"Now" by the Invisible Committee thread, Part II

Have you read "Now" by the (French) Invisible Committee? Composed of seven incisive if laden essays, there's a link below to the PDF. We had a tiny thread about some of the chapters yesterday:

>PDF
illwilleditions.noblogs.org/files/2018/02/Invisible-Committee-NOW-READ.pdf

>Why should I read "Now?"
A relentless, immolative project, if you have been observant, you may find very little new or particularly insightful, but there are many beautifully composed observations and criticisms permeating the translation. Although specific to France and her issues, there seems few places immune to the problems highlighted by Now. Some have said it's a hopeless text, but it's also refreshing and clarifying, squaring readers away as to what we can have faith in (each other) and what to fear (all servants of the status quo).

Here are excerpts from the essay, "End of Work, Magical Life" where the economic ideas of UBI, surveillance capitalism and the "Needy Opportunist" are explored:

>In economics, the theory of the Needy Opportunist, the Crevard, is called the “theory of human capital,” which is more presentable. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development defines it these days as “the knowledge, skills, competencies and attributes in individuals that facilitate the creation of personal, social and economic well-being.” Joseph Stiglitz, the left-economist, estimates that “human capital” now represents between 2/3 and 3/4 of the total capital—which tends to confirm the correctness of Stalin’s unironic title: Man, the Most Precious Capital. According to Locke, “Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his” (Treatise of Civil Government), which in his mind did not rule out either servitude or colonization. Marx made “man” the proprietor of his “labor power”—a rather mysterious metaphysical entity, when you think about it. But in both cases man was the owner of something that he could alienate while remaining intact. He was formally something other than what he sold. With the theory of human capital, man is less the possessor of an indefinite cluster of capitals—cultural, relational, professional, financial, symbolic, sexual, health— than he is himself that cluster. He is capital.

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Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Khomri_law
youtu.be/AHQDvnpUvPs
blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/bernard-e-harcourt-a-readers-guide-to-the-invisible-committees-now-2017/?cn-reloaded=1)
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

>For capital, the disintegration of wage-earning society is both an opportunity for reorganization and a political risk. The risk is that humans might devise an unforeseen use of their time and their life, that they might even take to heart the question of its meaning. Those in charge have even made sure, therefore, that we humans having the leisure are not at liberty to make use of it as we please. It’s as if we needed to work more as consumers in proportion as we work less as producers. As if consumption no longer signified a satisfaction, but rather a social obligation. Moreover, the technological equipment of leisure increasingly resembles that of labor. While in our fooling around on the Internet all our clicks produce the data that the GAFA resell, work is tricked out with all the enticements of gaming by introducing scores, levels, bonuses and other infantilizing caveats.

>Instead of seeing the current security push and the orgy of surveillance as a response to the September 11 attacks, it would not be unreasonable to see them as a response to the economically established fact that it was precisely now in 2000 that technological innovation started to decrease the volume of job offerings. It’s now necessary to be able to monitor en masse all our activities, all our communications, all our gestures, to place cameras and sensors everywhere, because wage-earning discipline no longer suffices for controlling the population. It’s only to a population totally under control that one can dream of offering a universal basic income

>The reign of the Needy Opportunist is an aspect of what the journal Invariance called, in the 1960s, the anthropomorphosis of capital. As capital “realizes, on the entire planet and in the whole life of every person, the modes of total colonization of what exists that are designated by the terms real domination [...] the Self-as-capital is the new form that value aims to assume after devalorization. Within each one of us capital is summoning the life force to work (Cesarano, Apocalypse et revolution).” This is the machination by which capital appropriates all the human attributes and by which humans make themselves into the neutral support of capitalist valorization. Capital no longer just determines the forms of cities, the content of work and leisure, the imaginary of the crowds, the language of real life and that of intimacy, the ways of being in fashion, the needs and their satisfaction, it also produces its own people. It engenders its own optimizing humanity. Here all the old chestnuts about value theory take their place in the wax museum.

