From: melcher@nets.com
Subject: [Arclist] France Is Burning
Date: November 10, 2005 7:24:19 AM MST
France Is Burning
The news about Paris and riots is not altogether unfamiliar. I remember Hough, Glenville and Detroit and Watts in the 60's and again in the 90's.. Those who follow mainstream American media probably think that all this has something to do with Jihad or terrorism or another of our paranoid obsessions, since we are after all dealing with arabs here. those who watch Fox probably think the French somehow had it coming for being so snotty in the face of American wars. Rich white people everywhere probably grow a little nervous. Perhaps the George Bushes in the world will use this to raise their falling political capital.
In truth the news from France as well as South America these days gives a pretty good picture of the emerging state of the political world in the new century; the rich versus the poor, the dark skinned versus the light, the once colonized nations versus the colonizers. For America, which pursues its own war on the 'underclasses' with relentless abandon, the bell is certainly tolling. To those who believe that the essence of freedom is the 'right' to pursue individual wealth absolutely without restraint (Republicans) the curtain is beginning to fall. The world is turning and those who must absorb the consequences of greed and arrogance manifested by the wealthy nations are stirring from their sleep. How many more hurricanes, wars and famines do you think it will take?
Paris is burning. Just one of the cities of empire, and I don't imagine society will alter its collective course any time soon. The police and the armies will 'clamp-down.' The people in the street will be called 'terrorists.' The proud and the boastful will meet at conferences in isolated cities to avoid civil unrest. The demonstrators will chase them down as best as they can. While the poor of the world awake to the source of their plight and in some cases explode into violence, most people will refuse to wake up, lost to the televised propaganda we call the 'news.' The alternatives cause too much discomfort. To understanding why Paris is burning is to watch the clock winding down.
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CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 28, NO 3
1000 Days 023 09/11/2005 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
Event-Scene
France Is Burning
=================
~Thierry Bardini~
How does it feel to see the country of your birth burning on
television? Today it makes me feel like a migrant worker, watching
the kids of other migrant workers rioting in the streets of cities
you've probably have never heard of -- but that they have been
cleaning for two generations. Today I am reminded of the same scenes
I once witnessed first-hand in the streets of Caracas and Los
Angeles. Today I am reminded by all these comparisons I read in the
papers, Paris-Baghdad, Ile-de-France-Tchetchnia, that bring back
images and feelings to my mind. Flashes of light, Carnival, riot. My
neighbor, this insignificant dog-walking-little-man, breaking a
window, shoplifting. Black uniforms on motorcycles with very long
sticks and machine guns. Fires. Dionysian parties, tomorrow tears.
~Hepa chamo~ why did you burn our car, and your school? Flashes of
Curfew (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 1988, Caracas, Venezuela, 1989).
~Toque de queda~, my poor Thomas. What to do but keep on partying
when I can't get back home in time? Avoid the crowd, stay in well
lit areas, talk to the cops only if you have to, only if they ask
you a question or if you fear something worse. Be ready to run.
Don't stay too close to the windows. Watch the same General over and
over again on TV, lying through his teeth, back to order. That was
then, in the Third World, homeland of the migrant workers before
migration. There riot rhymes with coup, as in "coup d'Etat" or "coup
sur la gueule." There the troops take three days to deploy in
streets on fire, and the troops are eighteen years old, wearing
helmets too big and carrying ten ammos apiece. Needless to say, they
are scared shitless. And so are you and so it seems is everybody --
past this third day. A week later, the streets are cleaned, a
thousand people are dead. Order is restored, until the next coup.
There, in Caracas, the poor and the desperate came down to the heart
of the city and burned it. Their targets of choice were the
~abastos~, the dammed little capitalists on each street corner who
were shelving coffee, rice and pampers, waiting for the prices to
come up, or the ~caritos~, the damned little capitalists who doubled
the price of the ride, just a few days before they burned. Just a
step above them on the starvation ladder, barely out of the
~barrios~. In Los Angeles (1992) I was working for the University of
Spoiled Children, thanks to a Japanese endowment at the famous
Annenberg School. The building was rumored to have been a Republican
think tank, unless it was an intelligence think tank I don't
remember; a massive eagle was covering the entrance hall. The first
strange thing that I noticed that day was a guy armed at the gates
of the University. He was not yet eighteen years old and wore no
helmet. I bet that he had plenty of rounds on his belt. I jumped
into my car and saw the rest on TV -- from my rent-controlled
apartment in Santa Monica. Downtown and Watts seemed very far away,
until I noticed the smoky skies from the window. It felt like I was
watching images of Caracas on CNN -- It can't be here. Sounds
concrete suddenly, pockets of the Third World in the First World.
