The Anarchist Turn
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0745333427
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The concept of anarchy is often presented as a recipe for pure disorder. The Anarchist Turn brings together innovative and fresh perspectives on anarchism to argue that in fact it represents a form of collective, truly democratic social organisation.
The book shows how in the last decade the negative caricature of anarchy has begun to crack. Globalisation and the social movements it spawned have proved what anarchists have long been advocating: an anarchical order is not just desirable, but also feasible.
The contributors, including leading anarchist and critical theorists, argue that with the failure of both free markets and state socialism the time has come for an 'anarchist turn' in political philosophy. In doing so they relate the anarchist hypothesis to a range of other disciplines such as politics, anthropology, economics, history and sociology.
Reading Negri: Marxism in the Age of Empire (Creative Marxism)
The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte
Robert Nozick: Property, Justice, and the Minimal State (Key Contemporary Thinkers)
Machiavelli and Republicanism (Ideas in Context)
Democracy: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
30). What the assumption of equality accomplishes is to challenge the hierarchical order, what Rancière calls the police order, of most social arrangements. To act democratically is to act collectively on the presupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone. To do so, as the citation we saw earlier notes, is to act with a sort of collective trust. The suggestion I want to make here is that modes of friendship that resist the figures of neoliberalism offer, in some of their elements, both.
Interacting desires. (Wigley, 1998a) Platforms, and platforms on top of platforms, joined by hallways, opening up onto rooms that could be transformed at will into other rooms, ad infinitum. Homo ludens, humans-at-play, would wander nomadically through the structure, freely and continuously transforming their relationships to one another and their space, in turn transforming the physical and social geography. Constant’s blueprint for a society of freedom was, however, severely anarchist.
Conversely, the topologist traces the orderings and extracts from them the dynamic rhythm of worlding. So faultline topology recalls being as presencing–absencing, and the need, against this, to assert an ordering ground, thus suturing over the ‘conflictuality without sublation which is truth’ (Schürmann, 1993). The second task of topology is decidedly methodological: it traces the ‘epochal stamps’, those measuregiving grounds esteemed highest for an age, which anchor all that we can say, know.
What is left is only spatial localizable coordinates and their ordering as such. Schürmann: Turning outward, we find but natural resources to be harnessed, and turning back upon our past, only cultural curiosities to be marketed. Turning inward, I no longer find, as did Augustine, the immutable light of truth, but rather neuroses awaiting treatment; and turning upward, more resources – perhaps uranium on Mars – awaiting exploitation. (Schürmann, 1993, p. 210) The spatial imaginary of anarchism.
Critique of utopian socialism (and more generally the idea that to describe an ideal state of things will automatically engender change simply because of its intrinsic intellectual value) is a powerful reminder of the dangers of any abstract metaphysics of freedom. By envisaging utopian communities on the sole basis of the fanatical belief in the miraculous effects of their theory, people risk ending up in a reactionary position, unable to keep pace with the current state of the world.14 I.