#1 13-09-2024 16:53

TO

2007 – The Coming Insurrection – and Beyond

1. The small book in question here, The Coming Insurrection, is what could be called, in the dominant information, a social phenomenon. It speaks of our time in a way in which it is not often spoken of. Everybody finds something familiar in it. And also, everybody feels foreign to what is said. It is this shifting game of point of view, which commits and allows to take some distance, both at the same time, that has allowed some, from Le Nouvel Observateur to the modern teleology, via the PCMLM or Sud*, to take interest, not without interest, not without annoyance, in this contemporary voice.

Let us start with what seems estimable, from the point of view of modern teleology. It is rare to read, nowadays, a book that is so critical of the current society. It is a pleasure close to consolation, a relief, to hear an articulated discourse completely refusing the present social organisation, and trying to draw practical conclusions therefrom. That such a deep and argued rejection may be expressed, makes ours less isolated, and already undertakes the critique of separation that has been on the program of negative practices since the beginning of the Iranian revolution, in 1967.

The anonymity of the authors, which they present as offensive, contains the will to put the word forward, as opposed to the vain celebrity and to the digests contained in signatures. This is another point at which the modern teleologues, who have been supporting it for so long, are delighted. The integrity of the word, today, manifests itself more and more when it is clear of the individuals who have uttered it, unfortunately. Thus an anonymous signature like that of the “Comité invisible” is first a sign of probity.

This anonymity, however, seems oddly defended by their authors, when they want to turn it into a sort of clandestinity, little compatible with a public activity like the discourse in which it appears, in such a policed society. All the more so, if what Le Nouvel Observateur, whose critique knows the number, the age, and apparently the home location of the members of this committee, is true. If anonymity against the police forbids any access to publication, the anonymity that allows publication should at least be able to stay away completely from the media the most committed in our society like Le Nouvel Observateur. It is never difficult to deter a journalist from talking about you. In fact, it is enough to avoid any approach by proving fiercely unfriendly, so to speak, from the very first contact. A dull hostility efficiently protects from the echo makers.

The book’s style and tone take part in the annoyance. Stemming from a literary tradition obviously inspired by Guy Debord, the long assertive discourse flies with fluidity but imprecision between never supported personal experiences, and almost always abusive generalisations. An example: a few borrowings of events from other countries seem to give an international character to this 100% French world view; or, a few conceptions from everyday life, extended to a “we” with no outline that provokes the exclusion or the rejection of those who do not share this experience: “Besides, we do not work anymore: we job.” No. I do not “job”.

This assertive and yet approximate tone plays with generalisation. Yet it does not do it from the point of view of history, but from the point of view of a daily life to be reinvented. Generalisation here is, precisely, the historical part seen through the angle of daily life. That is exactly the dominant point of view: to no longer understand in what history is fundamentally different from daily life, to call for a revolt that would settle in the world built around a daily life. This too short vision is already announced in the title: an insurrection is always a middle term between the current situation and a goal. In this Coming Insurrection, what simply lacks is the goal of the insurrection, what will enable us to go beyond it or what will give a direction to this supersession.

2. The Coming Insurrection is divided into two parts: the statement and the project. The statement is an analysis of the current society, in seven circles, which by the way have no immanent circularity, and the structure of which rather shows a quite inappropriate literary affectation – an imitation of the structure of Dante’s Hell? –, than a ground in content.

The statement only shows us what is bad in this society. That the social organisation is opposed to our interests as a whole seems not only a arguable thesis, but a good offensive tool. In The Coming Insurrection however, the chosen bias is to show an addition of bad things, which would mean as a result, implicitly, that everything is bad. That is the first considerable weakness of this text.

Our world is not bad in every thing, precisely. It is made of multiple satisfactions, which dull us and reduce us, maybe, but which we need. The current society has managed to reduce asceticism to almost nothing, and to corrupt, through pleasure, through satisfaction, our fundamental unsatisfaction. It has legalized and spread states of its “well-being”. Through modes of thought related to rest, to recuperation, it has colonized, for its own use, borders of the unconscious, paces at which the focus of consciousness retracts and the imagination wanders. This breach of the taboo not only generates falseness, it also draws support to this society: yes, a “good” movie, a sprint in a sports car, an internet porn site, an excellent meal, a “trip” in an unknown capital city, a concert or a football game are moments, states, modes of thought and of satisfaction in which we all more or less take part, suspending during these instants our abilities for critique. To eat sufficiently and not to endure war remains a double demand of poor people, which the current society satisfies at least in the western states, and there are not many instances in the past of such a situation lasting for so long. This is not about promoting any sort of asceticism or rejecting pleasure; but admitting that its mutation into a positive value of middleclass society is also used in order to defend this middleclass society.

