4th-dee event matrix irruption!
As was perhaps obvious from my description of the activities involved, I wasn’t really at a secret anarchist training camp, I was on holiday (with some friends who mostly are in fact anarchists). We had some interesting discussions about anarchism, though, carried on in an entertainingly stereotypical British activist fashion (a whole evening talking about what was effectively communitarian vs. individualist anarchism, in which none of Stirner, Kropotkin or Bakunin were mentioned). It was interesting to discover that, on one level, this group of friends/comrades (many of whom I’ve known for three or four years) are _much_ more ideologically diverse than I realised. I would never have imagined, in all the times I’ve seen Nick dragged away by cops or security guards, that he thinks “basically, something like the court system is right on.”
Only on one level, though, and not, I think, on a level that matters much. These differences arise when we start asking questions _as if_ we could now decide on the consitution of the anarchist utopia to come . I’ve previously dismissed such discussions as irrelevant, but it’s really a little more subtle than that. When we talk about utopias, we’re like the blind men and the elephant, each grabbing hold of a bit of something we’re not (yet) able to actually speak of. You could talk about this in Badiou’s terms — self-aware utopian discourse is a way of making the void, the essentially unrepresentable element of the current situation, more visible in its void-ness. So it’s a preparation for an event, allowing us to see where an event might arise and what decision it might call on us to make.
We did actually discuss Badiou a little, because I happened to have one of his books with me, and there were a number of mathematicians there (indeed, we were doing pretty well in terms of Alistair’s discipline/company hierarchy, with an astronomer and an ex-physicist, too). However, it’s also interesting to think about utopias in Grant Morrison-esque terms. What different people are seeing are different perspectives on a hypercube. This makes a lot of sense if we think that what people are looking at is post-revolutionary society: because after all the revolution is four-dimensional.
And the fact that the revolution is extended in time explains our unity in practice. Although we all see different bits of the hypercube but act from the same position on it, our current actions can all be in accordance with the revolution. This explains the importance of the anarchist direct-action conception of revolution. Some Mexican anarchists came to speak in Cambridge yesterday, and I thought they phrased it very nicely: “We don’t think the revolution is something that will happen tomorrow, we think today’s changes will happen today, and actually we’re a little behind.”
So all in all it was a great holiday (the skiing was lovely, you know). Terribly bourgeois, of course, although I hadn’t realised how terrible until, as we were leaving, I discovered that the guy who owned the house had taken part in the march of middle-managers which broke the strike at FIAT. I have a horrible feeling of 4-dimensional scabbing.
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“carried on in an entertainingly stereotypical British activist fashion (a whole evening talking about what was effectively communitarian vs. individualist anarchism, in which none of Stirner, Kropotkin or Bakunin were mentioned)”
Is that really the best possible stereotype of British activism? I am sure you can think of some better ones.
Comment by Tom @ 2/25/2005 8:30 am