12436 SOR0010.1111/1467-954X.12436The Sociological ReviewTruong research-article2017 The Sociological Review Article Total rioting: from metaphysics to politics The Sociological Review 1–15 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.12436 DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12436 journals.sagepub.com/home/sor Fabien Truong Paris 8 University, France Abstract This article further develops understandings of urban riot as a social and political symptom to consider the riot as a situated and situating biographical moment, a personal experience which is both signifying and significant. It argues for a paired understanding of riots as a set of physical incarnated (re)actions and as ‘total social fact’ – involving ‘society as a whole’ and putting its institutions at work ‘all together and at once’ (Mauss, 1950). It switches from ‘urban riots’ as a descriptive notion to total rioting as an analytical tool. Total rioting consists of intertwined social upheavals and exchanges, writ through the metaphysical, sociological, poetical and political. It assembles people of a particular kind forever, hence manufacturing social solidarities and subjectivities. As a particular response to specific problems, it reveals how a contemporary state of metaphysical, social and political insecurity generates new forms of empowering projections and intimate policies; and why what is destroyed is precisely what matters. As an attempt to make and unmake society at the same time, it has become the pinnacle of a paradoxical political socialization process. Being less a language for a broader political communication than an insider trading activity, its long-term outcomes reshape the politics of recognition and claims for visibility. Keywords riots, urban poverty, marginality, relegation, banlieue, stigmatization, total social fact, body, longitudinal ethnography, ghetto Introduction ‘Top-down’ sociological analyses present riots as rooted in powerful, mutually reinforcing structural factors of economic and social domination. Such an approach makes visible a mechanics of urban riots, ‘the long term context of the crisis’ (Beaud and Pialoux, 2003), ‘slow rioting’ (Curtis, 1985; Mckenzie, 2013) produced through deepening inequalities and the psycho-social and symbolical mechanisms of collective inferiorization. Working-class pauperization, racism, spatial segregation, school ‘drop-out’ rates and Corresponding author: Fabien Truong, Paris 8 University, 2 Rue de la Liberté, 93526 Saint-Denis, France. Email: fabien.truong@univ-paris8.fr 

12436 SOR0010.1111/1467-954X.12436The Sociological ReviewTruong research-article2017 The Sociological Review Article Total rioting: from metaphysics to politics The Sociological Review 1–15 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.12436 DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12436 journals.sagepub.com/home/sor Fabien Truong Paris 8 University, France Abstract This article further develops understandings of urban riot as a social and political symptom to consider the riot as a situated and situating biographical moment, a personal experience which is both signifying and significant. It argues for a paired understanding of riots as a set of physical incarnated (re)actions and as ‘total social fact’ – involving ‘society as a whole’ and putting its institutions at work ‘all together and at once’ (Mauss, 1950). It switches from ‘urban riots’ as a descriptive notion to total rioting as an analytical tool. Total rioting consists of intertwined social upheavals and exchanges, writ through the metaphysical, sociological, poetical and political. It assembles people of a particular kind forever, hence manufacturing social solidarities and subjectivities. As a particular response to specific problems, it reveals how a contemporary state of metaphysical, social and political insecurity generates new forms of empowering projections and intimate policies; and why what is destroyed is precisely what matters. As an attempt to make and unmake society at the same time, it has become the pinnacle of a paradoxical political socialization process. Being less a language for a broader political communication than an insider trading activity, its long-term outcomes reshape the politics of recognition and claims for visibility. Keywords riots, urban poverty, marginality, relegation, banlieue, stigmatization, total social fact, body, longitudinal ethnography, ghetto Introduction ‘Top-down’ sociological analyses present riots as rooted in powerful, mutually reinforcing structural factors of economic and social domination. Such an approach makes visible a mechanics of urban riots, ‘the long term context of the crisis’ (Beaud and Pialoux, 2003), ‘slow rioting’ (Curtis, 1985; Mckenzie, 2013) produced through deepening inequalities and the psycho-social and symbolical mechanisms of collective inferiorization. Working-class pauperization, racism, spatial segregation, school ‘drop-out’ rates and Corresponding author: Fabien Truong, Paris 8 University, 2 Rue de la Liberté, 93526 Saint-Denis, France. Email: fabien.truong@univ-paris8.fr 2 The Sociological Review poor access to the job market are further aggravated by quotidian stigmatization, discrimination and the silent genealogy of the ‘suffering of the immigrant’ (Sayad, 2004). Commonly, the event sparking the urban riot – the flashpoint (Waddington et al., 1989) – is the sudden death of a local inhabitant during a confrontation with the police.1 At that particular moment, the accumulation of frustrations and daily humiliations results in distrust of the police (Waddington et al., 2009; Reicher and Stott, 2011; Jobard et al., 2012). The setting, a dense space where a large number of adolescents share anguish regarding the future, accelerates such mechanics of urban riot. This article further develops understandings of urban riot as a sociological and political symptom2 to consider the riot as a situated and situating biographical moment, a personal experience which is both signifying and significant. It adopts an ethnographic approach to allow us to consider the riot not only as a