Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 02:26:19 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Zaslove: "An Anarchist Definition of Community"


An Anarchist Definition of Community

http://www.poeticguerrillas.com/articles/arcade.html

by JERRY ZASLOVE

Here is an anarchist definition or framework for,
about and of community for the new century, which all
anarchists might see as an opportunity for the hope
for the hopeless in the time of the 'last thing before
the last' (Siegfried Kracauer) or human history in the
making at the end of the twentieth century. My own
'credo' for the future is based on several seachanges
that I see around me of which only one can be
mentioned here. (I have explored millennial obsessions
in a longer essay.) I do not define anarchism here,
but point to some features of anarchism that continue
to be active in various human communities and lives of
individuals. That we live in a world of quantification
of people, numbers, places and sizes can be
represented by the internet, that strip mall of
consumption and delusion about the culture of the
future which even some anarchists believe is the
utopian horizon. The future, if there is one, will
have to account for the rise of cities that will
number, according to recent predictions, 25 million
people and up - Dacca, Lagos, Karachi, Mexico City,
Tokyo. No New York, Berlin, Rome or London. No
modernism of the neighborhood or the abstract made
livable according to Marx or Bakunin or Duchamp, or
Kafka - that is no human rights that can be imagined
or framed in ways we have understood whether in
surrealism, the unconscious, the organization of work
around meaningful time and not endured by chronically
ill-time of the nomads in the cities. So these
thoughts bear on my continuing reflection on the role
of anarchism as a way of seeing and opening the world
up to a rights-based vision of human relationships.
How artists think is crucial to this
anarcho-communitarian sense of how people have
survived against systemic violence and systemic
delusions and the in-built violences of the swollen
overly complex societies that pretend to be
democratic. Clearly this obsession with what I call
"overwhelmitude" [the internalization of the system]
comes at the end of centuries where regeneration,
revolution, reform, and renewal struggles against some
of the modernist ideas of historical decline,
degeneracy, disease, displacement, defeat and
devolution: the re- words against the de-words. But if
we believe we always live in some bridging, or saddle
time, then we do what the systemic violence wants us
to do, give up imagining a future and accept the
illusions that are prepared for us now. The
anarcho-community is a direct and many-sided
relationship among members of a self-regulating
'group', and this activity of the 'intentional' or
dialogical community militates against specialization
and expertise and centralization, which belong to
another level of society that is itself always
centralizing and monopolizing power. A dialectical
sense of how the society operates is therefore
necessary - whether by Marx or Hegel. But dialectics
ends up in the mind or locked into the unconscious
[Lacan]; however, for the anarchist, reciprocity and
mutual aid are the basic foundational social values
even as the principle of mutual aid takes many forms,
but is commonly understood as co-operation, sharing
and listening, rather than the Hobbesian mediated
power relations grounded in competition, bureaucracies
and systemic patriarchy. In addition, the
anarcho-community is not based on eschatological or
revealed religion. At the same time a sense of common
values are required in order to counteract the way the
state assumes it is eternal and the only way humans
can protect what they have made. The
counter-tendencies to the state must be based on 

-institutions as 'normative' frameworks that fade away
and come again 

-expressive forms and forms of memory and transference
boundaries 

-capacity to recover from traumatic, external
interventions including natural ones . . .

. . . that means a sense of 'time' is needed that is
not just quantitative, since cultures are organized
for the future around genres of time. Anarchists are
always interested, or should be, in the forces that
break up continuities and in the shocks to tradition
that create pain and force changes. In order to frame
the myths, ideologies and religious roots of
communalism that accompany the 'genres' of community
in history a rights-based value system of social
justice must be mediated by a social contract that is
not always secured by laws coerced from above, but by
negotiating the inevitable differences that arise in
language-based animals whose lives are lived in
delusionary fantasies of their own powers, as much as
in fantasies of liberation. This social contract
better understood as planning, must be monitored to
map the qualitative capacities of the economically
defined areas of non-traditionally educated
individuals and their working lives (often mediated by
organic intellectuals' relationship to intellectual
and manual labor) as well as those capacities that are
formed around intellectual activities that are framed
by natural forms of competence. This means that
anarcho-communitarians are always interested in the
changing forms of competence, shifting power
alignments, and whether social movements come from the
left or the right, and how the production of goods
always, but always, enters into the production of
culture and the cultures' "discontents". As Freud
taught us, all cultures are in some way against us
because they exact too high a cost for demanding
ethical promises. Thus for the anarchist the crisis of
production is always measured, or looked for in the
ways culture is against 'man' and acts against the
formative aspects of community - sometimes called its
"social capital". The anti-bureaucratic bureaucracy
that I have lived in (universities) has given me the
chance to be part of an evolving community, but this
has now deteriorated into a merchandising of
knowledge, which, based on the above short
description, has become a Hobbesian Leviathan that
will eat its children the way Saturn chewed and spit
them out. In time Saturn - whom Freud knew because
Saturn controls melancholy and the depressive phases
of life - will become nauseated and will create a
prosthetic appliance to replace its stomach. At that
time the angel of history (Walter Benjamin) will
remember where it is and will flee right by Saturn at
the speed of light. Further to the above there are
'inner' or generic models of community: 

FIVE MODELS OF UNDERSTANDING COMMUNITY AGAINST
MILLENNIAL FORCES 

I. Crisis or Adversity models which address needs,
traumas, dysfunction and invasions from external
forces that compromise the traditional security self-
understanding of the community.. 

II. Needs models which are based on economic
inadequacies, neglect, poverty and work related
transitions from one tradition to another or
immigration or development practices which are alien
to the community. 

III. Analytical models based on how the intellectual,
technical, rational, or planning agents perceive and
communicate information and perceptions to the
literate idea builders of the community. How the
planners imagine their own processes of negotiation
and consultation and how university research projects
touch on concepts of community (the Prison Research
Project et. al.) 

IV. Dialogical-experiential models that educate, form
and expand the zones of contact of aspects of the
community with information, or maintain the
traditional basis of experience as a cultural and
value-based communal measure of the working
traditions. This is a community of meanings and
significance, ceremonies and rituals, symbolic
transactions and celebrations, as well as
ideologically formative languages. It is also open to
examination of other forms of mediation, negotiation
and contract based dispute resolution. 

V. The "incommensurable" model that acknowledges the
shifting and changing experiences and political forms
that create particularities by relating the community
to 'otherness', or the experiences outside of the
existing and integrated communities, often by
encouraging networks with non-traditional forms. This
might be called the 'irrational' community, or the
aesthetic community, or the avant-garde community and
is a feature of new populations, hybridism, exiles,
and shifting geographical boundaries.

===="“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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