Philosophy.Com

media, democracy, power

In The blind newsmaker at Open Democracy Tony Curzon Price says that the mass industrial media, at their best, perform two basic public functions. First, they monitor and hold to account, and second, they form and maintain a common purpose, an ``imaginary community''. These are ``negative'' and ``positive'' tasks: avoiding the worst excesses of power and rule by experts; and defining and sustaining a common good.

This is the public role of the media as the watchdog for democracy in a nation-state view. Behind this stands the history of nation building, the peoples voice, nationality, freedom of the press and professionalism journalism with its ethos of objectivity and neutrality. This constellation is decaying and it is generally held that the press fell asleep at the wheel after 9/11 as they failed to ask the tough questions. Fox News is the new kind of media.

Price notes the decline of the mainstream media in a digital age-- due to dropping circulation and print advertising revenue falling---and he asks:

Techno-optimists believe that the hyper-modularity of the future of news-making will allow us to re-assemble whatever value was produced in the old system. But the two essential public functions of the news are inherently the products of un-fragmented processes. The troubling question becomes: who will protect us from the excesses of power? and what sorts of common projects and shared identities will flourish in the fragmentary world? What power will we permit to emerge, and who will we become?

Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, argues as a paper-optimist that the old institutions will simply transfer online, and that revenues online will rise fast enough for the old model of production to survive.

The Guardian looks as if it is able to deliver whilst The New York Times is struggling to find a viable business model after its experiment with a subscription wall failed and the hedge finds are circling.

Price argues that all the components of the newspaper's two core functions will continue to be produced, often in a very fragmented way. He mentions the Security Council Report for the negative power of speaking truth to power and The Arts And Letters portal as an example of the defining and sustaining a common good function.

Update
Is this fragmentation happening in Australia? Yes. The Bulletin magazine has gone --it largely became irrelevant---and Crikey is an example of the formation of digitally based watchdog truth to power, even though this is not recognized as professional journalism. The ABC, as the national broadcaster, looks as if it is able to follow the Guardian or BBC pathway to a viable digital presence.

'Trust me' government

In a speech to the Sydney Institute Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty argued that terror cases should proceed free of public scrutiny until they have been dealt with by the courts. The implication of the talk entitled 'Terrorism: Policing’s New Paradigm' is that media scrutiny of law enforcement agencies is unwelcome. Keelty said:

But we are now witnessing these records of interviews being leaked to the media to add weight to public campaigns. Whatever you think of this practice, it defeats the purpose for which video and audio records of interview were introduced and it begs the question as to who decides what should or should not be leaked to the media, and where does that decision become accountable?
When a record of interview is given to the media with accompanying commentary, we run the risk of jeopardising the accused's ability to receive a fair trial when the matter reaches court. It is also only one part of the greater body of evidence, and when considered in isolation it may serve as a public relations tool in the short term, but it has the potential to severely harm a case in the longer term. Call me old fashioned, but I don't believe anyone accused of, or charged with, a crime can receive a fair trial if the matter is tested in the court of public opinion before being appropriately tested in a court of law. It will always be a challenge to get the equilibrium just right, but let's not forget that it is these freedoms that we want to enjoy and protect for the whole community.

This is the same Commissioner Keelty who leaked information to shape public opinion by smearing people as terrorists---eg., Mohammed Haneef--- prior to any trial through selected leaking of dubious information. This is also the same Commissioner who is strong on surveillance by the national security state that restricts the freedom of citizens, and desires increased surveillance powers. Now he wants less public scrutiny. This is from a Police Commissioner who allowed himself to become an instrument of the Howard Government's political agenda.

Keelty's conception of government is a trust me one. Under this "theory" of government, there is no need for oversight or limits on the power the executive possesses because it is good and so you can trust our leader and his underlings to exercise those powers only for your protection and security. Nobody needs to look over his shoulder or "check" what the leader is doing. We can place faith in our leader for being strong and defending us from the terrorists.

America's unipolar moment

In an article entitled Waving Goodbye to Hegemony in the The New York Times Magazine Parag Khanna argues that:

At best, America's unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war "peace dividend" was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing -- and losing -- in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world's other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules -- their own rules -- without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.

Khanna says that previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an "East-West" struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.

