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The Invisible Committee

Now

"It's useless to wait-for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear
apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe
is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a
civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides."

- The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

Tomorrow is cancelled

All the reasons for carrying out a revolution are present. None is missing. The
sinking of politics, the arrogance of the powerful, the reign of the false, the
vulgarity of the wealthy, the cataclysms of industry, rampant poverty, naked
exploitation, ecological apocalypse – we are spared nothing, not even that of
being informed. "Climate: 2016 breaks the record of heat", tells us Le Monde on
its first page, as almost every year nowadays. All the reasons are united, but
it is not reasons that make revolutions, it is bodies. And the bodies are all
in front of screens.

We can watch a presidential campaign sink to the depths. The transformation of
the "most important moment of French political life" into a grand game of
massacre doesn't render the soap opera anymore captivating. Koh-Lanta [French
version of the U.S. "reality" show Survivor] could not be imagined with such
characters, nor with such vertiginous twists, such cruel trials, such general
humiliation. The spectacle of politics survives as the spectacle of its
decomposition. The incredulity reaches to the very landscapes of filth. The
National Front, this political negation of politics, this negation of politics
on the terrain of the political, logically occupies the "centre" of the smoking
ruins of this political game. Humanity witnesses, bewitched, at its own
sinking, like at a first class spectacle. It is so much taken that it does not
feel the water lapping at its legs. In the end, it will transform everything
into a buoy. It is the destiny of the shipwrecked to transform everything that
they touch into a buoy.

This world is no longer to be commented on, criticised, denounced. We live
surrounded by a fog of commentaries and of commentaries on commentaries, of
criticisms and of criticisms of criticisms, of revelations that trigger
nothing, except revelations about revelations. And this fog takes away from us
any hold on the world. There is nothing to criticise in Donald Trump. The worst
that one can say about him, he has already absorbed, incorporated. He embodies
it. He wears as a necklace all of the grievances that one could ever imagine
holding against him. He is his own caricature, and he is proud. Even the
creators of South Park throw in the towel: "It is very complicated now that
satire has become reality. We really did try to laugh at what was happening but
we couldn't keep up. What was happening was much funnier than anything that we
could imagine. We therefore decided to give up, to let them play their comedy,
and we would play our own." We live in a world that has established itself
beyond all justification. Here, criticism can do nothing, no more than satire.
They remain without effect. To stick to the denunciation of discrimination,
injustice, and wait to harvest the fruits, is to be mistaken about our epoch.
The leftists who believe that we can still raise something by working the lever
of guilty conscience are very much mistaken. They may very well go into public
to scratch at their wounds and make audible their complaints believing that
this will excite sympathy, they will arouse nothing more than disdain and the
desire to destroy them. "Victim" has become an insult in all quarters of the
world.

There is a social use of language. No one believes it any longer. Its price has
fallen to zero. From which comes the inflationary bubble in global jabber.
Everything that is social is deceitful; everyone knows it from now on. It is
not only those who govern, the advertisers and the public personalities who
"engage in communication". It is every entrepreneur of the self that this
society aims to make of each of us, persistent practitioners of the art of
"public relations". Having become an instrument of communication, language is
no longer its own reality, but an instrument in the service of operating on the
real, to obtain effects according to different conscious strategies. Words are
no longer put into circulation except to travesty things. Everything sails
under false flags. Usurpation has become universal. One does not retreat before
any paradox. The state of emergency is the state of law. War is made in the
name of peace. Bosses "offer jobs". Security cameras are "apparatuses of video
protection". The executioners/torturers complain that they are persecuted.
Traitors protest their sincerity and their fidelity. Mediocrities are cited
everywhere as examples. There is the real practice on the one hand, and on the
other, the discourse, which is an implacable counterpoint, with the perversion
of all concepts, the universal deceit of oneself and of others. Everywhere, it
is exclusively a question of preserving or extending interests. In return, the
world is peopled by the silent. Certain among them explode in acts of madness
closer and closer to each other by date. Who can be surprised? Don't say
anymore, "The young no longer believe in anything." Say: "Shit! They no longer
swallow our lies." Don't say anymore, "The young are nihilists." Say: "Fuck! If
this continues, they're going to survive the collapse of our world."

