Submitted by anon (not verified) on Sat, 08/28/2021 - 00:06
Still, I did not come out of it with an optimism for a project of synthesis or a collective force, partly because of how the passages below resonated with me. The quips I added are my impressions upon reading them.
"...anarchists share a tendency to waver between dogmatism and dispersion, with consequences for both individual and collective practice that are all too predictable. The consolation for anarchists is that the difficulties that lead to this sort of wavering are almost certainly structural..."
anrch(anything) is dispersion, an impasse
"The anarchist tradition is, in its actual form, simply the ensemble of all that anarchists are saying about anarchism or anarchist ideas in any given moment, together with whatever share of historical anarchist utterances remain active in some sense in anarchist discourse. It is not a sum or resultant. We cannot count on it to “add up” in any very consistent sense. Indeed, we expect that it would exhibit considerable conflict and inconsistency, assuming we could somehow make all of its elements simultaneously present to consciousness."
anarch(anything) is a hodgepodge ensemble of utterings, a cacophony of contradictions, conflict and discord
"...-isms as “not worth a pair of boots,”..."
"...the collective manifestations of anarchism have remained primarily spaces of conflict, compromise and failure."
" To at least start to address that question, I want to return to the “general formula”: Anarchism = (((an + arche)ist)ism)"
this reminds me of what Wittgenstein said about truth propositions and language games, & analytic philosophers resorting to formal logic & math, & math itself being a doomed endeavor
"We’re looking for ways to “fix” the terms of analysis enough so that we are not constantly struggling with various kinds of semantic noise and slippage, while still respecting what is fundamentally anarchic and ungovernable in both the concepts and the bodies of theory and practice we are hoping to examine. In that context, anarchy is the term that needs to be defined with the greatest care."
Anarch(anything) is an empty signifier, the place of noise and slippage.
"...the anarchy of our anarchisms seems to emerge from uncertainty about the shared ideal, from the substitution of some other guiding concept for anarchy “in the full force of the term,” [...] the “anarchisms” in question are ultimately incommensurable—and we may not even be able to have a good fight about them. Rather than a plurality of anarchisms, we have some form of dispersion, obscured by shared terms."
"when anarchists find themselves talking about the different meanings of important keywords, it is to acknowledge that we may simply be speaking at cross-purposes—whether or not that recognition leads us to make the clarifications presumably called for. It probably makes a lot more sense to be on particularly our guard against missteps as we play anarchic games with the language and concepts associated with anarchy"
anarch(anything/whatever) is an instance of wordplay at its origin & core, as useful/useless as a pun
"...it is really the most general sort of anarchism that confronts us most dauntingly as we are attempting to become an anarchist, whether we are beginners trying to confront or embrace it all at once or whether we are old-timers forced to deal with how much anarchism there is out there that is so clearly not “our own.”"
no anarch(whatever) is our own, except our own, because it's many made-up things upon which there's no agreement
“Profusion and uncertainty” is the formula I have used in other writings to gesture at the ways that anarchy provides us with both too much and too little, all at the same time. Anarchism-in-general seems to frustrate our needs and expectation in similar ways."
"what it would take for anarchism-in-general to be recognized among anarchists as a space of solidarity, rather than primarily a space of distinction and conflict"
anarch(whatever) is distinction & conflict, all unity & solidarity is outside of it
Still, I did not come out of it with an optimism for a project of synthesis or a collective force, partly because of how the passages below resonated with me. The quips I added are my impressions upon reading them.
"...anarchists share a tendency to waver between dogmatism and dispersion, with consequences for both individual and collective practice that are all too predictable. The consolation for anarchists is that the difficulties that lead to this sort of wavering are almost certainly structural..."
anrch(anything) is dispersion, an impasse
"The anarchist tradition is, in its actual form, simply the ensemble of all that anarchists are saying about anarchism or anarchist ideas in any given moment, together with whatever share of historical anarchist utterances remain active in some sense in anarchist discourse. It is not a sum or resultant. We cannot count on it to “add up” in any very consistent sense. Indeed, we expect that it would exhibit considerable conflict and inconsistency, assuming we could somehow make all of its elements simultaneously present to consciousness."
anarch(anything) is a hodgepodge ensemble of utterings, a cacophony of contradictions, conflict and discord
"...-isms as “not worth a pair of boots,”..."
"...the collective manifestations of anarchism have remained primarily spaces of conflict, compromise and failure."
" To at least start to address that question, I want to return to the “general formula”: Anarchism = (((an + arche)ist)ism)"
this reminds me of what Wittgenstein said about truth propositions and language games, & analytic philosophers resorting to formal logic & math, & math itself being a doomed endeavor
"We’re looking for ways to “fix” the terms of analysis enough so that we are not constantly struggling with various kinds of semantic noise and slippage, while still respecting what is fundamentally anarchic and ungovernable in both the concepts and the bodies of theory and practice we are hoping to examine. In that context, anarchy is the term that needs to be defined with the greatest care."
Anarch(anything) is an empty signifier, the place of noise and slippage.
"...the anarchy of our anarchisms seems to emerge from uncertainty about the shared ideal, from the substitution of some other guiding concept for anarchy “in the full force of the term,” [...] the “anarchisms” in question are ultimately incommensurable—and we may not even be able to have a good fight about them. Rather than a plurality of anarchisms, we have some form of dispersion, obscured by shared terms."
"when anarchists find themselves talking about the different meanings of important keywords, it is to acknowledge that we may simply be speaking at cross-purposes—whether or not that recognition leads us to make the clarifications presumably called for. It probably makes a lot more sense to be on particularly our guard against missteps as we play anarchic games with the language and concepts associated with anarchy"
anarch(anything/whatever) is an instance of wordplay at its origin & core, as useful/useless as a pun
"...it is really the most general sort of anarchism that confronts us most dauntingly as we are attempting to become an anarchist, whether we are beginners trying to confront or embrace it all at once or whether we are old-timers forced to deal with how much anarchism there is out there that is so clearly not “our own.”"
no anarch(whatever) is our own, except our own, because it's many made-up things upon which there's no agreement
“Profusion and uncertainty” is the formula I have used in other writings to gesture at the ways that anarchy provides us with both too much and too little, all at the same time. Anarchism-in-general seems to frustrate our needs and expectation in similar ways."
"what it would take for anarchism-in-general to be recognized among anarchists as a space of solidarity, rather than primarily a space of distinction and conflict"
anarch(whatever) is distinction & conflict, all unity & solidarity is outside of it