Westfield ‘die-in’ shows viral nature of solidarity
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Version 0 of 1. Sebastian Faulks’s novel A Week in December was an attempt to channel the nascent threats to global capitalism in the pre-crash London of 2007. Its opening scene focused on the building of Europe’s largest urban shopping centre, Westfield, in west London. Faulks wanted to suggest the new mall as a place of portents, a monument to consumerism that seemed to contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Half-built, it carried the image of a carcass in the desert: “The sand-covered site was showing only skeletal girders and joists under red cranes…” he wrote, setting the scene for a novel that explored city-wide anxieties about Islamic fundamentalism and rogue hedge funds. “This is not a retail park with trees and benches, but a compression of trade in a city centre, in which migrant labour was paid by foreign capital to squeeze out layers of profit from any Londoner with credit.” In the week of December just gone, it has felt a little like Faulks was on the money with his sense that Westfield might prove a prime focus for the capital’s globalised excesses and disquiet. The 150,000 square metres of branded global village has, anyway, been the symbolic backdrop for a couple of curious American imports. The first was the shopping spectacle of Black Friday, a stocking-filling binge that ran through the weekend to “Manic Monday”. The second, last Wednesday night, was a protest, “a die-in” intended by the organisers to show solidarity with similar events that brought cities (and malls) to a standstill across the States in the wake of the New York grand jury decision to take no action against the police involved in the death of Eric Garner. The two events at Westfield were, you might say, shadow or copycat versions of those across the Atlantic. The London embrace of Black Friday came without the preceding Thanksgiving holiday that made sense of it. And the London protest that borrowed the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag – and which resulted in the arrests of 76 protesters – was apparently directed against a police force and a state (not to mention a few thousand Christmas shoppers) who had no culpability in the incendiary deaths of Eric Garner on Staten Island or Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. What mattered in both instances, it seemed, was the sense of duplication. These were, self-consciously, tribute events. It appeared important that the images gathered and spread from them on the internet were as close as possible to identical to those that had been seen previously on Twitter and Instagram feeds from the US. Social media demands reiteration. If you look at uncaptioned images from the Black Friday frenzy – grown men wrestling over coffee-making gadgets and “must-have” toys – those from Shepherd’s Bush or Chicago are indistinguishable. Likewise, if you study the smartphone videos of the Garner protests in Westfield and the one in San Diego, there is a sense of spot the difference. In London the protesters even borrowed the language they had seen on YouTube, chanting at the somewhat bemused Metropolitan police and the security guards who confronted them: “Back up, back up/we want freedom, freedom/we don’t need these racist-ass cops/we don’t need them!” The protests at Westfield were organised by a couple of groups, one calling itself London Black Revs, and the other the National Union of Students’ black section. Their mimicking of the American protest had a fairly hostile reception, not only from shoppers, but also on the social media on which it quickly circulated. (Even the police were not impressed. “This,” said one, “has to be the worst protest ever. There’s no message.”) It was widely argued not only that the protest borrowed the anger of an issue only distantly relevant to Britain, but also that the point was being made in the wrong location: why not outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square? These criticisms, though valid in their own terms, betrayed a misunderstanding. The first point – that this was not a British issue – was a straightforward argument to counter. Notwithstanding the fact that some of the prostrate protesters attempted to make an implicit link with the deaths of Mark Duggan and (20 years ago) of Joy Gardner at the hands of the Met, the history of protest in this country has often been an expression of solidarity with other demonstrations around the world, most obviously the Vietnam war or apartheid. Neither was it entirely accurate to argue that, since the community affected by the deaths was on the other side of the world, the anger was manufactured. The fragmentary nature of the BuzzFeed world most may inhabit has no filter for proportionality – gossip and jokes and deaths in custody share equal billing – and neither does it care for geography. Of all the horrific deaths of black men and women at the hands of the American police, Eric Garner’s fatal arrest was grimly tailor-made for a viral audience. It came with a Vine-length video clip and devastating slogan: “I can’t breathe.” The kind of inchoate anger that characterised the Occupy movement is always looking for a comprehensible subject, before it moves on to the next. The second criticism of the 600 or so at the “die-in” – that the protesters had chosen the wrong location to make their point – sounded more valid, until you asked yourself who the protest was really aimed at. Is the symbolism of a corporate public space replicated in cities across the world as pertinent a place to make a point about global solidarity as any of the city’s squares? Possibly. Anyhow, the single necessity of the action was to obtain a well-lit overhead image of many people playing dead (some taking selfies). The shopping centre not only offered a built-in overhead gantry (the kind of place where people go for their 15 seconds of fame in Britain’s Got Talent auditions) but perhaps the greatest guaranteed concentration of mobile phones to capture the image at 8.30 on a Wednesday evening anywhere in the capital. |