What do WE know about the London riots?

By James Duminy

The recent acts of insurrection, violence and looting in London have drawn typically shocked and patronising condemnation from all corners of the newspaper-reading classes. “Isn’t it just shocking that people can behave like this? What must their parents say?” A particularly pernicious discourse has emerged to describe these events — the vocabulary of “scum”, “filth” and “feral”. The lowly gangster class and their bandwagon passengers, careless in their sheep-like daze, are apparently responsible.

Criminalisation of the events has been the sweeping response from the British state, a process operating through both discursive and official mechanisms. David Cameron cleared it up for us: “As to the lawless minority, the criminals who’ve taken what they can get, I say this: We will track you down, we will find you, we will charge you, we will punish you.”

The homes of “looters” have been raided to recover goods, and some local authorities have evicted the families of “perpetrators”. The official hand of the state casts its net wider to rein in the slippery whitebait. It tries to confront its opponents with total onslaught. In times like these, usually benign governmentalities, expressed through surveillance and normalising effects, are not enough. Sovereign power in the form of direct physical violence is necessary once again.

Now, what should a South African know to write about the London riots? I have lived in the UK previously for approximately 15 months, I have a running interest in British colonial history, but I claim no intimate knowledge of that country. As with all complex societies and cities, the total of their functions and actions defies narrow definitional boundaries and linear causal comprehension. Yet I feel, as a South African, that I may have something to say about “events” such as this, given our historical experiences with radical occurrences (including the ungraspable ruptures emanating from colonialism in addition to more recent events) as well as our writing about these events. Thus, my title.

Most people who will try to think about the riots in something approaching a “thoughtful” way will raise points about the alienation of the British youth, especially “immigrant” groups, through unemployment, political and economic exclusion, and a bureaucratically and CCTV-induced anarchic hatred for law and order. Some might interpret these as being directly political statements — acts of insurgent citizenship, of claims in favour of a renewed right to urban life.

Yet writers in the media will keep thumping their heads against the issue of causality. Why did the violence and looting happen at such a scale? The question “why?” is a highly problematic one in this context as it searches for a causal explanation. Unfortunately we will never find a neat causal explanation for liminal moments of ambiguity, of “being on the threshold” through the collapse of taken-for-granted forms and limits, through logical reduction and analysis. Things can happen in the collective moment, things which are violent and extreme; but the moment demands the rupture of the possible.

The issue of collective violence has made a fascinating topic of analysis for some scholars of the postcolonialist Subaltern School of Indian history, including Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Suranjan Das, Nandini Gooptu and others. Though their analytical approaches and political intentions differ, from their work collective violence emerges as a concept that is inherently difficult to pin down with meaning and causality. Yes, British colonial writers and historians were prone to discursively producing the Indian working classes as violent and disorderly, but there were also real acts of violence that seemed to run counter to conventional narratives of class interest. Why did they happen?

The question we should ask is how did they happen? As most who have put themselves in the situation know, there is something unpredictable and arrogant about the crowd, an undue Dutch courage that leads to places and things previously unimaginable. This not only applies to moments of violence — clubs full of dancers, sports teams and crowds, political rallies, religious ceremonies — these are all affective experiences, drunk with the esprit de corps. The strange and intoxicating rhythms of the collective will, the synchronised extension and recollection of bodies and words, drive the unbridled will to the edge of reason until, once over the precipice, there is no coming back. Now all that matters is agency; the act. Now I can and must become more than I am.

That is the extent to which we can talk about moments of collective violence from a vantage point of security, defined not only in physical terms but in semantic terms — the existence of a specific gravity that ties things and events to consistent meanings. In London, in Tottenham and Wandsworth, and in other cities, the collapse of arbitrary categories of interpretation and meaning produced new urban spaces; spaces operating without the instructive beat of abstract rules and representations of what is or isn’t public behaviour; spaces in which the possibility of action flexes to the forgotten corners of desire.

There is a point at which we have to hold back in the analysis of such events, to recognise that there might be some things we cannot grasp conceptually, in our conventional language of everyday life. We have no adequate vocabulary for war and trauma, the horror defies narrow interpretation, although for ease of reference we may give cursory, impossibly vague and connotative signs to describe what it is like to be “in the suck”. After the fact comes the judgemental interpretation in the luxury of semantic solidity, and the emergence of a discourse to name, categorise and subject those involved.

It is your freedom to condemn the acts of violence and “criminality” in London, but at least be reflexive about the position from which you view these events. The only way something productive, rather than oppressive, can emerge from these events is if we try to suspend ordinary moral judgement to some extent, to open up a discursive space in which we can talk about neoliberal urban inequality and oppression without the language and dampening hand of legality. Communication and engagement is increasingly a social necessity and demand. We cannot afford to respond to social unrest through highbrow condemnation and repression, for this would be delaying the inevitable. The only possibility is more freedom, more engagement in public discourse — even if this means rethinking social and political relations in their fundamental nakedness.

James Duminy is a researcher at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town.