11 Indirect Hostile Objects

That Police DON'T Want You To See

1. Cops are active objects

they arrest, detain, beat you

against which all action is forbidden (including fleeing from their action) and against which all action will be taken as purposeful (i.e. one cannot hit a cop as a human but only as a cop — only as an assault against the Law as such).

2. Cops are objects of force to guard capital

a cop is tautologically specified as “untouchable” by the same order of law that he* enforces, the same one that declares individual subjects to be no concern of the police

.

Because the declared rules of engagement have different conditions for those involved (for example, for you and an officer on the same street), an exchange between nominal equals is utterly impossible.

The possibility of a struggle, conversation, encounter, or discourse on terms that apply mutually to both parties is denied. The two cannot both be understood as subjects in the same register. They are incommensurable

.

* use “he” on purpose, because the gendered position of the police, even if an officer happens to be a woman, is distinctly male

3. Where does “Cops” come from

people don’t “become the cop that they are” through submission to the law. No, they do so through fully enacting everything about them that seems opposed to being cop, such that they come to adopt their proper position as the principle outside the law which guarantees that law.

Some false statement: “although the police is a general notion more than a local instance, it is nevertheless made up of “subjects” (individual cops) who, taken together, seem to make up a collective subject of sorts: an agency that acts with force upon the world and passes judgments on it, however disjointedly.”

4. A cop is a negated subject in two senses

as an expression of the law and as outside the sphere of reciprocal interaction with those to whom the law is applied.

5. Cops are not people.

cops can look and act just like real people.

This act of mimesis allows them to walk among us, to live in human spaces, and do amazing human tricks like speak or take selfies.

6. What is ‘selfie’

Selfies are the affectation of social commodity wherein commodity mirrors the social character of the product of labor, in this case, the self.

The triumvirate in a cop selfie fleshes out the assumed police authority in just a quick snap.

7. This cop took a selfie though

Sure, selfies lend a humanizing lens to cops, but anything requiring an external humanizing effort is not organically human. Is a motorcycle-riding circus bear a human? Is a dog walking on two legs and wearing sunglasses a human? What about a waterskiing squirrel?

8. Cops are comic objects.

they are objects involved in the depiction of things as worse than they are

The defense of law, with violence enacted on those who don’t follow it, backed by the claim that the one defending it is not legally or ethically subject to that same law, that it is the “others” who cause problems and require such a law to have to exist in the first place:

9. What then is the subject in a cop selfie,

…given that the commodity form or the corporeal extension of a cop? Trick question, cops cannot be subjects. Cops are active hostile objects used to protect capital, first and foremost.

Cop Selfies are illegitimate selfies complicit in the fetishism of violence by the guards of capitalism, maintained by the State with illegitimate authority.

If you’re still unsure of this, try challenging a capitalist notion and you’ll be met by a cop.

10. sup

actually think i’ll call all selfies featuring bare buff torso "cop selfies" bc instrumentalization of male power

11. This is the fetishism of commodities:

all value is created by labor and labor creates a product

the value of police labor is derived through utilizing the police uniform (badge, gun, baton, pepper spray, handcuffs, patrol car, sirens, apprehension; or the tools of production)

the uniform is the commodity as it mirrors the social character of the product of police labor—suppressing the agency of the majority working class by imposing the will of a minor ruling class

authority too, is expressed through compliant and submissive recognition of the uniform and the qualities imbued to its host

Smash the police state

Smash the cop selfie