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Title: Anarchy and Ecstasy Author: Hakim Bey Language: en Topics: John Moore, chaos Source: Fifth Estate # 335, Winter, 1990-91 https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/335-winter-1990-91/anarchy-and-ecstasy/
Nineteenth century rationalist/materialist/atheist anarchists were wont
to assert that “Anarchy is not chaos.” In recent years, a revaluation of
the word chaos has been undertaken by a number of anarchist writers (the
undersigned included) in the light of both “mythohistory” and science.
Both fields now view chaos as more than merely violent disorder or
entropy.
Classical physics and mechanics, like classical political theory
(including socialism and anarchism), were based on a masked ideology of
work and the “clockwork” universe. A machine which went haywire or ran
down was a bad machine. Chaos is bad in these classical paradigms. In
the new paradigms, however, chaos can appear as good—synonymous with
such affirmative-sounding concepts as Prigogine’s “creative evolution.”
Meanwhile, and simultaneously, mythohistory has uncovered the positive
image of chaos in certain cultural complexes which might be called
pre-Classical (or even pre-Historical). Thus, the very new and the very
old coincide to offer us what can now be seen as an anti-Classical or
anti-mechanistic view of chaos. For an anarchist to use a word like
chaos in a positive sense no longer implies a sort of Nechaevian
nihilism. Case in point (as Rod Serling used to say): John Moore’s
pamphlet Anarchy & Ecstasy: Visions of Halcyon Days.
Moore appears not to have read any of the american “chaos” school of
anarchism (such as Discordian Zen, anarchy-Taoism, “Ontological
Anarchy,” etc.). Nor does he refer to any works in chaos science. He
seems to have “made his own system” (as Blake advises) in relative
isolation, utilizing an idiosyncratic mix of readings, which in some
ways mirrors the american synthesis (as in his absorption of
Situationist “pleasure-politics”) but in other ways diverges from it.
Moore’s brilliant analysis of the figure of Chaos in Milton’s Paradise
Lost, for example, gives his work a distinctive british flavor, as does
his evocation of Avalon (the apple garden) as an image of paradise worth
regaining. But Moore certainly does read american books—including F.
Perlman, K. Rexroth, Margot Adler and Starhawk. His reliance on the
latter pair of authors reveals an interest in “neo-paganism” which will
no doubt annoy certain anarchists, despite his claim to oppose
“religion” (and “God”) with “spirituality” (and “the Goddess”). I admit
to some problems with this aspect of Moore’s work, and will return to
the question again.
Moore is at his best in the presentation of what I call “poetic facts.”
For example, he investigates the etymology of the words wild and
wilderness, connecting them with will (to be wild is to be self-willed)
and bewilderment (to wander in a trackless forest; also “amazement”).
From all this he creates a portmanteau-word, be wilderness, which he
offers as a description or slogan of his project, his “brand” of
anarchy. This is a ploy worthy of a poet.
In games like this Moore achieves his best writing and clearest
thinking. When he relies on solid facts (such as dictionaries contain)
and his own imagination, he makes real donations to anarchist literature
(in fact I intend to appropriate the term be wilderness for my own
purposes immediately).
In dealing directly with a text such as Milton or the Oxford English
Dictionary, Moore shines. However, when he relies on secondary material
(the theories of other theorists) his insights become less convincing,
less luminous. The extensive quotations from Starhawk are permeated with
an odor of New-Age, and the semantic vagueness of the whole feel-good
school of neo-shamanism. Moore also makes excessive use of an author
named Henry Bailey Stevens (The Recovery of Culture, 1949), whom I have
not read, but whose theories appear to me questionable, to put it
mildly.
Forgetting his implication that the earliest human society must have
been (like Chaos itself) without “gender,” Moore uses Starhawk to assert
the primordiality of matriarchy. My own position on this vexing question
is polemical: I oppose the idea of primordial matriarchy because I
oppose the idea of any primordial “-archy.” The “Rule of Mom” may in
some ways be preferable to the “Rule of Dad” (or then again it might
not)—still I prefer to vote for Nobody (an-archy, “No Rule”) rather than
for the lesser of two evils.
