The English Riots the Hamletmachine

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Once the plague is established in a city, normal social order collapses. There is no more refuse collection, no more army, police or municipality. Pyres are lit to burn the dead whenever men are available. Each family wants its own. Then wood, space and fre grow scarce, families fght around the pyres, soon to be followed by general fight since there are too many corpses. The streets are already choked with crumbling pyramids of the dead, the vermin gnawing at the edges. The stench rises in the air like tongues of fame. Whole streets are blocked by mounds of dead. Then the houses are thrown open and raving plague victims disperse through the streets howling, their minds full of horrible visions. The disease gnawing at their vitals, running through their whole anatomy, is discharged in mental outbursts. Other plague victims, lacking buboes or delirium, pain or rashes, examine themselves proudly in the mirror, feeling in splendid health, only to fall dead with their shaving dishes in their hands, full of scorn for other victims.

Over the thick, bloody, noxious streaming gutters, the colour of anguish and opium, spurting from the corpses, strange men clothed in wax, with noses an ell long and glass eyes, mounted on kinds of Japanese sandals made up of a double arrangement of wooden slabs, a horizontal one in the form of a sole, with the uprights isolating them from the infected liquids, pass by chanting absurd litanies, though their sanctity does not prevent them falling into the holocaust in turn.

These ignorant doctors only show their fear and childishness.

The scum of the populace, immunized so it seems by their frantic greed, enter the open houses and help themselves to riches they know will serve no purpose or proft. At this point, theatre establishes itself. Theatre, that is to say, the sense of gratuitous urgency with which they are driven to perform useless acts of no present advantage.

The Theatre and its Double, Antonin Artaud (1938)

I think the rioting that cascaded over the next few days, starting with the riot in Wood Green, there was that kind of hyper-materialism, that kind of me-tooism. Remember this is twenty-four hour news, you saw those pictures over and over again. People looting in Wood Green. People trying on shoes, people queuing up. You think yeah why not? But also, there was a mix of people because remember as the looting cascaded on over days, by the time it reached Salford the looters were all white. Diane Abbot, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington quoted in The Riots: from Spoken Evidence, Gillian Slovo (2011)

Greek tragedy in the oldest form dealt only with the suferings of Dionysus […] all the celebrated characters of the Greek stage – Prometheus, Oedipus and so on – are merely masks of that original hero […] this hero is the sufering of individuation […] This suggests that dismemberment, the true Dionysian sufering, amounts to a transformation into air, water, earth and fre, and that we should therefore see the condition of individuation as the source and origin of all sufering and hence as something reprehensible. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, Friedrich Nietzsche (1872)

Vigilante: They’re trying to be us. Riley: They used to be us. They’re learning to be us again. Vigilante: It’s like they’re pretending to be alive. Riley: Ain’t that what we’re doing? Pretending to be alive? Land of the Dead, George A. Romero (2005) THE NERVEMETER

CONTENTS A HISTORY … The Birth of Tragedy Theatres of the Oppressed Crass

… OF THE PRESENT Throbbing Gristle Theatres of Mutilation The English Riots The Hamletmachine

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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

All time shall fall Even if God existed down from the stars, just as the blood we would have to suppress him. of a hundred slit throats shall pour on your grave! Grafﬁti of the Latin Quarter, Paris, 1968, Flowing as from pitchers smashed to the ground The Boy Scout’s Guide to the Situationist International: 1968, so it will ﬂow out of the murderer’s bound bodies, Tom Vague [VAGUE 49] (2008) and in the tumult of a swollen river the vitality of their lives will gush from them […] And we, we your blood, your son Orestes and your daughters we three, when this is done enthroned in purple from the steam of warm blood which the sun sucks up to itself, then we shall dance, your blood, in a ring around your grave: Passionately, with pathos And I shall step over the corpses one foot after another […] Elektra. Tragödie in einem Aufzug, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1979a)

