Le Soleil Pourri

On October 27th, violence came to the the suburbs of France, a violence that is apparently now under control, things are returning to normal. But what if the normal, what passes for the normal has, for a very long time, been violent in its turn, in les banlieues, and not only there?
(I'd barely written the sentence above, when I get a call that the Prefect of Police in Paris is invoking the "state of emergency" to ban all gatherings in Paris that could "result in" violence, and that there is also a call for demonstrations. )

Can the violence committed by some kids be measured against the violence that they have been submitted to, from birth, and which (in)forms/(de)forms their heritage? To enumerate, and too easily, for a sentence or two can hardly give a sense of the weight of this daily and generational violence: the continual decrease in public services, massive unemployment, segregation, discrimination in the workplace, religious and cultural stigmatization, everyday racism and brutality by the police.
But there is more, for these youth have experienced being deprived of the possibility of speech, of making their voices - and names - heard in the public agora which is supposedly democracy. And they can speak, and quite well, in their own name. Yes, they have proper names they can be called by, addressed. How to begin to measure the violence of a Minister of the Interior who obliterates so many names by calling them "scum", "trash", "refuse"... ?
So they burn cars. Are they not burning precisely the vehicles of movement in a society that curtails their movements and speech?

Is the democratic State listening? How does it respond? To discrimination and injustice, it adds insult and provocation. To social crisis it has nothing more to say than "it is necessary to establish order," and anyone in the way is a criminal.  So the State enforces a "state of emergency" which was last put in place, not in 1968, but during the Algerian war in 1955.  The Socialist Party says that it will be "very vigilant" regarding this, but one would like to point out to them that something like a state of exception has been at work in the suburbs for a while, whose inhabitants have been submitted, in their daily existence, to law without having recourse to the law, which involves a folding back of the State's colonial racism on its own citizens.

What is it about the western sun, enlightening the world, that stinks? It is not a matter of dismissing with a facile, empty, and irresponsible gesture, democratic ideas and ideals, throwing them into the Seine or the Mississippi or the Tigris. (Even though, democratic states seem more than willing to throw their citizens into rivers, or abandon them to the onslaught of overflowing waters. )

Is it not necessary to look this darkness in the heart of enlightenment, of the law, in the eye, even if the stench and stink makes one's eyes water? It might sting, but one is dealing with tear gas and phosphorus. And more.

Ways of dying also include crimes. This is a book about a crime. I've often wondered, and perhaps it has passed through your minds as well, just where the virus of crime has escaped to - it cannot have simply disappeared from our world twenty years ago just because murder is no longer praised, desired, decorated with medals, and promoted. The massacres are indeed, over, the murderers still among us often been attested to and their guilt established, some of them, not all, even sentenced in court. The existence of these murderers has been known to all of us, not only through more or less discreet statements, but also through literature.

Yet this book has little, only very little to do with this. It seeks to reveal something, to seek out something, namely something that has not disappeared with the world. For today it is infinitely more difficult to commit crimes, and thus thereby these crimes are so subtle that we can hardly comprehend or perceive them, though all around us, in our neighborhoods, they are committed daily. Indeed, I maintain and will only attempt to produce the first evidence that still today many people do not die but are murdered. For nothing is - if not more powerful - more monstrous than man, if I may remind you of what you learned in school. Crimes that require a sharp mind, that tap our minds and less so our senses, those that deeply effect us - there no blood flows, but rather the slaughter is granted a place within the place and morals of a society whose fragile nerves quake in the face of such beastliness. Yet the crimes did not diminish, but rather they require greater refinement, another level of intelligence and are themselves dreadful.

The settings then are Vienna, the village of Galicien, Carinthia, and the Arabian, Libyan, and Sudanese deserts. The real settings, the interior ones laboriously concealed by the external are elsewhere - at times within the thinking that leads to a crime, and at times in that which leads to dying.
(Ingeborg Bachmann, foreword to Franza.)

