Claimed by many to be the best thing ever seen on television, The Wire portrays an American urban life that epitomizes the systemic violence of the neoliberal state and capitalism. Through its portrayal of the prevalent systemic problems of various bureaucratic institutions that govern Americans’ lives, The Wire represents a pessimistic vision of contemporary America. The show comprises five seasons. The first and third seasons mainly portray the Major Crime Unit in the police department of Baltimore, and its target, the Barksdale organization. The second season focusses on Frank Sobotka's severely deteriorated harbor union and the Greek's smuggling organization, which brings drugs and other illegal cargo into Baltimore. The last two seasons introduce more diverse subjects: the Baltimore school system, Major Colvin's unauthorized legalization of drugs in his district, the city politics and elections, the Baltimore Sun newspaper and a new drug kingpin, Marlo Stanfield, who does not follow the code of the street.

Throughout the series, the members of the Major Crime Unit – Cedric Daniels, Detective Jimmy McNulty, Lester Freamon, Kima Greggs, Ellis Carver, Thomas Hauk, and Roland Pryzbylewski – are the most commonly recurring figures in the show; they construct most of the main narrative, while actively engaging with various street characters such as Stringer Bell, D'Angelo Barksdale, Bubbles, and Bodie Broadus. In addition, at least four other groups of people, such as Sobotka's harbor union, city politicians, Edward J. Tilghman Middle School's students and teachers, and reporters and editors on the Baltimore Sun, constitute substantial portions of the story of Baltimore rendered in the show, as they are interwoven with the city's police department.

The Wire is a subversive cop show that unveils the structural problems of the police and policing in contemporary America. And through its vivid rendering of the slums in Baltimore, The Wire also foregrounds social outcasts who turned into vagabonds, paupers, beggars, robbers, prostitutes, addicts, drug dealers, and smugglers partly from inclination, but in most cases under the force of neoliberal changes and circumstances. In portraying the police as one of the deteriorated bureaucratic institutions that fosters the production of outcasts, the show raises a strong sense of inequality and injustice in America. In doing so, it insistently emphasizes that everyone in the show is exposed to the same type of systemic violence and problems brought about by the neoliberal state and capitalism.

The Wire is one of the most widely discussed and taught TV shows in America. Many reviews and critical essays have contributed greatly to the show's somewhat cult status in academia, crystallized by William Julius Wilson and Anmol Chaddha's “Why We're Teaching ‘The Wire’ at Harvard.”Footnote ¹ And many of these reviews and essays have also explored The Wire in relation to the neoliberal state or neoliberalism. Among them, Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle's “Baltimore as World and Representation: Cognitive Mapping and Capitalism in The Wire” is one of the most lucid and balanced understandings of The Wire's representation of our world in which neoliberal or post-Fordist capitalism reigns.Footnote ² In this article, taking a cue from David Harvey's The Urban Experience,Footnote ³ Toscano and Kinkle argue that The Wire is “one of the most cogent attempts” to depict “social space in our historical moment” and “the totality of class struggle on a global scale.” After they aptly defend The Wire's often criticized pessimistic representation of America as “an inevitable aesthetic and epistemological barrier,” they contend that “The Wire could be seen as dramatizing the struggles of any critical or political ‘will to know’ in the current ideological and institutional dispensation.” Though I agree with and share many arguments made by Toscano and Kinkle, the way they render the main characters’ struggles as tragic and even a “tragic necessity,” which eventually leads us to “the tragic–existentialist view of the possibilities of political action,” makes me wonder whether we have accordingly assessed the political implications of the main characters’ struggles.Footnote ⁴ In an interview with Nick Hornby, the show's creator David Simon claims that “The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces” and “those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed.”Footnote ⁵ As Simon points out, every heroic character in The Wire fails to overcome the bleak reality of the neoliberal state and capitalism. However, in a certain sense, what matters to us is not their failures or tragedies. Rather, it is that in how they fail (and we fail) we can examine the political condition of our acts in the future.

In order to clarify the political implications of the main characters’ struggles, this paper examines these struggles in terms of Jacques Rancière's ideas of politics and equality, and contests them against contemporary critics of sovereignty and sovereign politics. This paper's exploration of The Wire unfolds in three steps. First, after briefly introducing Zygmunt Bauman's idea of wasted lives – the collateral casualties of capitalistic globalization – in relation to the eclipse of the Foucauldian police in the neoliberal state, it examines the show's depiction of a bleak urban landscape in terms of the police department. Second, it explores how bureaucracies in the show fail to salvage wasted lives: “the ‘excessive’ and ‘redundant’, that is the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be recognized or allowed to stay.”Footnote ⁶ This paper's final part discusses some morally complicated characters, such as Major Colvin and Detectives McNulty and Freamon. They are arguably the most heroic characters, who attempt to surmount the systemic problems of the department. However, in a way, they are all failed heroes in that they are helplessly entrapped in the system that they attempt to subvert. In examining their controversial police work – including their transgressions of law – this paper clarifies the political implications of these tragic police officers.

