c) Class and race
The third challenge posed to community cohesion is poverty. In this regard, the privileged targets for community cohesion programmes are a working class neighbourhoods – ‘Those with poorer life chances’, the document states, ‘tend… to feel the most negative about cohesion. . . [and] can blame immigration for their circumstances’. (SCJ: p. 90). The challenge, the document continues, is to make them feel positive about migration and about diversity.
This is where the white English working class poor are imagined as hopeless monoculturalists, racists and anti-social (Haylett 2001; Skeggs 2004). In some sections of government policy, designing out crime is about designing out working class youths. The Blair government’s Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 and Respect Agenda launched in 2006 are a case in point. Both aim at tackling anti-social behaviour, defined as including a range of behaviours from ‘nuisance neighbours’ [sic], to ‘yobbish behaviour’, ‘graffiti’, or ‘reckless driving of mini-motorbikes’ – behaviours that have been repeatedly associated with working class youths. On the anti-social behaviour page of the respect.gov.uk website, a photograph appears at the top.
It is of four youths wearing ‘hoodies’ (hooded sweatshirts), standing in front of a closed storefront and talking, two of them holding a canned drink, the nature of which is unclear. Two of them also have their arms stretched out and their hands touching, as if exchanging a small item – a joint? a coin? a cigarette? a piece of paper? Moving the cursor to the photo, a small window appears bearing the message: ‘asb [anti-social behaviour] hanging around’. Nothing in the photograph indicates that these youths are a nuisance. It is consistent, however, with the demonization of working class ‘chav’ youth as threat and as such, as the privileged target in community policing and technologies of corrective citizenship aimed at preserving good neighbourliness and social cohesion.
A final point about class → At the time of writing these lines, a series of documentaries and dramas are running on BBC Two television, about the British white working class. Entitled the ‘White Season’, the series’ subtitle is ‘Is white working class Britain becoming invisible’. In the lead up to the series, as well as running alongside it, debates and discussions on television and on BBC radio 4 have agonised about the appropriateness of the series, about the future of white Britain, or other related matters. The ‘season’ alone can be the subject of an separate article. Suffice it to say that alongside the denigration of white working class chavs, as mentioned earlier, what is emerging now is a desire to recover the dignity of ‘white working class Britain’, once conceived as the ‘backbone of the nation’, as the BBC Two website put it. Roly Keating, Controller of BBC Two explained that ‘The White season is a complex look at how life has changed for the white working class in Britain.’ And the BBC website states that ‘The white working class . . . now feel that their community is under threat and largely forgotten by the Government.’ It also states that ‘As political parties debate the way forward for immigration, debate rages in the media and the popularity of the far-right continues to rise in some sections of society, White explores the complex mix of feelings that lead some white working class people to feel under siege as if their very sense of self is being brought into question.’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2007/11_november/20/bbctwo.shtml [accessed 2 December 2007]
What strikes me as I listen to the debates, are the deep feelings of loss, melancholia, disaffection, betrayal expressed by some, several, callers and commentators.
NOT SURE WHERE I’M GOING WITH THIS – NEED TO CONNECT RACE&CLASS WITH COMMUNITY COHESION. THE PEDAGOGIC AIMS OF CC – TO EDUCATE THE POORER SECTIONS OF SOCIETY ABOUT THE GOODS OF IMMIGRATION AND DIVERSITY, FOR E.G.
In conclusion
Haunted by its potential failure to stabilize desirable forms of closeness, the governance of community cohesion seeks to build worlds, to create physical and emotional spaces by annexing and diverting unwanted kinds of relations, or by containing or subverting forms of attachments that exceed the organized and predictable forms that circulate in the public domain. Policy discourses on community cohesion discursively emplace individuals within webs of social or institutional multicultural interactions that prescribe ways of living together and feeling for each other. Encounters with diversity are not only negotiated and ‘managed’ in literal spatial form (‘linking projects’ bussing school children between ‘ethnic’ or ‘faith’ schools, various government ‘capacity building’ strategies to regenerate multiethnic neighbourhoods, etc.), but these relations are imagined through specific emotional and ethical injunctions, such as mixing, tolerance, and adhering to core civic values. Moreover, these injunctions are imagined in the ambivalent spatial terms of obligations to and dangers of proximity.
Proximity is not only about spatial and physical closeness. As Greg Myers has indicated (2007), it is also scalar (the small and the large), haptic (touching and out of touch), relational (as in a network), conjunctive (the bringing together of previously or apparently unrelated entities), and it is about security – the protection of self and others, as clearly suggested in the British government’s policy review. This article suggest that ‘proximity’ is also moral, that is, it is deeply inflected by moral codes (more or less formalised) that set out injunctions about how to conduct oneself as an ethical subject. That is, community cohesion and its underpinning ideal of ‘closeness’ is framed through an ethic of collective responsibility in the fight against crime and terrorism. The project of cohesion is an ethical project which involves: (1) a confrontation with one’s ‘society’ and immediate world – think of the citizen who is aware and prepared against crime – in which one becomes conscious of oneself as a person at risk; (2) if Muslim, an identification with oneself as a person with a culture, a culture that puts oneself and others in danger within specific conditions; (3) a discernment of the specific movements of culture that put one at risk of extremism; and (4) a reform of the relationship between oneself and one’s culture so as to reduce or eliminate culture’s risk-generating capacity. (from Geary 2007: 684).
To be developed → the slipperiness of ‘community’ in this document. How it has several meanings: from locally specific areas, to social groups, to ethnic populations, etc.
NOTES
1. The distinction between ‘individuals’ and ‘groups’ signals the ways in which some bodies are individualised yet disembodied – e.g. the citizen – while others are perceived primarily through their bodily presence that stands in for a group presence – e.g. ‘Black Minority Ethnic groups’ or ‘BMEs’, immigrants, Muslims/terrorists, etc.
2. Since 2005 or so, the term ‘chav’ has become a ubiquitous term of abuse for white working class subjects, a bit like ‘white trash’ in the US.
3. Similarly, the ‘community cohesion’ page on the government’s ‘Communities and local governments’ website, clearly establishes a connection between community cohesion and ‘conflict resolution’ which, as we read on, turns out to be ‘inter-ethnic’ conflict. (see http://www.neighbourhood.gov.uk/page.asp?id=519 [accessed 21 March 2008])
4. These include: Black African, Black Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, other Asian, mixed.
Weimar ou l’hyperinflation du sens. Portraits et exils