Australia Day

It's Australia Day. Flag waving day. Officially it is a celebration 220th anniversary of the arrival of the first fleet in Sydney Cove. A celebration that is yet to recognize that this was also an invasion and an occupation of land occupied by Indigenous people.

Kathleen Petyarre, My Country / Bush Seeds, 2000, acrylic on linen

Marcia Langton writing in The Australian writes in terms of the perpetual Aboriginal reality show:

The very public debate about child abuse [amongst Indigenous people] is like Baudrillard's war porn. It has parodied the horrible suffering of Aboriginal people. The crisis in Aboriginal society is a public spectacle, played out in a vast reality show through the media, parliaments, public service and the Aboriginal world. This obscene and pornographic spectacle shifts attention away from everyday lived crisis that many Aboriginal people endure: or do not, dying as they do at excessive rates.

She says that this spectacle is not a new phenomenon in Australian public life, but the debate about indigenous affairs has reached a new crescendo, fuelled by the accelerated and uncensored expose of the extent of Aboriginal child abuse.

western alliance in a Hobbesian world

This report Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership makes for interesting reading. The authors propose:

abandonment of the two-pillar concept of America and Europe cooperating, and they suggest
aiming for the long-term vision of an alliance of democracies ranging from Finland to Alaska. To begin the process, they propose the establishment of a directorate consisting of the USA, the EU and NATO. Such a directorate should coordinate all cooperation in the common transatlantic sphere of interest. The authors believe that the proposed agenda could be a first step towards a renewal of the transatlantic partnership, eventually leading to an alliance of democratic nations and an increase in certainty.

As Paul Rogers comments at Open Democracy "the common transatlantic sphere of interest", and develops the view that only a "super-Nato" can guarantee security for its members and order in the wider world. The key assumption underlying this approach deserves to be brought out. This is that the north Atlantic is a fundamentally civilised community that is under threat from the forces of disorder - by implication, the barbarians at the gate. This notion of an essentially benign order is at the core of the western security paradigm: "we" embody liberal democracy rooted in the free market, which together represent the current apogee of world civilisation.

Bourdieu + collective intellectual

The latter Bourdieu is the one that I do know: the Bourdieu, who, when faced with governmental policies eroding the welfare state in France, turns into an outspoken public critic of neo-liberalism, globalization, market-oriented reforms and privatisation. This shift into the public intellectual is documented in the collectively authored work under his direction titled The Weight of the World (1993) and it gives rise the idea of the ‘collective intellectual’. The ‘collective intellectual’, according to Ulrich Oslender, in The Resurfacing of the Public Intellectual: Towards the Proliferation of Public Spaces of Critical Intervention in ACME is a:

....series of critical networks made up of ‘specific intellectuals’ that oppose the production and imposition of a neo-liberal ideology promoted by conservative think tanks and ‘experts’ in the service of Capital...The collective intellectual has two functions: firstly, a negative (i.e. defensive) one, critiquing and
working towards the diffusion of tools to defend against dominant power discourse; and secondly, a positive (i.e. constructive) one that contributes to a collectively perceived political re-invention and political and economic alternatives. At the ame time it is a call for the collective organization of intellectuals, a form of
intellectual militancy that defines an activist strategy for an intellectual field threatened by public policy discussion and formulations that have become framed by neo-liberal economic assumptions.

This usefully shifts the emphasis away from challenges the commonplace assumption of the production of intellectual thought as an individual enterprise to the structured networks, connections, alliances and linked-up solidarities takes into account the multiple sites in which intellectuals participate.

academia: myth + reality

The popular conservative image of universities is that they are dominated by left-wing, granola-head faculty who endeavor to corrupt youth with political correctness and relentless questioning of authority.The reality is somewhat different, especially in the US that is obsessed with national security.

On the economic side of things academia increasingly faces pressures of corporatization and flexibilization that have given rise to the segmentation of academic labour into stable tenured or tenure-track professors and “flexible” sessional and adjunct faculty. Along with the corporatization of the university and the casualization of academic labour is the university becoming akin to a sausage factory, in that the academics (teachers and researchers) are similar to workers in a meat-processing plant, as they are value-producing labour with the purpose of enriching the institution.

