Anarchist Meditations, or: Three Wild Interstices of Anarchism and
Philosophy
--------------------------------------------------------------------

People :
----------------------------------

Author : Alejandro De Acosta

Text :
----------------------------------


Abstract



Philosophers allude to anarchist practices; philosophers allude to
anarchist theorists; anarchists allude to philosophers (usually in search
of theory to add to the canon). What is missing in this schema, I note with
interest, is anarchists alluding to philosophical practices. These are the
wild interstices: zones of outlandish contact for all concerned.





Todo está ya en su punto, y el ser persona en el mayor.



Conocer las cosas en su punto, en su sazón, y saberlas lograr.



— Baltasar Gracián



Failure and the Third



I dare to call certain turbulent interstices of anarchy and philosophy
wild. I feel that there is a lot of activity there, but not (yet) along
predictable lines. For some time now, those interested have been hearing
about several other such interstices: tamer ones, from my point of view. Or
at least more recognizable. So let us play the familiar game of theory and
practice, that game in which we presuppose them as separate and seek to
claim them reunited. From within the play of this game, the tame
interstices are variations on the following moves: philosophers allude to
anarchist practices; philosophers allude to anarchist theorists; anarchists
allude to philosophers (usually in search of theory to add to the canon).
What is missing in this schema, I note with interest, is anarchists
alluding to philosophical practices. These are the wild interstices: zones
of outlandish contact for all concerned, I think.



But there are other games to play, even if they are only innocent games of
exposition. I think it is important and interesting to stop presupposing
separation, to dissolve its painful distribution of thinking and action.
That is, we might hazard the risky game (which is also an experience, an
exercise) in which there are no theories, no practices; just more or less
remarkable enactments of ways of life, available in principle to absolutely
anyone, absolutely anywhere.[1]



Anecdotally, these reflections have a double genesis. The first occurred
some years ago, when I was asked at an anarchist gathering to participate
in a panel on “anarchism and post-structuralism.” It was around the
time some began speaking of and writing about post-anarchism. The
conversation failed, I think, in that no one learned anything. Of the four
speakers, two were roughly in favor of engaging with post-structuralism and
two against. I write roughly because we seemed to agree that
“post-structuralism” is at best an umbrella term, at worst a garbage
term, not acknowledged by most of the authors classed within it, and not
particularly helpful in conversations such as that one. As if there really
were two massive aggregates on either side of the “and” we were being
asked to discuss! Indeed, the worst possible sense that something called
post-anarchism could have would be the imaginary collusion of two crudely
conceived imaginary aggregates. During the discussion, a participant asked
the panel a question: “how do post-structuralist anarchists organize?”
Of course the question went unanswered, though some of us tried to point
out that there just aren’t, and cannot be, post-structuralist anarchists
in the same sense that there are or may be anarcho-communists or
anarcha-feminists or primitivists, etc. The operative reason was that our
interlocutor seemed to be (involuntarily?) imagining post-structuralism as
a form of theory, and anarchism primarily as a form of practice with no
spontaneous or considered theory of its own. This is a variant of the
familiar schema of separation, in which theory offers the analysis that
informs practices, a.k.a. “organizing.” No go.



That night, I also posed a question, one that went unanswered: “is there
a third?” I meant to ask both about the status of anarchism and
post-structuralism as massive, clumsy imaginary aggregates, and also about
the presupposed separation in their implicit status as forms of practice
and theory. Or perhaps merely to hint at the unacknowledged efficacity of
the and, its silent labor, its gesture towards possible experiences. What I
have to say here is my own attempt to answer that question as provocatively
as possible. I will begin with this claim (which I think does not
presuppose separation): it is precisely the apparent political failures of
what I am now glad to have done with referring to as post-structuralism
that could make certain texts and authors interesting. And it is precisely
the supposed theoretical failures of what it is still a little silly to
call anarchism that could make its peculiar sensibilities attractive.



Indeed, the great and continuing interest of anarchism for philosophers
(and for anarchists, if they are willing to learn this lesson) could be
that it has never successfully manifested itself as a theoretical system.
Every attempt at an anarchist system is happily incomplete. That is what I
suppose concerned our interlocutor that night: he was worried, perhaps,
about the theoretical insufficiency of anarchism compared with what
appeared to be an overwhelming array of theories and concepts on the other
side. In this anxious picture, the array seeks to vampirically attach
itself to whatever practice, interpreting, applying itself to, dominating,
ultimately, its motions. ‘Theories without movements: run!’ I would
prefer to invert the terms and claim the apparent theoretical weakness of
anarchism as one of its greatest virtues. For its commonplaces (direct
action, mutual aid, solidarity, affinity groups, etc.) are not concepts but
forms of social practice. As such, they continually, virally, infect every
even remotely extraparliamentary or grassroots form of political action.
And, beyond politics, they compose a kind of interminable reserve of social
intelligence. In all this they neither require a movement to become
manifest nor compose one by default of tendentially existing. In this
sense, what anarchism offers to philosophers (to the philosophers any of us
are or might be) is that it has been and remains primarily a way of life.
Its asystematicity and its persistent recreation as a way of life probably
account for the fact that anarchism, as theory, has never been incorporated
into or as an academic discipline.[2]



Anarchism acts as an untimely echo of how philosophy was once lived, and
how, indirectly and in a subterranean fashion, it continues to be lived.
And, paradoxically, we might learn something about how it is lived by
reference to philosophical practices.

Dramatization: Wild Styles



Practices, or simply philosophy as a way of life: that is the second
genesis of what I have to say here. This idea crystallized in studying, of
all things, the ancient Stoics. Seeking to give a (pedagogical) sense to
Stoic logic, physics, and ethics as a lived unity and not as components of
what they already called a “theoretical discourse,”[3] I had recourse
to the elaboration of the practice of spiritual exercises by Pierre Hadot.
He describes them as follows: “practices which could be physical, as in
dietary regimes, or discursive, as in dialogue and meditation, or
intuitive, as in contemplation, but were all intended to effect a
modification and a transformation in the subject who practiced them”
(Hadot, 2005: 6).[4] Or, again: “The philosophical act is not situated
merely on the cognitive level, but on that of the self and of being. It is
a progress which causes us to be more fully, and makes us better. It is a
conversion which turns our entire life upside down, changing the life of
the person who goes through it” (Hadot, 1995: 83). Briefly, it’s that
every statement that is still remarkable in the fragments and doxographical
reports is so in light of its staging (dramatization, theatricalization) as
part of a meditative practice that might have been that of a Stoic.



Hadot offers several examples from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
demonstrating that logic and physics, the purportedly theoretical
components of Stoicism, were already and immediately part of ethical
practice. Logic as a “mastery of inner discourse” (Hadot, 2005: 135):
“always to define or describe to oneself the object of our perception so
that we can grasp its essential nature unadorned, a separate and distinct
whole, to tell oneself its particular name as well as the names of the
elements from which it was made and into which it will be dissolved”
(Aurelius, 1983: III, 11). Physics as “recognizing oneself as part of the
Whole” (Hadot, 2005: 137), but also the practice of seeing things in
constant transformation: “Acquire a systematic view of how all things
change into one another; consistently apply your mind to, and train
yourself in, this aspect of the universe” (Aurelius, 1983: X, 11).



I contend that such spiritual exercises are theories dramatized as
subjective attitudes. As the pivot of the whole system or at least of its
comprehensibility as such, the role of logic and physics for the Stoics
must have been precisely that of a training for ethical thought and action.
But in some sense the converse is even more compelling: subjective
attitudes, their theater, seem to secrete theory as a detritus in need of
being taken up again — precisely in the form of a new or repeated
exercise, a renewed dramatization. Setting aside the labyrinthine
complications of the entanglement with what is still badly understood as
Fate, I would like to retain this much of Stoic ethics in my anarchist
meditations: to find if there is anything to affirm in what confronts us,
what we encounter. Concluding a recent essay, I shared a desire “to
affirm something, perhaps all, of our present conditions, without recourse
to stupid optimism, or faith” (de Acosta, 2009: 34). I would like to
speculatively expand on the practice of such affirmations. As Gilles
Deleuze once put it: “either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is
what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what
happens to us”[5] (Deleuze, 1990: 49). What we encounter cannot but
provoke thought; if it can, meaning, if we allow it to, there is something
to affirm, and this affirmation is immediately joyful. How we might
thoughtfully allow events, places, actions, scenes, phrases — “what
happen to us,” in short — to unfold in the direction of joy is the
explicit or implicit question of every spiritual exercise.



 



I propose, then, an interlinked series of fantastic spiritual exercises:
meditations for anarchists — or on anarchy. They have, I suppose, been
implicit in every significant anarchist discourse so far (including, of
course, the many that have not called themselves anarchist) (cf., de
Acosta, 2009). They have been buried, indirect, assumed but unstated, in
these discourses. Or at least in much of their reception. In each of these
three forms (or styles) of exercise what is pivotal is some use of the
imagination — at least the imaginative-ideational uptake, Stoic phantasia
or phantasma, of written or spoken discourse, and of what is given to
thought in experience.[6] So, we are concerned here with experiential
dispositions, attitudes that at first seem subjective but are ultimately
prior to the separation of subject and object, and perhaps even of possible
and real.



Whatever happens, these exercises are available. I will not opine on their
ultimate importance, especially not on their relevance to existing
movements, groups, strategies, or tactics. In what fashion and to what
degree any of these exercises can be applied to another activity — if
that is even possible — is ultimately up to any of us to decide upon in
the circumstances that we find ourselves in, or through situations that we
create. The status of these meditations is that of a series of experiments,
or experiences, whose outcome and importance is unknown at the outset and
perhaps even at the conclusion.



I will have recourse in what follows to texts and authors that preceded
what is now called anarchism, or were, or are, its difficult
contemporaries, so as to underline that what matters in anarchist
meditations are the attitudes that they make available, not any actual or
possible theory or group that they may eventually secrete. The secret
importance of anarchy is the short-circuit it interminably introduces
between such attitudes and action, and back — what is badly conceived as
spontaneity. (Or worse, “voluntarism,” in the words of our enemies...)



Perhaps, then, the truly compelling reason to call the three forms of
meditation wild styles is that anarchists have no archon, no school, no
real training in or modeling of these activities outside of scattered and
temporary communities and the lives of unusual individuals. But they can
and do happen: interminably, yes, and also informally, irregularly, and
unpredictably. That is their interest and their attraction.

