On the Riot – Library of Riots (1990)

^{_{Bordeaux, June 29, 2023}}

From Bulletin n°1 de la Bibliothèque des Emeutes, 1990 (originally published in French)

There is currently no conscious debate on the finality of humanity. The aim of humanity is necessarily to end. Which is why the absence of such a debate goes against this aim.

The debate on the end of humanity is the very content of history. As well, this debate alone is the criterion for what is historic or not. Today’s lack of a debate is not just fortuitous, because human society is organized in the absence of debate, including the substituting of the appearances of debate for this real absence. This is why those who fight such an organization fight this absence. Today, it is outside of consciousness that this battle has been repressed. Alienation has so completely invaded consciousness that consciousness appears as a moment of alienation.

But while this phenomenon of the absence of history is generalized within history, it cannot suppress history. On the contrary, it is the debate on humanity which supersedes this phenomenon. This debate on humanity finds itself outside of consciousness, against alienation. Alienation has certainly invaded all mediation, all organization, but it cannot capture immediacy and spontaneity. Here is where the real debate on humanity, the world and their end has found refuge and is concentrated. It is a practical debate where words once again become onomatopoeia and ideas become blows. But this raw negativity, brutal and savage, is all that is here.

The riot is the only practical and public moment in which alienation is criticized as the organization of a society that blocks any debate about humanity’s finality. As soon as it is organized, it ceases to be a riot. It is the strength and weakness of this sole forum for humans wanting to master humanity that it is just a burst of life without consciousness: the riot is currently the only movement of thought faster than alienation.

Riots are easy to recuperate, discredit or crush, except when and where they take place. In the profundity of the times in which we find ourselves, each riot is like the awkward and angry scraping of flint, but whose result transforms coldness and obscurity into their opposite. Always too quickly drowned or stamped out, modern riots are nonetheless the living refusal of submission and alienation, a crowbar that opens perspectives, a refusal of limits that one is tempted to call limitless, for which the key of consciousness has become rusty.

Roman plebeians’ riots, peasant uprisings, or nineteenth century working class riots are very different from modern ones, contrary to what is generally assumed. It is their content which is different: a Roman senator, a feudal lord or even a nineteenth century wheeler-dealer prince could not have imagined what today is revealed, that the richness of humanity has taken refuge in these impoverished revolts of the poor.

They are also different in terms of the conditions that determine them: they are always a threat to the State in an entirely statist world; they are always urban in an entirely urbanized world; they have become battles for thought in a world where thought has been freed from humans. Where there are bosses, they are the overrunning of these bosses; where there are commodities, they are the destruction of commodity value. Their actors are different from those of the past: they are anonymous.

Contrary to what is generally assumed, there are no longer any manipulated riots. Potential manipulators have alienated their mastery of the world, and in leading the crowds astray have themselves been led astray by the crowds. If only because of the number of participants, the modern riot has gone beyond any measure. Semi-literate, poor and dissatisfied, the enemies of the riot resemble potential rioters more than its potential recuperators. But the reverse is also true: modern rioters are loaded with ideology, fear and satisfaction. And their separations, which this sole modern festival threatens to supersede, constitute their first policing, at the same time as the end of any form of police. Finally, the immensity of the shame of what they reveal, more than the extent of the fear they provoke, forbids their attribution to a party, as in the past. The silence that covers them also discredits them.

In time, a riot is something very short, usually lasting a few hours, rarely a few days. In space, a riot is very localized, always taking place in a city, often in just one neighborhood and often in a segregated neighborhood. Today, the rioters of the world make up only a tiny minority of the world. Separated from each other, they leave the narrative and motivations of their emotion to those who had no part in it other than fighting against it. It’s not uncommon today to find rioters believing more in what’s on the news than in their own memories. Almost always defeated on the terrain (to the extent that many of them consider the mere fact of fighting as a victory, which sometimes contributes to their defeat), they are also defeated in the theorization of their beginning of a debate, which is then a liquidation of their beginning of such a debate.

The professionals of the riot, which are at times evoked during these liquidation campaigns, do exist; but they are uniformed or plainclothes police and informers. No one else is paid to be there. Rioters are amateurs: neither hierarchical nor specialists. And if, in different riots, you come across the same rioters, these are the real amateurs.

The rioter risks his life. Those judging the riot without having participated in it only run the risk of shame. At today’s going rate for shame, there is no comparison between rioters and non-rioters when they express themselves. Courage and fear, which in each riot reach paroxysms that cinema and literature still attribute to wars between States, are always abstract outside the riot, allowing those absent, the observer and the enemy, to minimize and conceal. But when courage and fear are freed without limits, other violent emotions are freed too. And to know which ones, when it is a question of riots and not of wars between States, it is necessary to have finished reading, and get going. The beginning of debate on the end of debate is here.

The Bibliotheque des Emeutes will commit no other incitement to riot. Indeed, since the riot is spontaneous, we find it contradictory that anyone would incite it. Consciousness cannot incite unconsciousness. You don’t go to a riot, you’re there. The practice of emotion, that is to say, the finding of limits in its exhaustion, is today either falsified in a spectacle or has fallen out of any mode of use in the sole immediacy. No one has premeditated either the riot or the emotion of their life, hence their poetry. On the other hand, incitement to riot is an act proscribed by law in most of the world’s states. This is one of their lesser contradictions: today, they are the main perpetual incitement to riot, the truth-suffocator that makes it explode.

In itself, a riot is just an intense moment that is both light and profound. Its inherent aim is its propagation. When a riot spreads from a neighborhood to a city, and from a city to every city in a State, from one day to the next and then to an entire week, from contempt to consideration, and from ignorance to universal consciousness, it constitutes what can be called an insurrection. An insurrection which overflows State borders, which takes the totality of its object and reveals the foundation of human contention, is a revolution. There is no example of a revolution that did not begin with a riot.

_{[Editorial note: In French, the word for ‘riot’, émeute, is associated with emotion and movement with a crowd or pack. – M.Gouldhawke]}

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