>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
Now by the Invisible Committee (PDF ITT)
>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