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Violence is the hard drug of the information society. It
interrupts the program, it cuts through the rhythm of
stress, entertainment and boredom that passes for ordinary
experience. The images of violence sear into your mind, like
witnesses of the present. That's how I remember the nights
of October and November in France. I can still see the
images of the flames, the skeletons of the burning buses. I
can still hear the strange thud of the exploding cars, I can
still feel the tension that separates the police with their
helmets, tear gas and flashball guns, from the ghetto kids
with their hoods and scarves, their paving stones and
Molotov cocktails. All that happened so close to where I
live, but so far away, worlds away from the city center; I
only saw it through the media. For three weeks, it looked as
though Gaza, Beirut and Baghdad had come to the outskirts of
Paris, Strasbourg and Marseilles. Then the pressure of the
image subsides, the memory blurs and fades, until a new
convulsion – like the huge social movements unfolding in
France right now - comes to chase away what seems
unforgettable. Just as the riots themselves chased away what
had seemed unforgettable: the "no" vote on the referendum
for a European constitution.
What's hidden in the blazing light of the mediated image? I
want to look back on those nights of October and November,
when a European society was literally "under fire." The
point is to find another interpretation for the images of
violence, so they don't appear as proof that race wars are
inevitable in Europe, and in the world. By comparing the
riots in the banlieues with the middle-class protests
unfolding in France right now, it can be shown that what's
at stake is an old but still unanswered question: the
transformation of the welfare state in response to the
demands of the global economy. This is a case where the
representation of violence directly influences its
organization, through the effects that the image exerts on
electoral politics. It has become the responsibility of
intellectuals, and of all citizens, to work both with and
against this "hard drug," which seems to generate an anxiety
that can only be quelled by massive police deployments, or
by the militarization of society itself – as we've already
seen in the US, and to a lesser extent, in Great Britain.
What happened, then, in the poorest districts of the French
suburbs, from October 27 to November 17, 2005? The events
began with the death of two teenagers, Bouna Traore and Zyed
Benna, who ran in fear from a squadron of police on their
way back to Clichy-sous-Bois, in the northeast of Paris.
They were returning home from a soccer match and they didn't
have their papers on them. Along with a third boy they
scaled a fence and hid in a dangerous transformer for a
period of around thirty minutes, until both were
electrocuted. Local youth, convinced that the boys had been
pursued to their deaths, began to riot in Clichy that night,
following a pattern which has become typical in France,
after every killing of immigrant children at the hands of
the police.
As you probably know, disturbances in the housing projects,
or "cites," are anything but rare in France these days. In
the course of the year 2004, approximately 20,000 cars were
burned; in the first nine months of 2005, that number had
already reached 28,000. That's an average of a hundred a
night. The events of Clichy-sous-Bois would probably never
have have made it beyond a byline in the local papers if the
interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, had not provoked outrage
by calling the inhabitants of the suburbs "scum" on October
26. And the insurrection might never have spread if police
hadn't thrown a tear-gas grenade in front of an occupied
mosque in Clichy, on the night of October 30. After that,
the riots began to multiply in the Paris region, then
throughout the country, finally touching almost 300
different communities. Each suburb seemed to compete for
visibility. Buses, schools, stores, municipal buildings and
garbage cans were set ablaze by relatively small groups of
youths, armed with gasoline, matches and large quantities of
stones, used for confrontations with the police. Some 10,000
automobiles were ultimately torched, including 1,400 on the
single night of November 7. Over 4,000 arrests were made and
some 600 individuals were condemned to prison sentences. Yet
no deaths and few serious injuries could be directly
attributed to the insurrection - a fact which must mean
something. The events were finally stopped by what seemed
like the sheer fatigue of the protesters, but also by the
imposition of special police powers under a state of
emergency, using a law that dated from the Algerian war. The
colonial overtones of that law were lost on no one; and the
latent racism of French society suddenly appeared in broad
daylight, embodied by the Interior Minister.
