#1 12-09-2024 16:20

BE

1990 – On Riot

There is currently no conscious debate on the finality of humanity. The goal of humanity is necessarily to end. This is why the absence of that debate goes against that goal.

The debate on the end of humanity is the very content of history. As well, only this debate is the criterion of what is historical or not. Now, the absence of debate today is not only fortuitous, because the society of humans is organized in the absence of debate, including by substituting appearances of debate for this real absence. This is why those who fight this organization fight this absence. Today, it is outside of the consciousness that this fight is repressed. The alienation has so completely invaded consciousness that consciousness seems a moment of the alienation.

But this phenomenon of the absence of history, generalizing itself in history, cannot suppress history. On the contrary, it is the debate on humanity that overcomes this phenomenon. This debate on humanity finds itself back outside consciousness, against alienation. Alienation has certainly invaded all mediation, all organization, but cannot take hold of immediacy, of spontaneity. It is therefore there that the real debate on humanity, on the world and on their end is refuged and concentrated. It is a practical debate where words have become again some onomatopoeia and ideas some blows. But this uncouth, raw and savage negativity is the only one there.

The riot is the only practical and public moment where alienation is criticized as the organization of a society that prevents any debate on the finality of humanity. As soon as a riot is organized, it ceases to be a riot. It is the strength and the weakness of this only tribune of the humans wanting to master humanity that it is only a spurt of life without consciousness: the riot is currently the only movement of thought faster than alienation. Riots are easy to recuperate, to discredit, to crush; except at the moment and where they take place. In the depth of time where we are, they are each time like flints scraped with clumsiness and anger, but whose result reverses the cold and the darkness. All too quickly drowned or stifled, modern riots are nonetheless the living refusal of submission and resignation, the crowbar that opens perspectives, with limits such that one wants to say without limits, for which the key of consciousness has rusted.
 
 
The riots of the Roman plebs, the jacqueries, or the workers' riots of the 19th century are very different from modern riots, contrary to what is generally accepted. They are different in their content: it could not have occurred to a Roman senator, a great feudal lord, or even a business prince of the 19th century to assume what reveals today, that it is in these poor revolts of the poor that the wealth of humanity has refuged. They are also different by the conditions that determine them: they are always a threat to the state in an entirely statized world; they are always urban in an entirely urbanized world; they have become battles for thought in a world where thought frees itself from humans; where there are leaders, they are the overflow of these leaders, where there are commodities, they are the destruction of the commodity value. Their actors are different from those of the past: they are anonymous. There are no more manipulated riots, contrary to what is generally accepted. Potential manipulators have alienated the mastery of the world, and have lost that of crowds by leading crowds astray. If only by the number of participants, a modern riot has become without possible measure. Semi-literate, poor, and unsatisfied, the enemies of the riot look more like potential rioters than potential riot recuperators. But the reverse is also true: modern rioters are loaded with ideology, fear, and satisfaction. And their separations, which in this only modern festivity threaten to overcome themselves all, make them their first police at the same time as the end of all police. Finally, the immensity of the shame of what they reveal, more than the extent of the fear they provoke, forbids their imputation to a party, as in the past. This silence that covers them also discredits them.

In time, a riot is something very short, usually a few hours, rarely a few days. In space, a riot is very localized, always in a city, often in a single neighborhood of a city, and often in a separate neighborhood. So that the effective rioters in the world constitute today a tiny minority in the world. Separated from each other, they have abandoned even the account and the motivations of their emotion to those who took no part in it, except to fight it. It is not uncommon today to see rioters believing more what a television newscast says of it than what their own memory reminds them. Almost always beaten on the ground (to the point that many of them consider the mere fact of fighting as a victory, what contributes sometimes to their defeat), they are also beaten in the theorization of their beginning of debate, which is then a liquidation of their beginning of debate.

Professionals of rioting, which such liquidation campaigns sometimes report, exist: but they are the police officers, in uniform and plainclothes, and the informers. No one else is paid to be there. The rioters are amateurs, neither hierarchized nor specialists. And if, in various riots, you meet the same rioters, these are the real amateurs.

The rioter risks his life. Whoever judges the riot without having participated risks nothing but his shame. At the price of shame nowadays, there is no comparison between the rioter and the non-rioter at the moment they express themselves. Courage and fear, which in the riot reach the paroxysms that cinema and literature still transpose in wars between states, are always abstract outside the riot, what always allows to minimize it, even to conceal it to the observer, to the absent, to the enemy. But where courage and fear release themselves without limits, also release themselves other violent emotions. And to know which ones, when it comes to riots and not to wars between states, one must have finished reading, and go there. The beginning of the debate on the end of the debate is there.

The Bibliothèque des Emeutes will commit no other incitement to riot. Indeed, the riot being spontaneous, we find it contradictory that someone can incite it. Consciousness cannot incite unconsciousness. One does not go to the riot, one is in. Today, the practice of emotion, that is to say finding limits only in its exhaustion, is either falsified in a spectacle, or fallen outside any How to Use in the sole immediacy. Nobody premeditates any more the riot nor the emotion of its life, hence their poetry. On the other hand, incitement to riot is an act proscribed by law in most states of the world. This is one of their lesser contradictions: they are today the main perpetual incitement to riot, the truth-stifler that makes it explode.

In itself the riot is only an intense moment, both light and deep. Its inherent goal is in its propagation. The propagation of a riot from a neighborhood to a city, and from a city to all those of the state, from one day to the next, and from the next day to a whole week, from contempt to consideration, and from ignorance to universal consciousness, constitutes what can be called an insurrection. And likewise, an insurrection that overflows state borders, that takes the totality as its object and that reveals the fundament of human dispute is a revolution. There is no example of revolutions that did not begin with a riot.

(Bibliothèque des Emeutes, 1990)

12-08-2023

Re : 1990 – On Riot

the 1997 translation by Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed seemed so loose that I felt obliged to do something with my poor means