Harald Bauder in The Segmentation of Academic Labour: A Canadian Example in ACME says that:

Increasingly, temporary and part-time positions are being created where tenured and tenure-stream positions should exist. Segmentation no longer serves to stabilize the positions of tenured faculty; rather, the secondary segment threatens to replace the primary segment. Segmentation becomes a
strategy of reducing wages and labour standards in the entire academic labour market.

The segmentation of labour refers to the fact that some workers are valued less than others, and therefore receive lower wages, fewer benefits and less recognition, despite having similar qualifications. It results in first- and second-class staff or faculty.

surveillance

Law enforcement regularly uses surveillance to gather evidence about suspects.Technological advances are making the surveillance practices easier; but sometimes thesenew tools open individuals to potential invasions of privacy. The question becomes, is the use of newer surveillance technologies and practices qualitatively different from what was done before, or it is a matter of law enforcement have better tools to conduct surveillanceas they have always done?

This question is asked by Krista Boa in Privacy Outside the Castle in Surveillance and Society

Roskam on rights

John Roskam has an op-ed on human rights in The Age. He says:

the charter [of Rights] prevents the Victorian Parliament, government departments and local councils from infringing on human rights. If people believe their rights have been affected, they have a numberof avenues open to them, including the ability to seek a declaration from the Supreme Court that their rights have been infringed. While the Supreme Court can't actually overturn a government decision, a declaration claiming that something the government has done is in breach of a person's human rights will have a powerful political impact. The government would be expected to respond, most likely by changing its decision.

He comments:

The argument from advocates for the charter is that no one should be opposed to protecting human rights. But the question is not about protecting human rights. Instead the question is how to protect those rights.The best way to protect human rights is through the democratic parliamentary process whereby elected representatives make decisions on behalf of the community. The system is far from perfect, and it sometimes fails. But it's better than the alternative. If a politician gets a decision wrong, they can be voted out at the next election. If a judge gets a decision wrong, the community is powerless.The charter effectively hands to judges the political authority that once belonged to members of parliament. For some people this isn't a problem — and indeed for some people this is the whole point of having a charter. According to them, politicians can't be trusted to protect human rights, but judges can be.

So how do you protect the minority from the majority? Say with bad surveilance laws directed at Arab-Australians.

diagnosing world historical events

Perry Anderson's article Jottings on the Conjuncture in a recent issue of New Left Review explores the longer-term logics of the world-historical changes we are living through. He says that:

At least four alternative readings of the times—there may be more—offer diagnoses of the directions in which the world is moving that are substantially more optimistic. Three of these date back to the early-to-mid nineties, but have been further developed since 9/11. The best known is, of course, the vision to be found in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, to which the other three all refer, at once positively and critically. Tom Nairn’s Faces of Nationalism and forthcoming Global Nations set out a second perspective. Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing constitute a third. Malcolm Bull’s recent essays, culminating in ‘States of Failure’, propose a fourth. Any reflection on the current period needs to take seriously what might superficially appear to be counter-intuitive readings of it.

These are a kind of contemporary philosophy of history. All four versions take as their points of departure thinkers prior to the emergence of modern socialism: Spinoza for Negri, Smith for Arrighi, Hegel for Bull, Marx before Marx (the young Rhineland democrat, prior to the Manifesto) for Nairn. The one that interested me, as I was unfamiliar with it, was that given by Malcolm Bull who returns to Hegel.

Anderson says that Bull’s story begins in the 17th century, with the first intimations of an involuntary collective intelligence, as distinct from conscious collective will, in the political thought of Spinoza.

Descending through Mandeville at once to Smith, as the invisible hand of the market, and to Stewart, as the natural origin of government, this tradition eventually issued into Hayek’s general theory of spontaneous order—perhaps the most powerful of all legitimations of capitalism. Today it has resurfaced in the ‘swarm intelligence’ of Hardt and Negri’s multitude, counterposed to the state that supposedly embodies popular sovereignty, descending from Rousseau....The dichotomy to which Hardt and Negri revert, however, is effectively an expression of the impasse of contemporary agency, which has become a stalemate between the pressures of the globalizing market and defensive populist reactions to it.

Populist reactions have so far indeed been the principal response to the expansion of the globalizing market, even in Australia.

