VirusHead

Jean Baudrillard, one of my all-time fave thinkers, has written a short piece on the torched cars and ransacked schools of France. "The Pyres of Autumn" argues that these events (among other things) call attention to the actual lack of a meanful social culture. He describes the ideological bankruptcy of the West as a "banalized, technized, upholstered way of life, carefully shielded from self-questioning." What does national belonging really mean, and how does one have a sense of it today?

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.

It might be time for a cultural revolution. The counter-cultural revolution didn’t adhere – money beat love.

I see the horrible resurgence of the non-compassionate, non-christian Christian right as another symptom of this. The riots on the cartoons take hold for similar reasons. The need to hold onto the familiar, no matter how cruel, is a last-gasp measure. Does anyone really believe in rule by mob? Myself, I do not believe that Allah, Jehovah, or being-who-cannot-be-named would approve in the slightest.

I hope there is an alternative to all of this greed and hatred. I hope that we discover it (again?) soon.