collective demonstration and result of driving social forces, but also to capture its specific incarnation. Rioting is an experience built upon previous ones, becoming an event that leaves marks and provides bearings, which are rationalized in time. A social peak and a political agenda-setting event, the riot is also for those involved a social gathering, a cathartic moment and an intense experience with personal consequences. What does it mean, therefore, to be and have been a ‘rioter’ and to look at one’s ‘rioting self’ ten years later? Capturing the riot as a biographical moment This paper focuses in particular on the trajectory of a former French rioter, Elliott, and his retrospective view on the 2005 ‘banlieue riots’.3 This trajectory is drawn out from a series of interviews and encounters between him and me, conducted over a period of more than five years carried out as part of a longitudinal ethnographic research project on the becoming of a cohort of young ‘banlieusards’ living in the northern outskirts of Paris, whom I initially met when they were in high school (Truong, 2015). Banlieue denote the public housing estates built on the outskirts of French cities from the 1950s onwards. While at first these were socially mixed and embodied modern comfort they were now known as sites of deprivation, with high levels of unemployment and poverty common. They are notably home to France’s ethnic minority populations who were originally housed there when the demand for migrant labour from the colonies was at its peak. However, as work opportunities have become increasingly restricted, the banlieue have transformed into places where immigrants had to settle and ‘assimilate’ (Hargreaves, 2007), those in the most disadvantaged positions faced with the objective impossibility of leaving. In 2005, Zyed Benna (17) and Bouna Traoré (15) died while hiding from the local police in an electricity substation in Clichy-Montfermeil, sparking what I refer to in this paper as the ‘banlieue riots’. My approach tracks changes in my interlocutor’s narratives; consisting of ‘biographically and placed based focused revisits’ (Burawoy, 2003) it is methodologically framed to capture the ‘biographical illusion’ (Bourdieu, 1993). Against this background, the decision to focus on a single trajectory has three rationales. (1) The value of incarnated density is revealed through the case study approach, allowing for the density and complexity of social trajectories, and thus avoiding Truong 3 the simplifications and categorizations which are often employed to explain participation to such exceptional and widely broadcasted events (Sennett, 1969; Waddington, 2008; Bloom, 2012; Moran, 2012). While the latter depicts urban riots as an ephemeral and unpredictable faceless phenomena generated by welldocumented social factors, looking at rioters and rioting rather than riots dampens such a dichotomy. As a visceral reaction relying on prediscursive capacities, rioting also refers to ‘carnal connections’ (Wacquant, 2005) revealed within the sphere of intimacy, thus implying close commitments with individuals to be partially grasped. (2) The virtue of incarnated temporality is drawn out through analysing a case over time. While working with long-term effects and processes actual rioters seem to vanish from the scene and only the interpretation of the riots lives on. Focusing on the riot as a biographical moment avoids fetishizing urban riots as a unique heuristic phenomenon and forces us to engage with the tension between the normality and everyday aspects of life and the exceptionality/spectacular of rioting moments, stressing how politics and policies can be located within both and opposing to dominant discursive media regimes. Documenting how time passes by for people reiterates that riots are not only ‘caused by’ but also ‘lived’ and ‘memorized’. Time passed with people helps to excavate coping strategies, through the ‘attention that gives sociology an opportunity to hear those who are not listened to and challenge the claims placed on the meaning of event in the past and in the present’ (Back, 2013: 1). It thus engages a dialectic between the past, the present and the future, offering a reflexive and relational perspective on the social world (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). (3) The patterns and motives condensed into Elliott’s experience are representative and significant beyond the description of an isolated case, revealing the guarantees offered by dissected individualities. However, the question of whether Elliot’s case study alone is robust enough should remain open; as any ethnographer, I run a monopoly over ‘my’ data, which cannot be taken for granted. That said, as a reflexive practice, dissecting individual cases relies on ‘revisits’ which help proofing and proving empirical findings (Burawoy, 2003); as a narrative protocol, it offers the possibility of sharing an extensive range of data with the readers, opening up opportunities for the contradiction of my interpretations; as organic subtracts, individuals concentrate singular dissonances and plurality which speak volumes, once retrieved, about social constraints (Lahire, 2010). Finally, Elliott’s case stresses the benefit of switching from ‘riots’ as a descriptive notion to total rioting as an analytical and methodological tool. By acknowledging the anthropological nature of rioting as a set of physical reactions and a ‘total social fact’ involving ‘society as a whole’ and putting its institutions at work ‘all together and at once’ (Mauss, 1978 [1950]), rioting becomes a sociological magnifying glass rather than a mere artefact. As a particular response to specific problems, total rioting reveals how a contemporary state of metaphysical, social and political insecurity generates new forms of empowering projections and intimate policies. 