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Call
91 pages, Paperback
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About the author
Tiqqun
25 books157 followersTiqqun is a French collective of authors and activists formed in 1999. Their journal was the first to publish the collective author “The Invisible Committee.” Tiqqun's books include Introduction to Civil War, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, and This Is Not a Program (all published by Semiotext(e)).
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 18, 2013
This is effective propaganda; getting my blood boiling; making me want to run outside and grab you and you and you and make out and fight our enemies (and to admit that we have enemies) and find more friends to build a new society!
It is exactly what it says it is: a Call. A call to organize. A call to build something better. "From now on all friendship is political."
Tiqqun calls for a new way. As they say, "community is not the solution: it is its incessant and ubiquitous disappearance that is the problem. They practically yell: humans are not supposed to be isolated from each other nor from the other beings of this world; we are bound by multiple attachments that we learned to deny.
From here on, I'll let their words (chopped and screwed) speak for themselves:
We have been sold this lie: that what is most particular to us is what distinguishes us from the common. No, what is most singular calls to be shared. Our ideas, our joys, our loves, are forced to be individual; they must not have an effect on our larger world. But this is not a private matter. We depend on the construction of shared worlds, on the sharing of effective means. Building this will take time. We start now.
Only in the barracks, the hospital, the prison, the asylum, and the retirement home is collective living allowed. The normal state is the isolation of everyone in their private cubicle. We reject private space. Our strategy is to immediately establish rallying points for desertion. For the runaways. For those who leave. We need places. Places to get organized, to share and develop. To co-operate. To form collective surroundings and turn those into a milieu and from a milieu into a scene.
How to get rid of all the dependencies that weaken us?
How to get organized so as to no longer have to work?
How to settle beyond the toxicity of the metropole without "leaving for the countryside"?
How to live together without mutually dominating each other?
How to ruin empire?
______________________
Anyway, here's some examples of what they want:
"Had it not renounced any political perspective, the experimentation of the Bauhaus with all the materiality and the rigor it contained, would evoke the idea that we have of space-times dedicated to the transmission of knowledge and experience."
There's also the successor to Bauhaus in the U.S.: The amazing Black Mountain College.
There's the early Black Panthers.
Black Mask / Up Against the Wall Motherfucker.
The collective canteens of the German Autonomen,
tree houses and art of sabotage of the British neo-luddietes,
the careful choice of words of the radical feminists,
the mass self-reductions of the Italian autonomists,
and the armed joy of the June 2nd Movement.
______________________
Two complaints:
I could nitpick about a lot of stuff. Tiqqun are typically dicks (in the situationist model) and love the grandiloquent bullshit statement. I generally think they're sloppy theoretically and often dangerously wrongheaded. But this Call speaks to me. So I only have two major issues:
One: They hate the city, which is retarded. I get it. Right now, I hate NYC, and I could see how I could hate Berlin. But historically, and even today, a city is where the rejects flock to. Carving out an alternate lifestyle, at least in the U.S., is much harder in a town or rural area. Townsfolk are ridiculously conservative and controlling. The surveillance in a town puts the surveillance state to shame.
But they claim "the metropole is the place where there is almost nothing left to re-appropriate. A milieu in which human only relates to himself, only creates himself separately from other forms of existence, uses or rubs shoulders without ever encountering them. The most minor attempt at disregarding commodity relationships has been made criminal."
But the city is where the Call has traditionally been heard.
Two: They have no clue what science is. This isn't specific to Tiqqun, but I wish radicals, the left, theoretical academia, etc, would get a better understanding of what science is. The pharmaceutical industry, industrial agriculture, the military industrial complex, all technologists, technology makers, and ideology built on science is NOT science. Science is similar to art. It is not necessary to employ it practically. Scientists are not technologists, and science, as such, doesn't construct ideologies. They are not the same.
It is exactly what it says it is: a Call. A call to organize. A call to build something better. "From now on all friendship is political."
We contest nothing, we demand nothing. We constitute ourselves as a force, as a material force, as an autonomous material force within the world civil war.They describe our current world as a isolated space where our very relations and reality resemble the cubicles we work in.
[We have been forced] into an ocean of atomic individuals. Which in turn have an unfortunate tendency to turn into things, by letting themselves get managed.They elaborate this ideology as "existential liberalism." They're talking about an life that pushes us to be cynical, be apathetic, be selfish, be quiet, be safe, control your desires, stay separate, stay away from communities, betray your ideals in order to be "an adult," behave like an owner, even towards your own experiences. And at all times, repeat this mantra: "That's just the way I am," and its confirmation "that's just like you!" Both are reflections of our current malaise; our current shit show. Send a check to Amnesty International, buy fair trade coffee, see the last Michael Moore film, and then go back to our sad existence and pretend that things are going to get better.