First Wild Style: Daydream



A Daydream may take the form of a meditative affirmation that informs how
we might read so-called utopian writers. Of these I will discuss the
absolutely most fascinating. It is Fourier, with his taxonomy of the
passions; with his communal phalansteries; with his tropical new earth,
aigresel oceans, and kaleidoscopic solar system; ultimately, with his
Harmonian future. What are we to do today with such a discourse? A version
of this first wild style is beautifully laid out in the following remarks
by Peter Lamborn Wilson:





Fourier’s future would impose an injustice on our present, since we
Civilizees cannot hope to witness more than a foretaste of Harmony, if it
were not for his highly original and somewhat mad eschatology. [...] One of
the things we can do with Fourier’s system is to hold it within our
consciousness and attention in the form of a mandala, not questioning
whether it be literally factually true, but whether we can achieve some
sort of “liberation” through this strange meditation. The future
becoming of the solar system, with its re-arrangement of planets to form
dances of colored lights, can be visualized as a tantric adept uses a
yantra of cosmogenic significance, like a Sufi meditation on “photisms”
or series of visionary lights, to focus and integralize our own individual
realization of the potential of harmony within us, to overcome our
“prejudices against matter, which is represented to us as a vile
principle” by philosophers and priests (Lamborn, 1998: 17–17).





From which I would like to retain at least the following: first, we can
affirm nothing in the present unless we acknowledge that the future is
unthinkable, unimaginable. Fourier did write, after all, that if we sorry
Civilizees could grasp the ramifications of the entire Combined Order, we
would be immediately struck dead (Fourier, 1996: 67). (This, by the way,
seems to be why he was more given to examples about Harmonian banquets than
ones about Harmonian orgies.) So, with respect to direct action, his
intention is clear enough: one does not build Harmony as such, because it
is unimaginable; one builds the commune, the phalanstery. (That is why so
much of The Theory of the Four Movements, for example, is dedicated to a
discussion of transitional phases, e.g. “Guaranteeism”).[7] This
practice is focused, however, through a contemplation in which we are not
planning for a future that is, after all, unforeseeable; we are dreaming,
fantasizing, but in a peculiarly concentrated way, acting on ourselves in
the present.



Secondly, setting aside the future, one can somehow meditate on Fourier’s
system. And not just the system as totality; perhaps the most effective
form of this meditative affirmation that I can report on is that which
focuses on one single and exceptionally absurd element of Fourier’s
speculations: for example, the archibras, a prehensile tail he claims
humans will develop, good, as Lamborn Wilson notes, for fruit-picking as
well as orgies. Or the sixteen kinds of strawberries, or the lemonade
ocean, or the anti-giraffe.[8] Fourier is as dumbfounding when he describes
the industrial armies of Harmony as he is when he suddenly reveals one of
these strange Harmonian monads to his audience.



It seems to me that Lamborn Wilson suggests an entirely different mode of
reading and experiencing Fourier’s writings than either the impatient
critique of so-called scientific socialism or the predictably tolerant
pick-and-choose of the other socialists and anarchists. To focus on what is
systematic, or appears to be so, in Fourier, is to try to recreate for
ourselves his precise derangement, to train our thinking in the paths of
his mad logic, the voice of his desires, without for all that believing in
anything. Especially Harmony. As he wrote: “passionate attraction is the
interpreter of nature” (Fourier, 1996: 189). I will accept this only if
it can be agreed that interpretation is already an action, on ourselves
first of all. (For example, it might be a healthy use of the same
imaginative faculties that many of us squander on video feeds of one sort
or another.)



 



A similar meditative affirmation could allow one to make good use of
“P.M.’s” infamous zerowork tract bolo’bolo. The text opens with a
short predictive narrative about the “substruction of the planetary work
machine” by the construction of small autonomous communes or bolos
networked together into the global bolo’bolo. We are, by the way,
twenty-two years too late; bolo’bolo should have emerged in 1988. The
bulk of this tract, however, is taken up by a series of systematic elements
that may become themes for Daydreams. It is the ideographic sign language
of bolo’bolo, asa’pili, the series IBU, BOLO, SILA, TAKU ... each
coupled with an invented ideograph. As with the hexagrams of the Classic of
Changes, each heading encapsulates and illustrates a concept with a simple
sign. Imagine the use of this artificial lingua franca: the ideographs and
odd bisyllabic words could aid a certain meditative translation. IBU is and
is not an ego; NIMA is and is not beliefs; TAKU is and is not private
property; YAKA is and is not a duel. And so on. Confronted, then, with
egos, beliefs, private property, or duels, I may always perform an exercise
that translates them to asa’pili. This means asking, speculating on, the
question: and what would do we do with all this in bolo’bolo? This
language is said to be of a future and yet we are already using it, making
new sense or even new worlds of sense with it.



The second systematic series occurs only once: it is an incredible list of
sample bolos. “In a larger city, we could find the following bolos:
Alco-bolo, Sym-bolo, Sado-bolo, Maso-bolo, Vegi-bolo, Les-bolo,
Franko-bolo, Italo-bolo, Play-bolo, No-bolo, Retro-bolo, Thai-bolo,
Sun-bolo [...]”[9] It is again a linguistic operation at first, which is
obvious since so many of these are puns. Once we are amused, the
imagination begins its playful reverie. Once the suffix takes on
consistency, we are dreaming other dreams. Imagine, not just Sado-bolo and
Maso-bolo, but the relations between them. What are the parties in
Dada-bolo like? The art of Tao-bolo? The dialect of Freak-bolo? As with the
punctual things, events, or practices denoted by the terms of asa’pili,
we have some initial sense, but our imagination is pushed to a new and more
voluptuous level of complication and creation in conceiving each bolo, its
inner workings, and the interrelations, or lack thereof, among bolos.



