From a Durham Conversations on Collapse Attendee
KMO and Durham people at the Pinhook collapsarian convention a couple of weeks ago,
I highly recommend 'The Coming Insurrection' written by the Invisible Committee in France right before the banlieues (ghetto suburbs on the periphery of Paris) riots a couple of years ago. Theoretically, I think it is the tightest, most reality embracing expression of our present historical moment. The watchmen on board a shipwreck are the first to die; lets all stop analyzing and create greater ties, because this process has been in motion for a long time before we got here---with just a little effort, we can all stop pontificating on what IT is. The only way to start creating a viable alternative reality is to resonate with people, and you don't do that with telling everyone that the sky is falling; they already know:
"From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This is not the least of its virtues. From those who seek hope above all, it tears away every firm ground. Those who claim to have solutions are contradicted almost immediately. Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. 'The future has no future' is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of consciousness of the first punks...
There is no environmental catastrophe. The catastrophe is the environment itself. The environment is what's left to man when he's lost everything. Those who live in a neighborhood, a street, a valley, a war zone, a workshop--they don't have an environment, they move through a world peopled by presences, dangers, friends, enemies, moments of life and death, all kinds of beings. Such a world has its own consistency, which varies according to the intensity and quality of the ties attaching us to all of these beings, to all of these places.
It's only we, the children of the final dispossession, exiles of the final hour--who come into the world in concrete cubes, pick our fruits at the supermarket, and watch for an echo of the world on television--only we get to have an environment. And there's no one but us to witness our own annihilation, as if it were just a simple change of scenery, to get indignant about the latest progress of disaster, to patiently compile its encyclopedia.....
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."
I highly recommend 'The Coming Insurrection' written by the Invisible Committee in France right before the banlieues (ghetto suburbs on the periphery of Paris) riots a couple of years ago. Theoretically, I think it is the tightest, most reality embracing expression of our present historical moment. The watchmen on board a shipwreck are the first to die; lets all stop analyzing and create greater ties, because this process has been in motion for a long time before we got here---with just a little effort, we can all stop pontificating on what IT is. The only way to start creating a viable alternative reality is to resonate with people, and you don't do that with telling everyone that the sky is falling; they already know:
"From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This is not the least of its virtues. From those who seek hope above all, it tears away every firm ground. Those who claim to have solutions are contradicted almost immediately. Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. 'The future has no future' is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of consciousness of the first punks...
There is no environmental catastrophe. The catastrophe is the environment itself. The environment is what's left to man when he's lost everything. Those who live in a neighborhood, a street, a valley, a war zone, a workshop--they don't have an environment, they move through a world peopled by presences, dangers, friends, enemies, moments of life and death, all kinds of beings. Such a world has its own consistency, which varies according to the intensity and quality of the ties attaching us to all of these beings, to all of these places.
It's only we, the children of the final dispossession, exiles of the final hour--who come into the world in concrete cubes, pick our fruits at the supermarket, and watch for an echo of the world on television--only we get to have an environment. And there's no one but us to witness our own annihilation, as if it were just a simple change of scenery, to get indignant about the latest progress of disaster, to patiently compile its encyclopedia.....
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."