One of the main problems of the party of unsatisfaction is that it is facing an organisation of multiple and connected partial satisfactions that nobody can avoid today, and that makes one forget the unsatisfaction that allows humanity to move on towards its accomplishment. That is the exact contrary of what comes out of the statement of The Coming Insurrection: here we have an arbitrary addition of unsatisfactions, multiple and connected, that simply hides the reasons for agreeing with this society as if they did not exist; and we have a society that is not called into question as a whole, because it is never considered as a whole.

The point of view of this statement is indeed the collapse, not only of society, of the current “civilisation”. Now the very term of civilisation, one of the most discriminating term invented by the dominant ideology for the last two centuries, is evanescent today. Thus, when “our” civilisation, western or whatever one wishes to call it, collapses, it is only this very illusion, that of a civilisation to which we would belong, that is collapsing. It simply is this false idea that appears to be false, this hypothesis once hypostasied that is rejected.

But beyond this semantic objection, it seems that the Comité invisible gives in, in the dubious game of predictions, to the diagnosis of collapse, of disaster, of catastrophe. That is an analysis we do not share. We think that our enemy is redoubtable, no longer very young, but not old yet, destroying many things, but building some too. The growing pauperization, the deprivation of debate, the isolation, all the forms of coercive strengthening of the current society are far from looking like a disaster for us, or even from looking like a decline for this enemy. We think, on the contrary, that a dispute is taking place, that it brings into play two opposing views, and that the strongest view for now is not ours. The modification of the world happens according to this view; besides, this badly known dispute takes place on a background of growing alienation. This unprecedentedly huge movement of thought, unimaginable for a consciousness, affects positively and negatively both parties, like the apologia of pleasure, which was once critical, and which the enemy managed to make its own.

We are carefully observing the erosion of this enemy, and we find that it is slow, and that its abilities of regeneration are inventive, more so than those of the party of unsatisfaction, which however seems imperishable, a phenomenon of which the enemy seems to have lost, for now, the worried awareness. Corruption and criminality, which always mark the gap between the rules and the players, are growing, but not yet to the point of being able to endanger this society, by far. We are also looking at the dialectic between desire and satiation, and the present time is rather allowing the latter to contain the former. These discrete, and fine, equilibriums, disprove quite clearly the ambiance of the end of a world that is projected by the statement of The Coming Insurrection.

3. “We can no longer even see how an insurrection might begin. Sixty years of pacification and containment of historical upheavals, sixty years of democratic anesthesia and the management of events, have dulled our perception of the real, our sense of the war in progress.” That is how the project part of the books begins. And it compares with what follows. It is firstly a thick historical ignorance. We can see very well how an insurrection begins: from a riot. There are indeed riots without insurrection, but there are no insurrections without riot.

The sixty years of pacification may be felt so in the autism that may be cultivated in a small vegetable field in the French countryside, but they are not lived so at the scale of the world. Is the war in progress indexed on a certain official history for little well-behaved people that claims that the last world war marks the last war? Then what shall be said about the vast social movement that has transformed the world, its debate, and even in a certain sense its self-perception, and that has torn and reconstituted the planet between 1967 and 1993? It would be a good idea for the theoricians of a future insurrection to know about those they have avoided, in their lifetime. There is less shame in admitting that one was not in Iran, in Kwangju or in Toxteth, than in doing as if these very events had not contributed to make up the battlefield in which we stand today.

The Coming Insurrection would spread from “commune” to “commune”. A scattered piece of revolt adds up to another scattered piece of revolt, which can be of such different natures as a wildcat strike or a pirate radio, there would be networks of scattered revolts, more and more dense, tighter and tighter, more and more numerous. Here is the insurrection that comes and that would end together with the sixty years of pacification that separate us from the so-called world war. Let’s suppose so. What is the aim of this process? There is none other, for the authors of the book in question, than to settle in this process.

The end of this vision, without goal and without object, is a short text which presents, if one is to understand correctly, the situation of the insurrection. It starts with the subway, where people speak to each other; it goes on to the squatting of a town hall by the evicted residents of a building, the relocation of screws and cops whose addresses are known, to the bar and grocery store of the village where “we carry our surplus goods (…), and take what we lack. Some of us stay long enough to discuss the general situation and figure out the hardware we need for the machine shop.” Then, a rocket makes a prison wall collapse. And a prime minister calls for calm, while no one can no longer tell how long it has been since these “events” began.