In neither case is there anything to believe in. Certainly not bolo’bolo!
I maintain rather that to gather and concentrate one’s thought process
using these signs or examples is to accept their provocation, to undertake
a deviation, détournement, of the imaginative flux. In so doing we find,
paradoxically, that we have names for otherwise unimaginable relations. We
are in an even better position to do so than when the book first appeared
since, according its chronology, bolo’bolo should have already come
about. So the more credulous among us, those unhappy souls awaiting some
anarchist version of 2012 or the Apocalypse of John, will be stumped and
disappointed. It can no longer be read as a book concerning (do please
laugh here) ‘the current conjuncture.’ Two mostly unhappy decades have
returned it to its fetal form: a wish, a mad dream, that models its madness
in an exemplary fashion, precisely by drawing us into its codes. Each
ideogram, each bolo’s name, is a monad. To meditatively grasp it is to
attain a perspective on the otherwise impossible: to be a witness to
bolo’bolo. It is only when we hopelessly use these monads that they can
have an effect on our thinking-in-the-event: a healthy use of what Bergson
called la fonction fabulatrice, perhaps even what Freud conceived as the
wish-fulfillment involved in dreams.



 



Another sort of Daydream, the meditative negation, manifests in a similar
way, as a summoning up of powerful, almost unthinkable images of
destruction, specifically of consumption. I consider this strange passage
by Max Stirner to be paradigmatic:





Around the altar rise the arches of the church and its walls keep moving
further and further out. What they enclose is sacred. You can no longer get
to it, no longer touch it. Shrieking with the hunger that devours you, you
wander around about these walls and search for the little that is profane.
And the circles of your course keep getting more and more extended. Soon
that church will embrace the whole world, and you will be driven out to the
extreme edge. Another step and the world of the sacred has conquered: you
sink into the abyss. Therefore take courage while there it is yet time,
wander about no longer in the profane where now it is dry feeding, dare the
leap and rush the gates into the sanctuary itself. If you devour the sacred
you have made it your own. Digest the sacramental wafer and you are rid of
it (Stirner, 1995: 88–9).[10]





This is perhaps the most excessive of many such passages in The Ego and its
Own. What is the status of this discourse? Just who is speaking here? What
I is addressing me, presenting its ideas as my own? What is the altar, the
church, its walls? What is the sacred exactly? What is the hunger referred
to here? The courage? What does this apparently metaphorical act of eating
entail in practice? As I have posed them, abstractly, these questions are
unanswerable. I propose rather that the interest of passages such as these,
their significance in Stirner’s text, is that, functioning as a model,
they allow one to project a parallel thought pattern onto one or more given
sets of circumstances. This meditation could help me to divest myself of my
allegiance to a stupid political group that I have made the mistake of
joining; or it could save me from a noxious commonplace of sexual morality.
In each case I would find the sacred element, identify its will to power,
feel my impotence for a moment (“hunger”) and then strike with courage,
undoing the sacrificial logic that has possessed me.



The difference between meditative affirmation and negation is that in
affirming I actively imagine a future that I do not take to be real; I
explore its details to act on my own imagination, on my thought process, to
contract other habits. In negation, as in affirmation, there is no future,
just this present I must evacuate of its meaning. This meditation is a
voiding process, a clearing of stupidities. It is what I do when I can find
nothing to affirm in the present.



That is not the only form a meditative negation can take. Throughout The
Ego and its Own, Stirner also deploys countless brief, pithy phrases that
are not imagistic, but rather almost speech acts, cases of a kind of
disruptive direct action in discourse: “I do not step shyly back from
your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I need to
‘respect’ nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!”
(Stirner, 1995: 220). “I do not love [the world], I annihilate it as I
annihilate myself; I dissolve it” (ibid., 262). I do not know what could
possibly follow such statements, though something must. These phrases could
be ironically spoken aloud to a coarse interlocutor as the mark of a
necessary distance; they could also be thought silently to oneself, as so
many available elements of an egoist tetrapharmakon that could recall us to
ourselves in even the most alienating moments.[11] The I that speaks in
Stirner’s text is more often than not offered as a common property, that
is to say, not a property at all. It is a model, a case. It is there to be
taken up, imitated, if we have the courage to be the confessed egoists we
could be. Stirner was not describing the world, he was acting on it; so we
too might act if we study and train ourselves in such imaginary and
discursive exercises. Like anarchism, egoism cannot be taught, only modeled
and perhaps imitated.

Second Wild Style: Field Trip



Although careful and generous acts of reading are vital to anarchist
meditations, the exercises I am describing could also take the form of
concentrations of thought developed not through engagement with written or
spoken discourse but with the materiality of places. In affirmative or
negative meditations, the question is that of another attitude, another
tone of thought, another voice. And reading bizarre books is only one way
to achieve it. A second form of exercise, the Field Trip, is a kind of
speculative anthropology of geographical spaces. I will elaborate it
through a detailed examination of one example, both for its richness and
because I suppose many of my readers are unfamiliar with its source, a
recent text from the sometime proponent of a “nihilist communism.” In a
tone sometimes echoing Bakunin, sometimes Bataille, “Frere Dupont,” the
pseudonymous author of species being, proposes that revolt is a sort of
anthropological constant. It corresponds not so much to the organizations
that seek to bring it about, or at least stimulate and channel it, but
rather to an existential dimension of the human. Borrowing from another
lexicon, I would say that for Dupont revolt is anthropogenetic. “The
untheorized and non-included aspects of human existence is [sic] our
platform” (Dupont, 2007: 47). I suppose the term “platform” is used
here with tongue fully in cheek. What is this ironic project, then? “Our
purpose is to develop a feral subject [...]” (ibid.). Very well: how is
this subject developed?



