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Title: Insurrectionary Foucault
Author: Andrew Culp
Date: 2010
Language: en
Topics: foucault, biopolitics, tiqqun, the invisible committee, communization, The Coming Insurrection
Source: https://motherfoucaultsreadinggroup.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/andrew-culp-insurrectionary-foucault.pdf

Andrew Culp

Insurrectionary Foucault

The notoriety of The Coming Insurrection has risen to almost epic

proportions since the arrest of its alleged authors in November, 2008

for acts of terrorism in the sabotage of the French TGV high-speed

trains lines as part of an anti-nuke direct action. The government

repression of the authors has only stoked a burgeoning resentment, and,

as the support committees for the arrested so eloquently put it,

“understanding the logic at work doesn’t appease us. It only makes us

angrier ... public meetings will be held so that the question of knowing

how to react to the situation that is made for us can be posed

everywhere. There aren’t nine people to save, but an order to bring

down.” In North America, the excessive reaction of the French State

piqued early interest in anarchists and academics, then the book

garnered mass appeal after the conservative talking head Glenn Beck gave

an emotional review.

Some might want to dismiss The Coming Insurrection as a vulgar or

extreme interpretation of Foucault, warped for highly politicized

purposes. This paper challenges that position. In particular, through

clarifying the theoretical influences of The Coming Insurrection, I

challenge the current reception of Foucault’s recently published College

de France lectures. It is my contention that Foucault has been tamed by

many academics, especially by governmentality scholarship’s uncritical

rehearsal of state histories that intentionally omit insurrection. Texts

like The Coming Insurrection are therefore, not only the extension of a

hidden side of Foucault’s own work, but also provide a productive

challenge to the all-too-safe reading of Foucault found in the American

academy.

Resurrecting Foucault’s Forgotten Social War

The prologue to the argument I put forth in this paper begins with the

untimely death of Foucault. His unfortunate passing left a lot of

questions, especially given the uncertain trajectory of his later work.

One site of increased interest has been the concept of biopower, despite

only taking up a few scant pages in the History of Sexuality Volume 1.

When it became clear that the lectures Foucault gave at the College de

France were an exception to his injunction against posthumous

publications, since public and bootleg copies have been floating around

for years, scholars excitedly took up the material from the long eight

years between the first and second volumes of the history of sexuality.

The first of the lecture publications to have a major impact was the

series from 1975-76 entitled Society Must Be Defended, for there had

already been considerable scholarship using two lectures from SMBD that

had been translated and released in the 1980 anthology Power/ Knowledge.

SMBD marks a shift away from modern subjects of power, deviants, and

psychiatric patients, to a focus on the power relations found more

generally throughout society. Scholars were most excited by two aspects

of the lectures: first, the expanded demonstration of the genealogy that

Power/Knowledge had only provided a glimpse of more than 20 years

before; and second, an increased level of detail describing the rise and

function of biopower, specifically in relation to disciplinary power.

Both of these points are mere asides to the explicit focus of this

lectures, however, which was to test the proposition ‘does war provided

a useful grid of intelligibility for understanding social analysis and

power relations?’ The general silence on the radical implications of war

as a grid of intelligibility serves as a foundation for the argument of

this paper.

One way to describe SMBD’s contribution to genealogical study is that it

demonstrates a specific example of genealogy in use: the re-mobilization

of previously marginalized knowledges in order to disrupt the present.

Genealogy dredges up knowledges, picking up discarded weapons and uses

them for attack on the power-effects of institutions and scientific

discourse. Rather than trying to dispel authority with a counter-power,

they use already delegitimized knowledges to bring the established order

‘down to the same level.’ As Foucault notes,

genealogies are therefore not positivistic returns to a form of science

that is more attentive or more accurate. Genealogies are, quite

specifically, antisciences. It is not that they demand the lyrical right

to be ignorant, and not that they reject knowledge, or invoke or

celebrate some immediate experience that has yet to be captured by

knowledge ... They are about the insurrection of knowledges. (9)

Most practitioners of genealogy focus on the SMBD lectures because they

provide added detail to what Foucault would consider subjugated

knowledge (buried and disqualified knowledges). What gets ignored is the

limited and literal sense in which he is describing the genealogy of

SMBD as insurrectionary genealogy. And while the phrase “insurrection of

subjugated knowledges” has proliferated since its initial appearance in

the 1980 translation of the first two lectures, it has lost its relation

to social war because it was originally read out of context.

