Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 01:14:58 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Condit: "Practical Millenarianism: Norms of  Anarchism in the 21st century" 


Practical Millenarianism: Norms of Anarchism in the
21st Century

by Stephen Condit

excerpt:

"The anarchist deontology pulls our reasoning in two
directions. In order to disclose the  dissonance
between the structures of social knowledge
legitimating the prevailing order  and their actual
content, consequences and vested interests, and in
order to aggravate the  offence of their false
legitimacy, we need what Foucault calls the archeology
of  genealogies of knowledge.(Foucault, 1977) We must
disinter and revive lost modes of  knowledge, and in
some degree their social formations, and so emancipate
ourselves from  the thrall of what seems inevitable
and adequate. We reveal the extent to which prevailing
 structures and institutions of knowledge are beholden
to power rather than dedicated to  truth. Truth, after
all, is a norm limiting what we know and restraining
our presumptions to  act on our knowledge, and is not
necessarily the pre-eminent interest of these
institutions...

Such a principle might be the repudiation of
sovereignty, insofar as sovereignty legitimates  a
system of command which in the end is unaccountable,
irresponsible and therefore  coercive, no matter how
embedded in ostensibly democratic procedures, because
its  rightness is vested only in its agent’s
proclamation of right. It presumes finality where the 
anarchist ideal admits none. Foucault suggests that
sovereignty can always be revealed in  relations of
domination and power as their justification by the
dominant party or by that  party seeking some benefit
from them, be it a state or a single person claiming
sovereignty  for personal conscience.(Foucault, 1977)
Following Rousseau, he rejects this as a  grounding
for right. When right entails subjugation, it becomes
power only, and  contingent. Bakunin likewise detests
sovereignty, although he erroneously attributes it
only  to the state. The repudiation of sovereignty as
a conceptual possibility, thereby stripping it  of
legitimacy as a social principle, must entail norms
empowering us to disclose the  pretensions and
mystifications of sovereignty and to subject it to the
ethical and practical  critique of the anarchist
ideal. This cannot be, as Foucault warns, merely a
resort to some  kind of non-sovereign power, such as
punitive discipline justified through the good of the 
victim. The repudiation of sovereignty need not deny
what the concept might once have  meant, the
declaration of rightful authority. Our task is to
alter its form, to decentralise it  so that to the
extent we claim authority, we do so on the grounds
that its right is vested not  in ourselves as its
agent but in its reason and presence in the beings of
all who endure its  consequences. "

for the rest visit
kvl.joensuu.fi/pdf/philosophical_anarchism.pdf )

===="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

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam
http://mail.yahoo.com