Battle of the Banlieues:

Resisting the Secure

Christopher Leite (cleit094@uottawa.ca)

University of Ottawa, School of Political Studies

Faculty of Social Sciences
55 Laurier Avenue East
Desmarais Building
Room 9101
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
K1N 6N5

Abstract
This paper argues that the focus of security has shifted from the protection of one set of individuals from
another, to an emphasis on how the act of rendering secure constructs a particular presentation of what
individuals are. As such, the central argument of this paper has three premises. First, security itself is
defined by the practices of identity-formation in which it engages. Second, identity-formation cannot be
taken as a passive set of events, but ones that are deeply engaged with the emotional register of those
whose identities are being created. Finally, recognizing the emotional or affective responses present in
identity-formation enables security to be understood as co-productive of the resistance to its very
practices. The paper will examine the Paris banlieues riots of 2005, focusing on how the riots can be seen
as a method of resistance to the constructions of a securitized reality through counter identity-formation
practices.
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―They'll try to, push drugs that keep us all dumbed down
And hope that, we will never see the truth around
Another promise, another seed
Another packaged lie to keep us trapped in greed
[...] We should never be afraid to die,
Rise up and take the power back‖
- Muse, ‗Uprising‘

The lyrics of this popular rock song by the band Muse highlights the particular poignancy with

which practices of governance have been met with instances of social upheaval and resistance to

those practices. Since the attacks of 9/11, 3/11, and 7/7, the tools of rendering society secure for

governance have become increasingly-extreme. In some cases, they have resulted in often

radically-illiberal practices in the name of maintaining a secure liberal order, for example the

restriction of citizenship and immigration laws for the purpose of maintaining a clearly-distinct

idea of who deserves security – ‗us‘ – and who does not – ‗them‘ (Jabri 2006, Neocleous 2008,

Varadarajan 2004). As such, situations arise that challenge this order, often present as riots,

uprisings, or other instances of civil disobedience. The use of riot police or paramilitary units to

quell such instances of civil unrest is not a novel occurrence, nor is it of principle interest here.

The present focus, instead, is the mechanisms that allow society to be ‗secured‘, and resistance to

these mechanisms, as being productive of a specific type of identity-formation process,

drastically shifting the way in which these instances of resistance are understood.

In late October, 2005, two teenagers named Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré were

allegedly chased by police officers in their Paris-area banlieue, Clichy-sous-Bois, and while

hiding in a power substation, were accidentally electrocuted and died. By the end of that night, in

response to the deaths, gangs and youth groups from Clichy-sous-Bois and other surrounding

banlieues took to the streets against riot police, where Molotov cocktails and tear gas shots were

exchanged. By the time riot police and military personnel quelled the revolt in late-November

through the use of the so-called ‗Miami model‘1 of riot policing, the violence had spread to

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almost all of the area surrounding Paris, and had resulted in various other skirmishes and mini-

revolts throughout most of the country. The events were called either a rebellion or a riot,

depending on which press outlet was reporting it, and referred to the combatants as guerrillas,

rebels, or hoodlums, again depending on who was doing the reporting (Balibar 2007, Schneider

2008). What this type of labelling issue highlights is the question of ascription of identity and

how this process functions as a discursive process.

This paper begins by asking: how can one resist the identity-formation that comes as a

result of living in a securitized, hyperreal society? To answer this, I conceive of security in terms

of its relation to identity-formation, and the responses that come from this relationship. The

argument made here is that the process of securitizing something from something else becomes

productive of a particular type of identity of the individuals both being secured and being

secured against (Campbell 1998). However, in creating ‗us-them‘ or ‗self-other‘ dichotomies, the

act of securitizing relies on a constant self-manipulation to consistently be able to reify these

distinctions. In doing so, the focus of security itself shifts from protection of one set of

individuals from another, to a framing and construction of what those two sets of individuals are:

what constitutes a ‗self‘ and what entails an ‗other‘. In doing so, I argue that the actual act of

rendering secure constructs a certain particular presentation of what individuals are, by creating

specific identity-formation practices, lending to the notion of the simulacra or the hyperreal

(Baudrillard 2006), the constructed reality (Der Derian 2009), the image of real (Burke 2002),

or dromocracy (Virilio 2006). The common thread through these different but overlapping

concepts is creating a ‗secure‘ environment through the illusion of approaching disaster and

safety simultaneously, the very visual-ness of being aware of both birth and death, creation and

destruction.

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Using, amongst others, Baudrillard, Hansen, and Virilio, I argue that presenting a

hyperreal image of the secure society constitutes a technology that, in its framing of what it

means to be secure and the identity-formations that come from this meaning, co-produces its

own accident in the form of resistance and counter-identity-formations. This presentation defines

who counts as a viable ‗secure‘ and thus ‗political‘ actor, which in turn defines the shifting

conceptual terrain of what is ‗political‘ and what is ―outside of the public domain regulated by

the laws and institutions that define public or political life‖, or apolitical. (Pin-Fat and Stern

2005).