Comments

[roger]

Nice analysis. The white riot, the normal order, that has preceeded and will succeed these riots won't have a label, won't evoke indignation and analysis, and won't be news. But... perhaps that is one of the functions of the last fourteen days -- to make the white riot emerge as news, the normal order appear as disorder. Which it is at heart.

[Alain]

Amie, a perspicuous snapshot of what is happening in France and the United States. What choice do we have today but to concentrate on the "darkness in the heart of enlightenment?" It seems to me that to ignore it, or respond with police measures, is not only immoral but extremely dangerous. Thank you for such a timely post.

[Amie]

Roger, Alain, Thanks! Particularly if you made it through despite the inumerable typos!

[s0metim3s]

But surely looking into the heart of *this* darkness means reckoning with democracy?

Would it not be irresponsible - the very definition of the absence of a response - to not do this? Not simply because democracy routinely (but, say, perversely) tosses its citizens (those who are property to it and its property) into the waters (and fire), but because it will always relegate those who are not 'the people' to there, as the axiomatic of its very functioning. In that sense, not reckoning with democracy seems to me to be quite gestural.

[Amie]

s0metim3s, I agree with you. I've written poorly if it comes of otherwise.

[s0metim3s]

Amie, we both of us seem to miss the inflections between. :)

[Amie]

Hey Archive, I more than welcome any questions/criticism from you of anything I write, in fact I'd appreciate it.
I'm loath you know to fall into the mode of "this is what I really meant", which does not interest me and does not really do anything.
Your comment does however perhaps require that I repeat that the "darkness" I mention is not elsewhere than "in democracy", which is what is precisely what must be reckoned with, and allusions to 'fascism' are a cop-out. That was behind citing the Ingeborg Bachmann text ( a writer who I would unreservedly recommend ) who is hardly going to conflate nazism and democracy, but who precisely attempts to think how crime works in a "democratic world", and who knows that it is not a matter of indicting this or that "corrupt official" when the law "itself" is in question.

[s0metim3s]

Maybe the problem here is that I'm not at all familiar with Bachman, who I'll definitely chase up on your recommendation.

The whole democracy thing is a difficult one. And I think you're right to note that taking on fascism is far easier, something 'we' can all agree to be against, and so it doesn't risk the cut into the 'we' that a discussion about democracy would more likely entail (or, better: make visible).

And, you know, we'll talk more on this.

[John S. Ransom]

I've wanted to comment on this interesting post for a while. The result is too long.

I've been struck lately -- even though 'to be struck lately' is a horrible cliche -- with the role of cars in recent (broadly conceived) oppositional activities.

I raise this from a scientific point of view and so the question here has nothing to do with rightness or wrongness of use. The phenomenon I'm interested in (not that anyone has to follow me in this interest; I'm just talking) is the 'use' of cars in oppositional activity. For instance, they've really seemed to be one of two things that the U.S. military in Iraq cannot handle. First, they've been unable to manage (not that there haven't been any successes) roadside bombs, the Improvised Explosive Devices that all those improvisational Iraqis have done such a good job of riffing on. When we improve our armour, the Iraqi 'resistance' (which is actually a fairly neutral label) improves its bombs.

The second thing the U.S. military has been unable to control is suicide bombers. I can't believe anyone blames them for that. I mean, who knew? These guys make the Japanese kamikazi pilots look like specialists in CPR. Looking at the picture of the Iraqi woman arrested in Jordan all wrapped up in what looked like fairly thin, unobtrusive plastic explosives around her body -- you could easily imagine how lots of people could probably get away with walking around with bombs like that. What's hard to imagine is someone being willing to put the belt on. What kind of will does an enemy have if it is willing and able to send wave after wave of ever-more professional suicide bombers into your midst? I'd say that's one scary will! I remember when the West was getting involved in Serbia and Croatia back in the early 90s a number of people said: "Don't get involved in that part of the world! They're all incredibly insane in Serbia and Croatia! Don't even try -- you have no idea!" And then, that advice didn't turn out to be quite accurate, though it's been no easy ride there, while in Iraq the surprise is that the Iraqi resistance has a highly scary will.

