The Politics of HBO's The Wire

Everything is Connected

Shirin Deylami, Jonathan Havercroft, Shirin Deylami, Jonathan Havercroft

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415791168
• eBook ISBN: 9781136026003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This innovative new work suggests that The Wire reflects, not simply a cultural take on contemporary America, but a structural critique of the conditions of late-modernity and global capitalism. As such, it is a visual text worth investigating and exploring for its nuanced examination of power, difference and inequality.

Deylami & Havercroft bring together nine essays addressing issues of interest to a range of academic fields in order to engage with this important cultural intervention that has transfixed audiences and sparked debate within the social scientific community. While the TV show is primarily focused upon the urban politics of Baltimore, the contributors to this volume read Baltimore as a global city. That is, they argue that the relations between race, class, power, and violence that the series examines only make sense if we understand that inner city Baltimore is a node in a larger global network of violence and economic inequality. The book is divided into three interrelated sections focusing on systemic and cultural violence, the rise and decline of national and state formations, and the dysfunctional and destructive forces of global capitalism.

Throughout the series the relation of the urban to the global is constantly being explored. This innovative new volume explains clearly how The Wire portrays this interaction, and what this representation can show social scientists interested in race, neo-liberal processes of globalization, criminality, gender, violence and surveillance.

Part I

Building states, crumbling nations

1 “It can’t be a lie”

The Wire as breaching experiment

Joshua Page and Joe Soss

The five seasons of The Wire are widely recognized as a landmark event in the history of media efforts to portray life in America’s poor, racially segregated communities. The show was especially momentous for scholars, such as us, who study urban poverty and the various ways authorities work to manage its problems and populations. Here, finally, was a dramatic depiction of the world we knew through our research and tried to convey in our teaching and public engagement. Here, finally, was a nuanced, humane account of the lives and lived realities – of cops and drug dealers and teachers and addicts and students and parents and more – that intersect and shape one another in the most marginalized neighborhoods of the nation’s cities. Here, finally, was a wildly popular, critically acclaimed, nationally televised cry of dissent from the “thriving cultural industry of fear of the poor, led by such television programs as America’s Most Wanted and Cops.”¹

Even more than most documentaries, The Wire offers a realistic depiction of life inside the “hyperghetto,” a social space defined by stark racial segregation, severely diminished jobs and social services, inadequate schools, rampant poverty, open-air drug markets, widespread housing foreclosures, and pervasive depression and dilapidation.² From the show’s inception, this realism has been a central reason for its appeal to scholars in our field. The Wire portrays in vivid detail, not just the social facts of collective life that we study, but also the daily struggles, failures, and, in some cases, successes of people who live and work in the hyperghetto.

Realism, however, is only part of the attraction. Social scientists have cheered The Wire as well for its ability to dramatize how individuals are shaped, in powerful but far from deterministic ways, by the social and institutional environments they inhabit. In the US today, poverty and related “social problems” are all too frequently understood as products of individuals’ bad choices and moral failings.³ The Wire, as Ammol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson rightly argue, “effectively undermines such views by showing how decisions people make are profoundly influenced by their environment and social circumstances.”⁴ Crucially, The Wire does not depict this dynamic in a way that isolates the poor or suggests they are uniquely susceptible to structural forces. It draws police, politicians, union bosses, and journalists into the same frame, showing how individual agency gets shaped and structured across a broad spectrum of positions in the social field.

Characters in the series are not automatons (or “social dupes,” to borrow from Harold Garfinkel⁵), unwittingly manipulated by institutional forces. They are thinking and feeling individuals who confront and make real choices, however consciously or unconsciously. Some even choose to buck the tide. Throughout the series, however, viewers are forced to confront the far-reaching ways that institutions and social circumstances condition individuals’ decisions. In an American culture overrun with paeans to rugged individualism, The Wire stands out as a rare and forceful proclamation of the dictum that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves.”⁶

As it situates individuals in this manner, The Wire shines a particularly bright light on the nature and consequences of public policy. Public policy figures centrally in the show as an exercise of authority thoroughly shaped and suffused by power. Policies are used as tools to enrich and deprive; they are invested with alternative cultural meanings by contending groups. Perhaps above all, policies are revealed as creative forces that can produce and harden social structures, remake organizations, and redefine the institutional conditions of people’s lives.

The choices we make about public policies have profound consequences for individuals, families, groups, and organizations. Across the series, viewers confront this reality in many guises – perhaps most poignantly in season 4’s exploration of the education system. Without question, however, the policy at the heart of The Wire is the “War on Drugs.”

When it began in the 1970s, the drug war was a set of pronouncements, targets, goals, and techniques. More than four decades later, the policy has produced durable structures that shape law enforcement operations, community life, and government priorities. The journey over these forty-plus years has exhibited many of the dynamics emphasized by social scientists who adopt “policy-centered” and “policy feedback” approaches to the study of politics.⁷ Tough new drug policies and related changes in the criminal justice field quickly took on a life of their own, setting a number of mutually reinforcing dynamics in motion. Policing and social welfare organizations were assimilated into the new agenda, and forced to adapt their core operations to its priorities. As drug felonies and incarceration rates skyrocketed, states encountered budgetary crises that put intense pressures on other social investments.⁸ Predictably, the new policies reconfigured interests, mobilizing and empowering organized groups – such as the Corrections Corporation of America and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) – with a stake in strengthening draconian drug policies as wellsprings of mass imprisonment.⁹ At the same time, the drug war branded vast numbers of disadvantaged young men with stigmatizing markers that undercut individual life chances and reconstructed social perceptions of both race and criminality.¹⁰ In these and other ways, the War on Drugs set powerful new political dynamics in motion that propelled a spiral of unforeseen and tragic social and economic costs.

