{"id":341279,"date":"2025-03-24T18:08:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-24T14:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/epress.am\/?p=341279"},"modified":"2025-03-24T18:08:30","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T14:08:30","slug":"the-coming-insurrection-the-invisible-committee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2025\/03\/24\/the-coming-insurrection-the-invisible-committee.html","title":{"rendered":"The Coming Insurrection\u0589 Invisible Committee"},"content":{"rendered":"

Armenian translation is available on\u00a0Epress.am<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The Coming Insurrection
\n<\/strong>First Circle<\/p>\n

\u201cI AM WHAT I AM.\u201d This is marketing\u2019s latest offering to the world, the final stage in the development of advertising, far beyond all the exhortations to be different, to be oneself and drink Pepsi. Decades of concepts in order to get where we are, to arrive at pure tautology. I = I. He\u2019s running on a treadmill in front of the mirror in his gym. She\u2019s coming back from work, behind the wheel of her Smart car. Will they meet?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI AM WHAT I AM.\u201d My body belongs to me. I am me, you are you, and <\/span>something\u2019s wrong.<\/span><\/i> Mass personalization. Individualization of all conditions\u2014life, work and misery. Diffuse schizophrenia. Rampant depression. Atomization into fine paranoiac particles. Hysterization of contact. The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get. We cling to our self like a coveted job title. We\u2019ve become our own representatives in a strange commerce, guarantors of a personalization that feels, in the end, a lot more like an amputation. We insure ourselves to the point of bankruptcy, with a more or less disguised clumsiness.<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, <\/span>I manage<\/span><\/i>. The quest for a self, my blog, my apartment, the latest fashionable crap, relationship dramas, who\u2019s fucking who … whatever prosthesis it takes to hold onto an \u201cI\u201d! If \u201csociety\u201d hadn\u2019t become such a definitive abstraction, then it would denote all the existential crutches that allow me to keep dragging on, the ensemble of dependencies I\u2019ve contracted as the price of my identity. <\/span>The handicapped person is the model citizen of tomorrow.<\/span><\/i> It\u2019s not without foresight that the associations exploiting them today demand that they be granted a \u201csubsistence income.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The injunction, everywhere, to \u201cbe someone\u201d maintains the pathological state that makes this society necessary. The injunction to be strong produces the very weakness by which it maintains itself, so that <\/span>everything seems to take on a therapeutic character<\/span><\/i>, even working, even love. All those \u201chow\u2019s it goings?\u201d that we exchange give the impression of a society composed of patients taking each other\u2019s temperatures. Sociability is now made up of a thousand little niches, a thousand little refuges where you can take shelter. Where it\u2019s always better than the bitter cold outside. Where everything\u2019s false, since it\u2019s all just a pretext for getting warmed up. Where nothing can happen since we\u2019re all too busy shivering silently together. Soon this society will only be held together by the mere tension of all the social atoms straining towards an illusory cure. It\u2019s a power plant that runs its turbines on a gigantic reservoir of unwept tears, always on the verge of spilling over.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI AM WHAT I AM.\u201d Never has domination found such an innocent-sounding slogan. The maintenance of the self in a permanent state of deterioration, in a chronic state of near-collapse, is the best-kept secret of the present order of things. The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that endlessly adaptable subject required by the ceaseless innovation of production, the accelerated obsolescence of technologies, the constant overturning of social norms, and generalized flexibility. It is at the same time the most voracious consumer and, paradoxically, the <\/span>most productive self<\/span><\/i>, the one that will most eagerly and energetically throw itself into the slightest <\/span>project<\/span><\/i>, only to return later to its original larval state.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWHAT AM I,\u201d then? Since childhood, I\u2019ve passed through a flow of milk, smells, stories, sounds, emotions, nursery rhymes, substances, gestures, ideas, impressions, gazes, songs, and foods. What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously <\/span>are not me<\/span><\/i>. Everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don\u2019t form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living <\/span>existence<\/span><\/i>, from which emerges\u2014at certain times and places\u2014that being which says \u201cI.\u201d Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief in the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s dizzying to see Reebok\u2019s \u201cI AM WHAT I AM\u201d enthroned atop a Shanghai skyscraper. The West everywhere rolls out its favorite Trojan horse: the exasperating antimony between the self and the world, the individual and the group, between attachment and freedom. Freedom isn\u2019t the act of shedding our attachments, but the <\/span>practical<\/span><\/i> capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them. The family only exists as a family, that is, as a hell, for those who\u2019ve quit trying to alter its debilitating mechanisms, or don\u2019t know how to. The freedom <\/span>to uproot oneself<\/span><\/i> has always been a phantasmic freedom. We can\u2019t rid ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI AM WHAT I AM,\u201d then, is not simply a lie, a simple advertising campaign, but a <\/span>military<\/span><\/i> campaign, a war cry directed against everything that exists <\/span>between<\/span><\/i> beings, against everything that circulates indistinctly, everything that invisibly links them, everything that prevents complete desolation, against everything that makes us <\/span>exist<\/span><\/i>, and ensures that the whole world doesn\u2019t everywhere have the look and feel of a highway, an amusement park or a new town: pure boredom, passionless but well-ordered, empty, frozen space, where nothing moves apart from registered bodies, molecular automobiles, and ideal commodities.<\/span><\/p>\n