The Greeks invented theatre as part of the government. Like the Judiciary and the legislature you have the theatre. The Greeks made this giant ear in the side of the mountain and called it a theatre and they put a seat for every single citizen who could vote. Now that means only men because democracy was a wonderful thing unless you were a woman or a slave. And so meanwhile every one of the Greek plays is about women or slaves; the people who were not allowed to vote. And so it was a place where the people you never hear from in the senate ﬁnally can speak. And it was this idea that you can’t be a citizen until you hear these people speak also. And your voting will be informed not only by the senate but by the theatre, where the microphone is given to woman, to slaves, to foreigners and to children. Voetzorker [Squib] programme on the Belgian television Personally, I would liken the role of the Angry channel Canvas, reprinted in Performance and the Politics of Brigade to the Chorus in Greek drama. The Chorus Space: Theatre and Topolgy, Erika Fischer-Lichte & Benjamin played the part of an ideal public committed to Wihstutz (2013) the interests of the body politic. The Chorus was an essential part of the drama: they watched events unfold, interfered at critical points in the The further out one moves, the simpler becomes action, sometimes to warn, sometimes to exhort one’s understanding of what theatre is. I now would and, occasionally, to intervene with an appropriate accept only that theatre is a situation in which dramatic gesture or action. people gather to articulate something of common Stuart Christie quoted in, The Angry Brigade, concern. A History of Britain’s First Urban Guerrilla Group, ‘X-ings’, Ken Dewey (1965) Gordon Carr (2010) THEATRES OF THE OPPRESSED

Both in his work and in his life, Artaud failed … what he bequeathed was not achieved works of art but a singular presence, a poetics. An aesthetics of thought, a theology of culture, and a phenomenology of suffering […] Upon that art, theatre, he has had an impact so profound that the course of all recent serious theatre in Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods – before Artaud and after Artaud. Susan Sontag’s introduction to, Antonin Artaud. Selected Writings (1988)

Instead of continuing to rely upon texts considered deﬁnitive and sacred, it is essential to put an end to the subjugation of the theatre to the text, and to recover the notion of a kind of unique language half-way between gesture and thought. The Theatre of Cruelty (First Manifesto) Antonin Artaud (1958

I salute Antonin Artaud for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive. ‘A Tribute to Antonin Artaud’, Andre Breton (1995)

At that time I was concerned with theatre as theatre, and about its relationship to social human beings. Now, I am more concerned with human beings as theatre. Theatre of the Oppressed (preface to 2008 edition), Augusto Boal

I, Augusto Boal, want the spectator to take on the role of Actor and invade the Character and the stage. I want him to occupy his own space and offer solutions. By taking possession of the stage, the Spect-Actor is consciously performing a responsible act. The stage is a representation of the reality, a fiction. But the Spect-Actor is not fictional. He exists in the scene and outside of it, in a dual reality. By taking possession of the stage in the fiction of the theatre he acts: not just in the fiction, but also in his social reality. By transforming fiction, he is transforming into himself. This invasion is a symbolic trespass. It symbolises all the acts of trespass we have to commit in order to free ourselves from what oppresses us. If we do not go beyond our cultural norms, our state of oppression, the limits imposed upon us, even the law itself (which should be transformed) – if we do not trespass in this we can never be free. To free ourselves is to trespass, and to transform. It is through a creation of the new that that which has not yet existed begins to exist. To free yourself is to trespass. To trespass is to exist. To free ourselves is to exist. To free yourself is to exist. Theatre of the Oppressed (preface to the 2000 edition) Augusto Boal

The slum kept his apocalyptic vision honed, and somehow the concentration and intensity of the unfulﬁlled needs of its inhabitants, and their visibility, translated for him into the need for his work that his ethics made a requirement for doing it. The Bread and Puppet Theatre, Volume 1, Stephan Brecht (1988)

It seemed to me that suddenly there were people there – on the Lower East Side – really, speciﬁcally where we lived – for whom it would make sense to produce art. In Germany I felt that to produce art is total surplus and nonsense, and with too many books and too many galleries and too many everything – and so, why do it? And on the Lower East Side it felt if one could produce a piece of art in the street there, and people would take it, then, at least, one would do that – you know – that ﬁrst requirement that there’s a clientele for what you do. Peter Schumann interview (1982) in The Bread and Puppet Theatre, Volume 1, Stephan Brecht (1988)

