Bosco Redmond runs into the Student ‘Riots’, ‘Peaceful March’, ‘Demo’... You decide!

Yes I witnessed  all of those things in the title. But let me tell you... I got off the ‘Chechnya Shuttle’ at Victoria Station and I am told there are no buses running to Piccadilly.  OK, no buses. I will walk and I set out for Green Park. I am supposed to be attending a discussion on ‘Illocutionary Utterances’ - don’t ask me what it means, I have read the paper four times and still don’t understand it. There, I have used the device of self-deprecation beloved of all those profoundly untalented, ubiquitous stand-up comedians. End of rant.

I get to Green Park but the entrance is blocked by police vehicles. I have never seen so many Police. Beyond the police wagons I hear the chanting and drums being banged. How French Revolution is this? Then I hear the first ululations of the marchers, a kind of frightening swell of sound. Quite chilling that.

Ok, so I can’t  get into Green Park, so I double back and now am I walking parallel to the marchers, the roar has died but the air is rented with shouts, bellows, clanking drums bugles and whistles. I reach Parliament Square and now I see the students for the first time.  It is a hotch potch; a rag bag of that kind of studiously understated dress code that I have seen on many campuses. But there is a hell of a lot people wearing masks. Innocently, I wonder why?

I see the phalanx of police lining up preventing the students entering Parliament Square. Behind the thin looking line of police there is string of mounted police on massive looking Shire horses, who judging by their dancing hooves seem distinctly edgy.   

Behind the line of horses I gather with the other voyeurs, all snapping away on their mobile phones, the atmosphere is carnivalesque. Then that roar again. There is something sublime about this sound. You try to work out what it is but human figuration is limited, there is a physical incommensurability with this roar. For it is the roar of thousands. You stand there, the human figure swamped by this sublime sound.

Sublime indeed! I am being writerly, hysterical, take your pick. Then the roar gets louder it is coming or from the bowels of somewhere. It is the power of the people and beyond description

“What is that?” asks someone standing beside me.                                                                     “Smoke, is that tear gas?”                                                                                                                         

 “No they are burning something...a flag I think.”                                                                   

The horses who we are yards behind begin to get more frisky, their hooves tapping out on the road as if auditioning for Spirit of the Dance.

Then that roar again, then a pistol sound like a gunshot (some has set off a cracker) to which the horses, in an instant, as if all their lives they have been schooled for this moment, in unison swing round and gallop at full pelt towards the voyeurs/interested observers/curious bystanders. We all scramble comically and in a Charley Chaplinesque way I stumble as I try to mount the bank to the get away from the Charge of the Light Brigade. Shit. Safety, that was close.

I stand now and watch the horses charge by it is a frightening demonstration of power. You can just glimpse behind their blinkers the crazed eyes of the horses. Now there is a sticky sensation on my shin. I lift my trouser and see blood where I have scraped my leg getting up the bank.

Then that roar again and the students break through and they are running pell mell.  I wonder will they have time to be paying a visit to the Labour headquarters who introduced the fees in the first place. Eh no. So it’s 4 out of 10 for not being discursive enough.

I think of something about an ostensible opposition to a system merely ending up re-constituting the system because the system has already constituted the opposition. Higher Educaton becomes a subsytem of the social system, they both have the same performativity criterion. (University/Universal)

It would seem that independence and integrity do not exist in opposition to the marketplace but are produced by and contained within it. The extraordinary unifying and systemising power of late capitalism, which is so omniprsesent as to be invisible. Late capitalism cannibalises all. Are they having such thoughts as they mount the barricades?                      


 'We are through. Out of my f*+*ing way.'

.

I recall words written by Flaubert when writng of the Paris Commune uprising in (L'education sentimentale) in 1848. Here they are in a mangled form as best I remember.

"One of the females, a young woman, picked up the flag and leaping over the barricades, uttering language of provocation, confronted the National Guard, a shot is fired and she is killed. Oother females followed and began to throw stones at the National Guard. Shots ring out..."
I think of History repeating and not repeating itself as I move away. 

The line has been broken and now I can get through to the other side of town and as I walk though London that day I will witness/hear of the blizzard of schizophrenic images on display from spouting Keats to burning down the Treasury. This day will be a ‘bad trip’ for many. I will also witness many peaceful kids just demonstrating, and see many pockets of the young masked, talking incoherently in their patois about what? How to hack into and disrupt the Iranian regime (eh...I don’t think so).

I walk on proud of my bystander badge of affirmation - the dried blood on my leg