BENJAMIN BAS

In a book I was reading, I came across an interesting concept that I think deserves highlighting. In the book Anti-oculus a philosophy of escape from Acid Horizon the concept of Thermostatic Governance is introduced. 

What we usually describe as a “boiling point” in everyday usage, in a household kettle or heating water on a stove, is hardly dangerous in and of itself. This is because reaching of a boiling point is not yet a boiling-over. The heat we generate poses little threat or disruption to the workings of the household and its appliances, so long as there is an act of intervention; a management of the heated matter that neutralizes its destructive potential. Such an intervention must be made before control over the energized flows, before the bubbling violence of the body of water, is lost.

They conjure up this regulated system of a kettle, where a body of water can never boil over into chaos. It can heat up to its boiling point, but when it reaches that point, the heating element switches off and the body of water remains contained by its limits. Its boundaries can only be approached, but at the moment where these boundaries might start to break down the system makes sure that they remain. 

I think we can think of many moments in the past year within our society where we found ourselves at such a boiling point. Where the way society functioned, the way our leaders reacted to world historic events, made the social body of citizens heat up towards a point where it threatened to break down our system of government. Take for example our leader’s actions (or better said lack thereof) towards the Israeli occupation, systematic oppression and even genocidal behaviour against Palestine. Despite being a representation of Dutch citizens, they refuse to listen to them. Mass protests ensued, the biggest ones we have seen in years, more than we have seen in years, but this all changed nothing. There is enough heat, people are angry, so why does it not boil over? Why doesn’t it break down anything?

The way governmental bodies deal with social unrest in this country can be compared to the system of a water boiler we described earlier. The water boiler is a system of control, it regulates all that the body of water can do within its system. We shall call this thermostatic governance. 

Thermostasis is the maintenance of a certain desired temperature by the regulation of heat flows through a body, e.g., the body of water within a radiator or a furnace. This control aims at the proper rhythm, and feedback allows for modifications to be made, such that things run in the proper order. Regulate the heat, discover the limit. Stay within the limit or just before its penultimate boundary, and the whole system should keep working for its intended function. 

Yet, there is a significant difference between the system of a water boiler and the system of thermostatic governance. Whereas the boiler loses some heat in the form of steam that escapes the system, thermostatic governance has found a way to make that steam part of the system. Whenever there is too much heat in society and there is a threat of boiling over, there are modes of blowing off steam set in place that reduce the heat and at the same time feed the system, thereby reproducing its boundaries. 

Thermostatic governance needs to keep its subjects moving, not just in any direction, but in the direction pre-determined by pathways of control. 

One of these pathways is our right to protest, it reproduces the idea that we have freedom in our society, freedom to be against anything and make it known on a public platform. This is a freedom that Deleuze would call the freedom of the highway. 

You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and “freely” without being confined while being perfectly controlled. This is our future.

Protests follow this same structure, they make it so that our heat and anger has a path it can move into, this path is a path within the structure of society, so every time we follow this path it strengthens the idea that society is working. When we see protests, we can not help but think ‘how glad am I that I live in a society where this is allowed’. This turns the protest into a reproduction of the boundaries of the system instead of a breaking down of its boundaries. 

When it comes to protests, this strategy is aptly named “containment” or “kettling”. Kettling represents an inversion of the traditional logics of anti-protest policing since the mid-1980’s; “instead of rapidly diffusing the protest, it sets up a bounded space for containing and potentially absorbing its energy.” The kettle is a response to decentralized disruptive forms of protest, which seek to create blockages in places where productive motion typically occurs (streets, highways, etc). The function of the kettle is to keep politically heated bodies from spreading out throughout the circuits and pathways and overloading them. The kettle contains protestors in order to create “zones of relative immobility to protect those urban circulations deemed productive”. In this, every policing of a protest reduces the police officer to a traffic cop. The kettling agents, the traffic cops, direct flows of productive activity around the contaminant zone, creating a zone of exception within its boundaries. They aim at producing an internal outside to the zone of control, which is itself controlled. “The geared up bodies of the police, crowd control fencing or steel barricades are used, but also flexible and lightweight shutoff devices made of plastic fabric,” creating internal walls within the city itself. 

Here you see how a protest is nothing but part of the infrastructure of western society, a channel or a pathway through which heat can escape without it disrupting anything that is of value. At the same time, it restores the belief in many people that our society is working. Although named kettling the only thing this produces is coldness, it cools down a heated up body and releases it back into society again. You see this in effect best when it fails, if the police antagonises you see the heat boil up again. Any display of aggression on the side of the police works as heating rod in the body of people, it is a display of the failure of a system Whenever a governing body has to display its power it loses it effectively, the power a governing body has, has to remain the threat of power. When it enacts this power on its citizens, there is nothing left to threaten with, and the structure falls apart. 

Heat needs room to dissipate, only then can it affectively break down the system it is contained in. Heat also needs community to jump over.

When large numbers of people directly confront the state and capital in its forms that bring them into a shared location for multiple days, they often develop practices for collectively procuring food, cooking, and shared eating; for sleeping arrangements in proximity to each other; for sharing child-rearing responsibilities and aiding disabled comrades. All work to share the work of care, to enable diverse participation, and to protect each other against harm. 

These communities are the circulations of heat that policing bodies try to disrupt by making them conform to their pre-determined pathways and rules. A protest should also follow its own map and with that build its own territory, it should do this strategically in order to generate as much heat as possible. Heat in the form of anger towards the governing bodies, heat in the form of communities caring for each other, and heat that breaks down the boundaries of the system that tries to keep us contained. Like a volcano, we need to boil over in order to terraform the land into something that has fertile soil where society can bloom. 

Sources:

Anti-occulus, A Philosophy of Escape – Acid Horizon (Repeater books, 2023)

Gilles deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control (the MIT Press, 1992)