#1 13-09-2024 17:00

TO

2008 – On Modern Riot and Leftist Archaism

It seems that the leftists in particular have a hard time understanding what the teleologues say about riots. For leftists believe they know very well what a riot is, all the more so that they are rather in favour of this type of manifestations, not without noticing sometimes their weaknesses. But for them riot is a tool in the pouch of projectiles against ruling society, among others. So there is no more reason for them to speak more of riot than of strike, of protest, of civil insubordination or of parallel forms of management, which they may identify with. Thus first they believe that riot, for the teleologues, is a sort of fetishism; then that the teleologues have “recourse” to riot, much too often; lastly that, all in all, riots throughout the world are very different, since those so great and beautiful happening far away, where the enemy’s control is so cracked that it allows them, do not compare to these rubbish bins arsons by handfuls of hoods on some Friday night in a suburb where they, our leftists, have little access.

So let us go back to the explanation that the teleologues inherited from the Bibliothèque des Emeutes. Riot is not a tool. We do not have “recourse” to riot. Riot is a moment where the poor fight without management, and without the mediation of the state, of commodity and of dominant information, and often against them. The conditions for fighting without enemy mediation are extremely rare in our society, and they have the particularity of liberating some thought: those who are there are forced to build their own mediations by themselves. It is by lack of wanting, of being <able>, or of daring to do so that most riots are defeated. Nobody can call for riot, not because it is forbidden by law, but because a riot is an unprepared encounter between poor people who are precisely getting out of existing organisations and managements. It is not consciousness that commands riot, but <the> emotion, the unconscious, <the> opportunity that command consciousness, in riot. That is why it is an extremely interesting form of struggle: it has the potential of a beginning of a free debate. If any one message may be understood within what the Bibliothèque des Emeutes and modern teleology have said about riot, it should be this: it is a beginning of debate. That is, a beginning of a possible debate, but a beginning of a free debate, clear of the usual dross that make the poor unable to debate, to which ideologies also belong, including the one in question, leftist, but even the teleologue ideology. This moment of beginning of debate is exceptional, because revolutions, which are the debates of humanity on itself, the moments when humanity takes itself as its object, the moments when totality is the object of history, are always supersessions of insurrections; and because insurrections are always supresessions of riots. Or, in other words: no known revolution has happened without an insurrection; no known insurrection has happened without a riot.

Not all riots, by far, actually develop the possibility of a revolution. Yet this moment of thought, possible in riot, is so important that it deserves to be analysed. That is why the Bibliothèque des Emeutes had built a world view from, that is from the point of view of, modern riot, the crossing of consciousless thought and of consciousness. Let us repeat that modern riot is the opposite of classic, Blanquist riot, entirely manipulated, preorganised from outside. Modern riot has become such a rich potential social leverage precisely because it is not manipulated, and because it must make up its organisation itself from its own course. The hasty generalisations that such a stance may lead to must of course be weakened. First, riot is only rarely the source of a debate of which we are speaking of here, and its surroundings are always vitiated, are blanquised, however weakly nowadays, which is good news: almost all the modern rioters are ideologised, sometimes organisations appear at the heart of the battle, and the beginning of critique thereby manifested rarely seeks its supersession. Besides, this moment of beginning of debate, which can carry along the whole humanity–since it is about gathering the general assembly of <human kind> as a precondition to its accomplishment–, may exist from other acts. Only, we do not know any. Somehow, we think that with love there is an analogical perspective, but this would yet have to be proved, and the leverage of love seem much longer to use in order to come to this result than that of riot. But if there are other moments that allow to envisage a perspective that leads to the debate that humanity needs so much on itself, we will be very glad to explore it. For the misfortune of riot and love, in this perspective, is that we don’t know how to trigger them, and we even think that they are uncompatible with any triggering; the good news, however, for riot, is that despite this ignorance of the trigger, there is a great number of them in the world, a fact that the enemy, besides, still manages to dissimulate. For love, we have no clue: there are no possible statistics.

On the other hand, one does not go to a riot. Riot, precisely, begins where it is, or doesn’t. The activists who arrive the second night already are the recuperators and the enemies of the debate. Only those who suddenly are <there>, make a riot, and they first may prolong it in a supersession. We never have “recourse” to riot, because the very nature of riot forbids to have recourse to it: that is what a Mandosio, raised with traditional leftism, will never be able to understand1. Thus our stance on riot is to say that it is a very peculiar form of struggle, because it contains, in principle yet not every time, a founding moment of our goal, and because it has multiplied throughout the second half of the 20th century. This multiplication is significant, and we have attempted to explain this significance in two complimentary ways: one is the synthesis of this phenomenon, scattered but in quantitative and qualitative augmentation fifteen years ago, synthesis that we have called the Iranian revolution; the other is the analysis of the phenomenon, or at least of its visible signs, that we have called spirit, or alienation.

Lastly, the key moment of riot, which contains its supersession without having its perspective lost, indeed happens in the bleak Parisian suburbs as well as in the beautiful plains of the Ganges. The enemy control doesn’t understand this moment, like us. That is why the threat against this world is ever so present: it first depends on the conditions to be created, and not on the existing conditions. Riot is so feared because its moment expresses a future, and because the managers and the other conservatives like the leftists seek their rationality in the past. Naturally, some of riots’ formal aspects depend on the pretext, on the weaponry and on the propaganda, and these formal aspects may even sometimes limit the goal of the event that could have triggered a beginning of debate; yet the true content of riot is in the moment that slips from our conceptual nets and from our decreases of unsatisfaction. That is why France may very well compare to Gujarat, Kabylia or Port-au-Prince in this matter.

For riot is a frustrating thing for those who wish to use it, that is for all of today’s Blanquists. It cannot be triggered, it cannot, in principle, be joined after its start, when it is in the distance, in some state in which the conditions are not yet as tight as here, it is beautiful but too far, and when it is here, it is small and ugly, and even this disgraceful detonation refuses to welcome the big-hearted activists who wish they could participate in anything that moves. Our leftists, salon revolutionary, thus cannot know riot. That is why they are a bit annoyed at hearing about it a lot. And since they don’t know this event–for them, it still is the Blanqui riot–, they don’t listen what has been found out recently about its content, as this content, it must be emphasized today, is recent. The word riot of the 19th century is much closer from the Roman riot than from the riot of the second half of the 20th century. In what we have tried to reveal about riot, this is what they have been unable to hear. Here is a form of social struggle that has become a form of public expression. Riot has fundamentally changed, even though the word has remained the same.

Finally, we must say that we agree with the then French prime minister, Villepin, when he said that the 2005 movement was not a movement of riots. During the month of november 2005, there were less than three events that deserve to be called riots, in the sense that had been defined by the Bibliothèque des Emeutes. There is on the contrary a strong will to extend the French word for riot, “émeute,” to make it a “feeling,” an attention catching word, and also a word close from the English “riot” which has the same meaning, but in a much more devalued sense than in French. People tend, for ideological reasons, to call riot a mere street brawl. That language moves is quite according to the movement of spirit; but that the notion of riot moves towards a great banality is a movement towards the loss of the moment that, in riot, matters. This inflation of the word has indeed also affected, a few decades ago, the word love, the spirituality of which has hence been lost. And revolution, by becoming a sort of synonymous of putsch, is another example of this attempt to turn the difficulty of understanding by the dispersion of usage.

(téléologie ouverte, 2008)