The third thing is associated closely with the second, and that's cars. A good number, though not all, suicide activity in Iraq takes place using cars. Cars are usefully uncontrollable. You simply cannot have a many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands people kind of city without cars being used. Cars "can't be stopped."

Now we've seen cars play a different but also unique role in the revolts and mini-revolts that have spread into some areas in Europe, the most spectacular being in France. Youths run around burning up cars. Why cars? There are so many of them, and (I suppose) so few secure parking places that they cannot be effectively defended against attack. Because of the gasoline in them, they produce a spectacular flame. There's not many people who do not enjoy a spectacular flame, especially when they set it, and they can see it first hand. It can become a fad!

Here's what one participant says: One 20-year-old who grew up near Paris in Clichy-sous-Bois said he had stopped looking for a job and joined the rampage. “Maybe I burnt cars. I know it’s not very nice of me but, to be honest, I am happy that things heated up everywhere to let everybody know that we are sick of it,” said Ahmed Zbeul, hanging around a courthouse Thursday to support friends on trial for theft. [from an msnbc story]

In one place, Iraq, the car is so mobile that it can't be controlled, and one suicide car bomb after another finds (more or less) its target. In another, France, the car is indefensibly stationary -- and for that reason, cannot be controlled.

[Matt]

Amie, this is a wonderful post. Is there a place you'd recommend to start with Bachmann, if you were to recommend...I've only just read a short bio. There doesn't seem to be all that much..

It's almost comical, isn't it, how the mainstream discourse (MSD) just can't bring itself to acknowledge, to even recognize the sheer appropriateness of this act, the burning of cars, at least on a symbolic level. Not as Jon Stewart easily remarks, "probably not the best way" to fix an unemployment problem; but as it's rather the *illusion* of mobility, freedom/car commercial prosperity (in addition to other things, such as the illusion of genuine help and assistance) that is being sacrificed, if anything, no? Not, of course, to read everything under the sun into it (and speaking of the nation's only original tv personality, I did laugh at the Godard clip especially, as Stewart always plays the therapeutic anti-PC card or whatever gently, with a lighthearted undercutting), but it does seem on some level a very genuinely anarchic gesture, this car-burning. But then maybe cars are less sacred and symbolic of personal freedom when they all look the same, same size, etc. Sorry this is so rambling and off-topic, but I take it back; Stephen Cobert is original too, and will only get better the more they let him off his Daily Show leash. It's high time we had an occasionally Kaufmanesque, rude and smart and genuinely gracious liberal on tevee. Even if he sometimes channels Mr. Rogers, there with his wunderkammer shelf of exotic objects..

Anyway. I'd be very interested in more Bachmann, if you ever felt like drawing her writings out any further.

[What an Ass]

"My view is unorthodox," Mr. Buckley says of the violence roiling the French suburbs. "It seems to me that a very hard dose of market discipline would distract the attention of the young revolutionaries from their frolics, traditional and otherwise, and my sense is that if they had to worry about how to eat, and buy food, they would stop screwing around and face reality. If these people didn't wake up in the morning thinking about what cars to burn--instead of work--they might not be having these problems."

[anon]

http://www.digitalnpq.org/articles/global/33/11-09-2005/anthony_giddens

[s0metim3s]

A lecturer of mine - many years ago - endeared herself to me by once boasting of dropping a plate of food in Giddens' lap at a conference, with a hyperbolic "I'm so terribly sorry". I guess that was the academic version of pie-ing.

[alphonsevanworden]

one can't speak of democracy and fascism seperately, but the terms describe moments which it is essential to see in their distinctions: capitalist elites rule imperial center states by oligarchy, whose poles are democracy (the practical pole that is the 'default' configuration, and serves to generate and embody certain ideological abstractions) and fascism ( the mystical pole which involves the 'protection' of those abstractions against the material conditions and availability for expropriatrion of their embodiments). The swinging back and forth, determined by the state of class struggle, is an essential or at least very convenient mechanism in the maintenance of the oligarchy's hegemony and the property relations they favour.

