CURA.

The reactions to the protest movements in France in the weeks following the racist murder of a young teenager by a white police officer in June 2023 were apt proof of the only contempt that oppressed classes could receive when presenting themselves as their own political entity. What had largely been characterized as a set of vital demonstrations, had been transcribed as a global ensauvlement of those who were set out to silence. At the same time as an obviously racist murder, part of the police’s colonial history, was taking effect, the furious reactions of those who could also have been shot – and who symbolically smashed cars, shop windows, or burned the flag of the country that had colonized and impoverished their parents’ – were solemnly judged as barbarians, thieves, murderers and looters. I remember precisely the moment when, watching television with my friends, the dissociation was made, as if obvious, between a demonstration – led by white activists – and a riot – led by non-whites. 

They speak of a ‘new cartography of riots’ in neighborhoods they call ‘sensitive’, ‘popular’. They speak of ‘urban violences even more intense than that of 2005’, referring to the movements that followed the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who were electrocuted in an electrical substation while trying to escape from the police. They speak of a mob of looters for a few stolen Lacoste sweaters, a few bags taken from broken windows. Yet this looting carries its meaning in its reverse; it manifests the direct abolition of the commodity form, the suspension of exchange structures from the rules of the Capital, the rupture of the social contract in its identity of class, gender and race.  

It is the use of this symbolic force that is discussed by Aaina Lakha and Kay Gabriel in Politics (2022). How far can this strategy go? How does it lead to a popular consciousness, a common receptivity? Through the elaboration of these autonomous means, rioting and looting is engaged as a time when the state is losing out, unable to contain populations within the systems it has established through the authority of the police. It’s disobedience. There’s also the question of purpose, and the extent to which its strategies lead to a modification of class, gender and racial systems. Maybe that’s not the question either, and that these moments manifest themselves for something else. That the organizational expression of these struggles is above all a moral, or anti-moral. Because it creates this pleasure, this joy in fulfilled desire, forbidden in this very social contract, against the injunction to obey in order to form a collective convention that elaborates the extraordinary. Which, in the end, is the closest thing we have to the idea of freedom. 

Broken Windows (2022) brings together interviews with three anonymous individuals who, in 2020, took part in the looting of dozens of stores in the streets of New York as part of the protests sparked by a racist crime committed by a white police officer in the USA that same year. If every detail relating the places and names of these events is masked by the sound of a police car siren, it is in this sense the application of a conscious censorship, put in place to protect the discourses of these activists, and to protect their legal identities. Raising the question of how far activist political discourse can reach in a judicial system established through reprobation and punishment, each experience asserts itself in the possibility of gathering, translating and transmitting facts that cannot be precisely archived. 

Impotent in the face of the rule of justice – which defends only those who decide it – the identities of the three activists are masked by a piece of wood, a barricade, the same as those erected on all the major stores during the BLM movement (and which it was assumed had increased the cost of wood by 275% in the USA), and others, in France too, as everywhere else. It’s a report of censorship enforced by authority, by what Cedric J. Robinson understood as all the events, instruments and organs which contribute the existential boundaries to any and all individuals. (…) An absurd, irrational and arbitrary placed insight which contains the first and last marks in the universe sustained by faith and fatigued intellectual bruteness in the presumption that there is nothing beyond. 

Perhaps, it’s surely because it might only for this ecstasy that these events take place, that they are in essence the true meaning of life.