The August riots,shock and the prohibition of thought

Introduction

The long-term impact of the riots that broke out in London and elsewhere in August 2011 has yet to be established. While testimony from some participants in the riots carries a familiar tone of excitement, intensity and festival, the events’ wider impact has been determined by their context and reception. In this article, we argue that the dominant reception of the riots was marked by the profound shock that struck large sections of the UK population, not just on an intellectual or moral level, but also on an affective one. This shock was marked by a sensation of fear and even panic, as some old certainties threatened to collapse. Reinforced by the endless looping footage of shops set alight with little apparent regard for those living above, this affective reaction was articulated by political and media elites into a right-wing backlash. A hysterical campaign was launched to prevent the riots becoming linked to the context of crisis and austerity from which they emerged. Indeed, a prominent feature of this shock was the ease with which it was mobilised into a prohibition on thought, which was then ruthlessly policed. Anybody asking if the events could be understood as a response to the economic crisis, and the subsequent imposition of austerity, was vigorously condemned. The Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson, tellingly responded to a question about the shooting that sparked the first riot by declaring, ‘It is time that people who are engaging in looting and violence stopped hearing economic and sociological justifications for what they are doing’ (Guardian, 2001a).

In the cold light of day, this response might look faintly ludicrous. Just as the riots of the 1980s went down in history as being, at least in part, responses to the austerity of the time, it was obvious that the August riots would also be recorded as one event in a varied series of responses to the great recession of the early years of the 21st century. Indeed, ‘Reading the riots’, a joint study conducted by the LSE and the Guardian newspaper, which drew on interviews with 270 participants in the riots, showed that austerity provided more than just a general context. Alongside other issues such as hostility to the police, it formed a central part of the self-understanding of the riots by participants. As summarised in the report,

Rioters identified a range of political grievances, but at the heart of their complaints was a pervasive sense of injustice. For some this was economic: the lack of money, jobs or opportunity. For others it was more broadly social: how they felt they were treated compared with others. Many mentioned the increase in student tuition fees and the scrapping of the education maintenance allowance.

We should, of course, note the limitations of this study and the objections made by some that a variety of interpretations could be put on self-declarations of motive made after the fact (see, for example, Bracchi, 2011). Such questions, however, are peripheral to our interest in this paper. Rather than examining the causes of the riots, we want to unpack their effects. We are interested in using the experience of the riot aftermath to think through the political effect of shock upon social movements – and specifically its effect on the articulation of different struggles within the UK.

In a blog post of February 2011, later expanded into a book, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, Paul Mason identifies three key social actors in the current upsurge of militancy: organised labour, ‘the graduate with no future’, and the urban poor (Mason, 2011). Situating these forces alongside an analysis of networked technologies, he asks, ‘What if – instead of waiting for the collapse of capitalism – the emancipated human being were beginning to emerge spontaneously from within this breakdown of the old order?’ We don’t think these categories can be treated as empirical realities: they overlap, they don’t describe the whole of the UK working class (they say nothing about the ‘squeezed middle’, for instance), and they are not nuanced enough to deal with the complexities of race and gender. But if we use them as a tool, they can help reveal some important points about those social forces which are on the move, and they can help us to frame the problem of shock within the more general problematic of creating and maintaining an articulation between quite different struggles and responses to the crisis.

Mason’s argument is that these ‘three tribes of discontent’ can be seen coming together at the most important points of social unrest during the period 2010–11, from the Arab Spring and the movement of the indignados in Spain to the wave of Occupy actions right across the globe. In the UK, we can perhaps see this most clearly in the demonstration on 10 November 2010 against education cuts and the tripling of tuition fees, a demonstration which ended in the occupation of Conservative party headquarters at Millbank. The day’s lasting image was that of a masked demonstrator kicking in the building’s plate-glass windows, propelling a notion of antagonist street politics on to the front pages and in so doing, creating the space for the emergence of a more militant politics in the run-up to the ‘March for the Alternative’ anti-austerity demonstration on 26 March 2011.

Instead of traditional organisational politics, Mason conceptualises this movement as networked protest, but we would go even further: rather than pose the question of articulation purely in terms of formal alliances and agreements, it might be better to frame the problem as one of enhancing the resonance and avoiding the dissonance between different struggles. The formal links between Tahrir Square, for example, and anti-cuts actions in the UK were minimal, yet many of those taking part were in no doubt about the connections.

Seen in this light, we can think of a rhythm of resistance in the spring of 2011. Those who were part of that rhythm were bound by weak ties, with the result that the rhythm was mobile, highly responsive and able to grow very quickly as new people adopted, and adapted, the beat. But in the absence of more coherent forms of organisation, those weak ties made the rhythm vulnerable to disruption, and that is exactly what happened in the aftermath of the August riots. If the enduring image of early spring 2011 was that of a boot going through a window, then the summer was captured in those photographs of the ‘Broom Army’. Rallied through the Twitter hashtag #riotcleanup, these volunteers were promoted as being law-abiding citizens reclaiming the streets, and heralded as an example of the ‘Big Society’ in action. Rather than directly critique this response, what’s interesting about it is the speed with which it emerged, and how quickly a rhythm of resistance was transformed into its opposite: hundreds of people banging the drum for law and order with brooms, bin bags and dustpans.

