scarletghoul
4th September 2011, 15:47
Wrote this a while ago but only just typed it up. let me know what you think, and please criticise if you think i made a mistake somewhere/everywhere ..
http://scarletghoul.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/anxiety-and-destruction-analysis-of-the-english-riots/
Anxiety and Destruction: Analysis of the English Riots
“Every subject stands at the crossing between a lack of being and a destruction, a repetition and an interruption, a placement and an excess.” – Badiou
I wrote before that a full revolution requires both destructive and creative force on behalf of the masses (rage and love (http://scarletghoul.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/on-rage-and-love/), negative and positive consciousness). Since then, the people of London and several other English cities have forced open a new chapter in English history with an unprecedented explosion of rebellion.
I characterised the event in Egypt as being essentially destructive and composed of negative consciousness. Obviously, the same can be said of the recent uprising here. But, also obviously, there is a big difference between the two. In Egypt, the destruction was concentrated (both geographically, in Tahrir Square, and ideologically, with a clear political demand), whereas here it was dispersed and (while entirely political in essence, despite what the racist and youthphobic propaganda of the BBC etc would have you believe) had no clear demand, so hasn’t resulted in any concrete progress.
So what exactly is the reason for this difference between Tahrir and Tottenham ?? Both were political rebellions, eruptions of the peoples’ rage. Both were accompanied by mass expropriation of capitalist private property (‘looting’)….. As far as I can tell, the difference is due to the fact that the tyranny in Egypt had a name – Mubarak – whereas the tyranny in England is an unnamed Real that is hard to grasp. This is why the bourgeois propagandists have been able to say that the protests here are illegitimate thuggery unlike in Egypt (“we are a democracy, there is no need to rebel”..); the tyranny is a raw real felt only by the poor, and has no place in the state’s ideology. Mubarak functioned as a “master signifier” that tied together the whole of the Egyptian bourgeoisie’s ideology + state, and thus symbolised tyranny and oppression for the downtrodden masses. Mubarak was the system. In the UK, however, the tyranny and oppression hides behind the term “democracy”, adorned as it is with all kinds bullshit about ‘freedom’ and so on.
We can demand that Cameron steps down, sure, but that stays within the realm of the system, which builds its fake legitimacy on the fact that the individual can be voted out of office occasionally. We have to look and see beyond this crap.It is not a case of an individual “dictator”, but the dictatorship of an entire class (the bourgeoisie/capitalists), via a system they call “democracy”. Unlike the Egyptians, we don’t have the luxury of an individual person who embodies oppression – we have to dig deeper and understand that it’s the system, not the people who occupy its places, that oppresses us. We must demand the destruction of bourgeois parliament and the entire state. Who cares if the face of the Prime Minister isn’t permanent.. The robbing of the poor to give to the rich, the murder of the people by the pigs, the imperial wars … all these things are permanent, and can not be changed through bourgeois parliament, because the rule of the bourgeoisie rests entirely on this oppression (its class dictatorship).
The Egyptians had it laid out clearly for them: what they needed was an end to the dictatorship of Mubarak. What the British people must demand is an end to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is harder to discern than Mubarak, so in order for a concentrated mass movement to properly occur here, it is necessary for the people to understand the way the system works, and to organise accordingly. This is a task that must be led by a revolutionary party, one that is in touch with the people.
There are two important effects of the August riots:
1. General increase in the level of class war, and
2. An entire generation of people losing their fear of the police and realising the fragile and illegitimate nature of this system.
The first effect is obvious (just look at the news and see the state crack down on social networking, working class youth being sent to jail for stealing 2 scoops of ice cream, etc). The second effect hasn’t received much attention yet, and should be studied and considered closely as it is extremely important. What exactly is it that happened ? What change occurred in the subjectivity of the lower class youth ? Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject is our guide here, and it can also clarify the difference between Egypt and England.
For Badiou, “every subject crosses a lack of being and a destruction.” What he means (in part following Lacan) is that the structure relies on a lack, passed over repetitively:
“In this trajectory, the subject is governed by the ignorance of the loss that constitutes it. It follows that there is no truth which is not mutilated, and no subject which is not subjected.”
The subject (not just the individual subject, but also the political subject, like the revolutionary proletariat) must interrupt this repetition in what Badiou labels Destruction:
“Destruction divides the effect of lack into its part of oblivion – of automatism – and its part of excess over the places, of the overheating of the automatisms.”
For example, the proletariat consists in its lack, in the Real of class antagonism. When the proletariat revolts, there is a destructive excess of this antagonism, an interruption of the capitalist order’s repetitive ‘passing over’ of this lack.
The agent of destruction, for Badiou, is anxiety:
“Anxiety is the submersion by the Real, the radical excess of the Real over the lack, the active failure of the whole apparatus of the symbolic support provoked by what reveals itself therein, in a cut, as unnameable encounter.”
“Anxiety is that excess-of-the-real (excess of force) over what can be symbolised (placed) thereof in a certain order, from whence a subject emerges already divided, crushed from its own truth, whose saying , under the rule of lack, comes itself to lack.”
Who couldn’t recognise here the events in London, Manchester, Birmingham, etc ? They are the destructive excess of the class antagonism over its own lack in the symbolic order of capitalism, in the form of an explosion of anxiety.
But anxiety alone is not enough. Badiou names courage as the inverse of anxiety:
“Courage is insubordination to the symbolic order at the urging of the dissolutive injunction of the real. As based on the excess-of-the-real, courage is identical to anxiety, but as a disruptive force within the splace, it functions as its inversion. Courage positively carries out the disorder of the symbolic, the breakdown of communication whereas anxiety calls for its death.”
“Courage is the destructive tipping of the scales in which the truth is sustained in its division.”
This is where the subjectivity of the Egyptian rebels differs from that of the English rioters. What happened in England was primarily an anxious affair; in Egypt the anxiety was turned into a courageous and true insubordination to the (symbolic) Order. There was of course an element of courage in the riots, but their class essence was one of anxiety.
As I said earlier, the symbol8c order of the Egyptian tyranny (with Mubarak at its center) is much clearer than that of the English regime (a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie hiding behind “democracy”, as if changing the face of the executioner turns death into freedom). This clarity made it easier for the Egyptians to convert their anxiety into courage. For the people of England this is a more difficult task, and one which in my opinion requires intense political work among the masses. This work would be best carried out by a party of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist type.
Anxiety and courage are two sides of the destructive rage of the people, two halves of their negative consciousness. We have the anxiety, and have witnessed its power, but it is only courage that properly carries through destruction, and opens the way for creation of the New.
http://scarletghoul.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/anxiety-and-destruction-analysis-of-the-english-riots/
Anxiety and Destruction: Analysis of the English Riots
“Every subject stands at the crossing between a lack of being and a destruction, a repetition and an interruption, a placement and an excess.” – Badiou
I wrote before that a full revolution requires both destructive and creative force on behalf of the masses (rage and love (http://scarletghoul.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/on-rage-and-love/), negative and positive consciousness). Since then, the people of London and several other English cities have forced open a new chapter in English history with an unprecedented explosion of rebellion.
I characterised the event in Egypt as being essentially destructive and composed of negative consciousness. Obviously, the same can be said of the recent uprising here. But, also obviously, there is a big difference between the two. In Egypt, the destruction was concentrated (both geographically, in Tahrir Square, and ideologically, with a clear political demand), whereas here it was dispersed and (while entirely political in essence, despite what the racist and youthphobic propaganda of the BBC etc would have you believe) had no clear demand, so hasn’t resulted in any concrete progress.
So what exactly is the reason for this difference between Tahrir and Tottenham ?? Both were political rebellions, eruptions of the peoples’ rage. Both were accompanied by mass expropriation of capitalist private property (‘looting’)….. As far as I can tell, the difference is due to the fact that the tyranny in Egypt had a name – Mubarak – whereas the tyranny in England is an unnamed Real that is hard to grasp. This is why the bourgeois propagandists have been able to say that the protests here are illegitimate thuggery unlike in Egypt (“we are a democracy, there is no need to rebel”..); the tyranny is a raw real felt only by the poor, and has no place in the state’s ideology. Mubarak functioned as a “master signifier” that tied together the whole of the Egyptian bourgeoisie’s ideology + state, and thus symbolised tyranny and oppression for the downtrodden masses. Mubarak was the system. In the UK, however, the tyranny and oppression hides behind the term “democracy”, adorned as it is with all kinds bullshit about ‘freedom’ and so on.
