From: swilbur-AT-wcnet.org Subject: [postanarchism] Panarchy, tolerance, conflict Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2004 14:27:46 US/Eastern Just a few more thoughts on the more general issues raised in the fundamentalism thread: In the midst of the War on Terror, its easy to forget that not all responses to the questions of in/tolerance need to be in the all or nothing form the Bush admin seems to favor. There are plenty of ways to be "opposed to fundamentalism" that don't involve going to war, or racial profiling, etc. If we are going to have a living, developing culture, open to the emergence of new ideas and such, we are going to have conflict and opposition. We must have it. If we are going to avoid embracing indifference, we are going to end up acknowledging that not all differences are equally desirable. How we deal with that dynamic is the critical thing, and "tolerance" and "coexistence" are among the ways we'll talk about the active process of keeping an open society open. Anarchists should undoubtedly find opposition without understanding rather distasteful - at the very least, not very helpful. I think, however, that there is some truth in the critiques of various "postmodern" and "multicultural" forms of tolerance as repressing the emergence of active difference (and differance) in the name of harmony. Viva conflict! But with understanding and responsibility as key values as well. And let's understand that, whatever we call the better social arrangement we are aiming for, it will not be enough to simply leave space for otherness. Those spaces have to be worked (or un-worked) for. Some of the difficulties here are clear in the original proposal for Panarchy. I share Jason's fascination with the notion - though his enthusiasm surprises me a bit, given his earlier dismissals of mutualism and his attitude towards "the enlightenment." Make no mistake - Panarchy is based in the universal application of a very familiar notion, but it's not a notion that has been particularly respected within many anarchist circles. Here's some of de Puydt's essay: "I have a high esteem for political economy and would that the world shared my opinion. This science, of recent origin, yet already the most significant of all, is far from reaching fulfilment. Sooner or later (I hope it is sooner) it will govern all things." "...there is a need for free competition, first of all between individuals, later internationally - freedom to invent, work, exchange, sell, and buy, freedom to price one's products - and simply no intervention by the State outside its special sphere. In other words: "Laissez-faire, laissez-passer." Laissez-faire. de Puydt places himself among the "consistent Manchesterians" (using Tucker's phrase.) And his consistency raises "laissez-faire" to the level of a universal. "In science there are no half truths. There are no truths which are true on the one side and cease to be true under another aspect. The system of the universe exhibits a wonderful simplicity, as wonderful as its infallible logic. A law is true in general; only the circumstances are different. Beings from the most noble to the lowest, from the living plant, even down to the mineral, show intimate similarities in structure, development and composition; and striking analogies link the moral and material worlds. Life is an entity, matter is an entity; only their physical manifestations vary. The combinations are innumerable, the particulars infinite; yet the general plan embraces all things." There is quite a metaphysics at work here, with the logics of the market placed right at its center. It's not clear how important it is that we accept the *whole* of de Puydt's system to give Panarchy a hearing, but we should at least understand the context for his proposal. And there is no escaping the fact that the functioning of the Panarchy is the functioning of a "free market." He is explicit about this, even to the point of allowing that there will be "insolvent minorities" who will not be free to choose how they will be governed because they lack the market clout. This may sound pretty horrible to many anarchists. How we respond to it largely depends on whether we think something like a "market anarchism" is possible. The individual sovereigntists and mutualists certainly did, and maintained a clear separation between truly free exchange and capitalism. Tucker and the individualists believed it for quite awhile, although Tucker was eventually disillusioned, feeling that too much capital had accumulated in too few hands, so that it would simply not be enough to remove the "four monopolies" to free up markets. Some sort of revolution would be required to break up capital accumulation. Hodgskin wavers, on my reading, between seeing some sort of revolutionary transition as necessary and falling back on faith in the dynamics of the market. Proudhon seems to develop a notion that "property" must be transformed to serve libertarian ends, a position already taken by Thomas Skidmore. The question is a familiar one for us, dealing with the nature of power. If power is not merely suppressive - as we appear to agree is the case - then we might well be skeptical of the model of "the market" that flows freely except when dammed by monopoly. At the very least, we might look for something like the transvaluation of the notion of property that Skidmore and others envision as a part of the founding of a free society. At the very least, i suspect... We might recollect two other interventions at this point, if only to serve as foils for what's already on the table. In the essay "Declarations of Independence," Derrida talks a bit about the difficulty of founding a free society without doing so by at least a kind of violence. If we were to accept, even for the moment, the desirability of Panarchy (or any of our anarchist dreams), we still need to ask what it would take to found such an arrangement. If we include the "freedom to be unfree," for example, what is the guarantor that that "freedom" remains such? How do we think through the birth of the paternalistic entity or the transvaluation of values that can maintain the Panarchistic space as a space of diversity and difference? The question of "transition" haunts anarchists too, i guess... Fourier envisioned something similar to the Panarchistic experiment in his phalanx, but his idea was truly "utopian" in the sense that he thought - or acted as if he thought - he had the blueprint. The process of balancing the "passions" within the population of the phalanx would eliminate conflict and "sin," by simply(?) harmonizing all the impulses - to every urge an outlet, with the presumption that truly destructive urges were mostly the result of lack of outlets for less harmful ones. Here is a delightfully sane proposal for the creation of a limited economy within which "laissez- faire" might really be practiced in fine libertarian fashion. Alas, you need something like a phrenological taxonomy of passions to make the construction of such a space possible. Without that technological intervention, and in the absence of a reliable science to make population selection possible, we're stuck outside Fourier's Eden. But the thought experiment involved is probably still useful in thinking about more mundane aspects of social tolerance and harmony. One more, perhaps equally scattered thought: some of our fascination, perhaps obsession, with "difference" comes out of a sense that "difference" (or differance) and "justice" are closely linked. This is explicit in the work of folks like Lyotard, Derrida, Blanchot, and probably Bataille (where the notions of general and limited economy which inform so much of the other work are so well laid out.) What seems more and more clear to me is that there is a temptation, given this sense, to treat "difference" as a good, while it is probably more accurate and useful, from the perspective of poststructuralism, to think of "difference" - and "justice" - as "beyond good and evil." Hopefully there are some useful bits to chew on in all this. -shawn --------------------------------------------- This message was sent using Endymion MailMan. http://www.endymion.com/products/mailman/
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005