Setting aside, perhaps even ignorant of, the procedures of scientific
anthropology or archaeology, Frere Dupont enters an archaeological site in
the East of England and reports:





It is noon on the Tenth of May. The year is Two Thousand and Six. I am
crouching, my hands on the floorstone, in Pit One of Grime’s Graves, a
retrieved neolithic flint mining complex in Norfolk’s Breckland. I have
chosen this place to begin my investigation into the tendency within
society to modify itself through the chosen activities that it undertakes
in response to the perceived limits of itself. I have asked myself whether
this tendency of transformation out of stability is explicable in terms of
a motivational sense of lack and/or a sense of abundance (ibid., 48).





The question Dupont is asking could be understood to belong to political
philosophy, ethics, anthropology, or any number of other disciplines. It is
also, of course, a variant of the old anarchist question about the
inception of the State-form and authoritarian politics: the
institutionalized concentration of power.[12] This text bears with it the
rare sense of a situated thought (“I have chosen this place”), the
unusual idea that it matters where one is when one thinks; or, again, the
fantastic intuition that one can conceive of the activities that have
unfolded in a place, even thousands of years later:





I am crouching in Pit One of the complex. It is dark because the custodians
of the site have put a roof over the site, but four thousand years ago, at
midday, on a day like today in bright summer light, the chalk walls would
be dazzlingly intense. To increase this effect the miners built angled
walls from the chalk spoil at the surface of the shaft to further reflect
light down into the galleries. My first impressions are of the miners’
appreciation for the actual process of mining as an activity in itself,
which they must have valued in their society above the flint that was
mined. Also, I felt an awareness of their creation of an architecture,
their carving out of underground spaces, and the separations and
connections between these and the world above. Somewhat self-consciously, I
crouch at the center of the shaft and announce my short, prepared thesis,
“organization appears only where existence is thwarted” (Dupont, 2007:
51).





The three key components of this exercise seem to be location in an
unfamiliar and significant place (“I am crouching”), affective
engagement with the history and arrangement of the space (“My first
impressions [...] I felt an awareness ...”), and the conscious, explicit
introduction of what would otherwise be an abstract “thesis” into that
experience (“I [...] announce”). I suggest that in so doing an aleatory
element is introduced into thought, a tendency that unfolds, at least in
this case, in solitude. Perhaps the place and its intuitive reconstruction
act as a sort of externalized primary process on speculation, inflecting or
declining it. It is an analytic moment. Not: what does this thesis mean?
But: what does it mean that I said it here? Dupont offers up the thesis to
the mute walls of the pit. And then something happens: new thought. The
“thesis” thickens, taking on a new consistency.





Organization appears only where existence is thwarted [...] And existence
appears only where organization is thwarted. But is this because the
appearance of existence-in-revolt is a negatively constituted movement (a
mere inversion of what is, a substantiation of the possibilities of the
form), or is it an indication of a crisis within organization, the
breakdown of the holding/defining of the scene — or rather, is the
recurrence of existence-counter-to-present-structure an intimation of
organization yet to come? The question here concerns capture, and return
— the possibility of getting back to a previous stage where the problems
of any given structure, or structure itself, have yet to appear (ibid.,
56).





What Dupont discovered, perhaps, is some way to imaginatively recreate
precisely what is lost of prehistoric peoples — their anarchy: a kind of
vanished attitude modeled anew. Dupont does not claim to speak the truth of
those peoples. Who could ever claim to know what they thought? Or even if
they experienced thought as a relatively autonomous faculty, the
presupposition, by the way, of all our amusing contentions about
“theory”? Rather, speculating in a place that is still somehow theirs,
and letting the speculation remain what it is — a hallucination,
ultimately — she or he moves to a speculative or archaeological
reconstruction of our own problems. Dupont is able to speculate on some
Neolithic transformation from existence to organization (whatever else this
means, I suppose it has to do with the stabilization of proto-states,
ritual structures, divisions of labor, etc.) insofar as she or he locates,
imaginatively, analogous or even genealogically related elements in our
present. Namely, the vast, unthought but available, background of the
thesis! I might encapsulate that background by reference to a feeling: the
terrible sense that the group one is in is becoming rigid, static, that a
hierarchy, hierogamy, or hierophany is developing where initially only some
sort of kinship or friendship existed. The place (here, the pit)
concretizes, materializes, or grounds thought in a provisional, momentary,
but remarkable way. Could this be the birth of the feral subject?



Elsewhere in the book Dupont quotes Krishnamurti: “Meditation is to find
out if there is a field which is not already contaminated by the known”
(ibid., 114). Whatever this statement could have meant in its original
context, I understand Dupont to be suggesting that we always need new
practices of thought, new contemplations, that habituate us to overcoming
our profoundly limited common sense about what is human, what the human or
its societies can do and be. The field, then, in this example is both the
pit and the attitude or wishes one brings there — though the latter may
only become evident in the pit.



