after post anarchism

after post anarchism (2012) by duane rousselle via 107 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/duane-rousselle-after-post-anarchism]

duane also did post anarchism: a reader

pg of duane? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane_Rousselle] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDxuA0Ku1Ig&t=37s]

notes/quotes:

4

afterword

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As a point of connection, Walter Benjamin was known to have failed to defend his Habilitations-schrift on the Origin of the German Mourning-Play for his PhD examination. Having failed the exam as best he could, the study nonetheless became widely published and influential. For my own PhD examination I also felt destined for failure: I was to defend a written examination on Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood that demonstrated my ability to parrot information back to my examiners. I thought it much better to fail the exam as best I could than to succeed through the worst possible circumstances. But here I maintain that post-anarchism had to fail in order for it to have been effective. If post-anarchism had not provided its naive reductive account of the classical anarchist tradition, it would not have been able to make enough enemies to separate itself as a sect and as a theory of the new. To put it another way: it is only after the failure of the fundamental fantasy that the traversal of the fantasy can occur. Or, to rephrase an old Shakespearean cliche, why is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? Precisely because in the most successful failure of love, one is able to pass on to the crucial next stage of learning from one’s mistakes. The post-anarchists needed to begin by sketching out a naive critique of the ontological essentialism of some monolithic ‘classical’ anarchist tradition—I claim that we can fail much better.

walter on art et al.. walter on messianic time..

An old joke reads: a lecturer asked his student: ‘What, since every answer of yours is wrong, do you expect to be when you grow up?’ The student responded: ‘I expect to be a TV weather forecaster after graduation!’ Today the traditional and postanarchists might ask us: ‘what, since every answer to the question of ontology has been wrong, do you expect to do after post-anarchism?’ As good postanarchists we ought to answer our interlocutors as follows: ‘I expect to be a speculative philosopher after the coming displacement!’ This is precisely the problem that we are up against: by dismissing all ontologies as suspiciously representative and as incessantly harbouring a dangerous form of essentialism, post-anarchists have overlooked the privilege that they have placed on the human subject, language, and discourse. Here, the ontological question is itself elided into the epistemological register. The epistemological characterization of postanarchism has held sway for far too long. Perhaps it is time to revive the roots of post-anarchism—after all, Hakim Bey’s ‘post-anarchism anarchy’ was itself an ontological philosophy.

ontology:  the philosophical study of being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of reality and every entity within it. *To articulate the basic structure of being, ontology examines the commonalities among all things and investigates their classification into basic types, such as the categories of particulars and universals. Particulars are unique, non-repeatable entities, such as the person Socrates, whereas universals are general, repeatable entities, like the color green.. Ontologists disagree regarding which entities exist at the most basic level

to me *this just perpetuates sea world ness.. so to me.. black science of people/whales law is diving deeper.. to.. we have no idea (no legit ie’s/data) of what legit free people are like

bey articles et al

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On the other hand, the best way to defeat the privilege of epistemological anarchism is to shift the terms of the debate—this is also something that post-anarchists have already proved themselves quite good at doing.

and to me.. debate ness.. is also just a perpetuation of same song.. a cancerous distraction

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The third period, the one that is to come—the one that is already here if only we would heed its call—will not take such care with attempts at identification or canonization. An after to postanarchism is no joke, it is already here, like a seed beneath the snow, waiting to be discovered.

if only we listened/trusted that deep.. ie: need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs

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The Sacrifice of Knowing

Held at gun-point by a mugger, you have one of two choices: your money or your life. The obvious twist is that if you depart from your life you would also by consequence depart from your money. This choice that is not a choice describes perfectly the dilemma of subjectivity: your knowledge or your being. If you depart from your being you also by consequence depart from your knowing. 

yeah.. i don’t know.. i think thinking there’s a knowing ness.. kills our being ness.. like the way maté trump law works.. i don’t think knowing ness is an essential to being.. so again.. think it’s like intellectness as cancerous distraction

If I am to make the case for post-anarchist ethics, I must first of all provide the reader with the conceptual framework upon which this essay has been constructed. As such, what follows is the result of an attempt at formulating a response to this task which has been set before me. The astute reader will take notice that there are a few incongruities relating to the classification systems developed herein, but these classificatory issues should not in the end distract the reader from the overall point being made. It is not for the purpose of utility or for the gratification of constructing or defending a sound theory of the subject in society that I develop these foundations but rather, and precisely, *for the purpose of demonstrating the problem set before me. It is the problem of all positive conceptions of foundation and system—in a word, I am speaking about the problem of essence—and the relationship of each of these conceptions to a curious body of thought, anarchism, that I wish to explore. Foundations harbour the full range of possibilities inherent to the questions posed by ontological philosophy, and, similarly, systems harbour the full range of possibilities inherent to the questions posed by epistemological philosophy. Foundations and systems are always fraught with disastrous instability and this thereby necessitates philosophers to produce elaborations on the accidental (what I also call negative elaborations) as well as the essential (what I also call positive elaborations).

*taleb center of problem law et al

we need a problem deep enough to resonate w/8b today.. via a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8b today.. in an ecosystem open enough to set/keep 8b legit free

ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8b today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8b today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8b legit free

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For the purposes of this essay, essence and accident should be understood as attributes founded within the inextricable connection between issues concerning *ontological and epistemological philosophy and within the overarching study of metaethics. ..As a point of example, I put my tickets in a hat and drew Sartre’s name: Sartre argued that the two domains (being and knowing) are as far apart as the poles, “[t]he essence is not in the object; it is the meaning of the object […] The object does not refer to being as to a signification; it would be impossible, for example, to define being as a  presence  since  absence too discloses being, since not to be there means still to be” (italics in original; Sartre, [1943] 1993: 8). Sartre’s provocation was an elaboration of this full range of attributes inherent to the meta-ethics—it is just as likely that the object’s absence (or accidental features) discloses a truth as does its presence (or essential features).

*ontology: being epistemology: knowing.. so to me.. shouldn’t be basing being on knowing .. graeber can’t know law.. et al

It is in this regard, *I set before me the task of rewriting the foundation of traditional anarchist conceptions of being; a task that will, as a necessity, remain an unfinished failure. The problem of successfully finalizing this project is also the problem of creating a knowledgeable account of being. .. The paradox is thus that, as Sartre has put it, “[b]y not considering being […] as an appearance which can be determined in concepts, **we have understood first of all that knowledge can not by itself give an account of being” (Sartre, [1943] 1993: 9).

*to me.. cancerous distraction

**to me.. ‘giving an account of’ ness.. is a cancerous distraction

The success of this project would invite the appearance of the essential subject and foreclose the subject as constitutive of an absence as well. Be this as it may, *in writing about the absence I nonetheless construct an appearance in place of it which occurs as a betrayal of the source. In constructing a framework of knowledge about the anarchist subject I only move further away from that which I seek to describe. .. **Meta-ethics occurs quite fundamentally at the intersection of epistemological and ontological philosophy. (Is this not the same intersection that occurs between Marxism and Anarchism, Economy and State, and so on?)

*yeah.. and to me.. not what legit free people would spend their days doing/being.. naming the colour ness et al

**so .. cancerous distraction.. ooof

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Unbeknownst to the reader until now: *I write this in direct opposition to my overall intention. I write this while shamefaced. In writing about this topic—the subject of anarchist philosophy amidst the recent development of a system of ideas in postanarchist political philosophy—**I remain trapped within the world of useful knowledge. For Georges Bataille, all knowledge or positive epistemological systems operate within the restrictive economies of utility (Goldhammer, 2005: 154): “[t]he smallest activity, or the least project puts an end to the game […] and I am […] brought back into the prison of useful objects, loaded with meaning” (Bataille, 2001: 98). ***The problem of writing the knowledge of being, as with the problem of the least project, is the problem of the erasure of the accidental by the appearance of the essence. And yet is this not also the very problem of being: to speak of the freedom of non-knowledge from the position of the knowing subject? ****Inevitably, there is a certain passion in this slavery to knowledge, a certain joyful sacrifice of being of which Georges Bataille was keenly aware: “Living in order to be able to die, suffering to enjoy, enjoying to suffer, speaking to say nothing […] the passion for not knowing” (Bataille, 2001: 196)… *****One can sacrifice a great many things in life but in doing so one does not sacrifice the experience of the sacred. On the contrary, it is through sacrifice that one is able to engage in this experience and to thereby celebrate ethical life. .. It means that ethical acts are never coded into the commandments of the symbolic order, or language. I shall speak to this point in more detail in the sections that follow.

