Black people gotta lot a problems
But they don't mind throwing a brick
White people go to school
Where they teach you how to be thick
But they don't mind throwing a brick
White people go to school
Where they teach you how to be thick
An' everybody's doing
Just what they're told to
An' nobody wants
To go to jail!
White riot - I wanna riot
White riot - a riot of my own
White riot - I wanna riot
White riot - a riot of my own
All the power's in the hands
Of people rich enough to buy it
While we walk the street
Too chicken to even try it “
Just what they're told to
An' nobody wants
To go to jail!
White riot - I wanna riot
White riot - a riot of my own
White riot - I wanna riot
White riot - a riot of my own
All the power's in the hands
Of people rich enough to buy it
While we walk the street
Too chicken to even try it “
The Clash, White Riot
This
August in England, much of London and several other cities 'feral' youth-as the Daily Mail likes to refer
to them- rose up in what has subsequently been described as an “outburst of outrageous behaviour by the
criminal classes - individuals and families familiar with the justice system,
who haven't been changed by their past punishments” (Clark, September 2011). In
4 days of uprising the forces of order were generally unable to handle the
unrest and the very ability of the British government to maintain law and order
was called into question. French philosopher
Alain Badiou. in a recent seminar made the claim that we are currently
living in a time of riots, in which the crisis of capitalism we are currently
experiencing has brought upon “social impasse, poverty, and the growing feeling
that the system is not viable nor as magnificent as was previously said”
(Badiou, 2011). Added to this is the trend of governments who have openly
declared their loyalty to what David Harvey describes as the “Party of Wall
Street” or the various incarnations of finance capital across the globe (Havey,
2010:10-11). Governments from Greece to the United States have been eager to
facilitate the transfer of massive amounts of public wealth to the pockets of
the financial oligarchy (see 2008 recession).
The point has been made that the
latent criminality of the financial sector goes unpunished, while the
small scale looting of corporate businesses does not merit “phoney human rights
concerns” (Glover, August 2011). As a measure of this the total costs of damage
of the 2011 riots are estimated at 133 million pounds (Laville, Dodd and
Carter, 2011), while the estimated total loss of assets of the 2008 recession
are as a high as over 50 trillion dollars (Harvey, 2010:6). It seems then that
riots will become even more common across the globe as cuts kick in and the world
economy continues to struggle with the devastating consequences of this most
recent crisis of capitalism. In this essay I will attempt to read the 2011
Riots as a political action and more generally
attempt to sketch a theoretical account of the political nature of the
riot drawing on the work Alain Badiou and Jacues Ranciere in order to empathize
the 'agency and subjecthood' of the rioters'.
I will also be drawing from historical accounts of the British riot provided
by E.P. Thompson and Peter Linebaugh. Added to this I will argue that riots
fail to articulate themselves as events with sufficient capacity to establish
an alternative future. They are not events which one should express fidelity to
in the Badioun sense. Noting this one can attempt to understand the riot and
the rioters, without endorsing the riot a priori. as well as
understanding that there are obviously different kinds of riots and whether one
should or should not be supportive of a particular riot is contingent.
The Riot as an anti-political
phenomenon
Slovenian Hegelian provocateur Slavoj
Zizek in a recent essay published in the London Review of Books
maintained that the London riots failed to fit into the conventional Marxian
description of 'the revolutionary' subject and instead fitted better into
Hegel's articulation of 'rabble'. Those, according to Zizek's reading of Hegel,
who are located outside of organized social space, who are only capable of
expressing their discontent “through ‘irrational’ outbursts of destructive
violence – what Hegel called ‘abstract negativity’ (Zizek, 2011). Furthermore
he makes the claim that the London Riots were “a violent action demanding
nothing. In their desperate attempt to find meaning in the riots, the
sociologists and editorial-writers obfuscated the enigma the riots presented.”
(Zizek, 2011). In this essay I will attempt to argue against Zizek's framing of
the riots as an act of 'abstract negativity' and the mainstream discourse of
riots as a manifestation of latent criminality. Rather riots can be seen as
generally political acts. It is all too easy and too comfortable for theory to
reduce those who particpate in riots to
a feral mob of irrational energy, it in fact a manner to deny the agency of
what is commonly called by the punditorcacy the 'underclasses' or 'feral
youth'.
