File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0410, message 9


Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 14:59:54 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Shawn P. Wilbur" <swilbur-AT-wcnet.org>
Subject: Re: [postanarchism] re: anarchobasics



On Wed, 6 Oct 2004, andrew robinson wrote:

> Shawn,
>  The first problem I have with what you're saying is that it seems to
> be out of sync with your Derrideanism, on account of which there would
> seem to be no "basics", but only the meanings something acquires
> through its articulation.

This is a set of observations, based on the history of the movement and
observed contemporary attitudes. If you're attempting to attach some more
*fundamental* sense to thse "basics," then you're barking up the wrong
tree.

> "* Anarchists emphasize voluntary action and association: Nobody should
> *have* to do anything, or associate with anyone. "

> That's not an emphasis on voluntary association, because one may
> choose to associate or not to associate.  So the assumption that a
> right to associate or not to associate leads to "voluntary
> association" implies an ontological presupposition of sociability.

Emphasis on *voluntary.* You snipped out the clarification about "strong
construals" which made explicit the possibility of inaction or
non-association. But the point is really one about freedom from coercion.
If we act or associate, then it ought to be voluntarily.

> "Most of us would probably agree that nobody should *have* to be an
> anarchist.
>
> Well that depends what you mean by "having to be an anarchist".  If
> you're saying that people have a right to be statists, state
> socialists, liberals, fascists, etc., this implies that they have the
> right to act on these principles, and therefore to impose liberal,
> fascist, etc., states.

There are two separate issues here:

1) Can we imagine an *anarchist* association in which the participation of
the participants was *forced*? Wouldn't such an arrangement simply be
oxymoronic?

2) If we extend the freedom not to be anarchists to others, as perhaps we
must, then what are the consequences?

> Now of course, such states interfere with your
> first principle of voluntary association, because these states are
> non-voluntary.

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.

> Furthermore, the affirmation of such states as
> legitimate seems incompatible with being an anarchist.

Who is talking about legitimacy? It isn't the case, and as a crusader
against "normalism" i would expect you felt much the same way, that i need
to approve or disapprove of everything that happens. My question is really
whether we have any specifically *anarchist* grounds for claiming that any
voluntary association is illegitimate (as an association, prior to or
separate from concerns about likely outcomes.) You have made much of what
you take to be contradictions in my positions. Let's not run ahead of
ourselves, skipping steps in the arguments.

> Thus, to be an
> anarchist is to deny to others the right to establish oppressive
> regimes of state power.  And this is, in effect, to deny others the
> right to be fascists, liberals, Stalinists, etc., since consistently
> being any of these things means building and defending coercive state
> apparatuses based on these ideologies.

I'm curious what other folks think of this position. 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? This is a
particularly interest question when we open it to forms of association
that we perhaps do not already recognize. How will we vet new forms of
association? (Andrew has provided his answer in his own model, but these
more general questions are necessary to work out the differences between
the "minimal anarchist program" i'm trying to ferret out and the
anti-state, anti-legislative orientation of Andrew's proposal.)

>  So, in a sense, to be an anarchist is to insist that everyone (or at
> least everyone whose exercise of power impinges on oneself or on any
> other anarchist) be anarchists (at least at the level of action),
> because this anarchism - this absence of statist repression in
> whatever form - is a necessary condition for oneself or anyone else to
> have the right consistently to be an anarchist, to live an anarchist
> life, without being under the control of some state or other.

I've been suggesting that to be an anarchist means to believe in the
voluntary principle and to seek its extension in mutual relations.
Anarchism grows as mutuality spreads. 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, or how i would back up such an
insistence to make it meaningful. A group of people could, i think,
"insist together" in more formally anarchist associations, but this mutual
insisting is precisely the sort of thing, if it has any teeth at all, that
Andrew has been objecting to in my previous defenses of voluntary
association.

It appeared in previous posts that one could not voluntarily give
*oneself* a rule, and now it appears that anarchism involves giving such
rules universally.

> "But that means we recognize the rights of folks to behave in ways
> that we don't consider freeing - or that may seem against their own
> interests. At the limit is the explicit acknowledgement of a freedom
> to be unfree."
>
> There are two points here.  One is that, since one person's exercise
> is freedom is different from another's, one should be tolerant towards
> others who engage in different activities and ways of life to those
> one would (or does) engage in oneself if one were (or is) free.  One
> should resist labelling these alternative ways of life as "unfreedom"
> because one would not freely choose them oneself (for instance, one
> can freely choose to be subject to sado-masochistic practices, to have
> one's tongue pierced or to commit suicide).