What were the reasons? The complaint of the mainstream left
was that there were no spokesmen, no explicit demands, no
political representation – only wordless violence. The right
was much more explicit. A deputy minister blamed the
outburst of violence on "polygamy" – the very reason that
colonial France had used to deny citizenship to Muslim
Algerians. Sarkozy also voiced that argument, but insisted
more heavily on the need to repress organized gangs. The
specter of Islamist terror networks in the suburbs was
raised, in the international as well as the national papers.
A book by a certain Charles Pellegrini, hot off the presses
in November 2005 under the title Banlieues en flames, can
give you an idea of the rhetoric. On the fourth page,
Pellegrini quotes the center-right newspaper Le Figaro:
"Projections based on data from the National Institute of
Statistics show that if immigrant fertility does not change,
in around 25 years, by 2030, their mass with their
descendants could represent some 24 percent of the total
French population." This is the language of invasion: "The
development of immigration remains preoccupying, since from
1997 to 2002, the number of foreigners who took up residence
on French soil has grown by 70 percent." Pellgrini openly
scorns the cultural programs that the left set up in the
suburbs: "The remedy bears no relation to the malady, which
translates into delinquency, violence and Islamism,
imputable to a minority, concentrated in the housing
projects, in total rupture from our society."
Despite the vitriol, the special information service of the
French police declared, in a report leaked to the papers,
that there was absolutely no evidence of any organization
between the rioters, or of any links to Islamist groups, or
even any encouragement from local imams. Instead it was
stated that "the youth of the problem districts feel
penalized by their poverty, the color of their skin and
their names... It seems as though they have lost all
confidence in the institutions, but also in the private
sector, the source of desires, jobs and economic
integration." Some 4.7 million people of both French and
immigrant origins, or approximately 8% of the urban
population, live in mass housing projects in the 752
so-called "sensitive urban zones," where unemployment rates
for youth from 16 to 25 years old can reach as high as 40
percent. This is a dull, slow violence; it can't be captured
in an image. The "sensitive zones" are clearly segregated
from the city centers: they are difficult to reach by bus
and have no access by metro or tramway. The housing stock is
decayed, educational and sporting facilities are of abysmal
quality, drug trafficking is common. Residents complain of
job discrimination based on their names and their address.
Local police have been withdrawn from these zones by the
recent right-wing government; but punitive raids are
frequent, and resentment of the cops is the reason most
often given for joining the insurrection.
None of these problems are new. The first riot in the French
banlieues occurred in 1979, at a time when mass unemployment
had already set in, and when those who could afford it had
already fled the suburbs. In the 1980s, the Socialist
government of François Mitterrand set up special
rehabilitation funds and cultural programs under the name
"developpement social des quartiers" (DSQ); but these were
considered a failure by 1990, when rioters in the projects
outside Lyons destroyed the rock-climbing walls that were
supposed to give them some healthy entertainment. Subsequent
programs focused on the demolition of large complexes and
their replacement by middle-income housing. But community
associations were also supported, and subsidized jobs were
created for the so-called "older brothers," who were
basically assigned to keep the peace in their neighborhoods.
Two decades of Socialist government brought great advantages
to the middle classes, to state functionaries, unionized
labor, cultural workers and also to the new urban
professionals of the information society; while at the same
time, significant efforts were deployed to put a lid on the
intensifying problems of mass unemployment, without any cure
for the underlying causes. Social democracy, cultural
development, welfare: what all these words really signified
was a state of slow decay or "suspended animation" for the
banlieues.