This discotheque metaphor sorta loses me, but it does confirm this is French people thinking about life:
>Consider the contemporary case of the dance foor of a nightclub: no one is there for the money but to have fun. No one was forced to go there in the way one goes back to work. There is no apparent exploitation, no visible circulation of money between future partners who are still moving and grooving together. And yet everything going on there has to do with evaluation, valorization, self-valorization, individual preference, strategies, ideal matching of a supply and a demand, under constraint of optimization—in short, a neo-classical and human-capital market, pure and simple. The logic of value now coincides with organized life. Economy as a relationship with the world has long surpassed economy as a sphere. The folly of evaluation obviously dominates every aspect of contemporary work, but it also rules over everything that escapes that sphere. It determines even the solitary jogger’s relationship with end of work, magical life themselves, the jogger who, in order to improve their performances, needs to know them in detail. Measurement has become the obligatory mode of being of all that intends to exist socially.

Imagine if left intellectuals put all the effort they have expended in turgid navel gazing into a new and improved systematic theory of political economy.

>What is new in the current phase of capital is that it now has the technical means at its disposal for a generalized, real-time evaluation of every aspect of beings. The passion for rating and cross-rating has escaped the classrooms, the stock market, and supervisors’ files and invaded every area of life. If one accepts the paradoxical notion of “use value” as designating “the very body of the commodity [...], its natural properties [...], an assemblage of multiple characteristics” (Marx), the field of value has been refined to the point that it manages to achieve a tight ft with that famous “use value,” places, the characteristics of beings, and things: it conforms to bodies so closely that it coincides with them like a second skin. This is what an economist-sociologist, Lucien Karpik, calls the “economy of singularities.” The value of things tends not to be distinguishable from their concrete existence. A now French-Lebanese financier, Bernard Mourad, made this into a piece of fiction: Les Actifs corporels [Corporal Assets]. It may be useful to know that the author went from the Morgan Stanley commercial bank to the directorship of the Altice Media Group, Patric Drahi’s holding branch that controls Liberation, L’Express and i24 News in particular, before becoming Emmanuel Macron’s special adviser during his campaign. In the novel, he imagines the entry of a person into the stock market, a banker obviously, with his psychoanalytic and professional profile and biological checkup in support. This story of the insertion of a “society-cum-person” into a market position in the context of a “New Individual Economy” was futuristic upon its publication in 2006. Currently the employer federation MEDEF is proposing that a SIRET number, a business identification number, be assigned to every French citizen at their birth. The value of beings becomes the set of their “individual characteristics”—their health, their humor, their beauty, their know how, their relations, their “social skills,” their imagination, their creativity, and so on. That’s the theory, and the reality, of “human capital.” The value field has incorporated so many dimensions that it has become a complex space. It’s become the whole ensemble of the socially sayable, legible, and visible.

Appreciate you doing this. DOn't know if I'll read it but the quotes are a great overview.
More people should do this for their readings.

Imagine thinking the way out "is a new and improved political economy" lmao

It couldn't hurt, better than endlessly waxing poetic around fairly trite observations, many made decades ago.

The essay "Everyone Hates the Police" rings the most controversial and "edgy" to me, but the parallels between America's hyper-legalistic and highly aggressive policing and France's equivalent experience are compelling. America has many small towns and small-scale police traditions, sheriffs, for instance, and this points to another model. But it does seem like police forces, once they grow to the size of the LAPD or NYPD, other traits become predominant. With the BLM vs Police events in recent memory, the events and groups referred here are new to me, but it seems like French people "took to the streets" under more erudition or composure than America's "wildings" versus the MRAP sound cannons. Maybe this is my own Paris Syndrome, however.
>Maintaining order is the main activity of an order that has already failed. One only has to go to the CAF, the family assistance fund, to take stock of things that cannot last. When an agency as benign as that must surround itself with guards, ploys, and threats to defend itself from its clients, one realizes that a certain rationality has come to an end. When the orderliness of demonstrations now can no longer be assured except by means of sting-ball grenades and kettlings, and the demonstrators are forced to fee the green lasers of the Anti-Crime Brigade’s LBD 40s, targeting its future victims, this is an indication that “society” has already reached the stage of palliative treatment. When the calm of the banlieues comes at the cost of arming the CRS with automatic rifes, we know that a certain fgure of the world has faded. It’s never a good sign when a democratic regime takes up the habit of having its population fred upon. Since the time when politics started to be reduced, in every domain, to a vast police operation conducted day after day, it was inevitable that policing would become a political question.