4 The Sociological Review Elliott (2005–2015): from school drop-out to white collar In 2005, Elliott is 14 and lives in Aubervilliers on the northern outskirts of Paris. He has two older brothers and an older sister (six years older). His parents are from Guadeloupe: his father works at the Post Office and his mother is a cashier in a supermarket. He has dark skin, a shaved head (after having had dreadlocks for many years) and considers himself ‘black’. Though his petty delinquent activities (e.g. theft of motorbikes, shop lifting, dealing small quantities of cannabis, participation in burglaries in private homes) are well known locally, he regularly manages to escape legal and judicial sanctions. He attends senior high school, where he is in open conflict with most of the teaching staff, though he has strong ties with some teachers, including me. He drops out of school in his final year but shows up for his baccalaureate examination, which he fails. After a series of small jobs and unskilled temporary work, thanks to a series of circumstances, his own expediency and a fake CV, he manages to secure a job as a payroll clerk in Paris. After a year and a half, he is made redundant. He takes advantage of the situation to get a diploma which attests his professional knowledge. He then gets a job as a manager and administrator for a subcontracting firm of cleaning services. After a year and a half he is offered a middle executive position to replace his boss, who has been fired for serious misconduct. He is finally in the position to save some money for a first home, which he hopes to be able to purchase soon. Although his statistically exceptional trajectory sounds like a social fairy tale, his professional success is ambivalent. Very much attached to his ‘cité’ (council estate) and to the ties that he has developed there, he still lives there with his parents and feels the need, in order to relax after work, to hang around late at night with his friends from the estate who haven’t, in his words, ‘had the same luck’ as him, the very same friends with whom in 2005 he participated in riots in his neighbourhood. Metaphysics: death by the police and policed by death In 2005, Elliott attends secondary school and has had some academic success: he has ‘good grades without working too hard’ and is going to be admitted to senior high school. At the same time he engages in petty delinquency, which is profitable ensuring a temporary income and the respect of his peers and ‘protection’ from ‘older delinquents’ (‘les grands’) to whom he lends his services (deliveries, surveillances etc.). On weekends he also works ‘off the books’ on building sites and street marketing operations. Rioting could allow him to commit some profitable petty delinquent activities, but this is not at all what motivates him in 2005. This is in contrast to his attendance at the anti-CPE4 demonstrations in Paris a year later, where he had the specific aim of stealing protesters’ MP3 players and telephones. The political aspect of this movement never appealed to him (‘At the time we didn’t care about work, it was just for the fun and the money’), his actions focused on carrying out offences towards wealthier teenagers (‘les petits bourges’) for his own profit ‘up in Paris’. However, in 2005 rioting primarily expresses a feeling of injustice for a collective condition, experienced as oppressive and exclusionary. It is about intimate insecurity and facing intruders ‘all together’ by defending and reclaiming a familiar territory, at all costs. Each time he brings up the riots in our conversations, emotion takes over, as if time could not attenuate certain symbolical wounds. His Truong 5 remarks systematically shift from ‘I’ to ‘us’ (‘les banlieusards’) as opposed to ‘them’, loosely identified as the ‘State’ and its right hand (Bourdieu, 2014): the ‘cops’ (‘les keufs’). He repeatedly mobilizes the semantic field of combat and his constant use of the present tense shows to what extent the riots – and the deaths which are systematically associated with them – revive an antagonism which never entirely belongs to the past. There had already been already Sarkozy’s stint on TV, and that, we all had seen it, we all had heard it. And then, there was Ali and Karim in Aubervilliers. And then Zyed and Bouna in Clichy. That affected us all the same! We are losing youths from the housing projects! And in front of us, a big media buzz for Nicolas Sarkozy, but actually, there is nothing! There are some kids who died but nobody gives a damn! (tout le monde s’en fout). They don’t give a damn about us. Tomorrow, my brother, he will fall, he will be dead. And me, it’ll be the same. The deaths of Zyed and Bouna at Clichy-sous-Bois (15 kilometres away from Aubervilliers) reactivate the local memory of two tragic ‘accidents’ which took place in his neighbourhood: the death of Karim, 17 years of age, during a police chase a few months earlier, and that of Ali, a few years before. The mirror effect revives scenes in which proximity and connection to the victims turns death into a traumatic and tangible experience (Elliott insists on his far-removed family ties with Karim and on the emotion he felt during the protest marches in Aubervilliers). But if Elliott, like many other young boys, thinks that he and people close to him could ‘tomorrow’ be in the stead of Zyed, Bouna, Ali or Karim, it is because police controls – and the risk that these can degenerate at any moment – are part of a daily routine. Grievances against law enforcement officials are frequent, stemming from a relationship of stigmatization, inferiorization and arbitrariness which are experienced as a form of harassment. ‘Interpellation’ (Fassin, 2013, drawing on Althusser) is an experience of incorporation and designation of a sullied identity. During adolescence, it leaves traces in the construction of imaginaries, stressing an underlying guilt for existing (Mansouri, 2013). In order to account for these imaginaries – and perhaps better understand why direct confrontation with the police is a permanent possibility which rioting only magnifies – let us recall an episode which takes place in 2014, nine years later. While Elliott is working in his Parisian office, a policeman in civilian clothes shows up, in order to gather the testimonies of employees who a few days earlier witnessed from their windows a suspicious manoeuvre during an