In the healthiest moments of history it looks as if art is an almost natural by-product of human behaviour, an almost useful thing. In the sick periods of history art is self-sufficient, has loose and superfluous connections to society, is scientific and extremely conscious of its self-imposed limitations. The Bread and Puppet Theatre, Volume 1, Stephan Brecht (1988)

It was no longer a theatre in the formal sense; it was a tribe, a commune. The new performers on stage … were not primarily artists sharing in a collective effort, but members of a family cultivating alternative modes of living. And … why not? The violent, polarized society we lived in then demanded new strategies. The Return of the Living Theatre: Paradise Lost, Gerald Rabkin, Performing Arts Journal, vol 8 (1984)

During ‘The Plague’ scene in Mysteries, Luke Theodore had rubbed the raw yolk that had been thrown at him deﬁantly over his genitals. The young girl, seated near the edge of the stage, interpreted this as masturbation; enraged, she slapped the actor ﬁve times. The Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Outrage, John Tytell (1995)

Resuming their tour in a caravan of Volkswagen buses, the company performed Paradise Now in a theatre in Mulhouse surrounded by CRS, the French Security Troops, in black uniforms. During the ‘Apokatastasis’ scene, Judith was thrown to the ground by a maniacal man screaming German poetry, and Jenny Hecht was ﬂung off the stage. After the performance, everyone had to exit through windows because the CRS had blocked the exits. Some of the spectators left the theatre to chant ‘Desertez! Desertez!’ in front of an infantry barracks. The Living Theatre: Art, Exile and Outrage, John Tytell (1995)

It is important to remind oneself of the relationship between the eye of the media and that of the corporate police state – they are both the guardian of the commodity, however nebulous and ephemeral that commodity may become. As a tactic designed to point out the paradox of a system that turns the lens on a public that has been taught to place more importance on images recorded by cameras than images seen by their own eyes, we propose Guerrilla Programming of Video Surveillance Equipment. Guerrilla Programming of Video Surveillance Equipment, Carter, M. (1995)

The ﬁrst produced by the group was Alfred Jarry’s Ubo Roi (1996). Characteristically, the piece was performed in front of surveillance cameras to a crowd of passers-by. Other works enacted by the group during the 1996-7 season included Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and a special adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. All performances were open to the public, who could either see the actual play or watch the group’s video monitors displaying the work in its progress. Members of the group, watching the performances on the monitors as well as performing as actors, were also videotaped, alongside the audience, for the purposes of documentation. Thus in Headline News (1999), a double bill, following a piece by the Living Theatre, they held up a series of placards, including one with a huge CBS logo captioned ‘WE WATCH YOU WATCH’ while other group members distributed hand-drawn maps marked with camera locations and explained to the crowd that they, too, were being monitored. Surveillance Camera Players (1999) reprinted in The Politics of New Media Theatre, Gabriella Giannachi (2007)

9. CRASS

So don’t fool yourself you’re helping with your white liberal shit. White Punks On Hope, Stations of the Crass, Crass (1979)

To a bored teenager, ‘Feeding Of The Five Thousand’ was different and unprecedented in so many ways. Perhaps older generations would have noticed how much was borrowed from the hippie counter-culture or the great art movements of the past. But either way Crass had produced a record – or more accurately a package – that screamed blue murder in your face: screamed its integrity, screamed its love and screamed a scream that deﬁed you to stand up and be counted. It was a record that dared to suggest punk was (or at least could be) part of something bigger and more important than a ﬁve minute fart in the face of authority. The Story of Crass, George Berger (2006)

Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine. Oath, Pattie Smith (1972)