Now that the whole SMBD lecture series has been translated, Foucault’s

use of ‘insurrectionary genealogy’ is clear. He does not mean a

metaphorization of insurrection (as in simply resisting hegemony or

domination) or even insurrection as a general heuristic, but

insurrection as a specific set of material practices for which social

war is the best available model. The context specific to this set of

lectures retains this exclusive focus – insurrectionary genealogies of

knowledges that produced upheavals that resulted in bloody wars, violent

counter-revolutions, and the brutal machinations of the Nazi state.

Situated in the larger arc of Foucault’s career, the turn to social

warfare as a model for power isn’t replaced, but is supplemented by

governmentality. It is first in Discipline and Punish that Foucault

suggests studying power as the micro-physics of a “perpetual battle”

between enclosure institutions and the people they hold captive, a

perspective that looks to “points of confrontation, focuses of

instability, each of which has its own risk of conflict, of struggles,

of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations” (26-7). To

demonstrate this point, he inverts Clausewitz’s popular maxim “war is

the continuation of politics by other means” by arguing that the order

of society and politics owe more to military institutions and military

science than to the social contract or rights (168-9). Next, in History

of Sexuality Volume 1 Foucault notes that using war as a model is not

the only way to look at power but rather should be chosen for its

ability to produce a certain type of strategic intervention:

Should we turn the expression around, then, and say that politics is war

pursued by other means? If we still wish to maintain a separation

between war and politics, perhaps we should postulate that this

multiplicity of force relations can be coded—in part but never

totally—either in the form of ‘war,’ or in the form of ‘politics’; this

would imply two different strategies (but the one always liable to

switch into the other) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous,

unstable, and tense force relations (93).

In other words, coding as war is the model of social war from SMBD and

coding as politics is the study of governmentality. Note that Foucault

is explicit that these two codings are complementary not mutually

exclusive.

Foucault’s following year of lectures, Security, Territory, Population,

is an exposition on governmentality. Rather than following the model of

social war, Foucault replaces it completely with the model of

governmentality. Taking ‘the point of view of power’ as the starting

point of analysis, Foucault describes the production of the dispositif

of governmentality through it’s winding path from the ‘conduct of

conduct’ art of governing, through the ‘police state’, all the way to

the ‘frugal form of government’ that establishes the four

characteristics of the modern raison d’etat: naturalness, an internal

logic, population as its aim, and the concept of freedom.

Placing the analysis of social warfare side by side with

governmentality, we see that Foucault’s analysis of each side of the

war-politics couplet produces completely different effects. In addition,

each grid of intelligibility has its own form of genealogy. The model of

social warfare makes visible a set of politico-historical tools that

could be remobilized as weapons to upset power-effects. And according to

Foucault in SMBD, it provides at least four different sets of techniques

for fighting domination: one, it challenges the link between truth and

peace/neutrality; two, it values explaining from the perspective of the

defeated below not the victor above; three, it is a radically historical

project driven to “rediscover the blood that has dried in the codes”;

and four, it is the first discourse in which truth functions exclusively

as a weapon (52-9). Alternatively, genealogies of governmentality reveal

the fragile, temporary, and contingent nature of governance, but is less

clear about a positive project. And while this genealogy provides the

basis for understanding the historical transformations and shifts in

logic necessary for the emergence of modern liberalism and

governmentality, it does not provide any insurrectionary tools. If

anything, it suggests how governmental politics as a model of power

papers over and buries the history of struggles made visible by the

model of social warfare. Given that current scholarship has focused so

heavily on governmentality, it seems evident that social warfare

deserves greater consideration.

Enter, The Coming Insurrection

So what is one example of insurrectionist genealogy inspired by

Foucault’s work? The Coming Insurrection. The first part of the text

critiques disparate centers of power characteristic of contemporary

society. Two of the problematics addressed in this section are strongly

Foucauldian in inflection, subjectivization and the disciplinary effects

of work. The last sections provide explicit instructions for a coming

insurrection; clearly taking the model of social warfare as its base of

analysis.

It’s unfair to let The Coming Insurrection take all the credit, however.

