Friday 7 October 2011

Melancholy, politics and London riots

What were the London riots about? The consensus seems to be: not much. Yes, the initial spark might have been the shooting of Mark Duggan and the police's subsequent refusal or failure to talk to his family, but the looting of shops in London and Manchester didn't seem to be much more than a free for all. What hasn't yet been given much space is the possibility that the riots could be both a free for all AND the momentary opening up of a space for political commentary on inequalities that mark young lives in the city. I don't want to underplay the tragedy of these events - not only the shooting of Mark Duggan; to which I'll return in a moment but also the murder of three men in Birmingham defending their property, the murder of a man in Ealing who was killed for trying to put out a fire, the fear and losses of people whose homes in Tottenham and Croydon were set alight. These events are tragic. A neighbourhood that is already one of the poorest in the borough (as it happens the neighbourhood I was brought up in) was trashed by some of its own residents, much to the despair of many others. During the riots it may have seemed exhiliarating to those who literally walked into shops and took what they wanted that the polices' authority seemed to simply melt away. Some months later; not so much. The sentences handed out to young offenders have been excessive (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/18/full-picture-of-riot-sentences).

This is obviously a very bleak picture and I don't want to suggest that the protagonists had some deeper political purpose in mind as they looted Foot Locker. Although there have been one or two commentators, community leaders, claiming that this is a response to disenfranchisement and material inequality I find this unconvincing. If it was, it wasn't for the most part, or perhaps at all, consciously so. Nonetheless the initial rage and the subsequent randomness of violence, of setting fire to your own neighbourhood, of stealing stuff you can't use because it doesn't fit, or you can't carry it, or someone steals it off you, is this just completely inexplicable?

I would say not. I would say that this can be seen as a moment of what I have written about elsewhere as "melancholic memorialisation". Melancholy here borrows from Freud's claim that unresolved mourning produces melancholia - a refusal to move on from loss. This moment, so unproductive for individuals, can be politically productive in as much as the refusal to let go of this kind of loss can push an otherwise personal event into a political reckoning; death then becomes more than a personal tragedy and raises questions about social justice and the unequal distribution of risk and violence. Compare, e.g. the amount of press coverage that came in the wake of Duggan's death because it was followed by riots to the response to the death of another black man at the hands of the police: Jacob Michael, 25 who was restrained by 11 officers and died in custody (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/30/police-ambulance-family-man-custody).

For this moment between death and settlement to be a productive political space rather than the destructive chaotic and in a sense, wordless, events of the so-called riots, there have to be narratives available to people that do something other than simply describe the facts of their lives, which is what a good deal of sociology and politics does do; we need narratives that describe other ways of being, that suggest remedies for the unequal distribution of violence and risk and material inequality. Until this is in place the political space opened up by melanchoic mourning will repeatedly be closed again by hegemonic forces. The failure to develop such narratives is an indication of the absence of any wider political dialogue about alternatives to the current global or national order.

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