There is, in short, a tentative anthropology here[13], and it is overtly
speculative and intuitive. The interest of its statements lies not in their
truth-value but in their importance, their success — their felicity, as
one says of a performative utterance. They are felicitous if they can
meditatively restage some or all of a fantastic anthropogenetic moment in a
present itself rendered fantastic.

Third Wild Style: Psychogeography



A third wild style bears as its name a Situationist term, which they
defined as follows:





Psychogeography: the study of the specific effects of the geographical
environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and
behavior of individuals (Knabb, 2006: 52).





I mean it somewhat differently, however, since the question is not merely
to understand effects, but to act on them, to generate other effects
inasmuch as one becomes capable of experiencing places and spaces
differently.[14] One could view this style as a complex combination of the
first (affirmation especially) and the second (though the speculative
anthropology here refers not to the past but to a perspective on our
world). A first simple form of Psychogeography could take up, for example,
the long lists Kropotkin made of what in his present already manifested
mutual aid: public libraries, the international postal system, cooperatives
of every sort (Kropotkin, 1955: Chapters 7 & 8, et passim). Kropotkin
argued that mutual aid is an evolutionary constant, as generic and vital as
competition, or what was called the struggle for existence. But we would be
mistaken if we thought his books, essays, speeches, etc. had as their only
rhetorical mode the one perhaps most evident on a first reading, that of
scientific proof. His examples, his repeated and lengthy enumerations of
actual cases of mutual aid, offer up an entirely new world, an uncanny
symptomatology of a familiar world. It is our world, seen through a new and
clear lens.[15] One could then travel to the places revealed in this new
world, buildings or events, and meditate on the activity there so as to
eventually grasp what is anarchist about them immediately and not
potentially. I am referring to what is colloquially called “hanging
out.” Going to the public library, for example, for no other reason than
to witness what in it is anarchic — or, again, to a potluck. This
practice involves another way of inhabiting familiar spaces. It brings out
what in them is uncannily, because tendentially, anarchic. It multiplies
our sites of action and engagement and could shape our interventions
there.



Those interested could expand the range of this exercise, making the goal
not only arrival at the sites of mutual aid (or other anarchic activities),
but also the journey. Here again a Situationist term is relevant: the
dérive, that “experimental behavior” (Knabb, 2006: 52) of wandering
across an urban space with no determinate destination. I suppose that if
one has begun to master the affirmation of certain places as anarchic, one
could begin expanding the range of the exercise, meditating as one walks or
rides a bicycle or bus, affirming now forms of movement, escape, or
evasion, as well as creative flights of fancy. Soon many places in urban
space will emerge, detached from their everydayness, as remarkable: places
of intensity, or of virtual anarchy. (I think here, for example, of the
great significance some friends put on visiting certain garbage
dumpsters.)



Indeed, it is likely that Fourier’s preferred examples may have emerged
in just this way. Reading his finest descriptions of Harmony, we find
innumerable parades. He plans Harmonian processions: “Parade Series: In a
societary canton all the members of the industrial phalanx [...] are
divided into 16 choirs of different ages; each choir is composed of 2
quadrilles, one of men and one of women, making a total of 32 quadrilles,
16 male and 16 female, each with its distinctive banners, decorations,
officers and costumes, both for winter and summer” (Fourier, 1996: 293).
It is strange and lovely to suppose that all of this began with the
solitary tradesman Charles Fourier looking on as a military parade passed
by, spontaneously inventing his version of this exercise by asking himself:
what can we do with the passions set to work in this array? It seems these
people like costumes, display, fanfare, and ordered group movements. How do
these passions fit in Harmony, given that the constraint in thinking
harmonically is to affirm every passion? Once the question is asked, our
experience reveals the details to be meditatively rearranged. For Fourier,
parades are not only great fun; they also presage the serial organization
of the Combined Order. “All this pomp may be thought unnecessary to the
cultivation of flowers and fruits, wheat and wine, etc., but baubles and
honorific titles do not cost anything, and they are incitements to greater
enthusiasm in the work of the Series” (ibid., 299). “You will come in
the end to recognize that there are no bad or useless passions, and that
all characteristics are good in themselves, that all passions must be
intensified, not moderated” (ibid., 303). Psychogeography could show us
where each passion, intensified, may bloom.



 



One night in the mid-nineties I had dinner with Peter Lamborn Wilson. We
spoke about Fourier and he told me of a group of friends who had set off
from New York into Canada in an expedition that had as its goal to trigger
the birth of the Northern Crown, that “shining ring of light,” which,
in Fourier’s system, “will appear after two centuries of combined
order” (ibid., 33–4). I do not remember all the details, but, since it
has been fifteen years, and the Northern Crown has yet to emerge, I am led
to wonder what this journey could have meant for its participants. I am
reminded here of the great and catastrophic Tupi migrations of the
sixteenth century documented by Hélène Clastres: ambiguous wanderings of
whole peoples who abandoned a sad and sedentary way of life and danced off
(literally!) in search of a land of immortality that they expected to find
in the Andes or across the Atlantic (Clastres, 1995: 49–57). Or so it is
said. We read of such journeys and perhaps conceive of them as pointless
— fanatical, even. We suppose, perhaps, that they were primarily
religious, missing what is remarkable about the absolute desertion of
agricultural labor, marriage customs, etc. Religion might be the operative
discourse, and prophetism the power mechanism, but the lived practice seems
like something else entirely: “The quest for the Land-Without-Evil is
[...] the active denial of society. It is a genuinely collective
asceticism” (ibid., 56). Should we say the poor Tupi were duped by their
own prophets? What if the journey were its own reason? How did the Tupi
experience what Clastres calls the “auto-destruction” of their own
societies? What could the wanderers Lamborn Wilson told me of have felt and
thought as they made their way north?[16]

