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A Frenchman Responds to the
Paris
Rebellion
The
Pyres of Autumn
By
Jean Baudrillard
Fifteen hundred cars had to burn in a single
night and then, on a descending scale, nine hundred, five
hundred, two hundred, for the daily ‘norm’ to be
reached again, and people to realize that ninety cars on average
are torched every night in this gentle France of ours. A
sort of eternal flame, like that under the Arc de Triomphe,
burning in honour of the Unknown Immigrant. Known now,
after a lacerating process of revision—but still in trompe
l’oeil.
The French exception is no more, the ‘French
model’ collapsing before our eyes. But the French can
reassure themselves that it is not just theirs but the whole
Western model which is disintegrating; and not just under
external assault—acts of terrorism, Africans storming the
barbed wire at Melilla—but also from within. The first
conclusion to be drawn from the autumn riots annuls all pious
official homilies. A society which is itself disintegrating has no
chance of integrating its immigrants, who are at once the
products and savage analysts of its decay.
The harsh reality is that the rest of us,
too, are faced with a crisis of identity and disinheritance;
the fissures of the banlieues are merely symptoms of the
dissociation of a society at odds with itself. As Hélé Béji1 has remarked, the social question of immigration
is only a starker illustration of the European’s exile
within his own society. Europe’s citizens are no longer
integrated into ‘European’—or ‘French’—values, and
can only try to palm them off on others.
‘Integration’ is the official line. But
integration into what? The sorry spectacle of ‘successful’
integration—into a banalized, technized, upholstered way of
life, carefully shielded from self-questioning—is that of we
French ourselves. To talk of ‘integration’ in the name
of some indefinable notion of France is merely to signal
its lack.
It is French—more broadly,
European—society which, by its very process of socialization,
day by day secretes the relentless discrimination of which
immigrants are the designated victims, though not the only ones.
This is the change on the unequal bargain of ‘democracy’.
This society faces a far harder test than any external
threat: that of its own absence, its loss of reality.
Soon it will be defined solely by the foreign bodies that haunt
its periphery: those it has expelled, but who are now ejecting
it from itself. It is their violent interpellation that reveals
what has been coming apart, and so offers the possibility for
awareness. If French—if European—society were to succeed in
‘integrating’ them, it would in its own eyes cease to exist.
Yet French or European discrimination
is only the micro-model of a worldwide divide which,
under the ironical sign of globalization, is bringing two
irreconcilable universes face to face. The same analysis can
be reprised at global level. International terrorism is but a
symptom of the split personality of a world power at odds
with itself. As to finding a solution, the same delusion applies
at every level, from the banlieues to the House of Islam: the
fantasy that raising the rest of the world to Western living
standards will settle matters. The fracture is far
deeper than that. Even if the assembled Western powers really
wanted to close it—which there is every reason to doubt—they
could not. The very mechanisms of their own survival and
superiority would prevent them; mechanisms which, through all
the pious talk of universal values, serve only to reinforce
Western power and so to foment the threat of a coalition of
forces that dream of destroying it.
But France, or Europe, no longer has the
initiative. It no longer controls events, as it did for
centuries, but is at the mercy of a succession of unforeseeable
blow-backs. Those who deplore the ideological bankruptcy of
the West should recall that ‘God smiles at those he sees
denouncing evils of which they are the cause’. If the
explosion of the banlieues is thus directly linked to the world
situation, it is also—a fact which is strangely never
discussed—connected to another recent episode, solicitously
occluded and misrepresented in just the same way: the No in the
eu Constitutional referendum.
Those who voted No without really knowing
why—perhaps simply because they did not wish to play the game
into which they had so often been trapped; because they too
refused to be integrated into the wondrous Yes of a ‘ready for
occupancy’ Europe—their No was the voice of those jettisoned
by the system of representation: exiles too, like the immigrants
themselves, from the process of socialization.
There was the same recklessness, the same
irresponsibility in the act of scuppering the eu as in the young
immigrants’ burning of their own neighbourhoods,
their own schools; like the blacks in Watts and
Detroit in the 1960s. Many now live, culturally and
politically, as immigrants in a country which can no longer
offer them a definition of national belonging. They are disaffiliated,
as Robert Castel2 has put it.
But it is a short step from disaffiliation
to desafío—defiance. All the excluded, the disaffiliated,
whether from the banlieues, immigrants or ‘native-born’, at
one point or another turn their disaffiliation into defiance and
go onto the offensive. It is their only way to stop being
humiliated, discarded or taken in hand. In the wake of the November
fires, mainstream political sociology spoke of
integration, employment, security.
I am not so sure that the rioters want to
be reintegrated on these lines. Perhaps they consider the French
way of life with the same condescension or indifference with
which it views theirs. Perhaps they prefer to see cars
burning than to dream of one day driving them. Perhaps their
reaction to an over-calculated solicitude would instinctively be
the same as to exclusion and repression.
The superiority of Western culture is
sustained only by the desire of the rest of the world to join
it. When there is the least sign of refusal, the slightest
ebbing of that desire, the West loses its seductive appeal in
its own eyes.
Today it is precisely the ‘best’ it has
to offer—cars, schools, shopping centres—that are torched
and ransacked. Even nursery schools: the very tools through
which the car-burners were to be integrated and mothered.
‘Screw your mother’ might be their organizing slogan. And
the more there are attempts to ‘mother’ them, the more they
will.
Of course, nothing will prevent our
enlightened politicians and intellectuals from considering the autumn
riots as minor incidents on the road to a democratic
reconciliation of all cultures. Everything indicates that on the
contrary, they are successive phases of a revolt whose end is
not in sight.
The torching of the French banlieues as both
sequel to the No vote of May 2005 and symptom of a wider Western
malaise. Rejection of official pieties of integration, and
flames of revolt against an automated Europe.
1]
[Tunisian writer, author of L’Imposture culturelle (1997).]
2
[Sociologist, author of L’Insécurité sociale (2003).]
Source: New
Left Review 37, January-February 2006
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
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will be discriminated against, legally,
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reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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