Policing and worldmaking.
I think quite a common retort to the kind of work that we're doing is, okay, but which police are you you know, which institution of the police are you talking about? You have to be specific.
Tia Trafford:What I'm interested in thinking about is the way that we think about the makeup of the social through colonial modernity. And so this is why police is not just a thin blue line, but is the form of the the world
Melayna Lamb:itself. Hello. My name's Milena Lam. I'm really excited to be here today to talk to Tia Trafford about their book, Everything is Police. Just a little bit about me, I guess, before we get started.
Melayna Lamb:I am a lecturer at the University of Law London, and I'm the author of A Philosophical History of Police Power with Bloomsbury. I look at issues of police power and how police power relates to sovereignty and law, and thinking about this in the context of western philosophy or the canon of western philosophy, which has some interesting affinities with the book that we're gonna be discussing today. Tia, do you want to introduce yourself?
Tia Trafford:Yeah. Thanks so much, Milena. So, yeah, my name is Tia Treffert, like Malena said. So I'm currently a reader in philosophy and design at University for the Creative Arts, which is based around the Southeast in The UK. So we're gonna discuss my new book, which is Everything is Police, which is trying to think about policing both in its kind of concrete instantiation, but also in the most the most abstract way possible.
Tia Trafford:So thinking about what is policing, what is it coming from, what is where is the kind of desire to please and be pleased come from, And building upon quite a lot of conversations that are that are becoming more prevalent in the past few years where people are trying to think about things like the racial violence within policing and often thinking about that in terms of tracing the origins of police to the plantation or colonial origins. And I'm trying to build upon that and follow that trajectory a little bit further. I think that that work is incredibly important, but it doesn't necessarily go far enough in explaining what Frank Wilderson, for example, talks about in terms of the universality of black policing and Reynaldo Walcott. He talks about the way in which police violence is like a normal and an almost mundane part of black life.
Melayna Lamb:Yeah. That's really interesting because we have sort of landed on similar approaches, I think, to police power from slightly different angles, but independently of each other. So it's really great to be able to be in conversation with you, and our books are very much in conversation without knowing it when I was writing mine and when you were writing yours, presumably. But just as kind of a further introduction, I wonder you kind of mentioned the limits, perhaps, of some of the other critical writings on police that we've seen proliferate in recent years. But maybe you could just say a little bit about what prompted you to write this particular book in the first place.
Tia Trafford:Yeah. So I read this book called Empire at Home, which came out during the pandemic, I think, maybe, like, 2021, something like that. And that was thinking about whether or not we could usefully apply the idea of the internal colony to Britain and particularly contemporary Britain since the sort of sixties, seventies. And thinking about the way in which Britain might be understood not as encapsulated by its borders, but as this kind of continuing, like, colonial project, which goes far beyond those borders and in which then we can kind of think about the internal colonization not necessarily bounded by the island shores, but in terms of a set of a kind of logics and things like that that could be deployed in in various ways across Britain as colony through time and space and things like that. And in that process, obviously, a lot of that was thinking about policing and the police and and techniques that had been developed in colonial policing and then brought into into the kind of heartland of British policing.
Tia Trafford:I'm thinking about how that works out in terms of, like, counterinsurgency and stuff like that. So I've been doing that work, and there's a bit of a sort of philosophical inflection in that work in the sense
Melayna Lamb:that I was looking at Britain as this kind of
Tia Trafford:unstable category almost, which has to kind of constantly recuperate itself and reproduce itself. But I wanted to return to some more philosophical questions. And in the same moment, I there's a couple of things. Like, one is, like, I was reading work by writers like Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton and David Marriott and and Roberta Walcott, and this was pushing me. It was challenging, I think, some of the limitations of that previous work, which was much more sociologically embedded and challenging me to really think about what was happening at a more kind of abstract level.
Tia Trafford:And then at the same time, we had you know, we're going through a pandemic in which policing and particularly kind of interpersonal policing was just absolutely rife. So all of all of the neighborhood chats and, you know, as much as we wanted to, like, set set up, like, mutual aid groups and, like, helping people with with with slight shopping and and mobility issues and all this kind of stuff and lots of good things happening. But even in those spaces, policing became rife. Like, all of the kind of snitch hotlines and things, like, my neighbor was out exercising for more than that allotted out. And it's like, what is this like, where is this desire coming from?
Tia Trafford:This is real compulsion to please ourselves, to please one another. And we and, like, very quickly that that becomes ensconced in this racialized discourse, like, immediately, but also in this requirement that we must continuously, like, self please. So thinking about these things together pushed me towards thinking about policing in a more abstract way, but, you know, not abstract in the sense that it is kind of divorced from the concrete by any means, but thinking about these two things together.
Melayna Lamb:Yeah. So I was gonna ask because in my work, I think about the relationship between police power and sovereignty specifically. So if sovereignty is the power to kill and it not be considered a crime, which is kind of how certain jurisprudence thinkers would would conceptualize it along with political theory thinkers. I'm wondering what the relationship for you is between policing and the police. Because for me, the police have the ability, you know, and and frequently use that ability to kill with impunity.
Melayna Lamb:Right? And I wonder what happens when we subsume the police under a a a larger banner of policing as such.
Tia Trafford:Yeah. Okay. That's a good question. And I think that I'm not because I'm not thinking about it in exactly the same way. I maybe need to to translate these things a little bit more.