In a book entitled Quand la ville se defait (When the City
Falls Apart, 2006) the sociologist Jacques Donzelot shows
how the notion of welfare first arose in the late 19th
century, as a way of defending society from the potential
violence or disease of its members, who were increasingly
gathered at close quarters in the city. This protection of
society from the individual was achieved, he says, through
the individual's protection by society: unemployment
benefits kept workers from falling into poverty, and
therefore from becoming dangerous criminals; while health
insurance and sanitary services kept them from succumbing to
potentially contagious diseases. The postwar apartment
complexes, built from the 1950s to the 1970s at the height
of the French welfare state, were supposed to be an
apotheosis of this double protection. They sought to create
a healthy new city for all the social classes, from the
production-line worker to the top engineer; and they
monumentalized this condition of urban equality, using
modular architecture to create a symbolic relation with the
modern industries that brought wealth to everyone. But the
dream fell apart with the collapse of the industrial economy
on which it was founded. Donzelot shows that from the early
1980s onward, the urban condition in France tended to
fracture into three separate zones: the single-family
housing developments of the new exurban communities, built
for middle classes fleeing both the violence of the suburbs
and the rising rents of the city; the gentrified historical
centers, increasingly occupied by new professionals trying
to catch the rising wave of the information society; and
finally the decaying suburbs, where unemployed industrial
workers and migrant families are relegated to the failed
modernism of poverty, immobility and social invisibility.
The question he seems to be asking, is just to what extent
these three zones can really become hermetic to each
another, before something really breaks.
To grasp what the triple division of the city means in
political terms, I think you have to understand that France,
along with Austria, Belgium, Italy and Germany, has a
"corporatist" or "continental conservative" type of welfare
state – as distinguished from the social-democratic and
liberal versions (cf. G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds
of Welfare Capitalism, 1990). Under the French version of
the corporatist welfare state, the payment of the most
generous pensions, health plans and unemployment benefits is
supposed to come from special mutual funds established by
specific professions and branches of industry. The state
only administers those funds, which will typically be
disbursed to middle-class families living in the detached
housing of the exurban communities. But the state also has
to fill in the gaps, both when the mutual funds can't cover
their obligations, and when a minimum of universal coverage
becomes necessary for the unskilled employees and jobless
people outside of the corporatist system. It's exactly this
universal-minimum coverage that has been inexorably cut over
the last twenty years, along with other public provisions
like education. The cuts leave the inhabitants of the
banlieues on the short end of the stick, while the rest of
the population begins to tremble in fear at the increasing
crime and delinquency of the suburban children. Meanwhile,
the new professionals and business elites gathering around
the speculative project of gentrification call for lower
taxes, less regulation and greater labor flexibility, in
order to continue profiting from the information economy –
and, they say, to provide new sources of employment for the
former industrial workers. But these demands, in their turn,
strike fear and resentment into the hearts of those who
depend on the largess of the state. As Donzelot shows in his
book, a sharp contradiction then arises between the people
concerned with society's protection of the individual, or
social security, and the people concerned with society's
protection from the individual, or civil security. The
former, who are often state functionaries, are pushed them
to the far left of the spectrum, represented in France by
the Trotskyist parties, which rally around the defense of
public services; while those more concerned with civil
security, often lower-income whites who couldn't leave the
suburbs, are pushed to the far right, represented by the
National Front, with its slogan of "France for the French"
and its appeal to the strong-arm language of authority.
The most recent effect of this contradiction between civil
and social security was a deep split of the popular vote
between the far right and the far left in the April 2002
presidential elections, a split which decimated the
Socialist candidate in the first round and, to everyone's
astonishment, positioned the National Front candidate
Jean-Marie Le Pen as a possible president. Frightened
leftist voters then helped bring Jacques Chirac to power by
an overwhelming majority. But his center-right government,
while mouthing the civil-security rhetoric of the National
Front, has in reality proceeded to implement the neoliberal
agenda of the business elites – which means flexibilizing
the labor markets, lowering the taxes on capital, and
eliminating the deficits of the corporatist welfare state.
This is basically the program of the Lisbon Agenda for the
competitiveness of the European Union in the info-economy,
which is also the program adopted in Germany, via the Hartz
reforms and Agenda 2010. It was applied successfully in
France to raise the retirement age of teachers, railway
workers and other state functionaries. But it was also
applied to cut the Socialist programs of support for
community associations and jobs for the "older brothers."
