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November 26, 2005
À propos des banlieus...suite
[In haste...]
So it wasn't about jobs, after all...? An article in today's Le Monde reveals:
Contrary to the claims of the minister of the interior, the majority of minors who were arrested and presented before the judge following the urban violence...were unknown to the courts...Most of the 577 minors who appeared before the judge were "ordinary" young people. Aged from 16-17, often french, they had obtained average results in their studies. Most of them were enrolled on vocational courses, often as apprentices.
Response to this 'surprising' finding is somewhat inadequate: the director of the PJJ quoted thus:
Certain of the participants in the violence were motivated by hatred (la haine...) and the desire for destruction, but there was also a ludic dimension in all of this...the "game boy" generation behaved as if in a virtual world
The vague evolcation of a 'ludic' dimension, whilst perhaps lending strength to our '68 parallel, hardly serves to explain this contagion. And, we suspect, neither will it prevent the social hardliners and the new intellectual theocracy from the wealth of opportunity the émeutiers offer them. In the same newspaper 'philosophe' Régis Debray affects to support the call for a return to religious values with a return to Freud: in an article entitled 'Civilisation and its Discontents...continued', he speaks up against any inflammatory linking of the violence with religious (presumably, islamic) motive, arguing that the religious problem here lies deeper. Taking up with relish what he imagines a wise old man caught in a ring of burning Renaults might say: "The problem here is not too much, but not enough religion." The transmutation of religious fervour into the culte republicain and the "messianic progressivism" of workers movements, has now somehow been lost altogether.
Evoking an absolute discontinuity between "the ancient struggles for hopes and the current despair of vandals", he decries the absence of leaders, martyrs: Tony Montana, the 'icône des quartiers' if there is one, is hardly a suitable model like Trotski, Stalin or Ché. A proper "super-ego" is what separates revolutionary fervour from mere "jacquerie urbain" "without leader, without slogans"...
And this is the very impulse of religion – to "reunite isolated individuals, by channelling, or more often inhibiting that (quoting Freud) instinctive primitive and autonomous tendency of the human being: aggression".
For it is remarkable that the need for religion is always for them...Freud's insight was to understand that the "opium of the people", writes Debray, could in reality be "the vitamin of the poor", contributing to a "programme of civilisation", which "distinguishes us from the chimpanzees": In Freud this was an historico-psychoanalytic thesis. Here it becomes dangerously close to an intellectual-elitist prescription: religion is good for the poor, it provides a necessary pacification and civilisation, drags them up from the level of animals, or racailles.
Then we get the by now irritatingly banal 'radicality' of defending this 'politically incorrect' position. A bit of discipline is good for you...would be good for them, to make them into the type of revolutionary mass that would get us excited. Stop the desublimation of civilisation! One need not disagree with Freud, or even with the contention that "a supermarket is never going to be enough to make a community," to find this suggestion, this programme, dubious in both logical and pragmatic terms.
If this argument – the youth "unaffiliated to anything except consumer goods, apparently more preoccupied with the signs of wealth than with the redistribution to all" – recalls Badiou's incisive article on the veil, where he demands "a law against brand names...the conspicuous symbols of Capital" as more divisive than religious symbols, we must say that the suggestion of an anachronistic return to unifying religious faith is less convincing, though perhaps its clumsiness reveals something underlying about Badiou's own more sophisticated position.
Which brings me to the Politics of Truth. Because Alberto Toscano very convincingly picked apart the apparently simple continuity between religious fanaticism and revolutionary zeal, the idea that what constitutes modern revolutionary politics, and what needs to be renewed, is less a secularisation than a 'respiritualisation' of politics. What remains an open question, however, is how far even Badiou's nominally secular position remains subtended by a cryptotheological agenda; how far the absolute indifferent binding, this universal unification is necessarily religious in all but name, and thus as preposterously idealist as a return to village community and church on sunday.
There is no doubting the depth of research and ingenuity showed in these earnest attempts at a renewal of the political. But uncomfortable questions certainly hang heavy for me, amongst the Leninist quips and the gleeful affirmations of political uncorrectness which delight this crowd. In the radical rhetoric it is difficult not to sense a comforting return to old certainties, a reignited boy-scout fervour of party meetings, which fails entirely to engage with the complexities of the contemporary world. Sometimes one is struck by the preposterous nature of the stupendously ambitious notions: but of course, one must not limit infinite thought! And of course, this constellation of intellectual positions almost defines itself by a repudiation of complexities: pleading the impossibility of political action on the basis of the density of the world is defined as the most heinous crime against 'fidelity'. But one need not be a 'postmodern defeatist' or a devotee of nomadic chicanery to suspect that what the domino-fall of the eastern bloc, where the wake of an apparently revolutionary democratic agency of the people guided in property developers, rapacious investors and McDonaldisation taught us was that the only revolutions that would take place from now on were those required by capital. One need not be an 'impossibilist' to argue that there is no 'outside' of capitalism from which to set up a 'front' or a political encampment (and one certainly isn't convinced by Negri's – or Seattle's – "multitudes"): Precisely Deleuze and Guattari's genius was to have described the logic of capital in great detail – of course, they are not at all the spontaeous anarchist clowns that the new theocratic right-left wants them to be (a dissmissable 'ludic dimension', living in a 'virtual world', perhaps!) – rather than to have merely got excited over faded photos of lenin and images of the absolute (the 'Deleuzian century', crossing Y2K, will still be in force long after 'public intellectual' Zizek has been forgotten).
It remains to be seen whether what Badiou has to say today can allay my suspicions.
Posted by robin at November 26, 2005 07:38 AM