>Our very ego-self appears as more and more complex, less and less coherent puzzle, so that to make it hold together, in addition to pills and therapy sessions, algorithms are necessary now. It's pure irony that the world "wall" is used to describe the solid streams of images information and commentary by which Facebook attempts to give a shape to the self.
If you haven't read this yet, here's the PDF:
illwilleditions.noblogs.org
I'll post quotes and highlights from my reading.
Other urls found in this thread:
I really liked the part about how everything we do is always haloed with the suggestion of what we could have done, and everything in the system is bent on continuously circulating this feeling through us like blood
thx
>A planetary generalization of liberal democracy was announced but what is generalizing instead are “the electoral insurrections” against it and its hypocrisy, as the liberals bitterly complain. Zone after zone, the fragmentation of the world continues, unceremoniously and without interruption. And this is not just an affair of geopolitics. It’s in every domain that the world is fragmenting, it’s in every domain that unity has become problematic. Nowadays there is no more unity in “society” than there is in science.
DLed. Thanks for reminding me.
>The wage-work system is breaking up into niches, exceptions, dispensatory conditions. The idea of a “precariat” conveniently hides the fact that there is simply no longer a shared experience of work, even precarious work. With the consequence that there can no longer be a shared experience of its stoppage either, and the old myth of the general strike must be put on the shelf of useless accessories. In like manner, Western medicine has been reduced to tinkering with techniques that break its doctrinal unity into pieces, such as acupuncture, hypnosis, or magnetism. Politically, beyond the usual parliamentary messing around, there’s no more majority for anything.
>The unity of the Republic, that of science, that of the personality, that of the national territory, or that of “culture” have never been anything but fictions. But they were effective. What is certain is that the illusion of unity can no longer do its work of fooling people, of bringing them into line, of disciplining them. In every domain, hegemony is dead and the singularities are becoming wild: they bear their own meaning in themselves, no longer expecting it from a general order.
>Seeing that there will be no common salvation, everyone will have to achieve their salvation on their own, on whatever scale, or abandon every idea of salvation. And attempt to lose oneself in technologies, profits, parties, drugs, and heart-breakers, with anxiety pegged to one’s soul
>The process of general fragmentation is so unstoppable that all the brutality that will be used in order to recompose the lost unity will only end up accelerating it, deepening it and making it more irreversible. When there’s no longer a shared experience, apart from that of coming together again in front of the screens, one can very well create brief moments of national communion after attacks by deploying a maudlin, false, and hollow sentimentality, one can decree all sorts of “wars against terrorism,” one can promise to take back control of all the “zones of unlawfulness,” but all this will remain a BFM-TV newsfash at the back of a kebab house, and with the sound turned of.
>“Kettling” does not simply constitute a technique of psychological warfare which the French order belatedly imported from England. Kettling is a dialectical image of current political power. It’s the figure of a despised, reviled power that no longer does anything but keep the population in its nets. If it’s the figure of a power that no longer promises anything, and has no other activity than locking all the exits. A power that no one supports anymore in a positive way, that everyone tries to feel as best they can, and that has no other perspective than to keep in its confining bosom all that is on the verge of escaping it. The figure of kettling is dialectical in that what it is designed to confine, it also brings together. It is a site where meet-ups take place between those who are trying to desert. Novel chants, full of irony, are invented there. A shared experience develops within its enclosure. The police apparatus is not equipped to contain the vertical escape that occurs in the form of tags that will soon embellish every wall, every bus shelter, every business. And that give evidence that the mind remains free even when the bodies are held captive. “Victory through chaos,” “In ashes, all becomes possible,” “France, its wine, its revolutions,” “Homage to the families of the broken windows,” “Kiss kiss bank bank,” “I think, therefore I break”: since 1968, the walls had not seen such a freedom of spirit.