TCI is one among a number of texts penned by the Invisible Committee, a

splinter group from a French journal Tiqqun. Tiqqun was a project that

grew out of autonomist-inspired political activism in France in the

Winter 1997-8 movement of the unemployed [le mouvement des chômeurs] and

was initiated to produce theoretical works for an imaginary formation

they call the Invisible Party. One of the central problematics of Tiqqun

is the crisis of singularities, illustrated by, among other things,

their Agamben-inspired focus on ‘whatever singularities’ as a crucial

component of the contemporary condition. The Tiqqun experiment led to a

number of texts and two full-length issues of the journal that were

published in 1999 and 2001. By the end of 2001 Tiqqun exploded under the

pressure of conflict and its parts flew off in different directions. The

thought of Tiqqun spread: it found homes in the rural community of

Tarnac and the cold heart of the metropolis; it appeared in the

Bernadette Corporations movie “Get Rid of Yourself” and the works of the

ready-made artist Claire Fontaine; and it become imperceptible in zones

of opacity and black holes.

The Coming Insurrection is meant to be more a provocation and less a

densely theoretical contribution to the study of insurrection. It may be

best understand as a specific articulation of the concept of civil war

developed in Tiqqun 2. There is substantial overlap between Tiqqun’s

‘civil war’ and Foucault’s ‘social warfare.’ Both are tied up with

mythical-religious impulses, Tiqqun connects to SMBD’s genealogy of

biblical insurrection with a Benjaminian messianism. Both historicize

their disputes, challenging the modern State as a contingent form. Both

explain war from below, with peace as the perpetuation of pacification.

And both challenge the truth of peace, posing speaking subjects as

locked into a winner-take-all war over mutually exclusive visions of the

social.

There are important points of differentiation between Tiqqun’s civil war

and Foucault’s social war. No doubt some of Tiqqun’s formulations are

Foucauldian, but it also includes a wider network of references that

they share with Giorgio Agamben. Most importantly, Tiqqun’s concept of

civil war is deeply ontological in character, drawing from Spinoza,

Lucretius and Wittgenstein, which is altogether different than

Foucault’s epistemology-driven system that maintains a bare-bones

ontology. A key reference for Tiqqun that isn’t shared with Foucault is

Debord’s virtual civil war, developed in his “Comments on the Society of

the Spectacle”. In this essay Debord considers both standard examples of

revolutionary civil wars: Spain, the French Revolution, Soviet Russia,

and May 68; and also less noted ones: the unactualized revolution in

Italy and the state of terror and economic domination that accompanies

the war economy. Another reference is Schmitt’s political theology,

which provides the composition and strategy that results from bodies in

encounter in terms of friend, enemy, and partisan.

A number of tendencies share the model of civil war to diagnose the

current moment. Capitalism is crisis, governance is the management of

crises, the social is a desert, and politics is founded on a mall-like

universalism. But there is a disagreement over the proper response – a

problem that influenced the Tiqqun split in 2001. The risk is that it

only actualizes new forms of being together through a siege mentality.

So the ultimate question may be: what is the form of conflict that

should arise from the condition of civil war? Claire Fontaine turned to

art as a form of human strike that de-familiarizes the everyday. The

Invisible Committee moved to the French countryside in a return to the

land and self-sufficient autonomy against the metropolis. And at a

greater remove, in America so-called Insurrectionist Anarchists and

Left-Communists advocate the working out of social war, an

intensification of a growing sense of ungovernability through petty

crime and attack.

Tiqqun produced a short text that succinctly explored their strategy of

ontological re-articulation by taking on Lenin’s “what is to be done?”,

leaving behind what they considered to be a voluntaristic nihilism. For

them, the real question is the ethical and subjectivist “how is it to be

done?” What follows are two co-productive lines of attack: compositional

process of communisation and the de-subjectivizing human strike. The

Tiqqun text “Living and Struggling” defines the empirical basis for this

problematic, warning against the dangers of giving up and forming a

ghetto or submitting to the suicidal impulse of becoming an army like

the RAF or the Red Brigades. But nowhere is it captured so eloquently as

in the Invisible Committee text, The Call: “On the one hand, we want to

live communism; and on the other, to spread anarchy” (61).

Communisation is a form of lived communism is founded on the imperative

“communism now or never”. Instead of being a social form that has to be

prepared for, communism is thought of a contingent possibility at every

moment. On one side there is communism, a being-together of bodies; and

on the other, there is the social, a desert of alienated proletarianized

subjectivities that through de-socialization have lost the ability to

connect to each other. Communisation formed as a post-68 rethinking of

the classical Marxian categories of the subject and revolution reflected

in the texts of Gilles Dauvé and Theorie Communiste. The Invisible

Committee wants to make an explicit break from the Marxism of other

theories of communisation, however. In The Call, they argue that

“Communism is not a political or economic system. Communism has no need

of Marx. Communism does not give a damn about the USSR” (62). Rather,

communisation works to build affinities and construct shared worlds

through attack. One such form of attack is the human strike.

