On Paris Burning by neil
By Neil Balan.
This is a ramble of thoughts about the violence in Paris that some may want to pick up on. There are strengths and weaknesses here so push and pull as you see fit.
I want to draw attention to the mobile engine—Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy—who spectacularly invaded, with grandiose and publicized flair, the outer rings of Paris that now burn. Sarkozy’s initial appearance over a week ago, with cameras rolling and security forces in tow, was an exercise in showmanship and rhetoric. An effort to cultivate an image of an aspiring Presidential hopeful occupying a neighbourhood. With a vehemence characteristic of self-perceived noble duty, he claimed that he would spare no expense in “taking out the trash”.
Fortunately, Sarkozy’s bodyguards were on-site, among the many cameras, to protect him from the insults and occasional pot, pan, or crumbling piece of dilapidated tenement concrete, that came flying down from the balconies to which he was pointing.
This incited no shortage of anger on the part of residents, citizens already feeling marginalized, disempowered, and on the short-end of the governing stick. The coincident deaths of two local youths, who died while scaling an electric fence at a power substation compound, accelerated the frustration and anxiety already in place in a highly-policed enivironment of localized tension.
Though I can only speculate as to Sarkozy’s intents (i.e., did he want to induce this response?) , I cannot think of a better method used by repressive organs of government to put the wealth of the poverty of the multitude to work—to extract value and energy from them in moments of crisis—than to walk into someone’s backyard, call them “scum”, wait for a reponse, and “address” out the “trouble” with repeated inevitability-laced claims of, “See, I told you so.”
Let “their” anger provide the semiotic relay.
Says a report on Reuters:
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, accused by opponents of enflaming passions with his outspoken attacks on the “scum” behind the violence, maintained a conspicuously low profile.
Reuters on the Riots in Paris.
No shit. Sarkozy’s been waging a public war on these communities for over two years; his policing targets 25 neighbourhoods that represent a “threat” to French society, whatever we may want to define that as being. It seems that, for Sarkozy, it’s exclusionary from the outset. The champion of social brinksmanship, fastidiously and deliberately making a name for himself in harm’s way, is creating a race war. Not in terms of a particularized kind of racism directed at specific groups or elements in society (which is substantaial and certainly overlaps) but in terms of an ideological “us-them” relation. For Sarkozy, the issue is civility, civil society, and a question civilization: the savages must be contained and pacified.
[Note: This generalized race-war, purge-friendly, has a very ominous quality to it, and it is something that has been diagnosed and analyzed with precision and clarity by Michel Foucault in his 1975-76 College de France lectures, “ ‘Society Must Be Defended’ ”. The last chapter (the March 17, 1976 lecture) is significant in this regard.]
Here, some context and feedback from a community member:
The open political rivalry between Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential race has further strained the atmosphere. “I’m afraid the Arabs and Africans of France are being used as pawns in the political debate for the next election,” social worker Aziz Sahiri said in a televised debate with Bauer. The ambitious Sarkozy, vying with Villepin to lead the right in the presidential elections, has sought to consolidate the right’s traditional base with tough law-and-order policies.
Sarkozy’s visit to the tenements reminds me of Ariel Sharon’s notorious September 2000 visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, another exercise in grand-standing pomp. They have an elemental quality that is modular; they procede with a hyperreal grammar and syntax that is startling, both as event and as image.
Sharon came armed with bodyguards and cameras, though his bodyguards didn’t have to momentarily deflect flying objects, which came later:
Also on September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This visit became the pretext for instigating large scale demonstrations, the start of the al-Aqsa infifada.
Sharon did not attempt to enter any mosques during his 34 minute visit to the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest place, which Muslims have renamed Haram al-Sharif. His visit was conducted during normal hours when the area is open to tourists. Palestinian youths — eventually numbering around 1,500 — shouted slogans in an attempt to inflame the situation. Some 1,500 Israeli police were present at the scene to forestall violence.
