Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 16:12:14 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] re: anarchobasics


"If you're attempting to attach some more *fundamental* sense to thse "basics," then you're barking up the wrong tree."

Fundamentals is Latinesque for basics.  The fundament means the same as the base.  Hence this is a rather strange distinction.  But the points still arise:
a) if the claim is observational/historical, why is it posited rather than demonstrated with reference to sources etc.?
b) to what extent is anarchism - and even more so postanarchism - constrained by the "basics"?  Isn't it also inevitably haunted by the non-"basics", which have even greater significance according to a Derridean perspective, deconstructing and distorting the reading of the basics through the play of differance?
 
"But the point is really one about freedom from coercion.  If we act or associate, then it ought to be voluntarily."

Which would seem to be impossible, given that you claim that unconstrained action is impossible - although I take your point that you didn't mean what your claim about an emphasis on voluntary association actually said (though as you well know from Derrida, the meaning of the text can exceed your intent).
 
"Can we imagine an *anarchist* association in which the participation of the participants was *forced*?"
 
You are assuming the binary voluntary/forced or freedom/coercion to be very clear and to leave no remainder... another very un-Derridean manoeuvre.  As I've made clear, it is contradictory to impose anarchism by means of statist methods.  But as I've also made clear, this does not leave repressive tolerance as the only option.  Nor does it preclude a right to self-defence against systems of social action which threaten one's right to be an anarchist by constructing repressive and statist social relations.
 
"One can voluntarily become a nazi. If one associates with others who want to be nazis, then that is a mutual and voluntary (but obviously not anarchist) association. If you go and put a bunch of people in death camps as a result of further association, then your association with *them*  is not voluntary - and ought without question to be opposed on anarchist principles."

OK then, explain how someone can be a Nazi WITHOUT having the goal of putting someone else in death camps, or at least subordinating others violently.  What if the bond of connection between fascist A and fascist B is not inherent to this relation, but is a result of a unity against some racial other, X?  In this case, is not the coercive intent towards X a conditioning factor in creating the association between A and B, in which case, the association between A and B cannot properly be called "voluntary"?  Your position would seem to require that A and B have an inviolable right to come together in order to persecute X, and that in no circumstances can anyone else challenge this coming-together or the social inside it forms.
 
"Is the possibility - or even the likelihood - of coercive acts developing from an initially
voluntary association sufficient reason to *preemptively* demand that associations take certain forms - which is to say to demand conformity to certain standards beyond those of the voluntary and mutual?"
 
Why are the standards of the voluntary (at the level of the ego) and the mutual (which you haven't defined) so important?  This in itself presumes certain standards of assessment, especially the latter - who is to decide when a relation is sufficiently equitable to be mutual, and how annoyed does a worse-off party have to be with the arrangement in order for the mutuality to cease? - but also the former - how, for instance, can an association be called voluntary, when it is based on decisions which restrict the future becoming of selves, and how can it be called voluntary in cases where its members in fact breach the very rules they agree to?
 
Instead of these rather vague criteria, which rely on a naive personological or characterological model of interpersonal relations, my own criterion is that all formations based on active desire should be celebrated, and all those based on reactive desire should be opposed (which does not necessarily mean "forced out of existence by coercion", as Shawn seems to assume).  
 
And the point is not that one category are harmless and the other harmful - while reactive desire is always harmful because of its repressive basis, active desire can also create conflicts based on different desires within or between subjects.  The point is rather, about the arrangement of social and territorial space.  Is this space to be arranged as a repressive regime of place, or is it to be arranged as an open space of proliferation and articulation of rhizomes?  Although there are many hybrid forms, the choice of the two kinds of space is ultimately exclusive - relations tend to produce one kind of space or another.  Both kinds of space have their risks and dangers (in an open space, one must abandon the attempt to "guarantee" against "crime" of whatever kind, indeed, the attempt to regulate action through characterological and labelling strategies, and this means embracing risks which a closed space pretends to remove - though in fact it fails to do so and can only fail to do
 so).
 
So the struggle against voluntary (among reactive subjects) but nonetheless repressive and reactive kinds of social and spatial territorialisation and subjectification is not about some leftist take on Mill's harm principle; it is based on a different axis of assessment, in which the crucial issue is that the closure (or rather, striation) of space is an attack on potentiality and on the future possibility of choice per se, whereas the opening (or rather, smoothing) of space is the creation of a context for freedom, where a kind of voluntarity which is not simply the realisation of the pressure of the superego finally becomes possible in social and spatial, not merely psychological, terms.
 
"How will we vet new forms of association?"
 
There is no "vetting" because there is no general social agency to do the "vetting".  There are only diverse individual, subindividual and small-group responses to situations.  And I think the point is that people who value openness of space and relations will act in ways to preserve and extend this openness, and this will include various actions against those who try to close space, which may include (for example) the deterritorialisation of spaces territorialised for reactive projects, the blocking through direct action of the expansion of the territory under their control, the persuasion of members through dialogue, a refusal or reluctance to engage in relations of exchange on terms set by such people, a tendency to treat any commitment made in association with such people to be non-binding on oneself, etc.  These methods could be used whenever a reactive project asserts itself in distinctly reactive ways (and need not be taken against the "association" in its entirety, when and
 wherever it manifests itself).
 
