I just started watching this TV show The Wire. It’s been on for a while now, as usual I’m behind schedule. I’m not proud of it (being an anarchist and all) but I really like cop shows and spy shows. I’ve only watched the first two episodes or so. In this episode there’s a sequence where a homicide detective sits in a court room during a trial for murder. Some of the people involved in the murder sit in the courtroom and intimidate the witnesses. The jury finds for the defense. The judge speaks with the detective and asks to know what happened. This results in a minor scandal among the police hierarchy. It pretty much boils down to injured egos and perhaps fear of real professional and economic consequences due to mistakes and so on. The show seems to suggest a similar circumstance within the drug dealing operation that the police are opposing. What I find interesting in all this is that it implies a relative autonomy of some segments of the state from each other – at a pretty low level really, all within the police force and legal operations of one city. In this relative autonomy there also seems to be different organizational/institutional logics – different groups operate according to different sets of interests (or the same sorts of interests but opposing actual interests), which are not reducible to short-term narrow interests in the way that some people (at least me) tend to think. It reminds me of the passages in Marx where he talks about the need to recoup value advanced and about the relationship between price and value. Over all, at a general and abstract level, these things correspond and so forth, but this stuff fails in/at short term small scale predictions. There’s a Raymond Williams quote on this too, about how much of Marxim is better at diagnosing epochs than at accurately discussing changes and activities within epochs. This is part of why we need categories like gender and race. I think the epochal changes don’t make sense without those categories, for sure, but even more so the smaller scale/scope changes don’t make sense and the details of *how* changes play out make even less sense without those categories. This is over-reaching but as a starting hypothesis I think this point about relative autonomy and different logics and so on etc etc, I think these dynamics are present in most cop show scenarios where there’s a conflict between a lower level and a higher level police officer, where the lower level police officer’s argument is something like “but what I’m doing is in greater service to the law/justice” and so on. (The Wire seems to be setting up this sort of dynamic between a lower level detective and a higher level commanding officer.) The lower level officer follows a different sort of logic or procedure than the higher level one. Ultimately (in what I bet happens in the show) these activities help the state over all – the relative autonomy is part of an over all dynamic (or rather a sectoral dynamic which is itself bound up with yet relatively autonomous from other sectoral dynamics and a larger systemic dynamic.)
Given what I know of your interests, you’ll come to love the show. I tell everyone to give it six episodes, which is, yes, a long commitment to something you might not like, but I’ve yet to have anyone I’ve recommended it to not become committed after six episodes. If you’re interested in previewing the social dynamics beforehand, check out Aaron Bady’s series of posts on it. Lots of brilliance there (both on the part of the show and Bady).
Yep you’re going to love it… but we can’t talk too much about it until you’ve seen a few more seasons!
Although, our friend chabert turns out to be a Wire naysayer: http://traxus4420.wordpress.com/2009/05/03/culture-so-90s/#comments
Thanks friends. I totally wasted today watching episodes. I think I’m on line episode 7 or 8 now. I have a nasty cold so this is sort of acceptable as convalescent behavior but once I get better it’s going to be frustrating trying to get work done when all I want to do is what this show. (I got seasons 1-3 as a gift from a friend recently.)
That doesn’t surprise me about notre ame le Colonel. She’s great but we disagree on cultural consumables.
take care,
Nate
Ah yes, early stages of The Wire addiction. It’s better to just get it over with as quickly as you can, I find.
As for “relative autonomy,” you may have already advanced behind your original (I think) quite on point observations, but it seems worth pointing out that it isn’t just any old kind of low level autonomy from centralized authority, but Simon’s very specific sense that Baltimore is nowadays defined by a breakdown of the social contract. In other words, people like McNulty always seem to go rogue in response to the center’s failure to hold, a narrative of the original sin of neoliberalism that I’m still trying to parse out. have fun!
hi Aaron,
Thanks for the comments. I’d like to hear more of your take on this. (And yeah, I’m totally bingeing, I’ve watched up through the 2nd episode of season 2 I think. It’s really a great show, and a great way to both convalesce and to decompress.) Re: relative autonomy, what you say makes sense. One of the things I’ve been thinking about and reading just a bit about (this is one of my summer projects) is that in treating the state in close detail the unity of interests often supposed gets really fuzzy. The state, like most objects of analysis, becomes, at a certain level of analytical magnification, characterized by differences and conflicts between different actors composing the whole. I’m still committed to a view of an over all unity, even if I can’t work out how this all plays out (in the sense of integrating different registers of analysis). The Wire struck me (among many other reasons) because the portrayal of law enforcement agencies in the show makes that point clear in a fictional setting. One example of the unity of state actors, though, is in the response when the female officer gets shot after going undercover (her name escapes me just now). I think there’s similar dynamics within the group in season 1 – up and down the chain of command in different sections of the police, and in the team composed by those chains of command, but everyone comes together when when the old alcoholic office gets punched.
cheers,
Nate
Moments from The Wire in haiku, 1.
Dredge canal, create jobs;
Socialist realist stained glass;
Kima’s at a desk.
Moments from The Wire in haiku, 2.
