Passer À L’acte: Policing (in) the Office: Notes on Industry Standards and the Große polizeiausstellung of 1926

Abstract

In his Comparisons between European, Asian and Other Apparently Barbaric Governments (1762), Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi refers to public administration as Polizeiwissenschaft, the science of the police.² Justi wrote at the tail end of the so-called Polizeizeitalter (the era of the police), a time when the police—in the comprehensive sense of that word as essentially all of res politicae—and the (administration of) the state were one and the same.³ During that time, the term police described nothing more and nothing less than the (administration of) the state, hence the polis, itself, and the police took care of a vast array of things, from the maintenance of an army to the administration of justice and the management of external affairs. As a police publication early last century put it, “What was not explicitly entrusted to other agencies … belonged to it [the police, S.S.].”⁴

‘Voir sans être vu’ est l’un des adages de la non-communicabilité policière. Bien avant celui de l’anthropologue ou du sociologue, le regard jeté par l’enquêteur sur la societé est éminemment extérieur à celle-ci.

—Paul Virilio¹