*to me.. all writing ness (against written thought et al) is accountable in ness.. so yeah.. cancerous distraction to itch-in-the-soul.. to the dance

**hari rat park law et al.. and imagine a turtle ness et al

***aka: naming the colour ness et al

****am thinking that slavery/passion is whalespeak

*****to me this has red flags.. i think ethic ness would be irrelevant to legit free people

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My aim in pursuing this line of inquiry is to elucidate the nihilist core (from the latin nihil meaning nothing or no-thing) that has heretofore animated fragments of the anarchist tradition. This is its accidental core which, as with the subject in Stirnerian or Lacanian philosophy, has been its distinctive but largely unrealized ontology. Thus, there are, as it were, two anarchist traditions that have unfolded in tandem. On the one hand, there is the manifestation of a tradition that opposes what Bataille enthusiasts have described as restrictive states (ie, nation-states) and restrictive economies (global capitalism); however, in this manifest tradition, states and economies are limited to a positive interpretation: state refers to a sovereign political foundation and embodies a set of commandments or laws, and economy refers to a system of exchange and the valuation of this exchange within and between labourers (as in classical Marxian economies). ..Bataille likewise produced a philosophy of the general economy—which is always founded on no-thing:

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“Sovereignty is NOTHING” (Bataille, 1993: 256). Noys writes:

The movement onward would be the movement of sovereignty as NOTHING, and of sovereignty as that which refuses to settle within subjectivity […] but while sovereignty is NOTHING it is also a ‘nothing’ that displaces the philosophical model of the subject […] sovereignty is NOTHING, a nothing that is a slipping away of the subject […] it reveals the unstable status of the subject (Noys, 2000: 74–5).

Sovereignty, as the subjectivity of no-thing, is the release of the subject from the chains of knowing: it is the sacrifice of knowing.

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Thus, when I speak about nihilism, I intend to describe meta-ethical discourses that refuse to settle within conventional manifest philosophy. Rather, nihilists are critics of all that currently exists and they raise this critique against all such one-sided foundations and systems

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The nihilist responds negatively to the place of ethics just as the atheist responds negatively to the place of god.

21

The resolution of the problem of system must also go hand in hand with the resolution of the problem of being. The problem of being must also be revealed as the question of non-being. But *the problem of being is also hindered by the problem of knowing. For this reason Allen Wood has argued that ethical nihilism “is the diametrical opposite of ethical relativism” and, as a result, “relativism denies that anyone can say or believe [that] anything false” (Wood, n.d.: 3). ..nihilists retain the autonomy of the truth-claim but recognize the paradoxical attributes of this claim— there is a latent truth and there is a manifest truth:

*magis esse quam videri et al.. graeber can’t know law et al..

[R]elativism says that whatever anybody believes must be true (for that person) […] [nihilism] denies that we can ever be sure which beliefs these are [...] [it] is quite an extreme position, and probably false; but it is not threatened with self-refutation, as relativism is. For it is perfectly self-consistent to say that you hold beliefs that are uncertain, or even unjustified (Wood, n.d.: 4).

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The problem of ethical universalism is therefore the problem of mistaking fantasy for base reality, *base reality is much rather the unstable foundan of these limits.

*rather.. whalespeak.. cancerous distractions

Contrarily, politics begins with our frightening relationship to things in the world and with our inability to become the thing among things that we are.

Walter Benjamin knew very well that children had no need for politics. He took pleasure in his childhood relationship to things, a pleasure surmounted by an extreme discomfort on the verge of his collapse. Very nearly had the young Benjamin become a thing among the things that inhabited the space of his hiding place. By encasing himself within the world of things, he threatened to destroy himself and become a thing with them: “The child who stands behind the doorway curtain himself becomes something white that flutters […] and behind a door, he is himself a door” (Benjamin, 2006: 99). The human intruder invited panic in Benjamin: “In my hiding place, I realize what was true about all of this. Whoever discovered me could hold me petrified […] [and] confine me for life within the heavy door. Should the person looking for me uncover my lair, I would therefore give a loud shout […] with a cry of self-liberation” (ibid., 100). A cry, perchance for having failed in his impossible task, for having chosen to be human in the face of abjection; a cry that sounded in the memory of an adult day-dreaming of his more capable childhood. In the withdrawal of things from view, fear and anxiety are primordial—and the distance (however close) of things to view is the founding for politics.

Politics involves the administration of fear, it is the fear of fear itself..t

rousselle politics law

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*Fear is primordial. ..Bertrand Richard writes in the preface to Virilio’s newest book: “The administration of fear is a world discovering that there are things to be afraid of but still convinced that more speed and ubiquity are the answer”..t (Virilio, 2012: 10–1). Grey Ecology is the discovery of the accident of postmodern capitalism—an accident that is revealed as a movement from perversion toward psychosis, from disavowal toward foreclosure, a shift in the cultural logic of late capitalism. Today we glimpse the emergence of a new regime of power that sustains itself through an ideology of claustrophobia: “imagine this universe where things will already be there, already viewed, already given” (Virilio, 2010: 34). **Beneath the postmodern ‘circuits of drive’ a disaster is looming: “The fear of acceleration is not there yet, but certain people, who are claustrophobic, or asthmatic, already feel this fear: the fear of exhausting the geo-diversity of the world” .. t(ibid., 33). The fear of acceleration is the onset of postmodern psychosis and the decline of symbolic efficiency, and claustrophobia is the symptom of a world of speed, of the loss of the ***nom-de-pere. It is a fear of fear itself insofar as claustrophobia is the foreclosure of the distance separating ourselves from things..t

*perhaps in sea world.. but not in garden-enough ness et al.. ie: no fear in love

**like higashida autism law et al

***via google: Nom de père” is a French term meaning “name of the father“. In Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, it represents the father’s role in the “Symbolic Order,” which includes language and social structures. Lacan uses the term to highlight the father’s legislative and prohibitive functions, emphasizing his role in shaping a child’s identity and entry into language. 

Virilio contends that today “[w]e are in a world of madness” (Virilio, 2010: 92), the onset of which, I maintain, occurs as a response to the acceleration of the image through the geometral point of the eye. We are reminded that the first machine of acceleration was “not the locomotive of the industrial revolution […] but the photographic apparatus” (ibid., 58). Virilio thereby relegates the problem of acceleration to the operations performed across the scopic field, to the acceleration of the stain: “[t]he machine of acceleration is the machine of vision” (ibid., 58). The question of the scopic field relates to the distance between two unities in geometral space—the stain is the pollution of a distance and this pollution becomes the central problem of postmodern politics. Virilio writes, “[t] he pollution of distance is grey ecology. One must keep one’s distance” (ibid., 81). The pollution of our space from things occurs as a consequence of the proliferation of images and as the ostensible elimination of that distance. In the photo-graph one quickly brings the world out there into one’s hands—a deceiving picture of the world that paradoxically brings reality further from view. A fitting aphorism: ‘relationships are like sand in the grip of your hand—held loosely and the sand remains where it is, but gripped too tightly and the sand trickles out.’ We have gripped things too tightly in our hands—acceleration, hyper-conformity has only made capitalism less perverse and more psychotic!..t Today, one has the image or the photograph without the sufficient number of point-de-capiton [quilting points]. Virilio’s ‘University of Disaster’ is the place from which the discovery of accidents inherent to the acceleration of progress might occur—and these discoveries are crucial because they contribute, in whatever minimal way, to the possibility of regaining some sense of the world. The discovery of the airplane brought with it the accident of the plane crash—and yet, to protect ourselves from the fear of flying, we forget about the accident and focus on the tele-vision folded-out into view just a foot from our eyes. Perhaps the appropriate counter-accident was JetBlue’s in-flight movie of ‘Air Emergency’.

