Facebook messages from my connections in England are referring to riots taking place in a number of inner city areas in England. British politicians and journalists have found it relatively easy to denounce these riots as the work of criminals. Very few reflections can be found that try and engage with any issues that might be at stake.
Unbeknown perhaps to those who deploy the term ‘copycats’ to describe continuation and spreading of the rioting, these events provide a testimony to the Tardean concept of ‘imitation’ as the basic form through which the social emerges. Seemingly without ground, rioting spreads from Tottenham to other areas of London, and then outwards to Birmingham, Nottingham and even Liverpool.
The label ‘opportunistic yobs’ however raises more questions than it answers. What is going on in a society when such disturbances spread so easily without ground? What links the actions in Tottenham, Nottingham and Liverpool? What exactly is the stuff of these particular imitations? Media quickly blame media: Twitter, Facebook even Television. However, that is still not an explanation why groundless imitation has taken place.
Perhaps we should take this groundlessness more seriously. Collective violence is an emergent (social) event perhaps because other collectives have broken down. England is in a very serious political-economic predicament: the world economy is slumping into a recession, financial markets are collapsing, the very infrastructure of late capitalism seems to have come to a grinding halt.
Perhaps we should try and link the current riots in England with the so called Arab Spring and we would see other things at stake. Suddenly, criminals would become legitimate protestors fighting against an oppressive state who have turned democracy into a puppet show (is this perhaps the real reason why Spitting Image has disappeared from our television screens: reality is already funny enough?). Do we blame Al Jazeera for being too critical? What is clear among all of this is that analysis is failing in a most rudimentary sense. This, I would argue, is the most powerful indicator that we are dealing with an apocalypse.
In 1997, the second issue of space and culture appeared under the title ‘Apocalypse’ and there I asserted that the apocalypse had already happened, if one were to define it not as a complete and total rapture, but as a ‘cool revelation’ that the world as we know it has come to an end. That was 3 years before the dot.com economy collapsed, 4 years before 9.11, 6 years before the second gulf war, 7 years before the premiere of Team America World Police and the revelation that Kim Jong Ill, the alleged center of the Axis of Evil, is in fact a cockroach, 8 years before the Tsunami, 10 years before the credit crunch, 13 years before Fukushima.
In no way is what we published back in 1997 a prophecy of what was to come. We simply maintained that it had already happened. Everything that followed was nothing more than a repetition of what happened before. As we act like vultures, hovering over the cadavers of meaningless reflection, all we can do is perform the same cycles over and over again.
To go back then to the riots, the most sensible next step would be to stop meaninglessly asserting the meaninglessness of collective violence and start engaging in more meaningflul responses. If the riots are mere imitations, what is being imitated? Why are these imitations taking place in England and why now? What alternatives can we offer those who are inclined to ’seize the opportunity’ to go out in the streets and engage in collective violence?
… Joost
4 Comments
it’s a dramatic change to see a post at this blog about such a current event. i welcome it.
i don’t understand the tardean stuff. but your reference to “groundless imitation” among the rioters prompts me to think you might be interested in a statement at another blog i follow today: “The parents of Britain need to get a grip. Every parent of a teenage child in London, Birmingham and other major cities needs to ‘ground’ their child tonight, and remove their mobile phone from them.” trying to ground the groundless sounds like a spatial challenge to me.
(source: http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2011/08/the-london-riots-a-time-for-big-society )
as for the temporal challenge of apocalypse: your list of disparate instances seems rather in the mode of the list of disparate riots earlier in the post. does this suggest that it’s a groundless apocalypse? in any case, i tried to look at the table of contents for the journal issue you mentioned, but it’s absent from the journal’s online archive.
btw, a fine blog for occasional posts about apocalyptic and millenarian thinking is zenpundit.com, especially the posts by charles cameron.
onward.
Hi David,
thanks again for the comment. I like your link to grounding, although I fear that would only return the violence to more individuated domains, having similar statistical consequences regarding damage but without political consequences.
My initial response to your second comment was that the disparate instances of ‘apocalyptic proportions’ were ‘only’ a matter of discursive imitation (if there is ever such an innocuous shadow that we can call ‘only discourse’), but then I started to become more inclined to think about links between the various events, and also consider the less spectacular missing links, and then realised that it is far too early to dismiss any links ….
As far as my own anger goes, I am very tired of the fake opposition between accounts that refer to riots as caused and accounts that talk about ‘mindless, criminal copycats’. I am also tired of the idea that trying to provide proper analysis autimatically means searching to legitimate the violence. It is just that I would like to expand the list of suspects that should be investigated.
Finally, that issue of Space and Culture appeared when we were still working outside the establishment of academic publishers. I should still have a few rare copies of the issue somewhere in my office.
every good wish
Joost
In this respect, one does not always know where to classify the current events in Israel. Though at present non-violent, Israel is being shaken by protests that quickly spread from Tel-Aviv to most other cities and towns in the country. Facebook and other social networking media definitely provided a testing ground for opening a field of engagement between citizens, corporations and the state.
In the press, the foci of imitation and difference have different geography. Tel-Aviv’s urban space replicates in a pattern of uncanny repetition the difference between affluent north and struggling south, as illegal immigrants and rundown neighborhoods give to the tents in the southern area an off-mainstream character.
While Egypt’s Tahrir square acts as a subject of imitative discourse in both social and political sense, even though comparisons do not go far in view of starkly different conditions in the two countries, London riots are taken up as a premonitory example of a possible, and rather apocalyptic, future, should neo-liberal policies continue to be imitated.
-Pablo
Dear Pablo,
indeed, and I am also wondering what has happened to the Intifada since the the uprisings elsewhere. Whatever the world we live in, arbitrariness seems ubiquitous but it does not provide a legitimate excuse to only deal with what is made ‘present at hand’. What remains is the political necessity to resist – at all cost – the preemptive demogogic strike against analysis because that is exactly what is at stake here.