Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 14:40:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: TMB <tblan-AT-telerama.com>
Subject: Re: Re : [postanarchism] Kropotkin-Newman (Sasha's review) (fwd)




On Thu, 8 Apr 2004 swilbur-AT-wcnet.org wrote:
> 
> Is this a fair characterization of deconstruction? It seems, in some
> ways, more characteristic of more mainstream, analytic forms of
> philosophy.
> 
> Deconstruction is always concerned with the "more than one voice"/"no
> more one voice" that appears to haunt the most authoritative of texts.
> "There is unraveling," we might say. But there's a difference between
> paying attention to the other ways in which a text might speak and
> simple unraveling. Recall the passage on the pharmakon where Derrida
> refers explicitly to garments and "seams holding."

Still, might not one conceive of a more positive affirmation of a
multiplicity based not on the negational "de-", and rather on a post
deconstructiona "en-", as the enconstructive, the en-sembling of voices,
etc. Doesn't Derridean deconstruction really have at a certain
authoriality as singularity, yet, at the same time, doesn't this in turn,
perhaps (or maybe not perhaps) lead in the end to a certain re-affirmation
of that very monolithic mode of authorility, albeit one that is perhaps a
bit more "ownmost"? And again, does the dominance factor obtain regarding
Derrida and deconstructionk in that once that deconstructive project is
unleashed, doesn't it tend to lead too much back to a certain status quo?
What if an enconstructive philosophy were possible, but required a
displacement of that Derridan aporia? What if this paralleled, at the same
time, the role of voices, authority, leadership, etc., in political
activisms, such that progress is in fact *not* possible until leadership,
authority, etc., does not decend into the deconstructive moment of
multiplicity, lit too much in the light of the burning of monolithic
authority, but rathr in other lights, according to other calls? I believe
it is indeed the case that the other call, what I call the "third call", a
difficult call to thought in a certain really irreducible way, that
obtains within thought in a very difficult way. For thought should be
unleahing into a lot of things that it is not unleashing into when one
works in/around Derrida. Rather, it gets frozen, sucked up, pinned, lost
in the deconstructive arena. To recoznie it (it is it's own
being-recognized, in part, apparently), is enable moving on in cetain
ways, according to that most important of "Derridean" moments: stakes. For
at stake are so many stakes that await the *augmentation*, orientational
freeing, enrichment, etc., of various project works that thinking at least
of the callibre of Derrida can enable, and thought that is
philosophically, philosophemically enriched and enabled, etc. Yet these
stakes, I believe, languish in the domiance I mention here.