What I find interesting is Bulls' suggestion that in his time Hegel offered a resolution of the antinomy. For The Philosophy of Right\ constructs a passage from the spontaneous intelligence of civil society—the market as theorized by Scottish political economy—to the orderly will of a liberal state. This was then dismantled in the early 20th century by adversaries from Right to Left. Anderson says that Bull argues that this is the legacy of which a metamorphosis is needed:

For what has happened in the interim is the disintegration of the global state whose overlapping incarnations have been the European, Soviet and American empires: first decolonization, then de-communization and now, visibly, the decline of US hegemony. Does this mean, then, the unstoppable release of a global market society: collective intelligence stripped of any collective will? Not necessarily. The entropy of the global state could release, instead, dissipative structures inverting the Hegelian formula: not subsuming civil society into the state, but—in the opposite direction—reconstituting civil society, on a potentially non-market basis, out of the withering away of the state, as once imagined by Marx and Gramsci.

Bull sees an impasse between the globalizing market and populist reactions to it and this implies that they are of equivalent weight, neither advancing at the expense of the other.

However, instead of the withering away of the state, as once imagined by Marx and Gramsci, we have the decay of the liberal state as it transforms into a more authoritarian one. However by the state Bull does mean the nation state of Hegel: --he means a global one in the form of US hegemony, and so its dissolution gives rise to a global civil society.?

changes in the liberal state

In Fear and camouflage: the end of the liberal state? at Open Democracy Saskia Sassen says that:

The liberal state has changed profoundly with significant consequences for the type of society we have come to expect – whether in the rich democracies of the north or the struggling democracies elsewhere. At the heart of this emergent transformation lies the historical reshaping, firstly of the relations between the three parts of the liberal state (the executive, the legislature/parliament, and the judiciary), and secondly of the relation between the state (especially the executive branch) and the citizens, with the latter losing rights and entitlements. ...The privatising of the power of the government’s executive branch (or prime minister’s office) along with the erosion of the privacy rights of citizens is hollowing out the powers of the legislature. These shifts are no anomaly. These are systemic shifts. They transcend party politics and go beyond the much-discussed democratic deficits brought about by economic globalisation.

Similarly in Australia. The executive has become by far the most powerful branch of government: it has amassed undemocratic powers, become highly secretive, is increasingly a form of privatised power and has gained added control over public administration. The “people’s branch of government” – the legislature – was never strong but has lost much of its power.

We are aware of this shift in power in Australia but pundits haven't thought of it in terms of the end of the liberal state

decay of the liberal state

In an interview at Eurozine entitled Denationalized states and global assemblage Saskia Sassen picks up on the decay of the liberal state theme mentioned in this earlier post. She says:

What is happening today is on the one hand a decay (objectively speaking) of liberalism even as an ideology – being replaced with neoliberalism, attacks on the welfare state, etc – and, on the other hand, a decay of the structural conditions within which Keynesian liberalism could function.

She says that this is evident in the US and in other liberal democratic regimes that are neo-liberalizing their social policies, hollowing out their legislatures/parliaments, and augmenting as well as privatizing or protecting the power of their executive or prime ministerial branch of government.

That is to say, we will see these trends where we see the conditions I identify for the US, even though they will assume their own specific forms and contents. I would say that Blair's reign in the UK especially since the war on Iraq has clearly moved in this direction. Instead of being guided (and disciplined!) by the Cabinet, which is parliament based, Blair set up a parallel "cabinet" at Downing Street from which he got much of his advice and confirmations of the correctness of his decisions. This had the effect of hollowing out the real Cabinet.

A similar process in the centralization of executive power happened under John Howard's regime in Australia. Big governance decisions were made without cabinet on ocassions-- eg. around the water issue in the Murray-Darling Basin.

The inference is traditional liberalism is in crisis, or at least being attacked by the governments themselves as well as by powerful economic actors and certain traditional society sectors, such as fundamentalist evangelical groups in the US. Why should it last forever?

Perhaps the real question is whether the state in countries such as the US is liberal, or ever was liberal. It may have implemented liberal policies, and the legislature at various times did embed liberal norms in the state apparatus. But these did not always last. Today we are witnessing yet another set of breakdowns.

Sassen says that today's "social question" – the groups that are marginal or excluded in today's economic circuits and the political subjectivities that this gives birth to illuminates like few others the decaying capacity of the liberal state to handle the social question – given the type of liberalism that has evolved over the last twenty to thirty years and the context within which today's liberal state operates.

