The English write Jeremy Bentham used the phrase once (I believe he actually said “upon” and not “on” but whatever). He wasn’t talking about The Coming Insurrection but he could have been. That’s the title of a whack job piece of what I recently heard aptly described as lifestyle communism - little different from lifestyle anarchism except in the resources it (ab)uses, calling to mind Paul Mattick’s suggestion that Marxism might be the last refuge of the bourgeoisie (most notably the petit bourgeoisie, or upper strata cultural producers who aspire to petit bourgeois [qua celebrity] status). Here’s a good review of why the book is crap.
Here’s the last bit of the book:
The goal of any insurrection is to become irreversible. It becomes irreversible when you’ve defeated both authority and the need for authority, property and the taste for appropriation, hegemony and the desire for hegemony. That is why the insurrectionary process carries within itself the form of its victory, or that of its defeat. Destruction has never been enough to make things irreversible. What matters is how it’s done. There are ways of destroying that unfailingly provoke the return of what has been crushed. Whoever wastes their energy on the corpse of an order can be sure that this will arouse the desire for vengeance. Thus, wherever the economy is blocked and the police are neutralized, it is important to invest as little pathos as possible in overthrowing the authorities. They must be deposed with the most scrupulous indifference and derision.
In times like these, the end of centralized revolutions reflects the decentralization of power. Winter Palaces still exist but they have been relegated to assaults by tourists rather than revolutionary hordes. Today it is possible to take over Paris, Rome, or Buenos Aires without it being a decisive victory. Taking over Rungis would certainly be more effective than taking over the Elysée Palace. Power is no longer concentrated in one point in the world; it is the world itself, its flows and its avenues, its people and its norms, its codes and its technologies. Power is the organization of the metropolis itself. It is the impeccable totality of the world of the commodity at each of its points. Anyone who defeats it locally sends a planetary shock wave through its networks.
“the taste (…) the desire”
Moralizing. Police your wants. I’m for that, actually, but not this way, and it’s ironic given the source.
“the insurrectionary process carries within itself the form of its victory, or that of its defeat.”
That is: insurrections succeed. Or else they don’t. That’s deep.
“Whoever wastes their energy on the corpse of an order can be sure that this will arouse the desire for vengeance. ”
This is a clumsy but workable description of the role of circulations of texts like the Coming Insurrection in a niche market that capitalizes on left chic: lifestyle communism’s consumerist aspect.
“wherever the economy is blocked and the police are neutralized, it is important to invest as little pathos as possible in overthrowing the authorities. They must be deposed with the most scrupulous indifference and derision.”
Deride, and deride indifferently, or else capitalism and the police shall triumph. Nonsense upon stilts.
“the end of centralized revolutions reflects the decentralization of power. Winter Palaces still exist but they have been relegated to assaults by tourists rather than revolutionary hordes.”
In other words:
A. economic and state power used to be centralized
B. they are no longer so
C. there is a homology between the form of economic and state power and the form of revolutionary transformation
Thus,
D. centralized revolution used to make sense
E. centralized revolution no longer makes sense
B is highly questionable if at all true, particularly as a marker of a transition from A as a prior condition.
C is also highly questionable.
D is probably false and sides retrospectively with some of the worst elements of the marxist tradition
E in the sense of “we are not for seizing state power” is fine but there are many other - less stupid and less odious - roads to that destination.
“Today it is possible to take over Paris, Rome, or Buenos Aires without it being a decisive victory.”
Okay, sure. The force of this sentence is to work against a “take over the city” kind of perspective in any given locale. After all, surely what we want is “a decisive victory.” But then: “Anyone who defeats [power] locally sends a planetary shock wave through its networks.” Either sending “a planetary shock wave through [power’s] networks is not a decisive victory, in which case who cares, or it *is* a decisive victory. In the latter case, that would mean that taking over Paris, Rome, or Buenos Aires would in fact be a decisive victory because it would send a planetary shock wave through the networks of power. I repeat, nonsense upon stilts.
Very fashionable, though. I’ll be sure to buy a copy to place on my coffee table next to a black balaclava and a collection of Debord films on DVD for when I have my philosopher friends over to drink clear liquor and toast our twin certitude in both the bankruptcy of all actually existing organizations and the inevitable arrival of a true, pure organization that shall have done once and for all with the muck and the dirt of this degraded life.