Human strike is the turning away that jams subjectivization machines. It

is similar in formulation to the autonomist refusal to work. The refusal

to work is not meant as a literal refusal to work, but the refusal of

the work relationship and the values it implies. In its refusal, it

rejects both aspects of the work relations: first, how the body and time

of the worker are abstracted in the form of labor-power; and secondly,

the theft of the body and power of the worker in terms of surplus value.

The human strike is similar to refusal to work but is a refusal of the

subjectivizing process of the social. In addition to the category of the

human strike being more capacious than the workerist refusal to work, it

also implies a third move, the mobilization of affect. A recent

presentation by Claire Fontaine resurrected Michelle Perrot’s research

on the 19^(th) century strike. Perrot commented on the birth of

‘sentimental strike’ in the year 1890 that follows the trajectory of the

refusal to work, “the strikers didn’t give any reason for their

interruption of the work... just that they want to do the same thing as

the others”. What Claire Fontaine wants to emphasize is the circulation

of affect that emerges from this form of strike, something uniquely

captured by the concept human strike. Perrot describes the

transformation of Amandine Vernet, “she never made herself noticeable

before May the 14th when she started to read a written speech in a

meeting of 5000 people in the Robiac wood. The day after she had started

to speak, and the following days, made more self-confident by her

success, she pronounced violent and moving speeches. She had the talent

of making part of her audience cry.” So while they pose a negative

anthropology, whereby the human is slowly removed from the clutches of

subjectivization, what is left is the collective form of power: affect.

In summary, insurrection is not a dead end but the way forward. The

challenge today is to pose fruitful avenues of inquiry that ward off the

state through insurrection rather than cultivating expertise in the

daily affairs of statecraft.

Works Cited

Collective Statement of the Delegates from Nearly 30 “Tarnac 9ʺ″ Support

Committees Who Met in Limoges, Belgium, "An Order to Bring Down", March

2009, http:// tarnac9.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/an-order-to-bring-down/

Agamben, Giorgio

State of Exception, trans Kevin Attell, University of Chicago Press:

2005

Means Without End, trans Vincento Binetti and Cesare Casarino,

University of

Minnesota Press: 2000 Cunningham, John

“Invisible Politics: An Introduction to Contemporary Communisation”,

Mute

Mag, September 2009, http://www.metamute.org Deleuze, Gilles and Felix

Guattari

A Thousand Plateaus, trans Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press:

1987 Eribon, Didier

Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing, Harvard University Press: 1992

Fontaine, Claire

Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A few Clarifications,

http://www.clairefontaine.ws “Human Strike and the Rise of Visual

Fascism”, Presentation at the Descent to Revolution Exhibition curated

by James Voorhies and the Institute of Public Culture, Columbus OH,

October 28, 2009.

Foucault, Michel

Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey, Picardor: 2003 Security,

Territory, Population, trans. Graham Burchell, Picardor: 2007 Birth of

Biopolitics, trans. Graham Burchell, Picador: 2008

Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, Vintage: 1977

History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley, Vintage: 1990

(English original 1978)

Power/Knowledge, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate

Soper, Pantheon: 1980

Halperin, David

Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, Oxford University Press: 1997

Institute for Experimental Freedom

“Social Justice or Social War?”, presented by Liam Sionnach at The Ohio

State

University, November 2009 Invisible Committee

The Call, trans. anonymous, US Committee to Support the Tarnac 9: 2004

The Coming Insurrection, trans. anonymous, Semiotext(e): 2009

Perrot, Michelle

Les ouvriers en grève, France 1871-1890, Mouton: 1974, p.99-100, trans.

Fulvia Carnevale, presented by Claire Fontaine at the Descent to

Revolution exhibition curated by James Voorhies and the Bureau for

Public Culture, Columbus OH, October 2009

Tiqqun

“How is it to be done?” in Introduction to Civil War, trans. Alexander

Galloway

and Jason E. Smith, Semiotext(e): 2010

Introduction to Civil War, trans. Alexander Galloway and Jason E. Smith,

Semiotext(e): 2010

“Living-and-wrestling”, in Tiqqun 2, trans. anonymous, zinelibrary.info

Tiqqun, independent: 1999.

Tiqqun Revue Nø2, La Fabrique: 2001

“Tiqqun Apocrypha”,

http://anarchistwithoutcontent.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/

tiqqun-apocrypha-repost/