File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0403, message 27


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/



   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005