Looting the Lexicon
I’m no Malcolm X, but I’m no Norman
Tebbit either. ‘Malcman in the Middle,’ if you like. Being in the
middle might be boring and not a sexy as stringing them all up, or
garroting all the coppers, or taking everyone in London off to
Butlins together and talking about our feelings, but I’m not
inclined to apologise for that. I find it unlikely that a complex
problem will have a simple solution. Simplicity, usually, is for
simpletons.
But there’s a difference between
simplicity and clarity. Too much of the language being used around
the events of early August is vague, or meaningless, or is used as
George Orwell once said, not to reveal meaning but to obscure it. In
the two months since the riots and looting, things have got worse,
with debate settling into familiar ruts and easy clichés, and most
politicians and journalists claim to be able to end rioting simply by
opening more youth centres or more jails, as if a profound
sociological crisis could be solved by scrapping one trident missile
and rewriting one line of a budget. If we are going to have a
meaningful and productive discussion about what happened we need to
start with first principles, and that starts with thinking about the
words that we use.
I’ve been suspicious about the word
‘community’ for a long time, at least as it’s used in political
discourse, where it has a long and sorry history. In the late 1990s
for example, the Lord Rogers-endorsed political orthodoxy was that
inner city areas like Gorton or Mile End suffered from a lack of
communal feeling or ‘community spirit’ thanks to their
unsympathetic architecture and urban landscape. The prescribed
solution was to build anew, ensuring that the new Utopia that sprung
up was designed in accordance with the wishes of the residents; ‘the
local community.’ The writers of ‘Towards a Strong Urban
Renaissance’, the 1999 report on the future of cities, never
realised the circularity of stating on the one hand that
dysfunctional design and degraded infrastructure made for a hollowed
out, disparate population with no collective identity or solidarity,
and on the other hand that the attendant social problems could be
solved simply by talking to this population and listening to its
(coherent? unanimous?) voice.
Anyway, fast forward to now and the
word ‘community’ is being passed round like a bag of coke at a
Bullingdon Club party. What is a community? Is it just a generic word
for all the people who live in a geographical area? If it is it’s a
rather useless concept, since if August showed us anything it’s
that having a mix of people in an area doesn’t necessarily make it
happy or socially cohesive. In fact, the evidence has been there for
years, if you care to look. Middle class people who live in Brixton –
like me, indeed – will say that they love the area for its
diversity, its capacity to challenge one’s expectations, to expose
one to funny food in the market. All this is true, up to a point, but
what is also true is that any number of studies of Brixton - or
London Fields, Dalston, Peckham, Kentish Town, Hammersmith, or
anywhere else in London you care to mention – show that people here
tend to associate with others who earn like them, learn like them,
talk like them, think like them, dress like them, and usually look
like them.
John Major once said that when faced
with criminals society needed to “condemn a little more and
understand a little less,” the only example I know of where a
politician (openly) made it his policy to promote ignorance among the
electorate. Reading my facebook during the riots I began to think
that the internet was broken, and that the Daily Mail comments page
was leaking into my newsfeed. People I used to know at school poured
scorn on any attempt to understand or explain what was happening.
‘It’s criminality and greed’ they shrieked, la-la-laing with
their fingers in their ears – an easy misunderstanding if you don’t
know the difference between a cause and a motive. By all means
declare that those people breaking windows and stealing trainers were
motivated by nothing more than the desire to own and possess, and at
the same time to disrupt and to destroy. Maybe that was all that was
in their heads. But why, and how, do we come to a state of affairs,
in this city – one of the richest and by its own proclamation,
‘greatest’ in the world – where a large number of young people
are prepared to behave like this?
I began by listing a couple of people I
am not. I could add semiotician to the list. I’m no Roland Barthes,
for example, but in the last analysis I damn community for its lack
of meaning. As Gramsci made clear, ideology is intimately linked with
the concrete and material. To be ideological is not simply to be an
idealist. Thus the hollowing out of our politics, the removal of
ideology from our political parties, is paralleled by a turn to the
abstract. For all their talk about ‘what works’, politicians now
are less, not more engaged with reality.
‘Community’ is too vague to call up
anything concrete. It is evocative rather than indicative. It calls
to mind indisputed Good Things: friendly people, shops where they
know your name, identifiably local places rather than characterless
nonplaces, the personal rather than the anonymous, the specific
rather than the general. A vision, of Police Community Support
Officers biking through the morning mist to the Tesco megastore. It
is apolitical. A solidarity without politics for a political culture
without ideology. In short in this small angry island it is the only
form of society we really deserve.
