Riotous Assemblies: Afterword

The fissures in the organization of society that has obtained for some while widen weekly. And yet this anxious persistence, this uneasy suspension. Will there be a restoration? Greater catastrophe? Which should we prefer?

—Joshua Clover ([2016] 2019), Riot. Strike. Riot., p. 31

The closing sentences from the introduction to Joshua Clover’s ([2016] 2019) Riot. Strike. Riot. describe a kind of living between: a poised indecision with regard to historical processes that Clover, invoking Antonio Gramsci, refers to as an interregnum. Since its publication in 2016, the feeling of living in a world freshly split apart has not resolved but instead intensified. The “uneasy suspension” Clover observed in the aftermath of Tahrir Square and Ferguson has only become uneasier, while any “restoration” of a prior liberal order, however undesirable on its own terms, is now so remote as to seem impossible. To evoke a Victorian rather than a Romantic-era analogue, the present wanders between two worlds, one dead, the other struggling to be born (Arnold 1867, ll. pp. 85–86). What comes next?

The last email I have from Daniel is from May 2018, and in it, we discuss his plans for a Special Issue on the topic of riot. It is hard to read now. He had been thinking about the topic a lot, it appears, having described to me in conversation his idea that attention to historical forms of revolt against unlivable social orders might be particularly important at that moment. I have come to understand that since the release of his astonishing book in May 2017, Daniel’s thought on riot had taken shape in dialogue with Clover’s text. But it had also been informed, I think, by the concrete events that in those years made the riot form newly salient as a collective and therefore political practice. Clover calls riot a strategy, though I do not know whether Daniel would consent to that cognitivist or intellectualizing terminology.

Multilingual Subjects is a gorgeous act of intellectual solidarity not least because Daniel’s argument there for the creative political power of minoritized speech stems from a commitment to develop a theory or conceptual framework that might prove adequate to the lived practice of human beings almost totally crushed under the wheels of established power. There are interchapters in the book, you might recall, each of which centers on a single person whose improvised activities and poetic redeployments of official discourse had been almost entirely lost to standard histories. In Daniel’s telling, it was such subordinated, but in no way conquered, people—the poor, the young, the unlettered, the racialized, “the students,” as he would say—who had the capacity to generate vernacular oppositional practices at the edges of what was in the eighteenth century crystallizing into “standard” speech and orthodox ways of being. Multilingual lives is what he called these interstitial testimonials to lived or embodied theory. In this way did the ineradicable glow of human creativity emanate, beautifully, from the core of Daniel’s project—all his projects.

Anyway, to Clover’s list of concrete sites inspiring a conceptual return to the topic of riot in 2016—Tahrir Square, Clichy-sous-Bois, Tottenham, Oakland, Ferguson, Baltimore—we could add Minneapolis, where, in late May 2020, crowds used propane tanks, Molotov cocktails, and other improvised tools to burn a police station to the ground. The collaborative act was an inchoate but locally effective insubordination against a legal regime demonstrably tied to white supremacist violence and the maintenance of capitalist apartheid. It was a victory—if fleeting. Nearer to Daniel’s own neighborhood in Washington, DC, where he and I would meet for coffee sometimes and sit in the park, crowds that spring burned cars and broke into stores with such success that the counterrevolutionary mobilization invoked to suppress them included some 1700 military reservists, along with thousands of other troops, all hoping to “Control DC.”1 Given that the National Guard occupies Washington DC at the time of this writing, and that I saw soldiers in the street on the very morning I drafted this sentence, it appears that the spasms of uprising and countermeasure of 2016 and 2020 become visible, today, as premonitions. “Theory is immanent to struggle,” Clover says. “Often enough it must hurry to catch up to a reality that lurches ahead” (p. 3).

I do not know what Daniel thought of the Minneapolis insurrection, or what theoretical and practical motions he perceived in the linked rebellions springing into the world in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd that COVID-19 spring of 2020. Nor yet can I know how he would have sketched the historical arc linking those insubordinations to the cycles of popular refusal and vernacular resistance of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which he knew well. Clover says that the strike uses an act of collective defiance to re-set the wage, meaning that this form works within the existing regime of commodification to effectively adjust the price for labor, or wage. Its logics are of organization and discipline. The riot is a motlier form, since its two most salient modes of appearance are improvised economic destruction and looting (p. 29), a “conjoined negation of market exchange and market logic” by which the dispossessed arrange themselves against visible institutions of capitalist exchange without any clear articulation of what might come next (p. 29). In a social order that presumes commercial institutions and the property relations they express to be sacrosanct embodiments of quasi-natural laws, riot will perforce appear as “always and everywhere illegitimate” (p. 37).

