Public Order and the Internal Security Apparatus: Affective Tension Monitoring as Police Epistemology¹

Farmer develops the concept of the civil order to help understand the function of criminal law, but civil order is a particularly capacious concept. In this article I use it to frame the field of public order and the internal security apparatus. The internal security apparatus names those elements of the state which ensure a docile populace. This article suggests that internal security should be considered as an affective apparatus, arguing that at its core is the need to understand and manage the affective life of the populace. To show how this operates, the article develops a genealogy of the technique of ‘tension monitoring’ in Britain. The article argues that tension monitoring is a particular form of ‘police epistemology’ within the internal security apparatus, one which is oriented around resonance rather than veracity; and which produces the collective subjects of ‘community’ and ‘the populace’, as the objects of its interventions.