Anticipation, abolition, possibility: on riots, networked communication, and listening

ABSTRACT This paper considers the riots and protests that irrupted around the world in the wake of the killing of George Floyd on 25 May 2020. It examines the politics of noise and listening in relation to the growing calls for abolition, asking how we can listen to, and for, an abolitionist imperative. The paper contextualizes the riot as a form of struggle that responds to the crises produced by capitalism in its circulatory phase, specifically the production of racialized surplus populations that are subjected to intensive forms of policing. The riot is figured as a politics of immanence that suggests what Ashon T. Crawley calls ‘otherwise possibilities’. The paper tracks the historical conditions that give rise to riots and follows the noise in the street into platform media and back again in order to theorize the riot as a distinct form of struggle that is organized as well as contagious. Turning to the sonicity of the riot, the noise of this collective formation is figured in metaphysical terms as that which accounts for transformation and possibility – an originary turbulence with no single point of origin that foregrounds the relationality of the world. The paper then elaborates on listening as a crucial modality for generative collectivity and solidarity, developing an abolitionist conception of listening that attunes to relationality of noise and foregrounds anticipation and possibility.