[spectre] (fwd) Thierry Bardini: France Is Burning

[Andreas Broeckmann]

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  CTHEORY:         THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE        VOL 28, NO 3
         *** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***

  1000 Days 023    09/11/2005    Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
  Event-Scene
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                             1000 DAYS OF THEORY

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  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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