Interstices



Let me return to the question, “how do post-structuralist anarchists
organize?” I have suggested that what perhaps went unthought in it was
the presupposition of separation. In this case that meant that the prized
goal of the game, the theory-practice intersection, ought to be (to embody
or resemble) organizing or an organization. Here I recall Dupont’s
thesis: organization appears where existence is thwarted. Could we rewrite
that last word with the phrase separated from itself?



Indeed, my three wild styles concern forms of existence that are more and
less than organizations, or, to be direct, organisms, since in the
unconscious hylomorphic background of the schema, theory is the soul,
practice is the body, and progress is the organism’s health. To maintain
that anarchist meditations are interstitial is to propose that something or
someone thrives and swarms ahead of, behind, among, inside of, and between
the slow-moving theory-practice compounds that we call organizations. The
vital question is: do organizations ever do anything at all? Or are they
something like remnants, the clumsy carapaces of what has been and is
already being done? David Hume wrote: “The chief benefit which results
from philosophy arises in an indirect manner, and proceeds more from its
secret insensible influence, than from its immediate application” (Hume,
2008: 104). A secret insensible influence: that is all I would claim for my
wild styles. They are good practices, and good practice. They do not
dictate action; action is its own reason and its own model. But they have
had a long-standing, indirect, and insensible influence on what anarchists
and many others in fact do.



Unlike a theory that purposely or accidentally posits an ideal state or a
goal, they have no implicit or explicit teleology. I have long felt, and
remain convinced, that there is nothing to be gained by positing a goal for
action other than in the most irreducibly local sense (and even then!).
Although I have my reasons for maintaining this near-metaphysical
proposition, I will restrict myself here to underlining the contemporary
phenomenon of non-ideological political actions, which could nearly all be
called tactics without strategies. Or even: punctual acts in the course of
detaching themselves from the tactical realm of militant and militarized
politics. I prefer not to think such actions as practices in need of
theoretical interpretation. If there is anything to praise in them, it is
that these actions are wild experiments: ‘what happens when we do
this?’ They install themselves, impossibly, I admit, on the side of
existence, and attempt to remain there.



These wild styles ought, eventually, to put into question every political
project — first, as project, and, again, as political.[17] That is their
virtue, or at least their contribution to virtue. Whatever effects they may
or may not have, they exemplify in thought that aspect of anarchist
practice called direct action. The famous and pathetic theses of the innate
goodness of humans or of a future utopia have perhaps no value other than
their role as themes for meditation and affirmation in the present. Hume,
again: “The chief triumph of art and philosophy: it insensibly refines
the temper, and it points out to us those dispositions which we should
endeavor to attain, by a constant bent of mind, and by repeated habit”
(ibid., 105). This sort of direct action, as it infuses our lives, may
succeed or fail. To the extent that it succeeds, we are on the way to
anarchy. To the extent that it fails, it succeeds as well, though in a more
local way. We have bent our mind, as Hume wrote, and made life
“amusing” (ibid., 113).[18]

References



de Acosta, Alejandro. (2009) “Two Undecidable Questions for Thinking in
Which Anything Ges.” Contemporary Anarchist Studies (Amster et al., Eds.)
New York: Routledge.



— . (2009) “How the Stirner Eats Gods,” Anarchy: A Journal of Desire
Armed, 67 (Spring).



Aurelius, Marcus. (1983) Meditations. Indianapolis: Hackett.



Clastres, Hélène. (1995) The Land-Without-Evil. Chicago: University of
Illinois Press.



Clastres, Pierre. (1989) Society Against the State. New York: Zone Books.



Dupont, Frère. (2007) species being and other stories. Ardent Press.



Dupont, Monsieur. (2009) Nihilist Communism. Ardent Press.



Deleuze, Gilles. (1990) Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia.



— . Dialogues. (1987) New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.



— . (2001) “Hume.” In Pure Immanence. New York: Zone Books.



Fourier, Charles. (1996) The Theory of the Four Movements. New York:
Cambridge.



Graeber, David. (2004) Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago:
Prickly Paradigm Press.



Hadot, Pierre. (2004) What is Ancient Philosophy? Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.



— . (1995) “Spiritual Exercises.” Philosophy as a Way of Life.
Blackwell.



Hume, David. (2008) “The Skeptic.” Selected Essays. New York: Oxford.



Internationale Situationniste. (1997) Édition augmentée. Librairie
Arthème Fayard.



Inwood, Brad., & Lloyd P. Gerson., Eds. (2008) The Stoics Reader.
Indianapolis: Hackett.



Knabb, Ken., Ed. (2006) Situationist International Anthology. (Revised and
expanded edition) Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.



Kropotkin, Petr. (1955) Mutual Aid. Boston: Extending Horizons.



Lacan, Jacques. (2007) The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton.



