B.S.!
wallmartyr@gmail.com wrote:
> "Warning Lights"
> A Surrealist Statement on the Recent Riots in France
> Paris Group of the Surrealist Movement
>
> For three weeks, in the ghettos of the poor suburbs, euphemistically
> named "sensitive neighborhoods," on the outskirts of the outskirts,
> thousands of cars were burned, public utilities devastated, troops of
> police deliberately attacked.
>
> There is nothing new about what sparked these incidents: the absurd
> death of two adolescents seized by panic, in the course of "normal
> police behavior." Comparable police blunders also occurred in the
> past, and nearly always lootings and burnings were the inevitable
> response. But such incidents were localized.
>
> Nor is there is anything new in the methods employed or the visible
> targets: For many years now, notably in Alsace, cars are burned on New
> Year's Eve or at the time of more obscure commemorations. And for a
> long time schools have been vandalized by schoolboys expelled from
> school; buses or police cars stoned; passengers methodically robbed in
> public transport.
>
> What is new today is the immediate extension of this violence, its
> rapid spread to the provinces, well beyond the borders of a spontaneous
> and unpremeditated movement.
>
> This is a movement without explicit demands, except the resignation of
> a Minister of the Interior disqualified by his remarks and, as
> everybody knows, scorned by his superiors. This is a movement
> impossible to reduce to ethnic or racial demands. If the majority of
> the rioters are of Maghreb or African origin, some of them are Asian
> and French. This is also a movement irreducible to the category of
> youth, for the majority of the youth-unlike those of May 1968, or the
> demonstrations against the CIP in 1994, or the secondary school
> movement of last spring-, have no associations there.
>
> This is, moreover, a movement without spirit or class consciousness-a
> movement typical of those common uprisings that blur conventional
> distinctions: a movement of "imperative revolt" due to permanent
> poverty and daily humiliation. But it is also a movement without
> strategy, a movement more prone to gaze at itself on television
> screens, drawing its ephemeral strength from the media coverage it
> produces, and thus depending on the self-censorship of information put
> in place to avoid "the telethon effect." It is a movement nevertheless
> more Luddite than playful, sustaining itself at the source of real
> despair, but lacking utopia, its horizon limited by bars and block
> towers.
>
> For sociologists, journalists and certain revolutionaries, this
> movement is incomprehensible since it resists the well-oiled arguments
> they use to explain social movements: neither social analysis, nor the
> study of the composition of class succeeds in defining its specificity.
>
> These riots are made by an unidentifiable mob-rebellious bodies whose
> existence is reduced to bare necessity, and who have not found any
> other language than that of destructive gestures.
>
> Let us not fool ourselves; in everyday life many of this mob are
> detestable; some are numbed by religion, many alienated by consumerism,
> or enthusiasts of masculine values, sharing with the masters of society
> the stupid worship of sport (some riots were suspended during televised
> football games). Many are contemptible in their behavior toward
> women-whose absence in the riots signals an unacceptable limitation.
> Most of this mob would certainly not be friendly to us.
>
> What is remarkable, however-beyond them-is their revolt. Through
> their actual contradictions, they represent the dark face of a vengeful
> social unconscious held back for too long, as those in bygone days
> representing the "dangerous classes." But, at the risk of plunging
> back even more bitterly in their poverty, it will be necessary for them
> to draw on the lessons of their recent experience in order to gain
> lucidity. Already they have seen at work the repressive role of the
> imams and of Islam, mere auxiliaries to the police- as is all
> religion. This movement still has to get rid of all forms of
> puritanical and masculinist morality so that women will join them as
> equals-like the women fire-raisers of the Paris Commune in 1871-to
> take an active part in all future stuggles. Likewise, they must have
> done with the stupid gang rivalry that nails them to their
> "territories" and deprives them of a mobile offensive. And finally,
> they must learn to choose more directly political targets.
>
> In a society in which all previous forms of belonging, and therefore of
> associated consciousness, have been wiped out, these events testify to
> the eruptive and uncontrollable return of the social question, firstly
> under an immediately negative form, that fire-emblem of all
> apocalypses- symbolizes. Indeed, unlike the rebellions in Los Angeles
> in 1965 and in 1992, the population of the districts here did not
> massively join the rioters. And in contrast to May '68 neither poetry
> nor brilliant ideas are on the barricades. No wildcat strike is going
> to spread widely with these troubles. But the rulers have been give a
> good hotfoot and have been forced to unmask themselves.
>
> A democracy which, in order to face up to a quantitatively limited
> movement (considering the number of participants), has been obliged to
> put back in force an old colonial law, but also to reveal its
> constituent deception: that is, where the police abuse their powers,
> the state of emergency gives to their abuse the legitimacy that it
> lacks. What we long ago called "individual freedom" is today known as
> the "discretionary power" of the cops.
>
> In a flash, such warning lights have revealed-during these November
> nights-the return of a possibility that seemed to be lost: that of
> throwing power into a panic even when its forces are harassed in a
> disorganized manner through the whole territory by a handful of
> forsaken social casualties. From now on, we can imagine the strength of
> an uprising that would-beyond the inhabitants of the
> ghettos-include the whole population suffering from the rise of
> impoverishment, and would turn into civil war against the organs of
> capital and the state.
>
> Beyond recent infernos presented as the very image of a nightmare, it
> is time that the dream of concrete utopia is raised anew.
>
> The Paris Group of the Surrealist Movement
> November 2005
>
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