Award winning poet Joshua Clover theorises the riot as the form of the coming insurrection
Joshua Clover is a professor of literature and critical theory at the University of California Davis. A widely published essayist, poet, and cultural theorist, his most recent books are Red Epic and 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About.
Riot, in this absolutely necessary book, is considered as
differential procedure and rigorous improvisational method, as
essential repertoire on the way from general malaise to general
strike. But then this conception folds tightly yet disorderly into
a new and open set of questions. It's not that the raging, ragged
entrance to the new golden age is the new golden age. It's not that
theory can't bear a riot. It's just that riot makes new ways of
seeing what theory can and can't do and imposes upon us a kind of
knowledge of our own embarrassing and already given resources of
enjoyment. Joshua Clover says riot deserves a proper theory but
here-sly, stone cold-he gives us more than that. Now we have some
guidelines for the new and ongoing impropriety that fleshes forth
and fleshes out our optimal condition.
*Fred Moten, scholar, activist, poet and author of In the Break:
The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition and The
Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study*
In its sweep, rigor, and elegance, Riot. Strike. Riot. is
pleasurable and provocative, worthy of the urgent debates it should
inspire.
*Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the
Hip-Hop Generation and Who We Be: The Colorization of
America*
Riot. Strike. Riot. is the crystalline analysis of this fraught
moment-between communism and anarchism, between street protest and
economic strike. Clover's text is clear without being simple,
contemporary yet historical, and affectionate without being
mawkish-much like a riot, in fact, it opens up the future while
remembering that the past is comprised of little other than
exploitation, exclusion and the kinds of violence that deliberately
are attributed to the very people who suffer most from it.
*Nina Power, senior lecturer in philosophy at Roehampton University
and author of One-Dimensional Woman*
One of the liveliest, sharpest, and erudite cultural theorists in
the US.
*The Stranger*
Frisky, audacious . Riot. Strike. Riot screams across the sky of
our electoral theater.
*Chicago Tribune*
[Riot. Strike. Riot] thrills. It elucidates and, in a way,
valorizes a taboo fixture of the political arena in an era of
seemingly perpetual economic crisis and withering patience for mere
reform.
*East Bay Express*
Phenomenal...The genius of Riot. Strike. Riot lies in its concise
and historically confident analysis of riots.
*Public Books*
Joshua Clover provides a history of the present that is at once
erudite and militant. In unfailingly elegant prose he not only
traces where today's struggles came from but also proposes how they
can chart the path to a new future.
*Michael Hardt, co-author of Assembly*
If communism is, as Marx wrote, "the real movement which abolishes
the present state of things," then Joshua Clover is its most lucid
and uncompromising contemporary theorist. Among its many virtues,
Riot.Strike.Riot explains how our time of stagnant economic growth,
exclusionary state violence, and uprisings of those left without
reserves, might be capitalism's end times. In doing so, he
challenges all of us who are committed to bending the status quo
toward justice to an ambition adequate to its breaking point.
*Nikhil Pal Singh, author of Race and America’s Long War*
Why do we find police in places where there was once an economy?
This unique book is a
brilliant, clearheaded analysis of the historical relation between
two forms of struggle, focusing
on the riot, a pre-capitalist form returning in the transformed
mode of "riot prime" as one of the
most telling forms of our late capitalist present. Along the way,
Joshua Clover gives us much
needed concepts to deal with the strange new negations we have come
to encounter in this
moment of waning accumulation-Long Crisis, the production of
nonproduction, aerosolized
production-as capital shifts its center of gravity to circulation,
and nonlabor struggles emerge as
the logical form of social conflict based on shared distance from
labor markets rather than shared
labor conditions. R-S-R' is a theory of riot but as such,
crucially, a theory of periodization; it is
essential reading for all students of the present.
*Sianne Ngai, author of Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute,
Interesting*
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