Treasury, capability development

Back to the speech, entitled "Addressing Extreme Disadvantage Through Investment in Capability Development", which was given by Dr Ken Henry, Secretary to the Treasury, to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Conference "Australia’s Welfare 2007. Henry starts by saying that:

If I were to identify two fundamental roles for government they would be these. First, to provide sustainable macroeconomic growth, with low and stable inflation and unemployment, through sound macroeconomic frameworks and the maintenance of well functioning markets. And second, to ensure that all Australians share in the nation’s prosperity.

And then to his credit he addresses how to measure 'sharing prosperity:

From the Treasury perspective, there is far more to sharing prosperity than simply ensuring that income is redistributed in a way that avoids inequality widening over time beyond some arbitrary level. To our minds, the distributional goals of government must relate to a much broader concept of prosperity, or wellbeing; one that goes well beyond standard inequality measures, or poverty line constructs, based on crude statistical measures of dispersion around mean or median income. These traditional income based measures of poverty and disadvantage are just too simplistic for the task. The dispersion of money income is of consequence, to be sure, but it is not enough.

He suggests a better way is to use Amartya Sen’s concept of disadvantage as capability deprivation, as this enables us to expand the traditional focus on poverty measurement to develop indicators of deprivation and social exclusion.

What then does Treasury mean by this:

Sen emphasises what he refers to as ‘substantive freedoms’ — including political and civil liberty, social inclusion, literacy and economic security — that, of themselves, form ‘constituent components’ of development. Among the capabilities of importance to poverty analysis, Sen identifies one subset including such things as the capability ‘to meet nutritional requirements, to escape avoidable disease, to be sheltered, to be clothed, to be able to travel, and to be educated’. Poverty lines, defined in income terms for example, that captured these capabilities would not vary much from one community to another and would not, for the same reason, vary much over time. In other words, they might provide the basis for an absolute poverty line measure. But Sen also notes that a second subset of other relevant capabilities of considerable interest to the classical economists — such as the capability to live without shame, the capability to participate in the activities of the community, and the capability of enjoying self-respect — provides a basis for relative poverty comparisons.

Henry says that including all of these elements in an all-encompassing measure of poverty (or disadvantage) — built on a person’s endowment of capabilities, rather than their command over commodities — would be quite a challenge. So its not surprising that, despite an increasing interest in such a broad measure of disadvantage, no universally accepted measure has been developed. What Treasury has done is adopt the broad conceptualisations of wellbeing and disadvantage being used for various analytical purposes:

we in the Treasury have developed a wellbeing framework as a descriptive tool to provide context for public policy advice. It is built on elements of Sen’s capabilities framework within the context of a generalised-utilitarian framework. This quite broad conceptual framework anchors the objective and thorough analysis of policy options that is central to the Treasury’s role.

Well-being has three components---healthy living; autonomy and participation; and social cohesion, and Treasury's policy approach is not to ensure equality of outcome Policy makers should be concerned with opportunities. Specifically, they should be concerned to ensure that individuals are endowed with capabilities that allow them the freedom to choose to live their lives in ways that have real meaning and real value.

Nietzsche

Nietzsche, Will to Power ( section] 866):

Once we possess that common economic management of the earth that will soon be inevitable [what we would now call 'economic globalization'], humankind will be able to find its best meaning as machine in the service of this [global] economy--as a tremendous lockwork, composed of ever smaller, ever more subtly "adapted gears"; as an ever-growing superfluity of all dominating and commanding elements: as a whole of tremendous force, whose individual factors represent only minimal forces, minimal values.

It's a suprising passage as Nietzsche's major theme was how to avoid decadence (or the inability to generate new values), cultural degeneration, and the "advent of nihilism," and not specifically how to avoid environmental destruction and "ecocide."

between the national and the global

In an article entitled The world’s third spaces at Open Democracy Saskia Sassen challenges the way that much of the globalization literature has assumed a global vs national binary. She argues that we can no longer speak of "the" state, and hence of "the" national state versus "the" global order. What lies between the two, in the middle, as it were, is:

the proliferation of partial, often highly specialised, global assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights once firmly ensconced in national institutional frames. These assemblages cut across the binary of "national vs global" - this being the usual way of attempting to understand what is in fact genuinely new.These emergent assemblages inhabit both national and global institutional and territorial settings. They span the globe in the form of trans-local geographies connecting multiple, often thick, sub-national spaces - institutional, territorial, subjective.