Accidents are un-intentional byproducts inherent to the intentional narcissism of progress. In the scopic field they are best examined through contemporary art. According to Virilio, the accident of abstract art was that it made possible an aesthetics of the invisible—ie, the task of post-war abstract art was to bring the invisible into the geometral space, into the visible. Virilio’s response to modern abstract art is crucial for continental aesthetics: he reveals the pollution of the visual field by the narcissism of the imaginary. Thus, the symptom or accident of postmodern capitalism is not just claustrophobia but also glaucoma: “[w]ithout knowing it, there is a restriction of the visual spectrum, and one loses laterality. […] Tele-objectivity is a glaucoma […] In the here and now, in the divine perception, and not by way of a screen, of a microscope, or the screen of a television, there is a very important element. I am surprised to what degree people are no longer able to orient themselves in life..t They have lost their perception of their lateral environment” (ibid., 56). *The glaucoma of postmodern capitalism: ‘eyes so that they might not see.’..t Lacan was clear on this point: “In the scopic field, everything is articulated between two terms that act in an antinomic way— on the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them. This is how one should understand those words, so strongly stressed in the Gospel, they have eyes that they might not see. That they might not see what? Precisely, that things are looking at them” (Lacan, 1988: 109). “To see,” Virilio claims, “is not to know” (Virilio, 2010: 79). Virilio teaches us that acceleration brings with it the accident of seeing but not knowing, of acting without knowing the intention or accidents inherent to one’s acts or presentations, and so on. Eyes so that they may not see, Virilio intends to remove our eyes so that we might see.

*like naming the colour ness..

need a means to see/hear what is already on each heart

‘one sees only w/the heart good.. the essential is for the eyes invisible’ – the little prince

ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)

the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. w/o a raised eyebrow et al

[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]

there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of that much unconditionality.. of that global detox leap/dance.. for (blank)’s sake..

ie: whatever whatever whatever.. for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition

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Postmodern politics as the public activity of those who do not act, postmodern aesthetics as the visibility of that which the eyes can not see— Virilio’s theory of aesthetics reveals the invisibility of visibility itself. ..The accident, an accidental encounter with the things of the world through over-proximity, through the foreclosure of distance, this is the visible hidden within the invisible. As Virilio puts it, “[a]lthough the accident—the inherent potential for derailment—is intentionally much less visible than the ostensible benefits of any given development, this ‘hidden face’ deserves critical attention” (ibid., 136). It is this hidden face that challenges the hysterical Left’s contemporary fascination with a ‘politics without politics’ (cf., Dean, 2009).

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Virilio’s Grey Ecology is an essential read for those looking to diagnose the accident of contemporary politics. It is also of interest to those dissatisfied with the current democratic turn in the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics. The book proves that there is the possibility for a nondemocratic but equally non-statist intervention into aesthetics and politics. Virilio’s advice is to look the Medusa in the eye, face our fears, and traverse the fantasy of postmodern politics:

The problem with ethical relativism ..outlined by Todd May: “The command to respect the diversity of language games is precisely an ethical one; moreover, it is a universally binding one” (May, 1994: 129). The result is that one invites domination or else falls back into a universal prescriptivism: “[T]he concern with ‘preserving the purity’ and singularity ‘of each genre’ by reinforcing its isolation from the others gives rise to exactly what was intended to be avoided: ‘the domination of one genre by another’, namely, the domination of the prescriptive” (Sam Weber as cited by Todd May, 1994: 129). Zizek argued that this ethical code has become the fantasy of contemporary liberal politics:

Today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism wishes to experience the Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically holistic approach to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sight). Along the same lines, what this tolerance gives us is a decaffeinated belief, a belief that does not hurt anyone and never requires us to commit ourselves (Zizek, 2004).

Ethical relativism thereby renders invisible what was previously visible in the project of ethical universalism: a certain violence or domination. It is for that reason all the more suspect and problematic (how do we attack an enemy that we can no longer see?). Jeffrey Reiman has described this as the paradox of relativism:

Here enters the paradox: The critique of universal standards because they exclude certain individuals or groups of individuals is a critique of those standards for not being universal enough! Consequently, rather than abandoning or opposing universalism, the critique is itself based on an implicit valuation, albeit one that aims to be more inclusive than the ones critiqued (Reiman, 1996: 253).

needs to be sans any form of m\a\p

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Admittedly, the previous statement comes easy to me because it refers to the typical structures against which the majority of anarchists position themselves. But the question must be raised, following Saul Newman: “Why is it that when someone is asked to talk about radical politics today one inevitably refers to this same tired, old list of struggles and identities? Why are we so unimaginative politically that we cannot think outside the terms of this ‘shopping list’ of oppressions?” ..t([2001] 2007: 171).

any form of m\a\p as same song

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The problem thus becomes: how can we be against representation and power without falling into the service of representation and power. The answer is paradoxical.

or not paradoxical.. rather.. we just can’t.. because any form of re ness perpetuates same song

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The promise of post-anarchism is the development of new ways of thinking about old ideas on the subject of anarchism, recirculating frozen signifiers, letting a little anarchy into the mix..t

oi.. there’s that shopping list ness.. rather.. let’s try something legit diff.. the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

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This has always been the latent, and at times also quite explicit, preoccupation of traditional anarchist political philosophy but the consequence of this pre-occupation—an attack on essentialism, toward an embrace of the accidental—has not yet been fully realized. 

need both/all

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A Lacanian may describe the ethics as the c factor of anarchist political philosophy. As Lacan put it, “[i]n the symbolic order, first of all, one cannot neglect the importance of the c factor which, as I noted at the Congress of Psychiatry in 1950, is a constant that is characteristic of a given cultural milieu” (Lacan, 2006b: 204). In a word, the c factor describes what is central and consistent to any milieu. In any case, Newman was aware of this limitation and he pointed toward future research in the area:

so ‘c factor’ for human being ness: maté basic needs

While the possibility has been created, then, for a non-essentialist politics of resistance to domination, it remains an empty possibility. If it is to have any political currency at all […] [i]t must have an ethical framework of some sort—some way of determining what sort of political action is defensible, and what is not. […] Is it possible to free ethics from these essentialist notions while retaining its critical value and political currency? This is the question that the anti-authoritarian program must now address (2001: 160–1).

deeper question: what are conditions so that all my be legit free..

answer: mech/space/resources to org around legit needs (org around essence of human being ness)

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I have suggested that post-anarchism presents a new reading of the traditional anarchist discourse. The development of a distinctly post-anarchist philosophy was thought to have emerged out of what David Graeber has called ‘new anarchism’ (Evren in Rousselle & Evren, 2011). Any umbilical cord that once attached David Graeber (2002) to the term ‘new anarchism’ has now been cut. In an email correspondence, Graeber insisted:

If I end up being considered the source of something like ‘new anarchism’ (not even a phrase I made up, it was invented by the editor of NLR [New Left Review], since you never get to make up your own titles in journals like that), that would be a total disaster! (Graeber, 2010).

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Far from a mere overnight transformation of anarchist priorities and even further from a rejection or replacement of traditional anarchism, post-anarchism has more simply been a concept used to describe what has always already been going on within anarchist movement (Purkis & Bowen, 2004; esp pp. 15–17).

if want legit freedom.. need something diff.. ie: the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

Kuhn, for example, argued that “[t]here is [a] difficultly with the postanarchist label, namely the suggestion that the junctions of anarchism and post-structuralism/postmodernity as laid out by Newman […] are new, when, in fact, they are not” (Kuhn, 2009: 21). *What I have argued, is that this newness is never in fact entirely new sensu stricto but rather a redefinition of something that was previously thought unimportant or hidden amongst the old. It is naive, at best, to argue that the postanarchists have moved beyond traditional anarchism. .. However, if the fate of post-anarchism depends exclusively on the currency of its label, we shall have no fear, for post-anarchism is nothing other than anarchism folded back onto itself, and if the anarchist tradition by some measure demonstrates a **desire to reflect back upon itself with the same amount of effort, we shall be all the better for it.