From here the research will ask, in a more guided way, how the Paris banlieues riots of

2005 illustrate the possibility for resisting the various identity-formation practices created

through different presentations of ‗the secure society‘. Riots, and the government responses to

quell them, take this notion of constructed reality and demonstrate the inherent tensions present

in the construction of ‗real‘ and ‗secure‘. By attempting to resist being made ‗apolitical‘,

participants in resistance undertake their own acts of identity securitization, illustrating how the

secure political order, and resistance to it, are co-produced. In short, the central argument of this

paper has three premises. First, security or the act of ‗rendering secure‘ itself is defined primarily

by the practices of identity-formation in which it engages. Second, identity-formation cannot be

taken as a passive set of events, but ones that are deeply engaged with the emotional register of

those whose identities are being created. Finally, recognizing the emotional or affective

responses present in identity-formation enables the practice of security to be understood as co-

productive, in that the processes that form the identities of the ‗secured order‘ are the same

processes that form the resistance to these identities. These three premises then allow this paper

to develop a cohesive theory of resistance that is rooted in security and political philosophy

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literature, and can be applied generally through its conception of what resistance means in the

citizen-sovereign relationship.

In order to argue this, the remainder of the paper will be organized as follows. First, there

will be a brief outline of the methodological approach of the paper. The Second, Third, and

Fourth sections will then each begin with a look at a specific aspect of the Paris banlieues riots of

2005, specifically focusing on how the riots themselves can be seen as an instance of resistance

to the hyperreal presentation of reality through counter identity-formation practices, before

introducing a new element of a theoretical conception of each event by examining the act of

security and how it produces identity-formations, isolating the construction of secured societies

and versions of realities from the resistance to these constructions, casting ‗security‘ as a co-

productive concept, and looking at the emotional and affective results of these identity-

formations. Finally, the conclusion will suggest four contributions that this paper aims to make,

specifically by outlining how it can be used as the basis for further research into the relationship

between security practices, identity-formations, affect, and resistance, before attempting to

outline the importance of resistance for understandings of not only security, but sovereignty as

well, and how these links can be pushed and further contemplated.

Methodological Approach
Before diving into the denser meat of the paper, a few methodological elements need to be

clarified. The goal here is not to develop a tight and cohesive theory of how hyperreality is

constructed and what it means, as such a discussion has taken place elsewhere (Baudrillard 2006,

Der Derian 1995, Burke 2002, Campbell 1998, Hansen 2006, Williams 1998). Likewise, it

should be made clear that this paper does not seek to develop a systematic theory of riot or anti-

protest policing methods, as it is again outside the present scope (Bonelli 2001, Ceyhan 2005,

Waddington 2000). Instead, I take as given that there is a hyperreality that is secured and

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engages in identity-formation practices, in order to concentrate the largest part of my argument

on how resistance to this hyperreality and these imposed identities operates as a product of

internally-produced affective responses, highlighting the difference between these constructed

identities and the status-quo notion of the ‗citizen‘ in relation to its sovereign. Finally, instead of

attempting to develop a clear line of causality or causation between a political act and the

internal response to that act, or likewise an internal event as necessarily causing an external

political act, the approach here is to highlight that political acts have some sort of internal

impact, whatever the nature of that impact, and again likewise that political acts are in some way

informed by internal processes, regardless of what specific processes this includes. To do so, the

approach here focuses on the ability of multiple phenomena to resonate together, to occur in

tandem, or to exist relationally, but not necessarily be linked causally in a linear sense (Connolly

2005, Deleuze and Guattari 1994, Massumi 1996).

Creating a French Security System and Identities therein: for whom, by whom?
The Social Technology of a ‘French security order’
In order to establish how exactly the riot can be seen as an instance of resistance, we first need to

understand the very thing being resisted. This aim here is not to outline all of the numerous

transgressions, real or perceived, that those living in the banlieues felt were levelled against them

by the rest of French society, the police, or the federal government. Instead, this section will

introduce the relationship between the broader EU security environment with that of the

practices of the French government. Moreover, the section will briefly paint a picture of what the

practices that entail a ‗secured society‘ mean in the context of France before the riots, and from

there illustrate how these practices entailed identity-formations for French citizens.

To fully grasp the security climate of France in 2005, one must look back to two

developments at the EU level that took place two and three years prior. First, just nine months

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after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington, the EU released

the Council Framework Decision of 13 June 2002 on combating terrorism. The Framework

Decision centralized the importance of managing or combating terrorism, through arguments

such as ―Terrorism constitutes one of the most serious violations of [the] principles... democracy,

to the free exercise of human rights and to economic and social development.‖ (European

Council Presidency 2002). In doing so, the Decision was able to centralize the management of

terrorism by linking it to the core principles upon which the EU and its member states stand,

serving to push the issue of terrorism into one of national security, thereby placing it outside the

realm of everyday, contestable politics and into the realm of the exceptional.