Tiqqun calls for a new way. As they say, "community is not the solution: it is its incessant and ubiquitous disappearance that is the problem. They practically yell: humans are not supposed to be isolated from each other nor from the other beings of this world; we are bound by multiple attachments that we learned to deny.
From here on, I'll let their words (chopped and screwed) speak for themselves:
We have been sold this lie: that what is most particular to us is what distinguishes us from the common. No, what is most singular calls to be shared. Our ideas, our joys, our loves, are forced to be individual; they must not have an effect on our larger world. But this is not a private matter. We depend on the construction of shared worlds, on the sharing of effective means. Building this will take time. We start now.
Only in the barracks, the hospital, the prison, the asylum, and the retirement home is collective living allowed. The normal state is the isolation of everyone in their private cubicle. We reject private space. Our strategy is to immediately establish rallying points for desertion. For the runaways. For those who leave. We need places. Places to get organized, to share and develop. To co-operate. To form collective surroundings and turn those into a milieu and from a milieu into a scene.
How to get rid of all the dependencies that weaken us?
How to get organized so as to no longer have to work?
How to settle beyond the toxicity of the metropole without "leaving for the countryside"?
How to live together without mutually dominating each other?
How to ruin empire?
______________________
Anyway, here's some examples of what they want:
"Had it not renounced any political perspective, the experimentation of the Bauhaus with all the materiality and the rigor it contained, would evoke the idea that we have of space-times dedicated to the transmission of knowledge and experience."
There's also the successor to Bauhaus in the U.S.: The amazing Black Mountain College.
There's the early Black Panthers.
Black Mask / Up Against the Wall Motherfucker.
The collective canteens of the German Autonomen,
tree houses and art of sabotage of the British neo-luddietes,
the careful choice of words of the radical feminists,
the mass self-reductions of the Italian autonomists,
and the armed joy of the June 2nd Movement.
______________________
Two complaints:
I could nitpick about a lot of stuff. Tiqqun are typically dicks (in the situationist model) and love the grandiloquent bullshit statement. I generally think they're sloppy theoretically and often dangerously wrongheaded. But this Call speaks to me. So I only have two major issues:
One: They hate the city, which is retarded. I get it. Right now, I hate NYC, and I could see how I could hate Berlin. But historically, and even today, a city is where the rejects flock to. Carving out an alternate lifestyle, at least in the U.S., is much harder in a town or rural area. Townsfolk are ridiculously conservative and controlling. The surveillance in a town puts the surveillance state to shame.
But they claim "the metropole is the place where there is almost nothing left to re-appropriate. A milieu in which human only relates to himself, only creates himself separately from other forms of existence, uses or rubs shoulders without ever encountering them. The most minor attempt at disregarding commodity relationships has been made criminal."
But the city is where the Call has traditionally been heard.
Two: They have no clue what science is. This isn't specific to Tiqqun, but I wish radicals, the left, theoretical academia, etc, would get a better understanding of what science is. The pharmaceutical industry, industrial agriculture, the military industrial complex, all technologists, technology makers, and ideology built on science is NOT science. Science is similar to art. It is not necessary to employ it practically. Scientists are not technologists, and science, as such, doesn't construct ideologies. They are not the same.
October 10, 2014
Good propaganda.
September 2, 2015
"The most inteligent and insightful insurrectionist tract I have come across" (P. Gelderloos)
September 15, 2015
What an annoying book.
November 22, 2015
reading tiqqun always makes my pulse quicken, and makes me want to stand on a chair and cheer.
August 13, 2022
very good
October 6, 2024
To claim that anti- globalism was neutered is a straight up lie. WTO riots in Seattle in 99 were just the beginning, and Alex Jones has long had curiously similar rhetoric (as well as Black Lives Matter grifters and Neo-Nazi groups involved in J6 that the FBI still don’t know the name of). But the book was often insightful.
November 9, 2016
Meh, maybe I would've liked this more when it came out? As it was, all of the "everyone knows..." shit made me feel like these folks are either super naive or liars.
June 26, 2025
I was sad, and then i found “And the war has just begun”, and i never in my life I’ve been feeling more understood.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews