Why Glenn Beck is Wrong About “The Coming Insurrection”
Reported by Alex - February 23, 2010 -
If you are interested in the politics of personal identity – and if you are patient enough to wade through 60+ pages of dense hyperbole – you should read The Coming Insurrection by the Invisible Committee. Despite its many shortcomings – including a heavy freight of cynicism and innumerable points of self-contradiction – the first seven chapters of The Coming Insurrection comprise a full-on critique of capitalism’s ability to co-opt to its own ends everything that might oppose it, and provokes some nasty questions about personal identity which marketers are well aware of but most of us tend to ignore, put off, or deny when they start to flicker at the edges of our consciousness.
But if you are looking for a handbook of practical political action, forget it. In spite of its heavy-handed call to communalism and exhortations to guerrilla action, this book is useless as the handbook for an American "progressive" insurrection that Glenn Beck claims it is, for three reasons: one, the insurrection that this book calls for is based on spontaneous uprisings of individuals working completely outside the established political system; two, I have yet to meet any progressives who are calling for the complete destruction and anarchy advocated by this group; and three, anyone who tries to take this book seriously from start to finish will end up gibbering in a corner trying to reconcile all the contradictions between its philosophy and its call to action.
Glenn Beck has been hyping the dangers of The Coming Insurrection since last summer, crying from the rooftops that this book will fan the flames of the Marxist/communist/socialist (take your pick) takeover of the United States being nurtured by the Obama administration and led, apparently, by Van Jones and Nancy Pelosi. “Ignore it at your peril” he warned – with the result that this little book has hit the best-seller lists at least once, and its sales spike every time Beck gives it a shout-out. Someone has been reading it, but whether it’s some disaffected lefties looking for an anarchists’ handbook, the rabid right doing a “know thine enemy” recce, or mostly the simply curious (c’est moi), we’re not sure.
One thing we are sure of, though, is that Beck has missed the point of the book, which is that all of the old forms of left-wing politicking have become part of the system of oppression that the authors, the “Invisible Committee”, rail against:
There’s no reason to engage in one citizen’s collective or another, in one extreme-left impasse or another, in the latest communitarian imposture. All the organizations that claim to protest the present order themselves have all the puppetry of the form, morals and language of the miniature States about them. None of the old lies about “doing politics differently” have ever contributed to anything but the indefinite extension of Statist pseudopodia.
So much for common cause with old lefties like Bill Ayers or religious thorns-in-the-side like Reverend Wright.
While Beck squawks that members and associates of the Obama administration are working to take America down and yada yada yada, and that this book will aid them in their goals, the Invisible Committee eschews all "isms", instead recommending that their readers recognize what is real and true for them, harness their passion in its service, and come together spontaneously with like-minded individuals to create incidents of guerrilla warfare which will rise, bubble-like, from the depths of the collective psyche to the surface of the nightmare of urban social and physical decay, ultimately to erupt in some form of revolutionary chaos. Kind of like Erica Jong’s zipless f**k in the 1970’s novel Fear of Flying, these mass political orgasms are meant to be the product of a sort of magnetic attraction or magical mating call resulting in seamless, almost un-self-conscious actions, after which the protagonists have a cigarette and wait for the next spontaneous action to arise from within self-organized communes with no leaders and no decision-making process:
If the General Assembly fantasy can be gotten rid of and replaced by a kind of 'assembly of presences', if the always renascent temptation of hegemony can be evaded, if making decisions is no longer fixed as the final goal, then there might be some chance that a kind of 'mass solidification' could take place, one of those collective crystallization phenomena where a decision suddenly 'takes people', as a whole or only in part.Yeah, like that’s really going to work, especially in the context of the United States (the authors are French and write mostly in a French context). In fact, in the final few pages of the booklet a little voice of doubt creeps in:
For an insurrection, the question is how to go beyond the point of no return. Irreversibility is attained when the authorities’ need for authority has been defeated, when property’s taste for accumulation has been defeated, when the desire of hegemony for all hegemony has been defeated. That’s why in the insurrectional process contains within itself either the very form of its victory, or that of its defeat…There are ways of destroying things that inevitably provoke the return of what has been annihilated. He who kicks the corpse of a social order is guaranteed to awaken its professional avengers…In our lifetime, we might take Paris, Rome or Buenos Aires, but still not win the decisive battle…Yaahh, good luck with that!
Did Glenn Beck even read this booklet? If he did, is he capable of understanding it? Okay, granted, a background in continental philosophy or 1960’s protest meetings might be helpful, but given that much of this text reads like a conversation among a bunch of stoned sociology students, I would have thought that Beck’s extensive background in illegal substance abuse would have given him a leg-up. But given his reaction to the contents I’d wager that if he read it at all, his inner Pavlov’s dog crapped itself at the first sight of the words “commune” and “insurrection”. No one who understands this work could possibly confuse the theory it lays out with anything that would work within the confines of an established political system. Or outside of it, for that matter. It reads more like a project of the N.Y.Neo-Futurists or an old hippie "happening" than a practical handbook for revolution.
If there’s anything for the Chicken Little of Fox News to worry about, it's this:
There’s no reason to react to the news of the day, but to understand each information given as an operation carried out on a hostile battlefield full of strategies to decode, an operation aiming precisely to stir up some certain reaction or other among some group of people or another, and to see the operation itself as the real news contained within the apparent news.Taken to its logical conclusion and acted upon, that could really be subversive.
* For further discussions and reviews of The Coming Insurrection go here, here and here.
* See also Newshounds posts on 12/18/09, 12/19/09, 2/12/10 and 2/22/10.
Oh, and Glenn: The revoultion will not be televised.