accident on the street. Though Elliott has progressively built himself a ‘white collar’ identity at the office, where he feels ‘at home’ (he works there on average ten hours a day), the police presence – and the feeling of reciprocal recognition which stems from it – abruptly reactivates an uncomfortable banlieusard identity. The cop (le flic) arrived and, right away, he recognized me, and I recognized him too. He saw me, I saw him: I knew he was a cop, he knew I was a guy from the hood (un jeune de cité). He and I, we looked at each other and in three seconds, without knowing each other, we knew. I was under pressure, uncomfortable, I started sweating and all, it was horrible: it was as if he had come for me. To catch me. At the same time, today, I am clean as clean can be! There is nothing one can reproach me for, but I was in the room and I wasn’t comfortable. He looked at me and I could see he was wondering what I was doing there – and I was also wondering what the hell I was doing there (qu’est-ce que je foutais là?). They recognize us like we recognize each other. It’s their job. And when they are there, I don’t feel safe. 6 The Sociological Review Elliott’s sensitivity to the policeman’s presence – at a moment where he is ‘as clean as clean can be’ – clearly shows how scenes of police control intimately affect him and how his ‘self’ has been constituted under the gaze of particular ‘significant others’ (Mead, 1934). It also reveals the precarious legitimacy of adolescents from sink estates who penetrate the spaces of economic power in French society. The policeman’s inquisitive gaze is all it takes to destroy, in a few minutes, his perceived legitimacy. Suddenly, his place is at risk. The sweat tells it all: he remains a possible culprit. As an aside, whether the policeman actually recognized Elliott or not is irrelevant; it is Elliott’s own perception which allows an understanding of what is at stake. The unstoppable drops of sweat show the extent to which the conflictive relationship between youth and police shapes the socialization of young boys in the banlieues. It also helps to understand why deaths resulting from police encounters reactivate the feeling of a dire collective destiny, which can lead to violent defensive reaction. The vicarious deaths of Zyed and Bouna as epilogues of police interpellations add to an already long list of moments of anguish and humiliation, in themselves small, social deaths. In that sense, rioting relates to metaphysics – that is, the philosophical principles dealing with being and knowing, establishing the grounds of one’s existence beyond immediate experiences. It is a visceral response to a social configuration in which metaphysical interrogations – Who are we? Why are we here? From where do we come from? Where are we going? – have been set in a disruptive and inquisitive process. Being summoned to justify one’s everyday presence in one’s neighbourhood by repetitive ID checks (often in front of friends and families) in the eyes of an external patrolling entity (‘les keufs en patrouille’) only perpetuates a vivid state of metaphysical insecurity. Living under suspicion and incompletion only nourishes anger against the tangible depositaries of this insecurity. This metaphysical dimension partially explains why the many political, economic and social reasons for indignation – while evoked by rioters – alone have a very small chance of sparking a riot. These systemic injustices are well known. They can be pointed to and located, but they appear beyond reach. They involve ‘society’ as a whole and refer to groups with blurred outlines. They seem to be broadcasted by external, intangible forces. On no occasion do they have the immediate, corporeal and metaphysical power of the ‘death by the police’ which affects individuals in their own being and intimacy, thus highlighting the inner contradictions of the ‘project of freedom’ that shapes contemporary ‘private selves’ (Rose, 1990). As a physical response, rioting hence totally engages rioters – body and soul. Collective poetics: the ‘bullshit’ and its spectacle This is precisely why rioting, as a sharing and shared experience, also relates to the initiatory and collective pleasure of becoming a rioter. From this point of view, the register of suffering, privation and humiliation does not exclude that of pleasure, excitement and game. Age and gender jointly influence the shaping of a participation to riots which is both festive and cohesive (Khosrokhavar, 1997). Participation becomes at the same time specular and spectacular when it involves seeing oneself through the eyes of peers, conforming to more seasoned practices and going ‘on scene’ in front of a small group of Truong 7 regular spectators. These moments of socialization, group celebration, identification and search for a particular masculine sense of ‘respectability’ (Willis, 1977; Skeggs, 1997; Bourgois, 2003) are all the more seductive when they take place in an unpredictable way. Their high degree of improvisation and the suddenness adds to the feeling of freedom and elation created by the temporary inversion of roles between hunters and hunted. While the usual scheme consists in the police patrolling streets and surprising young men, who run away, the policemen are now surprised and obliged to run under a shower of objects. As Elliott says: ‘the most exhilarating thing was not to see the cars burn, but to wait for the cop’s siren, listening to it get closer and closer’ in order to observe the police from close up. Rioting shuffles the deck without any calculation, creating instantaneous and total comradeship – body, buddy and soul. 2005 had nothing to do with organized gangs! It was more a group movement. I was a follower. I didn’t wake up one morning and decide I was going to burn some cars! I saw some people doing it and I thought ‘That’s the thing to do!’ You are there, you are in your neighbourhood, you talk. Things are burning a little bit everywhere … So you say to yourself ‘let’s go! We’ll have fun too.’ I know that there is a team of that cité that is taking off to do some bullshit; everybody knows, it’s the street, the Arab telephone. In your head you already have tons of thoughts milling around, you say to yourself that there are guys who die. You grew up in a cité so obviously you hate the cops (t’as forcément la haine contre les keufs)! Rioting is also a game: ‘playing in a team’ – which refers to a small group of rarely more than ten people – with rules and objectives, collecting small victories as well as small defeats. Game practices make the group exist and consolidate the status of its members. This leads to establish one’s reputation, maintain a system of reciprocal obligations, ensure the prestige of one’s ‘team’ in a competitive logic, and conform to what the ‘grands’ do, hence recognizing their descent.5 In a context where showing initiative and bravado are ways to confirm one’s status, rioting constitutes a memorable socializing moment. Elliott’s joyful evocation of these memories, probably embellished by time and by his personal life course – although I have never met a rioter expressing regret or sadness – reminds of the ‘fun’ and the ‘good times’, the ‘exploits’ of experts or the ‘flops’ of novices. The first time we tried to burn a car, two guys (mecs) went look for petrol. They saw that diesel was less expensive, so obviously they buy diesel. Those morons come back with diesel, but it doesn’t burn (que dalle!). So we couldn’t blow up the car, that evening. We emptied the bottle, and then nothing. So we fell back on garbage bins. It was the first time I burned a car, so all I can tell you is that it doesn’t work the first time, huh, while a garbage bin, it burns well! It’s easy, it burns all by itself, there is paper and cardboard. We weren’t there anymore to run in all directions when the cops arrived. It was the older ones who knew better. But us, we were learning. Anyway I can assure you that a car doesn’t explode like in films. I never saw a car blow up in my life, though I certainly tried! [laughs] I burned cars because it was funny and everybody laughed. I never managed to watch until the end! We could laugh of everything and nothing. It was just about screwing around. Rioting is ephemeral: the feeling of unity and cohesion is all the stronger when rioters know that it is not going to last. There is no elaborate plan, no strategy, just an 8 The Sociological Review effervescence which celebrates pride in common belonging and the fragility of a state of exception. Just as winter social gatherings oppose summer hunting dispersion of the Eskimos studied by Mauss (1978 [1950]), rioting consolidates endangered ties. That is the social charm and pleasure of doing ‘bullshit’ together, at a particular pace which dictates – for a very short period – the pace of all the other existing social times, hence making time (Bourdieu, 2000). In this way, despite the moral condemnation of rioters by their peers from the banlieue who did not participate in the 2005 riots – their condemnation equally ambivalent, rejecting the means used by the rioters to express their distress, while expressing a similar social critique – the spectacle of the blazes also acted as a form of poetics, in other words a previously unseen aesthetic transfiguration of everyday life. As the ‘Reading the riots’ study (The Guardian, 2011) demonstrated, anger and euphoria can be mixed together in these moments, leading people to describe the riots as a giant ‘party’; indeed, many ‘nonrioters’ watching the riots from their windows explained to me that this had offered a glimpse of hope and pride – a feeling that they found ‘tricky’ to understand, as it seemed morally wrong afterwards. The riot as spectacle does not only affirm the group’s strength, its evocative nature also nourishes a feeling of transcendence, stimulating imaginaries and imaginations alongside public stances. This aesthetic power of pyromaniac despondency contributed to the riots’ success in the media, hereby affecting global sensibilities and susceptibilities. The public use of violence is a communicative performance judged on the basis of competitive normative justifications (Ray, 2014). The collective poetics of riots touched French society as a whole, and exacerbated symbolic struggles around the political signification attributed to them (Jobard, 2009),6 in the process accentuating divides and divisions. Politics: the ‘hate’, the ‘noise’ and the ‘State’ For Elliott, rioting was also motivated by an explicit political view of society, expressed in his critical view of the cité’s organization, social order and of the course of public affairs. This contradicts the ‘idea according to which delinquent activity (past or present) is opposed (for the youth of underprivileged neighbourhoods) to the expression of a political or ideological conscience … typical of these forms of top-down rationalization [in an] intellectual arrangement which suppose delinquents to have no political conscience or disposition to contestation’ (Mohammed, 2009). In 2005, Elliott perceived himself as a ‘revolutionary’, fighting against the ‘State’ and all of ‘society’. His focus on the ‘State’ (he defines himself as an ‘anarchist’ at the time) is motivated by his identification of this institution as the ‘geometric centre of all perspectives’ (Bourdieu, 2014) – hence the target of frustrations. If the discretionary power of the police incarnates this controlling figure at its highest point, school is also one of the State’s essential supports. Educational institutions are places where mechanisms of security, surveillance and stigmatization are reinforced, which partially explains why some schools were set on fire in 2005. Rioting is at the same time a corporeal reaction against a feeling of dispossession, as well as a critique of the organization and distribution of power within society. Focusing on the state is an attempt to de-centre authority, while recognizing its legitimacy. In France, vandalism against schools and bus stops showed the extent to which education Truong 9 and public services matter for people who feel marginalized in a society where cultural capital is a key source of legitimacy; during the UK 2011 riots looting