Anarchoblogs

i've been reading the works of the yale political scientist/anthropologist james c. scott, for example the art of not being governed; an anarchist history of upland southeast asia and seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. it's work that flips your head over. the experience of reading it reminds me of the first time i read foucault's discipline and punish: you suddenly see what we and our histories lok like from a completely different angle: the truths that you can only see from the outside. also like foucault, scott does theory by producing detailed empirical observations; there is very much hard work i can't help comparing my own work; i am more likely to wield the big theoretical construction; i wish i had more of scott's consciousness, though maybe you need both. 

i'm not sure how i missed this stuff; it's easy to not register 'james scott,' and i kind of thought he was writing about some ragtag bands of anarchist rebels in burma or something. not at all. scott's data ranges around the world, but is also insistently particular and local, which is precisely what the intellectual structure he's constructing demands. so, he's roughly to be ranged in the movement of 'anarchist anthropology' that would include michael taussig and peter clastres and then younger figures such as david graeber. this sounds obnoxious, i admit; why combine the name of a political position with the name of a discipline? what if i said i'm doing capitalist anthropology or something? 

but really here is the idea: such disciplines as environmental studies, anthropology, and political science are infested with statist assumptions that need to be questioned to get at the truth. here's how scott states one of the basic ideas of this trend:

Shatter zones are found wherever the expansion of states, empires, slave-trading, and wars, as well as natural disasters, have driven large numbers of people to seek refuge in out-of-the-way places: in Amazonia. . . in that corridor of highland Africa safe from slave-raiding, in the Balkand and the Caucasus. The diagnostic characteristic of shatter zones are their relative inaccessibility and enormous diversity of tongues and cultures.

Note that this account of the periphery is sharply at odds with the official story most civilizations tell about themselves. According to that tale, the backward, naive, and perhaps barbaric people are gradually incorporated into an advanced, superior, and more prosperous society and culture. If, instead, as a political choice, to take their distance from the state, a new element of political agency enters the picture. Many, perhaps most, of the inhabitants of the ungoverned margins are not remnants of an earlier social formation, left behind, or, as some lowland folk accounts in Southeast Asia have it, 'our living ancestors.' ...Their subsistence routines, their social organization, their physical dispersal, and many elements of their culture, far from being the archaic traits of a people left behind, are purposefully crafted both to thwart incorporation into nearby states and to minimize the likelihood that statelike concentrations of power will arise among them. art of not being governed 8

scott ends up producing incredibly rich evidence for such assertions. the narrative of history or of hunter-gatherer indigenous tribes that reveal our stone-age past and so on, the teleological conception of history, is inherently a state dogma. my favorite little example, which is mentioned by scott, are the seminoles: they are themselves some kind of extruded portion of the cherokee nation intermixed with whatever was in florida. and then they welcomed and interbred with escaped slaves; they were so quaintly primitive; they were so hybrid and schooled in the arts of resistance. that might be quite typical. it's not like different people literally inhabit different temporalities, and i doubt that any human band is evr truly isolated for very long. scott does point out the disadvantages of living in the lowland valley states: corvee labor, conscription, taxation. obviously, some people might rationally opt into the woods. scott is fascinated too by everything that takes place within state formations that delays, irritates, evades, or undermines it.

draft of preface to entanglements: a system of philosophy: a philosophical autobiography.

some jagged news: an extremely smart and accomplished young poet and scholar, kelly grovier - who writes all the time for the times literary supplement - has a book coming out on walking stewart: very much the kind of thing i was contemplating! it's quite typical: two centuries without a book on the guy; suddenly everyone's doing it. i am contemplating whether this pre-empts my project. this is the kind of thing that happens in the sciences all the time, but it can also happen in the humanities, though with very different inflections. one good thing: grovier is an excellent writer and an expert on british romanticism. stewart will very much get treated right. what i could possibly do better - or so i tell myself - is work stewart into the history of philosophy.

you know when i was doing a book on voltairine de cleyre - the great american feminist and anarchist, neglected since her death in 1912 - sharon presley contacted me to say she was doing a book too, so with some discomfort we collapsed our two projects into one. but when we published in 2004, eugenia delamotte's book came out almost simultaneously. and also brigati's reader. really these things make you think twice about zeitgeists. 

response to cb:

i have been entertained or even delighted by many novels. in my teens i read *lord of the rings* a dozen times or more. in my twenties it was wodehouse: i read all hundred novels, more or less. thirties: well, for one thing noir: hammett and especially chandler. etc., and i've read a lot of the classics, some of which i liked a lot, and many of which i thought were absurdly overrated. now i don't doubt that a decade in middle earth or blandings castle had some effect on my personality. but no more than watching a lot of sports on tv, or driving a honda and many other activities. the novel is an excellent form of entertainment. you just need to stop bloating your little pleasures into a profound, world-transforming and person-transforming Truth. people (mostly lit professors) have tried to understand all human life and personality in terms of the novel: as 'narrative constructions.'

you'd better keep this pretty amorphous. there have been novels that actually had some real effect. supposedly goethe's *sorrows of werther* gave rise to a suicide fad, for example. other than that it's stuff like 'the invention of the human,' or a kind of deep insight into the zeitgeist or something: you'd better keep it at that mega-wooly level where the assertion just kind of sounds profound but has no actual content, because actually novels are just little rectangular objects with ink stains, which basically don't do a damn thing. yo that's ok! 

if it's any comfort to you, i regard philosophy the same way, more or less. it's not implausible to argue that locke, or marx, or confucius, had dramatic social effects. but that's three out of thousands. (however, no novel has ever had those sorts of effects.) i fully expect my books to have no effect on anything, and i'm good with that. it's like my hobby or whatever; i find it intrinsically absorbing, and that's why i do it, and that's good enough to keep me going.

you should get worried if i start saying that 'life itself is a philosophical treatise,' or 'we are the polemical essays we compose,' or that the structure of the universe itself is a syllogism. or when the dude at the honda dealership likens world history to a sales pitch. the novel has no more claim to reflect the very structure of consciousness and the nature of reality than does carpentry, or free jazz, or gastronomy, or gardening, or driving, or playing board games, or bird-watching, now if you're thinking that all of these are significant because they fall into a narrative structure, i say, first: that's not true. and second: it would work just as well the other way round: a novel is like a house, or like a meal, or like a commute.