>We propose a different perception of things, a different way to apprehend them. Those who make the laws evidently don’t respect them. Those who want to instill the “work ethic” in us do fictitious jobs. It’s common knowledge that the drug squad is the biggest hash dealer in France. And whenever, by an extraordinary chance, a magistrate is bugged, one doesn’t wait long to discover the awful negotiations that are hidden behind the noble pronouncement of a judgment, an appeal, or a dismissal. To call for Justice in the face of this world is to ask a monster to babysit your children. Anyone who knows the underside of power immediately ceases to respect it. Deep down, the masters have always been anarchists. It’s just that they can’t stand for anyone else to be that. And the bosses have always had a bandit’s heart. It’s this honorable way of seeing things that has always inspired lucid workers to practice pilfering, moonlighting, or even sabotage. One really has to be named Michea to believe that the proletariat has ever sincerely been moralistic and legalistic. It’s in their lives, among their own people, that the proletarians manifest their ethics, not in relation to “society” The relationship with society and its hypocrisy can only be one of warfare, whether open or not
>In like manner, Western medicine has been reduced to tinkering with techniques that break its doctrinal unity into pieces, such as acupuncture, hypnosis, or magnetism.
Dumb. All three are curiosities of negligible relevance next to actual medicine, one traditionally non-Western (acupuncture), and magnetism hasn't been seriously considered by anyone seeking medical alternatives for 200 years. If you want an example of breaking up the hegemonic concept of health care, homeopathy/alternative medicine is the only valid example, and if you widen the parameters: therapy, supplements and diets, meditation, drugs. Not fucking magnetism
>The epoch takes amazing shortcuts. Real democracy is buried where it was born two thousand five hundred years before with the way in which Alexis Tsipras, scarcely elected, got no rest until he had negotiated its capitulation. One can read on its tombstone, ironically speaking, these words of the German Minister of Finance, Wolfgang Schauble: “We can’t let elections change anything whatsoever.” But the most striking thing is that the geopolitical epicenter of the world’s fragmentation is precisely the place where its unification began under the name “civilization,” five thousand years ago: Mesopotamia. If a certain geopolitical chaos seems to be taking hold of the world, it’s in Iraq and Syria that this is most dramatically demonstrated, that is, in the exact location where civilization’s general setting in order began. Writing, accounting, History, royal justice, parliament, integrated farming, science, measurement, political religion, palace intrigues and pastoral power—this whole way of claiming to govern “for the good of the subjects,” for the sake of the flock and its well-being— everything that can be lumped into what we still call “civilization” was already, three thousand years before Jesus Christ, the distinguishing mark of the kingdoms of Akkad and Sumer. Of course there will be attempts at cobbling together a new denominational Iraqi state. Of course the international interests will end up mounting harebrained operations aimed at state building in Syria. But in Syria as in Iraq, state-directed humanity is dead. The intensity of the conflicts has risen too high for an honest reconciliation to still be possible.
>We are the contemporaries of a prodigious reversal of the process of civilization into a process of fragmentation. The more civilization aspires to a universal completion, the more it implodes at its foundation. The more this world aims for unification, the more it fragments. When did it shift imperceptibly on its axis? Was it the world coup that followed the attacks of September 11? The “financial crisis” of 2008? The failure of the Copenhagen summit on climate change in 2009?
>Against the possibility of communism, against any possibility of happiness, there stands a hydra with two heads. On the public stage each one of them makes a show of being the sworn enemy of the other. On one side, there is the program for a fascistic restoration of unity, and on the other, there is the global power of the merchants of infrastructure—Google as much as Vinci, Amazon as much as Veolia. Those who believe that its one or the other will have them both. Because the great builders of infrastructure have the means for which the fascists only have the folkloric discourse.