played a similar structural role for rioters against the backdrop of consumption as a marker of status (Casey, 2013). The looting and the vandalism expressed in these two different national contexts are paroxystic cases of ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu, 2000). As authority is first of all felt within the family unit, its households also turn into conflictual zones. Rioting is a way to test and contest the parental order. Once, I went home during ‘rush hour’ and I smelled like smoke. I got my ass kicked (je me suis fait déchirer). It started in the entrance, I still remember. I was about to go out and my brother, who was 24 years old asked me if I smoked. I say no. He asks me if I burned a car. I say no and wham! there goes a slap (une baffe). He kicked my ass (il m’allume) in the entrance, then he brought me in to the dining room: my dad kicked my ass too, he smacked me right away. But I didn’t change anything, I still went out. It is easy to suppose that Elliott knew he would expose himself to parental anger by going home during ‘rush hour’. The ingeniousness which he had deployed in the past to hide this or that behaviour from his family’s eyes suggests he was looking to ‘be caught’, therefore presenting himself as a rioter in front of his father and older brother. His opposition to what they represent for him at this moment (‘dogs on the State’s leash’) is a form of self-affirmation against previous generations’ acceptances (humiliating jobs, racist comments, etc.). Many young men went out explicitly flouting parental bans. This expresses a demand for visibility and recognition, which is at once a form of rupture and of continuity. Importantly, this needs to be read against the tautological and unevidenced political readings of urban riots as provoked by a ‘culture of poverty’, a contradictory explanatory framework that either presents parents as ‘absent’ and lacking control over their children or ‘too present’ and raising their children in a ‘feckless’ culture of defiance. Burning cars and throwing stones is a way to stand out and to fit in by catching public attention. This desire to be seen and recognized was further exacerbated by the sudden realization of the extraordinary potential that rioters had to momentarily define the media agenda. Competition and rivalry to burn the maximum number of cars does not explain all. If the riots spread swiftly to the whole territory, it was also because in rapidly making the headlines, rioters experimented with this new visibility as a feeling of social dignity, agency and influence on the course of events. This had been until then unthinkable for youths who had not lived in the 1980s nor experienced what the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism represented at the time.7 In fact, what changed in 2005 was the noise! We told each other, at a certain point, that maybe it would move some things. And worse come to worst, if nothing changed, at least we would make some noise! At the time, we were angry, we liked to do bullshit (conneries), of course, but we didn’t imagine at all that it would make all that noise! I didn’t know at all that it was going to come out in the newspapers, I didn’t know it would make all that noise! And then, it changed everything for us, because before, for example, a guy who did a hold-up, got caught and ended up in the news, we would say he was an idiot! And there they were talking about us, everywhere, all the time at 8 pm! Before the news would say ‘there is a big black guy who did a hold-up! 10 The Sociological Review While there is was just as if we has gotten together to make some noise. It wasn’t embarrassing (c’est plus la honte), it was a form of pride! The visibility and sonority of the 2005 urban riots clearly opposed the imperatives of secrecy and discretion behind most practices of delinquency; instead, it outlines a collective image that aimed to leave public traces of its passing and no longer tried to stay hidden. Riots therefore materialize a capacity for action, a power of influence and the ability to captivate an audience. The importance of this unexpected discovery of a form of ‘visibility capital in the mediatic regime’ (Heinich, 2012) where celebrity and popularity have become one of the most significant forms of access to recognition and social prestige should not be underestimated. The paradox and the limited symbolic value that this capital possesses for the rioters, as what makes the power of the ‘star’ lies first and foremost in the continual reproduction of an individual and singular face (Castles, 2007). While the riots’ visibility was experienced at the time as a political promise (‘make things move’), the media produced a very different image of the event. In 2005, there was no ‘stardom’, individuation or personalization of the images of the riot, and therefore no gain associated with the singularity and excellence produced by visibility, which the media can exploit through storytelling. The rioters were masked and hooded, acted at night and didn’t have a charismatic spokesperson. This led to a uniform representation of the riots which produced, like 9/11, a paradoxical form of ‘diplopia’: the impression of seeing double after having witnessed so many times the same images of a complex event, in a double effect of ‘looping’ and ‘déjà vu’ (Chéroux, 2009). These effects doubtless reinforced the rhetoric of status quo aimed to strengthen powers and positions in place. Though this demand for visibility constitutes a political act because it raises issues of representation and exhibition, its symbolic potential is clearly limited. Without an audible message and an identifiable spokesperson, urban riots tend to be dismissed as ‘non political’ events. Ten years later, Elliott recalls the souvenir of a rendezvous manqué. I have a lot less hate in me (la haine) today. Lately I found some rap lyrics that I wrote in class, they were worth nothing (à la noix). At the time, I was full of hatred, I really had a problem with the system. And when I re-read myself now, I think: ‘How did something like that come out of my head?’ At the time I was very revolutionary. When I spoke about anarchy, I was really convinced about it. There was no possible integration. ‘Don’t give a damn about anything, let’s fuck it all up and that’s it’ (on baise tout et on s’arrête là). One doesn’t obey anything (at that age). My answer to everything was “I don’t give a fuck!” (je m’en bats les couilles). All the criteria that they give us, we reject them. Like degrees. We don’t need them. Those are their criteria and not ours. Diplomas for me were like the pâté you give a dog, and I didn’t want to be a dog. Screw it all. The cause is a real one – we really did have a hard time growing up – but it’s not a good solution because concretely it brings you to prison or death. At the time, I had a real revolt (in me). I had a real spirit. At the time, I adored Che Guevara, Fidel Castro. The comparison between Elliott’s vision of the world in 2005 and that which he forged for himself ten years later is illuminating. The alternation between two forms of pronounced critical nihilism says a lot about the frictions between his personal trajectory Truong 11 and the situation of a deplored ‘general rottenness’. To the ‘real spirit’ of 2005, generally disconnected from the constraints of an adult life’s imperatives, Elliott opposes a bitter form of realpolitik and scepticism about the political consequences of the riots: he considers that Nicolas Sarkozy managed his political ‘stint’ (‘He let us burn cars in order to pose as the defender of security, and we got screwed. He won the elections, he started the thing and managed to play the hero, and it just got worse and worse’). It also probably helps him to rationalize his ascending professional trajectory, the source of some personal dilemmas. As an executive who manages the payrolls and contracts of cleaning personnel who could be ‘his buddies’ parents’, he admits that he has to carry out the ‘dirty job’ of ‘ripping people off with their lay-off compensation’ because they can ‘barely read’ and do not know their rights. He hesitates between two attitudes: that of the pariah who integrated the system to better overturn it and that of the egotistical social climber who has forgotten where he comes from. At the time it was really to be heard, it was to say that at our estate, it’s shit, so to say. That in our estate, 80% of people live under the threshold of poverty. Today, I articulate it better. I wasn’t as established as I am today. With the mind-set I have today, I wouldn’t go burn cars. I probably wouldn’t care (limite j’en aurais rien à foutre). That’s what I find sad. I am becoming more and more xenophobic, I don’t give a shit about human beings. One only thinks about one’s own hide (on ne pense qu’à sa poire). At the time, the Zyeds and the Bounas, that really touched me. If we want to topple the system, one has to get into it, that’s what Malcolm X said. Malcolm X, he learned the American dictionary by heart in order to know his adversary. I get lost in the system, I realize that I have no possibility to blow it up. Actually, if one wants to be profitable, one has to play on certain things. Knowing that in order to make a gross margin, it’s simple because what we sell is people … It’s the workers, that’s where one has to save up! And more I get in to the system, more I get lost! At times, I ask myself who I really am: am I still a guy from the cité? Am I still a Muslim? Do I still own my own person? Or am I simply a professional?’ Ten years later, while it was necessary to end the ‘hate’, what remains is to cultivate his faith in Malcolm X, or to accept being a ‘professional’ – a term which, in his situation, refers to a triple rift: that separating his adolescent past from his present as a young adult, that between the relative comfort of his personal material situation and the deep precariousness of a social situation which is still ‘explosive’ and that between his past belief in altruist and transcendental values and his current dissatisfaction with his own pursuit of material happiness. Conclusion This paper has argued for a paired understanding of riots as a set of physical incarnated (re)actions and as ‘total social fact’ (Mauss, 1978 [1950]; see also Wendling, 2010), switching from ‘urban riots’ as a descriptive notion to the total rioting as an analytical tool. Drawing inspiration from Mauss, rioting combines four distinct properties of totality: multidimension, concentration, alteration and indexicality. It is multidimensional in that rioting consists of a succession of social upheavals mobilizing at once several social institutions, writ through the metaphysical, sociological, 12 The Sociological Review poetical and political. Exploring empirically how these dimensions are intertwined allows us to consider the relevance of social interstices rather than drawing on pre-established hierarchies or ex post speculations. Its concentration as a morphological form assembles people of a particular kind on the whole and forever, hence testing and making social solidarity. Its potential for alteration lies in a Durkheimian ‘creative effervescence’; simply put, rioting transforms society – rioters through shared interactions and practises and non-rioters through their perception of a highly visible phenomenon. Additionally, it has long-term outcomes dependent on how people have been affected and involved underlining how ‘historical’ events are localized, born by individuals and thus indexical. Total rioting can therefore be considered as a methodological tool that shifts focus from ‘riots’ as a thing, descriptive talks about ‘integration’ or ‘exclusion’ as an analysis, and ‘politics’ as an all-encompassing discursive order. By enlarging the empirical scope of what rioters actually somatize, experience, rationalize and exchange altogether, total rioting calls for urgent attention to the intimate connections in between public discontent and the world it criticizes. Riots cannot be understood without consideration of the ways in which rioters are imbricated in society as a whole. Rioting is a paroxystic attempt to make and unmake society at the same time and has become