The riots and disorder that occupied the streets of London, Bristol, Birmingham, Salford, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, and other city centers have now ended. The death toll continues to rise in the aftermath--currently five at the time of writing--while victims of robbery, property damage, and arson stare at the prospect of personal ruin.
In sum, the English Riots* revealed the very worst aspects of English society. From the police misinforming the public about the circumstances involved in the shooting death of Mark Duggan, to the depraved indifference of the cabinet who continued to holiday while cities burned, to the gross disregard for the life and well-being of others displayed by looters, to the ill-informed and counter-productive proposals to militarize policing approved by the Tories in response, to the racist and reactionary sentiments articulated by some members of the public, the behaviour has been appalling along numerous fronts. At the same time, some of those most negatively impacted by the violence have shown courage, dignity, and decency. In particular, the families of Mark Duggan and Haroon Jahan have demonstrated immense bravery and poise under conditions of devastating personal loss.
Now, the fist-shaking and hand-wringing is set to begin. Debates over who or what is responsible for the English Riots will continue over the coming months. Already, some excellent analyses have been written, including a provocative piece in the Daily Telegraph (known pejoratively as the 'Torygraph') by Peter Oborne. But while this debate is important, the terms of debate themselves should not escape scrutiny.
Already, Helen Dexter at opendemocracy has penned a thoughtful critique of how discussions are being structured, noting that couching debates in moral terms and root causes will be counter-productive. She advocates an investigation into determining the conditions of possibility under which a resort to violence becomes strategically rational for members of society.
I too share a similar unease over the form of current debate. My concern is with the primacy of the term 'community' as the central unit of analysis in arguments that are being made across the political spectrum. Why am I suspicious of the word 'community'? Because community has been used over the past thirty years as a way of eliminating the discursive space for the political articulation and mobilization of other forms of political organization including class and society. Moreover, community as a concept has been central to the reconfiguration of government that we know as neoliberalism.
Nikolas Rose (2000) has argued that the new governing logic that is fostered by the primacy of community no longer seeks to give people a political, social, or economic stake in collective social advancement. Rather, the stake is generated through a community-based ethic that shapes each individual into a productive citizen. But this citizenship is not conceived as social citizenship; rather it is territorialized at a local level in the neighbourhoods, associations, or subcultures in which an individual is said to exercise some autonomy (Rose, 2000: 1397-1399). Rose (2000) argues that:
it is from these communities that autonomous, freedom-aspiring individuals are thought to derive the guidelines, techniques, and aspirations by which they think about and enact their freedom (1398).
Thus, the art of government is govern individuals through communities by fostering an 'ethopolitics' that ensures that individuals are bound and tied to their community through feelings of honour or duty in increasingly intense ways (Rose 2000: 1399).
As Rose (2000: 1409) notes, the problem is that the primacy of community--and the pluralism that this necessary entails--as the administrative space for governing requires that normalization and control be implanted into each individual more robustly than was possible through traditional outlets like schools, prisons, or social welfare programmes. And rather than recognizing the role of context--as identified by Dexter--the challenges of pluralism, or differing levels of financial capacity, the contemporary politics of community instead asserts that its preferred values are natural, self-evident, and universal. So to inculcate and enforce these values requires forms of everyday intervention that are increasingly at odds with the principles of pluralism and autonomy. Moreover, interventions on this scale and at this depth can never be fully successful. Yet at moments of abject failure, it is the community itself that undergoes demonization--and further forms of intervention-- for the unwillingness to police the risks that are said to have emerged from its confines.
So in part, the English riots and proposals made to prevent further outbreaks demonstrate the dangers of community as the primary site of governance in two senses. In the first sense, the unwillingness to govern at the level of--or in the name of-- society increasingly fosters what Guy Debord has referred to as 'lonely crowds' who are only linked by the corrective interventions that are undertaken by authorities to foster a pseudo-autonomy that is conducive to the dominant forms of organisation and consumption that define the current age. In this sense, the riots show what can happen when this unachievable project succeeds piecemeal.
In a second sense, the focus on community means that the ongoing process of imposing a set of values will only intensify leading to further decreases in everyday autonomy and concurrent increases in alienation that may then feed into the dynamic noted above. Early indications are that the government and authorities are set to contribute to this vicious circle. For example, the call from members of both the Labour and the Conservative parties to allow for the dismantling of social media outlets in times of 'unrest' unfortunately hints that few valuable lessons are going to be learned from this tragic set of events.
*At the danger of being pedantic, no rioting took place in Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland.
Image Credit: James Cridland [map of locations of the London riots with results from the multiple deprivation index overlaid]