Tia Trafford:Let me put it in slightly different terms. And and I think that the translation probably works because also when you're thinking about sovereignty, you're thinking often about this, like, space of exception if we're thinking about, like, Schmidt and and Gangnaman and things like that. Right? So let's think about things like the police is the thin blue line. Right?
Tia Trafford:So this is the overriding myth. Like, it's almost like rooted in Hobbesian kind of myth. Like, society will, like, collapse into this, like, regressive state of nature unless we have the police can constantly, like, reproducing the border of the social. Right? So protecting us from our external and internal omnipresent potential dissolution.
Tia Trafford:There's this kind of idea of this, like, mythological function of the thin blue lines inscribed into the important that I want to hold on to is that this is necessarily an an incomplete project. And that incompleteness comes into the foreground through a kind of insecurity and instability that that necessitates the police. Right? What I'm interested in thinking about is I think we might need to internalize the thin blue line, I guess, into the way that we think about the makeup of the social through colonial modernity. And so this is why I'll get to this to this idea that police is not just a thin blue line, but is the form of the the world itself.
Tia Trafford:So actually, the boundary between order and disorder is not one which is grounded before the police turn up. And then the police simply are kind of keeping the boundary in place. Right? The boundary between, like, violence at the extremity, including so for example, quite quite often how we think about this even in, you know, relatively decent, like, kind of leftist understandings of colonialism is that, like, colonialism was this, like, horrendous violence that's happening somewhere else, and there's, like, civil society, like, back home. And that's, like, calm and nice and reasonable and things like that.
Tia Trafford:Right? What I'm trying to suggest is that distinction, which I understand through the language of this idea of the breach using, like, Wynter and Fanon and Hartman and and writers like this. This distinction is is something which is constituted through colonial modernity in which then the world produced through that breach has to be constantly sutured, and it's an impossible kind of task to do so. Right? So I don't know if this is exactly answering, but, essentially, where you get to is following really apt phrase from Jared Sexton's work, which is the idea that the police are the avant garde of white supremacy.
Tia Trafford:That may well be a misquote, but it's some it's it's something like that.
Melayna Lamb:So then you're saying that the institution of the police is simply a kind of embodiment of this more abstract welding as you might call it.
Tia Trafford:Yeah. Exactly. And if you're thinking about, like, something like abstract policing, I guess, is precisely needed to manage this kind of unstable world, which is produced through colonial identity. And it's like, you know, part of the question is how do we turn a frontier into a world? How do you kind of internalize the violence necessary to constitute this world?
Tia Trafford:Now effectively, how do you make slavery into social form? This is the way that, like Taqi Garber is, writing about this. And part of the argument is to say that, well, policing then becomes constitutive so that in in the way that we normalize and internalize and legalize anti black violence in order that it is the ongoing condition for white life and freedom and and property and things like that. And part of that is coming out what I was saying earlier about trying to move beyond or, like, push further, let's say, along the trajectory that that we see with a with a lot of writers recently thinking about origins. And let's load a good work in that, and I'm not I don't wanna, I'm not criticizing that work.
Tia Trafford:It's really important to think through how those systems and technologies and techniques become embedded. I want to rather than just trace the origins of the police to the plantation, I want to stay with the plantation. I wanna like, Wynter talks about the way that the plantation concretizes Sylvia Wynter, concretizes new social forms that kind of reorganize the world and reorganize what it means to be human in different genres of man as she puts it. So I think this question of then if that shifts and that becomes entrenched in the structure of what the world is and what we are, then I wanna remain there and think with that. So this idea that like, actually, Sara Maria, Sorrentino also writes about this.
Tia Trafford:That's something that was just really important, and I think she's thinking with winter here, is that we need to stay with slavery whilst thinking about why staying with slavery is an impossible task. So there's something of what I'm trying to do in this work is thinking about the violences of white worlding beyond things like hierarchy, beyond exploitation, and to think about these things at this level of, kind of, political ontology that congeals around this unstable kernel.
Melayna Lamb:Yeah. I think that, it comes through really brightly in the book, the limits of various, quote unquote critical accounts of policing without you sort of having to spell them out or without you kind of going into loads of details about those accounts. I think your book really elegantly demonstrates the limits of those accounts without having to go into loads of details about those accounts, and I think that's something that's really great about it. Details about those accounts, and I think that's something that's really great about it. But I do wanna dig in here a bit more to to what you think those limits are because I can sense them in the book, but but you haven't necessarily elaborated on them that much.
Melayna Lamb:And you sort of pointed towards that with what you were just saying about this idea of the colonial origin of the police. In my book as well, I speak about that account as being limited in the sense that, you know, just kind of pointing to an origin that is in another time and another place doesn't really get you to the productive and, yeah, what Dexter and Martineau called that the avant garde of policing. Right? It thinks it's explaining why police violence or acts of police violence in the present are meted out on certain people over and above others by reference to this kind of colonial origin, but it doesn't constitute an explanation for me because it's not actually explaining why these acts are repeatedly happening in the present. And I wondered if you could say anything on on that.
Tia Trafford:Yeah. I think your argument in your book is perfect, particularly around the colonial boomerang, and I'm always tempted to just, like, get you to to tell us that. But, like, let me sum up what I'm taking from your argument as well, and then you can tell me if it's wrong. I think that part of the problem with those there's several problems. Part of the problem is that it exceptionalizes violence, like I was saying earlier.
Tia Trafford:Right? So this is where you push out that violence to the colony and then it returns. It boomerangs. And in the process, rather than understanding that that violence could be constitutive of the worlding, what you're doing is rather making it into this kind of paradox. Like, actually, you you've lost the ability to explain what's happening in that case.
