Total rioting: from metaphysics to politics

Abstract

This article further develops understandings of urban riot as a social and political symptom to consider the riot as a situated and situating biographical moment, a personal experience which is both signifying and significant. It argues for a paired understanding of riots as a set of physical incarnated (re)actions and as ‘total social fact’ – involving ‘society as a whole’ and putting its institutions at work ‘all together and at once’ (Mauss, 1950). It switches from ‘urban riots’ as a descriptive notion to total rioting as an analytical tool. Total rioting consists of intertwined social upheavals and exchanges, writ through the metaphysical, sociological, poetical and political. It assembles people of a particular kind forever, hence manufacturing social solidarities and subjectivities. As a particular response to specific problems, it reveals how a contemporary state of metaphysical, social and political insecurity generates new forms of empowering projections and intimate policies; and why what is destroyed is precisely what matters. As an attempt to make and unmake society at the same time, it has become the pinnacle of a paradoxical political socialization process. Being less a language for a broader political communication than an insider trading activity, its long-term outcomes reshape the politics of recognition and claims for visibility.