The New Insurrectional Thinking
Considered by the police as a piece of evidence against the alleged saboteurs of the TGV overhead wires, "L'insurrection qui vient" is much more than a manual for juvenile civil disobedience. Far from the snow job by poseurs that some commentators have depicted, the work takes the form of a simultaneously dangerous and coherent synopsis of the decay of an empty era. For many readers, this little green book seems to be the insurrectional manifesto, the revolutionary breviary of certain disillusioned youth.
This "imaginary collective" considers that a specter haunts the
The novelty, the authors assert, consists in the total absence of message, leader or demand on the part of the insurgents. Thus have the suburban rioters, according to the authors, set the tone for any new guerilla action. Since "the present has no exit," it's useless to seek empty social compromises. Since the catastrophe "has already taken place," it's impossible to further an ecumenical ecology that supplies capitalism with its most perfect ideological legitimization. Since everything must be made spectacle, traceable, legible, one might as well become "invisible."
This strategic upheaval is a political turning point. Most alternative movements have sought to attract the attention of newspapers, even though that risked their transformation by the media into official trouble-makers. So it's not only against all union and militant bureaucracies, but also against all coordinated movements that "reproduce so many governments in miniature," that the "Invisible Committee" pits its anonymity, its permanent dissolution. This fraction that assumes the form of a little army of shadows takes aim at all the glories of subsidized subversion and other TV children with out-sized egos: "Seeing the maws of those who are somebody in this society may help you to understand the joy of being nobody in it." Thus, to be "socially nothing" paradoxically constitutes "the condition for maximum freedom of action."
The sudden media coverage of Julien Coupat, whom the police and the prosecutors' office consider the alleged ringleader of this "imaginary collective" and sometimes stage as a replica of Guy Debord (1931-1994), founder of the Situationist Internationale, will undoubtedly alter the group's strategy. Nonetheless, the surfacing of the cutting edge of Julien Coupat's radical remarks - Coupat, who along with his friends has been subjected to a legal-police relentlessness - dispatches a certain kind of leftism to its obsolescence. Thus, in the eyes of Julien Coupat, "the extreme left à la Besancenot" offers nothing but "Soviet grayness barely retouched by Photoshop" (in May 26's Le Monde). As though suddenly Trotsky's made-over children, Che nostalgics, Fidel Castro aficionados were sent back to their not-only-authoritarian, but also counter-revolutionary, references.
What returns with "L'insurrection qui vient," a corrosive essay for which Eric Hazan, director of publisher La Fabrique, has been abusively interrogated, is a social criticism that until now had been reduced to its cultural dimension. People frequently remember a single image only from Guy Debord, one of the "Invisible Committee's" main sources of inspiration: that of the gang leader who becomes a master in the art of misappropriating American comics intended to feed the results of contemporary art galleries. So they forget that the author of "La Société du spectacle" ["Society of the Spectacle"] (1967) bet among other things on the advent of new workers' councils, along the lines of those in Barcelona in 1936-1937 or Budapest in 1956.
The movement Julien Coupat has emerged from - in spite of all the efforts to erase the trails of that heritage - from the anti-industrial criticism of Jaime Semprun, founder of the publisher, Encyclopédie des nuisances, to writer Annie Le Brun's critique of techie rationality - applies itself to conducting a radical and coherent critique of the present. If this "Invisible Committee" was seeking to renew the voluntary opacity, theoretical preciousness, rhetoric of excess and apology for violent action that were especially present in the first issues of the review Tiqqun (see Le Monde's June 28-29 edition), which was one of its branches, then it would risk adding to the general disorientation.
But perhaps that wouldn't entirely displease this little party of subversive defection.
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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
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By Moorey, Crip at Jul 12, 2009 09:55 AM
Read The Coming Insurrection here.
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Re: Literary Link
By Small, Brian at Jul 12, 2009 18:04 PM
Thanks for the link Moorey Crip. The text makes an impression. I haven't even read the whole thing, but I think I should...
