The London Riots and the making of "The Enemy"

There are no kids on the streets. Walking around the streets at 4pm the climate of fear is palatable and insidious, and on Old Kent Road we sit and watch 4 riot vans speed past, then another 3 a minute later, then another 2 after that. We walk up in the their direction and a couple more pass us. On Walworth Road it is hot and quiet. Shopkeepers assume guard position outside their business, conversing with locals and boarding up their storefronts and everywhere you look, everyone is talking about the same thing, This is an atmosphere of collective fear, and collective fear in an urban environment often gives birth to a sense of unity, community and conversation amongst those that vehemently denounce an event such as this. But this united city is by definition a purely oppositional force, such unity can only seem to occur through a violent rejection. This is the undeniable (and understandable) defensive behavior aimed at a singular “Enemy” but there is no “Enemy” in sight.

At 4pm this Tuesday afternoon, the “Enemy”s body has thus far been shaped and defined in the last 24 hours not only by it’s own (very real and very destructive) crimes and multi-directional, visceral expression of anger but also by an unavoidably reactionary media climate, that, despite the huge complexity of the situation, simply refuses to enter into a discourse that will require responsibility and acknowledgement of total confusion as a starting point. And so, since the events of Saturday night, we see the investigation into these events take on the form of a particularly reductive binary; It’s Us vs. Them, the physical manifestation of which is being seen on the boarded up streets right now. As news spreads to the rest of the country it divides those choosing to comment into either denouncers of an increasingly singular image of “The Enemy”, or supporters of total anarchy and destruction (also predicated on that same singular image of total violence), the rhetoric of the former increasingly baring all the hallmarks of age-old racist rhetoric. This singular representation of inner-city youth as "The Enemy" is, by definition, a construct of pure fear and paranoia, but it is important to make the distinction between this term and that of a scapegoat."The Enemy" that Britain is dealing with right now cannot have darts thrown at it for it is an abstract "Enemy" born out of neglect in both the historical and immediate contexts that surround these riots. Whether vitriolic and racist ("Protect our Country") or comforting and twee (Operation Cup of Tea) Anti-Riot campaigns, in their lack of dealing with the problem, (edit: in their lack of doing ANYTHING) simply shape and mould last night's transcendent rage and frustration into an object in the negative, an indecipherable body of pure rejection, rootless and beyond reconciliation.

The absence/invisibility of youth as a perceived operational manoeuvre on Walworth Road at 4pm today (Sky News interviewee: “you can’t wear that hood forever”) now signifies the exact invisibility of the oppressed within the oppressed that led to this situation in the first place. Since Saturday night the doomed generation within the doomed generation has let out an audible (to EVERYONE) scream of anger and loss to an echoing, cavernous silence. It is this silence that we walk through today, “The Enemy” not present, but perhaps seen to be skulking through the hot empty city during the daytime as an invisible, purely oppositional and volatile Other of such malice and destructive, remorselessness violence that it can only be conceived of in the dark, out of sight, out of earshot, perhaps lurking in oil-shimmering heat of Burgess Park, perhaps sullenly coalescing under the carbuncles of a decrepit estate, planning it’s next attack, but never in a position of conversation or confrontation, dialogue or discourse. We see artefacts of encounters with it the night before, we see the isolated, extreme end of it’s destruction repeatedly in hypnotic kaleidoscopes of fire and broken glass on live news channels, but at 4pm in South London those are all that exist, and right now there is nothing but emptiness, a vacuum of air in which “The Enemy” just looms.

The simplistic reduction of those involved in last nights riots into a single entity is ironic because it mirrors the exact opposite of the sentiments on the front line; standing outside Peckham Weatherspoon's with what felt like a large portion of the community facing a line of riot police that advanced and retreated in timed waves, the feeling in the air was not one of planned, cohesive protest with an immediate, attainable goal in sight, nor was it structured, calculated violence, but one of suffocating confusion and anger. Paul Virilio famously stated that “war is a continuation of politics by other means” and in the midst of last nights warzone, politics in London had no where else to go but the streets that night, and unlike the humanitarian struggles in the Middle East or even the cuts protests last winter (both of which this is NOT), it didn’t have time to organise itself into a coherent voice that spoke a language of politics that is immediately understood by those in power, and so the quiet, sunny aftermath of Monday's events, London is now attempting to deal with a total alien.