Re-reading the Riots: Counter-Conduct in London 2011 (original) (raw)
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In this paper I interpret recent rioting in England as a form of insurrection and fleeting resistance to authority, and attempt to understand moments that demonstrate a revolutionary dynamic without any apparent teleological programme for revolution. 'The four day truce: gangs suspended hostilities during the English riots' in The Guardian Online, 6 th December 2011
British Journal of Criminology, 2014
Drawing on the 2011 United Kingdom riots, this article explores contestation over the meaning of riots. Is rioting criminality and looting, or are there political aspects to the act? For those advocating a political element, there is difficulty in reconciling how an apparently spontaneous act can have political motivations. This article argues that rioting is a distinctly political action, and in order to understand it we must theorize the characteristics of agency that underpin the act. Drawing on Bourdieu's habitus, but developing it to include a preconscious component, the article develops a novel theoretical framework for understanding the rioter. Habitus is presented as a mechanism that can help better understand how experiences in the past affect the rioter's present, thereby leading to a coming to the surface of underlying political grievances.
A People’s History of Riots, Protest and the Law: The Sound of the Crowd, Matt Clement
In advanced capitalist regions of the globe, acts of collective resistance remain unusual events even if they do occur with some frequency, as Matt Clement in A People’s History of Riots, Protest, and the Law: The Sound of the Crowd demonstrates. Such acts appear unusual in part because they arise within countries whose economic ‘success’ has been built on the forging of an individualist mindset under which the majority of us, the majority of the time, are compelled to play the dull and isolating game of getting by to the best of our, individual, abilities. Those of us whose ‘daily grind’ has been interspersed with moments of collective action, protest and resistance have experienced the breaking of this stultifying, life-limiting framework if only for brief moments which are all too often dissipated as quickly as they first arose. These moments are not forgotten, however, and live in our, individual, consciousness as examples of possibility, of how things could be different, and of how to use the slogan of the anti-capitalist movement of the early 2000s, ‘another way is possible’.
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In August 2011, rioting in UK cities captivated an international audience. This article combines empirical and theoretical work in order to examine the conditions of possibility for the riots and for the print media's response to them. First a content analysis of fourteen British newspapers is provided to frame and criticize how the riots were portrayed. The article then turns to the conceptual framework provided by Charles Taylor's work on social imaginaries and the modern moral order. The author argues that the media enacted the kind of moralizing impulse that Taylor helps us to understand. Conversely, that same media response is indicative of the inadequacies of Taylor's account of morality and our imaginaries. Important features of our dominant imaginaries are neglected, such as how we identify moral fouls, along with power relations and the material conditions in which people live. Drawing on second-hand interviews with riot participants and on work by Stuart Hall, a more critical understanding of the riots is offered by viewing them in three distinct yet non-exclusive valences, specifically the transgression, culmination, and continuation of our moral order.
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The recent financial crisis can be read as an early indicator of the coming contraction of the global ‘real economy’, a decline predicated on a permanent condition of resource-depletion, whose immediate socioeconomic effects, under the logic of neoliberal capitalism, are the shrinkage of the money-supply and mass unemployment. Despite the gravity of the situation, data collected by authors and associated ethnographers suggest that most current forms of unrest in the West are not proto-political protests. The failure of the Occupy movement and other organised protests to garner mass support despite their accurate identification of the object of ethical critique can be attributed to the absence of a coherent alternative ideology that represents a plausible and comprehensible means of reorganising the global economy. The recent English riots in 2011, which rapidly degenerated into aggravated shopping, failed entirely to deliver an articulate ethical or political message. This chapter locates this current post-political form as a major shift in the historical trajectory of unrest in the capitalist era. Should politics grounded in the real economy fail to reactivate, these localised eruptions are the harbingers of our future in a post-ethical, post-social and post-political world colonised by a pure market. In the meantime, liberal-left social science, trapped in obsolete intellectual frameworks from a superseded era of economic stability and organic political militancy, is underestimating the current crisis, its trajectory and its consequences.
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(Published in Global Society) How can we conceive of practices of counter-conduct within spaces of resistance? This paper examines practices of counter-conduct in the context of Occupy movements that were keen to emphasise their openness, inclusivity, and their manifestation of processes which facilitate non-hierarchical and radically democratic social relations. As they criticise and work to unmake a global order marked by privilege, violence, alienation and extraordinary deprivation, they claim to embody and explore alternatives rooted in solidarity and empathy. However, such grand narratives can serve to obscure the more contested or ambiguous practices of these movements. In the face of stories and (proclaimed) subjects of emancipation, we explore those instances where resistance breaks down, excludes, ignores, privileges, and where subjects attempt to resist resistance. We do this by mobilising Foucault’s concept of counter-conduct that allows for power to be conceptualised as dispersed, networked, and as predicated on unstable and multiplicitous subjectivities. In this context, exploring the processes of counter-conduct of those challenging other forms of counter-conduct does not fall back into a dichotomous position which legitimates the status quo, but both complicates the picture and asks important ethical questions of the form, nature and practice of contemporary resistance movements.