They too, started in a party-like atmosphere, burning their own
neighborhood. Starting with the liquor stores. I bet I could have
seen my neighbor from Caracas, Residence Sans Soucis, Avenida
Libertador, Chacaito, stepping out of the broken window of this
~licoreria~, carrying a full case of Red Bull. The troops, the
National Guard that is, took two days to deploy, and prevented any
damage from reaching North Hollywood. In the meantime, the
small-business owners from little Seoul made use of their own NRA
licensed machine guns. There, in a so-called civilized country, they
only burned their own neighborhood. A week later, one house out of
two was left to ashes on Normandy Street, but order was back in the
city (or so they said on CNN). Who knows how many died, in a
democratic country and land of hope we do not keep stats like this.
Some of them did not officially exist anyway; they were just some
migrant Chicano workers. I thought about my own ~abuelo~, Nicolas
from Pontremoli, who migrated in 1921 from his native Tuscany
because of too many black shirts and no jobs. I thought about him,
the ~rital~, reconstructing the war destroyed north-east of France,
near ~Le Chemin des Dames~, quite a charming name for one of the
worst WWI battlegrounds. Hell if you're a poor bastard out of
fascist Italy in 1921, you'd better be a mason. Back to the street
~compadre~, wait for the next job pickup. Today I am a ~emigre~ in
well-kept Canada, a legal alien, still a French National; aside from
my name, I am French to the bone, as my fellow compatriots often
remind me here. I am no more the grandson of a ~rital~ but quite
simply put a ~maudit francais~ (and so might my son, if the trend
goes on). There, there are no Muslims (as they said on Fox) nor
blacks (as they wrote in the Teheran Times), but quite simply second
generation African descent born in France -- and being French I know
of at least ten derogatory words to call them, my fellow
compatriots, ~fils de l'emigration~. Sons and grandsons of migrant
workers for whom the law of the State of Emergency was first
designed, back in 1955. Before ruling the projects of even the
smallest towns of the country, it was used thrice, twice in Algeria
(1955, 1961) and once in New Caledonia (in 1984). Bringing the
colonies back to order before it brings the ~metropole,~ back to the
same order. Before bringing the colonies into the Metropole. Pockets
of colonies in the metropole, patches of periphery in the old
center. There the troops did not deploy yet. They would have no
crowd to face, only pockets of sons and grandsons practicing urban
guerrilla, patches of little gangs striking at random, hidden behind
the hoods of their latest fashion terrorist jacket, you know your
basic hoody, but with a zipper at the front and just two holes for
your eyes. You know, like in Baghdad, or better yet, like in
Jerusalem or Beyrouth. You know, young people of their time, mobile
and networked, flash mobs if you will. Kids of the viral marketing
age, junkware. Except this time their rap shoots at firemen and
nurses, and kills a poor guy in charge of the street lights -- they
say he was taking pictures in Epinay. What a Sunday for a family
trip, for this only casualty of a riot with no crowds, no protest,
and no end. A bus burns... It feels like I am watching pictures of
Caracas on CNN, back in Santa Monica, but I am watching Paris on
CBC, unless it is Watts on France 2. How does it feel, to see the
country of your birth burning on TV? Estranged. At home, if you call
yourself a migrant worker.
Montreal, November 9, 2005.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Thierry Bardini, a sociologist, is an associate professor in the
Department of Communication at the Universite de Montreal, Canada,
where he co-directs the Workshop in Radical Empiricism (with Brian
Massumi). In 2000, he published _Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart,
Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing_, at Stanford
University Press. He is currently finishing his second manuscript,
entitled _Junkware: The Subject without Affect_.
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*
* CTHEORY is an international journal of theory, technology and
* culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews in
* contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as
* theorisations of major "event-scenes" in the mediascape.
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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You can't stop the signal.
http://internet.cybermesa.com/~melcher/
1:40:20 PM 
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