The value of language has fallen to zero, and yet we write. It's because there
is another use of language. One can speak of life, and one can speak from life.
It's not the same language, nor the same style. It's also not the same idea of
truth. There is a "courage of truth" that consists in hiding behind the
objective neutrality of the "facts". There is another that considers that a
word which leads to nothing, that is worth nothing in itself, that doesn't risk
its position, that costs nothing, isn't worth much. All the criticism of
financial capitalism is a pale when compared to the smashed window of a bank,
tagged "Here are your updates!" ["Tiens, tes aggios!"] It's not because of
ignorance that the "youths" appropriate the punchline of rappers in their
political slogans rather than the maxims of philosophers. And it is from
decency that they don't take up the "We renounce nothing!" ["On lâche rien!"],
that militants cry out at the moment when they renounce everything. It is that
some speak of the world, while others speak from the world.

The true deceit is not that which one does to others, but that which one does
to oneself. The first is, in comparison to the other, relatively exceptional.
Deceit is refusing to see certain things that one sees, and refusing to see
them as one sees them. True deceit, are all of the screens, all of the images,
all of the explanations, which one lets between oneself and the world. It's the
way that we daily trample upon our own perceptions. So much so, that as long as
it will not be a question of truth, it will not be a question of anything.
There will be nothing. Nothing except this planetary asylum of fools. The truth
is not something towards which we would tend, but a non-evasive relation to
what there is. It is not a "problem" except for those who already see life as a
problem. It is not something that one professes, but a way of being in the
world. It is therefore not something that is possessed, or accumulated. It is
given in a situation, from moment to moment. Whoever senses the duplicity of
someone, the harmful character of a representation or of the forces that move
beneath the play of images, will strip away whatever hold they have on them.
Truth is the full presence to oneself and to the world, the vital contact with
the real, the acute perception of the givens of existence. In a world where
everyone plays, where everyone is on stage, where one communicates all the more
so when nothing is really said, the single word "truth" chills, irritates or
arouses sneers. Everything that this epoch contains of sociability has assumed
the habit of supporting itself on the crutches of deceit to the point of not
being able to let go of them. There is no need to "proclaim the truth". To
preach the truth to those who cannot even tolerate slight doses of it is only
to expose oneself to their vengeance. In what follows, we in no way pretend to
speak of "the truth", but of the perception that we have of the world, of what
we hold to, of what keeps us standing and alive. Common sense's neck must be
twisted: truths are multiple, but deceit is one, because it is universally
leagued against the least little truth that may surface.

We are kept up to date on the thousands of threats that surround us –
terrorists, endocrine disruptors, migrants, fascism, unemployment. And thus the
imperturbable routine of capitalist normality is perpetuated: against the
background of thousands of unsuccessful plots, hundreds of postponed
catastrophes. It has to be recognised that the riot has the paradoxical virtue
of liberating us from the livid anxiety that one tries to inoculate us with,
day after day, with armed military patrols, breaking news and government
announcements. It is what the amateurs of those funeral processions called
"demonstrations" cannot understand, those who around a glass of red wine taste
the pleasure of their defeat, those who let go of a flatulent "Or else this is
going to blow!" before wisely returning to their bus. In the street
confrontation, the enemy has a clear face, whether in civilian clothes or in
armour. S/he has largely known methods. S/he has a name and a function. S/he is
additionally called a "functionary", as s/he declares soberly. The friend also
has gestures, movements and a recognisable appearance. There is in the riot an
incandescence of the presence to self and to others, a lucid fraternity that
the Republic is very well incapable of arousing. The organised riot is equally
able to produce what this society is incapable of engendering: living and
irreversible ties. Those who stop before the images of violence always miss
what is at play in the fact of together taking the risk to smash, tag, confront
the police. One never leaves one's first riot untouched. It is this positivity
of the riot that the spectator prefers not to see, and which in the end
frightens her/him far more than the damage, the charges and counter-charges. In
the riot, there is the production and affirmation of friendships, direct
configurations of the world, clear possibilities of action, ready to hand
means. The situation has a form and one can move within it. The risks are
clear, in contrast to all of the nebulous "risks" that governments take
pleasure in making hang over our existences. The riot is desirable as a moment
of truth. It is a momentary suspension of the confusion: in the gas, things are
curiously clear and the real is finally readable. It is difficult then not to
see who is who. Speaking of the day of insurrection on the 15th of July 1927 in
Vienna in the course of which proletarians burned the palace of justice, Elias
Canetti said: "It is what I lived closest to a revolution. Hundreds of pages
would not suffice to describe everything that I saw." It would serve as the
inspiration for his chef-d'oeuvre Crowds and Power. The riot is formative
through what it makes us see.

