Neocleous’ work, Pacification, is the confluence of two projects: a Foucauldian-Marxist genealogical project into the nature of police power and the fabrication of social order, and a historical analysis from Plato and Aristotle into the emergence of security through discourses on the body and disease. By combining these divergent, but related projects, Neocleous deftly moves between different eras and intellectual developments in a manner that is extremely readable. He takes us from a detailed analysis of the differences between Greek and Roman interpretation of the law, to CIA COINTELPRO manuals or the history of the barricade, all the while scattering eye catching quotes and anecdotes throughout.
The central thesis is that pacification is a deliberate tactic of modern politics, one which integrates civilian and military aspects of society as a deliberate strategy of control. Pacification is not a socio-historical condition emerging out of a development of society, nor the result of the satisfaction of desires — Netflix and lattes a modernised panem et circenses. Pacification is the result of a politics of counterinsurgency that mobilises policing as a form of war against the population. He quotes Spinoza’s comments in the Tractatus Politicus that the sovereign power is, perhaps rightfully, always mistrustful of its people because ‘it suspects that they are constantly conspiring against it.’ (25) As Neocleous points out, we live in a capricious society that reproduces itself through the division of society into strata, primarily that of class, but also through race, gender. This is a condition that he calls ‘social war’, something Neocleous argues is ‘one of critical theory’s lost concepts’ (79). Social war is class war, understood non-reductively as a process from above utilizing horizontal vectors like race, gender, and ability, and the vertical relation of class. Pacification can be understood as the tactics and political organisations that the ruling elite class has used throughout history to continue to stay on top. The post-Hobbesian state is conceptualised as the suspension of the condition of civil war. Neocleous’ critical intervention is to show that this peace is, paradoxically, produced by a never-ending succession of wars: on terror; drugs; poverty; but principally on crime. Social war infuses the typical categories of critical theory like ideology, alienation, and emancipation with agential force, locating much of their material basis in the concrete structure of policing, although the claim that this form of social war is a lost category perhaps goes too far. After all, thinkers associated with critical theory like Balibar, Agamben and Butler have produced important works concerning state-police power and war, especially compared to other philosophical traditions.
Neocleous argues that the state holds a type of dialectical contradiction, inherent even at the etymological root stasis, from which both the idea of stability and static (as in interference) are derived. The codification of the state as a fixed locus of power was concomitant with the production of the private individual, but the legal foundation of constituting power is inseparable from the instability of the constituting forces of the polis, the body politic. Part of the answer to why we are content to live in a divided society is that power along with the coercive negating effects of force, it also produces pacified subjects. This proposal, I think, rightly centres the more explicitly coercive forms of control in society, even when they conceal themselves through secretive or implicit forms. Compared with, for example, Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion which centres economic compulsion as an equal form of social control to Althusser’s dichotomy between ideological and coercive state apparatuses, Neocleous’ focus on extremely ‘loud’ forms of compulsion has more powerful explanatory force. Neocleous demonstrates that many types of economic control that Mau discusses are ultimately reducible to coercive power in the form of the police.
The book has an introduction and five chapters. Each chapter contains large amounts of etymology, which at best is a useful starting point to a readable elucidation of phenomena, and at worst feels somewhat tired and overdone. The final chapter on debt as pacification is perhaps the worst offender. Neocleous writes ‘If it seems odd to find a chapter on debt in a book on pacification consider two small etymological points’ (249). Indeed, given the focus on security services, colonial institutions, and policing, debt might seem heterogenous. I admit that my patience had worn thin by this point, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of Nietzsche’s critique of the genetic fallacy in the Genealogy of Morals, that the function of an institution has nothing to do with its origin. The insight that debt and guilt are the same word in German will probably come as little surprise to anyone who has a passing familiarity with German or the canonical texts that Neocleous quotes, including Genealogy of Morals, which contains a well-known section on debt. The point — that debt is used to pacify people who might otherwise be willing to risk dissent — is a valuable one, although I wish he had arrived at it earlier and more succinctly. The discussion on the abolition of debt, as opposed to the reformist proposal of a debt jubilee, constitutes what is essentially the only proposal of the book. The fact that this appears in lieu of a conclusion feels a little too on the nose.
More positively, the early chapters are especially ripe with interesting anecdotes and compelling argumentation. The idea of pacification is related to the concept of ideology but nonetheless distinct from it. Pacification is a function of the social policing of society through appeals to security that bring individuals into state power. (197) Relating this to police power, as formulated by Neocleous in other works, feels like an important step in accurately analysing how neoliberalism has been able to maintain such an unfair system, in ways that ideology critique can sometimes fail to do. Ideology critique can be overly abstract, refuse to name who or what is driving ideological misapprehension, or give undue independence to liberal notions like the public sphere. Pacification rightly points out that even though there may exist relatively autonomous spaces of discursive and material power, they are often structured by formal institutions, ultimately remaining impotent.