As for H.B. Stevens, he supposes that the original society was not only
matriarchal but exclusively agricultural, or rather (to be precise)
fruitarian-vegetarian, based on an economy of orchards or groves.
Admittedly this is not labor-intensive agriculture aimed at the
production of surplus—rather an agriculture “before the fact,” before
the “Agricultural Revolution” of the Neolithic. The Fall from Stevens’
paradise was precipitated by the Ice Age and its naturally-imposed
scarcity, which led to the evil innovations of hunting and then animal
husbandry.
The meat-eaters (referred to as “barbarians”) then overcame the
fruitarian Southerners, thus introducing oppression into human society.
In the Stevenian ethos, Cain the agriculturist was quite right to murder
Abel, the herdsman, in defense of genuine paradisal economy and freedom
from “private property.” This reversal of biblical values suggests the
influence of Gnostic Dualism, and indeed Stevens creates a strict
dichotomy in which “good” represents tree/fruit/ gathering/female/South
and “evil” becomes ice/blood/hunting/male/North.
A fascinating thesis—but unfortunately for its supporters no
“arboricultural” tribes have survived to be studied by anthropologists,
nor can any trace of such economies be uncovered by ethnohistorical
means. Structurally speaking, the “earliest” societies we can observe
are hunter/gatherer societies which practise no agriculture, not even
the cultivation of orchards.
Moreover, the concept of non-authoritarian societies (as developed by
Sahlins, Clastres and others) depends for its illustrative material on
hunter/ gatherer economies. “War,” according to this school, does not
develop out of hunting but out of agricultural economy with its
dialectic of scarcity and surplus.
Hunter/gatherers possess non-hierarchic organization and are frequently
more gender-egalitarian than agricultural societies. Etc., etc. A great
deal of writing on these subjects has appeared since 1949. None of it
should prevent Moore from admiring the poetic vividness of Stevens’
theory—but some of it might lead him to doubt the factual basis of
Stevens’ claims.
There may exist medical or political reasons for frutarianism—or
veganism but Moore appears to imply the existence of moral reasons, a
stance strangely out of harmony with his promise to adopt an
“antinomian” position. If he were to argue that such-&-such a behavior
is “natural” (rather than “moral”)—and therefore somehow a categorical
imperative of sorts—might I not then reply (as many have done) that it
is “natural” to obey authority, or at least to accept on authority that
the behavior in question is “natural”?
I see no way out of this dilemma—and thus I cannot help feeling that the
inhabitant of the Bewilderness would do well to avoid all concepts of
“natural” rights and wrongs (including the “naturalness” of
hunter/gatherer societies and even of anarchy itself). The chaote is
free to imagine—to imagine Nature as Desire or Desire as Nature.
If the chaote desires such-&-such a behavior, then let it be proclaimed
by the Sovereign Imagination that the behavior is “natural” for that
chaote—not as an inalienable right, but as an act of will. And if anyone
should ask what then prevents the outbreak of violent disorder and the
spread of entropy, we may refer them to Moore’s own analysis of chaos as
a positive force of liberation, situated beyond the false and oppressive
dichotomy of cosmic good and evil.
Moore makes fun (and rightly, I believe) of the usual pallid anarchist
version of a future free society, in which everything human seems to
have disappeared except the politics of consensus. In its stead he
offers a vision, centered on a mystery of wildness, wilderness and
chaos, based on a personal reading of myth and history but also
involving practical and experiential inspirations for action in the
here-and-now.
As such, as vision, I find Anarchy & Ecstasy an “attractive” work (in
the sense C. Fourier used the word, to mean lovable and sexy). There are
pages, however, where Moore seems to take his vision for revelation,
something beyond the personal, something absolute—and here I begin to
tune out.
But as pure rant, the book overcomes its own limitations—and for its
“delirious rhetoric” it deserves a proud place on the shelf labeled
“Chaos.”