*ie: missing pieces.. almaas holes law.. et al

**to me.. this is cancerous distraction.. again.. since nothing to date legit new/essence

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This is what post-anarchism is all about, rewriting and rereading the past, finding things we missed along the way and highlighting things that we read/wrote wrong for so long.

oi to history ness

need something not yet tried

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It is the ethical standpoint that has been repressed by the anarchist tradition (and postanarchism we shall say is a return of the repressed). The anarchist reliance on ethics has the status of an absurdity, in the Freudian sense, and, truth be told, occurs as an absurd joke. 

if ethical: having to do with right and wrong.. oi

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The anarchist author Herbert Read has argued that, with Kropotkin, “[n]o better history of ethics has ever been written” (as cited in Woodcock & Avakumovic, 1971: 420). *Kropotkin, whom we may say is the originator and exemplar of the trend in practical ethics, has described an ethics of ‘mutual aid’ as the general condition and organization of the survival of the species. According to Kropotkin, there can be discovered, beneath the destructive manifest structure of the state, an organization of life that ought to be allowed to blossom or, at the very least, to be mirrored or protected. This form of naturalism ostensibly “removes ethics from the sphere of the speculative and metaphysical, and brings human conduct and ethical teaching back to its natural environment: the ethical practices of men in their everyday concerns” (see the “Translator’s Preface” in Kropotkin, 1922).

*maybe why i have such an issue with mutual aid (kropotkin) ness.. to me the dance isn’t (and can’t be) about right and wrong ness

**yeah.. (cringe)

Two fundamental questions were to be addressed by Kropotkin in his Ethics and, for this reason, his book was to be subdivided into two parts accordingly (see “Introduction by the Russian Editor,” in Kropotkin, 1922). He proposed first to respond to the question of place—his central question was *“whence originate man’s moral conceptions?” (Kropotkin, 1922)—and this motivated the writing of his first volume before his death. Kropotkin urged his readers “to consider the question of the origin and the historical development of morality” (Kropotkin, 1922). This latter question, on the historical development of morality, related to the question of process—his central question was **“[w]hat is the goal of the moral prescriptions and standards?” (Kropotkin, 1922)—and was the motivation for his attempt at writing a second volume. This final book would go unwritten. We are informed by the Russian Editor that “Kropotkin planned to devote [his final book to] the exposition of the bases of realistic ethics, and its aims” and that he wanted to produce a book that would engage with the popular radical philosophies of his time (Kropotkin, 1922). Unfortunately, this venture was interrupted by his death.

*once they entered sea world.. so since forever..

**obedient/orderly whales

There are at least two ways to respond (and these responses are not mutually exclusive) to Kropotkin’s ethics today: one may reject Kropotkin’s manifest ethics and/or one may reconstruct Kropotkin’s ethical writings by revealing their latent determinations. The latter approach involves the former. I shall pursue the latter ‘post-Kropotkinian’ path in accordance with the latent reading of the anarchist tradition that I have been unearthing until this point.

i had hopes that the latent ness would be more about the missing pieces of almaas holes law.. but again.. can’t be if about ethics as right/wrong ness

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John Slatter has argued that Kropotkin’s work, especially his “La Morale Anarchiste” (written in 1890, hereafter referred to as “Anarchist Morality”), was “principally […] a *ferocious attack on existing moral systems, all of which are seen as essentially self-serving justifications for the existing distribution of power and wealth” (Slatter, 1996: 261). There is thus room to suggest that Kropotkin’s work now reveals a latent dimension as well as a traditional manifest dimension. If it can be demonstrated that Kropotkin’s system of ‘mutual aid’ also called for the restriction of the free movement of the individual then it can also be argued that his work, like much of traditional anarchist philosophy, was always at war with itself. Slatter took Kropotkin at his word when he argued that “[anarchists must] bend the knee to no authority whatsoever, however respected […] accept no principle so long as it is unestablished by reason” (Kropotkin as quoted in Slatter, 1996: 261). Here, however, Kropotkin’s rationalism was maintained but only to reveal a useful parallel: “The appeal to reason rather than to tradition or custom in moral matters is one made earlier in Russian intellectual history by the so-called ‘nihilists’” (Slatter, 1996: 261). Like Kropotkin, the Russian ‘nihilists’ (or “The New People”, as they were called) adopted a rationalist/ positivist discourse as a way to achieve a distance from the authority of the church and consequently from metaphysical philosophies. The meta-ethics of Kropotkin’s work (note: not his first order ethics) thus reveals, not ‘mutual aid,’ but a tireless negativity akin to the spirit of the Russian nihilists: “[according to Kropotkin, the anarchist must] fight against existing society with its upside-down morality and look forward to the day when it would be no more” (Kropotkin as cited by Slatter, 1996: 261).

*but any form of people telling other people what to do is this.. ie: mutual aid (kropotkin)

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*The source of Kropotkin’s meta-ethics, according to Antliff, is “the libertarian refusal to ‘model individuals according to an abstract idea’ or ‘mutilate them by religion, law or government’ [and thus allowing] for a specifically anarchist type of morality to flourish” (Antliff, in Rousselle & Evren, 2011: 161). Antliff therefore reads beyond the restrictive interpretation of Kropotkin’s manifest ethics and finds something buried beneath the fabric.

*again.. all is the same song as long as any form of m\a\p

There is yet more evidence provided for a post-Kropotkinian interpretation. The Russian editor of Kropotkin’s Ethics has argued:

Many expect that Kropotkin’s Ethics will be some sort of specifically ‘revolutionary’ or ‘anarchist’ ethics, etc Whenever this subject was broached to Kropotkin himself, he invariably answered that his intention was to write a purely human ethics (sometimes he used the expression ‘realistic’) (italics in original; “Introduction by the Russian Editor,” in Kropotkin, 1922).

rather whale ethics.. as long as any form of m\a\p

We should fully consider this *distinction between ‘human’ ethics and ‘anarchist’ ethics—de-spite that we are often led by anarchists to believe that Kropotkin’s ethics were ‘anarchist,’ are we

*again.. no diff as long as any form of m\a\p

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As Dylan Evans has put it:

Lacan has a Cartesian mistrust of the imagination as a cognitive tool. He insists, like Descartes, on the supremacy of pure intellection, without dependence on images, as the only way of arriving at certain knowledge. […] This mistrust of the imagination and the sense puts Lacan firmly on the side of rationalism rather than empiricism (Evans, 1996: 85).

intellectness as cancerous distraction.. graeber can’t know law.. et al

Kropotkin’s adoption of empiricism was strictly a means to distance himself, through science, from religious authority. Morris described what I have termed Kropotkin’s meta-ethics (or, if you like, latent ethics): “As an evolutionary naturalist, Kropotkin took it for granted that moral concepts were extremely varied and were continually developing” (Evans, 1996: 428). Morris’s reading of Kropotkin is that his ethics were to some extent flexible and open to contingency. *Morris continued, “Kropotkin never saw moral principles as conveying absolute truths, only as ‘guides’ to help us to live an ethical life” (Evans, 1996: 437). In this sense, **whether as guides or as metaphors, Kropotkin’s meta-ethics reveals an attack on all moral principles which finally frees the unique individual to live an ethical life.

