15 June 2009: "Are Sneaker Freaks giving Los Angeles/African-Americans a bad reputation?"

This post is about Elias Canetti. Carles presents a photoessay of sorts to investigate crowds and power, and the hypothesis that spontaneous acts of underclass rebellion have been coopted by the consumerism that should constitute their proper target. (The pun with the big-box retailer here is partially intentional, though Carles doesn't explicitly explore the class origins and demographics of the retailers besieged by rioters.) In his customary elliptical, circular, non-phallologocentric fashion, Carles ends his discourse with his starting point: "Worried about the world. Worried about ‘consumerism’ being evil."

But his main concern is whether it is possible to conceive of an "authentic" riot within our society of simulacrums, or whether dissent is always already doomed to come across as contrived, as an excuse to act in accordance with capitalism's possessive individualism. At first, Carles allows only one motive for rioting:

Last night, the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA championship, and people in Los Angeles decided 2 use it as an excuse to ‘riot.’ However, it doesn’t seem like it is an authentic riot–like one out of rage. I think the bros who were ‘rioting’ seem to have just used it as an excuse to ‘fuck shit up’ and possibly ‘break into some specialized boutique stores in a gentrified part of town.’

But here, unfortunately, Carles's nomenclature is inadequately defined and somewhat obscure. It is not clear how "rage" is to be distinguished from "fucking shit up" or why vandalism and property destruction carried out along class lines is not an admissible expression of economic discontent. Surely Carles hasn't been taken in by the red herring of the professional basketball championship, which functions in this social equation as operator that joins together the volatile yet necessary riot ingredients of widespread media attention and spontaneous coordination of the otherwise disenfranchised. The Lakers victory signals not only that the basketball-watching world's attention is fixed on Southern California, but also that those who identify with the city and its manifold ills will be in the streets, ready for action. Sports is always an effort to quell or rechannel civic unrest, but ironically, winning championships undermines its function of siphoning off disgruntled energy and for that particular instance, instead channels it. Carles notes: "Wonder if riot pix are the new partie pix [via Iran]." Spectator-sport celebrations and elections are structurally homologous, but the tensions they engender boil into protest for inverse reasons -- whether the outcome is or is no longer in doubt.

Carles suspects the rioting is a matter of the transvaluation of values, a reaction to marketing or inadequate education, which might establish a basis for resistance to marketing materials: "I can’t help but think that these were ‘acts of greed’/'dumb ppl who value ‘kewl shit’ too much.’
Not sure who to ‘blame.’ Maybe the NBA for creating so many brands that people want to identify with. Maybe a racial group of people. Maybe ‘the media’. Maybe ‘the Los Angeles Public Education System.’ Possibly Nike / Phil Knight."
But of course, the real scandal, the real outrage, is not the rioting itself but the absence of rioting under "ordinary" circumstances, such that when dissent is expressed it can be easily be characterized as aberrant and motivated by trivial selfishness and maladapted civic pride. One day, a real rain will come and wash the streets of Los Angeles, and it won't be a matter of bouncing balls, zone defenses, and so called "dunk shots."