"Warning Lights" Surrealist Statement on Recent French Riots
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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
subjazz
subjazz
Outsourcing of American jobs? The unions like
the oil union?
Get real people. Most want security not utopia.
Utopia is great in the imagination but simply
does not work and most people do not want it.
In regards to the situation in France:
Is there not a form of socialism there?
Show me real solutions instead of throwing
fuel into the fire (something the surrealists are
very good at) and perhaps people will listen.
You have no answers so shut up!
Paul Kinsler
> > [Paris Surrealist press-release :-)]
> What does the surrealist movement think about the
> Outsourcing of American jobs?
I, being neither French nor American, also want to hear
the views of Parisian Surrealists on the outsourcing of
American jobs.
--
#Paul
Robert Morpheal
heavily populated countries to encourage faster, higher, reproduction
rates, to increase the labour pool, in highly overpopulated areas of the
world, to speed up the socio-political collapse of those parts of the
world into total chaos.
Why else do you think they would do it ?????
Think a little. It will all become perfectly clear to you.
R.M.
UBUjean-jacques viala
>Paul Kinsler wrote:
>>
>> subjazz <sub...@lmi.net> wrote:
>> > > [Paris Surrealist press-release :-)]
>> > What does the surrealist movement think about the
>> > Outsourcing of American jobs?
>>
>> I, being neither French nor American, also want to hear
>> the views of Parisian Surrealists on the outsourcing of
>> American jobs.
>>
>> --
absolute equivalent) I can answer:
http://combattantsafn.free.fr/page28.html
first part, to be heard every half hour from 5 am to 6 pm.
then:
http://hymne-national.ifrance.com/
with three dices you got a number and listen.
enjoy.
--
UBU
Ils se surveillaient les uns les autres comme des chiens qui tournent
autour de l'auge, et voici qu'au nom de leur justice ils commirent des
meurtres, car leur justice était d'abord égalité. Et quiconque se
distinguait en quoi que ce fut était écrasé par le nombre.
Saint Exupery
Robert Morpheal
> first part, to be heard every half hour from 5 am to 6 pm.
Will the party of the first part please consume your beverages
and behave sillier, or you will be in trouble with the party
of the second part.
R.M.