It’s useful to be circumspect when discussing an event at which one wasn’t present. I wasn’t present at an event last night, as riots and civil unrest broke out across Tottenham in North London. I got home about 4am to find twitter fervid, retweeted pix of flames in the grainy night, kinetic tweets from the scene. At 4:15am, after the BBC had replayed the same footage for the hundredth time, and were busying themselves with a lacklustre interview with an American colonel, while four miles up the road London burned, I flipped to LBC radio for breaking news. No such luck. So I headed out on foot.
I found myself after the event in its ghostly wake, a line of tired cops in riot gear strung out across monument way, behind them a highstreet reconfigured. Perhaps as befits an event, its reality was not quite available. It might’ve looked like a scene from Hot Fuzz, in between takes, the smashed Victorian brickwork, the upturned wheelie bins trimmed with melted plastic, the trudging extras in their helmets. Call of Duty: Tottenham was being bandied about on twitter, hardcore gaming gone hardercore, but here was the game’s shell, its nets, the empty multiplayer room, the interactive environment had now been interacted with, but more than that, it had been hacked and modded, in a rupturous serious way. The game world had its edges glimmer and disappear, the walls had zero depth, uncoded vistas were appearing as the players’ avatars twitched.
Moving round the side streets a French guy asked me what had happened here. I told him what I knew: that last thursday a guy called Mark Duggan was shot by armed police from Operation Trident, a division specifically set-up to police the black population, in very unclear circumstances. A protest outside the Police station yesterday evening had grown, pitched battles with the police ensued, people were hit and charged with horses, two cop cars were burned and a double decker bus. “Just like France” he smiled ruefully. Crossing the police tape into the High Road I came across the two cars, they looked ancient, like stone, and in the ashen grey patina you almost expected to see fossils. Whatever gas, as the paint combusted, was long since expelled. Event archaeology. St Marks Gospel church, just behind the police line, a large art deco building panelled up its tower and across its nave with glass, remained unharmed. Not fifty metres down the road Nationwide and Barclay’s bore the marks of apparent and structural disdain. An African guy gleefully pointed out a wrenched cashpoint in a nearby alley, a note of incredulity, bordering on admiration in his voice. Through the spider-cracked windows of the bank chairs had been tossed, limp bin bags had been hurled through a gaping doorframe scattering their contents, a tipping ground, it appeared now a strange softened act of disgust. However hot it got last night, there was pattern and critique here.
An ear back on the radio and the presenter was talking of a two-fold event, a “peaceful demonstration” which had then “descended” into violence, as “mischief makers” joined the fray to begin looting. This tired mantra is the dry dissecting hand of order. If we know anything about action of this kind, there is no divorce between the principled and the nefarious, there are no democratic goodies and anti-democratic baddies, however appealingly neat that would be (and which should be intuitively suspect for that very reason). As I walked back through the peeling playground on Hackney grounds I heard a man on the radio discuss how he would consider accepting fenced goods, “I wouldn’t have 6 months ago” he explained, “only, I’ve had a paycut of 12 grand since then.” A community that experiences murder by, and the routine attentions of, the Police might protest and they might take stuff from stores. In an area where unemployment is the highest in the capital, encompassing some of its poorest wards (about to become poorer should Pickles have his way) a distinction thus made only glosses the continuity of real antagonisms, reaching instead for a paranoid authoritarian gesture, which sides with law and order presuming it for the common good. If those liberals that will no doubt today seek to identify the bad, the “violent minority”, “thugs”, “idiots”, “youths” and as many radio callers last night charmingly put it (usually prefaced by a hurried put-upon mention of political correctness) “the blacks”, they might give pause to consider the evental-site, its politics, history, and social relations; they might consider the lives of the people that they judge to have “gone too far”.
Apropos of recently seeing Alecky Blythe’s excellent London Road at the National Theatre, I was reading about the events of the Hackney Seige in 2003 with which Blythe had engaged in a previous verbatim piece. What occurred in the 15 day standoff between police and a single gunman, just around the corner from where I now live, was something approaching martial law. Large draughts of the heavy handed Met had effectively occupied the area and were stopping and searching at will. Here at Tottenham I was expecting similar, but found something different. A sense of fatigue and permeability. Down the centre of the high road 14 or so Police vans were choked, a number of squad cars, their occupants ejected down the sides of the road, sitting on doorsteps, leaning on postboxes, red-rimmed eyes, clutching bottled water. Further down four heavily-armoured personnel vehicles (brutal snub little things that brought to my mind the Nazi Hetzer) had their backs open, their contents loosely exposed, sagging crates of riot gear and indeterminate flouresence and plastics. No one had closed the doors on the kennels within the dog vans. The whole air of the massed force was like an exhausted army at rest, a mobile camp set up in the middle of a London street. Two Policemen who had blocked off the High Rd in a small alley had hung their shields on a double gate, one breathed heavily “that was a long night and all” in reference to some previous campaign. One cop leaned on another, quite an uncharacteristic pose. “You fucking stink mate”. There was a stale fear which mingled with tiredness. A sense that there was little doubt the army would be called on to march again. An army that had never really been out of occupation.
When one doesn’t witness an event, like I didn’t last night, one is faced with a piecing together. With no primary sensate data to draw on, as I passed shop owners huddles outside their half-opened shops, with their hands on their hips, and brooms brushing away the debris which has accrued round their fruit and veg stands - into my inner monologue came the spooling tapes of news journalists in solemn and sententious tones. “In the aftermath a community rebuilds”. “Normality slowly returns”. “Put the events of last night behind them”. But the event, according to Alain Badiou, is precisely one that cannot be put behind us. It changes us, we are shaped in reference to it, through it we become subjects. We have the opportunity to consider ourselves in its light. And yes a scene of aftermath is a scene of reconstruction, but what guise does that reconstruction take, and must it be renormalised? This effort of reconstruction is about much more than sweeping up, than condemning violent minorities, and thugs, and youth. It is a process of making sense of this event. If this is truly an event, then the battle is not over, for social meaning which lies unravelled like the masonry strewn across the road, is there to be rebuilt. We rebuild for the communities that have been cored and hollowed out by successive governments, who are suffering waves of gentrification, for their young who have no stake. We rebuild for a summer and beyond, like Badiou says, “we seize the event of truths, their newness, and their precarious trajectory”.