The lesson is clear: if we are to avoid the creation of dissonance, we must learn how to handle shock. There will, after all, be many more shocks in the years to come. ¹

Understanding shock

Perhaps the first thing we need to make clear is that we are not concerned here with the avoidance of shock. If we think of shock as a break in the normal unfolding of life, then that disruption can be inflected in an anti-capitalist direction. After all, it is not preordained that those suffering shock will fall back onto comforting old tropes, such as the innate criminality of the urban poor. ² Indeed it can often take a shock to provoke new thinking. The rupture offered by events like the August riots can knock us out of habitual patterns and make us question the usually unthought assumptions and presuppositions of existing society. In this light, the problem becomes how movements can learn to respond to shock with open rather than closed affects.

Such a question becomes all the more vital because the problematic that has dominated and structured contemporary anti-capitalist movements is precisely the domination of the sense of the possible by the assumptions and presuppositions of the neoliberal era. Neoliberalism’s real strength is proving to be its domination of common sense, because this structures political possibility at a level that is difficult to reach in the normal course of politics. As Hardt and Negri (2009: 6) put it, ‘Such transcendental powers compel obedience not through the commandment of a sovereign or even primarily through force but rather by structuring the conditions of possibility of social life.’ The problem then is how to challenge, exceed and change the sense of the possible without producing the type of shock that will disorientate a population to such an extent that it falls back on familiar but reactionary tropes. To investigate this problem, we first need to clarify the conception of shock that we are deploying.

We can credit Naomi Klein’s (2007) book The Shock Doctrine with bringing the political effects of shock to contemporary prominence. Her approach is structured around Milton Friedman’s famous quote,

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. (Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, cited in Klein, 2007: 6)

It is from this that Klein develops neoliberalism’s relationship to crisis or shock, suggesting that neoliberal policies have consistently taken advantage of the disorientation that follows shock in order to implement policies that a more coherent public might resist. More than this, Klein suggests that these shocks are often engineered, at least partly, for that very purpose and indeed are often caused by the speed and scale of the neoliberal reforms themselves.

Such a model certainly fits the implementation of austerity in the UK. The sheer scale and diversity of the cuts in public services, for instance, inclines the population to a certain political entropy. While the closure of a single library might serve as a focal point for opposition, when a whole range of services are being closed or constrained all at once, it becomes much harder for a coherent and collective response to emerge.

Our focus in this paper is, however, a little different. We have after all tried to frame the riots within the problematic of how divergent responses to the crisis can shatter articulations or resonances between different struggles. The operative definition of shock used by Klein, while underdeveloped, is a good starting point.

Klein (2007: 16) uses a concept of shock drawn from CIA torture manuals, and in particular the way such techniques can rupture a prisoner’s ‘ability to make sense of the world around them’. Not least amongst these torture techniques is the literal application of electric shocks. However, Klein also emphasises the use of sensory deprivation followed by overstimulation through, for instance, barking dogs and continuous heavy metal music.

We can trace this notion of shock (as a disruption of sense-making) to modernist conceptions, not least the homeo-dynamic, and indeed economistic notion of shock developed by Freud. The problematic through which Freud touches on shock is the ability of an organism to protect itself against over-stimulation and the mechanisms with which it does so. ³ Freud (2001: 26) begins his examination thus, with the image of:

a living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation. Then the surface turned towards the external world will from its very situation be differentiated and will serve as an organ for receiving stimuli. ⁴

For Freud (2001: 27), however, ‘Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than the reception of stimuli.’ It is precisely the failure or overwhelming of this protection that creates trauma, and it is a sudden shock that is often the cause. Freud (2001: 31) takes pains to differentiate his psycho-social conception from what he calls ‘the old, naïve theory of shock’ which ‘attributes aetiological importance. . . to the effects of mechanical violence’.

[S]hock theory in its crudest form. . . regards the essence of shock as being the direct damage to the molecular structure. . . of the elements of the nervous structure; whereas what we seek to understand are the effects produced on the organ of the mind by the breach of the shield against stimuli.

Freud’s conception of shock and the mediation of the surrounding environment is taken up by Walter Benjamin through his considerations of the poetry of Baudelaire and the cinema of Eisenstein. Benjamin sees in Baudelaire a concept applicable to the experience of the modern city, where repeated encounters with stimulation and with other people overwhelm the city-dweller’s ability to take it in. Benjamin finds in this a conception of commodification inasmuch as the over-stimulation of the city-dweller creates a semi-conscious dream world conducive to consumption.