Lamborn Wilson, Peter. (1998) Escape from the Nineteenth Century. New York:
Autonomedia.



P.M. (1985) bolo’bolo. New York: Semiotext(e).



Stirner, Max. (1995) The Ego and Its Own. New York: Cambridge.



 


[1] I feel strongly about those last two phrases. But I would add that such
experiments should interest us in philosophy outside of universities and
anarchism — better, anarchy — beyond activist groups.


[2] Cf., David Graeber’s remarks in Fragments of an Anarchist
Anthropology (2004: 2–7). One might also consider here Lacan’s theory
of the four discourses, proposed, among other places, in The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis: first, in his problematization of the status of
psychoanalysis in its relation to the university discourse (there are
interesting parallels with what I have written about anarchist theory);
secondly, in light of the connections he implies between the hysterical
discourse, the master’s discourse, and revolutionary movements. To show
the singular status of the analyst’s discourse, Lacan often provoked his
audience by wondering aloud if there were any analysts. My way of adopting
this humorous provocation would be to ask if there are any anarchists.
Finally, I recall here Monsieur Dupont’s text on experience: “Nobody
can be an anarchist in the sense that the ideology of anarchism proposes”
(Nihilist Communism, 2009: 202).


[3] That is, philosophical logos. See Diogenes Laërtius, in The Stoics
Reader, 8. I was trying to teach that these spiritual exercises cannot be
taught, only modeled and perhaps imitated.


[4] The discursive and intuitive senses indicated in the definition are the
most relevant here.


[5] Or, more obscurely: “not being inferior to the event, becoming the
child of one’s own events” (Deleuze, 1987: 65).


[6] On phantasia and phantasma, see Inwood & Gerson (2008: 12). As will
become evident further on, there is also some question here of the
madness/ordinariness of speaking to oneself, silently or aloud, and of a
concomitant recognition of familiar and unfamiliar phrases, with their
differends. I will take this up in a future essay.


[7] Compare, in this light, the delirious foldout “Table of the Progress
of Social Movement” spanning 80,000 years with the utterly practical
propositions of the “Note to the Civilized Concerning the Coming Social
Metamorphosis.”


[8] See (Fourier, 1996: 50n, 284). The anti-giraffe is one of the new
animals of Harmony, “a great and magnificent servant whose qualities will
far surpass the good qualities of the reindeer.”


[9] “[...] Blue-bolo, Paleo-bolo, Dia-bolo, Punk-bolo, Krishna-bolo,
Taro-bolo, Jesu-bolo, Tao-bolo, Marl-bolo, Necro-bolo, Pussy-bolo,
Para-bolo, Basket-bolo, Coca-bolo, Incapa-bolo, HighTech-bolo, Indio-bolo,
Alp-bolo, Mono-bolo, Metro-bolo, Acro-bolo, Soho-bolo, Proto-bolo,
Herb-bolo, Macho-bolo, Hebro-bolo, Ara-bolo, Freak-bolo, Straight-bolo,
Pyramido-bolo, Marx-bolo, Sol-bolo, Tara-bolo, Uto-bolo, Sparta-bolo,
Bala-bolo, Gam-bolo, Tri-bolo, Logo-bolo, Mago-bolo, Anarcho-bolo,
Eco-bolo, Dada-bolo, Digito-bolo, Subur-bolo, Bom-bolo, Hyper-bolo, Rock
n’-bolo, etc. Moreover, there are also just good old regular bolos, where
people live normal, reasonable and healthy lives (whatever those are)”
(P.M., 1985: 80–1).


[10] I have already commented on this passage, with reference to related
alimentary imagery in Nietzsche, in my “How the Stirner Eats Gods” (de
Acosta, 2009).


[11] I am referring, of course, to the Epicurean tetrapharmakon or
“four-part cure,” the briefest epitome of their philosophy.


[12] The “centripetal” social organization, that is, whose emergence
Pierre Clastres tried to understand in the essays collected in Society
Against the State (1989).


[13] That someone can speak to a wall is already a marvelous and
irreducible fact of a future anarchist anthropology! This magical speech,
the natural converse of speaking to oneself, also belongs to a future
essay.


[14] I might note here that the definition, in French, seems to be
ambiguous as to whether it is the effects or the study of the effects that
acts on our affective life. But the conjoined definition of
“psychogeographical” makes clear that it is a question of the “direct
action” of the milieu on affectivity. Compare Internationale
Situationniste (1997: 13).


[15] Perhaps then a more relevant reference is not science but science
fiction. As Deleuze wrote of Hume’s empiricism: “As in science fiction,
one has the impression of a fictive, foreign world, seen by other
creatures, but also the presentiment that this world is already ours, and
these creatures, ourselves” (Deleuze, 2001: 35).


[16] Would it be going too far to write that they perhaps felt the Earth
anew?


[17] It is no coincidence that some anarchists and communists have recently
posed the problem of what they provocatively call “anti-politics.”


[18] Perhaps amusement is the only thing worth hoping for.



     From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

Events :
----------------------------------

     Anarchist Meditations, or: Three Wild Interstices of Anarchism and
Philosophy -- Added : January 25, 2021

     Anarchist Meditations, or: Three Wild Interstices of Anarchism and
Philosophy -- Updated : January 06, 2022

About This Textfile :
----------------------------------

     Text file generated from : 
http://revoltlib.com/