And the price for those cuts was the insurrection. So what's
represented in the images of political violence that you saw
coming from France in October and November of 2005 is not an
Islamist uprising in the heart of Europe, but instead a
defensive reaction against a racist-influenced attempt to
finally dismantle the minimum social-security protections
that had kept the suburbs in a state of isolation and
suspended animation over the last two decades.
With its combination of a neoliberal economic agenda and a
fascistoid appeal to authority, the center-right UMP – that
is, the French version of neoconservatism – has reopened the
question of the welfare state with a vengeance. And it is
continuing to do so today. Under the cover of a law for the
so-called "equality of chances," devised in the wake of the
November uprising, the right is now attempting to
flexibilize the labor force of young people up to 26 years
old, by instituting a job contract that can be freely
terminated by the employer at any time during a two-year
trial period. This is the CPE: Contrat première embauche.
That law is being challenged by a truly massive coalition of
high school and university students, temp workers, unionists
and anti-government forces, all assembled in the refusal of
increasingly "precarious" social conditions. What you see on
the images now coming out of France is the circulation of
political violence out of the suburban zones to which it had
been relegated, and into the gentrified centers of the
historical cities. The interesting thing will be whether the
precarious children of yesterday's middle classes can
surmount their parents' fear – and corporatist self-interest
– to make anything more than a merely rhetorical common
cause with the insurrectionalists of the banlieue. As usual,
that will depend a lot on how violence in the images gets
represented, and by whom. The symbolic targets of the
protests are in any case the same: the school system (but
this time it's the Sorbonne); the automobile (but this time
it's the fancy ones parked on the Left Bank); and finally,
of course, the police. What the right appears to be looking
for now in France is a massive confrontation with all the
social forces that have any inclination to defend the
welfare state, as though they were driven to see whether a
neoliberal agenda can really be imposed by neoconservative
means. The outcome of this confrontation remains, in my
view, highly uncertain.
I'm not going to try to predict what will happen over the
next few weeks. Whether violence will erupt again in the
banlieues, and how far it will continue to circulate through
the center cities, is something you will be able to see with
your own eyes, through a multiplicity of media. I will
predict, however, that over the next few years in Europe,
the question of the welfare state is going to remain open,
and that situations like the ones in France will happen in
other countries, at greater or lesser degrees of intensity.
Because the "corporatist" model of the welfare state has
become clearly untenable in the post-industrial information
society; but European populations do not seem to be willing
to permit its replacement by a liberal, Anglo-Saxon model.
What will dominate the agenda on the social policy front is
instead the Danish notion of "flexicurity," which is an
attempt to strike a balance between flexibility and social
security. What this involves, paradoxically, is deregulating
the labor markets and, at the same time, offering unemployed
workers exceptionally high benefits (up to 90% of their
former income). The reason it works is that the Danes also
impose reeducation programs and guided job searches that
keep the unemployed from remaining too long beneath the care
of the state. These flexicurity programs are a very
interesting attempt to adapt the social-democratic form of
the Nordic welfare states to the new demands of the
information society; and it's now becoming important to see
how they could be transferred to the more complex situations
of larger countries like France and Germany. But what I want
to suggest, in conclusion, is that the "hard drug" of
violent images has already injected itself to the notion of
flexicurity, and that it will continue to overdetermine the
burning question of the welfare state in Europe.
The French banlieue riots made us forget the "no" vote on
the European constitution; then the controversy over the
Jyllands-Posten caricatures made us forget the riots in the
banlieues. This time, the issue was not the welfare state,
but freedom of expression; and the site of the conflict was
not the closed world of the French suburbs, but the
wide-open theater of the "clash of civilizations," opposing
so-called "Western values" to the Islamist forces at work in
the Middle East. However, if you look behind the image of
Danish embassies burning in Tehran, Damascus and Beirut, you
will see that over the past ten years, precisely during the
time it developed the flexicurity programs, Denmark has
become an explicitly racist society, whose political agenda
has been shaped decisively by the far-right Danish People's
Party. The twin issues of this party are fear of foreigners
and protection of the welfare state. It's as if the benefits
of education, and of mobility through society, could only be
extended to white people – so as to protect the limited
number of high-quality jobs available in the information
society. And in fact, the conflict over the caricatures was
also an occasion for the People's Party to win support from
traditional social-democratic voters. As in France, the
danger is that social benefits can be regained, and maybe
even reinforced, behind the rising barrier of racism.