There are also moments of wonderful connection. Chapter three, which uses a historical analysis of counter-intelligence documents, argues that modern military power is no longer organised around the typical Napoleonic/Clausewitzian strategies with large formations in set-piece battles. Instead, a technique of long-term ‘hold-clear-build’ emerged, amalgamating military and civilian institutions and subsuming seemingly non-military structures like hospitals and social services into surveillance apparatuses. Evidence is given from colonies and metropoles, including Brazil, Kenya, and the US. Neocleous develops his argument from A Critical Theory of Police Power, that policing implicates every other social organ and co-opts them into policing. When a social worker has an office in a police station, rides along with a cop, and coordinates investigations between different institutions authorising searches of property and people, Neocleous rightly points out that the distinction between the ‘professional’ police and the social worker is essentially technical. Insurgency, real or imagined, acts as a bedrock in a wider social war of pacification.
In one of the finest sections of the book, Neocleous takes a strange anecdote from Bentham, who confessed to a life-long fear of ghosts, in part because his servants apparently tormented their young master. Neocleous notes that ‘Bentham was thus a good liberal obsessed as all liberals are with security, afraid of ghosts and spooked by the workers.’ (130) The paranoia at the heart of statecraft that Spinoza saw is often expressed through ghostly apparitions. The security state chases and employs ghosts, its agents ride in ghost planes acting as ghost warriors. Neocleous notes that ‘the spooks are spooked, it seems, – haunted by their previous dramas, fearful of the invisible powers of a spectral enemy.’ (131) This is a self-justificatory belief that ‘the spooks are troubled by their inability to control the terrors they themselves have done so much to conjure up, perhaps troubled by the ghostly return of the enemies they have killed’. (ibid) Neocleous terms this self-justification the ‘cunning of security’, where ‘we are encouraged to believe that our terror before the abyss of never-ending insecurity is to be removed by an open-ended commitment to security through the security industry.’ (132) What Walter Benjamin called the ‘no-where tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence’ of police power is the continuation of insecurity, rather than the realisation of it. Benjamin’s metaphor has been quoted so often in critical analyses of the police, by thinkers like Derrida, Butler, Zizek, and Vanessa Thompson, but like much of Benjamin’s writing it is gnomic and obscure. Neocleous’ analysis re-animates the spectre, this time showing that it is not only metaphorical, but has become tangible and all-pervasive in the material organisation and nomenclature of policing itself.
Decades of counter-terrorism policy have arguably done more to create and radicalise a new generation of potential attackers, and filled prisons and tabloid headlines with people who were encouraged or sometimes actively trained and armed by spooks. British foreign policy, such as arming insurgent groups in Libya, has frequently returned to the metropole. Neocleous, surprisingly, does not touch directly on this, choosing instead to show how this approach has been part of British policing the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, where the strategy of security through containment resulted in 96 deaths and 766 injuries at a football match. Fans were put in cages, ostensibly to prevent football hooligans from fighting or invading the pitch. The focus on containment, treating the public as the enemy, resulted in mass death: social murder in a social war. Far from being a sporting tragedy or accident, it was the result of kettling and containment, paranoid security over welfare and safety.
This chapter also has an interesting rejoinder to Marcuse, who saw containment as the ‘control of human needs and the subjection of human capacities by capital and the state.’ (218) As late as the 1970s Marcuse equated pacification with freedom and even as a potential basis to reject the alienation of capitalist production and consumption. As Neocleous clearly shows, ‘equating freedom with pacification is precisely what the state and capital want us to do.‘ (218) In moments like this, Pacification is clear and careful, and a deeper engagement with critical theory and the Frankfurt school would be a worthwhile project. If social war and pacification are lost concepts of critical theory, there is surprisingly little sustained engagement with critical theorists, but where it is done, it leaves the reader wanting more — perhaps no bad thing.
Pacification feels comfortably located in British, or perhaps more accurately English, colonial history. Frank Kitson looms large in this history, having cut his teeth in the Mau Mau rebellion before going to the North of Ireland to wage counter-insurgency. Kitson’s thesis, Low Intensity Operations, is one of the most important texts of counter-insurgency strategy, and will always be linked with the strategy of interment in the North of Ireland. Sadly, this is a minor reference for Pacification, and the relative omission of the North of Ireland in general in the context of British domestic policy is, in my view, somewhat puzzling.
Pacification is a provocative book. There are parts that are artful and clarify important concepts for understanding the basis for neoliberalism’s continued reproduction. It is let down, however, by pages that feel misguided and unimportant, diluting an otherwise powerful thesis with trivial or eccentric details.