I know you favor just working out what "deconstruction really is": don't
go by the semantic meaning, that's part of it, but it's more. But why does
this horrid over extension have to take place so much? IF it's called
something why is it called anything that even has pretenses to meaning
what it says, to designate or illuminate, disclose, conceptually capture
what is being so designated? Why do we use words such as "designate" to
mean "designate" if not because we mean then to mean designation, etc.?
And so with Deconstruction. I claim that this is no quibbling, it has
everything to do with whether and how thought really is or is freed up in
it. Even more, and this really is fully of the rather uniquely
*deconstructive* tradition (Heideggerian Destruktion and Derridean
post-Heideggerian semantic analysis, augmentation, unfolding and
affirmation), it was from the start an affirmation of *meaning* allowed to
have designational cache that could be more respectable and not
continually thrust into "meanings other than what is meant" that was at
work in Heidegger in the first place, a "revolutionary attitude", to be
sure, that accomplished itself well past a naive metaphysics of, say,
Decartes and then Husserl. No, meanings became much more important, not
less. When I harp on "econstruction", and perhaps other designations are
possible as well, that is part of what I am meaning. And when you keep on
affirmation "deconstruction" as "affirmation of multiplicty of voices" or
whatever, in fact it is eventually supposed to designate every thing
positive or somthing I suppose...(sorry don't mean to be rude), I strongly
think you are really missing the boat on the matter of meaning,
designation, naming, nomination, semantic cahe, thought/language, etc. I
just can't write a disseration to back this up well enough and have to
depend, rather, on making (presumably good) indications in these
directions and hope that you can look for yourself and gather that
perhaps, primae facie, that this may be the case. But in turn, this very
position, of the way in which this "meaning moment", matter of meaning,
naming, the semantic moment (and again, the way this unfolded in Heidegger
should be considered very carefully), bears on the situation here as well,
and on you (you personally in a manner of speaking, Shawn), and a
difficult appeal. The person who you are talking to in your dialogue has
this difficulty I think I tend to have. I presume and doen't mean to speak
for him/her, but I can see the signs of it quickly. YOu move to
indoctrinate him in the Deconstructive Project. I question how good this
is, whether what is going on there is in fact all that good, whether these
matters are adequately settled, whether too much is being in a way neatly
compartmentalized, domesticated yet at the same time put at a distance as
this space of "the reading of post-anarchy" takes place here. Again, while
I don't mean to say that such readings should not take place, a kind of
secondary authority, if not an authoritarianism, tends to accomplish
itself, along with possible capitalisms, etc., in the amassing of texts,
textual discourses, etc. While there may well be Othr Stakes involved in
deconstruction, I still see Still Other Stakes that tend to be
systematically languishing in the process, and therin lies a certain
conflict that is difficult and must ensue, without question (I believe)
with a suspension of the *revolutionary*, a move into the *envolutionary*,
a critique of the operation of tenure and loss of radicality into the mode
of "review collection" (as I'll provisionallky call it), and a lot of
other elements whose very unfolding, I claim, is the more authentically
"post-anarchistic". What if, indeed, too much on the outside of these
basic operations limps? What if that were, in fact, part in parcel with
the situation? What if it were...that...very much so? Yet this supension
of the "revolutionary" should not, I claim, lose itself into the
commidifcation of the spaces of tenure and "review collection", the
"stable discourse". And think of it, the business of the "discourses of
progress" that say "Well we are in this change", these run a very serious
risk of falling into a very difficult moment, position, while we know so
well that the hubris they guard against runs the risk of falling into
blind action. But these concerns constitute a *nonviolence*: a regard,
pause, concern regaridng a rich history of violence, and I believe that
the envolutionary can not be broached without some affirmation of
nonviolence that is independent, and yet which, in particular, can not
occur as an evolutionary arising (such as reviews would hope to take into
view), nor as revolutionary arising (since the very concept of
"revolution" is itself too metaphysially abrupt to allow without a
question concerning violence): that is, it must take place in a definite
affirmation of the "semantic revolution", it must accept semantic
designation, and must *provisionally* (I use this term with Heideggerian
resonations here, and if one is grasping what I am saying, they may see
the importance of it here), forward not symply a syncretic moment
("multiarchyt", "polystruction"), but the post-postal phase of the "en",
it's iterative moment and en-active position, etc., as a radically turn on
action and inaction both. Yet these both still bear the purity of western
metaphysics in that they can in fact conceptualize, for example, new ways
of doing harm, and hence an independent gesture *evolves* in my
announcement of a nonviolencde in this affirmation that graps that *I must
say this*: I must affirm nonviolence, at this level, as an independent and
crucial moment or term (as viable and basically feasible a term, despite
its generality, as "deconstruction", "anarchy", etc.), yet as a turn that
must be mention, and whose "mention" inhabits every tenured suspension of
"anarchy" as "revolution". Yet I again mean these gestures in definite
contestation of and refusloa in some ways of the solution of
"deconstruction as movement", and refuse the impacted meaning that is
supposed to ride along: I affirm a freedom of thought here that, again,
obtains in your interlocutor's comments, in the dealing with the semantics
of the terms. I could and should go on, but I run into limits. I do my
best.

Tom Blancato



> 
> We've been debating for a long time now just what the aim of Newman's
> critique is. It does not seem to me to be deconstructive, really.
> Instead, Newman seems to feel he has found something like unsound
> premises at the basis of "classical anarchism," and wants to reinvent
> anarchism on the basis of other basic assumptions.

> > marginalization and supplementation, but at
> > what point does a de-construction become exactly 
> > what its name implies, and thus nothing but a 
> > negation. 
> 
> Again, this doesn't really sound like the work of deconstruction.

Why, really? And why can't one note, suspect, even identify a domiance of
the negational moment of the "de-" of Deconstruction? And why can't one
wish for semantic cache's that enable whatever one might wish for within
reason, within a reasonable standard of work, etc.? And why does
Deconstruction become some magical bullet that supposedly unleashes
everything? I claim that it does not. I think that when others do not
support this claim, resonate with it, or even grasp preliminaries in a
good-willed speculation about what would be prima facie possibilities
along these lines, they do so according to stakes that exceed the logics
exhibited. IN other words, other Stakes obtain, jsut too much, perhaps
stakes of tenure, if nothing else, and perhaps it really is not that much
else beside that (indeed, indeed).


> On the other hand, the kind of analytic work which Newman appears to
> be up to has obvious uses. If it were the case that the "root" of
> "classical anarchism" was "essential human goodness" tied to a
> manichaean notion of power, some reinvention would certainly seemed
> called for. To the extent that we have *inherited* the "classical"
> texts along these lines, some reinvention certainly *is* called for.
> 
> > Constructing "a straw man in order to knock
> > it down and to put" something else "in its place", 
> > as you say, but without really putting anything else 
> > there. I don't know. I seem never to have answers.
> > 
> > You say Newman does not adress the proper historical 
> > context of Kropotkin and his endeavor (vis à vis the 
> > intellectual currents of his time, in which K. is to 
> > be seen as an "outsider", someone thinking in contrast
> > and in opposition to those of his time). 
> 
> I think if we take the historical context really seriously, we find
> that "those of his time" had a range of beliefs. Insider/outsider
> doesn't seem to address the real range of approaches to questions like
> human nature and evolution. Also, as several of us have noted,
> Kropotkin is "opposed" only to specific threads of Darwinian thought.
> 
> > If we consider K. and his work as a historico-specific 
> > product, then, may we be forced to view him as a
> > "stage" within a broader context? 
> 
> I think sasha is correct in saying that this implies a teleology.
> Specific historical grounding should lead us away from vague,
> inadequate models - like the broad- stroke "bad enlightenment"
> approach. There is also the fact that Kropotkin's work is still only
> partially appreciated and understood within anarchist circles.  If
> there is a "stage" involved there, it is one which is in some sense
> still ongoing.

