Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 11:10:38 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [postanarchism] Katsiaficas: "Coexistence With Islamic Fundamentalism?


The only universal that I see as being relevant to a
poststructuralist anarchism is the universality of
respect for difference (this would necessarily include
equal access to the material necessities of existence,
but that would be a fight that would occur *primarily*
within the local context). This respect for difference
is the radical content of multiculturalism that
appears to be lost on the otherwise interesting
elements of insurrectionary anarchism which seems to
be strangely latched to the ideology of the One,
probably due to the centrality of 'capitalism' in
their critique rather than 'domination' in general,
which would include capitalism but go far beyond it
into the millions of other forms of power as well. It
is in fact true that anarchism can become a
fundamentalism as I think all of us who have been
active in that movement are quite aware, from some of
our peers who shall remain nameless, anarchism is not
a tendency noticeable throughout human history but an
ideological 'tradition' to be defended at all costs,
lest it spiral out of control and actually become
relevant to the world as it is today. However, just as
anarchism certainly is not one thing and cannot be
easily pinned down, neither is Islam and for this
reason it makes little sense to make universal
statements about what it 'is' or 'is not'. There are
for instance, some strands of Islam that are more
liberatory than others, but more important than that
obvious point is that sometimes cultural boundaries
are important in order to maintain self determination
and to resist the onslaught of for instance Western
Capitalism or Soviet Communism. This where I start to
diverge from the Deleuzian / Hardt and Negri arguments
about how liberating 'smooth space' supposedly is in
the age of Empire (which seems to embrace the ideology
of progress rather than critiquing it, typical
classical Marxism in other words). I think it is
important to build horizontal linkages across the
globe to a limited and loose extent but far more
important than that is the construction of
decentralized, local, cultural alternatives to what we
currently have shoved down our throats each day, the
violence of the global, which has stripped out any and
all aspects of cultural difference in favor the pure
instrumentality of global technology. You say that
multiculturalism is the language of the TNCs, well so
is universalism and I would argue that universalism
has much more to do with the spirit of capitalism than
does multiculturalism, the latter of which was forced
into the public sphere while the former was the
building blocks on which modernity was founded (from
capitalism to communism to anarchism). The question of
"should" is a question that antiauthoritarians should
take very seriously as it is the question around which
our tradition has historically been most engaged, it
is what more than anything else, separates anarchism
from all the other isms an it is the question that
brings anarchism together with the concerns of
contemporary critical theory in all its various forms.

Jason



 

===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the 
        mania
     Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and
         one way."

- Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799

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