There were limited disturbances during Sharon’s visit, mostly involving stone throwing. During the remainder of the day, outbreaks of stone throwing continued on the Temple Mount and in the vicinity, leaving 28 Israeli policemen injured, three of whom were hospitalized. There are no accounts of Palestinian injuries on that day. Significant and orchestrated violence was initiated by Palestinians the following day after Friday prayers.
Who inflames and who forestalls is a question of relation. Biased source? Perhaps. What “Palestinian Facts” may or may not be is a question of both relation and the specific contingencies of how “truth” is produced.
Yet, notably, when I searched for attributions of Sharon’s visit as playing a major part in motivating the initial moments of confrontation and violence that transfigured into the intifada, not a whole lot came up in the way of major daily papers or news services. This is to say that either no one had the wherewithall to make this leap (which is not so much of a leap) or that leap was non-existant in that many independent and alternative narratives already ascribed value to the act in question. Interestingly, open-source Wikipedia turned up as one page which included this kind of phrasing, which is to say that somewhere in the Wikipedia passage, that connection was, if not made, then shaded as such in a suggestive way.
I’m sure there’s editorial analysis of the event in readily-accessible popular and public forums that point to this connection; yet, I was surprised as to how “buried” the sources citing this connection were in relation to the initial hits I turned up. A Google search for “start of intifada sharon” turned up many hits, though they seemed to come from outside the realm of “official” or “legitimate and newsworthy” sources. Certainly, Google generates findings based on sites that are most frequently referenced, lending something in the way of self-fulfilment to me being able to find sources who make this connection as being pro-Palestinian. However, the matter, as Sharon and Sarkozy recognize outright, is one of perception and how that perception is put into circulation. The fuzzy answers framing these incidents after the fact do little to deny the intensity and efficacy of the events that eventually transpired.
The “pretext” of these visits though, is substantial. For Sharon, the Temple Mount is an in-between space, a contested zone that is has been occupied and re-occupied for varying durations, in ways that are physical (we have more bodies and more force and it is ours), rhetorical (the fiery vitriol of self-perceived ownership), and imaginative (one day it will be ours). What would a visit by Arafat have accomplished? That I cannot say but I suspect that Arafat’s visit would have played out differently, the defiant rebel standing fast; Sharon calculated and timed his visit to coincide with visiting hours, using the cameras to take the place by force, a re-occupation.
The intersection of these two spectacles, as media and as real events, have created significant fall-out and this is something of a misnomer; of course, yes, violence ensues and we’re neck-deep in crisis. Yet, the model for this kind of event has a factor of recognition that is now normative. It’s an event occurring within the context of a narrative logic that is legible, which is to say that it comes off as natural and expected. That said, further analysis would most likely establish a pattern hinging on similar but singular events of this sort, where circumstances of contestation are similar but have their own qualities or characters specific to the set of events to which they belong. It’s not structure but rather a matter of normalized techniques used in situations where power relations are at their most intense, visible, and extreme. It’s the exhibition of this kind of daring, as a technique of precipitaion in already-tubulent systems, that’s most ominous.
November 5th, 2005 at 9:27 pm
One Reason Why Paris is burning.
Paris is burning—that much is certain. However, the root fires were started long ago. Though I believe that Neil has trenchantly articulated an affective—and thus effective technique that state figures invoke so as to precipitate violence amongst Others, I think it is also quite important to disinter the structures of oppression, those barely perceptible frames (for their subjective corollaries often lack the semiotic relays that are necessary to making them visible and perhaps intelligible) that impinge upon the Other and that undeniably contribute to her/his response to such pressures of Othering. ‘Integration’ is just one of those structures. And in right leaning countries, its corollaries can be severe.