Tia Trafford:Does that sound about right? Yeah. I mean, may maybe this is kind of moving towards questions around some of the thinkers that we're both thinking with that are, like, potentially slightly unusually thinking with in in The UK at least or in in my experience, and I think we've spoken about this previously, in terms of what so Afropessimism. This is almost a term that has become a kind of bogeyman in the way that it's attracted so much incredible fervor and caricature. The story of how a book comes to be published is one that should probably be, for the most part, just lost to history.
Tia Trafford:But I pitched this book to a different publisher at first simply because I knew someone who who was there. I'm very happy with where it ended up. But the I got quite detailed comments on that initial pitch. And it was like I think there was a couple of chapters. It was a slight yeah.
Tia Trafford:It was slightly different in the way that it was written up and stuff as, you know, these things kind of move. And the main comment was like, this book is Afro pessimist and therefore bad. Like, that was that was I mean, it was not spelled out quite so ridiculously, but, like, pretty much. Right? And for a start, I think saying that this book is Afro pessimist is is just like a wild misinterpretation of what is happening.
Tia Trafford:Because for a start, we're thinking about specifically the violences of white welding. And I and Afro pessimism is far, far wider and more interesting and invested in so many different things. Secondly, like, what that does is is it really congeals together a massive range of people who I think maybe in different context, maybe and this was in a UK context that perhaps is different in The US. But thinking about the kinds of people who I'm thinking with, so, you know, people like Sayeda Hartman, who mentioned and Secchus Dunn, Reynaldo Walcock, we talked about David Marriot and Wilderson, but also, like, Bica, Mandela Gray, Sylvia Wynter, Sara Marrero, Sorrentino, Tapia Garber, all these people. These people do not coalesce into into, like, Afro pessimism.
Tia Trafford:There are maybe there are people in there who may be avowed the Afro pessimism. There are people who are critical of Afro pessimism. Like Biko and Reynaldo, these these writers are, like, working, you know, orthogonally, I think, in many ways. Even Sexton is writing a paper about optimism and pessimism and and and thinking about these two things as kind of modalities. There's a real problem in the way that this form of thought is caricatured.
Tia Trafford:It's made into a kind of monolith. There's a multiplicity of things happening here, which I think are lost as a result. This is really interesting because what does it do to turn a form of thought into a bogeyman? It's effectively like a way of disciplining things. It's a way of, like, keeping things in check, pacifying things, recuperating certain things.
Tia Trafford:And the reason why I think this kind of maybe relates better to your question is that I think what's the main thing within Afropessimism that people are concerned about? And it's the idea that we're thinking at the level of political ontology rather than at the level of, like, sociology or materialism or empirical data. But at the same time, we're talking about disciplines that trade in abstraction constantly. We're very happy to talk about power and domination and value and labor in the abstract, but we're not we're not happy to talk about the abstract slave. And this is very interesting.
Tia Trafford:If it is the case that Wilderson and Sexton, I think, possibly clearest here, although that in in a sense you can read their work as extending Sylvia Wynter's work or taking it down a sort of specific direction, then this is necessary to think in the abstract in order to understand the sort of theological and political entrenching of racial slavery as and and Lewis Gordon is is really nice. He summarizes Wynter's position on this as the idea that racial slavery is written as the theodicy and grammar of the world. So the idea is that then racial slavery cannot be adequately articulated at the level of the empirical or the historical because it becomes a condition around which those things coalesce. And of course then, like, the slave as we know through modernity, through these discourses like sociology and Marxism becomes abstracted. It becomes this, like, abstract figure against which, you know, things like freedom can be thought.
Tia Trafford:It becomes like the conceptual armature through which we can we can articulate the world around us. So, like, you know, obviously, the idea of wage slavery is is the obvious one, but in this period, the metaphorical slave becomes the figure of any possible subjugation, whilst the racial slave becomes increasingly kind of invisiblized. We're chastising Afro pessimism for operating at the level of abstraction, but it seems to me at least to be absolutely necessary to think about the way that the human and the slave are articulated together across modernity. I've been reading Soren Mal's book recently, which is talking about things like mute compulsion and emergentism and the logic. These are all abstractions.
Tia Trafford:And there are abstractions that actually now presumably disagree with this, but I think probably require us to have already thought about the role of the the slave and the way the possession and domination figure kind of conceptually to make those models cohere.
Melayna Lamb:Just as a as a side note, I gave a presentation when I was a PhD student at my university, and there was, like, a visiting, quite well known Italian philosopher who was visiting from Italy who was in the room, and I I gave this presentation, and it was about, actually, Benjamin's critique of violence and the police. So I was just beginning to think about how I was gonna conceptually deal with with police in this kind of abstract way that I wanted to. Right? And, she was very critical of what I wrote. She did not like it at all, but I I remember the main comment that she gave me was like, you shouldn't or you can't write a a metaphysics of the police.
Melayna Lamb:And I thought that was, yeah, and I thought that was, like, a really interesting criticism because she just dismissed my whole project. Right? Like, you can't write a metaphysics of the police. And then I sat there and I was like, but what if what if metaphysics is police? Maybe not, like, straight away, but, you know, this is, I think, quite a common retort to the kind of work that we're doing is, okay, but which police are you you know, which institution of the police are you talking about?
