Passionate Utterances and the LA Riots / Uprising

• In Event: Doing Things with Performativity

Abstract

The term “riot” sits awkwardly alongside other forms of political gathering such as “protest,” “demonstration,” and “rally.” In contemporary political discourses, the political status of “riots” is often ambivalent or contested. On the one hand, “riots” are sometimes understood as apolitical or antipolitical due to their alleged looting and/or violence. On the other hand are efforts to reclaim “riots” as distinct forms of political action. Both claims are made in a discursive context in which the naming of political action is itself a terrain of political struggle.

This paper begins from the assumption that examining public discourses about “riots” can help map the topographies of normatively acceptable political action and agency. To this end, it asks: why don’t riots register as political, or, what makes riots ambivalently political? By examining public discourses about the 1992 Los Angeles “Riots” or “Uprising,” the paper suggests that “riots” are those gatherings whose performative force hegemonic publics refuse, disavow, and/or whose shared status remains under contest. As speech acts, so-called riots can inaugurate changes in the social world, from reconstituting “the people” to rearticulating the boundaries of public. Furthermore, as speech acts, so-called riots are suffused with emotions – from anger to excitement, fury to frustration – and in their affective intensity invite public audiences to engage with them. “Riots” can thus be understood as what Stanley Cavell (extending Austin’s performative) called “passionate utterances”: they are collective, embodied efforts to affect audiences and, at once, demands for these audiences to respond in kind – yet to which the latter can and refuse. As the contested political intelligibility of the 1992 Riots / Uprising illustrates, these invitations and refusals are conditioned by constitutive frames of political agency, affect, and action, such that some kinds of public gatherings – of non-normative affect, agent, and/or form – are systematically dismissed as “riots.” That a gathering is called a “riot” thus indicates some refusal of the invitation into the “disorders of desire,” the cost of which is a shared world in which the actions, emotions, experiences of those gathered are intelligible as such.

Author

• Stacey Liou, University of Florida