France wouldn\u2019t be the land of anxiety pills that it\u2019s become, the paradise of anti-depressants, the Mecca of neurosis, if it weren\u2019t also the European champion of hourly productivity. Sickness, fatigue, depression, can be seen as the <\/span>individual<\/span><\/i> symptoms of what needs to be cured. They contribute to the maintenance of the existing order, to my docile adjustment to idiotic norms, and to the modernization of my crutches. They specify the selection of my opportune, compliant, and productive tendencies, as well as those that must be gently discarded. \u201cIt\u2019s never too late to change, you know.\u201d But taken as <\/span>facts<\/span><\/i>, my failings can also lead to the dismantling of the hypothesis of the self. They then become acts of resistance in the current war. They become a rebellion and a force against everything that conspires to normalize us, to amputate us. The self is not something within us that is in a state of crisis; it is the form they mean to stamp upon us. They want to make our self something sharply defined, separate, assessable in terms of qualities, controllable, when in fact we are creatures among creatures, singularities among similars, living flesh weaving the flesh of the world. Contrary to what has been repeated to us since childhood, intelligence doesn\u2019t mean knowing how to adapt\u2014or if that is a kind of intelligence, it\u2019s the intelligence of slave<\/span>s. Our inadaptability<\/span><\/i>, our fatigue, are only <\/span>problems<\/span><\/i> from the standpoint of what aims to subjugate us. They indicate rather a departure point, a meeting point, for new complicities. They reveal a landscape more damaged, but infinitely more sharable than all the fantasy lands this society maintains for its purposes.<\/span><\/p>\n

We are not depressed; we\u2019re on strike. For those who refuse to manage themselves, \u201cdepression\u201d is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a sidestep towards a <\/span>political<\/span><\/i> disaffiliation. From then on medication and the police are the only possible forms of conciliation. This is why the present society doesn\u2019t hesitate to impose Ritalin on its over-active children, or to strap people into life-long dependence on pharmaceuticals, and why it claims to be able to detect \u201cbehavioral disorders\u201d at age three. Because everywhere the hypothesis of the self is beginning to crack.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Invisible Committee<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u0555riginal text in French: L\u2019insurrection qui vient \u2013 Comit\u00e9 invisible<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mass personalization. Individualization of all conditions\u2024 Diffuse schizophrenia. Rampant depression. Atomization into fine paranoiac particles. Hysterization of contact. We cling to our self like a coveted job title. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":341225,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[65981,66053],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341279"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}