Nothing of all this seems desirable. The vigour of the insurrection, which first is an intensification of life, a moment when one comes closer to the end of existence, physical as well as generic, nothing of this explosion of our crusts and of our slowness, of the abolition of our anaesthesias and of the management of our satisfactions, appears here. Somehow one may enjoy a perspective where people would speak to each other in the subway; but if there is an insurrection, who would make the subway circulate and why and to go where and do what? This seems much more interesting. And besides, what kind of sordid aesthetic taste would make us chose, as the first setting of recovered dignity, the narrow underground, stinking of servitude, of the subway? Then, what a beautiful fate for evicted residents: to live in a town hall. Many, to be sure, would find the street more dignifying. The relocation of the cops after an operation of denunciation against them, big deal! Now we don’t know where they are anymore, but they have gathered, and are on their guard. As for the bar and grocery store of the village where management is done, where people talk about the general situation and of the supply of the machine shop, how is it different from today? And the rocket that destroys the prison wall, let’s hope that it is not one against which we are leaning. There is still a prime minister, in this never-ending insurrection that erases in us the measure of time, just as well as the dominant information does today.

This particularly gloomy world is especially so because it shows quite well one of the fundamental threats that the enemy tries to inculcate into us: there is no way out, there is no possible beyond, there is no goal. The insurrection is its own goal, a way of life sustainable enough so that we forget how it starts, just as the Comité invisible today has forgotten how an insurrection may begin. While the anthropocentric project of humanity is a project of mastery of the human by the human, of the totality, the Comité invisible is unceasingly resigned to definitive losses of control, like even the notion of time. Even the Maoists of the PCMLM, who are at least thinking of exiting this universe through dialectics and class struggle, aim at supersession. Yet here, we remain in this world, it is only destroyed by war, in two sides with no end, in a sort of poor and tenacious apocalypse, which resembles some politic fiction B movies.

Facing such a mediocre project, which rather prompts to the current submission – which at least does not provide joy only with mechanic workshops and town halls invaded by evicted people –, here only one of the more fundamental disagreements that this text has made arise will be commented: what the authors say of the “general assembly”.

“Another reflex is to call a general assembly at the slightest sign of movement, and vote. This is a mistake. The business of voting and deciding a winner, is enough to turn the assembly into a nightmare, into a theater where all the various little pretenders to power confront each other. Here we suffer from the bad example of bourgeois parliaments. An assembly is not a place for decisions but for palaver, for free speech exercised without a goal.”

To say that voting transforms an assembly into a nightmare is a view that does not correspond, in any way, to those that took place in Argentina in 2002. The goal was palaver more than anywhere else – this goal was not admitted but still the goal –, and people voted much: voting was part of palaver. Vote there has also been used for power, but especially against all power, to cloud all the issues. In a word, voting was entirely delightful.

The “bourgeois” parliaments, on the other hand, vote precisely without deciding anything: the decisions are already made before the vote, by the party bureaucracies. The vote allows, in these assemblies, for no claim for power: the power, like the decision, lies in back rooms less exposed to the public. Lastly, to claim that palaver, free speech, is the one that is spoken without a goal, is definitely the token of the disarray of people without goals, and who do not want any. To speak without a goal is not particularly of interest for the assemblies that enjoy the urgencies of which history is the accelerator, and of which the insurrection is the proof. The assemblies that are today the closest from this definition – i.e. not designed for decision, but for palaver – are the TV pseudo-debates, where there is no vote either, and that claim to be, not without reason, the privileged places of free speech exercised without a goal.

The Comité invisible finds that there are very few decisions to make, so few that they should not be made, but that the decisions must take us. I make several thousand decisions per day, and on another level I seek to make the decision that contains all the others. It is about acquiring a control over what is. This decision necessitates several general assemblies of humanity, that would decide, not necessarily through vote actually, but even that will be decided by these assemblies. A decision that would take me is the complete opposite of a decision that realises me, that accomplishes me. The latter must be projected, and prepared. Here is everything that separates modern teleology from this “coming insurrection”, against which I would fiercely fight if it happened in the vast world that we go through as unsatisfied instead of in the poor imagination of a few poor people.

4. The phenomenon of this little book is strange, because it is both familiar and foreign to everyone. It is an arrow whose direction is not mistaken. It is shot with strength, but without range. It ends up at our feet or in a cloud, in the too short and in the too vague, given how absurd and little desirable the final insurrection seems to be, to ourselves who desire insurrections.

The weakness of the method, the very worrisome ignorance of history, the loss of distance and of global view, are the other oddnesses of a book that measures what the distance is between the scattered individuals of today and their own unsatisfaction, between the means of a statement that has lost the means of an analysis, and the derisory value of a project that has lost its goal.

It is probably through this infirmity that has generalized that The Coming Insurrection is familiar enough to us so that we examine this odd object, so hostile to the same enemy as ours and in which, however, we can see its influence at every step.

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Re : 2007 – The Coming Insurrection – and Beyond

Translator’s note – Le Nouvel Observateur: centre-left wing weekly magazine. PCMLM: Maoist party (parti communiste marxiste-léniniste-maoïste). Sud: left wing trade union.