In Wasted Lives, Zygmunt Bauman explores the social–economic mechanism of modernity that separates the excluded from the included, while focussing on the production and disposal of “human waste” or “wasted lives.” His “wasted lives” refers to the marginalized of capitalistic globalization in which we can include not only Giorgio Agamben's Homo sacer, the “‘legitimate targets’ exempted from the protection of law,” but also “unintended and unplanned ‘collateral casualties’ of economic progress.” The production of wasted lives is accelerated by a shift from the welfare state to the police state, which happened in recent decades. Bauman argues, “The state washes its hands of the vulnerability and uncertainty arising from the logic (or illogicality) of the free market, now redefined as a private affair, a matter for individuals to deal with and cope with by the resources in their private possession.” And he further articulates,

The government in contemporary society finds its justification not in its intervention in the market or in social inequality, but in the discourse of security that particularly flourished since the attacks of 11 September. Contemporary global capitalism systemically produces wasted lives while devastating the previous social structures that supported many ordinary modes of living. Instead of preventing or restraining the production of wasted lives, the contemporary police state stigmatizes and often criminalizes overflowing populations, such as refugees and social outcasts. And through its war on the wasted lives, the state converts them into bare lives for the sake of its justification and legitimacy.

In this contemporary police state, we can note a divergence from Foucault's idea of modern government and police. In “Governmentality,” Foucault argues that in contrast to sovereignty, “government has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition.”Footnote ⁸ The police are the externalized power mechanism of governmentality. Thus, in “The Political Technology of Individuals,” Foucault argues that,

Following von Justi's idea of the police in Elements of Police, Foucault concludes that in modern society, “The aim of the police is the permanently increasing production of something new, which is supposed to foster the citizen's life and the state's strength.”Footnote ¹⁰

In contrast to Foucault, Agamben argues,

In short, if Foucault foregrounds the bureaucratic aspect of the police in modern nation-states, Agamben reveals the sovereign character of the police: “Whereas the sovereign is the one who, in proclaiming a state of emergency suspending the validity of the law, marks the point of indistinction between violence and law, the police operate in what amounts to a permanent ‘state of emergency’.” Agamben's idea of police is “contrary to common opinion, which sees the police as a purely administrative function for the execution of the law.”Footnote ¹² It is beyond the scope of this paper to argue whether the function of the police has drastically changed in contemporary society, or to compare Foucault's and Agamben's ideas of the police in detail. However, this juxtaposition of two different ideas of the police helps us understand how The Wire elaborates a certain eclipse of the Foucauldian police in contemporary America through the show's portrayal of the wasted lives in Baltimore, and how the main characters struggle with this decline.

David Simon, the show's creator, told Slate magazine that “Thematically, [The Wire is] about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings – all of us – are worthless. We are worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It's the triumph of capitalism.”Footnote ¹³ As Simon argues, The Wire represents the systemic violence of unfettered capitalism and the various social institutions’ complicit relations with the production of wasted lives. Its portrayal of various social strata of Baltimore reveals that they are consistently afflicted by the same type of systemic problem and violence without any viable solutions. And this show's representation of the systemic problems is paradigmatic, as Peter Dreier and John Atlas argue: “The Wire could have been about any other American city, facing the realities of the past decade – the loss of blue-collar union jobs, a shrinking tax base, racial segregation and the concentration of poverty, street gangs and the drug trade, and troubled school.”Footnote ¹⁴

The Baltimore Police Department (BPD) is at the center of the show's description of the systemic social problems as it represents the nexus of diverse social strata in this show. In a certain sense, BPD officers seem as omniscient and omnipresent as Foucault predicts, “the police apparently see to everything.”Footnote ¹⁵ However, the police department also exemplifies the decline of Foucault's idea of policing. Major Colvin instructs Sergeant Carver about the deterioration of police work:

According to the show's depiction of Baltimore, drug-related crime is prevalent, and the city's urban landscape is becoming increasingly devastated: “The shit out there. The city is worse than when I [Major Colvin] first came on”.Footnote ¹⁷ This brutal urban reality becomes more profound with the fall of the Twin Towers, the Franklin Terrace Towers in Season 3, as a part of the city's housing development project. The Franklin Terrace Towers, which “represent some of this city's most entrenched problems,” are the prime territory of the Barksdale crew.Footnote ¹⁸ Though it lacks the terrorist element, the fall of the Terrace Towers resonates with 11 September, in that the Towers reflect the locus of (illegal) capitalistic enterprise and the fierce aftershocks ripple through a community when they are fully destroyed.

