In Defense and Praise of Rioting
This piece was originally written in May 2020 after the burning of a police precinct in Minneapolis.
Rioting gets a bad rap. Yes it tends to inconvenience others. Yes occasionally someone dies, and no, it’s not a form of constructive political organizing. But these criticisms can also be made of professional sports; yet most who find rioting unconscionable would pour into the streets to riot if the Super Bowl were canceled for anything short of a planet sterilizing asteroid strike.
In many cases, folks will try to claim a greater dignity for a riot by calling it a “rebellion.” A wide range of things have been called acts of rebellion. In that way, the word “rebellion” is similar to “resistance.” Because these are words we’re allowed to use with positive connotation, and because dominant orders will often apply them to the violent acts that made them dominant, they’re words that can be readily co-opted for actions acceptable to the dominant order, even when the claimed goal of those actions is overthrowing the dominant order. I can’t think of any social order that claims to have arisen out of a riot. Even if one ever has or ever did grow from pure rioting, I doubt the rulers would admit to it. They’d call it a revolution, a rebellion or even a protest, however little what actually happened resembles any of these.
“Uprising,” “rebellion” and “protest” imply a greater level of organization than a riot. Uprising and rebellion speak of specific opposition to the current order. Protest speaks of strident supplication to and demands made of that order; which implies that the existing order will be largely left in place to meet those demands.
Uprising and rebellion often suggest an organizing authority, potentially the germ of a new state. Uprising speaks to the upsetting of a hierarchy, the first becoming last and the last first; or, at least, that the last won’t be quite as last as they were before the uprising. If nothing else, there is connoted some definite intention to “rise upward.” There’s a political program implied, if only in the euphemism chosen after the fact.
At most you can call a riot a temporary uprising, but even then, insofar as those who are “uprising” act not in concert, it’s difficult to see how they can be said to be attempting a vertical move of any kind, except in the sense that seeking to destroy order itself by refusing to participate in “order” of any kind constitutes a rising above or beyond “ordered” existence.
A riot ignores the state, both the government and the existing state of affairs. It is the denial of order, the returning of sovereignty to The People as a collection of individuals; neither as a state existing nor a state trying to exist, nor even as a political community, except the small “polis” that emerges whenever two or more people encounter each other.
To riot is the most human of acts, a mass of individual decisions that depend on hundreds of others. A lone rioter is quickly arrested, a thousand rioters, though there is no coordination and no hierarchy, strikes the state as a fist. This is not to deny the role and work of organizers. But in conditions such as these, organizers function more as suggesters. Any influence they might exercise over the flow of events comes in the form of moral authority. They cannot deny anyone access to the disorder, there is no kicking anybody out of the riot. The riot belongs to everybody because it belongs to nobody.
The riot is proof that every rule can be broken. The fact of the riot makes the rules of the riot, it brings into being what Frantz Fanon called a new rhythm of existence. The old logics of productivity, respectability and obedience boil away like dew in the desert noon. A rule which can be broken might one day no longer be a rule. This is what the riot promises: That what humanity has made, humanity can unmake. The riot is a liminal space, a space between worlds. It is not quite the new world, nor even the making of the new world, but a vision of the fact that new worlds are possible. It’s the actors in a play stepping off stage to remember that they are but human beings pretending to be other people.
The impossibly possible worlds that live in the hearts and minds of the maladjusted burst forth as the feet and fists of The People gone into the streets. Last night, protestors in Minneapolis seized a police precinct building and shot fireworks over it. This was not the act of creating a new state, this was the act of free people knowing their freedom is temporary and deciding to make the most of it. After a riot, only the image is left, and this image is the truth of freedom, a shadow burnt into the hearts of The People, a shadow made flesh, a ghost renewed to life whenever fear flees before it. The truth of this apparition maintains the fire of sovereignty until the day of sovereignty finally comes.
Some will say that such displays symbolize unseriousness, that they are incoherent spectacles borne of childish aesthetic impulses. If such displays are meaningless, we must ask why the most powerful entities on earth, the nation-states, show reverence to flashy pieces of cloth. They talk to the cloth, sing to the cloth, present arms to the cloth; hardened dictators weep over the cloth, why? Because human is a symbol making animal, and the human animal is made human by symbols. The state lives because we believe it lives, its symbols are the living reality of the state. All the tangible effects of the state depend on our belief that it exists, the symbols rely on the state as much as the state relies on its symbols.
As a state lives in symbols, so does a riot. A riot is not political because it comes with a coherent program. A riot is political because it proposes, by the language of action and the very fact of its happening, the death of order. We know freedom and oppression by what we can and can’t do, who can and can’t do what, and who decides. The more grandiose and expressive the symbols of temporary freedom, the more deeply the riot will write itself into history.
A riot, then, is never a failure, for it was created as a thing never meant to last. When a new state is possible, Very Important People with great aspirations and the egos to match emerge out of the air bearing paperwork and pompous affectations, it is a suitably majestic affair; the youth are marginal, the poor are silenced, the insufficiently grandiloquent merely serve as spectators. The rebellion and the uprising are suited to military discipline and military hierarchy. The riot is a young, poor, plainspoken, unofficial and anti-official act. Riots have no spokespeople, there is no rioting committee, the riot is because it must be, and because it must be, it wins though it loses and prevails though vanquished. The point of the riot is that no matter how strong the state is, The People can still make it disappear. The riot is no end unto itself. The new world must get around to being built, but it is the temporary feeding of a hunger, an apparition from the world to come.
We must ask then, why we are chasing the right to be called loving names by the old world which we must destroy? By running away from the implications of the name “riot” (to say nothing of rioting itself): that it is disorganized, that it revels in disorder, that it lacks the regalia of organized rationality because it emerges out of hundreds and thousands of individual rational actors; we accept the judgment of state propaganda that sees zero value in the careful spontaneity of the people. The unwillingness to claim the name “riot,” for uprisings that are defined by independent action in community without hierarchy, and in defiance of coercive ordering, reflects a cowardly discomfort.
It will be a mournful day when humans cease to riot, our tomb will close and history die. The riot is not a state to be avoided but one to be achieved. Glorious will be the day when people care for each other in solidarity as the best rioters do, when we all bind up each other’s wounds free of charge and without pretension, when we move together critically and all life is a spectacle of creative purpose, when nobody is left behind and all things are possible.