*still a form of m\a\p.. even a raised eyebrow ness et al

**if bound in ethic as right/wrong ness.. then not freeing.. but perpetuating same song

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Yet we know very well that specifically anarchist ethics were once a concern for Kropotkin—at least while writing and publishing the individual chapters for his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), a time when, before publishing in book form, he was happy to call his approach an anarchist one. In one such essay, “Anarchist Morality” (1897) he began to describe an apt understanding of latent ethics that ought not necessarily be reduced to the remainder of the text:

anarchist morality

The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening. Then thought frees herself from the chains with which those interested—rulers, lawyers, clerics [dare we say, moralists?]—have carefully enwound her. She shatters the chains. She subjects to severe criticism all that has been taught to her, and lays bare the emptiness of the religious, political, legal, and social prejudices amid which she has vegetated. She starts research in new paths, enriches our knowledge with new discoveries, creates new sciences (Kropotkin, 1897).

but we haven’t shattered (let go of) the chains to date.. only partially blocked/ignored/detabed/protested.. et al

However, this reading is opposed to Kropotkin’s own view that “did not recognize any separate ethics; *he [Kropotkin] held that ethics should be one and the same for all men” (Kropotkin, 1897). Kropotkin’s latent nihilist meta-ethics thereby came into conflict with his manifest universalist ethics. ..Kropotkin perhaps had greater ambitions in mind than simply the egoist pursuit of happiness: **he wanted to subvert the dominant paradigm in full, replacing it with a softer, more anarchistic, ethic that was fuelled by the negative impulse.

*to me.. only thing same for all: missing pieces via maté basic needs law

**no legit subvert ness unless sans any form of m\a\p

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*It is worth highlighting the authoritarian dimension of Kropotkin’s manifest ethics, because Kropotkin has asked the unique individual to sacrifice herself, her very being, to the binding rules of conduct in the principle of ‘mutual aid.’..t Meta-ethical critiques of his work, stemming as early as 1925, have focused on Kropotkin’s essentialism and his **disregard for the freedom of the individual. .. Boas and others have produced inadequate accounts of Kropotkin’s work. What follows is the revealing of this problematic reading as an account of the manifest text. We shall see that Kropotkin’s ethical notion of sacrifice is quite different from the meta-ethical notion of sacrifice found in the writings of Georges Bataille.

*yeah that.. why ‘mutual aid‘.. while seemingly better/kinder.. still isn’t deep enough.. need a means sans any form of m\a\p

**won’t get legit attachment if no legit authenticity – maté basic needs law et al

Kropotkin argued, in “Anarchist Morality” (1897), that what “mankind admires in a truly moral man is his energy, the exuberance of life which urges him to give his intelligence, his feeling, his action, asking nothing in return” (Kropotkin, 1897). This is certainly an ethical response (to give ‘without return’ from the pit of one’s being) and yet the authoritarian dimension of Kropotkin’s imperative—epitomized, in some ways, in the Levinasian *“ethics of responsibility” (cf., Zizek, 2005)—is revealed in the notion of self-sacrifice. How else to instigate anarchist morality if not by force and coercion, if not by self-repression and self-sacrifice? For, on the one hand, the Stirnerian egoist sacrifices things which she owns, but she does not thereby sacrifice her ‘ownness’: as Stirner put it:

*responsibility ness as cancerous distraction

The Kropotkinian mutualist sacrifices her ‘ownness’ in exchange for her freedom just as the academic sacrifices her being in exchange for her knowledge, and if she does not do this she is thought to be a “monster” (cf., Kropotkin, 1922), to be the ‘un-man.’ 

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Kropotkin’s manifest anarchist ethics can therefore only be implemented by way of the ethical imperative; to be sure, an ethical imperative that is sustained by the explosive selfishness of unique individuals. But one does not freely sacrifice, according to Kropotkin: *one must freely sacrifice. .t In Morris’s article on Kropotkin’s ethics, he writes: “He [Kropotkin] was not therefore concerned with semantics, with the meaning of moral concepts, issues which fascinate contemporary philosophers leading them to emphasize what is clearly self-evident, **namely that moral judgements are prescriptive, giving rise to ethical theory or prescriptivism”..t (italics in original; 2002: 425). The point to be taken here is that Morris, in his endorsement of Kropotkin, and critique of semantic meta-ethical philosophers, confesses a fundamental truth of naturalism: the descriptive inevitably collapses into the prescriptive. Phillips has likewise argued that “Kropotkin transfers his naturalistic observations into a prescription for human society”..t (2003: 143), and so my thesis here is not unfounded. What is more, Phillips suggests that “Kropotkin’s naturalism, like that of the social Darwinists, lies not in describing nature, but in creating a metaphor for guiding human behaviour” (ibid.). This is the problem with the prescriptive extrapolation.

*aka: voluntary compliance et al.. mutual aid

**aka: any/all the forms of people telling other people what to do

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Ward’s provocation was steeped in the rhetoric of universal naturalism and it owed a great debt to Kropotkin’s ethics. Ward continued this underlying motif until his last interview (entitled “The practice of liberty”) before his death (cf., Ward, 2010).

Similarly, Uri Gordon, in his book Anarchy Alive!: Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (2008), described anarchism as a living force in the world that can be located in everyday grassroots activism. His critique of post-anarchism was that it has no ‘practical’ relevance for contemporary anarchism: “It should be emphasized that post-structuralist anarchism remains an intellectual preoccupation limited to a handful of writers rather than being a genuine expression of, or influence on, the grassroots thinking and discourse of masses of activists” (Gordon, 2008: 42–3). One is tempted to raise the question of the significance of intellectual preoccupations—what does this mean? Could it not be argued that Gordon’s book was also chiefly an intellectual preoccupation? If Gordon meant to suggest (as I believe he did) that post-anarchism does not speak to or influence grassroots thinking, this presumes that grassroots thinking is important (*a claim that would have to be substantiated or elaborated for clarification). 

*why? so maybe why i think legit free people would see claiming/explaining/debating et al as irrelevant s

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Peter Gelderloos’s Anarchy Works (2010) took “examples from around the world, picking through history and anthropology, showing that people have, in different ways and at different times, demonstrated mutual aid, self-organization, autonomy, horizontal decision making, and so forth—the principles that anarchy is founded on” (Little Black Cart, 2010). Similarly, Richard Day’s Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements aimed to describe the practices of the newest social movements that “open up new possibilities for radical social change that cannot be imagined from within existing paradigms,” these new possibilities come about

anarchy works

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 If the human essence is already benign, then there is no need to articulate what kinds of human activity are good and what kinds are bad (May, 1994: 64).

already on each heart ness

Kropotkin argues that ‘inner contradiction is the very condition of ethics’. For something to be ethical it can never be absolute. Poststructuralism rejected morality because it was an absolutist discourse intolerant to difference: this is the point at which morality becomes unethical (Newman, [2001] 2007: 166–7).

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prefiguration is primarily an *open method of experimentation. We do not know how to answer the question of process, that is, what the future society will look like and how to get to it. **Prefiguration is the assurance that ethical principles never objectively settle, that unique subjects are able to sort their own ethics in the midst of an everyday battle.

if we want *this.. can’t even have **this.. to me.. if legit free.. ‘assurance that ethical’ whatever ness.. would be irrelevant s.. cancerous distraction to legit open experimentation (alive ness.. graeber unpredictability/surprise law et al)

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There is the further problem of the replacement of the place of the essential human with the place of the virtuous anarchist. For, if one can be said to act virtuously, one must as a necessity construct another categorization which far surpasses, indeed escapes, the logic of virtue: the vice.

legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

According to Malatesta, “the end justifies the means: we have spoken much ill of that maxim […] In reality, it is the universal guide of conduct […] It is necessary to seek morality in the end; the means is [sic] fatally determined” (Malatesta, [2010]). Through this we have arrived at the underlying principle of utilitarianism: the utility of the means are valued by the consequences achieved—from within the tension of means and ends, in all utilitarian meta-ethics there is a conflation of means to ends. I do not want to spend a great deal of time writing about anarchist utilitarianism because I believe its real value for anarchists is self evident (that is, the majority of anarchists are fully aware of the limitations of ethical utilitarianism).