After the fall of the petty-Twin Towers, the sense of injustice becomes more dominant, epitomized in many characters’ outcries: “the game is rigged.”Footnote ¹⁹ The post-Towers world of Marlo Stanfield gives way to a codeless community in which the value of the lives of the people who live in the socially stigmatized areas becomes more insignificant. When Bodie and Poot discover Little Kevin's dead body in a vacant house, Bodie cries, “Nigger [Stanfield] killing motherfuckers just 'cause he can, not 'cause they're snitch, not 'cause it's business, but 'cause this shit comes just natural to him … This nigger don't feel nothing.”Footnote ²⁰ Before the fall of the Towers, when Barksdale was the mayor of the streets, the rules and codes of the street, like the famous Sunday Truce, were recognized and respected. The drug organizations were the street version of bureaucratic systems that hold the wasted lives in ghettos. Corner boys, like Wallace and Poot, used to take care of homeless, parentless kids in an abandoned low-rise housing complex. Even in the most devastated social area, the idea of community was preserved in its own style: as Detective Moreland says, “As rough as that neighborhood could be, we had us a community. Nobody, no victim, who didn't matter. And now all we got is bodies, and predatory motherfuckers like you [Omar].”Footnote ²¹

However, as Wee-Bay Brice, the most trusted soldier in the Barksdale crew, claims, the world has changed:

In A New Paradigm for Understanding Today's World, Alain Touraine argues that today's globalization creates “the separation between economy and society – a separation that contains within it the destruction of the very idea of the society.”Footnote ²³ After the fall of the Towers in the show, all existing social relations wither as Marlo Stanfield, who represents the brutal force of capitalistic globalization, dominates the street. In this new world, the new drug kingpin, Marlo Stanfield, slaughters whoever stands in the way of his accumulating capital and territory, without any particular purposes, dreams, ideals, or causes. And the police department is too incompetent either to arrest Stanfield or to save the citizens of Baltimore.

Why is the police department in The Wire so dysfunctional? Some characters find that the systemic problems in the police department are insoluble because the War on Drugs, the very game they play, is ideologically absurd. In the first episode of the show, Detective Carver wryly observes, “Girl, you can't even call this shit a war” because “wars end.”Footnote ²⁴ “The Target” was first aired on 2 June 2002 in America. At that time, America was engaged in another holy war, the War on Terror, which by Carver's logic likewise cannot be called a war: terrorism never ends. On 19 December 2004, the final episode of the third season, “Mission Accomplished,” was aired. In this episode, the title of which echoes President Bush's famous victory speech on USS Abraham Lincoln in the previous year, Slim Charles, the Barksdale organization's chief enforcer, encourages his boss to fight against the Stanfield crew: “Don't matter who did what to who at this point. Fact is, we went to war, and now there ain't no going back. I mean, shit, it's what war is, you know? … If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie.” In this manner, while resonating with the contemporary atmosphere of the War on Terror, Carver's and Charles's argument poignantly indicates the absurd elements in America's two holy wars on general nouns.

In cross-referencing the two holy wars in various episodes, The Wire foregrounds that the two wars are absurd not only in their ideologies but also in their practices. In Season 4, a session on the Western District's patrol briefing takes an unexpected turn when an antiterrorism expert delivers an extended monologue on the importance of keeping an eye out for potential terrorists in the police's patrolling districts: “And for emergency procedures in the event of biochemical agents, you can refer to Appendix B.”Footnote ²⁵ The show's rendering of the antiterrorism expert's session shows that the War on Terror has little, if any, direct ideological and practical purchase on inner-city communities, such as dispersed black ghettos in Baltimore: “Some Al-Qaedas were up on Baltimore street, planning on blowing up the chicken joint. But Apex's crew jacked them up, took their camels and robes, buried their ass in Leakin Park.”Footnote ²⁶ In effect, as a national mode of governance grafted onto an urban locality, the War on Terror seems a total flop as it appears to resonate with few in the show, just like the War on Drugs. The threats of terrorism and drugs are real. However, according to The Wire, the federal government's official approaches or strategies for dealing with the threats are often unreal.

In The Wire, the police department is also dysfunctional because of the city's budget crisis. Some detectives, such as Bunk, McNulty, and Freamon, are eager to do what they call real police work or career cases, but their efforts are easily frustrated by deep cuts to the department budget. In contrast to the police work seen on CSI, the detectives in The Wire need to wait week after week to receive their lab reports from the staff-deprived crime lab: the police lab supervisor Ron Lowenthal complains, “We had cutbacks, you know that. We lost three of four trace examiners, lost half our clerical. The freezer went bad, we lost four months of blood samples. Did you know that? Four months of evidence and they still haven't replaced my damn icebox.”Footnote ²⁷ And they often struggle to receive permission to wiretap a phone not because of the controversial nature of wiretapping, but simply due to its high costs. Thus they struggle on the front line of America's “holy war” without any viable signs of victory. It is not surprising to hear many detectives complain, “someday I want to find out what it feels like to work for a real police department.”Footnote ²⁸

The police department is also eroded by city politics. It is often politically exploited by the city's mayors and politicians for the sake of their own careers. In Season 3, the police executives manipulate crime statistics to help in the reelection of the incumbent Mayor Royce in an election year. And an ambitious Baltimore City councilman Tommy Carcetti divulges this fact during a television debate show. To claim to the public that crimes are down in Baltimore, the mayor needs to show numbers, so policemen drive to the corner and cuff whoever they can, instead of chasing high-level criminals like Barksdale and Stringer Bell. This is what led Carcetti to run against the previous mayor, but ironically this is also what he maintains in order to be elected governor after he has become the city's mayor. His chief of staff, Michael Steintorf, puts pressure on the new police commissioner, Cedric Daniels:

What matters most in this politicized police department is numbers, not the quality of police work: as Roland Pryzbylewski explains, “Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear, you juke the stats and majors become colonels.”Footnote ³⁰ As a result of entangled system problems, the police department fails to secure the prosperity of the urban population in Baltimore and neglects the brutal urban landscape, which helps ensure that it will become a permanent living condition for the marginalized.