In the bread and food riots of eighteenth-century England, the newly or continually immiserated would amass so as to secure the most basic element of social reproduction, often potatoes. In the Manchester riots of 1812, for instance, “Angry crowds, led by women, forced shopkeepers to sell food at low prices and carried off the stock of those who refused; later, cartloads of potatoes were seized from dealers at the market and carried off” (Poole 2019, p. 66). These “rude and uncultivated savages,” as witnesses called them, included colliers, weavers, and other members of the early-industrial precariat now gathered into a new social body, all of them (said witnesses) “far beyond the control of civil power” (qtd Poole 2019, p. 67). Like these riotous acts of the Romantic period, contemporary looting, Clover says, is a form of price-setting, albeit a setting of the price at zero (p. 29). It is clear, anyway, that an insistence on free goods and universal access in a social economy defined by mechanized scarcity connects the struggles of the General Ludd and Captain Swing periods to the uprisings of neoliberal austerity.

Who riots? For Clover, as several of this Special Issue’s contributors note, riot and police are twins, and the figure of law-preserving violence visible in the armed cop or helmeted soldier forms a dialectical pair with the riotous insurrectionist, whose anarchic movements seem to negate the meaning of law as such. This shadowy twinning means that the riot opens up for analysis the core principles of sovereignty, since in the encounter between “riot police” and “rioter,” the violence necessary to sustain and preserve the law faces against the violence that would render that legal order null, with nothing to guarantee the result but the outcome of the encounter itself.

With the Manchester-area riots and Peterloo in mind, Percy Shelley observes the riot’s intimacy with the sovereignty problem in The Mask of Anarchy (Shelley [1819] 2009), which spins around the dialectical relation between rioter and riot police until it is the law’s representatives that represent law’s absence, and anarchy itself is worshiped as “law and god”:

Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd,

To the earth their pale brows bowed;

Like a bad prayer not overloud,

Whispering—‘Thou art Law and God.’—

Then all cried with one accord

‘Thou art King, and God, and Lord;

Anarchy, to thee we bow,

Be thy name made holy now!’

(ll. pp. 66–73)

In Clover’s schematic historical account, strikes are a form of revolt proper to organized industrial capitalism. They are aimed at wage levels, while riots, which do not emerge from or seek to redress labor contracts, are instead focused on prices. Where the strike finds workers “appearing in their role as workers,” the riot “features participants with no necessary kinship but their dispossession” (p. 16). For these reasons and others, the riot becomes byword for disorganization and disorder, a phenomenon that, in official or normal accounts at least, cannot rise to the level of analytic object. It is hard to narrate. Sal Nicolazzo notes that because of this strange effect, accounts of riots often center on sounds—halloo, huzzah—and linger on the problem of plurality. The riot presents a particular social, analytical, and finally grammatical or poetic problem, Nicolazzo says, insofar as it is the expressive result of a being (“crowd”) that can be ascribed interiority but cannot be considered singular. Does a crowd have intent? In what sense, if any, can this plural being be said to exhibit (Clover’s word) strategy? And how can an aggregated collection of wills be considered to have a single inner vector of desire?

For Hobbes in Leviathan or Rousseau in The Social Contract, this is the central problem of political membership and what Rousseau calls the general will, and thus again does the riot crystalize philosophical and practical dilemmas of sovereignty that make this topic a key site for investigating not only legal order but the theories of right that would sustain it. All this is no doubt why the riot has from the outset been understood as a byword for existential threats to political order, The Riot Act of King George I (1714) being only the most culturally resilient insignia of the threat to political stability inherent in riot as social form. Two and a half centuries later, the Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956 helped the Apartheid regime in South Africa (temporarily) secure its stranglehold on race-based supremacy by outlawing anything that might “engende[r] feelings of hostility between the European and non-European inhabitants of the Union” (p. 33). Outlawed is not only killing and looting but also any gathering of people that might “show a manifest intention of destroying or doing serious damage to, any valuable property, whether movable or immovable” (p. 39). How a plural body might show its intention, or have an intention, is not discussed. The established authorities will know it when they see it.