Stephen Castles has wisely pointed out it is clear that the nation-state has not fully understood, nor adequately conceived of how to respond to diversity (1998:223)—and this fact is one that will likely to reveal itself over time. In many Western countries, ‘integration’ is touted as being the fairest means of dealing with pluralism. However, it is useful to note how diversity/pluralism or the arrival of Others is always—and quite revealingly—framed as a problematization, one that requires ‘dealing’ with. So then, ‘integration’ comes to stand as the answer to this quandary. However, this answer—as it asks little of you or I—tends to slip under the radar. Though it is difficult to perceive, the concept of ‘integration’ is nevertheless quite present. ‘Integration’ has a tremendous ego. For it reveals itself to be incapable of seeing past the edge of its own nose. Which is to say that it is an approach to immigration that fails to realize how “the challenge of communication is not to be true to our own interiority but to have mercy on others for never seeing ourselves as we do” (Peters 1999:266-267). And, as any diachronic consideration will reveal, ‘integration’s’ lack of understanding is the result of its having been lineally fettered to colonialist traditions. Moreover, one could make the argument that ‘integration’—by virtue of its constrained orientation to the self—inadvertently gives rise to racism, prejudice and other exclusionary practices. For it creates a fairly lofty goal of ‘integrating’ the Other into the Self, however, the Other is fated to never accomplish this goal to the Self’s satisfaction; thus, this often has the result of irritating the Self, who consequently reproaches the Other for their inability to accomplish a goal that was set ab ovo, not by the Other, but by the Self. Thus ‘integration’s’ colonial lineage lies in its presciently structured transformation and acceptance of the Other (Hage 1994:29). As Ghassan Hage importantly brings to light, concepts like ‘tolerance’ and ‘integration’ do in fact unfold from colonial mentalities and practices (34) in that they serve to reproduce similarly unjust relations of power (33). In a world marked by pluralism, it becomes a question of finding the less coercive means of maintaining governance over post-colonized subjects.
In fact, along these lines of thought, it becomes particularly interesting to think of what a concept of ‘integration’ affords or obliquely gives rise to. It of course implies that there exists a society replete with its own languages, cultures, forms of knowledge, social practices, etc. and that all these particular, and at times corresponding, histories that reach deep into the past. Of course for those coming from without, these ‘common’ understandings won’t be so obviously common. For those from within however, these ways of living are entirely natural, they’re just the way things are done, how else would one go about it. You see where this is going. Understood in this light, ‘integration’ becomes a standard of judgment; one which allows us to ascertain just to what extent they’re different, to assess how far they are from properly ‘integrating’ into our society. Integration is a bar to which they can be held, it is also a bar against which they can be reproached. Along such lines, France’s decision to ban the wearing of religious accoutrements (2004) is very telling in this regard. In fact, a CBC article explained that some believed that the (one that was ostensibly predicated on maintaining secularism in French society) “ban will help prevent the division of society into ethnic communities, and promote integration into French society.” As is clear from such forms of reasoning, ‘integration’ is itself quite oblivious to the ethical transgression that it commits in its application. Of course in the end, the concept, ethic and goal of ‘integration’ amounts to a fairly unreasonable demand, and it is one that has very little understanding of the dynamics of culture, identity and alterity. And it is in moments of crisis such as these that we come to realize the deep void left by the loss of figures such as Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault. For they were actors who particularly attacked such surreptitious forms of Othering and who managed to elicit outrage within, and commitment from, other members of French society. They were figures who keenly understood that the task of academic research in the field of contemporary citizenship is one that ought to be focused upon increasing and nurturing societies’ valence towards difference. We must be thankful that figures as potent as Kristeva (1991, 1993) still remain.
So part of what I wanted to draw attention to here is that Othered individuals do not simply burn cars or other materials capriciously—or because they have been deemed ‘scum.’ No, acts such as those quite often find themselves emerging from myriad forms of consistent Othering that have impinged upon, pressed down and thus bounded Others’ being in those peripheral spaces that have become their ‘home’ (a misnomer if ever there was one) away from home. Of course ‘integration’ is but one of many structures of oppression. However, it is, I believe, a particularly flammable one…
November 7th, 2005 at 10:31 am
“Rioting by French youths spread to 300 towns overnight and a man hurt in the violence died of his wounds, the first fatality in 11 days of unrest that has shocked the country, police said Monday.” …
France’s biggest Muslim fundamentalist organization, the Union for Islamic Organizations of France, issued a fatwa, or religious decree. It forbade all those “who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others.”
Arsonists burned two schools and a bus in the central city of Saint-Etienne and its suburbs, and two people were injured in the bus attack. Churches were set ablaze in northern Lens and southern Sete, he said.