Roughly a year later, in the midst of the Iraq Crisis, the office of Javier Solana, the EU‘s

High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy, released the European Security

Strategy, ―A Secure Europe in a Better World‖, which while centred on the foreign policy

changes necessary to combat terrorism, outlined that EU member states ―...should be ready to act

before a crisis occurs. Conflict prevention and threat prevention cannot start too early.‖ (Solana

2003, 7) The argument regarding the importance for French security practices here is not that this

was a case of the EU dictating national security projects for its member states, or vice versa, that

France as a major European country was able to dictate what EU security policy should look

like. Instead there is an interplay between the two levels that allowed these EU positions to fit

very easily into the French context because of two very specific elements of French society: the

guiding mantra of French governmental institutions of a Republican Ideal, as representative of

the principles and values of France and French society, and the already-established use of

national identity cards as justifiable means by which to manage the French citizenry, itself rooted

in a policy of state security. These two elements, as will be further shown in this section,

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provided fertile ground for the climate of security in Europe to play out in an inherently French

way. The work by Renée Zauberman and Rene Levy is telling for illustrating this point.

They argue that because of the way in which internal security is established through

policies on policing, certain identities are constructed, and others disallowed, for French citizens.

They outline that because French policing institutions are accountable to the French state, and

not the citizens they are protecting, law and order is the ultimate priority of the state, not the

citizens, and this order is ―easier to maintain where there is little proximity between police and

the public.‖ (Zauberman and Levy 2003, 1068) Two conclusions can be drawn from this. First,

this means that French laws concerning civil protection, the aim of security itself, and the

establishment of internal order – the mechanisms that create a presentation of a secured reality –

have very little to do with securing the citizenry directly, but instead are geared towards securing

the societal institutions that allow the citizenry to be secured. Second, it points to a trend in

French securing practices that places an emphasis on geographic spatiality when securing those

institutions.

This second focus, the spatial element of French securitizing practices, illustrates that

understanding the type of resistance seen in the banlieues riots must come through an

understanding of the space in which this resistance happened, and as the construction of this

space, as part of the larger construction of French security-through-institutions, entailed its own

identity-formation practices. The idea of the banlieues, thus, informs a large part of the way in

which the security order can be said to construct a particular identity-formation. For a non-

French observer, the banlieues are often thought of incorrectly simply as a suburb, a term that is

by definition linked with the idea of wealth, something the banlieues do not usually epitomise. In

French society, they are the equivalent of an inner-city, but not usually geographically found in

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the inner-city itself, and thus ―a frontier, a border-area and a frontline...It materializes what I

have elsewhere called the displacement of frontiers toward the center‖ (Balibar 2007, 48) or very

simply, a set of internally-facing ―lawless frontiers‖ (Zauberman and Levy 2003, 1066), as

problematic as these terms may be.

Often, but not always, the banlieues are where the largest population of immigrants and

new French citizens tend to live, and are often characterised – to much-deserved contestation – in

French media as being predominantly-Muslim, although they do tend to be of Arab or North

African descent, but also with large populations of Eastern Europeans and second-generation

Portuguese (Balibar 2007). Additionally, there is a distinction that needs to be made between

banlieue and banlieues, the first being the general name of a neighbourhood that may or may not

be affluent, and the second being the term used for what the research is discussing here. If this

research were to take the explicit historical definition of the term, ‗ghetto‘ might be the closest

thing to the type of banlieues that were the centre of the uprisings in 2005.

However, these geographic descriptions do little to describe the productive elements of

these spaces as being part of the ‗secured order‘. For example, we begin to understand what

living in the banlieues does by looking at how, from the perspective of the French state, their

very physical removal from the rest of society and the police institutions in that are part of that

society are justified as the maintenance of order, to reiterate, by having ―little proximity between

police and the public.‖ (Zauberman and Levy 2003, 1068) Thus, being in the banlieues means

having your identity constructed for you according the geographic space you inhabit, through the

securitization of this space in order to maintain a secured presentation of reality, in this case

upholding the French doctrine of more space – physical and conceptual – between the police and

the citizens resulting in ‗more security‘. Listing the different ways in which such specific

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identities have been constructed is far outside of the present discussion, but the very fact that

mechanisms of securing the state aimed to construct identity-formations for the residents of the

banlieues itself highlights its importance, regardless of whether these formations were along

racial, ethnic, or religious lines (Schneider 2008, Balibar 2007).

Continuing with this logic presented by the French state, the reliance on institutions to

provide this secure environment stems from clear ideas of Republican citizenship, which attempt

to eliminate individual identity-formations for citizens, in place of national-based ones. This

‗Republican Ideal‘ in France then ―prevents any recognition of personal identity as defined by

race, gender, religion, and so on‖ (Zauberman and Levy 2003, 1068), meaning that any identity-

formation not defined by the nation is necessarily then, not French. Further, there are laws that

prohibit official categorization of race, religion, or ethnicity (Zauberman and Levy 2003).

However, far from opening the door to either diversity, multiculturalism, or coerced assimilation,

this creates categorical binaries, where an individual in France is either a French citizen or an

alien. Therefore, not only does the French state‘s reliance on institutional mechanisms for

maintaining security entail identity-formation practices, but the driving logic of those

institutions, French Republicanism, narrowly-defines what these processes can include.