‘Nulty find body.
Docker starts day with Stooges tape.
Major swears in church.
Untitled self-reflexive haiku, 1.
I would like to write
smarter haikus, expressing
thoughts about The Wire.
Moments from The Wire in haiku, 3.
shipping container
with gruesome surprise cargo:
thirteen dead bodies.
Moments from The Wire in haiku, 4.
agencies shuffle,
dodging work. lazy police:
a recurrent theme.
Untitled self-reflexive haiku, 2.
Writing dumb haikus,
Watching The Wire. My cute dog
sleeping next to me.
moments from The Wire in haiku, 5.
McNulty and Bunk,
eat crab dinner together,
sloppy, disgusting.
Hey Nate,
Yeah I think you’re right about the portrayal of the capitalist state – in one sense this is really the Wire’s main point. I’ve seen left-liberal commentators trying to argue that it has a conservative worldview because of its pessimism about ‘the government’ but that’s obviously rubbish. It shows the state as – in Poulantzas’s terms – ‘a fissiparous unity’, which is kind of what you said too. It becomes more and more clear in later seasons when electoral politics come into the centre.
I’m just starting season 2 episode 3, probly won’t get through episode 4 before bed (I really have stuff I need to do instead of diving headfirst into hours and hours of TV but this is really compelling viewing; I think the writing is quite good and the acting as well, like the scene in season 1 when Bunk and McNulty are visiting an old crime scene and there’s 30 seconds of dialog that’s almost literally just the word ‘fuck’ over and over again).
Poulantzas is on my summer list, along with Milliband and Pashukanis – all about law and the state for a while. I can’t speak to the show enough yet but re: reality, I do think the systemic dynamic (this feels overblown, but I want to say the state’s tendential unity within relative autonomy, from itself and from capital) is really, really important. It’s like actually existing capitalism understood narrowly (the economy in a narrow definition of economy) – at any given level it’s characterized by disunity and conflict but those levels still have a systemic dynamic, which is what lets us talk about them as being components of elements we describe in a higher level or more abstract register (and not just because we’re sloppy or making mistakes, the higher register is accurate – I mean, it’s inherently inaccurate). Conflict within firms is compatible with firms acting in relation to other firms; likewise with markets defined industrially, nationally, whatever, and this runs all the way up to capitalist social relations in general. Sorry if this obvious to you Mike, I’m doing the typing equivalent of thinking out loud.
I’m interested to see what comes of the union vs cops motif. My initial reactions have been mixed – corrupt union local felt a bit cliche but then there’s a hint that it’s to keep jobs or create jobs (dirty dealing to fund lobbying to dredge the canal to bring in more shipping), which suggests a sympathetic portrayal, and they’re set up against a totally unlikable and useless person from the police hierarchy suggesting that we’re supposed to empathize with them to some degree. I do like that season two has some antagonists who aren’t black (other than the jewish lawyer), nice of them to share the wealth of bad guy-ness a bit more.
I also really like the images of industry, the port and all that, cool to see that on TV.
cheers,
Nate
with respect to Kima’s getting shot, I addressed it a little bit here: more or less along the lines you said.
Have fun with season two.
Great material here. After watching season 1 over a few weeks last year, I just discovered a Blockbuster nearby that has season 2 and I’m on the first disc. … What I was struck by with the the opening of the season two is the connections with neo-liberalism, deindustrialization and the decline of the US. Ultimately these lead to a weakening of institutions such as the economy, the political system and the police forces- I know this sounds typical, but bear with me- in the sense that they no longer work in the way that they are ‘supposed to,’ institutional power wanes while other forces emerge to fill their place; and while established/legal/traditional avenues of making things work are no longer effective, each set of players turns to whatever means available to advance their worsening situation. I remember reading an interview with the writer that called a fighter of ‘lost wars’ such as being a solider in Vietnam or a cop in the drug war.
Thanks Adam. This conversation is making me want to read about the history of Baltimore, among other things.
I’m not sure about the link between neoliberalism and institutions, at least the police anyway. I don’t know enough about neoliberalism, policing, or policing prior to neoliberalism. It seems to me that the institutional dynamics the show criticizes aren’t limited to neoliberalism. Clearly de-industrialization is a huge factor, along w/ post WWII housing policy, and I’d argue that neoliberal social policy is a huge part of the urban situation that the cops are trying to police, I;m just not sure about the effects of neoliberalism on the police beyond as part of what the cops are assigned to police.
take care,
Nate
ps – let me know are you get into season two.
Hey David Harvey has an essay on Baltimore in Spaces of Capital… you can find it online (but let me know if you can’t).
I’m not a naysayer! I don’t deny it is television. I just don’t think that one’s approval of what one perceives to be it’s posture regarding state employees’ relations to one another accounts for the pleasure viewers derive from watching over fifty hours of simulations of almost unrelieved anxiety, humiliation, suffering, torture, maiming and killing of fictional characters, or for the sensation of being addicted to them.
hi Colonel,
Fair enough. I can also say that I’m uneasy about race in the show, and am uncomfortable with sympathetic depictions of police…
take care,
Nate