oi.. 1\ talking majority.. as if that ‘self evidence’ of majority ness.. makes things plain/obvious/fully-aware ness.. is how we perpetuate same song 2\ talking limitations.. is how we perpetuate not legit unconditional.. not sans any form of m\a\p.. when the thing we need to try/see.. is the the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. and why we need tech w/o judgment (nonjudgmental expo labeling) first/most.. to facil that dance.. again.. otherwise we’ll keep perpetuating the same song.. the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world.. of not-us ness.. ooof

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The problem is *rather obvious. As Franks has argued: “The […] problem is [that] by prioritising ends over means, individuals become reduced to mere instruments, and are robbed of autonomy and **dignity” (Franks, 2008a). But this problem reaches a new level of complexity under post-modernism as the preoccupation with ends are themselves no longer sustainable. As Bauman put it, during the contemporary period “[i]ssues have no predetermined solutions” (1993: 32) and this renders all attempts at prefiguring the means with which to achieve maximum consequence/utilization naive at best. ***How to, for example, attend to a solution which prohibits the manifestation of itself as an issue in the first place? Similarly, today we ****no longer know how to distinguish between cause and symptom—as Lewis Call has argued: *****“The postmodern anarchist views capitalism and statism not as causes but as effects, not as diseases but as symptoms” (Call, 2002: 117)—and symptoms have now taken the place of disease. As a consequence we achieve a sense in which “the truth of the matter is opposite to the one we have been told […] ******It is society, its continuing existence and its well-being, that is made possible by the moral competence of its members— not the other way round” (Bauman, 1993: 32). Ours is a time in which utility serves only to *******obscure the truth of ethical origin and process, the emptiness from whence these processes have emerged:

*still taleb center of problem law.. usual red flag: saying it’s rather obvious.. ooof

**dignity ness (worthy of honor/respect) reduces individuals to ‘mere instruments’.. oof..

***yeah.. i think ‘attending to a solution’ ness is part of the same song.. meaning.. if all were legit free.. i think thinking in terms of problems/solutions would be irrelevant s.. so cancerous distraction if we’re trying to set the conditions for all to be legit free..

****if we ever did.. to me.. everything to date is ‘symptom’ ness.. nothing to date has gotten to root of problem.. all to date has been perpetuating survival triage.. et al

*****ha.. if only..

******oi.. this is a symptom (aka: whalespeak) of missing pieces.. ‘moral competence’.. oi

********i don’t think origin ness or whatever.. (to me legit freedom as in garden-enough ness) has anything to do with ethical ness..

In as far as the modern obsession with purposefulness and utility and the equally obsessive suspicion of all things autotelic (that is, claiming to be their own ends, and not means to something else than themselves) fade away, morality stands the chance of finally coming into its own […] no moral impulse can survive, let alone emerge unscathed from, the acid test of usefulness or profit. And since all immorality begins with demanding such a test—from the moral subject, or from the object of its moral impulse, or both (Bauman, 1993: 36).

we don’t need/crave/dance-to moral impulse.. we dance/crave/need to hear/see/be itch-in-the-soul.. de saint-exupéry essential law et al

The failure of utility, and more broadly the failure of positive meta-ethics, occurs as if it were presupposed, ironically, from within the meta-ethical system. The concept of utility collapses upon itself. The critique of this meta-ethics takes its penultimate deviation in Bauman’s proclamation that:

There are no hard-and-fast principles which one can learn, memorize and deploy in order to escape situations without a good outcome and to spare oneself the bitter after-taste (call it scruples, guilty conscience, or sin) which comes unsolicited in the wake of the decisions taken and fulfilled. Human reality is messy and ambiguous—and *so moral decisions, unlike abstract ethical principles, are ambivalent. It is in this sort of world that we must live; and yet, as if defying the worried philosophers who cannot conceive of an ‘unprincipled’ morality, a morality without foundations, we demonstrate day by day that we can live, or learn to live, or manage to live in such a world, though **few of us would be ready to spell out, if asked, what the principles that guide us are, and ***fewer still would have heard about the ‘foundations’ which we allegedly cannot do without to be good and kind to each other […] Knowing that to be the truth […] is to be postmodern (Bauman, 1993: 36).

*need curiosity (itch in the soul) over decision making

**because need to have no guide in order to hear what’s on each heart

***if go deep enough.. to missing pieces.. everybody could/would hear about ‘how to’ dance.. but unconditionally.. ie: who can name universal ‘good/kind’ ness.. that’s just more of people telling other people what to do

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Apropos of Bauman’s claim that we live day-today without the ability to spell out the principles that guide us, I would like to provide a basic example. I share a class at university with some anarchists and many non-anarchists. Outside of class, we organize. During our meetings outside of the classroom we find ourselves preoccupied with the establishment of certain democratic practices of consensus: we must use a speakers list, we must all come together with an agreement about what types of behaviours are unacceptable, hostile, and so on. We never really do anything, we spend weeks planning how to organize and, as a result, nothing ever happens. One event that we planned involved a guest lecturer, a public lecture for the community. All but two nonacademicians were present. Of these two non-academicians, one was homeless and the other was a ‘loud’ and provocative speaker. Each interrupted the presentation in turn: the one interrupted to ask for clarification and to explain why our academic babble did not make sense to him and the other interrupted precisely to disrupt this process of clarification, to complicate things all the more. These exchanges made everybody in the room noticeably agitated, almost on the verge of disavowed excitement. The anarchists talked about the disruption for weeks, and about how to keep something like this from happening again. They decided to implement the speaker’s list, and so on. The question for me is: why, when we attend class every week as students, do we not need a speaker’s list? Why do we tolerate the disruptions in the classroom? Why does it work in the classroom and not in the street?

already in the bubble man.. ie: assuming class/students/speakers.. it works in the classroom because structural violence et al.. oi

I risk the conjecture that contemporary anarchists have turned to virtue ethics and prefigurative philosophy as a way of creating a more flexible meta-ethical system. *It does not strike them that perhaps the answer to place and process deserve a simpler and more obvious response: unprincipled morality that emerges from no-where in particular is the fuel that sustains this juggernaut we call social life. This is what post-anarchism reminds traditional anarchists: to no longer be seduced by the discourse of power. That is, to paraphrase and appropriate Bauman’s words, post-anarchism is about the rejection of hard-and-fast principles which one can learn, memorize and enact (as virtuous practice). Our reality is messy and unlearned—and so is our meta-ethical framework. **We ultimately reject positive ethical principles, abstractions from life, in favour of an ethics without positive foundations or systems and, like good post-Kropotkinians, we demonstrate day by day that we can live in such a world. Knowing that to be the truth is to be post-anarchist. ***We thus abandon the positive meta-ethical framework in philosophy and render obsolete in practice the reduction of action to traditional manifest rulebooks. The politics of the classroom is a politics awaiting the eruption of the street but never able to symbolize it into the rulebook of consensus and speaker’s lists.

yeah *that..

not **that.. ie.. same song via: re ness; demonstrate ness (aka: proof vs nothing to prove ness);..

***this is ie of embracing/perpetuating that framework.. not abandoning.. oi

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 Just as there is a *lack that sustains the economy of our knowledge (language), there is also a **lack that sustains the state of our being. Thus, while postanarchism exposed the underside to traditional anarchist meta-ethics as that which sustains its discourse, Bataille exposed the full range of the meta-ethical framework: an underside to the question of place and process.