This combination is key to understanding the intimate relationship between the the EU‘s

ESS and anti-terror legislation, and the way they were implemented or adopted in France.

However, this is not to say that the two are wholly-separate, or that they can occur independently

from each other. Instead, as the EU adoption and member state adoptions tend to be one and the

same, based on the framework of the EU itself, France is illustrative of how the combination of

previously-existing historical conditions in France, in particular its type of institutions and the

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presence of a Republican Ideal, created a good staging ground for active use of ESS and anti-

terror legislation.

Security/Identity-formation
While merely outlining the historically specific ways in which France was able to create a

security environment alone does not present much fruitful discussion, the importance of these

details for the present argument is how they allow us to discuss the role of ‗security‘ as a practice

by which to order society. In this light, ‗security‘ comes to be seen as an image, or set of images,

with a productive power of its own: the power to instil identity-formation (Burke 2002).

In discussing identity-formations, Lene Hansen draws on David Campbell (1998) to

create a framework through which the practice of securitization is productive of relational

identities, enabled not through just the imposition of a construction of ‗self‘ by one group to

another, but ―constructed through the discursive juxtaposition between a privileged sign on the

one hand and a devalued one on the other [which] leads to a conceptualization of identity in

relational terms.‖ (Hansen 2006, 17) This imposition of an identity through the act of

securitization is only enabled through the processes of linking and differentiation, first outlining

areas of ‗sameness‘ before juxtaposing these areas with realms of ‗difference‘, in doing so

creating levels or spectrums of ‗selves‘ and ‗others‘ (Butler 1990, Hansen 2006).

These acts of security can then be understood by drawing most prominently from the

work of the Copenhagen School of security studies to argue that the process of rendering this

construction of reality into existence is through both speech acts, and visual actions that can be

seen as speech acts (Buzan, Waever and de Wilde 1998, Williams 2003, c.a.s.e. collective 2006).

From the Copenhagen School, the speech act renders into existence ‗security‘ by combating

insecurity through the very utterance of the word ‗security‘ (Buzan, Waever and de Wilde 1998).

However, this argument is extended by Michael Williams who argues that thanks to the nature of

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the media‘s use of the internet and television, a ‗speech act‘ is also performed through the visual

representation of something as a security threat. In this light, visual practices, that is any acts that

can be witnessed by an audience, themselves become capable of performing the speech act of

securitization as well (Williams 2003). The speech act of securitization itself is acknowledged to

be a negotiation between a ‗discourse‘ and a ‗practice‘, where the utterance is itself the act

(Buzan, Waever and de Wilde 1998). We build from this point to to argue that the practice – in

this case visual – is itself the utterance.

Didier Bigo‘s insight offers the best example of the way in which the practices of security

enable identity-formations for both the actors claiming security and the actors being secured

against, namely that those able to perform the act of security are backed by the ‗knowledge‘ of

how to achieve that security (Bigo 2000). However, drawing back to the socially-constructed

nature of any presentation of security, via securitization, instances of re-securitization or counter-

identity formations are enabled to any group of actors that claim such a construction, with

counter-presentations thus gaining relevance so long as they can be presented as coming from a

source of authority. There is a caveat to this argument, in that not every actor simply can claim

the authority needed to construct a presentation. What can be seen is that by claiming alternative

centres of authority or expertise, the original experts are forced to reconfigure what exactly

entails the ‗expertise‘ needed to claim security. By questioning the logic of the very expertise

itself, the claims of universality by these security experts are thus undermined, no longer having

a stable object of security. Once these claims of universality are questioned, and cracks appear in

the presentation of reality, the space has been created that can ―challenge available possibilities

for being.‖ (Burke 2002, 22)

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These conceptual tools help to make clear that, understanding both France‘s ability to

keep in step with the central themes of the ESS and EU anti-terror legislation, and the historical

specificity of France‘s formal – policing – and informal – Republicanism – institutions, the

French state succeeded in its construction of a climate of security. The next section will illustrate

how this climate itself also served to create an apparent divide amongst its own citizenry, by

having the practices that created the secured environment also create distinctions of who had

access to security – the ‗regular‘ family of white French descendent – and who did not – the

highly-segregated residents of the banlieues, through specific depictions of what entailed

security threats and what was considered ‗French‘, and so simultaneously, ‗non-French‘, thereby

drawing on the link between security and identity-formation presented in this section.

The Technologies of Security Systems: locating the root of rioting and resistance
The Accident of Rioting in the banlieues
Having then outlined how French security practices created specific identity-formations of

French and non-French, we can look at the form of resistance to these practices that creates

counter identity-formations. To do so, the very acts of the riots of the banlieues will be

explained, in order to show that they represent political acts themselves. Then, as a political act,

the physical performance of rioting was able to re-securitize the construction of identity-

formations in the banlieues, which will be explored in relation to how these counter-formations

could only come as a result of the identities that were imposed in the first place.

