Assembly, Affect and the Disorders of Desire

• In Event: Insurgent Imaginaries

Abstract

Shock, outrage, fear, frustration, anger, solidarity: these were some of the affective currents circulating around what has come to be known, in various quarters, as the “Rodney King Riots” or the Los Angeles Rebellion. While then-President George H. W. Bush invoked the Insurrection Act in response to the events and condemned them as the “sickeningly sad” “brutality of a mob,” Congresswoman Maxine Waters insisted that the events should be described an “insurrection,” explaining that “I am angry and I have a right to that anger and the people out there have a right to that anger.” These responses indicate two very different affective orientations toward the street gatherings, and they correspond to different interpretations of the gatherings’ political valence. What role did such affects play in seeing the assemblies as (a- or anti-political) riots or as (political) uprising? In what ways is affect one dimension or condition of an assembly’s political intelligibility?

In this paper, I engage these questions by reading Stanley Cavell’s passionate utterance alongside Sara Ahmed’s framework of affective economies. Those on the streets of Los Angeles in 1992 were engaged in performative acts that did something by virtue of their embodied presence in public space: declaring themselves materially, the assembled also effected a collective that did not precede that gathering. I argue, however, that as a series of embodied “speech” acts these gatherings were also public acts whose performative force depended upon their audiences in unpredictable ways. Put broadly, as a public act assembly is not governed by convention but instead invites its audiences into what Cavell calls the “disorders of desire” – an invitation to others who might refuse and disavow community with those gathered on the streets, as many like Bush did. I suggest that the affects swirling around the LA Rebellion / Riots index different public responses to that invitation. These responses, in turn, reflect the extent to which public audiences see themselves as sharing a world with the assembled and the political content that those audiences can find intelligible in the collective act of assembly.

Author

• Stacey Liou, University of Florida