 Contrast is a double-edged sword, kids. And by that, I mean: When things are right for once, it can often draw into relief just how wrong they are otherwise. My time at the inaugural North American Anarchist Studies Network (NAASN) conference a few weekends back sort of employed this truism to beat me about the head and shoulders, leaving me to make my way home a bit dazed, to be honest. It's not much of a secret anymore, but living in DC, I want virtually nothing to do with people who consciously articulate themselves as anarchists. That's a rather dramatic declaration, I know. And a somewhat embarrassing one, given that in 1997 (shortly after I fell in love with the tradition), a call for DC-area anarchists to meet up was put out, and I was one of 3 people to show up. It's not, at all, unfair to say I played at least some role in bringing what exists now into being, sadly.
But the fact of the matter is... In practically every meaningful way, the milieu in question contemporarily functions like a party apparatus, when it's not merely a social scene. Certainly, much as its members would deny it, there is a rather narrow set of aesthetic signifiers demarcating interiority/exteriority. The list thereof is not terribly interesting, but (for instance) I've lost track of how many of my Arab friends have said "Yeah, I poked my head in Sticky Fingers once, but I looked around and realized that I was not nearly 'cool' enough, and left." But more importantly, there are a host of deeply entrenched orthodoxies that make it increasingly difficult to meaningfully distinguish anarchists (in terms of any intellectual or ethical practice) from say... The Mormon Church. And for that matter, the penalties for transgressing or departing from said orthodoxies are often neck and neck with your average cult, in terms of cynicism, entitlement, duplicity, malice, and frenzy -- and in its wake, all the baggage, trauma, stigma, acrimony, gossip and standard horse shit one reasonably expects to encounter in the life of any religious kid who's (however fleetingly) wandered off the proverbial reservation.
And to lay this out in plainly political language, anarchist orthodoxy (at least here in DC) bears the distinct fingerprints of privilege. Now, I know -- I know -- the weight of that word itself has been warped and confused to the point of lacking much specificity, at all (largely... at the hands of white anarchists -- :::irony:::). So, I'll qualify my use of it, and for the purposes of this essay anchor it to Albert Memmi's description of what he called The Colonizer Who Refuses in his seminal work, The Colonizer and the Colonized (no, I'm not going to quote it here; go read it). What I'm attempting to name here are quite naked orthodoxies of self-reference, orthodoxies of identity-reinforcement, orthodoxies of self-justification -- and perhaps most importantly, orthodoxies often practiced in stark contrast to the stated ethics/principles from which they were purportedly derived (read: colonization). What we're left with are performances de-coupled from any objective beyond signification of identity.
In and of itself, there's nothing terribly wrong with the bulk of that. "All gender is drag", right? My clients engage in any number of signifying performances vis-a-vis class, culture, and professional identities. I have friends who openly mock the idea of a god, but will fast for Ramadan as a matter of culture and family tradition/cohesion. I can only vaguely elaborate any prefigurative political value from my obsessing over bikes or (god help us all... ) coffee. These acts of signification are what make us human beings, or at very least what make being human at all interesting. The distinction worth making here is that in none of these latter instances do the people referred to frontload these performances with some disproportionate political significance. There's a maturity and candor operating that allows them to own those practices for what they are, without recourse to the idea that as the performers they're special in some way that anyone else is not, or recourse to an alleged political discourse -- to say nothing whatsoever of policing the boundaries of said discourse.
In his book The Moral Theory of Postructuralism, Todd May breaks this down in terms of aesthetic and consequentialist evaluations. The former (in one of his examples) looks something like people saying that homosexuality is objectionable because it's a departure from something normative, or is contrary to religious doctrine. The latter looks something like saying, "If people opt to consensually rub genitals together that appear more than less alike, what are the tangible outcomes?". For those who've read and still aren't clear on the gist of Anti-Oedipus, you could reduce its thesis to that distinction (and a rejection of the former mode of evaluation) and feel confident that you did not, in fact, miss the point. Anti-intellectualism of the fundamentalist stripe and that of Carhart-bedecked (or increasingly, junkie-fit jean-sporting) anarchists ultimately produce the same effect: Atrophy; an inability to adapt or innovate. This is precisely why the anarchist milieu is still chewing the same cud it coughed up ten years ago with no apparent or consequent insights, and posts as headlines on its news sites such absurd and embarrassing crap as "The Bricks We Throw at Police Today Will Build the Liberation Schools of Tomorrow".