When looking at the types of acts that the riots actually entailed, the apparent desire to

destabilize without recreating becomes apparent. As Etienne Balibar describes:

Contrary to what television coverage suggested, this highly spectacular violence

remained relatively limited in terms of its destruction and victims: three dead

(including the two youths whose indirect murder by the police lit the powder), but

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no or very few attacks on persons. Instead, consumer items and symbolic places

were destroyed. (Balibar 2007, 51)

The fact that only three people died2 in these riots becomes even more impressive when looking

at some of the other acts that took place: in all, over three hundred towns throughout France

directly experienced the riots; nine thousand vehicles were overturned, torched, or otherwise

destroyed; hundreds of public and commercial buildings were levelled; four thousand rioters

were arrested; and one-hundred and twenty-five police officers were wounded (Schneider 2008,

136). Thus the rioters used ―means proper to the experience of reality in contemporary society

(there is no recognized existence other than that which can be represented)‖ (Balibar 2007, 53) in

order to frame their act as an overtly political one. Instead of the violence inspiring feelings of

hate or fear for those in the banlieues, the riot created the mechanisms for ―these modalities of

passion [to be] overdetermined by the feeling that it is not a matter of an isolable danger, but, to

the contrary, an expression of the becoming or the manifestation of what we ‗ourselves‘ are.‖

(Balibar 2007, 51) While both the state and civil society institutions of the French Republic –

which as explained above are the focus of the secured presentation of reality – attempted to

dictate the way in which civil unrest or violence is understood and ‗felt‘, the act of rioting turned

this presentation on its head.

Then, the fact that there exists a discrepancy between the way in which the riots took

place, and the way in which they were presented points back to the initial premise here: the

presentation of the resistance to a secured construction of reality matters more than the actual act

of resistance itself. The resistance to a presentation of secured reality, then, becomes a

negotiation of its own between the actual act of resistance, and how it is met or understood by

those involved, in that ―what should be taken from this ‗virtual violence‘ is that it transforms

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real, endemic social violence, to which it responds, into spectacle.‖ (Balibar 2007, 52) This then

reinforces the argument made above that the act of resistance itself is not necessarily the most

important component of resistance at all, but instead the defining feature of it is the way it leads

to the re-articulation of the limits of that presentation, thus engaging with the political process

that creates and re-creates that presentation.

Co-production, Order, Resistance

In order to account for these roots of resistance and rioting in France, this section will draw on

the work of Paul Virilio (2007) and his accident-technology-accident paradigm to discuss the

origins of these counter identity-formations and how these interactions are embedded in the

various acts of security that construct the presentation of secured reality in the first place.

From Anthony Burke, the idea of being secure itself is, in short, an unattainable dream,

but one that is presented as materialized nonetheless through the concept of the Aporia, which is

the very act of constructing a reality based on security (Burke 2002). In this light, security is an

enabling form of state power which aims to imagine and police the self and society in very

specific ways. Through this understanding, security is seen as a system of knowledge,

representations, and practices that ―imagine, define, and act upon bodies, spaces, and flows in

certain ways... [it is] a political technology.‖ (Burke 2002, 2) James Der Derian‘s idea of

‗constructed reality‘, Baudrillard‘s ‗hyperreality‘, and Virilio‘s ‗dromocracy‘ all speak to the

power of the state and its related systems of power to create and reinforce multiple notions of

security and reality, and in doing so establish a social order by which the images that dictate

what it means to be secured are reified and mediated as ‗real‘ (Der Derian 1995, Der Derian

2009, Baudrillard 2006, Virilio 2006).

According to Virilio, the dialectic creation of a technology itself entails the creation of

the accident that will destroy that technology, resulting in a new technology and the accident it

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creates to destroy itself, and so on. For this logic, the ―invention of the substance is equally

invention of the accident. The shipwreck is consequently the futurist invention of the ship and

the air crash is the invention of the supersonic airliner‖ (Virilio 2007, 5). In this sense,

‗technology‘ can be understood as both ‗technological‘ technology of the scientific-engineering

sense, but also, and perhaps more importantly for the argument here, as ‗social‘ technology, a

form of social ordering rooted and supported by state and societal institutions.

The internal discourse of the technology that created this particular conception of

constructed reality itself creates the accident that calls that construction of reality into question,

both processes thus being what can be understood as co-productions of each other, where the

constitution of one is simultaneously the constitution of the other and vice versa (Virilio 2007).

Accounting for the conflicting conceptions of reality that are both co-produced comes by

drawing on the work of Jean Baudrillard, who argues that any notion of ‗real‘ in the social realm

has now been blurred into the ‗presentation of real‘, which he calls the simulacra (Baudrillard

2006). In this light, the technology of the construction of reality through security itself inherently

produces the accident by which this technology is destabilized and forced to reconfigure itself in

the form of a new technology, thus shifting Baudrillard‘s focus slightly from the presentation of

reality in general, to the presentation of a ‗secure reality‘. The discourse of hyper-securitizing

against all forms of threat, then, pre-determines the radical response to insecurity that is present

in resistance itself.