[alphonsevanworden]

this relation of fascism to (capitalist, liberal) democracy is what distinguishes fascism from other forms of despotism (whose ideologies emphasize, typically, hierarchy, the reciprocity of class functions and social orders, etc.) unsuitable for capitalist property relations in the imperial center nations.

[Amie]

Alphonse, thanks! that comment should be keep me thinking for a while.

Matt, I'm not sure which Bachmann texts have been translated into english, or are in print. BTW, was the Godard clip of the "traffic jam" from Weekend?

John, perhaps someone should attempt a post or two re cars and "oppositional activity." Maybe someone already has?

Archive, thanks for the Giddens story -- brings back many a memory of spilling things at academic conferences!

[Matt]

"fascism (the mystical pole which involves the 'protection' of those abstractions against the material conditions and availability for expropriatrion of their embodiments)."

why 'mystical'?

Of course as Habermas and Derrida agree there is, in talking about fascism (or anything), always the danger of subtly naturalizing it. (As a side note: it's funny, in Borradori's interview/book, Derrida speaks of the inevitable dignifying that occurs by even mentioning or addressing something...Derrida who has only ever referred to Habermas in footnotes--Habermas who's written whole chapters on him--up until now....) Clearly not what you are doing, naturalizing, but it strikes me that this line of analysis (what definition of fascism is being imployed here exactly? is there any need for a precise, or uniterable historical sense? and to at least try to speak of them seperately?) would require some very careful qualification and precision (moreso than possible in a blog comment maybe); so: it's a good thing you also have a blog.

[Matt]

Amie, the Daily Show did a fake "French news clip" (for comparison). It was an off-color cinemascape series of images and stupid monologue, "zee car burns; it burns against itself, zee car" etc. then a shot of Godard wiping his upper lip with his thumb, but still quite funny.

[roger]

I was reading some of Aldous Huxley's essays yesterday. He used to have a column in the Hearst Magazine in the thirties -- which to my mind is wildly weird, Huxley as a columnist, and for, of all people, Citizen Kane -- and he wrote a column about the Stavisky riots in France. Basically, he wrote that it is odd, given how much fun it is to break things, that we don't break things more often. I was more interested in that riot itself, however, since it was organized by anti-semitic groups and something like 24 people were killed, with 500 wounded and 254 police wounded.

I vaguely knew that there had been riots, but I didn't know that they were so violent.

Interesting that the riot was organized by the ancestors of today's right wing parties in France, who even attacked the French legislature before they were driven back by the cops. It was after the riots that the left regrouped, with the Communists and the Socialists forming the Popular Front.

[alphonsevanworden]

why 'mystical'?

Well, in fascism ' the nation' which is to be protected - America say - is seperate from anything physical, from the concrete elements of 'the nation' and 'the citizenry/the people' as it is understood by liberal democratic ideology. It's just a spirit; you can say kill a portion of the citizens as a form of protecting the nation, and in fascist ideology there isn't even a hint of a contradiction there. In the ideologu of democracy, concepts have a material aspect and you can look at the material world to determine how the concepts - 'equality' say, or 'the people' - are doing. In fascism the concepts, the things that the state is championing and governing, are free floating fairies. 'America' can be described in one ideology in material terms; here it its territory; this is the list of its assets; these are its citizens, a compilation of material facts = 'America.' It is +embodied+. In fascism all these things are disembodied. In the fascist ideology, 'America' is mystical, is not coterminous with a collection of people and stuff. It's an Idea, as the Rob Lowe character I'm told said once on the West Wing.

and this elaborates itself in every aspect of ideology. People in manacles in a basement in Iraq being tortured are 'free' and people walking around in Caracas or Damascus having ice cream are 'unfree,' etc..

[alphonsevanworden]

...of course these two tendencies are always overlapping, and operating together, but the dominance of one or the other shifts and the practises and policies they allow and justify shift with them, and these shifts are determined by the relative strength of the classes in conflict.

It is not a matter of dismissing with a facile, empty, and irresponsible gesture, democratic ideas and ideals, throwing them into the Seine or the Mississippi or the Tigris.

'tis well said.