what follows is the closing paragraph to the first essay, "50 Shades of Breakage"
>The necessary condition for the reign of the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) is that beings, places, fragments of the world remain without any real contact. Where the GAFA claim to be “linking up the entire world,” what they’re actually doing is working toward the real isolation of everybody. By immobilizing bodies. By keeping everyone cloistered in their signifying bubble. The power play of cybernetic power is to give everyone the impression that they have access to the whole world when they are actually more and more separated, that they have more and more “friends” when they are more and more autistic. The serial crowd of public transportation was always a lonely crowd, but people didn’t transport their personal bubble along with them, as they have done since smartphones appeared. A bubble that immunizes against any contact, in addition to constituting a perfect snitch. This separation engineered by cybernetics pushes in a non-accidental way in the direction of making each fragment into a little paranoid entity, towards a drifting of the existential continents where the estrangement that already reigns between individuals in this “society” collectivizes ferociously into a thousand delirious little aggregates. In the face of all that, the thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming connections, whether confictual, prudent, or joyful, between the diferent parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other.
I agree but i think it's more a sign of how degraded we have become, that these charlatans can make so much money
Wrong. Acupuncture is in hospitals, and at physiotherapy they often use magnets and electrical stimulation as a part of healing.
Even leeches have made a comeback.
When they do the history of the police stuff, they name-drop the same historical theory people that Foucault mentions in a lecture of his. The Committee is very, very stupid btw
I read half of this a month or so ago, and really enjoyed it. I gotta go back and finish it. It just makes everything seem so hopeless though
Who's the "invisible committee"?
I am.
Ask me anything.
A pseudo-anonymous French collective which writes very acerbic, far-left anarchist tracts. The first one, "The Coming Insurrection", is closely associated with the legal case of the Tarnac Nine, and both the book and the legal case got into international news 11 years ago, when the Tarnac Nine were arrested in Tarnac, a village in central France, on suspicion of "terroristic" sabotage of railway lines. There's a passage in The Coming Insurrection which is exactly like the method of sabotage used. Amusingly, American conservative Glenn Beck found out about the book and sperged out about it back when he had a show on Fox News, and this is how most Americans became aware of the book. For legal reasons, the "leader" Julien Coupat has denied writing Invisible Committe texts, but it's an open secret that he's one of the authors in the collective.
The state had no real evidence, and so the group were finally acquitted some months ago (they got some of them on a few process crimes, but nothing substantive). But members of the group definitely did the sabotage, they were merely found "not guilty", as opposed to innocent. And that's as it should be desu, but it is annoying that they couldn't pin them down.
The Invisible Committe is also closely related to Tiqqun, an anarchist 'zine which ran for two issues from 1999-2001 until 9/11 happened and they decided they'd better quit (Coupat also contributed to the magazine in a similar pseudo-anonymous capacity). "Tiqqun" is a jewy concept which roughly means: social justice, healing, restoration.
The Invisible Committee has also written "To Our Friends", where they claim vindication from the last book following the 2007-08 recession amid the subsequent protests, and "Now", the one being discussed in the thread.
From "Let's Destitute the World"
> In every institution the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor is re-enacted year after year. Its true purpose is to persist. No need to specify how many souls and bodies must be ground down in order to secure this result, and even within its own hierarchy. One doesn’t become a leader without being basically the most ground down—the king of the ground-down. Reducing delinquency and “defending society” are only the pretext of the carceral institution. If, during the centuries it has existed, it has never succeeded at these things—on the contrary—this is because its purpose is different; it is to go on existing and growing if possible, which means tending to the breeding ground of delinquency and managing the illegalities.
>It’s not the failure of the health institutions that we are now living in a world that is toxic through and through and that makes everyone sick. On the contrary, we’ve seen their triumph. Quite often, the apparent failure of the institutions is their real function. If school discourages children from learning, this is not fortuitously: it’s because children with a desire to learn would make school next to useless. The same goes for the unions, whose purpose is manifestly not the emancipation of workers, but rather the perpetuation of their condition. What could the bureaucrats of the labor unions do with their life, in fact, if the workers had the bad idea of actually freeing themselves? Of course in every institution there are sincere people who really think they are there to accomplish their mission. But it’s no accident if those people see themselves systematically obstructed, are systematically kept out of the loop, punished, bullied, eventually ostracized, with the complicity of all the “realists” who keep their mouths shut. These choice victims of the institution have a hard time understanding its double talk, and what is really being asked of them. Their fate is to always be treated there as killjoys, as rebels, and to be endlessly surprised by that.
