Rivolte contemporanee come agire destituente

Abstract

The article would like to sketch a cross-section of contemporary riots as a practice that can be analyzed through the category of destituent acting, intertwining this understanding with the concepts of loops and circularity. The parallelism between the two lines of analysis can be declined in several senses: cybernetic (Curcio) and algorithmic (McQuillan, Galloway, Rouvroy) capitalism is based on a performative and retroactive circularity-described since the dawn of cybernetics (Wiener)-that consolidates through its operation the identities and subjective embedding that data are supposed to describe; the circulation of commodities and subjects within preformed environments (Foucault) is one of the constitutive features of contemporary capitalism (Clover), which simultaneously produces spaces of surplus and surplus with respect to this circulation; sovereignty is based on an ontological-political structure based on the presupposing threshold (Agamben) that projects as the origin the result of power. Revolts, understood as destituent action, undermine the exercise of all three of these loop functions: opacity and devastation of control devices deactivate the performance of data or inflate it to dissipation; blockage, irruption on the public scene and habitable condensation of life forms jam the circularity of the biopolitical or imperial metropolis; the threshold that places anarchy and civil war at the mythical origin of the sovereign order is belied in the actual deposition of government, which does not resemble the presupposed mythical image.