The Semiotic Review of Books

The revolution will not be televised. But The Coming Insurrection (2009) was. Originally published in France in 2007, the small booklet, written by the anonymous Comité Invisible (Invisible Committee), was denounced as a manual for terrorism by the French government and became a key piece of evidence against nine activists arrested in a raid in the small commune of Tarnac who were allegedly planning to bomb train lines: amongst the “Tarnac 9” was one of the text’s alleged authors, Julien Coupat. In July 2009, shortly after the English translation of the book was published by Semiotext(e), it was “reviewed” by Glenn Beck (2009) on Fox News with video from the Greek protests running in the background. Beck’s advice: that everyone should own a copy to keep abreast of the evil elements in America’s midst. Sales went through the roof. As if he had not yet given it enough of a plug, Beck (2010) picked up and wagged the book at Fox News cameras a second time in May 2010, this time against the backdrop of the massive May Day rallies across the United States and in Arizona in particular (in response to Senate Bill 1070 which targets migrant workers and their employers by requiring a show of documents on demand). Zeroing in on common protest slogans being chanted in the crowd, Beck scratches his chin and ponders. He’s read that somewhere before. Beck resumes his little blue book-wagging and asks how on earth it was possible for so many protestors to gather in such a short time. With a plug from Beck to his 20 million viewers – everyone should own a copy of this book – Semiotext(e)’s newest readership was not the left to whom L’insurrection qui vient was addressed but its counterpart on the right (Tea Party manuals dominate the “customers most likely to buy” list on Amazon). Although the book might have more readily found its target audience on the left had the translation been published under the banner of AK Press, PM Press, or Seven Stories, it makes sense that Semiotext(e) published the English translation of The Coming Insurrection: the Invisible Committee is allegedly tied to the journal Tiqquin which has its intellectual origins in the “French theory” that Semiotext(e), under the direction of general editor Sylvère Lotringer, had been ferrying across the Atlantic since the seventies. For Semiotext(e), the book represented the opportunity to renew an impulse. As the inaugural volume in their new “Intervention series,” the little blue book signalled a return to the recently abandoned little black book format that Semiotext(e) had been using to publish “Foreign Agents” since the eighties. With a small-print paragraph from the United States Foreign Agents Registration Act repeated in wall-to-wall columns across each cover, Semiotext(e) sold long essays by, and interviews with, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Paul Virillio as subversive tracts that were manufactured to move: cheap and quick to print and designed for easy transport through New York city via subway in the pockets of spiked leather jackets (Lotringer 2003b). Having since been heavily institutionalized it made little sense to continue to publish the texts of “French theory” as though they were in themselves subversive – trade paper with introductions and endnotes are the more appropriate format for the academic marketplace – but the work of the Invisible Committee, emerging from French theory, certainly merited a restart of the small book format. Lotringer’s approach to the introduction of French theory to an American audience was decidedly different from its introduction via other university channels. While contemporary French theorists were entering America via conventional channels like academic conferences, university presses, and chaired professorships, Semiotext(e), as Henry Schwartz and Anne Balsamo put it, “was conceived as an intervention into cultural politics, not merely as an exercise in theoretical reproduction, and far less an attempt to establish academic legitimacy for some sort of below-thehorizon publishing venture” (208-209). In the inaugural introduction of the Semiotext(e) journal, an issue entitled “Alternatives in Semiotics,” Lotringer notes that regardless of how established and complete any system, method, or mode of inquiry pretends to be, the fact of any inquiry is that it will project the project that it is inquiring into elsewhere (1974b: 3). Accordingly, the work that was done in semiotics under the Semiotext(e) banner was not simply about locating and describing alternatives found. Based upon an understanding that coherence is breached – and movement inevitable – as soon as an outside element (inquiry, or, looking in from without) becomes involved, Semiotext(e) self-consciously moved the alternatives it located in semiotics elsewhere. Semiotext(e) took an abrupt and explicit turn away from semiotics in the late seventies, but its relatively quiet beginnings in the field are carried with it not only in name – Semiotext(e) being a combination of “semiotics” and “text” with the “(e)” signalling its bilingualism – but also in impulse. Although Semiotext(e)’s publication of The Coming Insurrection and its little black books might have some believe that it is a “radical” press, I think it is more appropriate to consider Semiotext(e) a radicle project. Radicles emerge from seeds not as the beginnings of roots but as the first growth to break through the membrane of the seed, pushing intensities past the limits within which they had been building. Rather than following the trend towards systematization and containment, Semiotext(e) operated by projecting intensities beyond whatever limits threatened to contain them. Below I describe the impulses that Lotringer and the Semiotext(e) group gleaned from semiotics in Paris in the early seventies and explain how they were practiced through to the end of the decade. I focus upon the Semiotext(e)-organized Schizo-Culture conference in 1975 and the three journal issues that followed (on “Anti-Oedipus,” Nietzsche’s Return,” and “Schizo-Culture”) – reading rosters, cover art, and layouts – in order to illustrate how Semiotext(e) was a project devoted to capturing resonant movements without boxing them in. Semiotext(e) was not a project that was concerned with fidelity, integrity (joining the French left with its rightful partner across the Atlantic, for example), or communicating the way in which theory is supposed to be understood and applied; rather it is a project that seeks to effect projections, combining elements in such a way that they retain the radicle impulse to continue to become. This is the radicle alternative that Semiotext(e) located in semiotics in the early seventies: a fascination with, and enactment of, breach and becoming.