I know it's too late to comment on the London riots, as the Summer is over and people have moved on to more pressing issues (Cher's transgender son Chaz Bono is going to be on Dancing With the Stars! zOMG!), but I thought I'd still put my thoughts out there, or rather those of notoriously handsome continental philosopher Slavoj Zizek:
The George Clooney of Slovenia
Cheap cracks at his appearance aside, he's a genuinely engaging presence during talks, where he's never above telling a few filthy jokes, and his many, many books are extremely well written and intuitively engaging, if you like Marxist-Lacanin-Hegelian dialectical analysis...
I'm providing links here to two excerpts of a commentary he made on the subject of the Paris riots from 2005; I think they're still very relevant and it's fucking depressing how little anybody has learned from recent episodes of civil unrest throughout the world.
- Read the first two paragraphs of the first page here. Quote:
The first conclusion to be drawn is thus that both conservative and liberal reactions to the unrests clearly fail. The conservatives emphasize the Clash of Civilizations and, predictably, Law and Order: immigrants should not abuse our hospitality, they are our guests, so they should respect our customs, our society has the right to safeguard its unique culture and way of life; plus there is no excuse for crimes and violent behavior, what the young immigrants need is not more social help, but discipline and hard work... Leftist liberals, no less predictably, stuck to their old mantra about neglected social programs and integration-efforts which are depriving the younger generation of immigrants of any clear economic and social prospect, thus leaving them violent outbursts as they only way to articulate their dissatisfaction... As Stalin would have put it, it is meaningless to debate which reaction is worse: they are BOTH worse, inclusive of the warning, formulated by both sides, about the real danger of these outbursts residing in the easily predictable racist REACTION of the French populist crowd to them.
- Then read the whole of this. Quote:
The recent outbursts in Paris bear witness to the same Wall in Europe itself. The thing to resist, when we are faced with shocking reports and images of cars burning in Paris suburbs, is the "hermeneutic temptation": the search for some deeper meaning or message hidden in these outbursts. What is most difficult to accept is precisely their utmost meaninglessness: more than a form of protest, they are a passage à l'acte which bears witness not only to the impotence of the perpetrators, but, even more, to the lack of what Fredric Jameson called "cognitive mapping", to their inability to locate the experience of their situation into a meaningful Whole. The true question is thus: which are the roots of this disorientation?
Social theorists like to repeat that today's society is thoroughly "reflexive": there is no Nature or Tradition that would provide the firm foundation on which one can rely, even our innermost impetuses (sexual orientation) are more and more experienced as something to be chosen. How to feed and educate a child, how to proceed in sexual seduction, how and what to eat, how to relax and amuse oneself, all these spheres are more and more "colonized" by reflexivity, experienced as something to be learned and decided upon. However, the ultimate deadlock of the risk society resides in the gap between knowledge and decision: there is no one who "really knows" what to do, the situation is radically "undecidable", but we nonetheless HAVE TO DECIDE. The problem is thus not that of the forced choice (I am free to choose - on condition that I make the right choice), but the opposite one: the choice is effectively free and, for this very reason, is experienced as utterly more frustrating.
Admittedly, I doubt any of the philosophical jargon used will enter into the House of Commons: "I urge the Prime Minister to resist the Hermeneutic temptation!", "Would the right honourable gentleman please look beyond subjective violence!".
Speaking of which, did you see the so-called riot debates in August? It's basically a real-life version of the generic Tough on Crime speech Carcetti makes at the end of season 3 of The Wire, performed by a less charismatic actor.
What's so terrible is that famously, while the Bunny Colvin character emphasises that using war-like language in political discourse effectively makes it a drug WAR, Carcetti's tough-sounding speech had a lot of viewers utterly won over (possibly in part 'cos Aiden Gillen is a sexy man).
Speaking of discourse and how it's used to fuck things upinfluence people, as an academic nothing pisses me off more than when ideological agendas are legitimised using psuedo-scientific academic jargon, lending their argument the air of objectivity.
A recent article in the Guardian raised this point by condeming one of its own articles (!) for using the outdated social psychology term de-individuation, implying a mindless rabble bent on destruction. Sure enough, a nice article in Scientific American points out that
"group identity is a precondition for a riot: people will only riot when they think their actions are aligned with the worldview of the group as a whole".
The Guardian more or less reflects this point, indicating that ignoring the group identity of the rioters obscures the very real social ills underlying the outbursts.
But here the Guardian is guilty once more of employing research findings to push an ideological agenda, as by imbuing the rioters with minds capable of identifying with a group united by socio-economic deprivation this too obscures the tragic fact that these social ills are expressed precisely in the absolute mindlessness of their acts, lacking the intellectual and educational tools to articulate their frustrations in a meaningful manner.
As Zizek explains in the article I linked to earlier,
"if the commonplace that "we live in a post-ideological era" has any sense, it is here"".
Without understanding the ideological mechanisms that make their oppression possible, they are reduced to desperate and ultimately self-destructive outbursts of violence, which inevitably lead to popular backlashes in the press (and legal system!) confirming their status as barbaric enemies of society, like a tragic self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling prophecy.
And don't get me started on liberals defending the rioters' faux jamaican as legitimate expression. Yes, I know that language is a moveable feast, and yes, I understand that it's supposed to be the "patois of the streets" (here's a great post about the non-existence of Jafaican), especially after seeing the wonderful street argot represented in The Wire, but I must point out again that this obscures the fact that many of these kids are so educationally impoverished that they don't just speak a different language, they don't have much of a language at all. Many are utterly incapable of expressing a single coherent, meaningful idea because they literally lack the words with which to do so.
While we're on the topic, I fucking hate it when people try to expurgate their middle-class guilt by painting council-estates with subtle palettes to show the quiet beauty and dignity of the lost teenage souls that populate these cryptic wastelands... (I'm thinking Andrea Arnold). We know the people live there are human and have souls, but it is fucking miserable living in a council estate, and saying that it isn't shit to live there is some bizarre form of reverse-snobbery. There, I said it.
References worth checking out in relation to all of this nonsense:
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