>The carnivalesque ritual of social movements function within it as a safety valve, as a tool for managing the social as well as for renewing the institution. They bring it the flexibility, the young flesh, the new blood that it so cruelly lacks. Generation after generation, in its great wisdom, the state has been able to coopt those who showed themselves amenable to being bought of, let’ s destitute the world and crush those who acted intransigent. It’s not for nothing that so many leaders of student movements have so naturally advanced to ministerial posts, being people who are sure to have a feel for the state, that is, an appreciation of the institution as mask.
>It’s not for nothing that so many leaders of student movements have so naturally advanced to ministerial posts, being people who are sure to have a feel for the state, that is, an appreciation of the institution as mask
>Destituere in Latin means: to place standing separate, raise up in isolation; to abandon; put aside, let drop, knock down; to let down, deceive. Whereas constituent logic crashes against the power apparatus it means to take control of, a destituent potential is concerned instead with escaping from it, with removing any hold on it which the apparatus might have, as it increases its hold on the world in the separate space that it forms. Its characteristic gesture is exiting, just as the typical constituent gesture is taking by storm. In terms of a destituent logic, the struggle against state and capital is valuable first of all for the exit from capitalist normality that is experienced therein, for the desertion from the shitty relations with oneself, others, and the world under capitalism. Thus, where the “constituents” place themselves in a dialectical relation of struggle with the ruling authority in order to take possession of it, destituent logic obeys the vital need to disengage from it. It doesn’t abandon the struggle; it fastens on to the struggles positivity. It doesn’t adjust itself to the movements of the adversary but to what is required for the increase of its let’s destitute the world own potential. So it has little use for criticizing: “The choice is either to get out without delay, without wasting one’s time criticizing, simply because one is placed elsewhere than in the region of the adversary, or else one criticizes, one keeps one foot in it, and has the other one outside. We need to leap outside and dance above it,”
They get at least one thing right: when you're dealing with stupid leftists, the thing to do is to simply seize initiative and not get bogged down in procedure. Video related is exactly the sort of thing that they are rejecting and wish to simply supersede, with a well-placed action of some kind:
youtube.com
When the Committee speaks of the destituent, they want well-placed actors to do an end-run around this sort of pseudo-parliamentary nonsense, and frankly, it's easy to empathize when you merely watch it for a few minutes.
>From the extreme left to the extreme right, there’s no lack of bullshitters who endlessly promise us a “return to full employment.” Those who would have us regret the golden age of the classic wage system, whether they are Marxists or liberals, are not averse to lying about its origin. They claim that the wage system freed us from serfdom, from slavery, and from the traditional structures—in sum, that it constituted a “progress.” Any somewhat serious historical study will show on the contrary that it came into being as an extension and intensification of prior servitude. The truth is that making a man into the “possessor of his labor power” and making him disposed to “sell it,” that is, bringing the figure of the Worker into everyday life and customs, was something that required a considerable quantity of spoliations, expulsions, plunderings, and devastations, a great deal of terror, disciplinary measures, and deaths. One hasn’t understood anything about the political character of the economy until they’ve seen that what it hinges on as far as labor end o f work , magical life is concerned is not so much producing commodities as it is producing workers—which is to say, a certain relationship with oneself, with the world, and with others. Waged labor was the form by which a certain order was maintained. The fundamental violence it contains, the violence that is obscured by the broken-down body of the assemblyline worker, the miner killed in a methane explosion, or the burnout of employees under extreme managerial pressure, has to do with the meaning of life. By selling their time, by turning themselves into the subject of the thing they’re employed to do, the wage worker places the meaning of their existence in the hands of those who care nothing about them, indeed whose purpose is to ride roughshod over them.
