Normally we can cite race, gender, politics, money or sex. But this riot is explicable only in its confusion.
Published: Wednesday, August 10, 2011
The problem with being a small editorial team is clear on a day like today. All too regularly – acknowledging we haven’t the equipment to keep up with the news outlets – by the time one fullstops a piece of social vommitary, it has ceased to be newsworthy and, written off as a poor use of resource, it is thrown it into the unprofitable/ unjustified pile.
Starting in Tottenham/ Seven Sisters for fathomable reasons owing to the death-by-police of Mark Duggan, phase two was so sporadic, and unflinchingly relentless, it bore little to suggest an organised march of the underclass, the cries of the alienated, or attempts by the disenfranchised to challenge the socio-political status quo.
The rioting began on Saturday and advanced over Sunday onto yesterday. Late afternoon, evening and through the night last night we watched the news channels send their dusk crews to the four corners of London – inhaling the scenes between breaths of despair, disbelief and embarrassment. Today is cleanup Tuesday, and so it was time for the day’s clear light to capture the poignant new guise of those skeletal buildings destroyed in the fires. To sift through the wrecked businesses and talk to those too petrified to contribute in the antagonism of the dark.
Sat at a desk in Farringdon, the riots and their aftermath continue to dominate the day. So your writer – someone brought up in the monthly haze of Old Firm football moberism – offers his two cents on this very London, very web 2.0 social unrest. There’s nothing new: nothing scoopworthy, salient, spun, or saucy to be found here. Just the thoughtful scribblings of someone who feels the riots are explained by confusion, rather than characterised by it. The print press, tardy compared to the rest, are so concerned by the undertones to it: who is to gain voteworthy capital? What new law and order measures will be brought in? Will web 2.0 capture the ASBO bellends via the very social networks that facilitated their looting? Or will the government take heed that this is what happens when you cut society down to the bone with little recompense?
Starting in Tottenham/ Seven Sisters for fathomable reasons owing to the death-by-police of Mark Duggan, phase two was so sporadic, and unflinchingly relentless, it bore little to suggest an organised march of the underclass, the cries of the alienated, or attempts by the disenfranchised to challenge the socio-political status quo. Yet too much organisation – reportedly Facebook, Twitter, and BlackBerry Messenger played their parts – to be a coincidence or traditional flashmob. Yet in Web 2.0 context, how better to mobilise individuals by hitting them in their pocket. The Twitter Troops, the BlackBerry Berets: the digital facilitation of unrest.
Twitter was cited as one social networking medium used to arrange riots, but it was also the means by which us Londoners knew what was happening on our streets, and the platform used to band right-thinking capital-dwellers for the #riotcleanup.
Going back 30 years to Brixton, we have an example of an urban riot that was so easy to package compared to today. Racial discrimination, heavy-handed police, and an underclass of ghettoised black people. It also had a definite trigger: the deaths of 13 young men in a flat in Lewisham which the police were slow to investigate. It wasn’t pretty but it was simple, conforming largely to riot theory and expected patterns of civil disobedience.
This time the explanation isn’t so convenient. Respondents to questions on the rolling news reports – incidentally Sky did it a lot better than the BBC for once – offered that this was organised; wasn’t organised; was opportunist thievery; was politically motivated; was a move against the cuts, coalition, Cameron; was the understandable thuggery and outcry of the alienated….
The overwhelming explanation for the riots is that there is no overwhelming explanation. Such is life in the 21st Century that life exists within so many facets and a spider’s web of diversity, that today’s situation is less easily packaged as was Brixton in 1981.
But therein could lie the explanation: there is nothing overwhelming about it organisationally – the few anti-establishment sentiments, the smattering of anti-police feeling, the opportunism of the looting and general thuggery – points towards a demographic (nowadays we call it a ‘brand’) we can’t identify. Their lack of focus – as Brixton was race – IS the focus. The empowerment of the impoverished, the might of the marginalised.