>What the powers-that-be could not understand is that the loss of every hope also forms the precondition for pure revolt—the revolt that no longer seeks support in the thing it is negating and gets its warrant only from itself. What crystallized in the conflict against the loi Travail was not the partial refusal of a disastrous reform, but the massive discrediting of the government apparatuses, including the union ones. It’s not surprising that the banner of the French spring, “Basedons ingouvernable,” rendered as “Become ungovernable,” re-emerged in Washington in the protests against Donald Trump’s inauguration. Since within the governmental apparatus the police have the function of ensuring individual submission in the last instance, of producing the population as a population, as a powerless, and hence governable, depoliticized mass, it was logical that a confict expressing the refusal to be governed would begin by laying into the police and would adopt the most popular slogan: “Everybody
hates the police.” Escaping its shepherd, the flock could not have found a better rallying cry. What is more unexpected is that this slogan, appearing in the demonstrations following the killing of Remi Fraisse at Sivens eventually reached all the way to Bobigny after the police rape of Theo, as a slogan of “young people” there, thrown in the face of the uniformed brutes who were eyeing them from a raised metal passageway turned into a mirador.

If you're wondering about "loi Travail"
>The law makes it easier for companies to lay off workers, reduce overtime payments, and reduce severance payments that workers are entitled to if their company has made them redundant.[4][5] On the other hand, it allows workers to transfer untaken days off between employers, and provides additional support for young people without training or qualifications.
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Khomri_law

Even accepting the police may be corrupt goons or henchmen, I find it quaint and a bit childish to regard locking horns with the professional police forces as inherently virtuous. I think I understand the zeal and courage behind such sentiment, but the romantic law breaker is about as cartoonish as the benevolent job creator or the transformative politician. Pressing the authors to clarify and give examples, they've a list of martyrs, but what is built by criminal disobedience? Illegal Lemonade stands and food donations come to mind as examples but where do we wind up after we've fucked the police? Fatter bums?

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Does any political theorizing ever concede its own needlessness in a small town context? I can't help but think most of these ideas apply to the mega cities and large urban expanses. If you're in rural or remote parts, I think life is more simple

Morning bump

Violence is the one true capital.

Violence is boring

American police have to deal with blacks and Latin American drug cartels on regular basis. That is why they are thee way they are. European police forces were spared of this until recently. They will learn.

Based and redpilled my fellow bunkerchan poster

One thing that's based about Marxist-Leninists is that they would immediately send these types to a gulag.

thats the paradox. these critiques are a yearning for the 'community' of their country, when old intellectuals had influence in big things. but the bigger it gets with complex mixings of ethnicities, the more a country is adopted to follow homogenization of control and industry. they sound more like maga trads if you bridge the cultural divide. of course for them their tradition is lefty social critique, which they see as being irrelevant in the bigger demographic change of their lost big 'small town'. this is the reality. for example im totally convinced those burgerpunk threads are seething europeans trying to make sense of what is happening now in their quaint towns that has been a norm for americans since the beggining of the 20th century.

Poster from the last thread who hadn't finished. Read the latter half last night and enjoyed it thoroughly

Didn't they live on a small farm or something? Although they were academics, so lived in cities before.
>Americans
>quaint towns
No.
If anything, it was a Q-tier meme from Americans trying to stave off the infection.

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see, i knew it. took here comes the triggered asshat with memes a few minutes later. re read what i wrote without your autism. im talking about european towns, you cant stop the demographic change. another paradox is the left in big cities hate small towns but their social critique yearns for an idealized intellectual version of the lives of simple living small town people who actually can influence their town and community by congregating and voicing their critiques. conversely, the only realistic way to do this is being media 'rightwing', which means anti immigration. of course euros with spectacle ptsd will do anything to avoid that name. all this of course as they yearn to make france great again with the classic social critique the burgerpunk badged numasses dont give a flying fuck about. and you can only larp in magical notions about being workless, replaced by immigrants.

If you had an actual material understanding of the global economy you'd realize there's nothing to be done in the first world. Agitate and educate if you like but until imperialism, the greatest contradiction, is challenged by the progression of the developing world from labour-centric to capital-centric production (as if happening in China for example) nothing can be done.

You have been programmed to hate these people, so you and they can be set at odds

You CAN stop demographic change, it's just not desired by any decision makers because increasing the population size is viewed as a central strategic goal for many developed countries.

not if the same left are oblivious to the effects of what they support, and continue to decry it while perpetuating it.