What a load of rambling nonsense. At least when 19th and early 20th century Marxists repeated themselves, it was to deliberately illustrate a particular point they were trying to make.
Makes complete sense to me, sentence after sentence being composed with France as the subject, but I kept feeling the exact American equivalents of what they were referring to in a way that I forgot this was ever written in another language for another people. Their points can be muddy and nebulous, but I think that's to be expected when we're talking about such ungainly and obscure subjects. The essays read clippy, even through those parts, however, and it is tough not to feel a resonance, a healing clarity, even an epiphany. As an American, nearly all communication originating from prestige are cruel and crude schemes, obscurantisms, subversions, PR gimmicks and flagrant dishonesty that must send up quite an amused uproar in their salons. To whatever degree Now is less pellucid, it still booms in your head like the speech itself was on fire, so sickly and anemic is the intellectual context receiving Now's essays.
t. invisible committee
Not him but fuck the fuck off with this tryhard word salad. You are not smart. You do not have to write like the last thing that you just read. You're just writing-by-osmosis because you want so very badly to affect "smart", the same way that the Committee/Tiqqun does.
You also do yourself no favors by effectively conceding the "rambling" which the other user complained of. But (wait, listen...) trapped in your own word-salad, you make one cogent point: "I like what's in this book because it reminds me of things I know about." For future reference in rhetoric, that's what you should do: rather than trying to assemble your own French word-salad, hit beats and make arguments.
"Attach yourself to what you feel to be true. Begin there." -The Coming Insurrection, (Let me help you with this. The mere citation of the quote here accomplishes multiple things: it demonstrates my knowledge and authority on the texts (the most important part), and the English phrasing underlines the idiocy of the "(multiple) truth/facts/feelings; 'my' truth" discourse on the left which makes them so especially ridiculous today. Finally, the above is meant backhandedly as sincere advice for you on how to improve your own rhetoric.)
One of the great pleasures of Now is that the authors are obliged to admit their own impotence toward the end.
>It just makes everything seem so hopeless though
I think it can be overwhelming. Whatever truth is in their words, it applies specifically to France and French people. Many trends in the US are similar yet more complex due to our size and composition. It is sad to hear their elites are as feckless and daft as our own. It's not so hopeless, though, and I don't think the anarchists in France messing with trains help anything. The day after the mothership lands or whatever people will want something like trains, even if we do not want the scorched soilless acreage or cobalt mine pits or Foxconn factories. Some of these essays flirt with an anti-city vibe too, I feel, and are also European. Perhaps the New World has other possibilities, which is my own personal opinion. For instance, the "Fragmentation" they speak of is almost an assimilative process in the US, maybe with some additional atomisation now, yes, but we're nearly celebrating our fragmentations in the our big stew pot society. It does not alarm an American in the way this might someone from a smaller, older, more coherent society, such as France. Plus, I always think of the people working their asses off and not publishing anarchists texts and stopping trains, and I'd bet in many cases, the future is theirs. They are the ones showing up, whoever they end up being. I also remember that America is, whatever else it claims, an economic project where people try to build societies where we can. We're not one vision and at our best we reach a dynamism largely because we try to tolerate very disruptive forces: migration, economic risk, expeditionary warfare, empire building. If we can survive long enough, we may be able to grow new things, new methods, new lifestyles. So I don't think it's hopeless, just very dangerous and uncertain in the short term. Projecting out two decades, however, perhaps that's enough space for the sun to rise, women to have babies and people either become more itinerant or more settled and stick it out there and make something happen. We need to survive if for no other reason than to tell people of the goofballs and tomfoolery we witnessed.
A rhetoric coach! If only I gave an iota about whatever things you measure, friend.
Haven't read this yet, but that's not a word salad, sweatie.
Bumping