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

To acknowledge the plight of the Other is to confront the Self in question–thus it is to put the Self in question.

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?

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. ”

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…