Dispositions: Thoughts on Love & Riot

“It is usually the essence of mob formation… to find some common signal that makes everyone confident that, if he acts on it, he will not be acting alone.”

-Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (1960)

We decided to ask a few short questions on love and riots as a way to understand not only what is lacking from liberal politics, but in order to find a pivot on which to exit those politics and recapture the forgotten affective elements (rage, desire, etc) that make revolt possible and communicable. Liberal politics have averted and suspended what is essential in the ongoing war.

In love, as in riots, there is always something that escapes classical political thought. By their nature, these explosions do not expand from sedentary ideas of justice, brotherhood or equality. Like a virus, they open up something communicable and collective. We are interested in intensifying the conditions for this communication: understanding its disposition.

A disposition is a preparation, inclination or a state of readiness to act in a particular way under particular conditions. Disposition has etymological roots in the Latin for affection (affectionem), meaning “inclination, influence, permanent state of feeling” the stem of which (affec- from afficere) means, “to do something, to act on”.

Dispositions always have two sides. There is on one side the occurrence of a disposition (which may not be apparent) and on the other side its manifestation. For example, an electron has a minimal electric charge often described as ‘hidden’. “We have to do something very special to see that it is there. One might say that in the right kind of experiment the charge ‘makes itself manifest’.”

Like love, a riot can sometimes take us by surprise when we are not prepared. It would be in vain to say that we can prepare a riot, though we can at least prepare for riots: do what it takes to help ignite the fire, to release the charge.

At times we are pressed towards the game: towards the decision to riot or to love. When a situation arises it is always a question of an ethical disposition – we are forced to act upon our disposition, or to return, to flee. If you do not play, you cannot win.

The disposition towards love, as with riots, allows us to seize upon openings and situations. As such, we think there is a direct connection between the bonds that make up the way we live and organize, and our disposition towards riots; that is to say, between our modes of organizing, and our relationship to the idea of communism. It is not born only from our rage towards the arrogance of power, but through our modes of living together. It is these modes that cultivate our dispositions, and our readiness to strike.

Like essentially all human desire, love and riots are events that are always a matter of relations between people. A riot always needs a crowd, just as the lover always needs the beloved. And further, the riot can only occur through a sufficient amount of confidence that others, too, will riot. There must be people gathered who have a disposition towards riot, and they must also believe that others in that crowd desire a riot too. As with love, it is a contagious confidence. The first nervous kiss, or the first window smashed, “is not a signal that tells a person what to do. It is a signal that tells a person what other people will probably do”.

Why is the affective lacking?

None of what we hold in common is outside the war underway, most evident through the policing and management of our bodies, our ethos and emotions. Politics, reduced to a question of management, has become opposed to all that remains: we have left aside love, depoliticized friendship and art, become separated from the field of a deployment of passion. Politics has been hollowed of meaning.

This depoliticization of our lives has negated the development of a collective ethical foundation in favor of a mechanical management of the political. Affinity is seen as merely a matter for our private lives, while our private lives have been totally depoliticized. This is an essential part of liberal ideology. That which appears evident and desirable in our ‘private’ lives, what it requires and which is taken as an intimate truth, is hollowed out of all possibility for political organization. Personal lives are situated in the spaces of production and decision-making suspended from political problems of existence. All other questions become merely an after-thought to the way we interact with our roommates over a casual collective dinner after a laborious ‘organizing’ meeting.

Affinity has been abandoned to a lifestyle: nothing more, nothing less.

Those who have resolved to live ‘alternatively’ have often become isolated in their ‘alternative’ experiences, effectively coexisting with capitalism. The attempts for collective living and the inclinations towards hedonistic utopias and other life-style adventures exchanged offensive strategies for good vibrations. Where they succeed in individual self-actualization, they abandon concrete attempts towards communization.

There always comes the moment, in the individual retreat or the cocoon of the community, where challenging questions arise from the world beyond. Faced with the inevitability of a political meeting with the rest of the world, a position is always taken. Distance from “world affairs” is never a neutral decision. “Private” salvation is always synonymous with dissociation and treason. We cannot justify distrusting all those who follow this aspiration. But we must mistrust this aspiration as a fundamental existential given. The story is already partisan. It is the liberal story of Locke to Thoreau through Smith. Individuals at work towards the processes of individualization. Not that communism was ever their goal. Their world is a small island in which they find comfort within. They abandoned class war to serve their own greed.

Changing individual modes of access and accumulation does not change the broader modes of production and exploitation. Our political connections of affinity, voided of a strategy and maintained only through subsistence, have been emptied of political content.

The misery imposed by liberalism over our lives will not decompose in the commune’s dry toilet in the forest.

Returning to disposition

Reconnecting the disposition towards love with the disposition towards riots means reconnecting affinity and affect with political life. We cannot divide what we want from that which we fight against. On one hand there is what we wish to build (a shared usage of the world, communisation), and on the other that which we wish to eradicate (bosses, prisons, borders, cops, patriarchy, the state). Construction and destruction are two movements within the same impulse. It is a development of dispositions grounded in the strength of emotions that pass beyond managed thought.

Developing our collective ethical position proposes first to understand the basis of our connection: “what is strong and what we intend not to surrender on any account”. A centre of focus: a knot. Our ethical position, and our political position, cannot emerge as a material force if we avoid developing collective dispositions. ⚑