- Invisible Committee, The.
The Coming Insurrection.
Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, [2007] 2009.
ISBN 978-1-58435-080-4.
-
I have not paid much attention to the
“anti-globalisation”
protesters who seem to pop up at gatherings of international political
and economic leaders, for example at the
WTO
Ministerial Conference in Seattle in 1999 and the
Genoa G8 Summit in 2001.
In large part this is because I have more interesting things with which to occupy
my time, but also because, despite saturation media coverage of such events,
I was unable to understand the agenda of the protesters, apart from smashing
windows and hurling epithets and improvised projectiles at the organs of state
security. I understand what they're opposed to, but couldn't for the
life of me intuit what policies would prevail if they had their way. Still, as
they are often described as “anarchists”, I, as a flaming anarchist
myself, could not help but be intrigued by those so identified in the legacy media
as taking the struggle to the street.
This book, written by an anonymous group of authors, has been hailed as the
manifesto of this movement, so I hoped that reading it would provide some
insight into what it was all about. My hope was in vain. The writing
is so incoherent and the prose so impenetrable that I closed it with no more
knowledge of the philosophy and programme of its authors than when I opened
it. My general perception of the “anti-globalisation” movement was
one of intellectual nonentities spewing inchoate rage at the “system”
which produces the wealth that allows them to live their slacker lives and
flit from protest to protest around the globe. Well, if this is their
manifesto, then indeed that's all there is to it. The text is nearly impossible
to decipher, being written in a dialect of no known language. Many paragraphs
begin with an unsubstantiated and often absurd assertion, then follow it with
successive verb-free sentence fragments which seem to be intended to reinforce
the assertion. I suppose that if you read it as a speech before a mass assembly
of fanatics who cheer whenever they hear one of their trigger words it may work,
but one would expect savvy intellectuals to discern the difference in media and
adapt accordingly. Whenever the authors get backed into an irreconcilable
logical corner, they just drop an F-bomb and start another paragraph.
These are people so clueless that I'll have to coin a new word for those I've been
calling clueless
all these many years. As far as I can figure out, they assume
that they can trash the infrastructure of the “system”, and all of
the necessities of their day to day urban life will continue to flow to them
thanks to the magic responsible for that today. These “anarchists”
reject the “exploitation” of work—after all, who needs to work?
“Aside from welfare, there are various benefits, disability money,
accumulated student aid, subsidies drawn off fictitious childbirths, all kinds
of trafficking, and so many other means that arise with every mutation of
control.” (p. 103) Go anarchism! Death to the state,
as long as the checks keep coming! In fact, it is almost certain that the effete
would-be philosophes who set crayon (and I don't
mean the French word for “pencil”) to paper to produce this
work will be among the first wave of those to fall in the great die-off
starting between 72 and 96 hours after that event towards which they so sincerely strive:
the grid going down. Want to know what I'm talking about? Turn off the water main
where it enters your house and see what happens in the next three days if you
assume you can't go anywhere else where the water is on. It's way too late to
learn about “rooftop vegetable gardens” when the just-in-time
underpinnings which sustain modern life come to a sudden halt. Urban intellectuals
may excel at publishing blows against the empire, but when the system actually
goes down, bet on rural rednecks to be the survivors. Of course, as far as
I can figure out what these people want, it may be that Homo sapiens
returns to his roots—namely digging for roots and grubs with a pointed stick.
Perhaps rather than flying off to the next G-20 meeting to fight the future, they
should spend a week in one of the third world paradises where people still
live that way and try it out for themselves.
The full text of the book is available online in
English
and
French.
Lest you think the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a beacon
of rationality and intelligence in a world going dark, it is their
university press which distributes this book.
May 2010 