Melayna Lamb:You have to be specific. Particularly when you're talking about anti blackness in the police, there is a sense in which The US Police are frequently exceptionalized, or even The UK Police are exceptionalized in the sense that people often say, oh, The UK Police, you know, they don't have the same problems as the US police. And part of that stems from the fact that the US police originate in the slave patrols, which isn't the case for UK police. I don't know if this is a response that you've had, but this is certainly something that I've come across at various places that I've presented my work. You know, you can't essentially telling me you can't use the same analysis because of the institutional and geographical specificity of the US police that doesn't apply in The UK.
Melayna Lamb:And I wonder what your response to that I mean, I think I know what your response to that might be, but whether you could say something about that.
Tia Trafford:Yeah. You know, people would say that, you know, you can't extrapolate anything from US centered articulations of blackness either. And and, again, like, to return to the kind of Afro pessimist, This idea that, what you're doing, if you if you are doing something at the level of political ontology, then what that means is you're just, like, universalizing from a specific position, and that position is is a kind of US position, and it might work there, but but blah blah blah. It does not. And, of course, like, you know, maybe, you know, there are, like, some understandings of ontology, I guess.
Tia Trafford:And we were kinda used to that, like, knee jerk response to ontology a decade or two ago. I think things have moved quite considerably thinking about ontology and metaphysics in philosophy, you know, as a return of the real and all that sort of discourse. When was that? Like, probably over a decade, but I can't remember. But particularly when it comes to things like race, I mean, you can see why we don't want to ontologize in the sense that that critique thinks or or or, like, at least objects to.
Tia Trafford:Because, of course, like, that is not what's happening in this work. Then the other thing is, of course, like, UK exceptionalism is is like a whole thing. So the idea that The UK can be closeted off effectively from everything else that went on, I mean, that is that is, like, written into the myth of, like, Britain and Britishness, isn't it? Wasn't it also like Enoch Powell who said, look, like, the colonial project has failed, and we actually risked everything by having contact in the colonies. We risked our very, like, British Britishness, and he means this in the most sort of eugenicist sense.
Tia Trafford:Because at the same time, he's talking about, like, letting me know what we need to do is, like, reproduce good British stock, get back to, like, full health, all this kind of like, all of these sort of, like, standard sort of eugenicist metaphors. So there's something about this idea of Britishness which is salvageable even though it's done this thing where we risked, like, a a kind of impurity in contact with others. That kinda like British exceptionalism is written into what it means to be Britain. So, yeah, it didn't surprise me at all to have that response. On the other hand, we are emphasizing abstraction so far in the conversation.
Tia Trafford:The other thing that I'm doing in the book is, like, there's quite a lot of history in there. I mean, it's a short book and I'm not a historian, but I'm trying to root things in a context. This is very much something that I'm where I hope at least to be kind of thinking with Wynter Wynter's approach. So I think this is incredibly important, if weird, to think history and philosophy together. We don't normally do this.
Tia Trafford:Like social sciences and philosophy together is a little bit more normal, but, like, I'm sort of flip flopping a little bit often between, like, you know, in chapter one, thinking about Kant and thinking about Plantation of Barbados. Well, I don't really talk about methodology, and I'm I quite like the idea that maybe this is both slightly disorienting and but also simply in the form of reading in this interwoven way. It enacts the kind of methods that I'm interested in. I think it's really important to think the specific and the abstract together without collapsing them into one another. What's happening in this in the avoidance of thinking abstraction, I think, is you end up in this idea that we can we need to reduce everything to the sociological or to empirical data.
Tia Trafford:And then what comes of that is you end up writing in sort of transcendental norms without ever having the capacity to articulate them. You you have this sort of genealogical reduction possibly. It's impossible then to understand the kind of normative construction around those things. You don't have the explanatory framework. So Wynter's really, really useful on this because what she's doing is showing us how there are codes that become entrenched in the world and that through our kind of social practices and institutions and things like that, become further and further kind of entrenched.
Tia Trafford:We build upon these things, and they're self reproducing, become self reproducing. So she talks about autopoiesis a lot. And then there's a writer who's working in philosophy of biology called William Wimsatt, who's also in the background of my thinking here. He talks about the idea of generative entrenchment. And this is the idea that the more things that you build on top of systems, the more those things become entrenched.
Tia Trafford:They seem as if they are necessary or natural. So I think thinking about things in the way that winter does, you know, requires a sort of level of specificity, which is really important, but not at the cost of abstraction. So you're you're thinking about this in terms of things like affect and stuff like that, where you you kinda you're abstracting, and then you end up with, like, an excess that you then explain as as something which becomes key metaphysical focus or, like, the key that unlocks everything. So I think that there is something about it's important to think about Britain and British policing. And there are unique things that are happening there, of course, and, like, it's important to think about these things.
Tia Trafford:I'm hoping that what's also kinda interesting about the route that this book takes is that we move from Plantation Barbados. We move a little bit into The US, but also we move back through to thinking about the way that then what Britain does through sort of formal emancipation and then through, like, colonization, decolonization very briefly, but then to think about sort of contemporary forms of policing through Britain and also the continuation of unequal exchange and, properties systems of property and things of that. It's highlighting the way in which those things that are seemingly able to be exceptionalized are absolutely kind of forming the logics of how things work still.
Melayna Lamb:Yeah. I think that's a really nice thing about the book is that back and forth that you were just talking about. I think it works really, really well in enacting the thing rather than describing the thing that you're going to do and then saying it, right? It sort of enacts it, which is really, really nice and really impressive as well. One thing that I was going to say also is, when I, again, sorry to make it about my PhD, which it sounds absolutely not, but going back to the beginning of my PhD again, when I said to people, I'm writing about philosophy and the police, the response was often, oh, okay.
