Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conceive of neoliberal biopolitics as a deterritorialised and deindividualised instrument of influence on society in general and its subjects in particular. They postulate that complicity with neoliberal economic imperatives is inevitably induced by the forms of subjectivisation. In response to these analyses, which delineate the ineluctability of commodification and consumerist logic, this paper suggests that the London Riots of 2011 offer an anti-complicit – and local – protest which disavows the parameters of contemporary capitalist epistemology. In their specific disruption the riots respond to processes of subjectivisation; they cannot be limited to a mode of “destructive violence” (Žižek), bereft of any political dimension. The riots defied the logics of racial, class-related, and gendered intelligibility so pivotal for neoliberal regimes of power and punishment, while offering both, the perspective and the voice of the abjected and socio-economically stigmatised underclass. Their divergence from established hierarchically organised forms of protest, therefore, further enabled a conceptualisation of the members of this so-called underclass as potentially revolting subjects of a newly constituted “class for itself.” Transcending leftist male-dominated discourses, the protests demonstrate the heterogeneity of marginalised subaltern groups, instead of letting a particular group represent them and speak for them.