Just as the accident is the instant co-produced result of technology, resistance through the

formation of a counter-identity is the instant co-production of the establishment of identity-

formations by an order in authority. Thus, resistance itself is not ‗refusing security‘ as-such, but

refusing a particular construction of security, and thus the aim is not to ‗escape‘ the discursive

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order of hyperreality, but to shift the boundaries of that order by engaging in differently-

securitized constructions than those offered by the existing presentation of reality. Through this,

then, the aim of resistance assumes its primary role of the re-assertion, or reconstruction, of an

identity that is not imposed upon it, but that originates internally, through a process of

‗becoming‘ or ‗emergence‘ (Connolly 2002). In this light, resistance to these identity

constructions is not just a 'mega-event' or sudden rupture that essentializes identity but is the

result of the process of essentializing identity as part of an ongoing cycle of identity-formation,

reaction, and identity re-formation. Therefore instances of resistance are part of an internal

discussion of growth and self revaluation, differing only in that they are instances when identity

constructions, specifically imposed identity constructions, are pushed to their absolute limits and

forced to confront themselves to renegotiate those limits (Deleuze and Guattari 2004).

Emotional Cries of Rage: outlining the affective presence in resistance

The Role of Emotion in Rioting
When presented by the French state media outlets, the riots were said to have begun with reasons

ranging from the de-politicization of young Muslims, the polygamous nature of North Africans,

or the radical violence endorsed by Islam (Schneider 2008). However, when looking at those

individuals involved, ―only one-third of the rioters were of Arab or North African origin, all but

120 of the 4000 arrested were born and raised in France, and Imams from the major mosques

pleaded…for calm, one going so far as to declare a fatwa against those who engaged in violence

and vandalism.‖ (Schneider 2008, 137) Therefore, the rioting that was resisting identity-

formation processes raised the idea that contradictions to these processes exist. Openly having

contradiction itself falls outside of the French ‗Republican Ideal‘ outlined above, despite the fact

this ideal is what created the issues in the first place.

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Just as the political acts of the French state created a particular secured order, which also

created specific identity-formation practices by those involved, the riots-as-political-acts created

their own counter identity-formation practices. The act of rioting, by resisting the imposition of

identity-formations, became the practice of rearticulating identity-formations of their selves,

thereby othering themselves from those French authorities that created such impositions. The

riots were a statement that first called attention to ―the blindness and deafness of the French

establishment (including the larger part of its intellectuals) to the postcolonial critique of the

ideological functions of universalism.‖ (Balibar 2007, 55) This can be understood in terms of the

universal claims of national identity that do not allow for race or religion to play any role in

identity-formation, and resistance to which trying to open room for contradiction without a

singular replacement identity-formation formula.

The visual act of rioting in this case became an act of politicization, the very epitome of

―becoming political‖ (Balibar 2007, 61). By taking a stand, speaking out, and refusing to accept

the claims to universality of French citizenship, the riots were inherently engaging in political

discourse, despite their apparent lack of access to the ‗official‘ language, or claim to ‗authority‘,

enjoyed by those creating the presentation of security. However, in merely doing so, the riots

inadvertently recreated a new presentation of security by creating counter identity-formations.

They become seen as political acts with their own identity-formation practices because they were

―a will to affirm not so much a ‗cause‘ or a ‗project‘ as an existence that is constantly forgotten

or denied by the surrounding society.‖ (Balibar 2007, 53)

Given the political articulation of counter identity-formations that the riots entail, the re-

securitizing and counter-identity is only in relation to the presentation of security, as dictated by

the affective responses the presentation triggers. This is seen in that as opposed to merely trying

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to produce an alternative presentation, the aim of resistance and the riots was to criticize the

existing presentation, in which sense the riot ―‗has no aims‘ aside from a cry of rage‖ (Balibar

2007, 61), the very articulation of an affective response manifesting itself in an emotional, and

thus social, presentation. However, this cry of rage or discontent embodies recognition that the

existing claims of universality produced by the French security presentation lacked the very

legitimacy needed to claim this universality, thereby pre-ordaining its own destabilization.

Identity-formation and Affect/Emotion

Discussion of affect and emotion is best begun by the way in which they are often linked and

differentiated. As such, this paper will explicitly use the terms affect and emotion in subtly-

different ways. Where affect is a physiological intensity found throughout the brain and

presenting itself through the body, emotion, on the other hand, is the cultural-norm-influenced

manner in which such an intensity is articulated or displayed (Massumi 1996, Saurette and

Trevenen 2009). Despite the differences between the two terms, the way in which they are

understood for this argument is with regards to their role in examining identity-formation. Thus,

the interest here does not lie in the nature of the affective interaction, only that there is an

interaction at all, and that these interactions are manifested in socially-regulated modes of

expression of emotion.

When approaching this type of research, there is a clear hindrance in systematizing

analysis. Short of literally strapping electrodes on to the heads of the subjects being examined

and conducting brain scans, it becomes very difficult to speak with any authority that any event

triggers any type of psychological reaction. Further, any attempt to generalize and make claims

that an individual should or might act, or has acted, in a certain way in a certain situation quickly

devolves into a situation where a highly problematic ‗reading-in‘ of intentionality is required.

