#nathan jun

[forbidden-sorcery]

Like Bakunin, all anarchists are ‘true seekers’. They seek nothing in particular save greater and more expansive frontiers to explore. Such frontiers, moreover, promise nothing save the possibility of further exploration. Freedom is the practice of opening up new spaces for the practice of freedom. We might call these practices ‘life-possibilities’ and say that political postmodernity, that anarchy, is nothing more than a ‘life-creation process’. However, if all life is an indeterminate flow, we can never know in advance what forms lives can or will take. ‘There is a bit of death in everything’, wrote Rilke. Thus to be revolutionary is to be on guard against death, to prepare oneself not to flee death, nor even to fight it, but simply to change the subject, to do and think otherwise, to seek what is new and vital – all in the hope that some life can and will come from that death, that there is a ‘bit of life’ in everything, too.

Nathan Jun

[sharpened--edges]

Deleuze claimed at one point that Foucault was the first to teach us of ‘the indignity of speaking for others.’ Had Deleuze read Proudhon, Bakunin, or Goldman, he may have come to a very different conclusion. For indeed, if anyone deserves credit for this ‘discovery’ it is the so-called classical anarchists. It was they, after all, who originally ascribed the highest moral value (and not merely dignity) to the ability of human beings and communities to ‘speak for themselves,’ to act creatively upon themselves, to open up and pursue new possibilities for themselves—in short, to live. So, too, it was the anarchists who realized that the essence of political oppression is wresting this ability from others, and, more importantly, that this ‘wresting’ involves ‘giving people images [representations] of who they are and what they desire.’

Nathan Jun, Anarchism and Political Modernity (Continuum, 2012), p. 128.

[sharpened--edges]

Why … has anarchism continued to be mostly ignored within academia and especially in Anglo-American philosophy? Although there are no easy answers to these questions, one tentative answer concerns the fundamentally conservative nature of Anglo-American political philosophy. As the late David Mitrany noted, ‘most political philosophers in the past few generations have what the psychoanalysts might call a “state fixation.”’ Liberalism is not just one theory—albeit the dominant one—among many theories, but instead has become the de facto framework within which all political theorizing is carried out. In such a context, the idea of abolishing the state, let alone capitalism, is at best hopelessly utopian and at worst patently absurd.

Nathan Jun, Anarchism and Political Modernity (Continuum, 2012), p. ix.

[athousandgateaux]

Politics is not a field of inquiry. Rather, it is a descriptive term for power relations that are described and analyzed by various fields of inquiry including, but not limited to, political science, psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Because this distinction has largely been overlooked within the Western tradition, politics has often been conflated with the very disciplines that attempt to study it. A similar fate has befallen political philosophy, which is commonly regarded as a subordinate branch of moral philosophy that applies specifically to states or governments. To the extent that philosophers have analyzed other forms of social relation, such as friendship or marriage, their analyses have tended, with a few notable exceptions, to fall outside the scope of political philosophy sensu stricto. This characterization of political philosophy is misguided. If politics refers not to the study of social power relations but to social power relations themselves, and if political philosophy is understood as the broadest and most general study of social power relations, it follows that moral philosophy is better viewed as a branch of political philosophy and not the other way around…Although I will say more about the role of moral philosophy in the next chapter, let us describe it for the time being as a kind of micropolitical analysis that focuses on the actions of individual people. It is micropolitical, again, because human actions – especially the sort of actions that are studied by moral philosophers – always involve relations of power

Nathan Jun, Anarchism and Political Modernity pg. 15

[athousandgateaux]

anarchism may be understood as a kind of principled skepticism toward all authorities, even those of an open or transparent nature. Submission to arbitrary authority is by itself objectionable because ‘it divest[s] the personality of its most integral traits; it denies the very notion that the individual is competent to deal…with the management of his or her personal life.’ Put another way, arbitrary authority violates psychological and moral autonomy – the ability of the individual to think and act for herself in accordance with reason and conscience. Absent a theoretical or moral justification, opaque authority almost invariably backs up its power through coercion and violence, which anarchists oppose for the same reason they oppose opaque authority more generally: because it violates the ‘self-respect and independence’ of the individual. As Bakunin says, authority that purports to be ‘privileged, licensed, official, and legal, even if it arises from universal suffrage…’ will inevitably be enforced through violence ‘to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters.

Nathan Jun, Anarchism and Political Modernity pg. 114

[athousandgateaux]

Anarchists recognize that there are many types of authority relations, not all of which are coercive (thus, objectionable). As Richard Sylvan notes, ‘Consider, for example, the relation of a student to an authority in some field of knowledge who can in turn back up expert judgements by appeal to a further range of assessable evidence… [A]nyone with time and some skill can proceed past authority to assess claims made.” Such authority relations, which Sylvan calls ‘transparent’ or ‘open,’ stand in opposition to: ‘[O]paque’ (or ‘closed’) authorities, who simply stand on their position or station…[or] appeal to a conventional rule or procedure…without being able to step beyond some rule book…which has been enacted (for reasons not open to, or bearing, examination) by a further substantially opaque authority.'

Nathan Jun, Anarchism and Political Modernity pg. 113-114

[athousandgateaux]

If ‘anarchy’ refers not only to the absence of coercive authority, but to the absence of a ‘chief,’ ‘head,’ or ‘top’ – in other words, to the absence of concentrated power exercised ‘from the top down’ – anarchist equality entails the equal distribution of power, which in turn implies the categorical rejection of centralization and hierarchy. Such equality is necessary, moreover, in order to maximize individual freedom – not just ‘freedom from’ (negative liberty), but ‘freedom to’ (positive liberty).

Nathan Jun, Anarchism and Political Modernity pg. 124

[athousandgateaux]

[There are] two indispensable features of the anarchist conception of freedom: first, that freedom involves the capacity of the individual to create himself or herself, to resist what Foucault calls ‘subjectivation’ by cultivating new identities and forms of subjectivity; and second, that freedom is a capacity that emerges in, and is made possible by, social existence. The second feature belies a crucial difference between anarchism and liberalism. In a state of negative freedom, the rational, egoistic, atomic agent of liberalism recognizes her interests (understood not just as personal desires but as various ends determined by universal human nature) and takes means to achieve them. For the anarchists, however, the development of an individual human personality is a social process in which both community and the individual play a necessary and irreplaceable role. Human subjectivity is produced in part by social forces, which can be either positive or negative, as well as by the individual force of self-creation (i.e., ‘positive freedom’). The realization of individuality and individual freedom, Bakunin stresses, is only possible ‘in society and only by the collective action of the whole society.

Nathan Jun, Anarchism and Political Modernity pg. 125