In what follows, we suggest that The Wire is usefully understood as a “breaching experiment” in relation to the War on Drugs. In highlighting this concept, we invoke two of its classic usages in modern social science. The first is associated with James Scott’s influential analysis of power and discourse in Domination and the Arts of Resistance.¹¹ Countering the idea that ideological mystification leads subordinates to naturalize and internalize prevailing power relations, Scott shows how subordinates recognize many aspects of their domination and (outside the “public” earshot of dominants) carry on a “hidden transcript” of resistant communications and actions among themselves. Artistic and other cultural artifacts, Scott argues, sometimes allow these “hidden” discourses to be made public.¹² In the most forceful of such instances, “the frontier between the hidden and the public transcripts is decisively breached” through “a public refusal to reproduce hegemonic appearances.”¹³ Many of the realities depicted in The Wire are well known to those who live at the bottom of America’s social order. Most Americans, however, live their lives undisturbed by the knowledge that weaves its way through this hidden transcript. Against this backdrop, The Wire functioned as a kind of televisual “breaching experiment” in public discourse – a powerful “public refusal to reproduce hegemonic appearances.”

The second sense in which we use this term is indebted to Harold Garfinkel, who argued that powerful but invisible structures of social life can be revealed by actions that violate accepted social rules, norms, and understandings.¹⁴ For example, we may give no thought to how far one must stand back while waiting for a turn at the water fountain, yet become acutely aware of the norm if someone stands “too close” while we are drinking. Garfinkel argued that social breaches, even if they are contrived rather than “authentic,” can help us recognize and interrogate norms and patterned regularities (or structures) that normally remain implicit in social life. Violations of taken-for-granted norms (i.e., “common sense”) help us see more clearly the impersonal forces that shape our lives.

Transgressions of the drug war, large and small, recur throughout the five seasons of The Wire. Indeed, the very structure of the show’s first season – with its exposition of parallel dynamics in the Baltimore Police Department and Barksdale drug cartel – ruptures common sense understandings of the two sides of this “war” as moral and organizational opposites. Incidental scenes throughout the series use minor violations of expectations to reveal how the drug war has become a normative standard for thought and behavior among officials in law enforcement and government. Actors who transgress or question the policy appear deviant and are at times singled out for discipline. Frustrated and alienated in the wake of these events, the frontline agents of the War on Drugs soon return to puncturing its ideological veneer with sarcastic comments and subversive actions.

Breaches of this sort reach their apex in season 3, with Major Bunny Colvin’s radical subversion of the drug war through the establishment of a “free zone” called “Hamsterdam.”¹⁵ The Hamsterdam storyline is an arresting and provocative example of art’s power to present a counterfactual reality that reveals, through contrast, defining features of the prevailing social order. In a sense, though, it is only an outsized version of the show’s broader accomplishment: the use of fictional breaches in a compelling dramatic series to expose the logic of the drug war to viewers as a factual feature of American society – and as a product of human choice that can be questioned.

“Television-as-culture,” John Fiske writes, “is a crucial part of the social dynamics by which the social structure maintains itself” and a “bearer/provoker of meanings and pleasures” that can disrupt and alter these social structures.¹⁶ In what follows, we do not speculate on the ways viewing audiences have interpreted The Wire, nor do we advance claims about its actual social and political effects. By bringing The Wire into dialogue with social science, we seek instead to sharpen its character as a breaching experiment – to clarify the hidden realities it brings to public light, specify how they represent a “public refusal to reproduce hegemonic appearances,” and suggest how the show’s fictional transgressions of the drug war help to reveal the logics and consequences of a failed, destructive public policy.

A national crusade

Drug prohibitions, in one form or another, have been around in the United States since at least the 1800s. The country’s official commitment to a “War on Drugs,” however, is much more recent, dating back roughly to the early 1970s. The use and distribution of recreational drugs (with the notable exception of alcohol) were illegal in the preceding decades. Yet drug policy in the United States maintained a balanced posture that combined enforcement and treatment. In the decades after World War II, in fact, the federal budget for drug treatment increased at a greater rate than that for law enforcement.¹⁷ When Richard Nixon first used the term “war on drugs” in 1971, US public policy included many drug prohibitions yet still focused on treating addiction rather than punishing addicts.¹⁸

The hard punitive turn in US drug policy emerged as part of a broader conservative “law and order” agenda. As early as 1964, the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace showed (even in defeat) how a focus on moral decline and threats to authority could rally and unite religious, social, and racial conservatives. By the end of the 1960s, a coherent new narrative had emerged that identified civil rights social protest, civil disobe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction Everything is connected—Shirin S. Deylami and Jonathan Havercroft
• Part I Building states, crumbling nations
• Part II Neoliberalism, capitalist power, and social resistance
• Part III Precarious intersections
• Appendix: The Wire episode list
• Index