships between terrorism and the State (1982). Preceding Chomsky, Sanguinetti draws out the "spectacle" of State anti-terror campaigns with reference to the Red Brigades (R.B.'s) in Italy in the late 1970's: "the spectacle, which is para-logical, establishes the identity in basing it on the identity of the predicates, and thus says: 'terrorism is catastrophic, the catastrophe is terrorism'". Sanguinetti goes on to point out the symbiosis of State and anti-State formations and thus the hypocrisy of "this neurotic and clumsy slogan: "either with the State, or with the R.B's" which is tantamount to saying 'either with me, or else with me'"(1982:94).

4. Hutnyk (2000) has argued that this was always the intention of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act.

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Newspaper Articles, Zines and Websites:

"Anarchist protesters turn their May Day attentions to Mayfair" 27/4/02 The Guardian.

"Critics Not to be Compared With 1930's Appeasers, says Blair" 31/10/01 The Daily Telegraph.

"Armed Police on May Day Riot Alert" 22/04/01 The Observer.

"Police Mobilise for May Day Mayhem" 29/04/01 The Daily Telegraph.

"Blair Condemns Anti-Capitalist Protests" 2/05/00 The Guardian

" 'Anti-Capitalism' as Ideology... and as Movement?" Aufheben No.10-2002.

The Panel Report of the Oldham Independent Review. 11/12/01.

"Riot Police seal off Church used as sanctuary by 100 Sangate refugees" 12/11/02 The Independent