And this is what ultimately made the NAASN conference such a diamond in the rough. Really. I could wax poetic about how emotionally affected I was by it, what a rejuvenating experience it was, what redemptive possibilities it posed for a thoughtful, dynamic anarchist praxis. But it'd ultimately be more instructive for me to just fire off a handful of relatively simple things that made it unqiue:
1] While there were certainly disagreements (quite fierce, actually) about the content of this or that speaker's presentation(s), there was an expectation that even indications of self-importance would spring from a certain competence. Which is to say that a modicum of competence was a baseline. If I can return, for a second, to the point about anarchist self-articulation bearing the fingerprints of privilege and colonialist practice -- there's an epidemic sense (in DC, anyway) of entitlement sans competence among young, white anarchists. It's as though the lifelong experience of being afforded credibility out of hand because one inhabits a particular category of privilege has cultivated a certain offense or outrage at any interrogation of one's claims. When was the last time you heard someone make some sweeping, antagonistic claim about civilization -- coupled, of course, with some romantic reference to indigenous or (god help us) "primitive" peoples -- inclusive of the name of an actual tribe? And when was the last time you saw such an utterance (lacking in reference to an actual tribe) treated to incredulous laughter? This doesn't even begin to unpack the sense that one is entitled to an audience or a hearing, without ever demonstrating the merit of one's claims, or one's command over the subject matter. I'm not suggesting some stupid system of gatekeeping or whathaveyou. We're all at least superficially in agreement about the fact that people directly impacted by a particular system or form of oppression are the most qualified to speak to it. Those aren't the conditions at work, here. I'm suggesting that at the level of the individuals who comprise a movement or a community (particularly those of us socialized under conditions of considerable privilege), we ought to expect more from ourselves and each other than a roman candle-style dazzle of buzzwords or claptraps. We ought to expect of ourselves and each other actual substance -- and we ought to expect of ourselves and each other the labor it requires to arrive at that. It's not as though the NAASN folks were policing the hell out of what got in the door. The overall product was simply a reflection of what happens when consensus around standards is articulated from the bottom up. As an anarchist, nothing about this shocks me. People are perfectly capable of this.
2] In many sessions, this was reflected in the fact that people in the audience actually asked questions. Novel, I know. But between these sessions and those where post-presentation space was filled with people simply making statements, I noticed that in the former, the audience actually participated in moving conversations forward. Again, it's embarrassing that I even have to write this shit down like it's news. What the distinction seems to come down to is the presence/absence of curiosity (the absence thereof also being sadly epidemic among young, white anarchists). One needn't agree with a presenter in order to be curious. One can pose thoughtful, critical interrogations of a speaker by way of simply humbling oneself enough to be curious; by subtly admitting that -- yes -- there are things one does not know. And what one shares in that act likely moves everyone forward. Again, the NAASN folks weren't barking instructions about the format of discussion. Certain folks simply took it upon themselves (at times) to forego their rehearsed self-congratulation in favor of thoughtful questions.
3] Sessions were framed around new questions. I'm not even going to bother enumerating them here, just go look at the schedule posted on the NAASN site. I'm not suggesting that they were all unique little snowflakes of discursive wonder, but at any number of points, these panels and workshops could've retreated to familiar and unchallenging territory, and in most cases they did not. Badass.
Some of you probably want to know how my presentation went. Given that there was a very nice fellow manning a camera throughout, I suspect there's video of our panel floating around somewhere. And thus, anyone with bandwidth can judge for themselves. I'll say that I felt good about it, and that I was really, really moved that folks not only stuck to asking questions after, but posed really thoughtful questions that in some cases did not involve easy or comforting answers. And based on my interactions with folks who chatted me up after (at the urinal, even), the conversation seemed to have raised a number of provocative themes. I won't lie: That's undeniably exciting, and I'm thankful for the opportunity to have been part of that.
But it all makes for an awkward return home, no? The work I'm engaged in is still as exciting to me as ever, and the life I have with my partner, my neighbors, my friends, and my city is still immeasurable in its rewards. But the disillusionment and alienation I've grappled with for some time now is somewhat intensified by the hint that a redemptive articulation of anarchism is possible. There's now a wistfulness resting somewhere in there that's difficult to shake.
And it's a whole other conversation, but I spent my downtime in Connecticut reuniting and communing with a friend from my adolescent years in Italy, who I'd not seen in something like 15 years. I could devote considerable text to marveling at the generosity and hospitality she and her husband showed me, the latenight conversations that our bodies likely punished us for, or the stunning toddler they're raising and his rather brilliant quirks. It was both a refuge and a bit of a revelation.
My recollections of my years in Sicily are hardly fond. It wouldn't really break my heart to have the bulk of it wiped from my memory, to be honest, and the nostalgia of my former peers (beamed into my world by way of Facebook) is simultaneously baffling and depressing. The traumas, myopia, the pinhole worldview, and the impoverished sense of possibility we all had to swallow day-in and day-out care of the US military community... While I do my best to refrain from judgment, it's difficult for me to accept that so many of these folks have been so willing to subject their own children to that nightmare, by ducking right back into the community that produced them. I ran as far and as fast as my legs would carry me, frankly... As a matter of survival. To undertake anything of a return would've been pretty loaded for me, were this friend not who she is. Appropriate, perhaps, that this was all followed by Thanksgiving.
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