In an account that connects the European revolutions of 1848 to Tahrir Square of 2010–11, historian Christopher Clark reports that while poverty had always existed, the “‘pauperism’ of the early to mid-nineteenth century differed from traditional forms of poverty,” since it was now “collective and structural” rather than “dependent upon individual contingencies like sickness, bereavement, injury, or crop failures” (pp. 33–34). The new structural immiseration of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant that insufficiency became a feature of the system rather than a bug. That is because the engine of accumulation now required standing armies of hungry bodies whose physical needs—their corporeal drive to sustain life in the face of scarcity—were a mechanism to be calibrated toward the goal of keeping the machine churning. All this helps us see the crisis form of riot as inherent to capitalist accumulation in the early stages of industrial and protoindustrial capital. Revolutionary processes that are “non-linear, convulsive, intermittently violent and transformative” (Clark 2023, p. 7) in this sense link food uprisings of the 1750s, machine-breaking in the 1830s, and the revolutions of 1848 to the convulsive insurrections of late-stage neoliberalism and technofeudalist accumulation in the age of digital fascism.

What would Daniel have written about such strange itineraries? Whose stories would he have told? In Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler refers to “the need for a more generalized struggle against precarity, one that emerges from a felt sense of precarity, lived as slow death, a damaged sense of time, or unmanageable exposure to arbitrary loss, injury, or destitution” (Butler 2018, p. 68). In doing so, they echo Nicolazzo’s account of the riotous crowd’s strange grammatical properties by calling this felt sense of precarity “at once singular and plural” (p. 69). This felt sense is singular, because it is lived out always in a particular body, and thus the domain of the phenomenological; but it is plural because it will always be felt however differentially across bodies, in a mass or group, or better, a collective. It is never just about you.

One of the last sustained conversations I remember having with Daniel was about his time serving on a grand jury in DC. He was immersed in the trial—sequestered into it, in fact, if I remember it right; and the legal specifics and identifying elements of the case were things he was prohibited from discussing. But there were details he could not help but pass on. He told me one day that he had learned about a network of vernacular taxicabs in Southeast DC, not unlike the more familiar form of so-called “gypsy” cabs, but in this case, the cars were old Buicks and the cars of grandmothers and the elderly. These would move between supermarkets in the food deserts and landscapes of social abandonment in Southeast, connecting people across vast swathes of derelict urban space and infill lots decorated in edge-grass and broken shopping carts. For Daniel, this system of transportation was a kind of infrastructure from below: an improvised, collective set of countermeasures against neoliberalism that were as glorious to him as any poem. And they were in some ways more tangible, since these activities together constituted a kind of tweak in the deep order of a life that had been built to wear people down and kill them. His face lit up when he described this system to me, as he elaborated in vivid detail this odd network of transportation and conveyed all this specificity in the wonderment of someone looking on an art object—but in this case, the art object was a collective torque in the smooth operating procedures of a world that was then, and is now, functionally obscene. Daniel showed in his life that there is no escape from these processes, but he also lived out a practice whereby the work of the scholar is to make himself adequate to these interventions, to learn a way to understand them.

The historiography tells us that the “golden age of food riots” ran from the 1740s through the 1820s (qtd Clover [2016] 2019, p. 49), a timeline that positions the eighteenth century and perhaps Romanticism itself in the vortex of modernization and enclosure and the transformative capture of nature leading to the present moment. After the food riots of 1812 in Manchester, a special assizes was held at Lancaster to render justice upon those who had so brazenly flouted the law. King, and God, and Lord would be obeyed. Brought to the gallows was one Hannah Smith, fifty-four years of age, who had prevailed on the merchants to sell to her provisions at a fair price. “I never touched a potato,” she said. “Nor had one in my apron.” But she was hanged anyway, having been judged, so the government affirmed, “clearly guilty of a riot, and as it seems a felony, for to oblige a man by force to part with his property for less than he chuses to sell it for is felony” (qtd Poole 2019, p. 68). Feloniously, Smith re-set the price of goods to a level that might enable her to live; as a result, she died.

It is an honor to contribute a word to this Special Issue on riot, and to attempt in Daniel’s honor to describe his own intellectual practice in solidarity with the dispossessed. If lateral lines connect theory and practice, linking material facts and the ideas that describe them, then it might be that even a Special Issue of scholarly essays, perhaps even a posthumous one, can chart faint and gestural coordinates for what might, someday, become yet larger and more riotous assemblies.