Thus, the attempt in this paper is to side-step such an issue by not looking for a link of causality

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or causation, but instead to focus on the ways in which political actions have some sort of

affective impact on the visceral level, in that there is a common vibration or resonance between

the political act and affective response to that act, whatever that response may be (Deleuze and

Guattari 1994, Massumi 1996).

Given this distinction, the approach assumed by Hille Koskela, among others, is

particularly interesting. She argues that the emotional and the political are fundamentally

intertwined through power relations, as both are part of complex systems that are productive of

certain ‗space‘, either explicit or conceptual (Koskela 2000). This is not to say that instances of

power are necessarily linked causally with instances of emotions, but that they can at least be

discussed in relation to one another based on their ability to have similar instances of resonance,

in that they are occurring in tandem, with neither causing nor creating the other (Connolly 2005).

This approach stresses that political actions have some sort of affective impact on the

visceral level, in that there is a common vibration or resonance between the political act and

affective stimuli engaging in that act. Linking back to the act of imposing an identity-formation

then, claiming authority, forming an identity, and even having an identity are not passive acts, or

ones that can be attributed, analyzed and forgotten as ‗givens‘, but part of a deep interaction

between culture, body, and brain (Connolly 2002). This represents an area of potential criticism

to security discourse in that it seemingly-relies on a passive acceptance of not only the

imposition of a set of identities, but the mutual co-production of identities for those imposing

identities in the first place.

The work of Connolly becomes crucial here. He argues, like Hansen, that identity is

relational, in that it is constructed ―in relation to a series of differences that have become socially

recognized. These differences are essential to its being. If they did not coexist as differences, it

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would not exist...‖ (Connolly 2002, 64) As Connolly suggests, the very articulation of difference

cannot be done without first examining the ways in which difference is informed by the

emotional practices of self-identification, which would enable us here to then examine how

broader events, such as the construction of a presentation of reality, are ―capable of impacting

and altering the content, relevance and force of those emotions.‖ (Saurette and Trevenen 2009)

The objects that participate, then, are merely the sum of the information that we perceive

of them at a given time and the information that we previously-perceived and impose on it.

Therefore, objects, and the ‗objective world‘, exist only in relation to how we represent them as

mental constructs (Virilio 1994). From this, drawing on Virilio, the notion of a ‗self‘ is found in

a larger network of information, defined through links of similarities, self-positioning, and

integration into a network of information, including nets of social, political, cultural, territorial,

or geographic, all of which being forms of information (Virilio 1998, Der Derian, Introduction

1998). Concisely, self or identity becomes a form of ―virtually targeted ground-zero, concentric

circles of political fallout spread, leaving in the vitrified rubble all responsibility for the other

that forms the prior condition for truly intersubjective, ethical, human relationship.‖ (Der Derian,

Introduction 1998, 6) The most inclusive conception of identity here can be achieved through the

highly-related approaches of Connolly and Virilio, in that identity is a perpetual negotiation of

what constitutes the limits of understanding a ‗self‘ in relation to either others, for Connolly, or

for society‘s larger informational network, for Virilio.

This interplay is what Connolly calls ‗neuropolitics‘, the political implication of cultural

stimuli interacting with the internal processes of the brain and the body, and vice versa, in order

to produce a complete picture of what exactly a political process does (Connolly 2002). Adding

Koskela‘s notion of the political and the emotional as being intertwined then allows for the

21
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foundation of making the argument that the act of identity-formation itself is an emotional one

by being a political one, and by extension the act of counter-identity-formation – resistance – is

an emotional act simply by being a political one (Koskela 2000).

Connolly argues that the creation of these relational identities is part of a persistent

redefinition and re-negotiation of this relation, both by the ‗authorities‘ imposing identity-

formations, and the subjects of those impositions. Most importantly, then, when this re-

negotiation is not present and the contingencies that create these identities are sedimented, there

is an internal affective response that triggers the need to counter these contingencies, the

emotional basis of resistance itself. Resistance to these relational identity constructions then

becomes a struggle to contest the contingencies that have become entrenched in the constructions

of relational identities, through efforts to destabilize those contingencies which set and define the

prevailing identities (Connolly 1993, Connolly 2002).

This again points to the earlier discussion that having an identity-formation imposed is

not a passive act, but one that is heavily-involved in the internal cognitive processes of those

constructing and those being constructed. So, if we are to look at riots as political action, then we

can see that very act of rioting – of resisting something – is proof that an affective response is

occurring, even if the exact nature of that response is not known. In short, even if we cannot

discern any single or uniform motivation for the act of rioting, such as the emotions anger,

jealousy, or frustration, the fact that there was an act necessarily means that there was a visceral,

amygdala-triggered affective response that caused this act. This can be problematic of course, as

it does not point to the causal claim that the security order created identity-formations that in turn

caused resistance to those formations. It does allow that the security order created identity-

formations, which are necessarily-affective, and there occurred overt and explicit resistance to

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these formations, which is also necessarily-affective. This relationship is a clear articulation of

one of resonance, where the commonalities within the two, while not causally-linked, are still

linked in so far as they co-exist as interactions of each other. Thus, rioting in the banlieues

represents a counter-securitization, and so a practice of counter identity-formation. In attempting

to establish a secured reality, the construction of this reality itself begins to spell its own demise,

resulting in instances of resistance to this construction that aim to re-politicize and re-identify

along new lines. In order to cope with such instances of resistance, this network finds itself in a

situation of perpetual securitization in order to meet the shifting nature of ‗what needs to be

rendered secure‘.

