bad anarchism

Bad Anarchism – Aestheticized Mythmaking and the Legacy of Georges Sorel – (2011) mark antliff.. 23 pgs

via 23 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mark-antliff-bad-anarchism-aestheticized-mythmaking-and-the-legacy-of-georges-sorel]

notes/quotes:

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About the Author

Mark Antliff, Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University, is author of Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (1993); co-editor with Matthew Affron of Fascist Vision: Art and Ideology in France and Italy (1997); and co-author with Patricia Leighten of two books, Cubism and Culture (2001) and A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914 (2008). In 2010–11 he co-curated the exhibition The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–1918, which opened at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and then traveled to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and to Tate Britain. The present study derives in part from his book on Georges Sorel’s myriad impact on French politics, art and culture, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (2007).

another art world et al

Abstract

This article considers the varied impact of the notion of revolutionary consciousness first developed by the French political theorist Georges Sorel (1847–1922) on proponents of anarchism and Marxism, including Walter Benjamin, Bart de Light, Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci and, most recently, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. I question the strategy amongst these thinkers to draw selectively from Sorel’s writings in an attempt to create a cordon sanitaire around those aspects of his thought that are problematic by virtue of their impact on proto-fascist and fascist ideologues throughout Europe. In addressing this issue I examine how Sorel’s anarchist theory of anti-Statism, constructed around the power of myths, led him to endorse anti-capitalist antiSemitism as an extension of class struggle; and I critique his Janusfaced concept of aestheticized violence as it relates to his quest for moral regeneration through revolution.

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

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Central to Sorel’s theory following his break with orthodox Marxism was his notion of myth-making as the principle means by which oppressed groups establish a radical subjectivity among the rank and file in their ongoing battle against their oppressors. Thus in his Reflections on Violence (1908), Sorel concluded that the revolutionary transformations instigated by religious sects and political movements arise from the emotive impact of their core myths, defined as those visionary principles that inspire immediate action. For Sorel, myths were decidedly instrumental; rather than providing people with a social blueprint for a future to be created incrementally through political reform and rational planning *myths presented the public with a visionary ideal whose stark contrast with present reality would agitate the masses. For Sorel myths were at the core of the direct action strategies of the anarchists and the psychological catalyst for revolution. In his Reflections on Violence, Sorel underscored the emotive and intuitive nature of myth by defining it as “a body of images capable of evoking all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the War undertaken by socialism against modern society.” Having condemned parliamentary socialists for employing rational argumentation to promote social change, Sorel lauded the mythic power of the French anarcho-syndicalist vision of a **general strike for its ability to instill revolutionary fervor among the working class. If each worker believed their strike action would spark similar acts throughout France and that the proliferation of such strikes would result in the downfall of capitalism, then the evocation of such an apocalyptic general strike would inspire workers to engage in heroic forms of ***violent resistance to the capitalist status quo. ****Sorel viewed the general strike as only the latest manifestation of the power of mythic images to transform individual consciousness and ultimately, whole societies. Other examples included the Christian belief in Christ’s imminent return; the various utopic images that had inspired the citizen-soldiers of France to defend the Revolution of 1789; and Giuseppi Mazzini’s visionary call for a united Italy which had motivated the common people to take up arms during the Risorgimento (1861–70). In each case, mythmakers drew a strong contrast between a decadent present, rife with political and ethical corruption, and their vision of a *****regenerated future society, premised, in no small part, on the spiritual transformation of each individual within the body politic.

*not rev/diff.. just cancerous distraction.. nothing to date deep enough to get to (to be about) all of us.. **ie of this said part\ial ness ***more ie.. any form of re ness

****has to be all of us (beyond whole societies).. strike/myth (everything to date) not deep enough to get to root of problem.. so will just perpetuate the whac-a-mole-ing ness.. the same song ness.. of sea world

*****has to be each individual.. 1st thing every day.. self-talk as data.. to connect us.. ie: imagine if we

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In Le Mouvement socialiste, Sorel critiqued the deterministic, mechanistic and materialist aspects of both capitalism and parliamentary democracy, which in turn inspired him to posit a spiritualist road to revolution meant to galvanize both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. His primary concern was with the decadence of French society, for *Sorel viewed class conflict as the means by which bourgeois and proletarian alike could be rejuvenated and the corrupting effects of parliamentary democracy successfully resisted.

*?.. public consensus always oppresses someone(s).. marsh label law.. ie: class ness et al.. need discrimination (to infinity) as equity