"It is certainly my *desire* that everyone with whom i interact treat me as i would like to treat them - in the spirit of mutual aid and mutual respect. But i'm not sure on what
grounds i would "insist" on that"
 
And there are also no grounds NOT to.  The simple point is that, if someone does not treat one with respect, and therefore does not believe in mutual respect, there is no reason that person should be able to claim a right to set up social relations based on the disrespect or more precisely, the oppression of others.  Such a person has already, through disrespect, perpetuated an oppression which necessitates a rebellion on my part, or the part of whoever is not respected.  This is an automatic implication of the claim that the person is not showing respect.  The only distinctly anarchist point is the claim that one should side with the oppressed against the oppressors in all such conflicts.  And this has to do with extending a preference for open rather than closed social space.
 
"To put it another way: should we demand that people always act in ways that we consider freeing, and in their own best interests?"
 
"Demand" is too strong a word.  There is a long way between demand and repressive tolerance.  Are you really saying that one should never try to persuade someone else to do something which would free them?
 
In any case, as I've made clear, the crucial point is not to "free" others against their will, but to ensure the openness of social and territorial space.  I think all of us have every right to demand that others not close social and territorial space in repressive and reactive ways, because this reduces the space for our own self- or mutual liberation and for that of others who are free (whether this is the same freedom as one's own, or not).
 
"I can quibble with the best of them, but, honestly, all the Deleuze and Foucault in the world doesn't change the fact that "people" exist - if only as fairly stable sites in complex fields of force - and that people experience "freedom" or its lack in particular ways. And anarchism has historically concerned itself with that sort of freedom, though not to 
the exclusion of other concerns."
 
There are many strands historically within anarchism which also discuss freedom in terms of resisting spooks (Stirner), liberating ecological entities and animals (primitivism), resisting norms and conformity (Situationism), etc.  And this creates something DISTINCT in anarchism, since liberalism and socialism equally claim to want to "free" "people".
 
The so-called "fact" that "people exist" is not a fact but a conceptualisation, and since facts are dependent upon the conceptualisations which produce differences between categories, the claim that "people exist", which is to say, the claim that the word "people" has a meaningful libidino-praxical referent which is significant and specific when used in conjunction with the other concepts deployed in the specific context of a particular theory, cannot be a "fact", not can it be stated as obvious.
 
Even if anarchism historically has been concerned with liberating "people" and with voluntarity and mutuality between such entities (which you are far from having shown as exclusively as you would like), and if such "people" are taken to be molar selves with (for instance) a consistent and dominant ego and superego and a continuity of will, this does not necessarily make such a conception useful in the current situation, nor does it make it liberating.  Perhaps the liberation of "people", if "people" are molar selves and therefore have reactive psychological structures and character-armour, is impossible, because the oppression of such "people" is internal rather than, or as well as, external, and because the elimination of the cop in society would not eliminate the "cops in our heads" - and worse, because the "cops in our heads" would follow any liberation by re-establishing the cops in society in some more-or-less mystified form.  Perhaps the liberation of "people" can only come
 about through their becoming-not-"people" (if "people" is taken to mean molar selves).
 
Now, following from your next answer, suppose that "people" are NOT "molar selves" - and the question becomes not one of voluntarity/mutuality between such selves, but a question of articulations between rhizomes.  The problem becomes one of thinking a kind of "voluntarity" which does not rely on a dominant ego or superego - and which thus also requires that molarity and reactive structures be challenged, rather then being covered up beneath a superficial emphasis on voluntarity at the level of the ego alone.
 
"If, in pursuing it, we need to rethink "the human," we can do that."
 
The fly is still stuck in the bottle.  Let it out.
 
"What does "freeing desire" mean, if separated from "people"? ... Having learned the skills of schizoanalysis, of seeing the becomings that occupy the place where some had imagined an atomistic ego, it would be slightly ironic if we opted to "fix" that "insanity" by going completely to the side of deterritorialization."

Pure deterritorialisation is a myth (or a danger, depending which D&G text you're reading).  But smooth space, a plane of consistency, is a possibility.  Thus, the point is not to "fix" the "insanity" of schizo flows, but to create a space where they are not repressively overcoded by paranoiac/neurotic repressions and reactive structures.  One could maybe call this a right to live in a smooth space, which requires a resistance to all striations.
 
In any case, my main objection is not to "people" but to rigid and expectationist mechanisms of holding-responsible, particularly punishment.  Measures which punish (or "incentivise", etc.), a doer for a deed, when the deed is, rather, prior to the doer.  One can refer to molecular selves who nonetheless "exist" as "people", but in relation to whom it is utterly inappropriate and oppressive to produce general norms by majority vote or some such procedure, which these molecular, excessive, overflowing, non-continuous selves are then bound morally to obey, and in relation to which, it becomes ethically justified for some "enforcer" to harm those whose overflow takes them beyond the boundaries of the rules, of "the social" (in the sense of the abstract machine, the social counterposed to the anti-social).  These molecular "people" may nonetheless relate socially in many different ACTIVE ways, without fallback on the reactive structures which necessitate the molarity of the self.
 
So the existence or nonexistence of "people", the "human", the "self", etc., is not the main worry for me.  My main worry is with the molar self - both as an (incomplete) psychological reality, the reactive repression of desire, and (even more so) as a social expectation, which legitimates oppression of actual selves who overflow the norms, roles, expectations and conformities, either because their molar selves break down at certain points or because they are not molar selves at all.  This all started with the problem of the legislative modality - the question of the social/anti-social binary - which again, does not require that the "social" be identified exclusively with the binary, but which does require that certain practices and social relations be viewed as oppressive and intolerable to the extent that one rejects the legislative modality and the molar conception of the self which it implies (whether explicitly or in a fetishistic, "I know very well but still I keep doing it"
 kind of way).  It is this kind of conception of the "person", and this kind of conception of the "social" which relates these kind of idealised "persons", which is the target of my critique.
 
Andy

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