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, fairs, free festivals and gatherings began to proliferate throughout southern and eastern England, some peaceful, some confrontational, some hippy, some punk; some legal, some illegal. For many organisers, the inspiration was as much California as ‘merry old England’, extending and adapting Monterey, Altamont or New York’s Woodstock cultures. The use of ‘Albion’ illustrated a desire for truly alternative society, even alternative history, a dub version of Britain. Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties, George McKay (1996) The formed little groups, like rich mans ghettoes, Tending their goats and organic tomatoes. While the world was fucked by fascist regimes, I’ve never really enjoyed festivals – I They talked of windmills and psychedelic dreams. thought there was rather a hierarchy of The Last Of The Hippies, A Series of Shock Slogans wealthy hippie tipi people – they were and Mindless Token Tantrums, Crass (1982) very beautiful. I remember beautiful, attractive bare-breasted woman with things in their hair and men doing the All day the police struggled to control a new whole native American thing. I found it concept that had taken them by surprise. Normal quite cliquey. Then there were all the … demonstrations had leaders, stewards, organisation other people! I never particularly liked and an overload of Socialist Workers Party placards. the music. The generator never seemed Stop The City had kids in colourful rags forever to have arrived. And it was quite cold breaking off from the main group on their own and uncomfortable. initiative to effect their own actions: graffiti, street Eve Libertine quoted in, theatre, noise, free food, banks locks glued, patriot The Story of Crass, George Berger (2006) flags burned, leafleting, anti-apartheid actions against Barclays Bank, many arrests. And ultimately success, if only partial, as concluded by The Times: ‘The banking community struggled to keep money flows despite the unrest. They succeeded, but only Just!” Dave Morris of London Greenpeace quoted in, The Story of Crass, George Berger (2006) And God so loved the world that he gave his only begotton son, Charles Mason. ‘Piggy’ written in blood on the polished surfaces of social acceptance. No more shall ye walk alone. The Last Of The Hippies, A Series of Shock Slogans and Mindless Token Tantrums, Crass (1982)

‘We are a generation of obscenities. The most oppressed people in this country are not the blacks, not the poor, but the middle class. They don’t have anything to rise up against and fight against. We will have to invent new laws to break … the first part of the yippy program is to kill your parents … until you’re prepared to kill your parents you’re not ready to change this country. Our parents are out first oppressors.’ Jerry Rubin, leader of the Yippies (militant hippies) speaking at Kent State University, USA. Within a month of Rubin’s speech, the university was in uproar. The mostly white middle class students, to show their objection to the way in which both their campus and their country were being run, had staged innumerable demonstrations and burnt down part of the university. The authorities called in the army to ‘restore peace’, which did in true military fashion – by shooting dead four students … The system had got in first. What Rubin hadn’t accounted for, although past history should have been a lesson to him, was that parents would be prepared to kill their children rather than accept change. The Last Of The Hippies, Crass (1982)

Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great love. Che Guevara

THROBBING GRISTLE

The trouble with England is: it is run by old women of both sexes. The Revised Boy Scout Manual, William S. Burroughs, RE/SEARCH #4/5

People are trained to be comfortable because comfortable people are easier to control. Nobody who wants to run a country wants a lot of people who are individuals thinking for themselves, because they’re going to cause trouble at some point. So it’s as obvious as that. And that’s probably why occasionally we get problems with authority or organisations, because we don’t make anybody feel comfortable. Genesis P-Orridge, Throbbing Gristle interview, KPFA (25/5/81 – 11pm)

The exhibition Prostitution took place at the ICA, between 19-26 October 1976. Although it ran for only eight days and ﬁlled just the main gallery, the coverage it received in the national press was out of all proportion to its modest size. It was the subject of at least 100 newspaper articles, questions were asked in Parliament, and ‘Genesis P-Orridge’ and ‘Cosey Fanni Tutti’ became household names. Prostitution caused a scandal chieﬂy because it featured used tampons and contained pages from pornographic magazines featuring Tutti in her role as photographic model. The exhibition brought under the spotlight the increasingly antagonistic relationship between the experimental arts and their chief source of funding, the Arts Council, and also provided evidence of the lack of understanding between contemporary artists and the general public, or at least the self-selected representatives of that public – the newspapers. Wreckers of Civilisation, The Story of Coum Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle, Simon Ford (1999)