We can demand that Cameron steps down, sure, but that stays within the realm of the system, which builds its fake legitimacy on the fact that the individual can be voted out of office occasionally. We have to look and see beyond this crap.It is not a case of an individual “dictator”, but the dictatorship of an entire class (the bourgeoisie/capitalists), via a system they call “democracy”. Unlike the Egyptians, we don’t have the luxury of an individual person who embodies oppression – we have to dig deeper and understand that it’s the system, not the people who occupy its places, that oppresses us. We must demand the destruction of bourgeois parliament and the entire state. Who cares if the face of the Prime Minister isn’t permanent.. The robbing of the poor to give to the rich, the murder of the people by the pigs, the imperial wars … all these things are permanent, and can not be changed through bourgeois parliament, because the rule of the bourgeoisie rests entirely on this oppression (its class dictatorship).
The Egyptians had it laid out clearly for them: what they needed was an end to the dictatorship of Mubarak. What the British people must demand is an end to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is harder to discern than Mubarak, so in order for a concentrated mass movement to properly occur here, it is necessary for the people to understand the way the system works, and to organise accordingly. This is a task that must be led by a revolutionary party, one that is in touch with the people.
There are two important effects of the August riots:
1. General increase in the level of class war, and
2. An entire generation of people losing their fear of the police and realising the fragile and illegitimate nature of this system.
The first effect is obvious (just look at the news and see the state crack down on social networking, working class youth being sent to jail for stealing 2 scoops of ice cream, etc). The second effect hasn’t received much attention yet, and should be studied and considered closely as it is extremely important. What exactly is it that happened ? What change occurred in the subjectivity of the lower class youth ? Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject is our guide here, and it can also clarify the difference between Egypt and England.
For Badiou, “every subject crosses a lack of being and a destruction.” What he means (in part following Lacan) is that the structure relies on a lack, passed over repetitively:
“In this trajectory, the subject is governed by the ignorance of the loss that constitutes it. It follows that there is no truth which is not mutilated, and no subject which is not subjected.”
The subject (not just the individual subject, but also the political subject, like the revolutionary proletariat) must interrupt this repetition in what Badiou labels Destruction:
“Destruction divides the effect of lack into its part of oblivion – of automatism – and its part of excess over the places, of the overheating of the automatisms.”
For example, the proletariat consists in its lack, in the Real of class antagonism. When the proletariat revolts, there is a destructive excess of this antagonism, an interruption of the capitalist order’s repetitive ‘passing over’ of this lack.
The agent of destruction, for Badiou, is anxiety:
“Anxiety is the submersion by the Real, the radical excess of the Real over the lack, the active failure of the whole apparatus of the symbolic support provoked by what reveals itself therein, in a cut, as unnameable encounter.”
“Anxiety is that excess-of-the-real (excess of force) over what can be symbolised (placed) thereof in a certain order, from whence a subject emerges already divided, crushed from its own truth, whose saying , under the rule of lack, comes itself to lack.”
Who couldn’t recognise here the events in London, Manchester, Birmingham, etc ? They are the destructive excess of the class antagonism over its own lack in the symbolic order of capitalism, in the form of an explosion of anxiety.
But anxiety alone is not enough. Badiou names courage as the inverse of anxiety:
“Courage is insubordination to the symbolic order at the urging of the dissolutive injunction of the real. As based on the excess-of-the-real, courage is identical to anxiety, but as a disruptive force within the splace, it functions as its inversion. Courage positively carries out the disorder of the symbolic, the breakdown of communication whereas anxiety calls for its death.”
“Courage is the destructive tipping of the scales in which the truth is sustained in its division.”
This is where the subjectivity of the Egyptian rebels differs from that of the English rioters. What happened in England was primarily an anxious affair; in Egypt the anxiety was turned into a courageous and true insubordination to the (symbolic) Order. There was of course an element of courage in the riots, but their class essence was one of anxiety.
As I said earlier, the symbol8c order of the Egyptian tyranny (with Mubarak at its center) is much clearer than that of the English regime (a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie hiding behind “democracy”, as if changing the face of the executioner turns death into freedom). This clarity made it easier for the Egyptians to convert their anxiety into courage. For the people of England this is a more difficult task, and one which in my opinion requires intense political work among the masses. This work would be best carried out by a party of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist type.
Anxiety and courage are two sides of the destructive rage of the people, two halves of their negative consciousness. We have the anxiety, and have witnessed its power, but it is only courage that properly carries through destruction, and opens the way for creation of the New.