Interviewed looters ranged in their knowledge of the political landscape enough for commentators to grasp that organisation and a common grievance was lacking. But there was a grievance – a dangerous and multi-faceted one that’s difficult to title, but oh so real. The looting and thuggery unto itself is reason for this being an anti-establishment rebellion, and its lack of organisation indicative of alienation that doesn’t characterise but define it.
Targets followed no discernible pattern and the yobbery no resemblance to flash-mob or riot theory. It thus was difficult to hang an overarching reason on it – bar the predictable “Thug Britania”, “Yob Rule” etc – so it can be so easily dismissed as opportunism and disrespect on a gargantuan scale.
The middle classlessness of the news reporters – inevitably by day three the B team was playing – was so evident in their ignorance that one Sky News reporter mused that the youths in her midst probably didn’t have fathers.
The targets of rioters’ wrath didn’t follow any pattern. Move One – and they didn’t crowbar RBS, piss on Tesco, or hold up Selfridges with any less gusto than Move Two where they set fire to independent furniture shops and looted family businesses. Move Three was to knock off JD Sports, Debenhams, Comet et al. What was present in all these events was the aggression directed towards the police, and the overarching disregard for society, laws, and community.
Move One is an easily packaged move against the financial and political hierarchy but it was negated by Move Two which showed the undiscerning spree-ism of it. Anything goes. So we must look past the targets to the reasons why, acknowledging the act itself has more salient meaning.
Move three, it could fairly be offered, is that this undefinable mob are versed in Brand I, consumerism, and the me generation (aren’t we all), enough to see an opportunity to bag some new toys and threads. That’s not a revelation, granted, but the act of illegally obtaining goods – and the inherent disregard therein – is enough to show that something is wrong, especially when one is stealing from one’s own neighbourhood.
It removes any yesteryear notions of the community spirit and collective consciousness that bound and empowered the impoverished. This nods at middle class individualism/ isolationism and social mobility making the terms ‘class’ or ‘classless society’ a confused one indeed. We aren’t lumbered with friends by postcode default any more and so we lose empathy and a connection with our home turf. And so we’re back to alienation. People are standing outside of their humble community feeling alienated from each other enough to rob the convenience store; from the area enough to trash it; and from themselves enough to stick two fingers up and say: fuckitt, I don’t know much but I’m clued up enough to know that’s a fucking expensive telly, I want that… arrested? Who cares.
Consumerism always has a part to play when we’re talking alienation, it’s the basis for Marx’s theory after all.
Alienation is a process rather than a word. It starts with the subject becoming alienated from expected norms – the job, the pursuit of a better life, the quest for happiness, intimacy, empathy. The subject basically checks out of the hotel, caring less and less about less and less before the process nears completion and he becomes alienated from life, society, any concept of a collective conscience or community. Lastly he becomes alienated from himself. Once he has become alienated from himself he ceases to be a subject of anything.
Post-modernism, consumerism, capitalisation et al is hammered home by an interdependent web of media outlets who show us the ideal and broadcast the rosier side of life, with images and VT showing us consumerism, money, wealth, and the way life is supposed to be and look.
Out of the telly and into the real world, we have welfare cuts, joblessness, and the dream is shakier than it looks on the screen. The looting happened in rich as well as poor areas. Hitting the better off suburbs demonstrates we don’t know who David Cameron is, but we know what trainers are in and what a 3D telly is. Also, we don’t know why but we want one.
Traditional riots usually feature looting in the troublespot itself, which is more often than not a poorer place, but this time it also graduated to swag-claiming from the affluent areas. Stealing from the aspirational and fuelling flames with the knowledge it’ll never be me. Affluence burns just as quick as poverty, that’s one thing that binds us anyway.
Our natural focus is to look at the theory behind the riots and pull together some common meaning around those safe key areas of race, equality, sex, politics, gender, welfare ... or whatever. I’m sure these components are in cauldron bubbling away. But in lacking a salient theme binding the whole thing, we need to ensure we don’t dismiss 'lacking' itself, in whatever which way we define it, as reason to riot.
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