Policing the Affective Society: Beyond Governmentality in the Theory of Social Control

Abstract

This article argues that certain consistent themes are evident in police studies research (including my own) with respect to the issue of emotion. I have described these ‘emotional repertoires’ as paranoid in character. By this I mean that it is a milieu which overvalues order, homogeneity and stasis while being suspicious of difference, fluidity and change. It tends to split the world into good and bad parts with very rigid boundaries, and it projects negative qualities onto those groups and individuals imagined to be ‘bad’. It is also a milieu which strongly displays a collective desire to order, control or, sometimes, attack outgroups onto which bad qualities have been projected. The article develops an initial theoretical framework for understanding this apparent linkage between a particular occupational milieu and a specific range of emotional orientations to the world. I argue that we might think in terms of the institutional production of affective subject positions - and use ideas taken from Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and Elizabeth Grosz for this purpose.