The example that is most relevant to Australia -apart from the green NGO's with international linkages---is the possibility of decay inside the liberal state itself – and the attendant consequences of such decay.

In this earlier article at Open Democracy Sassen argues that:

the liberal-democratic state cannot simply be viewed as a function of the democratic deficit brought on by external forces. A focus on external forces – in turn, globalisation and terrorism – is the most common method of explaining the increasingly evident deficit in liberal democracies.There are consequences to such an interpretation. A focus on external forces keeps us from examining the possibility that the state is not simply responding but is also potentially producing the democratic deficit. My own research on globalisation over the last decade and a half has explored to what extent the global also gets constituted inside the national rather than just coming "from the outside". The state apparatus is one of the key sites for this sub-national constitution of the global.

The example she gives is the segmentation occurring inside the state apparatus, characterised by a growing and increasingly privatised executive branch of government aligned with specific global actors (notwithstanding nationalist speeches), alongside a hollowing out of the legislature whose effectiveness is at risk of becoming confined to fewer - and more domestic - matters. Sassen adds:

A weak and domesticated legislature in turn weakens the political capacity of citizens to demand accountability from an increasingly powerful and private executive, since the legislature gives citizens stronger standing in these matters than the executive. Further, the privatising of the executive partly brings with it an eroding of the privacy rights of citizens - a historic shift of the private-public division (even if always an imperfect one in practice) at the heart of the liberal state

Isn't this what we are seeing happening in Australia now?

Ken Henry, indigenous disadvantage, capability development

As is well known Noel Pearson's reform plan in indigenous Cape York Peninsula makes welfare payments conditional on four basic expectations: ensure your children attend school; fulfil your responsibilities to keep your children free from abuse and neglect; abide by the laws concerning violence, alcohol and drugs; abide by your public housing tenancy conditions. A family responsibilities commission comprising a magistrate and eminent representatives of the community be created to mandate these obligations.

This is Pearson's response to the existing artificial economy of unconditional welfare is no solution is paying for abusive lifestyles that compromise the protection of indigenous children and families.

Pearson argues that though these policies have a conservative flavour - rebuilding of social norms - the other two building blocks of our agenda have distinctly liberal and social-democratic flavours: realignment of incentives and increased government investment in capability development (that is in developing the capabilities of individuals). This builds on the work Amartya Sen, and the argument is that poverty and disadvantage are to a large extent capability deprivation. Indigenous capability development.

This view is developed in a speech, entitled "Addressing Extreme Disadvantage Through Investment in Capability Development", which was given by Dr Ken Henry, Secretary to the Treasury, to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Conference "Australia’s Welfare 2007, is an interesting one.

Rancière and the political

For Jacques Rancière consensus interferes with the “political.” The political is “the field for the encounter between emancipation and policy in the handling of a wrong.” In other words, the political, democracy as such, is the theater by which the demos (the unaccounted for minority) intervenes in a localized attempt at consensus in order to question the “givens of a particular situation, of what is seen and what might be said, on the question of who is qualified to see or say what is given.” In other words, democracy is political dissensus as “positive contradiction.”

Being political" is contrasted with "the police order", which is described as:

... the structured embodiment of a society where everything has its place. The police order is the government or process of governance that prescribes our reality or our sensibility – in relation to the underlying norms that define what is allowed or not allowed, available or unavailable in a given situation – in the realm of perception itself. Almost like a code of conduct. There is therefore an underlying division that dictates what can and cannot be said, shown, or done. This creates permanent sets of norms which in turn establish a community that decides who is included or excluded, whose words are significant or insignificant, who is entitled to govern others and who is not.

It regulates the destabilizing potential of the political. It refers to politics in the conventional sense — which would include both political institutions (eg., parliament,) and the ways in which policy decisions are made by institutions like the High Court and the Reserve Bank — operates within the parameters of an already-given, socially sanctioned distribution of the sensible.

Political dissensus is allowing:

those whose voices are only perceived as background noise to receive genuine attention.They are the excluded. They must be perceived as speaking beings, instead of regarded as "animals". This will take place when those who are not included, those who are not allowed to participate in decision-making – the proletariat, women, non-whites, immigrants, refugees – break into the police order's "consensual" system and impose themselves as visible and speaking.