Melayna Lamb:So you're writing about Foucault and or Ranciere, which is normally the response. And when I said, no, I'm writing about Hobbes and Hegel, you know, you'd get some kind of rather odd looks. And I wanted to kind of ask you as well, obviously, Kant figures quite heavily in the book as a figure that you're writing about and whose thought that you're writing about. And I wonder how did you turn to Kant, firstly, to think these things through?
Tia Trafford:I mean, Kant is like Kant's the archetypal, like, police philosopher who doesn't really talk about the police, just embodies the police. I'd done some work on Kant a long time ago, so I knew Kant. So it's partly a matter of familiarity. And because I was thinking about this idea of, you know, thinking with Wynter and thinking about as she talks about moving through the genres of man, I was thinking about Kant. I mean, she doesn't talk about Kant really, which is interesting.
Tia Trafford:I think this maybe because she's more concerned with thinking through the relation to the state. But this idea of, like, well, what if we think about Kant in relation to 1492 in terms of what Wences talking about this stuff? What would that mean? So thinking with this idea of Hilary Beckles, who's historian writing about Barbados as the as the the first black slave society, and I was thinking about this question. So how do you you know, if you think about this idea that how do you turn a frontier into a world?
Tia Trafford:How do we move from this sort of thin blue line to the the world itself? How does slavery becomes social form? How does whiteness congeal? How do we make these distinctions between indentured servitude and plantation slavery? How does that work?
Tia Trafford:How does that become formed into something like civil society, right, with law and institution and things like that? So thinking about what the slave codes were doing, you know, reading beyond what they're explicitly doing to think about how this collective ratification of, like, white responsibility. So whiteness becoming a matter of collective possession and collective violence. Kant is answering not those questions clearly, but Kent is also thinking about how you turn a frontier into a world. There's a lot of stuff in the background of this book, I guess, and it's stuff that I'm will continue to work on and have been working on a bit a bit since.
Tia Trafford:Part of what I think Kent is doing is asking the question, well, if we are to come into contact with an other that could destabilize us, how do we make sure that we aren't completely dissolved? In less abstract terms, I guess, it's like, if it's possible for people to become enslaved, how do we make sure that we as Europeans can never have been in that position to make sure that we are free and that our freedom is certain? You can read Kant as asking very similar kinds of questions. Right? And I think this becomes more obvious when we're thinking about the way that Kant deals with race and racism.
Tia Trafford:But, again, like, this is sort of reading between the lines a lot, and there's a lot of debate about Kant and race. You know, there's some very good work. Like Adler's work is excellent, I think, on this, but I would point towards Sean Capener's work on this. I think he's doing something a lot more interesting with Kant, where we're starting to see a reckoning with Kant that isn't just, like, was Kant a racist? Because, yeah, obviously, Kant was a racist, but that's not the interesting question.
Tia Trafford:Interesting question, I think, is given that the Kant is effectively working within this environment and attempting to produce a theory of, like, the subject, what are the ramifications of this? And so if it can't, like, black people can never be figured within kind of universal humanity because they are forever in the state of nature. This means that they will be a threat always. Can't one point says that we'll see these people wiped out. We should not actively, like, commit genocide, against them, but they would, like, sort of go by the wayside.
Tia Trafford:So there's a kind of interesting determinism written into the progression of the world. In order that the world, you know, comes to more fully express freedom and reason, we will inevitably see this happen. And later on in in the book, when I'm talking about Kant and then Hegel, you know, the argument there is essentially a very simple one. In order to make the theory coherent, you require the presence of black people, and you require the presence of essentially, like, a naturalization of racial slavery that you can't admit into your system. It's illegitimately transcendental as Ronald Jill Judy, puts it.
Tia Trafford:But you require that, but you also require that it is gone. You see, you're relying on something that you necessarily need to eliminate. And therefore, you have this idea of the progress of humanity. So the eventual, like, coming to fruition of the human, which is effectively the sort of white European writ large across the world to the, you know, the cosmopolitan view of progress is one in which, as I put it, white destiny is both necessary and impossible. So, yeah, these things I think these things are kind of it's a speculative reading of Kant for sure, and I will expand on it more in in other work, but I think other people are are doing more interesting things with Kant.
Tia Trafford:Kant is such a thorny topic as well. I really shouldn't have picked Kant because, like, when you see people even, like, suggesting that Kant might have been racist on, like, Twitter and stuff, there is so much backlash. It's like, yeah. But it's nothing to do with his, like, entire system, and it was annexed. And then, well, was did he change his mind about this?
Tia Trafford:Because it looks like maybe he changed his mind. There's a whole, like, loads of literature on this stuff. Don't really think this matters. I think what matters is the way in which the whole system actually depends on the idea that you can exteriorize race in the same moment that you need it for your system to work.
Melayna Lamb:Yeah. Definitely. So I just wanted to go back to something that you said about the threat always being there, the state of nature as threat kind of always being there as well because this is something that I write about in my book as well is this idea of the state of nature which is not actually outside of the state. Right? But it kind of exists in in the heart of the state.