*language as control/enclosure.. need to facil self-talk as data via idiosyncratic jargon via nonjudgmental expo labeling.. et al.. otherwise just perpetuating whalespeak .. seat at the table.. et al

**need 1st/most: means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs

for both.. better word/phrase for ‘sustains’ (because that word sounds like a good thing to us) would be ‘perpetuates same song‘

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Bataille’s sovereign subject, on the other hand, is grounded upon a nothingness of pure exteriority: *“sovereignty is NOTHING, a nothing that is a slipping away of the subject […] This slipping away is not secondary because it does not happen to a subject who is secure or has integrity, instead it reveals the unstable status of the subject” (Noys, 2000: 75). To be sovereign is not to make a conscious ethical choice, it is to recognize the sovereignty of being that already exists and to give oneself away to it from within the imaginary of everyday consciousness. The sovereign subject can thus not be reduced to the individual ego (Noys, 2000: 65) rather it is at once the movement of consciousness that compels the subject to disrupt her authority over her being, to take the proclamation of non-being seriously (Noys, 2000: 65), and it is the revelation of this accidentalism. There is thus a shifting of priorities in the text of Renzo Novatore when he insisted that he was an anarchist because he was also a nihilist: “I call myself a nihilist because I know that nihilism means negation” (italics in original; Novatore, 1920), and then he claimed that “[when] I call myself an individualist anarchist, an iconoclast and a nihilist, it is precisely because I believe that in these adjectives there is the highest and most complete expression of my willful and reckless individuality” (Novatore, 1920). There is a refusal in base subjectivist responses to the question of place to think beyond the agency of subject. For the base subjectivist, it is she who is responsible for the negation and it is she who is responsible for the creation that results from this evacuation of place. The great battle is between the subject of the statement and the creative subject of the no-thing. Contrarily, there is an anti-authoritarian dimension to Bataille’s meta-ethical system in his subversion of the authority of the conscious subject: “Sovereignty is the contestation of authority, a reversal of our traditional concepts of sovereignty” (Noys, 2000: 65). Just as the subject’s actions always fall within the pervasive logic of the restrictive state, the sovereign subject’s (in)activity always falls within the pervasive logic of the general state.

*some of this sounds pretty good.. so pulling it out of its context of cancerous distractions and adding it to sovereignty

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There have been arguments against this reduction of sovereignty to an ontology of place (cf., Noys, 2000: 66 et passim). The problem is that some readings of Bataille reduce sovereignty to an ontology of the ego. ..As Noys put it: “Sovereignty does not integrate into absolute knowledge but is the nonknowledge that undermines it” (Noys, 2000: 79). Sovereignty introduces the subject, fleetingly, to that which is outside of herself, to that which is neither ‘individual’ nor ‘social’ (Noys, 2005: 128), “neither subject nor object” (Kristeva, 1982: 1), to that which horrifies the subject and brings her to her limit in death. It is precisely this thinking that destabilizes the base subjectivist position (cf., Noys, 2005: 128 et passim, on the ‘psychoanalytic subject’).

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I have argued that the general state destabilizes the subject as an ontological category and in doing so it exposes the object of ethics proper—an ethics of the outside that is mythologically associated with the sun. *According to Bataille, ethical activity is not something the subject performs but rather it is something performed upon (and against) the subject by the forces of an external nature. We may say that the abject is the object of Bataille’s meta-ethical inquiry and that it crosscuts positive conceptions of place and process. **Abjection is the effect of the general economy on positive notions of place: “What opens in this rupture, in this shattering of the subject, are those states of abjection […] They include death, excretions, objects of horror, ecstatic enjoyment (jouissance) and so on, and are ‘things to be embraced, not exactly willingly, but that must be addressed in their horror’” (Noys, 2005: 131). The abject is what remains after the imposition of the subject; fleeting glimpses of this object are available through reductions in useful knowledge. ***It is only where knowledge is lacking that the subject proper (Bataille’s intimate or sovereign subject) comes into view.

to me.. let go of *this (and try the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness) if want **this (via bachelard oikos law et al)..

***to me.. rather.. only when we org around legit needs.. that legit free people can dance

My claim is that sacrifice occurs where servitude is assumed.

Sacrifice occurs where servitude is assumed: Bataille argued that sacrifice always “appears in our eyes as servitude” (Bataille, 1985). If it is true that sacrifice occurs where servitude is assumed perhaps the appearance of servitude is the *ethical act of sacrifice proper. The process of gift-giving, for example, abides by a logic which exchanges “the materially valuable for that which is culturally meaningful […] **Sacrifice is the act of exchanging that which is valued for meaning” (Thought Factory, 2004). The ethical act is the one that gives up on trying to overcome the problem of place and process and, instead, concedes purposeful activity only to the abject. ***There is thus a violence inherent to the ethical act but it is a violence that radiates from the restrictive economies and states of idealist culture rather than the violence that disrupts these frameworks. To be sure, the meta-ethical task falls into nihilism by virtue of a violence that exceeds the frameworks of any discourse that seeks to contain it, but the ethical task is to give in to the restrictive systems and foundations that sustain life and to hence expose a violence against the sacred intimacy that destabilizes the subject. As Noys argued, “Bataille wants to express a violence that is radically beyond language, and he searches for examples of this violence in acts of sacrifices […] The difficulty is that these examples reduce violence back into language and into a particular historical moment of subject […] Violence exists somewhere in the play of the example, existing through examples but also ruining the idea of the example through a violent opening” (italics in original; Noys, 2000: 10).

*resonates a bit with my unsettling ness of gift\ness et al.. giving ness.. as rather a form of people telling other people what to do.. and perhaps because too tied up in the **assumption that we need/crave meaning/purpose ness (when perhaps that is just part of whalespeak).. ie: would legit free people spend their days searching for meaning? or just be too preoccupied with the dance

***structural violence.. spiritual violence.. et al.. but i think too that a ‘violence that disrupts these frameworks’ (aka: any violence) .. perpetuates same song (so aka: structural violence.. spiritual violence)

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To give way to the abject implies two consequences: on the one hand, it implies that all activity is grounded upon failure and so too are the frameworks which are presumed descriptions of this activity. Fail again, fail better. The anarchists have never had a victory and yet we find some pleasure in this defeat. We fail better than any other political agent. But this also means that there is a violence inflicted, in the restrictive sense, through this activity. This thereby explains the meaning of the following: “Sacrifice exposes us to death but also saves us from death” (Noys, 2000: 13). For the anarchist—it is a crime to go to graduate school, get married, have children, or otherwise reproduce the existing homogeneity, and yet we know that the existing order is sustained by a force much greater than the restrictive states and economies that come and go through time. There is an order of the symbolic that compels us into servitude. Anarchists are often asked: what in this life is anarchist? We may say that very little in life is anarchist because every act is absorbed by the symbolic order and provided with meaning and value. The great sacrifice for an anarchist is thus to give oneself away to tolerable systems and foundations and to be stoned to death by her family, other anarchists, and so on, for doing so. It means that there are sacrifices that one has to make violently by both refusing meta-ethical systems and foundations but also in accepting certain ones as effects or approximations of anarchism. The ethical task is not to sacrifice a king, but to sacrifice ourselves to the king, to find in our sacrifice to the king a sabotage of the king. Several years ago I found myself in the middle of a political campaign at my university. Anarchists were teamed with avowedly Leninist political organizers on the political platform ‘United for Change.’ I was saddened by the amount of recuperation happening in my milieu. I put up posters in support of the group. However, I did so before the permitted time and in volumes not permitted by union regulation: I accepted their platform too much. They were very nearly disqualified. As a consequence, my anarchist friends called the police on me, threatened legal action against me, and so on.

I was threatened with violence. Fireworks were shot at my home, where my newborn baby slept. Letters and photographs were placed all around the internet. I was ex-communicated from the milieu. My publisher was notified that I was an agent provocateur, working and being paid by the state. Nothing that the sacrificed anarchist can say shall allow her to return to intimacy, and yet everyday she strives to build a better world anyway — a dying anarchist performs this function in secret, much like the dying criminal who “[a]ddresses himself to the crowd, a dying criminal was the first to formulate this commandment: ‘Never confess’” (Bataille, 2001: 79). The anarchists never ran for presidency again.