Defining the political
A definition of the political is
needed, before the question of the 'political' nature of riots can be put
forward. I will be drawing specifically on Badiou's and Ranciere's conception
of the political. Badiou defines the
political as “collective action, organized by certain principles, that aims to
unfold the consequences of a new possibility which is currently repressed by
the dominant order” (Badiou, 2008:3). In essence this definition seeks to
remove 'the political' from the domain of 'power' or the state and place it in
the form of collective action. Ranciere proposes an understanding of the
political that moves away from the concern of power. He contends that instead
of being though of in terms of power: “ Politics ought to be defined on its own
terms, as a mode of acting put into practice by a specific kind of subject and
deriving from a particular form of reason.”(Ranciere, 2001:1). According to Ranciere reducing politics to “the struggle to posses
power”, we reduce the possibilities of thinking politically and ultimately
create our own 'political constraints (Ranciere, 2001:1). Instead politics
begins with a paradoxical formulation ;
“politics is the ruling of equals, and the citizen is the one who part-takes
in ruling and being ruled” (Ranciere, 2001:2). Politics is not located within
the elite spaces of policy and power, rather politics belongs in the everyday
in the axiomatic assertion of the ability of the 'demos'(people) to be able
rule themselves. In this is an explicit denial of the notion that each person
has a set place in society (Ranciere, 2001:5). Contentiously Ranciere denies
the existence of politics as a clash of interest groups, in other words
classes. He rather contends that politics exists so long as 'the people' are
not identified nor reduced to any specific group in the form of class, race
etcc.. (Ranciere, 2001:8). This point is contentious and I would argue wrong,
but what I take here from Ranciere's understanding of politics is the notion of
equality in the ability of the people to both rule and 'be-ruled'. Politics is
then to use Badiou collective action trying to bring about social change and,
using Ranciere politics is when the people present agency in their ability to
both 'rule and be ruled', from this we can conclude that politics begins with
ordinary people exercising some sort of agency.
Defining the riot
A riot according to the Oxford English
dictionary is a “a violent disturbance of the peace by a crowd” (Oxford English
Dictionary, 2011). This definition has a distinct genealogy, historically the
riot can be seen as the praxis of the mob, the riot is the irrational outburst
of violence of the masses. This understanding
of the riot according to the great British historian E.P. Thompson is the
product of lazy and prejudicial historians. The riot instead emerged as a form
of “(D)irect action on particular grievances” which merges with “the great
political risings of the mob” or “organized forms of sustained illegal actions”
(Thompson, 1966:62). Noting this it is difficult to form a clear distinction
between the concept of the riot as an act of criminality and the riot as a
distinctly political act, once distinctly political events have been framed in
the language of criminality. This discourse of criminality can be traced back
to this manner in which the history of resistance to what David Harvey terms
'accumulation by dispossession' has been recorded. Accumulation by
dispossession is when capital is accumulated through the coercive seizure of
land and the formation of money power in both legal and illegal, which occurred
during the industrial revolution (Harvey, 2010:48-9). This occurred in the
context of what Peter Linebaugh's describes as“the contrast between the
abstract intellectualized argument for the national common, and the massive
disparate experience in appropriating to themselves part of the product of
their labour” (2003:436). In other words the transition towards wage labour and
the discipline of the factory could only be enforced ans sustained by
“(R)epression (fear, militarization and self-censorship)” (Linebaugh,
2003:436). Acts of 'rioting' targeted forms of repression ranging from bread
cartels fixing prices (something that still triggers off riots today) to forced
enclosure. Part of the authority’s
response to these forms of resistance was to remove the agency of those
who took part in them. This denial of agency took the form of an insistence on
the irrationality of the mob and the essential criminality of both the
proletariat and the exercising of its political agency. Riots have continued to
play a significant role in shaping British history, recent riots such as the
Brixton and Grovenor Square riots have helped shaped generational consciousness,
leaving their mark on the political history of the country. Another example of
this form of 'direct action' is the famed football hooligan culture of the
islands, which achieved much notoriety during
Thatcher's rule in the 1980s. Following this it is fair to assert that
the riot is as much a part of the English national culture as Cricket and Tikka
Masala. For the purposes of this essay I will be dealing only with what can be
termed the 'Urban Riot', which emerges as forms of collective urban violence,
this violence is usually unplanned and unorganized, but collective in nature.
A Brief history of the mob and the
English riot.
The word mob has its origins in the
abbreviation of a Latin neologism used by the ruling class in the 18th
century “to describe the labouring poor beneath it: mobile vulgus was
the cognate term”(Linebaugh, 2006:38). Linebaugh goes on to note that the term
contains further aspects of older social grouping that require attention,
firstly the term implies a tone of “imperious superiority” that such older
terms as 'multitudes' or 'host' did not. Secondly despite the abbreviation the
term retains connotations of motion expressed by its cognate, which might just
as easily be translated as “the movement” (Linebaugh, 2006:38). Thompson
suggests that 18th century 'riotous action took two forms: “that of
more ore less spontaneous popular direct action; and that of the deliberate use
of the crowd as an instrument of pressure by persons “above” or apart from the
crowd” (Thompson, 1966:62-3). The first
form emerges from a more sophisticated understanding of 'politics' here
as defined earlier, then the discourse of criminality surrounding the riot
suggests. This form rested on the legitimization by an older “moral economy”
which clashes with the 'market economy' in terms of setting value preference,
for example the price of bread during the 18th century was the
greatest marker of popular discontent. If the price was set too high, it was
viewed through the transactions of 'the moral economy' which “taught the
immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions by
profiteering upon the necessities of the people” (Thompson, 1966:63). This
moral economy validated the direct action present in the food riot. This
understanding of value present in the moral economy and the entirely legitimate
reasons for direct action are completely missing from the understanding of the
riot present in the “imperious superiority” of the tone suggested in the word
'mob'. The same tone of imperious superiority is to be found today in the forms of the English Ruling classes,
particularly in their aristocratic tory variety of such specimens as David
Cameron, George Osborne and Kenneth Clark.
Often a relationship formed between a criminal
hero such as the infamous escape artist
Jack Sheppard (who escaped over 15 times from various prisons) and the
'mob', this relationship was particularly apparent at public hangings in which
the 'mob' gathered in large numbers to wish off its hero. Furthermore, as Linebaugh
goes on to argue, the criminal was made into a hero and the acts of the
criminal were seen as acts of resistance to the ruling class and the discipline
of Capital that was being imposed on the 'mob'. Such hero-worship found its way
into songs and later books, there was a veritable genre of music devoted to
criminal tales of the likes of Jack Sheppard (Linebaugh, 2006:38-40). Noting
this, the absurdity of the likes of 'historian' David Starkey who recently, in
a television appearance, exclaimed that black culture in the form of rap music
was responsible for the riots. This black culture which glorifies 'criminal
behavior' and which according to Starkey has made white youth black, is really
what is wrong with England today (Quinn, August 2011). It seems then there is a
long tradition of making music in which 'criminals' are seen as heroes in the
UK itself, this vilification of hip hop,
shows not only a profound ignorance of hip hop, but also of British history.
This same conception of the riot as an
expression of irrational and essential criminality, can also be discerned in
the manner in which the discourse on the Brixton riots was initially framed.
Events surrounding the Brixton riots closely follow the circumstances which led
to the outbreak of the 2011 London Riots. According to Alexander Cockburn the
riots of 1981 signified the uprising of
black and white youth against “the police, against a desolate environment and
zero expectations” (Cockburn, 1987:62). These same problems are still apparent
in Cameron's Britain. The riots were kicked off, similarly to the 2011 riots,
by 'reactive policing which especially targeted blacks' (Cockburn, 1987:64).
Like the 2011 riots, the 1981 ones began in one area in this case Brixton and
quickly spread to over 30 cities (Cockburn, 1987:66), while in 2011 the riots
began in Tottanham and spread at a similar rate as far away as Manchester.
Darcus Howe who made similar points when interviewed about the riots in August,
noted that there was a dangerous tendency to invest the police with political
power, while the police remain an unelected force (Cockburn, 1987;68). The very
issue of police politics also played a significant role in sparking the fire of
the 2011 riots, much of the Metropolitan police's leadership had resigned
following the fall out of the phone hacking scandal and several ambitious
police chiefs were looking to increase their arrest rate in order to better
their chances of promotion. These similarities are important to note, in
continuing on my earlier point of rioting as a part of English culture, far
removed from the language of exception employed by politicians ignorant of
history.
The 2011 Riots
Much of the media coverage of the 2011
riots focused on specific incidents of violence directed against the police,
individual and property, the media stressed how random acts of looting and
arson destroyed family businesses. This is true, but the nature of the violence
directed against symbols of the hegemonic consumer culture should be
interpreted in a different manner. Zizek makes the distinction between what he
terms 'Subjective Violence: “violence performed by a clearly identifiable
agent” (Zizek, 2009:1) and 'Objective Violence' which according Zizek takes two
forms: Symbolic Violence which is embodied in language and forms, and Systemic
Violence: “the
often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and
political systems.' (Zizek,2009:1-2).
Both Symbolic and and Systemic violence in this sense were ever present
in what can be identified as some of the root causes of the riot.
Over the last few decades beginning with the rise of Thatcher, and
especially increasing with Blair, a dominant discourse in which the poor and
working class citizens of the United Kingdom are vilified has been escalating.
Portrayed as bottom feeders, leeching off the
welfare state, in other words the concept of the Chav, linked to this
demonisation of the working class, is the third way banality of “we are all
Middle Class Now”, assertions that the working class are responsible for their
own misfortune dominate media portrayals. (Jones, 2011:6). According to Jones
the concept of the chav “encompasses any negative traits associated with
working -class people-violence, laziness, teenage pregnancies, racism,
drunkenness and the rest”. This term has become almost synonymous with
'working-class youth'. (Jones, 2011:8).
This language used to describe the 'chav' can be seen here as a form of
symbolic violence which is directed against youth, this official contempt and
acceptable class hatred which takes a multiplicity of forms, is used to to
justify the systematic violence of destroying the welfare state in the form of
'cuts'. David Cameron's Conservative government's assault on the welfare state
is combined with the language of the feral underclass who leech off the
taxpayer, this justifies the removal of their 'benefits'. The conservative
campaign vilifying single mothers, as promiscuous harlots who have children to
increase their benefits, stands out in all its crude bigotry. Furthermore the police systematically target
urban youth, particularly black urban youth. The crucial event that set off the
riots, was the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a 29 year old black man who was
'reported' as being armed. Subsequent police reports have indicated otherwise
(Laville, Lewis, Dodd and Davies, August 2011).
Riots and Agency
Badiou makes an important distinction
between riot and revolution. He contends
that riots call state power into question and exposes the state to the
possibility of political change. Riots fail to embody this change, while a
revolution in itself proposes an alternative (Badiou, 2011). The manner in
which riots call state power into question is crucial, for articulating the
contention of the riot as a political act, again Badiou provides a useful
theoretical framework to operate in. The
event for Badiou is “purely hapzard and
cannot be inferred from the situation”
(Hallward, 2003:114). The event produces something new, something
different in being. It emerges “from
beyond, undeserved, unjustified and unjustifiable”. It emerges as a surprise,
it cannot be predicted or controlled. (Hallward, 2003:115)
The event brings as a maximal 'true' consequence of its own
existence “the existence of of an in-existent”(Badiou, 2006:286). This can be
viewed as through the rupture of the established order, in other words the
event, subjecthood and political subjecthood at that is created where it
previously did not exist. This event
produces a truth through which subjecthood is created through an intervention
with an operator of fidelity to an event (Hallward, 2003:14). Through adhering
as a militant to the truth of the event
the subject comes into being; “A subject which goes beyond the animal... needs
something to have happened, something that cannot be reduced to its ordinary
inscription in 'what there is'.” Something supplementary is needed, the event
is the supplement which produces “a new
way of being” (Badiou, 2001:31). What
can be termed “fidelity” is the choice
to to relate “from the perspective of the eventual...
supplement”(Badiou,2001:40-4). Fidelity to the event is to think of a situation
in terms of the event. This can be phrased in terms of a political example: the Paris Commune can be interpreted
as form of a political praxis operating outside of the logic of the state, for
Badiou this praxis is 'truth'. This truth is structured around a break with
what proceeds in accordance with the new in the form of fidelity to the event
(Badiou,2001:40-4).
Where Zizek's describes the rioters in
terms of the Hegelian 'rabble' capable only of outbursts of 'abstract
negativity' (Zizek, 2011). Badiou offers the idea that through the act of
rioting the participants reclaim their subjecthood. The riot operates here as a rupture or a
break with the established order in which all state power is called into
question (Badiou, 2011). The inability of the police to deal with the rioters
and the violence directed against the police stemming from the experience of the
systemic violence of policing operating towards young, mainly black males calls
state power into question. This break produces people operating in a new
fashion, in this sense there is agency, people are operating in a independent
and new manner. For example youth used Blackberry Messenger to co-ordinate
looting and running battles with the police in such a manner that the police were often defeated. The
inexistent, the oppressed, the excluded became existent in the eyes of the
state and the world at large, for example a youth was questioned by a news crew
and was asked if rioting really achieved anything, he replied; “You wouldn't be
talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you? ”(Penny, 2011). This can be
seen as a reclamation of agency in this sense. What is crucial to note though
is that the riot is not an event, it does not produce a militant truth, an alternative vision of a possible future is
not produced to remain faithful to. These riots called state power into
question, but they did not provide a alternative to them, people in this sense
limited themselves to looting and burning, a new politics fails to emerge from
the riot[1] Although
the riot fits Badiou's definition of the political in terms of collective
action which aims at challenging the official order, the fact that it does not
produce something new is important. The riot in this sense can be termed the
'almost event', it is an occurrence of a definite political nature, but it
fails to produce the break which brings something new transcendental or from
beyond into existence (Hallward, 2003:115).
London is the city with the greatest
number of CCTV cameras on the planet. Chances are after walking out of your
house and traveling to work everyday, a significant proportion of your day will
be captured on CCTV. It is estimated
that as of 2005 there were over 4.8m
CCTV camera in the UK(Lewis, 2009). Such intrusive surveillance proved to be
one of the hallmarks of New Labour's rule, the zones of 'abstract negativity'
and criminality which take the form of council housing estates contain a
particularly high concentration of cameras. This can be understood using
Ranciere's phrase as part of the “privitization of citizenship” which aims to
exclude part of the population from the domain of collective life of the
equality of citizens (Ranciere, 2006:59-60). This extends to public spaces
which are decreasing limiting the ability of people from being present in much
of the city. Some of the rioting can be interpreted in the demand of equality
of access to these spaces, these spaces and public life in the UK requires
certain rules and codes. Often those who
dress in certain fashions are prohibited from entering certain buildings, under
the command of “No Hoodies” for example. The seizure of such spaces, in some
sense is a demand of equal recognition, in that Ranciere's notion of democracy
as beginning from an axiom of equality suggests that in some sense rioting is a
'democratic act'. This is also not to suggest that the riots should be regarded
as a good thing, rather it is so to suggest that there is an essential
political character contained within the riot. The ability of the youth to
demonstrate some ability to organize an effective resistance to the power of
the state or the police to use Ranciere's terminology (2001:8). In that sense
rioting can be viewed as a one possible response of “a movement reaffirming the
right of anyone and everyone to that incessantly privatized public sphere”
(Ranciere,2006:58). As the riot is not an event, it is unlikely that the riot
will produce a new form of militant working class politics in the United
Kingdom, rather they called state power into question.
Conclusion
It can then be concluded, after noting
that the history of riots has been entwined within a discourse of criminality ,
that the political nature of riots has been largely ignored in ways analogous
to those discussed in the historical work of Thompson and Linebaugh. Following on from the understanding of the
political as a combination of direct action aimed at a political cause and the
understanding of politics as emerging from the people, rather than that of
power, riots seem to fall into loosely speaking a political category of action.
This is because riots evidence both a form of direct action and a principle of equality, in the sense
that they are an assault on the privatization of public life and public spaces.
Using Badiou's framework outlined earlier, a riot falls into the category of a
rupture of the established order that creates a political subjecthood of sorts,
but it fails to become an event, in the sense that it does not bring something
completely new into being or provide an alternative vision for the future.
Riots merely call the existing system into question. In this I have provided an
argument that riots are political, noting that I have been referring
specifically to the urban riot and interpreting the act of rioting through the
recent English Riots. The significance in establishing the political nature of
the riot, is the recognition of the agency of the persons involved, instead of
dismissing them ala Zizek in the form of a rabble of abstract negativity. Recognizing the political agency of any
excluded group is key to building a future emancipatory politics and creating a
meaningful solidarity, although this should not mean that one should
unconditionally support rioting.
Works Cited
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Hypothesis”, New Left Review, 49:29-42
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rioters, but address our social deficit too”, Guardian, 5 September, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/05/punishment-rioters-help
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[1] There are however political riots, such as
May 1968, in which confrontations of the basis of political ideology lead to a
riot, but I would argue firstly that May 1968 was an almost-revolution, hence
it transcends the category of the riot (see Ross, 2006) and secondly that
ideology is produced and that clashes between the police and protestors like in
Seattle 1999 are of a fundamentally different character.