Melayna Lamb:And I wondered about how you see this and the relationship to criminalization. And what I mean by that is that you have this interesting bit. You're talking about the Barbados slave codes, and you say the Barbados slave codes attempted to enforce a distinction between violence towards whites prompted by transgressions against prohibitions and law and violence toward black slaves as gratuitous and without constraint. And I think that really encapsulates this idea about gratuitous violence or or what, Frank Wilderson and Patrice Douglas call metaphysical violence that is in a different register to simply the violence of the criminal justice system, let's say. But what I find frequently in, again, kind of the critical literature around police violence and anti blackness ness is the idea of the myth of black criminality.
Melayna Lamb:Right? So so I'm taking that from Paul Gilroy, who has written on this and talks about this myth of black criminality. Right? This idea of criminality is attached to black people, which then sort of justifies state violence against them because they're being configured as criminal, right, regardless of whether they're actually breaking the law. There's a limit to that account because it presumes that, for me anyway, that the police are responding to criminality, even if that's just a kind of mythological criminality.
Melayna Lamb:Right? Even if it's a criminality whereby, you know, the person hasn't actually transgressed any laws, but but it's still assuming that the police are responding to a perceived criminality rather than a gratuitous or metaphysical violence that kind of exists in a different register that perhaps doesn't conform to these distinctions between criminal and and noncriminal. Does that make sense? I'm sorry if I'm waffling a bit.
Tia Trafford:Yeah. I agree completely. I think this is, in part, what I was trying to do in in the first chapter when I'm looking at the slave codes particularly in the way in which whiteness congeals around policing, is I'm trying to explore that distinction that Wilderson, and others are making between violence grounded in transgression and violence that is gratuitous. And I think, again, this is another place where this distinction is often mischaracterized. But thinking about it in terms of the myth of black criminality is really useful actually.
Tia Trafford:And I actually think it's it's almost inarguable when you think about it. I I kind of don't really get the disagreement with it in some ways. I find I do find a bit like some of this this disagreement with Wilderson just a bit perplexing. I start out that chapter describing quickly the murder of Azelle Rodney by the police in 02/2005. It's a London Met Police.
Tia Trafford:And that was an absolutely vicious murder. You know, it was a hard stop. There was an attempted cover up of the camera data. Actually, I'm not sure if anyone anyone got the camera data. We the the recordings the audio recordings were released a lot later.
Tia Trafford:You know, the witness testimonies didn't match the testimonies of the police officers involved. I think he was in the back of the car, and he was shot, like, eight times from, like, a meter away. It was absolutely vicious. And he was supposedly, like, reaching for a gun and, you know, there was no gun, of course. And, yeah, like, the typical thing that we do in response to that is to say, well, let's think about whether or not he was deserving of this.
Tia Trafford:It's kind it's absolutely it's hideous. It's obscene to think like this to my mind. Do you know the subsequent discourse around these kinds of events always emphasizes guilt or lack of guilt and justice and justification. And this is normally coupled with, like, a load of kind of media reports around, in this case, being a dangerous gangster and things like that. And, you know, a bunch of stereotypes.
Tia Trafford:I think Gabor is quite strong on the way in which the media representation of blackness employs those stereotypes. And, of course, Stuart Hall thinking about, like, British cultural studies traditions around this this kind of work. It's really important. But like you say, that entire way of thinking considers the actions of the police to be constrained and given credence through an institution like the state or a structure like the law or the legal justice system. And as I understand Wilson's point at least, the idea is that for blackness where and this is how you started the question, wasn't it?
Tia Trafford:If we're thinking about blackness as as kind of embodying the state of nature, like using that to sort of discussion through Kant and other philosophers also, then the distinction just doesn't work. Like, the distinction itself just breaks immediately. It doesn't make sense to talk about the criminal or the non criminal for the state of nature. So making the myth of black criminality the sort of central motif, what what is that gonna do? It's gonna ultimately recuperate the idea that there is a criminal, noncriminal distinction, which essentially recuperate policing.
Tia Trafford:Effectively, it's kinda getting things, like, the wrong way around. And the the thing that really stands out to me in the case of Cizelle Rodney is the his murderer, Anthony Long. When the audio is released, I think it's him or at least fellow officers can be can be heard saying sweet as sweet as as he's executed in the back of this car. This is exactly the excessive libidinal gratuitous violence embodied in this in this moment that I think Wilderson is pointing us towards and why it's so necessary.
Melayna Lamb:That can't be explained via a notion of simply, yeah, black criminality.
Tia Trafford:Yeah. Exactly.
Melayna Lamb:Those theoretical tools simply can't comprehend, as you say, the gratuitousness and also the pleasure that's being expressed in comments like you just said.
Tia Trafford:Yeah. Yeah. It should be an utterly obscene pleasure, but it I mean, it absolutely isn't. I think this is why, actually, it's important that Red, White, and Black, one of Wilderson's books, is about film. And Sexton is also writing about film, thinking about, art and film and thinking about these things in terms of the libidinal and thinking about pleasure, I think, is incredibly important.
Tia Trafford:This is not something that I think UK yeah. We have, like, traditions of thinking through, like, psychoanalysis and things like that within UK academia, of course. But when it comes to thinking about policing, I'm not seeing that in the same way, at least.
Melayna Lamb:I wondered if we could talk a bit about because it is such a big theme in the book about property and specifically the way that you're departing from what might be called a racial capitalist account of policing and property, there's a really interesting departure that you make there, again, but without kind of going into too much detail about the kind of racial capitalist account or perhaps even more orthodox Marxist accounts, right, which would posit that police exist to protect private property, essentially, right, in a very kind of reductive way. But then you get the kind of racial capitalism account, which goes a bit further, which might say, you know, that policing emerges to protect colonial property, but also might be enmeshed with practices of slavery as well. But, yeah, could you say a bit about how your discussion talks about property, but slightly departs from that way of talking about property.