As a final thought, this collection of texts to my mind confirms the near-pointlessness of post-operaismo, now little more than a slightly different plumaged breed of so-called post-leftism and/or insurrectionary anarchism. Lifestyle communism, an infantile disorder no more communist than the PCI or CP-USA.
I should say, of course, I am against the police rounding up those people in Tarnac and the attempt to whip up a frenzy around them. They should not have to endure the fucking up of their lives that may well result. That is important to say.
At the same time, the rest of us should not have to endure a concomitant result of the police action, the further infliction of such terrible ideas on us and the further diversion of communist ideas by aesthetes and mystics.
I tried out a reading group where the coming insurrection was sort of the central text. I agree; utter crap. I am of the opinion any more that philosophers should stay in the academy, sipping their lattés and tapping on their iBooks.
Comment by JCD — July 27, 2009 @ 9:08 am
Nate,
Thanks for posting that critique from Zmag. It was posted on Infoshop earlier today and I didn’t get a chance to read it until now. One of the comments there is really telling. Paraphrased, the person says “This guy doesn’t get TCI because he takes the quotes and reads them outside of the context of the book.” Normally I think taking things out of context is a bad idea for analysis, but what the author is actually doing is not that so much as allowing these sentences and paragraphs to breath on their own, which is valuable. Taken away from the atmosphere of pretension, which as someone who’s spent time in the academy, I’ll admit can be quite seductive, the texts themselves are pretty vacant and indeed stupid. Like the author of that critique says, counter-productive. But the problem, and it’s why this ridiculous IA fad isn’t going away anytime soon, is that those who read these texts so seriously and expect to be moved by them can’t see outside that air of seriousness and pretension, and so the text seems amazingly deep. Taken apart of course, it’s shallow as hell.
Comment by Brendan — July 29, 2009 @ 12:48 am
Dear Nate,
I love your site and read it with a great deal of interest and admiration. Which is why I find this post particularly odd. I understand very well the limitations of TCI, and I also understand why there might be some annoyance about the book’s visibility (not least because the reputed authors were arrested, one held for six months and still more or less under house arrest), but I am going to say this: the review of that book at zmag was awful and embarassing. I’m surprised you even linked to it, much less called it a “good” review. Your own account of the passage above is much better, if still dismissive and annoyed. etc.
So I will assume something is under your skin and leave it at that. And surely you don’t think TCI would be considered a book of philosophy, or belong to whatever you understand as post-operaismo…
JS
Comment by JS — July 29, 2009 @ 7:21 am
hi y’all,
JS, Thanks for the kind words and respectful criticism. I’ll take that on board and have more of a thought about TCI. I really dislike the spontaneist stuff that I see in TCI and the milieu (milieus, actually but I’m not sure that’s a word) that I see this stuff as tied to or at least resonant with. With regard to post-operaismo in particular, no I didn’t mean TCI but I wasn’t clear - the list of texts I linked to, largely stuff from the journal Tiqqun I believe, on the web site of the group that also hosts TCI, does include a melange of post-operaist work, at least elements of that stuff, with other philosophical work. To my mind that speaks ill of the post-operaist work. I didn’t mean that TCI was identical with that, though I sounded like I meant that as I was being sloppy.
Finally, yes, other things have gotten under my skin lately, things that have nothing at all to do with TCI, and some of that irritation came out in this post, unfairly.
Brendan, thanks much, I’m pretty sure you’re more familiar with the milieu this stuff comes out of than I am, so it’s good to hear your take.
JCD, I have mixed feelings on that. I quite like the uses of philosophy in politics that a few people sometimes do, but they’re really close to their object, so to speak. I’m thinking of some of the pieces I’ve mentioned here by Tom Wetzel, or I remember a really good piece by somebody on consensus (Tom’s already written good stuff on that), or my friend Todd. What I can definitely agree with is that philosophy is not a priori useful for uses beyond the philosophical,whether in politics or otherwise and it’s not at all clear resort to the philosophical is always an appropriate action in some context, or at least the most appropriate action.)
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — July 29, 2009 @ 12:37 pm