*Fundamental to Sorel’s distinction between vital and degenerative social forces was a division derived from Bergson between those social structures arising from intellectual modes of thought and those tied to intuition, and thus expressive of the vital durée animating life. Duration, Bergson’s term for temporality, was synonymous with creativity, and each material manifestation of duration reportedly contained within it an élan vital, or vital impulse. According to Bergson intuition was the faculty of thought most adapted to this life force and thus able both to discern duration and contribute to its creative evolution, its production of material form. Ultimately Bergson hoped that intuition would not only give us insight into life, but knowledge of each other, and that **social forms based on intuition would create a society open to its own creative evolution. Since intuition was a form of empathic consciousness, a disinterested type of instinct, the social order arising from this state would be the product of a sympathetic communion of free wills, an order expressive of the consciousness of each citizen rather than one imposed mechanically from without by some external authority. ***Intuition then was a state of mind able to reflect on its own nature and externalize or express that nature in the form of creative acts. The nature of those acts necessarily mirrored the creative process from which they sprang; thus intuitive acts had all the attributes of creative duration itself: they were indivisible, heterogeneous, and qualitative processes. ****For Sorel, Bergson’s insights had profound consequences, both for his vision of society and the means by which he sought to change it. In his interpretation of Bergson, intellectualized conceptions described by Bergson as antithetical to intuition had their political equivalent in Republican and enlightenment ideology.Sorel and his colleague Berth sought to identify the qualitative differences within the body politic ignored by democratic apologists, the most significant of these differences being that of class. In Sorel’s theory each class had its unique élan; *****the error of democracy was that it subsumed all classes into its abstract conception of citizenship, thereby denying the heterogeneity of class difference and the vital qualities intrinsic to each class.

*ie: intellectness as cancerous distraction .. need curiosity over decision making.. life over survival ness.. 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

[‘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 a global detox leap/dance.. to facil the thing we’ve not yet tried: the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake..

**aka: the dance

***aka: left to own devices ness

****aka: global detox leap.. to a nother way

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

*****any form of democratic admin as cancerous distraction.. but too.. any form of class ness.. any form of us & them ness..

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In his Reflections on Violence Sorel applied this theory of qualitative differences to his conception of collectivity, claiming that individuals chose to join a syndicat as an expression of their free will, and their intuitive sympathy with each other. *The spiritual transformation of each individual assured that all action undertaken by an individual was in harmonious relation to that of his peers. In a chapter titled “The Morality of the Producers,” Sorel related such harmonious actions to an internal discipline **“founded on the deepest feelings of the soul” rather than a discipline that was “merely external constraint.” He concluded that syndicalist action was the product of “a qualitative and individualistic point of view,” before adding that “anarchists have entered the syndicats in great numbers, and have done much to develop tendancies favourable to the general strike.” To Sorel’s mind anarchism and the intuitive consciousness animating syndicalism were utterly compatible, as long as creative individuals acted in consort, in response to a class consciousness premised on intuitive sympathy.

*yeah.. but only if legit detox/re\set.. ie: the dance

**aka: itch-in-the-soul.. need to try imagine if we ness..

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Finally we need to take another look at Sorel’s concept of heroic violence, which he defined in opposition to the punitive violence of the State. Those who have endorsed Sorel’s concept of the general strike as the principle expression of proletarian violence have mostly interpreted Sorel’s theory as a form non-violent resistance to the government’s barbaric use of “force.” Even Bart de Ligt, who acknowledges that Sorel’s doctrine “is anything but a plea for nonviolence” nevertheless does not take up a discussion of that issue, preferring instead to celebrate Sorel’s distinction between “Bourgeois violence” and Proletarian violence,” which de Ligt recasts as a contrast between “bourgeois violence and proletarian strength,” the better to ally Sorel’s theory with “direct non-violent action.” What figures like Benjamin, de Ligt and Laclau and Mouffe hold in common is an unwillingness to probe the most troubling aspect of Sorel’s theory of proletarian violence, namely his comparison of the sense of morality and justice motivating striking workers in their resistance to the State with that instilled in soldiers engaged in military battle.

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Sorel’s concept of military virtue was modelled after the citizen-soldier of ancient Athens while his productivism combined an antique concept of the dignity of labour with a nineteenth-century definition of “industriousness” encompassing managerial, productive and inventive skills, especially in modern industry. ..Sorel followed such luminaries as Montesquieu, Hume, and de Tocqueville in noting “the contradiction between the classical ideal of the self-repression and self-forgetfulness of the citizen and a social order in which the predominant motive is profit seeking.” Whereas military values extolled heroism and self-sacrifice in the name of the community, commercialism promoted individual selfinterest at the expense of the collective good. … The citizens were not merchants, demanding guarantees for their transactions and protection for their industry, or seeking favours from government. They were soldiers whose very life was linked to the greatness of the city.”.. “the warrior of the city” had a modern counterpart in “the worker of advanced industry.”

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For Sorel then, a war in the name of the appropriate values could reinvigorate the nation; examples included “the wars of Revolution and the Empire” which, by virtue of their success, were also a stimulus to “industrial production.” ..Thus proletarian producers could find their regenerative raison d’être not only in the general strike, but in the heroism of militant nationalism.

Thus the non-violent resistance exemplified by the general strike was one dimension of an ideological matrix that included armed aggression, for in Sorel’s mind both postures could potentially be animated by the same spirit of heroism, dignity and justice. This synthesis, like that of anti-capitalist anti-Semitism, indicates that Sorel’s theory encompassed revolutionary and reactionary elements. Thus in announcing their allegiance to Sorel, Europe’s fascists could rightly claim that their notion of violence was a direct outcome of — to paraphrase Laclau and Mouffe — the very structure of Sorel’s thought. Given such realities, anarchist activists and theorists would do well to ponder the example of Sorel not only as a potential model for progressive activism, but as an object lesson in how a doctrine of aestheticizing myth and ethical violence not subject to rational analysis (or critical reflection on the part of those who embrace such notions) can quickly devolve into a reactionary tool in the hands of political elites.

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