In Colombes in suburban Paris, youths pelted a bus with rocks, sending a 13-month-old child to the hospital with a head injury, Hamon said, while a daycare center was burned in Saint-Maurice, another Paris suburb.
Much of the youths’ anger has focused on law-and-order Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose reference to the troublemakers as “scum” appeared to inflame passions. ”
November 8th, 2005 at 11:42 pm
In relation Christian’s remarks.
I would add a few more things. There is indeed an intense set of discourses that have a historical legacy, which are bounds up and firmly tangled within this constellation; how they affect the events — in relation to reading how the riots function as a relay for the inclusion or exclusion of the enivornments and communities — is something that demands more attention. Saying that these communities are marginalized and disempowered is perhaps not enough. Perhaps we need some more Franz Fanon and Said here to help the discourse along…
I want to quickly make evident some of the recently-emerging narrative frames: I’ve heard “criminal networks” and “Arab communities” a few times in the last day or two. This suggests a few things regarding this, which make two things apparent.
First, the communities and youths embroiled with repressive State forces have certainly grappled with repressive ideological and discursive frameworks for years; these communities have become embedded — integrated and tolerated or not — in French civil society for some time. This is to say that there is a whole body of knowledge that is produced that constitutes the “delinquency” and “behavioural” aspects of this kind of violent defiance and the form of spectacular uprising this defiance has taken.
Again, this is a matter of the race war I suggested above in relation to Foucault. Criminalizing is a disciplinary technique of governance.
That the acts themselves constitute illegal actions have little register in comparison to being able to locate these crimes as emanating from particular place so as to affix them to a certain set of actors and conditions. As such, the communities in question then suffer a through a dilemma: in supporting the riots, they are still Other in legitimizing unspeakable acts against some imagined French civic ideal; in criticism, they risk downplaying the “structure of feeling” that tends to spread across these communities. I suspect there is much “gut feeling” in circulation on this one.
Second, the “Arab” tag is an interesting monkier. Misused — which is to say, used discursively to make reductions and generalizations and, hence, used correctly according to some — this catch-all does much to allow the events uptake into circulating discourses about pan-Islamic terror, terrorism, a war on terrorism — discourses that amplify the “threat” and “volatility” of these communities in France. “Arab” gains negative connotation in this context.
Yet, as Christian has pointed out, the communities in question — from what I gather, Algerian, Moroccan, generally North African — have an extensive history of relations with French State power in a post/colonial context that exists well prior to any current phobia about Isalm or the Middle East. This current situation is rooted firmly in a set of historical relations; I question the intents of those who choose to obscure them in confluence with these other kinds of contemporary discourses.
One final remark: the imagined efficacy of la republique in a historical context — at the barricades, in the streets, against the authorities of the State — has been strangely absent. Coincidence?
November 9th, 2005 at 2:06 am
Neil appositely invokes Williams’ ’structures of feeling’ vis-à-vis the material statements that are currently being burnt into the French landscape. And along these lines, it is both fascinating and terribly disheartening to see how these ’structures of feeling’ are quickly, consistently–and most importantly–semantically hijacked by the repressive state. just like after september 11th, any ’structure of feeling’ that tends towards questioning or investigating is immediately circumscribed and ‘defined’ by the state. thus, the actors of such material statements are immediately labelled as criminals, they are amplified (by dint of the forced and generalized association with ethnicity) and they are thus vaulted into the realm of threat: vast, inexplicable and undeniably dangerous.
To acknowledge the plight of the Other is to confront the Self in question–thus it is to put the Self in question.
November 26th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Good day
Here’s a quick video I made to show off the Dervish’s dance from the Guild-Wars nightfall [url=http://traveljam.blogspot.com/]weekend event[/url].
The dance the dervish does is the same one that Christoper Walken did in the video for Fatboy Slims’ - Weapon of choice music video (hence the music used)
What do you think about it?
Mine
youtube.com/watch?v=j_aONMdkzxU
Original for those that may not have seen it
youtube.com/watch?v=0WW8flwpH-Q
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