There was in the English navy this old toast, "Confusion to our enemies!"
Confusion has a strategic value. It is not by chance. It scatters wills and
prohibits their renewed reassembly. It has the taste of the ashes of defeat,
whereas the battle hasn't yet taken place, and probably never will. Each of the
recent attacks in France is thus followed by a train of confusion, which comes
opportunely to increase the government discourse on the matter. Those who claim
responsibility for the attacks, those who call for war on those who claim
responsibility for them; they all have an interest in our confusion. As for
those who execute the attacks, they are often the children – the children of
the confusion.

This world that babbles so much has nothing to say: it is devoid of
affirmation. Perhaps it believed that it thereby rendered itself unassailable.
But it above all placed itself at the mercy of any consequent affirmation. A
world whose positivity arises from so many ravages well deserves that what is
affirmed with life first takes on the form of pillaging, smashing, rioting. We
will not fail to be taken as desperate, on the grounds that we act, we build,
we attack without hope. Hope, here is at least a sickness with which this
civilisation has not infected us. We are not nevertheless desperate. No one
ever acted through hope. Hope is related to waiting, to refusing to see what
there is, to the fear of breaking in on the present, in short: to the fear of
living. To hope is to declare oneself in advance without a hold on what one
nevertheless expects. It is to hold back from the process so as not to be held
to the results. It is to want things to be otherwise without wanting the means
to make them so. It is cowardliness. One has to know to what one holds, and
then hold to it. Even if to make enemies. Even if to make friends. As soon as
we know what we want, we are no longer alone, the world peoples itself.
Everywhere allies, those close by and an infinite gradation of possible
friendships. Nothing is close by for one who floats. Hope, this very light but
constant impulse towards tomorrow that is communicated to us day by day is the
best agent for the maintenance of order. We are daily informed of problems
about which we can do nothing, but for which there will surely be solutions
tomorrow. The whole crushing sentiment of powerless that this social
organisation cultivates endlessly in each of us is nothing but an enormous
lesson in waiting. It is a flight from the now. There never was, there is not
and there never will be anything but the now. And even if what was formerly
exercises some effect on the now, it is because what was formerly was never
anything itself except a now. As tomorrow will be. The only way to understand
something in the past is to understand that it was also a now. It is to feel
the weak breath of air in which the women and men of yesterday lived. If we are
so inclined to flee the now, it is because it is the place of the decision. It
is the place of the "I accept" or of the "I refuse". It is the place of the
logical gesture that immediately follows perception. It is the present, and
thus the place of presence. It is the instant, ceaselessly repeated, of taking
a position. To think in distant terms is always more comfortable. "In the end",
things will change; "in the end", beings will be transfigured. Meanwhile, let
us continue as we are, let us remain what we are. A spirit that thinks in terms
of the future is incapable of acting in the present. S/he does not seek change:
s/he avoids it. The current disaster is like the monstrous accumulation of all
the deferred moments in the past, to which is added in a permanent landslide
that of each day and of each instant. But life is always played out now, and
now, and now.

Each one sees that this civilisation is like a train heading towards the abyss,
and that accelerates. The more it accelerates, the more are heard the drunken
hysterical hoorays from the discotheque car. You would have to lend an ear to
detect the petrified silence of rational spirits who no longer understand
anything, of those anguished who bite their nails and the false accent of
serenity in the intermittent exclamations of those who play cards, waiting.
Internally, many people have chosen to jump from the train, but they remain on
the footboard. They are still beset by so many things. And they feel so held
because they have made the choice, but the decision is lacking. For it is the
decision that traces in the present the manner and the possibility of acting,
of taking a jump that is not into the void. This decision, it is that of the
deserter, that of stepping out of the rank, that of organising oneself, that of
secession, be it imperceptibly, but in all cases, now.

The epoch belongs to the resolute.

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