The very thought of "stage" itself must be entered into thought. The
postality of the postal, which I've mumbled about before, the business of
progression, etc., needs to lead into a notion of "envolutionality", a
turn on "evolution" as "of-itself" progress. This is no small issue: it is
not a matter of "waiting for a next stage", nor necessarily proceeding in
"due process" (which is what so much of this is), but of grasping the
MOMENT and MAKING PROGRESS in REVOLUTION............hehe, precisely not
that. Which is to say that the whole turn on revolution itself must
accomplish itself in a self-engagement on the gesture of revolution, a
gesture that must at the same time be "embodied" in some way (Shawn, this
points back to my goofy "engagement" post I sent when I first posted on
this list: that posting, if you will recall, petitioned you for a certain
more "first person" kind of thought, a little less on the order of the
review, etc. OF course what is taking place here now is lots of reviews,
which in a call for reflective revolution is nothing to be dismissed, by
any means, yet, on the othr hand, according to at least these two
critiques (( of revolution and now of tenure )). I know what I am saying
here is goofy, and I am currengly a limping thiker, but I claim that the
moments I identify here are most rigorous and in fact best and responsive
to the query of this other guy who is talking to you.

I know I'm taking this out of context, and hey no time to read K or N, nor
much energy as well (limping and all), but again I feel it is best to
point in these directions and invite others to feed me and enable thought.

Regards,

Tom Blancato


> 
> [snip]
> 
> > With Kropotkin, then, we have an individual/ideas within 
> > the intellectual stratum of the fin de siècle; and/or 
> > individual/ideas as perversion (development) of Marxism 
> > and, at the same time, classical anarchist ideologist; 
> > and/or the various concepts of expropriation, mutual aid, 
> > human nature as positive instinct of creation and 
> > development, etc. When you argue against Newman's 
> > reductionism, you argue against his development of
> > only the third element of this historical triad (which may 
> > as well be four or fifteen, as I'm sure I have left out 
> > other arrangements) - but we cannot react by a complete 
> > dismissal of Newman's critique, because we need to  find a 
> > way to satisfy as many elements as possible (I think this 
> > is something of what Shawn had in mind when he spoke of 
> > scholarly rigour, but I don't know). 
> 
> A big part of what i'm calling for is a clarification
> of what our projects and problems are. With that goes a
> process of clarifying what's at stake in our arguments.
> For the same reason that Newman's argument *could* have
> importance for us, if his analysis of the "poison at the
> root" was correct, it is possible that Newman's apparent
> misreadings of one significant aspect of "classical
> anarchism" may pretty well torpedo his whole project. 
> 
> I have yet to find the place where Newman's strong 
> claims against "classical anarchism" are supported
> convincingly. Obviously, others see things differently.
> 
> > Still, however, even as arguing only from the conceptual 
> > point of view, Newman's critique is still incomplete - 
> > I assume, as only arguing the point of human nature as 
> > good, he does not develop K's thoughts on expropriation 
> > or, what I think is at the heart of K's attempt, a 
> > desire for the abolition of representative society. 
> 
> Perhaps Newman's critique is complete, and simply does
> not touch those elements. His project lies elsewhere.
> That's fine, as long as we are clear on the limits of 
> the project. 
> 
> [clip]
> 
> > Thus, I don't see how an argument against human 
> > nature as essentially good (which K. does repeat 
> > time and again, "the good sense and instinct for 
> > justice which animates the masses", etc.) can 
> > properly dismiss K's theories. 
> 
> Here is one of those places where extreme care in
> interpretation seems called for. The most damning
> claim against Kropotkin is the "essential goodness"
> of human nature, by which the critics seem to mean
> "goodness (and not also essential badness.") We
> know that Kropotkin believed "mutual aid" was a
> greater factor in evolution that struggle. It
> appears that he was optimistic that the "fecundity"
> of human nature (using Guyau's term) would manifest
> itself in predominantly positive ethical terms. 
> (It's at this point, thinking about the "economies" 
> of human existence, that we might bring the "Ethics"
> and works like "Conquest of Bread" into closer 
> contact.)
> 
> It just isn't clear that what Kropotkin said, given
> what he said about other human instincts, really
> amounts to the "good (and not bad)" characterization
> of the postanarchists. 
> 
> -shawn
> 
> ---------------------------------------------
> This message was sent using Endymion MailMan.
> http://www.endymion.com/products/mailman/
> 
> 

i