Today’s territory is the product of many centuries of police operations. People have been pushed out of their fields, then their streets, then their neighborhoods, and finally and from the hallways of their buildings, in the demented hope of containing all life between the four sweating walls of privacy. The territorial question isn’t the same for us as it is for the state. For us it’s not about possessing the territory. Rather, it’s a matter of increasing the density of communes, of circulation, and of solidarities that the territory becomes unreadable, opaque to all authority. We don’t want to occupy the territory, we want to be the territory.i The quote above comes from the pamphlet The Coming Insurrection, put out in 2007 by the provocatively titled Invisible Committee. Its language anticipates American’s Occupy movements by years, and then surpasses them in the blink of sentence – “we want to be the territory.” By doing so, the Invisible Committee harkens back to another time, when outright insurrection didn’t seem like a far-off possibility. The pamphlet takes the form of a political manifesto, surely an icon of revolutions past; yet it offers no program, attempts to not to bring together a party formation, a vanguard, or even a collective signifier for revolt. Instead, we find that The Coming Insurrection tries to act as a curious anti-manifesto, a non-platform for post-politics. “Organization,” we read, “are obstacles to organizing ourselves.”ii The Invisible Committee’s work got dragged into the American media Spectacle, briefly. As the Egyptian revolts surged through the country’s street and Occupy Wall Street began to take off, Glenn Beck held the book in his hand as he attempted to draw out the conspiratorial relationship between “the Left and the Islamists.” The Invisible Committee, in reality, was an ancillary project of Tiqqun, a radical collective that existed between the years of 1999 and 2001. Steeped in French intellectual thought and insurrectionary anarchism, Tiqqun espoused a politics of frustration; it allowed itself to unabashedly embrace the will to be against. ... deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress/2013/11/14/empire-biopower-spectacle-notes-on-tiqqun/
Posted on: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 09:27:28 +0000
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