To have a job is an honor, yet working is a sign of servility. In short: the perfect clinical illustration of hysteria. We love while hating, we hate while loving. And we all know the stupor and confusion that strike the hysteric when he loses his victim – his master. Most of the time he never recovers.
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The famous “parental resignation” has imposed on us a confrontation with the world that demands a precocious lucidity, and foreshadows lovely revolts to come. In the death of the couple, we see the birth of troubling forms of collective affectivity, now that sex is all used up and masculinity and femininity parade around in such moth-eaten clothes, now that three decades of non-stop pornographic innovation have exhausted all the allure of transgression and liberation. We count on making that which is unconditional in relationships the armor of a political solidarity as impenetrable to state interference as a gypsy camp. There is no reason that the interminable subsidies that numerous relatives are compelled to offload onto their proletarianized progeny can’t become a form of patronage in favor of social subversion. “Becoming autonomous,” could just as easily mean learning to fight in the street, to occupy empty houses, to cease working, to love each other madly, and to shoplift.
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A burst of laughter is the only appropriate response to all the serious “questions” posed by news analysts. To take the most banal: there is no “immigration question.” Who still grows up where they were born? Who lives where they grew up? Who works where they live? Who lives where their ancestors did? And to whom do the children of this era belong, to television or their parents? The truth is that we have been completely torn from any belonging, we are no longer from anywhere, and the result, in addition to a new disposition to tourism, is an undeniable suffering.
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Capitalism got as much as it could from undoing all the old social ties, and it is now in the process of remaking itself by rebuilding these same ties on its own terms. Contemporary metropolitan social life is its incubator. In the same way, it ravaged the natural world and is driven by the fantasy that it can now be reconstituted as so many controlled environments, furnished with all the necessary sensors. This new humanity requires a new economy that would no longer be a separate sphere of existence but, on the contrary, its very tissue, the raw material of human relations; it requires a new definition of work as work on oneself, a new definition of capital as human capital, a new idea of production as the production of relations, and consumption as the consumption of situations; and above all a new idea of value that would encompass all of the qualities of beings. This burgeoning “bioeconomy” conceives the planet as a closed system to be managed and claims to establish the foundations for a science that would integrate all the parameters of life. Such a science threatens to make us miss the good old days when unreliable indices like GDP growth were supposed to measure the well-being of a people-for at least no one believed in them.
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“The environment is an industrial challenge.”
Ecology is the discovery of the decade. For the last thirty years we’ve left it up to the environmentalists, joking about it on Sunday so that we can act concerned again on Monday. And now it’s caught up to us, invading the airwaves like a hit song in summertime, because it’s 68 degrees in December.
One quarter of the fish species have disappeared from the ocean. The rest won’t last much longer.
Bird flu alert: we are given assurances that hundreds of thousands of migrating birds will be shot from the sky.
Mercury levels in human breast milk are ten times higher than the legal level for cows. And these lips which swell up after I bite the apple – but it came from the farmer’s market. The simplest gestures have become toxic. One dies at the age of 35 from “a prolonged illness” that’s to be managed just like one manages everything else. We should’ve seen it coming before we got to this place, to pavilion B of the palliative care center.
You have to admit: this whole “catastrophe,” which they so noisily inform us about, it doesn’t really touch us. At least not until we are hit by one of its foreseeable consequences. It may concern us, but it doesn’t touch us. And that is the real catastrophe.
There is no “environmental catastrophe.” The catastrophe is the environment itself. The environment is what’s left to man after he’s lost everything. Those who live in a neighborhood, a street, a valley, a war zone, a workshop – they don’t have an “environment;” they move through a world peopled by presences, dangers, friends, enemies, moments of life and death, all kinds of beings. Such a world has its own consistency, which varies according to the intensity and quality of the ties attaching us to all of these beings, to all of these places.
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