Certainly. But this raises some thorny questions about what is "really"
freedom and what isn't. We have to apply the same caution with *all*
categories of behavior.

> But on the other hand, if something leaves someone genuinely unfree,
> it is incoherent to say that this person has a "right" to be in such a
> state, because "rights" are irrelevant to the state in which they are
> in, i.e., they are unfree and not therefore engaging in an act of
> choice or a free activity which they can have a "right" to make or to
> engage in.  Indeed, it is unclear that one can be unfree and yet
> assert one's right to retain this status.

The language of "rights" is probably one worth avoiding most of the time,
but i'm using it in its most general sense, so maybe we can just muddle
along. The "rights" i'm talking about are solely in the minds of
anarchists attempting to judge others' acts according to anarchist
criteria. To put it another way: should we demand that people always act
in ways that we consider freeing, and in their own best interests?

> Another point is that you seem to think the role of anarchism is to
> free "people".

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.

> This implies a great faith in the self as ego or consciousness.

No. It really doesn't. The self may be the most fragile of things. Bakunin
seemed to think so, dismissing notions of "the freedom of the will"
without also dismissing questions of human freedom. Kropotkin followed
Guyau, it seems to me, in placing much of his "faith" precisely in what
seems an excess over and above the parts of us that go into the economy of
ego maintenance. The Bergsonian psychology that informs some of Deleuze's
work or that of Nietzsche doesn't eliminate "people" from the picture,
though it asks us to think about them differently.

> But the question of liberation is not so simple.

Nobody said it was simple. But "people" is what we've got. "Mad" people
are people too. Anarchism is a human project. If, in pursuing it, we need
to rethink "the human," we can do that. We've done it before, pursuing
other projects.

> What if the point is precisely to free desire from its entrapment by
> the ego?  What if certain beings (such as the mad) cannot be freed
> through a liberation of the ego, but only through its dissolution?

What does "freeing desire" mean, if separated from "people"? You may
perhaps desire to "make yourself a body without organs" in some more or
less permanent way, deterritorializing and thus freeing the flows. That
sounds a bit like a death wish to me, or a desire to return to the womb.
But such drastic measures hardly seem necessary. Even Freud seemed to
sense that the dissolution of the ego was part of its economy, though not
the only part. 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.

> There is something very socially conservative about insisting that
> "individuals", and their specific characteristics, cannot be
> challenged or criticised.  It is a way of preserving existing social
> relations by refusing to challenge the way these relations are
> constructed through social identities.

...which is why *nobody* has insisted that. Perhaps you have missed the
references to the decentered subject, and to Whitman, the last dozen or so
times. Or the stuff about the singular-plural from Nancy...

Let me say this another way: We can probably take the point about the
primacy of "my own interests" from Stirner, and run with it, if we accept
all the poststructuralist cautions about what is "my own." There is
probably some analogue to the notion that "there is nothing outside the
text" which takes us in the direction of Whitman, "where every atom of me
as good belongs to you," but we're still not "the same," much less "the
same person." We can also take the egoist objection to *obligation* and
run with it through a similar transformation, where the development of any
ethics (used, again, very, very loosely, in the sense of developing
values) can be based on little more than the fact that we exist in the
same fields of force with others ("like us," but like us also in being
"completely other") - in that weak relationship Derrida calls
"responsibility," by which he means little more than there are others who
can repond. There is an assumption about the social here, but only that it
(again <sigh> in only the broadest terms) exists. "Hauntologically," in
Derrida's terms again, because the recognition tells us too little about
the nature of that existence to be worth calling ontological.

> "The strong construal of voluntariness leads to an emphasis on means."

>  This steers anarchism very close to liberalism - as if any outcome of
> a particular procedure, however destructive and oppressive, is
> legitimate because it is the outcome of this particular procedure.

Nope. The voluntary is necessary but not sufficient to anarchism.

> "Sympathy or solidarity come from our ability to see others as in at
> least some ways like ourselves."
>
> This is a legitimation of repressive sameness which concedes to
> normalism and other same-based ideologies by naturalising their
> premises as somehow unchallengeable.  In fact, solidarity can operate
> on a far broader level than sameness, and extend into solidarity
> across difference.

Nope, again...

We are "the same" in that we are each unique, just as much as we are "the
same" because we share similar genetic material or portions of the same
increasingly global culture.

-shawn


   

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