Riot. Strike. Riot

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.