London? Remember Paris? An apposite quote from a Zizek interview I read a few years ago in Soft Targets.
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The young people of the banlieue simply wanted to say (to adopt a slogan from Badiou): we are here, and we are from here. It was a question of asserting their sheer existence. It was a pure demand for visibility. This is the best example of the limitations of our much-vaunted democracy. There are enormous numbers of people who find themselves in a situation where their most essential demands cannot be formulated in the language of a political problem. It’s what Roman Jakobson called “phatic” communication—not, “I want this” but simply, “here I am.
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