File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2003/postanarchism.0311, message 47


Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2003 09:01:46 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Re: disassociation and postanarchism


Sasha, 

I 'totally' agree that consensus does not have to come
from the basis of Enlightenment assumptions about
human nature but in practice it usually does because
it is generally assumed by those who promote as though
it were a holy sacrament that people will tend toward
agreement without coercion and that if there is no
clearly visible repressive structure of power that
somehow power is not at play. 

But anyone who has been involved in an anarchist
project involving more than say, three people, knows
quite well that more often than not the most
knowledgeable, the oldest, the loudest, the most
talkative, the most time-endowed, etc. end up being
the ones whose ideas get implemented under the
consensus model. 

This is what is wrong with consensus politics being
reduced to an expression of power, that it becomes
little different for those who not as knowledgeable,
who are younger, quieter, less talkative and less
time-endowed than does the experience of any other
form of alienated power that they are exposed to on a
regular basis (which is precisely what it is in such
cases). 

How is Lyotard right wing, he was a member of
Socialism or Barbarism, participated in the May '68
uprising and his politics seems pretty clearly extreme
left from what I can tell (also keep in mind that this
is me quoting Tadzio Mueller, not my own writing)?

 I agree that privileging heterogeneity over
homogeneity is not always ideal but it depends on how
you look at it. For instance I think internally to any
group that is based upon voluntary association it is
fine to have a level of homogeneity, especially small
affinity groups. 

But the whole point of that from my perspective is to
preserve the possibility of heterogeneity on a larger
scale, such that, zooming out, we have a world of
millions of affinity groups each with possibly
entirely different perspectives. 

So long as none of these groups are controlling any
other groups or forcing their own members to stay
within, I dont see the problem with this - this is an
example of the kind of 'rules' I would consider to be
okay (it could also be thought of as a general
understanding or a norm). 

Within an affinity group I certainly do think there is
such a thing as consensus, when it is within a very
small group. But when it gets to be 30 people, much
less 300 people as with this email list I really doubt
whether there is ever a true consensus that is not
based on unacknowledged coercion of some form or
another. 

In regard to postanarchism versus anarchism I agree I 
am getting tired of the label "post" as it implies a
linear forward-backward view of the history of ideas
that reproduces much of thatwhich "post"structuralists
are critiquing in the first place. 

However I disagree that classical anarchism has given
us much insight into questions of these sorts, other
than DePuydt's 1869  essay on "panarchy" which I have
wholeheartedly endorsed and posted here in the past. I
do think some genuinely original ideas have popped up
in the past half century and wouldn't want to ignore
that fact.

Jason



===="“Marx says, revolutions are the locomotives of world history.  But perhaps it is really totally different.  Perhaps revolutions are the grasp by the human race traveling in this train for the emergency brake.” 

- Walter Benjamin

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