Richard Sennett's arguments on neoliberalism shed light on the systemic problems represented in The Wire. In The Culture of the New Capitalism, Sennett argues, “The goal for rulers today, as for radicals fifty years ago, is to take apart rigid bureaucracy.” Dismantling bureaucratic institutions and organizations foundational to modern states, the culture of neoliberalism claims that it promotes a free society of opportunity and competition, in which an individual can finally be free from bureaucracy's constraints: “The apostles of the new capitalism argue that their version of these three subjects – work, talent, consumption – adds up to more freedom in modern society, a fluid freedom, a ‘liquid modernity’ in the apt phrase of the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman.” However, the version of freedom provided by the new culture does not guarantee actual freedom to the majority of people in need: “Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary social conditions.”Footnote ³¹ Moreover, many of the majority are severely marginalized in the culture of neoliberalism. The stevedores in the harbor union and the numerous social outcasts in The Wire together epitomize those marginalized, ordinary Americans who agonize over the fact that in today's culture the value of people is much lower than in the past.

Sennett explores the culture of neoliberalism, focussing on three topics: bureaucracy, meritocracy, and craftsmanship. His principal claim is that American society has become a very unreliable and unstable community because of the destruction of bureaucracy and the demise of craftsmanship – Sennett suggests that we expand our idea of craftsmanship to a broader understanding of the enduring human capacity and desire to achieve better work for its own sake. The culture of neoliberalism brought about the collapse of public institutions, as is well demonstrated in The Wire's rendering of the police department and public school system. The major reason for this collapse, from Sennett's perspective, is that bureaucracy and craftsmanship are outweighed by the corporate culture of meritocracy across diverse social realms; in The Wire, the quality of police work or the craftsmanship of police officers is outweighed by the corporate culture of meritocracy, as epitomized by Rawls's and Sgt. Landsman's obsession with the department's clearance rate. Sennett claims, “The values of the new economy have become a reference point for how government thinks about dependence and self-management in health care and pensions, or again about the kind of skill the education system provides.”Footnote ³² In The Wire, “Market norms and corporate structures are replicated in every social sector – from the drug organizations and the police force through the schools and the newspapers.”Footnote ³³

In Urban Outcasts, Loïc Wacquant argues that market-oriented state policies “have aggravated, packed and trapped poor blacks at the bottom of the spatial order of the polarizing city.”Footnote ³⁴ In analyzing the ghettos of South Chicago and the Paris banlieue, which he calls the hyperghetto, Wacquant points out a transition from the welfare state to the neoliberal penal state that enabled the creation of those spaces while social services were reduced or eliminated. Similarly, Loretta Napoleoni argues,

And the people who occupy these criminalized urban areas are, in Bauman's terms, the collateral casualties of the socioeconomic change brought about by the neoliberal state and neoliberalism. The most advanced form of the contemporary state is that which requires the generation of new situations of insecurity to enforce its governance through the production of socially stigmatized people. The Wire repeatedly reflects this development, mainly through its rendering of the indifference and failure of the police to protect urban outcasts.

While emphasizing the effects of neoliberal public polices, Wacquant insinuates the possibility of a viable solution to this bleak reality through policy changes. However, The Wire's portrayal of Baltimore is more pessimistic than Wacquant's vision. In the show, everything repeats without change. A generation of corner boys disappears from the streets of Baltimore, but another generation very quickly comes up to replace it. A drug kingpin like Avon Barksdale is jailed but another big player like Marlo Stanfield immediately takes the throne. A corrupt commissioner, Ervin Burrell, is replaced by another incompetent police executive, Stan Valchek, who is only attuned to city politics and his personal interests. It is undeniable that detectives like McNulty and Freamon solve some career cases. However, in the end, everyday life remains unchanged in The Wire.

The systemic problems and violence perpetuate injustice and inequality in every social realm depicted in the show. The show does not reveal anything tangible by which the problem and the solution can be measured, and angry men, such as McNulty and Sobotka, do not really know how to react. Known as “an insubordinate little prick,” McNulty first brings the Barksdale case to the department as a sort of rebellion against incompetent and unintelligent police executives; he does not bring the Barksdale case for the sake of justice or great causes. This divorced detective, a college dropout, is somehow devoted to chasing drug kingpins while he is obsessed with sex, alcohol and anger. He is always so angry at the way he is situated in reality, so he becomes an unstoppable source of trouble. Bunk says to Jimmy, “You are no good for people. Damn everybody around you, Christ.”Footnote ³⁶ Freeman accuses McNulty of setting fire to everything he touches.Footnote ³⁷ In “Clarifications,” McNulty confesses to his partner, Bede, “I don't even know where the anger comes from. I don't know how to make it stop.”Footnote ³⁸

This pessimistic aspect of the show is criticized by Dreier and Atlas: “The Wire is the opposite of radical; it was hopeless and nihilistic. The city portrayed in The Wire is a dystopian nightmare, a web of oppression and social pathology that is impossible to escape.” They argue that “the show didn't even hint at the possibility that residents, if well organized and strategic, can push powerbrokers to change policies and institutions to make the city more humane and livable.” From this perspective, Dreier and Atlas conclude that “The Wire failed to offer viewers any understanding that the problems facing cities and the urban poor are solvable.”Footnote ³⁹

As Dreier and Atlas claim, The Wire does not provide us with any viable solution. However, the problems depicted in The Wire are not solvable through policy changes or civil activism, as they argue. Through Tommy Carcetti's political career, the show clarifies the point that policy changes or civil activism would not change the socioeconomic structures that have plummeted Baltimore into poverty and crime. In addition, the absence of an alternative or a vision for change is not where this show fails at all. Rather, it is the very reason why The Wire is so successful in exposing the bleak reality of contemporary America, while resonating with capitalistic globalization. In The Working Life, Joanne B. Ciulla argues that in the age of globalization, “Economists aren't concerned with the ghost in the machine; they have a more frightening specter: the global economy. This new ghost is unpredictable and illogical, yet it has had a strong influence on management behavior.” And as a result of this capricious economic environment,

In this business culture, “Frustrated unemployed workers don't always know who to blame or who to yell at. They can't blame managers or politicians, because nobody can control the global economy.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In Season 5, the Baltimore Sun executive editor James Whiting announces, “Seeking a balance in this new world, we're now faced with hard choices … We're quite simply going to have to find ways to do more with less.”Footnote ⁴¹ And City Desk Editor Augustus Haynes complains, “How come there's cut in the newsroom when the company's still profitable?”Footnote ⁴² In this new world, as Touraine argues, “The class struggle thus disappears not because relations between employers and wage-earners have become pacific, but because conflicts have been displaced from internal problems of production to the global strategies of transnational firms and financial networks.”Footnote ⁴³ In a Wall Street Journal essay, James Grant notes, “Through history, outrageous financial behavior has been met with outrage. But today Wall Street's damaging recklessness has been met with near-silence, from a too-tolerant populace.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Individual responsibility for economic crises tends to evaporate under capitalism. The systemic violence brought by transnational firms and financial networks is often (mis)understood by many ordinary citizens as an inevitable, neutral, and apolitical social driving force. As Perelman observes, “The capitalist has little choice but to compete aggressively or cease functioning as a capitalist. The result can be equally brutal, but the fault lies with the system, not the individual.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Eventually, the systemic violence brought by unfettered capitalism become transparent, although, as Barbara Ehrenreich argues, “Actual humans – often masked as financial institutions – did that,” referring to the 2007 credit crisis.Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus, on the one hand, this type of displacement of conflicts constitutes the impasse in which many main characters in The Wire feel trapped and powerless. On the other hand, it also perpetuates the prevalent sense of inequality and injustice in the show.

Jacques Rancière's idea of politics can provide insights into how The Wire criticizes this standstill of inequality and injustice. In Disagreement, Rancière argues that “politics … is that activity which turns on equality as its principle.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In “Staging Equality,” Peter Hallward writes, “Rancière's most fundamental assumption is that everyone thinks. Everyone shares equal powers of speech and thought, and this ‘equality is not a goal to be attained but a point of departure, a supposition to be maintained in all circumstances’.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus Rancière's idea of equality is an axiomatic presumption in that it is prior to any actual arrangements of inequality: “Equality, instead of being the result of a political process, must be conceived as the presupposition of those who act.”Footnote ⁴⁹

For Rancière, politics is essentially tied to aesthetics: “Before it is a matter of representative institutions, legal procedures or militant organizations, politics is a matter of building a stage and sustaining a spectacle or ‘show’.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In contrast to his idea of politics, Rancière defines the counterpolitical action as “the police.” And the police, for Rancière, signify what is commonly, in the journalistic parlance of our times, understood by the term “politics”:

From Rancière's perspective, on the one hand, the police reaffirm that there are only existing parts of society and that each of them has been given its due share. On the other hand, politics claims the opposite, that there is something wrong in the existing account of society and that there is a part in society for “those who have no part.”Footnote ⁵² The order of the police consists precisely in the denial of the existence of any such part, in rendering “those who have no part” invisible and therefore nonexistent.

In Rancière's politics, the disruptive enactment of equality implies a new division of the sensible against the regime of “division and boundaries that define, among other things, what is visible and audible within a particular aesthetic–political regime.”Footnote ⁵³ In The Politics of Aesthetics, Rancière argues, “The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Through the claim of equality, which is an event and a process of political subjectivization, the marginalized who are invisible in the previous aesthetic coordinates can become visible:

From Rancière's perspective, The Wire is a theatre of politics in which the axiomatic claims of equality make sensible the prevalent inequality and injustice through the show's foregrounding of the excluded wasted lives in Baltimore. It takes two strategies to make the claims of equality. First, its representation of Baltimore intersects the sensible part of the community and the insensible as it shows that everyone is equal and connected in the face of the systemic violence of corrupted bureaucratic systems and the culture of neoliberalism, regardless of their awareness. In doing so, it reveals and asserts the position of the excluded, or those Rancière names “those who have no part,” in the dominant distribution system of the sensible. Second, the show creates some controversial, angry characters who practice Rancière's axiomatic conception of equality for the sake of “those who have no part.”

As Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle point out, the police department and criminal organizations are depicted as structurally similar and highly interconnected:

The show's juxtaposition of “the organization problems of the city police department with those of the powerful drug gang controlling trafficking in the city's west sides slums” reveals that the heads of “both organizations, official and criminal, wrestle with similar management and personal issues, and resolve them with similarly cold self-interest.”Footnote ⁵⁷ And each demands similar compromises from the individuals caught up within their bureaucratic organizations. In addition, each season, a new wiretap allows the narrative to unveil the ways that the legal and illegal sides are tied to each other. The police department and criminal organizations are connected not just by wires, but by flows of power and money. As Detective Freamon remarks, “The truth is, those guys [the Barksdale crew] had money going everywhere, investments, political donations, consulting fees.”Footnote ⁵⁸

The drug organizations also act as a model for unfettered capitalism. In “Stringer Bell's Lament,” Jason Read argues,

Everyone in the show is the victim of the same systemic violence of unfettered capitalism, which, seemingly, nobody can control. In this world of inequality and injustice brought about by neoliberalism, the show's rendering of main characters emphasizes the interconnectedness of the people who seemingly belong to totally different realms in the dominant regime of the sensible. In doing so, the show asserts the equality of the excluded with the included.

The city of Baltimore is divided along lines of race, class, power, capital, and legality. Though the delimitation and segregation of the people in Baltimore seem insurmountable, the show's rendering of the city reveals that the lines of division are actually very porous. There are many lines that cross the city, but there are also many dialogues integrating the city, such as those seen in the relation between Omar and Detective Bunk, of Prop Joe and Commissioner Burrell, of Namond and Senator Davis, and of Bell and Major Colvin. Before being swallowed up in the darkness of the ghetto, a homeless drug addict, Bubbles, retorts to McNulty: “Thin line between heaven and here.”Footnote ⁶⁰ His remark ironically foreshadows Deputy Commissioner Burrell's comment at a fundraiser party: “In this state, it's a thin line between campaign posters and photo arrays.”Footnote ⁶¹ Bubble's dark alley and Burrell's bright party hall: the contrast of these two spaces appears an insuperable division, which segregates and delimits the black ghettos.

However, these types of division are reconfigured, as the show unveils that the main characters are all connected and all from the same community, though they might not realize it, through their sharing of speech lines. Known as “a predatory motherfucker” who only robs drug dealers, Omar Little helps Detective Bunk solve a couple of murder cases. It turns out that they went to the same high school; Bunk was a few years ahead of Omar. Omar might be the most notorious crime figure but he has his own principles: no civilians hurt, only drug dealers. And Bunk remarks, “a man must have a code.”Footnote ⁶² This line is repeated exactly by Omar when he is falsely accused of killing a taxpayer.Footnote ⁶³ The Eastside drug mogul, Prop Joe, also went to the same high school back in the day with Commissioner Ervin Burrell: “Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, Ervin was a year before me at Dunbar. He was in the Glee Club.”Footnote ⁶⁴ When Stringer Bell, the most business-attuned street figure, is killed by Omar and Brother Mouzone at the end of Season 3, his last words are “Get on with it, Motherfucker.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In the same episode, Colvin is humiliated and degraded in his last Comp-Stat meeting at the Baltimore Police Department. His last remark as a police officer is also “Get on with it, Motherfucker.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Senator Clary Davis and corner boy Namond likewise share a sentence: “I'll take any motherfucker's money if he gives it to me.”Footnote ⁶⁷ A US senator's moral consciousness is on the same level as a corner boy's. All the cross-references of objects, dialogues, and events emphasize the interconnection of the main characters in the show: they are all equal, and they are all from the same community. While depicting how this community is crushed and dilapidated under the influence of the culture of neoliberalism, the show also evokes that awareness of the connectivity of all the characters.

This evocation of the connectivity is a certain act of redrawing the dominant regime of the sensible. In doing so, it brings about a redistribution of the sensible, and this enactment of redistribution is dissent – what Jacques Rancière defines as “the manifestation of a distance of the sensible from itself.”Footnote ⁶⁸ By sharing various lines of speech, Bell, Omar, Namond, and Prop Joe, alienated and distanced from the dominant regime in reality, expose their presences in the world. Revealing their connectivity to the community is an act of reconfiguring the sensible of the community. And at the same time it creates the voice of dissent, which accuses the sensible world of ineluctable dissolution and vanity; as Deputy Commissioner Ervin Burrell admits, “You're not wrong, Lieutenant [Daniels]. In this state, there's a thin line between campaign posters and photo arrays.”Footnote ⁶⁹

According to Rancière, being political means creating dissent, and thus unveiling the covered inequality in the dominant system. Equality is not bestowed but produced by interpersonal activity in a community: “Democracy is the community of sharing, in both senses of the term: membership in a single world which can only be expressed in adversarial terms, and a coming together which can only occur in conflict.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The community in The Wire, while seriously divided, nevertheless disguises inequality, as it allocates and dislocates the people in the community into socially stigmatized sectors, and then as it silences their voices as if they do not exist or belong to a totally different world. However, as the show progresses toward its end, it reveals that there is no gap to bridge between the legal side and the illegal side, no gap between races or classes. On the contrary, there is a likeness that can be acknowledged and put into play in the very production of claiming equality. In this sense, The Wire shows that “those who have no part” in the community claim their part in the realm of the sensible, while arousing the sense of dissent. This is the very act of blurring the boundary between those who have a part and those who have not.

The Wire represents the interconnectedness of diverse social realms in America: from the police to unions, from public school to drug-dealing gangs. And, in developing ethically complex characters struggling with systemic inequality and unfairness, “The Wire suggests that, since attempts to reform these institutions from within are doomed to failure, the only way to challenge failed systems is through independent action unsanctioned by these very institutions.”Footnote ⁷¹ Thus, disappointed by the deteriorated bureaucracy and the systemic violence of neoliberalism, heroic characters such as McNulty, Freamon, and Colvin become rogue cops who defy bureaucrats for their own causes. To overcome the systemic malfunctions of the police department, they all transgress laws and, eventually, are all forced to retire from police work. How can we understand their transgression of law? Should we advocate Major Colvin's experimentation with Hamsterdam, where drugs are semi-legalized? Should we approve of McNulty and Freamon's illegal use of wiretapping in cracking down on Marlo Stanfield's organization? If we approve the illegal wiretaps of Freamon, then do we take them as an unavoidable lesser evil that should be allowed in times of emergency?

Simply put, from Rancière's perspective, the angry characters observe inequality and make the claims of equality. As a result of their claims, what happens in The Wire entails a certain political subjectivization: “Those who have no name, who remain invisible and inaudible, can only penetrate the police order via a mode of subjectivization that transforms the aesthetic coordinates of the community by implementing the universal presupposition of politics: we are all equal.”Footnote ⁷² The angry characters’ political commitment turns them into rogue cops. Instead of following and confirming social delimitation and legitimization as police, they subvert the police's regime of distribution and legitimization through their transgression of law. By depicting rogue cops who subvert the regime of the police, The Wire transforms the realm of the police into the politics of equality.

Frustrated by the unchanging reality in his district, Major Colvin transforms the abandoned houses into de facto legalized areas for drug trafficking:

His secret project is eventually named Hamsterdam by the street-drug people. The Hamsterdam project makes significant progress in the Western District, salvaging the shattered district with a 14 percent reduction in crime. Colvin's subversive experiment is born out of frustration with the shambles and hypocrisy of the War on Drugs and his personal wish to do something, however radical, that might actually break the standstill and improve the living conditions of the people in the stigmatized areas: “But I'm just trying to save what's left of my district any way I can, if I can.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In a certain sense, Colvin's police work can be understood to revisit Foucault's idea of policing, based on the microphysics of power between the population and institutions. However, as he subverts the established order of legitimization, more importantly, Colvin draws a new line of the sensible that brings “those who have no part” into a visible realm. The city's wasted lives, those banished into the darkness of abandoned housing projects, finally become visible in the three zones of Hamsterdam. This is the politico-aesthetic function of Colvin's Hamsterdam, though he might not realize it: as the Deacon observes, “No offense, but you're like the blind man and the elephant. It's a lot bigger than what you got your hand on” (“Moral Midgetry”).

In Season 5, frustrated by new Mayor Carcetti's forgotten promises about the reform of the department, McNulty and Freamon manipulate crime scenes to create a fictional serial killer, who receives nationwide media attention and forces City Hall to provide McNulty with a sort of carte blanche. And they use the money from City Hall to fund a case against the Stanfield crew responsible for the slayings in the vacant row houses a year earlier. The pitcher goes once too often to the well and is broken at last. Because of this fraud, McNulty and Freamon are eventually forced to retire, although this fictional homeless serial killer case makes it possible to disintegrate the Stanfield crew.

Colvin, McNulty and Freamon: they all transgress the law, which delegates sovereign violence to them. Their transgression is a revolt of petty sovereigns. Although violence is conducted in the name of the sovereign state, it is at the micro-level that sovereign subjects or petty sovereigns come to decide upon whom violence is to be inflicted. In Homo Sacer, Agamben highlights the sovereign character of the police:

According to Agamben, the local decisions and violence are committed by petty sovereigns who decide on a case-by-case basis which people will be detained. As they decide which case is legitimate, McNulty and Freamon are petty sovereigns who decide the legal and illegal in their localities. They illegally wiretap the cell phones of the Stanfield crew, whom they define as the legitimate target. In “The Dickensian Aspect,” Freamon solemnly narrates, “I've reached a point, Detective Sydnor, where I no longer have the time or patience left to address myself to the needs of the system within which we work. I'm tired.” He continues,

Such petty sovereigns as McNulty and Freamon are delegated sovereign power on the condition that they follow the chain of command. However, these petty sovereigns revolt against the chain of command: “Fuck the bosses.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Neither the police department nor City Hall can control those subversive police officers, though they can penalize them after the fact. Their acts of transgression are a political action against the police, which is, from Rancière's perspective, a system of a certain distribution of the sensible that precludes the emergence of politics. McNulty and Freamon use their prerogatory power to draw a new line of the sensible, to make the claim of equality for the sake of the bodies found in the row houses:

The bodies found in the row houses are wasted lives, those who have no part in the community. The two rogue detectives’ commitment to illegal wiretapping makes invisible, wasted lives visible. Through their illegal investigation, they enact and participate in the process of reconstructing the distribution of the sensible.

Angry and frustrated characters such as Colvin, McNulty, and Freamon observe inequality, they unveil inequality, and they take part in their own fight against inequality in order to claim the equality of the wasted lives. And all of them, equally, fail again and again. However, the show's demonstration of the failures is also a way of claiming the equality of the wasted lives. Such wasted lives have no part in the community, they are segregated and ghettoized, and they eventually become invisible. Through its rendering of this bleak reality, The Wire represents the fundamental claim of their equality. The show's most exceptional police officers, Detectives Jimmy McNulty and Lester Freamon, find their initiative and talent punished at almost every turn. In a way, the police department's response to them is natural in that what they attempt to achieve is to subvert the established division of the sensible: the very regime protected by the police. Their transgressions, participation or commitment in reality are polemic reactions to inequality, to say the least, compared to the Baltimore police department's upper echelons, who are determined only to advance their own careers and sustain the status quo.

In a certain sense, the show portrays McNulty and Freamon as righteous because they sacrifice themselves for the sake of great ideals they believe to be just. Lester and McNulty compromise the legality of their police work for the sake of what they believe is better police work. However, in The Wire, many detectives and prosecutors also compromise the application of the law for the sake of greater causes or better outcomes that, they believe, will be of greater benefit; they are always ready to negotiate with middle-level drug dealers to catch the drug kingpin, though it hardly ever happens. In addition, incompetent police executives and politicians also wield the law for their version of good police work. In the context of such pervasive legal compromise, how can a person's compromise or transgression of the law be justified? Can we advocate the petty sovereigns’ revolt? Are they suggesting to us a way of resistance against the systemic problems and violence brought by unfettered capitalism? As Judith Butler argues in Precarious Life, petty sovereigns’ power is, in essence, rogue power without legitimacy:

Freamon's and McNulty's transgressions of the law seems somewhat justifiable because they pursue a selfless, righteous cause, and because the Stanfield crew epitomizes terroristic criminality. However, the show never fully endorses their transgression of the law.

The lawless, rogue power is intrinsic in the police work of Freamon and McNulty. Notable here is McNulty's account of the power of the patroling officer:

Enforcement of the law depends on the personality of the police officer on the street, as it depends on the personality of the dictator or sovereign in the state of exception. The police officer can wield the application of the law as he or she pleases on the street, as McNulty elucidates in his conversation with Baker. McNulty's remark insinuates that the transgressions of the petty sovereigns in The Wire are also bound to sovereign politics – the logic and reasoning of the sovereign who decides the state of exception. In other words, the petty sovereigns’ revolt cannot evade the vicious circle of sovereign politics. In effect, they follow the same logic and reasoning of the sovereign, and this is the fundamental reason why their pursuit to overcome the systemic problems cannot but fail in the end, because they cannot offer a solution, alternative, or answer.

In the last episode of the show, everything seems to repeat itself. The sun rises but also sets. The camera shows the various aspects of the city without narration or music. It captures everyday life in the city, ranging from early morning traffic to a late-night harbor scene. The show emphasizes a certain repetition of the reality; we see Sergeant Carver succeed Daniels as lieutenant, and Sydnor become another insubordinate McNulty, talking with Judge Phelan to backstab superiors, and the various forms of drug trafficking on the streets continue unchecked. Closure of a career case does not really bring any changes into the life described in the show. All these scenes at the end of the series seem to indicate that the problematic life we witness in The Wire will continue, though the show will end soon. The game will never end: as Slim Charles says, “Game's the same, just got more fierce.”Footnote ⁸¹ According to The Wire, this is the bleak reality of contemporary America, one in which everyone is implicated, and one in which the claims of equality are more than urgent. Several of the main characters approach this call for equality in their respective ways. However, such heroic individuals all eventually fail to bring about any change. They do not know the answer to their bleak reality, devastated by unfettered capitalism. However, at least they know that “whatever it is, it can't be a lie” as Major Colvin points out in “Hamsterdam.”

Through its vivid description of the wasted lives in Baltimore, the show raises a sense of inequality and injustice. This revelation is a political act of dissensus. In the show, however, dissensus does not really bring about any real change. As nobody knows what follows dissent, we do not know how to overcome the bleak reality perpetuated by unfettered capitalism. In a town hall meeting in his district, Major Colvin admits,

According to The Wire, the most we can know is that we don't know the answer.