Now, by saying this, I am not trying to deny that the affair
of the caricatures was manipulated by Islamists in Denmark
and in the Middle East, and by the Syrian and Iranian
governments, because it clearly was, as important accounts
have proved
(randomplatitudes.blogspot.com/2006/02/cartoon-row-dissected-part-1.htm).
The manipulation is something serious, which can have
long-term consequences. What I am trying to say is that it's
an illusion to believe that the problems of unemployment in
Europe can be solved by a simple appeal to the information
society, because the contemporary economy also involves a
tremendous amount of low-end service jobs which are
increasingly being done by immigrants, for the benefit of
aging and retired whites. The neoliberal economy thrives on
exactly those jobs, which can also be performed by people
without any papers at all, people exposed to every kind of
exploitation. To fail to address the economic situation of
immigrants, to allow their children to slide into
delinquency and violence, and then to instrumentalize the
specter of criminality for the election of right-wing
governments whose liberal agendas which can only leave those
immigrant populations durably marginalized, or even
spatially segregated as in the case of France, is the surest
way I can imagine to guarantee that the growing Muslim
populations in Europe will not take the road of secular,
enlightened society, but instead will succumb to the
propaganda of Islamist forces which are, in effect, very
desperately trying to win their favor. But the Islamization
of Muslims in Europe can only give rhetorical fuel to the
neoconservative program of a security system at home, and a
neocolonial empire for the hinterland. Over the next ten
years, the real question of the welfare state, and the real
contradiction between the logics of civil and social
security, will revolve around the treatment of immigrant
populations in Europe, and their inclusion to, or exclusion
from, the benefits of the information society. Only if this
problem is solved within the EU, on what I'd like to call
the substantial or constituent level, can Europe expect to
have any positive impact on the rest of the international
system, of which it is obviously an inextricable component.
The point of this text has been to show the entanglement of
an entire set of economic dispositions, social forces,
rhetorical strategies, political formations and generations
of human beings, forming a system that gives effective
meaning to the images we see on television, in the press and
on the Internet. But the point is also to step outside that
deadly entanglement, which is still founded on the consumer
society, on the structure it has been given by the state, on
the pyramid of retirement savings still seeking its path
toward the financial sphere, and on the way that speculative
investment of every kind – even in the info-economy – still
ends up driving the classic imperialist scramble for
resources, and above all for oil. The strange irony of the
October-November insurrection is that its raw material was
gasoline, its exalted target was the motorcar, and its true
destination was the broadcast media. But that was the only
way to get a message – even a speechless one – into the
infotainment veins of welfare-state capitalism, which is
still massively Fordist, despite everything about the
factory system that has ended in failure.
So now I want to suggest a kind of thought experiment. Next
time you see images of fire, with smashed schools, burning
cars, and confrontations with the cops, think about all
that's behind them, and try asking a few questions. What
would it take for every group of people, with their faces,
their problems, their qualities, their locations, to become
visible to each other in a society that wasn't sealed off
into hermetic zones and dead-end streets? What sort of
education could be an entirely liberating experience, that
gives direct access to tools you can use? What kinds of
mobility can be built into the urban fabric, and how do
people find their paths through a society that has become
radically unequal? Finally, what confrontations could be
staged with the outdated forms of the state, that wouldn't
always bring us face to face with the eternal return of the
police?
If it becomes possible to see the images of fire in this
way, as a blazing language of unanswered questions, then
maybe, just maybe, Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna won't be dead
for nothing – "mort pour rien," the words you could read on
the tee-shirts, as the witnesses walked silently through the
city of Clichy-sous-Bois on Saturday the 29th of October, 2005.
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