One observes oneself and thee world & analyses how people who maximise their effectiveness seem to achieve it & then you apply these observations to oneself, adding personal variation & presto. Triumph of thee will. That’s what they meant. And that’s what Love Under Will means. Love is crucial. Uncorrupt, Unselﬁsh love is thee focusing agent. Excerpt from a letter from Genesis P-Orridge, T.G.H.Q.G.B. (July 9th 1981)

THEATRES OF MUTILATION

In the famous Kerch terracotta collection we find figurines of senile pregnant hags. Moreover, the old hags are laughing. This is a typical and strongly expressed grotesque. It is ambivalent. It is pregnant death, a death that gives birth. There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the fresh new life, conceived but as yet unformed. Life is shown in its two-fold contradictory process; it is the epitome of incompleteness. And such is precisely the grotesque concept of the body. Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Baktin (1968)

Fresh eggs were thrown into the audience. The boss smeared tomato puree on his face and has a mannequin dismantled, which was suspended head ﬁrst. Following the recitation of senseless sentences and scraps of words, there was a ﬁve minute reading of postcodes and corresponding city name, until the visitors – including sundry notables – revolted. Happenings: Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Realism, Jurgen Becker and Wold Vostell (eds.) (1962)

Hence the world we see is not the real world but the world we are conditioned to see: the Society of the Spectacle. Debord saw the end result as alienation, but didn’t necessarily see this as a bad thing as he felt this would eventually break the stranglehold of spectacular society. People were already rebelling against mass commodity culture; thousands of affluent Americans had dropped out in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, while in the Watts suburb of Los Angeles less affluent black people set fire to shopping centres. The Boy Scout’s Guide to the Situationist International: Paris and London 1968, Tom Vague [VAGUE 49] (2008)

Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, ﬁrst performed at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto on 20 July 1964, ushers in practice of self-mutilation in body art. Though Ono never experienced any real cuts to her ﬂesh, the performance demonstrates the use of the body as a site of giving/exchange and violence/ destruction, which links it with the logic of ritual offerings […] Ono left open the possibility for viewers to cut her body. And even though no one took the opportunity, some came quite close, according to her own later comments on the event: ‘One person came on the stage … he took the pair of scissors and made a motion to stab me. He raised his hand, with the scissors in it, and I thought he was going to stab me. But the hand was totally still. He was standing still with the scissors … threatening me.’ ‘Performing the other: Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece’, Jieun Rhee, Art History, 28 (2005)

The walls of the main room were covered in white hessian splashed with paint, blood and bloody water. On a meat hook, on the end of a rope suspended from the ceiling, hangs a slaughtered, bloody, skinned lamb (head down). A white cloth is spread out on the gallery floor beneath the lamb, and on it lie the blood-soaked intestines. The lamb is swung across the room. The walls, the floor and the spectators are splashed with blood. Blood is poured out in buckets over the intestines and the floor of the gallery. The actor tosses raw eggs against the walls and onto the floor and chews a tea-rose. The bloody lambskin hangs on the blood splattered hessian wall. More blood is splashed over it. Das Orgien Mysterien Theatre, Aktionen 1960-1979, Nitsch, H. (1979) In her performance of Lips of St.Thomas, performed in the Krinzinger gallery in Innsbruck, Austria, on 24 October 1975, Marina Abramovic maltreated her own body for two hours in various ways. She undressed before the performance began so that everything she did was performed naked. At the beginning of the performance she went to the back wall where she fastened a photograph of herself and framed it by drawing a five-pointed star around it. Then she went to a table, placed at the right side somewhat before the wall. The table was covered with a white cloth and set with a bottle of red wine, a glass of honey, a crystal glass, a silver spoon and a whip. Abramovic sat down and began slowly to eat through one kilo of honey with the silver spoon. She poured red wine into the crystal glass and drank it. After swallowing the wine, she broke the crystal glass in her right hand. Blood poured out. Abramovic stood up and went to the back wall where her picture was fastened. Standing before the photograph and facing the audience, she took a razor blade and cut a five-pointed star into the skin of her belly. Then she seized the whip, knelt down under the picture with her back to the audience and started to flog herself violently on the back. Bloody welts appeared. After this, she lay down with outstretched arms on ice cubes laid out in the shape of a cross. She held out for thirty minutes without being ready to end the torture […] Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritaul: Exploring forms of political theatre, Erika Fischer-Lichte (2005)