the pinnacle of the political socialization process for many young men in the banlieues. Metaphysical insecurity meets social effervescence and collective poetics, all of which being finally political. It is political as it stems from anger against an abstract citizenship and a global sense of injustice (Mauger, 2006; Lapeyronnie, 2009; Sutterlüty, 2014), but also as a brief experience of agency, empowerment and transcendence. In these respects, explanatory frames that focuses on a hedonist or nihilist culture to explain rioting fail to understand that pleasure and deprivation are two faces of the same socio-symbolic coin, tossed for a renewed politics of recognition. But as a non-verbalized political experience, a visceral reaction and a faceless phenomenon, rioting is less a language for a broader political communication than an insider trading activity. It thus mirrors from bottom-up the quasi-complete closure of the political field – at a time when la politique has become a self-centred, socially and racially homogeneous field bereft of imagination, met by the disappearance of le politique. This leads to questions of how such a disappearance interplays with struggles for value, how might be understood the politics of recognition and claims for visibility if those being recognized and made visible are coded without autonomous value – or at least perceived as such (Skeggs, 2011). This is precisely the situation Elliott experiences as a ‘simple professional’. Despite his achievements according to the neoliberal scale of ‘success’, he does not feel better about himself: betrayal and dispossession seem to dominate – as if there were still ‘better things to do with his time and energy’ (Skeggs, 2011: 508). In this political quest within everyday practices, Skeggs stresses three possible empowering ‘temporal configurations of value’: extracting from, accruing to and relationality. In the course of my latest observations, I shall add a fourth configuration – conversion to – a central configuration in the current appeal for Islam for marginalized youth. Values here are perceived to derive from a chosen, external, consistent, and sacred entity governing in return everyday practices for ‘the better’ through daily practical challenges (Truong, 2018, forthcoming). Such a shift towards intimate policies as social redemption and personal choices as a sense of belonging do Truong 13 not fall from the sky. It clearly addresses unanswered questions deriving from total rioting’s long lasting outcomes. Acknowledgements This article is an extended and revised version of a previous paper published in Agora/ Débatjeunesse (n°70, 2015) edited by Les Presses de Sciences Po originally translated by Kyria Grieco with the help of a doctoral grant from the EHESS. It has also benefitted from the critical inputs of the two anonymous reviewers and the deputy editor. Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. The 2001 riots in Bradford are a noticeable counter-example. Although notable that the stabbing of an Asian man did not coincide with the confrontation of local youth with the police, the subsequent riots directly targeted the police. It is easier to retrace the mechanics of riots a posteriori, while their occurrence remains largely unpredictable. Research rarely focuses on the local factors of political socialization which impede many situations from ‘degenerating’, and fieldwork is rarely conducted before, during and after riots. For further clarifications, see Mohammed (2009). I have elsewhere provided a more detailed account of Elliot’s personal trajectory (Truong, 2013), which will allow the reader to complete this summary with additional biographical elements. The contrat de première embauche (CPE) was a law proposal enabling employers to extend the trial period for first time employees. The French government was obliged to withdraw this project following an important wave of national demonstrations. According to Elliott, he was the only one who wanted to ‘burn the police station’. This earned him a ‘crazy reputation’, even though he admits to me ‘that it was impossible’ and ‘only talk’ because there were ‘too many Robocops’ to protect the precinct. As Whyte shows, not all ‘street guys’ are up to their obligations, and this in part explains their different status (1943). These ‘obligations’ are most often revealed in exceptional situations or in relation to economic difficulty. Upheavals position individuals within the social structure of the peer group. The fact that Elliott regularly ‘helps out’ his friends who ‘went through’ prison is not a coincidence: it illustrates the central position he used to have within his group of friends and his current ‘privileged’ economic situation. In France, terminology has been vividly discussed amongst scholars and militants. The term ‘riot’ is often seen as unpolitical and delegitimising as opposed to ‘urban revolt’ (révolte urbaine) – see Mouvements, 2015. What is at stake is the categorization process applied to qualify sudden outbursts of collective violence in relation to deeper processes of stigmatisation and subjectification. For the 2011 London riots, see David Cameron’s speech on 15 August asserting that riots were ‘not about government’s cuts, poverty or race’ but about ‘behaviour’ and Tyler (2013), for a counter-account of ‘revolting subjects’. The March for Equality and Against Racism (Marche pour l’égalité et contre le racisme) took place in 1983. Starting in Marseille, a few inhabitants of deprived neighbourhoods started a nonviolent march to protest against racist crimes, police harassment and living conditions in the banlieues. After 50 days, the march ended in Paris with a demonstration attended by 100,000 people and displayed new emerging figures of political militancy, speaking from and for the banlieues. 14 The Sociological Review References Back, L. (2013). The art of listening (2nd ed.). London: Bloomsbury. Beaud, S., & Pialoux, M. (2003). Violences urbaines, violences sociales. Genèse des nouvelles classes dangereuses. Paris: Fayard. Bloom, C. (2012). 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