>You CAN stop demographic change
Are you a mountain?

Thank you for this. It's a powerful idea that we may still cohere ourselves into something better and stronger.

Learn to speak English, mutt.

What people?
Americans?

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youtu.be/AHQDvnpUvPs

eat shit and die online gentleman

You know your lit is lit when states dispatch their best typists to muddy the culture.

Hold on to your berets for this one (from one of the earlier essays, "Death to Politics"):
>Those who reproach Foucault with having developed a rather stifling ontology of power in which goodness, love of one’s neighbor, and the Christian virtues have a difficult time finding their place should reproach him rather with having thought in an admirable way, but perhaps in a way that was a bit too French. France thus remains a court society, at the summit of the State even in the milieus that declare its perdition the most radically. As if the Ancien Regime, as a system of mores, had never died. As if the French Revolution had only been a perverse stratagem for maintaining the Ancien Regime everywhere, behind the change of phraseology, and for protecting it from any attack, since it’s supposed to have been abolished.

kek

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>In the epoch of human capital and living currency, every moment of life and every real relation are haloed by a set of possible equivalents that gnaw at them. Being here involves the untenable renunciation of being everywhere else, where life is apparently more intense, as our smartphone has charged itself with informing us. Being with a particular person is an unbearable sacrifice of all the other persons with whom one could just as well be with. Every love is vitiated in advance by all the other possible loves. Hence the impossibility of being there, the ineptitude for being-with. Universal unhappiness. Torture by possibilities. Sickness unto death. “Despair,” as Kierkegaard diagnosed it

(You)
>There’s a boatload of people nowadays who are trying to escape the rule of the economy. They’re becoming bakers instead of consultants. They’re going on unemployment as soon as they can. They’re forming cooperatives, SCOPs and SCICs. They’re trying to “work differently.” But the economy is so well designed that it now has a whole sector, that of the “social and solidarity economy,” which runs on the energy of those escaping it. A sector that merits a special ministry and accounts for 10% of the French GDP. All kinds of nets, discourses, and legal structures have been put in place to capture the escapees. They devote themselves in all sincerity to the thing they dream of doing, but their activity is socially recoded, and this coding ends up overshadowing end of work , magical life everything they do. A few people take collective responsibility for the upkeep of their hamlets water source and one day they find that they’re “managing the commons.” Not many sectors have developed such an obsessive love of bookkeeping, out of a concern for justice, transparency, or exemplarity, as that of the social and solidarity economy. Any small to medium business is a bookkeeping bordello by comparison. However, we do have more than a hundred and fifty years of experience of cooperatives telling us they have never constituted the slightest threat to capitalism. Those that survive end up sooner or later becoming businesses like the others. There is no “other economy,” there’s just another relationship with the economy.

>The fact remains that we must organize ourselves, organize on the basis of what we love to do, and provide ourselves the means to do it.

> There is no myself and the world, myself and the others, there is me and my kindred, directly in touch with this little piece of the world that I love, irreducibly. There is ample beauty in the fact of being here and nowhere else. It’s not the least sign of the times that a German forester, and not a hippy, scores a bestseller by revealing that trees “talk to each other,” “love one another,” “look after each other,” and are able to “remember” what they’ve gone through. He calls that The Hidden Life of Trees. Which is to say, there’s even an anthropologist who sincerely wonders how forests think. An anthropologist, not a botanist. By considering the human subject in isolation from its world, by detaching living beings from all that lives around them, modernity could not help but engender a communism destined to eradicate: a socialism. And that socialism could only encounter peasants, nomads, and “savages” as an obstacle to be shoved aside, as an unpleasant residue at the bottom of the national scale of importance. It couldn’t even see the communism of which they were the bearers. If modern “communism” was able to imagine itself as a universal brotherhood, as a realized equality, this was only through a cavalier extrapolation from the lived experience of fraternity in combat, of friendship. For what is friendship if not equality between friends?

> In reality, the question of communism is also raised in each of our tiny and unique existences in response to what is making us sick. In response to what is slowly killing us, to our failures in love, to what makes us such strangers to each other that by way of an explanation for all the world’s ills, we’re satisfied with the foolish idea that “People are assholes.” Refusing to see this amounts to wearing one’s insensitivity like a tattoo. It’s well suited to the kind of pale, myopic virility that’s required for becoming an economist.

>Love does not bring individuals into relation, it cuts through them as if they were suddenly on a special plane where they were making their way together amid a certain foliation of the world. To love is never to be together but to become together. If loving did not undo the fictitious unity of being, the “other” would not be capable of making us sufer to such a degree. If, in love, a piece of the other did not end up being a part of us, we wouldn’t have to mourn it when separation time rolled around. If there were nothing but relations, nobody would understand one another. Everything would be awash with misunderstanding. So there is no subject or object of love, there is an experience of love.

I like this critique (blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/bernard-e-harcourt-a-readers-guide-to-the-invisible-committees-now-2017/?cn-reloaded=1) and will post more as I find them:
>The Committee positions itself against critique and criticism, arguing that we now live in times that so explicitly value domination that there is no longer any need for the subtlety of critique. (8) >Nevertheless, the Committee’s book is filled with critique. The Committee seeks to unmask illusions and to expose how power circulates in society, and sets forth how to challenge and contest that. It unveils the “illusion of unity” that has done “its work of fooling people,” and shows that we live instead in an increasingly politically fragmented reality (22). It exposes “the iron cage of counter-revolution,” in other words the fact that revolutionary movements always reconstitute the power relations that they at first attacked. (76) It offers a vision of critical praxis that places, at its heart, the value of action itself, for its own sake. It reverses the ends-means relation: action should not be undertaken as a means toward an end, but as an end in itself.

>The Committee’s book, I suspect, is the product of several different authors, who have written separate portions of the book—or taken primary responsibility for separate chapters.[1] The author of the final chapter of the book writes about sitting underneath an “old sequoia sempervirens” (131) and mentions the other friends that they work with: “In this print shop dominated by an antique Heidelberg 4 Color which a friend ministers to while I prepare the pages, another friend glues, and a third one trims, to put together this little samizdat that we’ve all conceived, in this fervor and enthusiasm, I experience that continuity.” (132) Clearly, there are several hands at work on this book, and I suspect different contributing authors in different chapters. >As a result, there are somewhat different theoretical takes on particular concepts, which suggests that the chapters can be read autonomously.[2] >The task in reading Now should be to address segments of the book, I believe, rather than the book as a whole. Let’s do that here.
>Destituent power: Avoiding the Counterrevolution
>The central argument of chapter four, “Let’s Destitute the World,” calls for destitution rather than constituent power: to knock down, rather than reconstitute political institutions.
>For the Committee, the recurring problem with political action is that it always reproduces old forms of domination. Young student leaders become state ministers. Revolution turns into counterrevolution. This is what the Committee calls “the iron cage of counter-revolution”: the fact that revolutionary movements always reconstitute the power relations that they first attacked. (76)
>In order to escape the cycle, the Committee argues for a new type of power, destituent insurrections, that it opposes to constituent insurrections.[3] >The idea is to constantly avoid the reproduction of domination by always escaping from it, exiting, disengaging.

>The Committee gives very concrete examples of what it has in mind with regard to destituent power:
>“To destitute the university is to establish, at a distance, the places of research, of education and thought, that are more vibrant and more demanding than it is—which would not be hard—and to greet the arrival of the last vigorous minds who are tired of frequenting the academic zombies, and only then to administer its death blow.”
>“To destitute the judicial system is to learn to settle our disputes ourselves, applying some method to this, paralyzing its faculty of judgment and driving its henchmen from our lives.”
>“To destitute medicine is to know what is good for us and what makes us sick, to rescue from the institution the passionate knowledges that survive there out of view, and never again to find oneself alone at the hospital, with one’s body handed over to the artistic sovereignty of a disdainful surgeon.”
>“To destitute the government is to make ourselves ungovernable. Who said anything about winning? Overcoming is everything.” (81)
>According to the Committee, the idea is not to attack these institutions, but to let them wither and die: “The destituent gesture does not oppose the institution. It doesn’t even mount a frontal fight, it neutralizes it, empties it of its substance, then steps to the side and watches it expire. It reduces it down to the incoherent ensemble of its practices and makes decisions about them.” (81)

>intellectual version of the lives of simple living small town people who actually can influence their town and community by congregating and voicing their critiques
That is a huge projection at best and poor psychoanalysis at worst. If anything these people would rather be ivory tower academics than living the simple small town life.

Ma'am, you're projecting there too, I'm afraid.