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For Bataille, “[t]here is no [ethical] project; […] only the defeat of all accomplishment” (Stoekl, 1990: 4), we may also say that we have arrived at a crucial paradox in the work of Bataille, one that makes his ethical system tremble: as Stoekl has put it: “therein lies the problem, because any ‘saying’ or ‘writing’ [or doing], no matter how disjointed or disseminated, is already the product of a project, of a constructive activity not different in kind from that of the most servile ‘committed’ writer” (Stoekl, 1990: 4). The problem is that Bataille’s meta-ethical system appears to imply that the intimate subject ought no longer to act in the world. Certainly, inactivity has its place in any political program, but, at the same time, one can imagine scenarios in which this negative proposition also falls flat into a stable doctrine. For Stoekl, “Bataille can only be the ‘nothing’ and the imposition and betrayal of that ‘nothing’ through the coherent project of writing” (italics in original; Stoekl, 1990: 4). This betrayal, which occurs, I have argued, as sacrifice, “opens, in turn, even larger vistas of betrayal” (Stoekl, 1990: 4). Stoekl has taken this logic to its limit:

So perhaps in Bataille there is the necessity of morality and representation, no matter how ‘accursed’, along with its impossibility. There is the […] betrayal of the […] ‘nothing’, elaborated at the expense of the ethical, and there is, in and through that very writing, the impossibility of maintaining its purity, and thus the consequent, incessant, re-positing of the ethical, even in the representation of its defeat or sundering (Stoekl, 1990: 5).

perhaps until now.. now have means to facil the seeming chaos of the dance

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The practice of sacrifice brings us to an understanding of the role of silence in radical activity. Silence is a practice, but it is not the sort of practice that is performed by intimate subjects, rather it is that which interrupts the noise of ethical activity.

*Silence is hence, according to Bataille, “a question of speaking, silence being the last thing that language can silence, and which language cannot nonetheless take as its object without a kind of crime” (Bataille in Mitchell & Winfree, 2009: 199). To the extent that sacrifice is a violence that is inflicted upon the subject, it is also a refusal to “declare either its own existence or its right to exist; it simply exists” (Bataille, 1986: 188). After years of contemplation on the subject of silence, Bataille was forced to admit: “I know this now: I don’t have the means to silence myself” (Bataille, 1986: 68). **The problem is that in the description of the failure of language one performs the contradiction of expressing silence through language. I have hence failed, as a criminal, to perform in secret the sacrifice of graduate life, for example. The sacrifice that occurs, therefore, is the one that gets on with its day with all of the violence that this entails, including the violence against the sacred art of sacrifice itself. A sacrifice, without words. A sacrifice I could not perform today. A sacrifice, I ask, indeed beg, of all anarchists who read this volume: learn the fine art of pretending to be an anarchist. Hide this book. Do not let the other anarchists read it.

*to me.. more about quiet enough to see ness.. and the need to undo our hierarchical listening

**lanier beyond words law.. rumi words law.. et al

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Conclusion

*Georges Bataille aimed to describe the sacred principles of the general economy. However, in the preface to the first volume of The Accursed Share, he admitted that his work always failed at this task. To the extent that his work articulated the sacred it did so only through betrayed ‘approximations’ (Noys, 2000: 117). In this sense, Bataille was writing through the Lacanian ‘analyst’s discourse’: his discourse “trace[d] a contour around that which it hovers about, circles, and skirts” (Fink, 1997: 28). More than anything else, **Bataille’s writing approximated silence. In his essay “The Method of Meditation” (a chapter from The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge, 2001), he described silence as the practice of sovereignty: “The sovereign is in the domain of silence, and if we talk about it we incriminate the silence that constitutes it. […] ***We can certainly execute the study, but only in the worst, the most painful conditions” (Bataille, 2001: 126). It has been under this painful condition that I have executed my study of the intersections of three philosophical traditions.

*to me.. bachelard oikos law

**again to the quiet enough to see ness

***to me.. if still study ness.. then not legit silent/free ness

I have attempted to satisfy two mutually exclusive demands that have been imposed upon me from opposite locations: the demand to construct a system of knowledge about Bataille from the position of the academy (the discourse of the university) and the demand to sabotage this system of knowledge about Bataille through the faithful reading of his work. Moreover, in succumbing to the former demand I have also failed in my sovereign task (the latter demand): “Even, as far as talking about it, it is contradictory to search for these movements […] *Insofar as we seek something, whatever this might be, we do not live sovereignly, we subordinate the present moment to a future moment, which will follow it” (italics in original; Bataille, 2001: 126)..

*exactly.. huge huge huge

I have thus come to acknowledge that there are at least two ways in which failure ought to be understood in relation to my essay. First, I have failed in the putting-into-practice of Bataille’s ethics of failure. *By constructing a system of knowledge for the academy I have failed to perform the sovereign function of silence. Likewise, Bataille’s work “aimed at the acquisition of a knowledge,” even where this knowledge was discovered to be “that of an error” (Bataille, 1991: 10–11). For my part, I have aimed to demonstrate that a knowledge of the failed ethics of anarchism can be elaborated in reference to the failed knowledge of Bataille. Second, I have also realized that the failure to perform failure, productive as it may be, nonetheless necessitates future reductions of useful knowledge. It therefore dawns upon me that failure operates across two planes: the general and the restrictive economies. Bataille’s reduction of the general economy to the restrictive economy has proved essential to a full understanding of the ethics of failure. **Bataille had to fail so that he could approximate the sacred relationship and to promote movements toward sovereignty—Bataille could not be silent. Similarly, post-anarchists had to fail by producing a reductionist discourse in order to demonstrate the problems of reductionism. We get the sense that the first moment of failure is evident in the following passage from the preface to the first volume of The Accursed Share:

*aka: intellectness as cancerous distraction et al

**to me.. if legit free.. wouldn’t call that failure (lynch fixed hidden law et al).. just part of the dance.. and the there is never nothing going on ness..

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I have claimed that Georges Bataille’s ethical philosophy converges in interesting ways with recent readings of the anarchist tradition from the standpoint of an emergent body of thought known as post-anarchism. My first confession, that my classification systems intended to perform a failure, consisted of the following objective: I aimed to defy the contemporary codes of what it means to be an anarchist in the academy. I shall now end with a final confession: over the course of almost two decades of higher education I have learned that to be an anarchist in the academy is to consequently occupy a liminal zone between two (admittedly unstable) identities. On the one hand, as an anarchist one’s object of investigation is immediately rejected by academics as naive and contradictory; to be an anarchist in the academy is to have one’s research mocked—it means avoiding social encounters with other academics for fear of constant humiliation. On the other hand, as an academic one is immediately dismissed by anarchists for ostensibly speaking the “discourse of the university”; to be an academic within the anarchist milieu is to have one’s research mocked as well—it means being excluded from social encounters with other anarchists for fear of having their radical epistemologies recuperated by academic systems of knowledge.

solution: let go of explaining/teaching/describing/naming the colour ness et al

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*It has been my expressed purpose to question both of my identities (as an anarchist and as an academic) from another standpoint. This standpoint remains not in-between but unsettled, unsure, and perpetually suspicious of both identities (without, necessarily, remaining neutral). In this respect my thesis has been an **attempt to come to terms with my own position in between two worlds and to problematize the manifest ethical discourses of both in order to arrive at something new. What I have discovered is only ‘new’ in the sense that it is the object of multiple traditions that has hitherto been repressed. I have discovered a meta-ethics that opens up the discursive system of traditional anarchism rather than pinning it down to any meta-ethical discourse (resistance to closure). By way of concluding this essay, I shall now describe what brought me to this position. ***It is only by going to the end that we truly mark a beginning:

*if identity ing.. already same song ing.. marsh label law et al

**to me.. anything new can’t be commingled with any form of binary ness et al

***yeah to me that is part of the cancerous distraction game.. aka: takes a lot of work ness et al.. a legit dance would/could be no prep.. no train.. et al

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Consequently, the active nihilist creates her own values in life and leaves them uncoded—her ethical act is performed in silence. Similarly, Bataille’s ethical act is the one that does not get recuperated by meta-ethical discourse. My conclusion is that nihilist anarchism, as the tradition that lurks always beneath anarchism, maintains that all ethical acts are the ones that do not get reified by language—precisely, this is its meta-ethics.

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