Tia Trafford:Yeah. For sure. And I think there's definitely more to do in, like, putting this into conversation with those discourses than I'm doing in the book. What the thing that I wanted to do in the book is think about exactly that. So the idea of police as we talked about the police as a thin blue line.
Tia Trafford:So, like, one of the ways in which we mobilized that idea is thinking about police as the kind of thin blue line that protects property And thinking about how that is something which, again, like, I think it comes in too late to the story and gives us the wrong idea about what property itself is. Like, slightly polemically, you know, end the chapters with the argument that property is police. But everything is police. So k. So how do we get there?
Tia Trafford:So that so, basically, the idea is thinking about Locke's theory of property. I think a lot of a lot of the discourse around critiques of colonial property regimes and stuff like that orbit around Locke in an interesting way and in a way that maybe is limiting. So even when we're kind of critiquing the kind of ideas that come through the Lockean justification for the colonial project, we're accepting quite a lot. So for example, I think we might accept the idea that property is a regime, which is a matter of, like, the institution of rights over land in the first place. And that that is instituted, firstly, through, theft to take Robert Nichols, like, lovely sort of plenacle, like, property as theft, including things like land clearances and obviously the genocide and settler colonialism and things like this.
Tia Trafford:In order to justify those things, Locke appeals again to the idea of the state of nature. And Locke argues that not only is it our god given rights to ensure that the land doesn't kind of collapse into the state of nature, which would mean that it would be wasted, but we are required by god to make sure that doesn't happen. Right? So effectively, we are required to annihilate the state of nature by transforming land into property. And Locke's theory is that, you know, you transform land as property through labor.
Tia Trafford:It's a labor theory of property. And there's lots of good criticisms of this. The way that that justification is mobilized is really important. But I'm drawing here on Sorrentino's work and also Sorrentino with Tapji Garber, which I think is, like, actually really, really important article. Everyone should read that.
Tia Trafford:It's their response to the Tuck and Wang argument that the colonialism is not a metaphor. It's, I think it's called slavery is a metaphor. It is really important for me. Part of their argument is that relies on the labor theory of the slave as they write. I'm kind of continuing their line of thought a little bit to suggest that this is invisiblizing the role of the slave and the consolidation of property.
Tia Trafford:What we need to think about here is like slaves are positioned as property. They're thinking of slaves as chattel and this is property under collective white control, essential to the coalescing of of white community to be part of civil society which is also to be part of the regime of property is to be distinct from the slave. This is to not necessarily own property, but to potentially own property. The slave is not in a position to ever potentially own property according to to, you know, the way in which the slave is figured. Locke, for example, argues that those in the state of slavery are, and this is a quote from Locke, not capable of any property cannot in that state be considered as any part of civil society.
Tia Trafford:The chief end whereof is the preservation of property. So what we have here is this tension between the necessary drive towards the annihilation of the state of nature, which Locke has told us where it is like our god given requirements and the necessary dependence of that drive on the labor of the slave. So then, you know, you have this the system in which protection of property is kind of strengthened in opposition to the arbitrary disorder of the state of nature, but the slave is made to embody that disordering threat. And so the slave is both subject to property rights, but also the object of exclusion against incursion on those rights. They effectively embody this tension.
Tia Trafford:Land can be rescued from the state of nature because it it can be, like, turned into property through clearances, genocide, and labor. The slave, on the other hand, represents a state of nature that is both irredeemable and essential to this project. And then I start to kind of spell that out in terms of what that might mean through emancipation and this idea of thinking about emancipation. But I think I'm drawing on Tajah McDougall's work to think about emancipation through this idea of selling slaves to the state and the way that that selling of the slave to the state allows for control to be distributed. And then starting to think about how this works its way out in terms of thinking about the logics of the plantation and the continuation to thinking about the the way that Wynter's writing about this.
Tia Trafford:So this is where I sort of revert to thinking about what happens after the, like, formal collapse of colonies and things like that, the way that we had subsidizing of those property regimes. So I think about stuff like the way that we put national limits on workers, the way that we coalesce political movements around borders. So the way that unions rely on things like, you know, the British worker, the American worker, these kind of categories, what they actually mean, around arguments like the nationalization of services, arguments for things like universal basic income, which seem at first sight to be, like, relatively radical arguments, but always based on some form of citizenship, but based on a border which facilitates the continuation of unequal exchange. So you still have this this logic in which we are dependent upon those who are required to provide the resources for white accumulation and expropriation, but are also being simultaneously produced as exterior, as, like, forcibly outside and kind of incapable of being properly part of that social world. And, of course, like, seen as, like, a perpetual threat to it can always be mobilized as as the kind of threat out the border of the polis, that kind of thing.
Melayna Lamb:I think that comes through really nicely in the book, actually, this idea of the project of whiteness necessarily being impossible or, like, the fulfillment of the project of whiteness being impossible and the kind of paradoxes that that entails, but also the violences that that then produces. Right? It's this kind of drive to annihilate something that it is nevertheless reliant upon, produces this kind of, yeah, this unstable, extremely violent situation. And I think that that's encapsulated really nicely in in what you've written, because, obviously, there's some accounts of whiteness that portray it as being something that is completable, I suppose, or something that is rational and kind of, logical and coherent when actually you're pointing to is violent incoherence in a way.
