From: Jesse Cohn [jessecohn-AT-verizon.net]

 

Some thoughts about Daniel Colson's piece:

It's interesting that the examples of boring/dysfunctional/bureaucratic anarchist organizations concern issues of identification (e.g., who has the right to speak in the name of the organization; who has the right to call himself or herself an "anarchist" at all).  And it's a little strange to me that these are the examples Daniel picked (doubtless there are many others!), since questions of identification can actually be pretty difficult to decide.  More precisely: they are difficult to decide _if_ you are anarchist, if you are committed to an egalitarian ethics of action, and if you are therefore possessed of what Daniel aptly calls an "exacerbated sensitivity to . . . apparently minuscule and mild forms of authority and power"!

    Take the issue in the first anecdote: the question of whether some individual or group should be allowed to use the name and symbols of the larger organization in his/her/their communiqués.  Presumably the reason this is even a question in the first place is that the organization is wary of allowing anyone in particular to speak for the organization in general, i.e., to speak "in its name," as its _representative_.  Isn't this suspicion of representation quintessentially anarchist (and for good reason)? This is not to say that the specific organization in this instance was in the right, or that a decision about a matter of this kind ought to the subject of tedious debates and stultifying rule-mongering.  Moreover, I'm aware that since speech is an act and actions speak, the ethical maxim "no individual may speak [in the group's name] without explicit permission from the group" cannot stand, as it leads directly to a bureaucratic nightmare.  Still, the issue doesn't seem clear-cut enough for the anecdote to serve as a self-evident example of what's wrong with "anarchism today."

    A similar problem is in the background of the second anecdote.  It sounds as if the situation Daniel alludes to here is similar to the one that we have faced here in the US since 1999: under the name of "diversity of tactics," different groups engage in different actions, some within the bounds of legality and official propriety, others more confrontational and/or illegal.  One problem this entailed was that it created opportunities for provocateurs to blur the lines between groups in ways that would legitimize violent repressive measures on the part of the police (and that would serve once again to brand all the protesters as dangerous, violent, extremist, etc., preventing the uninvolved public from developing sympathies with them).  One solution to this problem has been to coordinate the protest groups in such a way that some clear spatial boundaries are respected, distinctions are made, the more vulnerable participants are protected, and so forth.  I am, unfortunately, too isolated from the mass protest culture to tell whether this has worked well in practice, though it sounds like a reasonable compromise in theory.

    Nonetheless, on a more general level, it is not hard to think of instances in which it is not very satisfying to simply accept that a category one uses to name oneself can be defined in different ways by different people.  For instance, I'm not content to allow racists to define "Jewish" as "money-grubbing" (as in the old anti-semitic expression one still sometimes hears in America, "to jew [someone] down," i.e., to lower a price through bargaining).  I'm also not content to allow the uninformed (or the all-too-well-informed) to define "anarchist" as implying a sociopathic disregard for other people's rights and lives, or to define "anarchy" as mere wreckage and disorder.  As long as those definitions enjoy hegemony, "anarchy" and "anarchist" will continue to be the rhetorical weapons of a very particular kind of order; wherever they cease to be accepted, there is a chance for people to see, as Proudhon put it, that "order" is a genus, and that the reigning form of order is just a species of it — and not the best species.

    I know that Daniel has been willing to embrace, in a certain way and to a certain degree, the more malign or nihilistic connotations of "anarchy," to appropriate them as part of our own rhetorical arsenal, elements of our bad glamour; nonetheless, I don't think he would entirely disagree with my point here.  Nobody particularly wants to live in wreckage, or in a community where no one may be trusted, and as long as "anarchy" means this to most people, most people will quite justifiably fear anarchy and anarchists.

    So for me, in short, the issues of power and representation that these anecdotes raise are not all that simple.

    I have less to say about the primary subject of Daniel's piece, the reception of Foucault among contemporary anarchists (I dislike this way of using a personal name as shorthand for an entire body of work and all the ideas therein, as if these can simply be assumed to be a coherent whole with a single interpretation — a notion Foucault himself poked holes in, e.g., in his essay "What Is An Author?").  From my perspective, Foucault is indeed "close to" the anarchist tradition on a number of the points that Daniel names, but this might just as well be taken as one less reason for anarchists to take an interest in Foucault: why make an extra effort to listen to a voice that merely echoes your own more faintly? And it is a fainter libertarian voice, I think, on a number of counts.  Foucault's theory of power, for instance, is far less useful to me than Gustav Landauer's (and Landauer himself refers back to Proudhon, and before him, to Étienne de la Boëtie — which makes it all the more irritating when self-described "postmodernists" breathlessly announce Foucault's theory of power as if it were the newest of discoveries).

    There are other reasons why some anarchists reject or are at least skeptical about Foucault, but I don't think Daniel really makes a fair representation of them here.  They have to do not only with the sometimes mystifying language Foucault uses (although it must be said that plenty of other poststructuralists are much worse offenders here) or even with the aura of celebrity that the name "Foucault" carries in the US in an otherwise fairly complacent, privileged community of academics (as David Graeber complains), but with the degree to which Foucault approaches relativism and distances himself from realism.  To what extent these perceptions are borne out by Foucault's own words and works is debatable, but it at least bears closer inspection.  By no means may the acceptance or rejection of Foucault serve as a "litmus test" for the anarchist character, no more than the acceptance or rejection of Nietzsche among anarchists of a century ago.  In both cases, some anarchists had very good anarchist reasons to accept, and others had equally good anarchist reasons to reject.  (Landauer, for instance, was both clearly influenced by Nietzsche in some ways and yet criticized him forcefully in other ways.)

    At any rate — and I mean this in absolute sincerity — I'd much rather read Daniel's work than Foucault's any day.  It is more useful for social action.  It is simply much more fun.  It inspires far more radical hope.  It has given me new eyes to read with.  And I hope to make more of it available in English someday, weather permitting.

    —Jesse.

 

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