What is more important for us, however, is Benjamin’s (1977: 165) conception of consciousness and reflection as the best defence against shock: ‘Without reflection there would be nothing but the sudden start.’ ⁵ There is then a sense that the human body can be trained to habituate itself to shock, to become better at processing stimuli and information. Indeed, if we consider Benjamin’s analysis of the shock techniques that Eisenstein creates through the rapid and unexpected juxtapositions of images, then we can develop a conception not only of shock caused by a flow of unexpected information excessive to a body’s ability to process it, but also of the ability of a body to habituate itself to new experience by incorporating it into its expectations and world view. ⁶ After all, Eisenstein’s cinematic shock techniques now underlie many Hollywood blockbusters, and in many cases the only shock involved is how shockingly bad they are.

This concern with the psycho-social affects of excessive information has been brought into contemporary anti-capitalist theorising through the figure of Franco Berardi (2009: 44), who talks about panic as a psychopathology caused when the organism ‘is no more able to process the sheer amount of information coming into its cognitive field’. In fact, Berardi’s concept of panic is in many ways an updating of the modernist conception of shock found in Baudelaire, Benjamin or Eisenstein. Whereas the modernist conception of shock is based on the overwhelming of sensibility by the sensations of the city, or even of the quick cutting techniques of montage in film, for Berardi (2009: 44), panic has arisen as a psychopathology because ‘while cyberspace is conceptually infinite, cybertime is not infinite at all’, based as it is on the finite nature of ‘socially available time of attention’.

We want to retain the focus on the processing of information from these definitions, but our use of shock here relies on a slightly different temporality to the one at play in these conceptions. We are not so concerned with the panic or exhaustion arising from continual over-stimulation. Instead, we are concerned with a more punctual conception of shock, one that can help situate the August riots and their aftermath.

Shock absorbers

Habituating a body to shock or anticipating its arrival is one way to mitigate its effects. We can think of military training, or perhaps the manner in which a boxer is trained, as not only the acclimatisation of the body to repeated shock but also the disciplining of the body – its programming with autonomic sub-routines which can be triggered during an encounter with shock. Soldiers commonly talk of ‘the training taking over’ as a reaction that prevents immobilisation and debilitation.

Military training, of course, is designed for a particular command structure and depends on fixed notions of ‘the body’, ‘the enemy’, and so on. If we want to think this problem through at the level of social movements, we need to return to our definition of shock as a sudden and unexpected burst of stimulation or information that exceeds a body’s ability to process it. From this perspective, we can see the limits of habituation as a strategy for responding to the contingent or unexpected. Instead, collectivising the reception and processing of the new stimulation or information seems a much better option. So our question is this: if organisation and collective analysis are the best shock absorbers, what forms of political organisation might enable social movements to respond to shock with open rather than closed affects ?

Klein (2007: 453) does briefly hint at a socio-political conception of shock absorption, and suggests that Latin American movements are learning to ‘build shock absorbers into their organising models’ by adopting more networked forms which are ‘less centralized than the sixties, making it harder to demobilize whole movements by eliminating a few leaders’. In the light of the psycho-social, informatic conception of shock developed above, we might ask whether a decentralised network form is sufficient to ensure the absorption of the kind of shock generated by the riots.

One of the key characteristics of struggles of the last few years has been the way actions, tactics and theoretical reflections have circulated by viral adoption and adaptation, taking advantage of the breadth of weak ties found in social media. A good example of this method can be seen in the rise and spread of UK Uncut. A small group of veterans of the Camp for Climate Action ⁷ imported the direct-action techniques developed there into the anti-austerity movement by blockading and occupying shops and businesses that had avoided large tax bills. The tactic had an immediate impact on the public debate by revealing austerity as a political decision and not the result of a ‘law of nature’. The model quickly spread across the country in self-generating groups that identified with the tactic. This viral method worked because the story of the action was instantly understandable, because the actions were easily replicable, and because participation carried a low entry level of risk.

Yet our impression is that the weak ties that had helped build the movement during its upsurge were ill-suited to the aftermath of the riots. ⁸ We found that computer mediated social networks proved a poor medium for dealing with shocked metrosexuals who had suddenly discovered their inner fascist. In many cases it seemed like social media was acting to circulate and reinforce the affect of shock and thus police the prohibition on thought. One tweet we received summed it up. It suggested the day after the riots be henceforth known as ‘The Great Day of De-Friending and De-Following’.

We would suggest that the expansion of weak ties that social media makes possible can act as accelerants for the circulation of ideas and tactics. However, if social movements are to become shock resistant, then the stronger ties that come from sustained engagement with a political project must become a supplement to these weak ties. Our understanding of shock points to the need to think forms of organisation through the problematic of collectivising the reception and analysis of unexpected information and stimuli. The question then becomes that of which repertoires, techniques and technologies can help set the conditions for collective analysis. This may well involve techniques and organisational forms that slow down the pace of events and the level of intensity to that at which thought and analysis can take place. We might see the repeated theme of occupying physical space, and the associated adoption of the slow deliberative pace of decision produced by consensus decision-making processes, as a move in this direction.