Tia Trafford:Yeah. And part of that is is simply a matter of tracing what I think Wynter is telling us about 1492 and also Fanon as well, right, of course, giving us this idea of the sort of manichean infrastructure created through colonial modernity. The struggle to create a world through the breach of order and disorder, slave and master, colonizer and colonize law and nature. And that, like, attempt to kind of create a breach. So for example, with law and nature, you created this breach and then you're pushing nature outside and then attempting to suture a world.
Tia Trafford:That's necessarily an incompletable project because nature is produced as a category within colonial modernity itself. Right? And I think this is what's partly what I am thinking about that idea of, like, whiteness as, like you say, a completable project because what it does then is position what is the sin of whiteness on that story? It's the idea that you've got a partial universalization often. Right?
Tia Trafford:So it's like what happens is we tuck some categories from Europe, and they are not the universal. They are partial, And then we universalized them as if they are the universal, and then there was this, like, othering that happened. And the other is then left with a choice, well, often, you know, a forced choice, either to kind of be you know, to fight for inclusion within this universal or to, like, stake things out in a sort of plurality or pluriversal. And I'm thinking about Mignolo and that kind of decolonial stuff. And, yeah, I don't think that's the right way of thinking about it because I think both of these things are created within colonial modernity itself.
Tia Trafford:So the idea is that whiteness feeds on the nature that it pushes out. And actually that this idea of the state of nature existing outside the domain of the civil order, no. Like, the civil order is fractious and violent. And there's this quote from Anthony Farley, who actually I should have mentioned earlier because Farley's work is, like, super important for this book as well. And Farley talks about the idea I'm slightly misquoting because I can't remember the exact quote, but it's that this space of, like, civil order, what we think of civil order or the space of reason or the space of, like, freedom is in fact the form of repressed desire and violence.
Tia Trafford:Repressed, like, anti black desire and violence. This is to sort of suggest that white worlding is not a coherent project in which you can have a sort of partial universal which works and is grounded in kind of you know, reason and law and civility against an exceptionalized other. The argument is that, no, this requires an endless attempt to suture the breach upon which it's grounded. And that attempt to suture is what means that we end up with a world in the form of the police. Right?
Tia Trafford:So it's like the project is required to manage and make sense, like you say, of this tension between the drive to annihilate blackness and maintain blackness as the source of exploitable value, rights, privileges, the coherence of of things like property, freedom, law. So any kind of, like, white world, lovely, utopian sort of world of order and rule, which sounds horrible, is not possibly completable. And also, like, its very form is one of policing. This is why we end up, like, policing ourselves in each other because the whole thing is grounded in this. There's implications to that.
Tia Trafford:Right? And I think I'm guessing we're sort of moving towards the end of the conversation, so it's useful points to talk about that. So the implications of that politically and this is not a very political book, I think.
Melayna Lamb:What do you mean?
Tia Trafford:Well, like, I mean, I'm certainly like, there's no, like, policy, like, objective here. Like, this is not a
Melayna Lamb:It's a very narrow narrow version of the political.
Tia Trafford:No. Fine. Alright. Well, it's not it's not a book for, like, the Labour Party or the Democrats. No.
Tia Trafford:Fine. Of course, it's sleep political in this sense. A good friend and colleague of both Malena and and I's, Petals Kalule, who I've written with a little bit before. One of the things that actually really sedimented our friendship was a phrase that they say a lot, which is a politics is police. And we wrote a thing a while ago about abolition and the politics of abolition and how that becomes recuperated under politics and effectively ends up recuperating police.
Tia Trafford:This is not new. This is also there's an absolutely, like, key piece of work by Jared Sexton called A Bell of Slavery, where he argues that I don't wanna completely mess up, Sexton's argument. But, basically, as I read it, the argument is that the attempt to root politics into the pragmatic, whether that becomes grounded in something like a project of, like, reparations or grounded in a project of, land back, and these are the two things that Saxon is mainly concerned about, Or whether this is grounded in a politics of, like, defunding the police. This will necessarily recuperate white supremacy. And I hope at least that the argument, in the book is giving us some reason to see why that might be the case.
Tia Trafford:The implications of this kind of impossible project of white worlding means that if it is in the impossible constitution of the world through which our categories of the political categories of, like, the human and property and freedom are constructed, then any project through which they could be restored is necessarily then a kind of reassurance of that world, which is to say it's policing, the attempted suture of that world. And this is where, like, thinking with Petals is so important, I think. Petals' suggestion is to move away from the idea of abolition and towards either abolitionism or or like the abolitionary or something like this, which suggests that the abolition is something this is how the book finishes is abolitionism without ends and where ends means, I guess, in the interminable, or the incessant, the continuation, but also some like, something that cannot be teleologically prescribed. So the endless suspension of the project of worlding itself. You know, the idea that the world as horizon that could be closed has to be something that you can't just kind of move beyond that.
Tia Trafford:It has to be end endlessly suspended. And for Sexton, blackness is precisely the category that allows us to do that, which is why I think it's it's such an important piece of work because it's, I guess, kind of circling back to where you began, Milena, in terms of thinking about sovereignty. This is precisely the way in which sovereignty can be neither moved beyond nor surpassed, but, or against, but something else.
Melayna Lamb:Right. That was really enlightening, I think, and really summed up some of the core arguments of the book at the end there. Thank you.
Tia Trafford:Thanks very much.
Melayna Lamb:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Everything is Police by Tia Trafford is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.