In this action, he cut himself through his shirt and skin with a razor blade and urinated in a bucket … he was now clearly pre-occupied with liberating the body completely from the physical and sexual taboo surrounding it. He seemed to have entirely left painting behind and was interested in the body and its functions. At the same time as he cut his body, he also let its secretions ﬂow during actions. It seemed rather easy to urinate, but he also succeeded in masturbating and emptying himself on stage, which can be seen as the last excess. ‘Cut Pieces: Self-Mutilation in Body Art’, Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen, in Sex, Violence and the Body: The Erotics of Wounding, Viv Burr (ed.) (2008)

[Valie] Export performed the action Eros/ion on several occasions during 1971. With different stagings she rolled her naked body in hundreds of broken glass pieces. The damage to her skin was not severe; the audience did not know, though, and she was met with shouting, as they wanted her to stop. From Export’s position the performance was meant as a symbol against the general violence to the female body. ‘Cut Pieces: Self-Mutilation in Body Art’, Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen, in Sex, Violence and the Body: The Erotics of Wounding, Viv Burr (ed.) (2008)

THE ENGLISH RIOTS

You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body – otherwise you’re just depraved. You will be signiﬁer and signiﬁed, interpreter and interpreted – otherwise you’re just deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one … otherwise you’re just a tramp. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1988)

Throughout the Summit, masked and potentially recalcitrant protestors were greeted by ofﬁcers promising to accommodate their goals and facilitate their activities, but this facilitation had clear parameters. Protestors could only proceed if they removed their masks, relinquished potentially dangerous ﬂagpoles, and disclosed exactly where they wanted to go. ‘We will facilitate your protest’: Experiments with Liaison Policing, Hugo Gorringe and Michael Rosie, in Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, vol 7, no 2 (2013)

Crowded together, its members are astonished at themselves. They are accustomed at other times to seeing each other running hither and thither in confusion, bustling about without order or discipline. Now this many-headed, many-minded, ﬁckle, blundering monster suddenly sees itself united as one noble assembly, welded into one mass. A single body animated by a single spirit. Die Natur, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1782)

First, as with other types of urban crime, there was a temporal rhythm to the riots, with most occurring later in the day … Second, rather than occurring randomly, the ﬁgure suggests that events tended to cluster in some (but not many) of the LSOAs (UK Census Lower Super Output Area). For example, at 10pm on the 8th – the hour during which most offences occurred – it is evident that 336 incidents occurred in 69 LSOAs, indicating that many more than one incident occurred in in some LSOAs during this hour … We explored patterns in the destinations of rioters. This is, however, just one element of the geography of riots. By additionally considering the home locations of rioters (from where they likely travelled), it is possible to explore patterns in offenders’ journeys to crimes. In further analysis we ﬁnd that like most crime types, the journey to riot conforms to a pattern of distance decay, with most offenders travelling only short distances to engage in disorder. Spatial Patterns in the 2011 London Riots, Peter Baudains, Alex Braithwaite, Shane D. Johnson, Policing, vol 7, no1 (2013)

Transform’d to serpents all, as accessories To his bold riot. Paradise Lost, John Milton (1667) Indeed, for Conservative government minsters, the febrile tensions of that riotous August were exploited to re-launch their dwindling ‘broken Britain’ policy theme, to push forward with welfare ‘reform’ (ie further cuts) and identify 120,000 ‘problem families’ thought to be responsible for spawning disruptive individuals. This was part of the ‘social ﬁghtback’ against the feckless and undeserving who could now, post riots, be spatially (as well as behaviourally) isolated, measured and ‘treated’ through the tightening of welfare rights and interventions in subaltern individuals and families. ‘The English Riots of 2011: summoning community, depoliticising the city’, Andrew Wallace, City, vol 16 (2014)