Conclusion

Instead of merely explaining how a set of events can be explained through a theory, the aim of

this paper was to make four contributions made evident through this explanation. The first

contribution is in the form of a self-criticism, in that the paper did not explore the implications of

space or spatiality in either the construction of identity-formations, or the emotional responses to

these formations. While regrettable, the present project did not allow for such a large digression

or addition to the central argument being made here. As such, a contribution here would be to

use the present argument as the basis to continue future research that deals explicitly with these

spatial elements. This project could argue, for example, that when something is successfully

securitized, it is pushed outside of politically-contested space, and forced into an apolitical one,

that of bare life (Buzan, Waever and de Wilde 1998, Agamben 1998). Understanding resistance

through this lens, the process of non-authorized actors engaging in re-politicization or re-

securitization along multiple lines and shifting out of the bare life becomes first act of resistance

(Aradau 2004, Agamben 1998).

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Such a future project can make a similar argument to the one here, in that just as political

acts create ‗political space‘, or areas of contestation, based the specific power relations present in

these acts – for example the imposition of identity-formation practices – emotional acts create

intersubjective ‗emotional spaces‘ in that they point to new, and reinforce old, norms of

acceptable social relations regarding personal expression (Koskela 2000). This becomes the

second contribution of this paper: if we assume that political actions are all necessarily

productive of identity-formation practices, the introduction of affect into the examination of

these practices can explain them as not passive acts, but ones that are deeply engaged in the

individuals and institutions performing them. Methodologically, this allows for an examination

not just of the linear imposition of a set of policies by one group onto another group, but a

relational interplay between those imposing and those receiving each negotiating how these

impositions will 'work'.

Third, the implication of taking into account the affective or otherwise internal responses

in attempting to construct a 'secure society' is an increased awareness of the identity-formation

practices that these constructions entail. From this, understanding the affective can serve to

further security discourse by illuminating the types of identity-impositions that come as a result

of the various mechanisms used to introduce security to ever-growing areas of governance and

society. Further, understanding these impositions as not passive but highly-active events for all

parties involved can highlight the tensions inherent in these impositions themselves.

Finally, understanding resistance as always necessarily being part of the order being

resisted allows for a renaissance for the very act of resisting. Claiming that resistance cannot

exist outside of that being resisted is not a wholly-novel claim, but the contribution that this

paper makes is found in embracing this fact. If there cannot be any form of resistance that is

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‗pure opposition‘ and destabilizing, then the very fact that resistance itself gets silenced and co-

opted, thereby shifting the limits of the thing being resisted, is the point of resistance. Its essence

is the fact that it does get silenced, because the way in which this silencing occurs reveals a re-

shifting of the limits of the thing being resisted, changing its nature, if even subtly.

Having outlined the four potential contributions of this paper, the final issue that remains

unresolved is what all of this interplay between resistance, its co-produced nature, and the

affective register upon which it operates means for the security practices that create it. Namely,

the discussion raises the final question about what this process means in terms of how we paint

the ‗other‘ onto our ‗self‘, securitize against possibilities, not actualities, and therefore interact at

the base, cognitive, affective level with all those involved?

In this regard, the study of the riots in France are not important as a study of riots writ-

large, but instead this study becomes important in that resistance in any form raises questions

about the duties of the citizen pitted against the duties of the sovereign, and their ability to act as

both cohesive and divisive forces or entities. Moreover, the presence of resistance becomes

central to understanding what type of sovereignty is being created and negotiated through both

practices of security and practices of resistance, as each are at their cores, reiterations of the

limits, and exceptions to these limits, of the sovereign‘s control. This brings us full circle to our

central question, and with it, raises subsequent questions for consideration about resistance and

sovereignty: If one is aiming to resist again a hyper-real, yet securitised society, then are resistors

merely resisting eventualities? If the security practices are now focused on constructing identities

and eventualities, then is the aim of resistance these identities or eventualities themselves, or the

sovereign constructions that create them? Finally, at the personal, individual, intimate level, if

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there is a motivation for resistance, then what importance should be placed on the motivations

for any given sovereign security practices that occur at that same level?

Notes
1. The ‗Miami model‘ is the widely-accepted method of quelling civil unrest through the
use of overwhelming force in riot policing measures, developed to counter the riots that
broke out in Miami in 1980 (Porte and Dunn 1984).
2. This is not to say any death is positive or can be belittled, but that in a riot perceived as so
violent, there was a relatively few number of deaths.

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