Further, it was the notoriously promiscuous concept of ‘community’ which became central to problematising who and what the riots were harming (community shops, businesses, neighbours, neighbourhood reputations) and which helped formulate condemnations of the ‘rioters’ and celebrations of everyday residents. ‘The English Riots of 2011: summoning community, depoliticising the city’, Andrew Wallace, City, vol 16 (2014)

The riot became a popular work of art, a party to which the whole city was invited. These riots represent imagination and passion consciously to the construction of immediate experience. They were, inseparably, a form of self-realisation and an objective assault on contemporary life: a society that has suppressed all adventure has made the only adventure the suppression of that society. King Mob Echo: English Section of the Situationist International [VAGUE 31] (2000) Perhaps the key development, a moment of ‘recovery’ came with extensive coverage of the so-called riot ‘wombles’ who gathered in Clapham, Camden and other London neighbourhoods, to clean up and repair damaged shops and amenities in the days after the nights before. This was the moment that defence of place and of community was apparently most clearly enacted and reiterated within the city (albeit one displaying a largely white, middle-class, gentriﬁer’s sense of entitlement and ‘right’ to the city not mirrored in poorer neighbourhoods and predicated on a clear segregation of a ‘them’). ‘The English Riots of 2011: summoning community, depoliticising the city’, Andrew Wallace, City, vol 16 (2014)

I am a nigger shooting heroin at 15 and dead at 35 with ho’s head cheeses for arms and horse for blood. But I am more than the images you super-impose on me, the despair that you inﬂict. I am the persistent insistence of the human heart to be free. I wish to regain that cherished dignity that was always mine. My esthetic answer to your lies about me is a simple one; you can no longer defer my dream. I’m gonna sing it. Dance it. Scream it. And if need be, I’ll steal it from this very earth. King Mob Echo: English Section of the Situationist International [VAGUE 31] (2000)

Although it is a crowd as sheer mass, each face is individuated. The people are dressed as clowns, many are masked. The masks are carnival masks, which conceal as they reverse identities. In the traditional crowds at carnival or some more insurgent enterprise men disguised themselves, often as women, in the Boston Tea Party as Indians. At the same time, given the carnival, the masks may have the effect of containing the subversive energy, reducing these rioters, as threats to social order, to harmless memes. The Art of Riot in England and America, Ronald Paulson (2010)

When it comes to riots there is a recurrent pattern whereby politicians accept that past riots were about poverty and discrimination but then argue that the most recent riot is an exception (because they are potentially responsible). It happened in 1985 about the 1981 riots. It happened in 2011 about the 1985 riots […] After every riot there are claims that people are mindless and that they are just criminal and, as data emerge, it turns out that they are not. After every riot there are claims that poverty and cutbacks and grievances against authority are argued to be irrelevant and, as data emerge, it turns out that they are. Understanding the English Riots of 2011, Stephen Reicher, Psychology Review. Vol 18 (2013) THE HAMLETMACHINE

I feed my data into the computer. My roles are spit and spittoon knife and wound teeth and gum/neck and gallows. I am the data-bank. Bleeding in the crowd. Exhaling behind the double doors, wordslime bubbling in sound proof speech balloons over the battle. My drama has not taken place. The script was lost. The actors hung their faces on the nails of the garderobe. The stage prompter rots in his box. The over-stuffed plague-corpses in the audience don’t move a ﬁnger. I go home and kill time, at one/with my divided self. The Hamletmachine, Heiner Mueller (1979)

OPHELIA While two men in doctor’s smocks wrap her from top to bottom in white bandages. Here speaks Electra. In the Heart of Darkness. Under the Sun of Torture. To the Metropolises of the world. In the Names of the Victims. I expel all the semen which I have received. I transform the milk of my breasts into deadly poison. I suffocate the world which I gave birth to, between my thighs. I bury it into my crotch. Down with the joy of oppression. Long live hate, loathing, rebellion, death. When she walks through your bedroom with butcher’s knives, you’ll know the truth.

Exit men. Ophelia remains on the stage, motionless in the white packaging. The Hamletmachine, Heiner Mueller (1979)