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Title: Authoritarianism and Self-Creation Author: Silas Crane Date: June 2008 Language: en Topics: authority, individualist, spirituality, marxism, theory and practice Source: Reproduction of Original
One of the first lessons to be learned upon entering the world of
radical politics is that the craving for power is not exclusive to
tribal warlords and right-wing politicians. Indeed, much of what passes
for left-wing organizing today is driven by the same impulses towards
tyranny, conquest, and domination that characterize the world’s most
odious systems of mass enslavement. This pattern is evident in the
centralized, hierarchical forms adopted by many anti-capitalist sects;
however, the seeds are planted on a deeper level, in a mode of
self-consciousness that fosters authoritarian practices by reducing
political life to a manipulative struggle for power and strategic
advantage.
A cynical observer might trace this authoritarian tendency to an
instinctive mechanism rooted in the biological nature of the human
species – a competitive impulse, an aggressive drive, a congenital will
to power. But such explanations have less to do with science than with a
secret wish to absolve humanity’s guilt for creating an unlivable world
– while at the same time furnishing a universal excuse for our ongoing
complicity in the disaster. After all, if the will to power can be
construed as an inviolable force of nature, then the need to strive for
alternative forms of government can be discarded as illusory. This
dead-end style of argument might be acceptable to those who yearn for
reconciliation with the current order, but to the rest of us it will
seem like a diagnosis with no cure. In any case, such arguments collapse
under the weight of self-criticism, and by reminding ourselves that the
will to power – unlike, say, gravity – is something that human beings
can decide not to exercise, we take the first step towards bringing its
operations into the sphere of collective agency.
Still, among many on the anti-capitalist left, belief in the
omnipresence of power remains an unacknowledged foundation for political
thought and action. Every project of social transformation, regardless
of its self-declared motives, is treated as an attempt to elevate,
advance, or otherwise alter the standing of a particular class of human
subjects within a field of power relations. For traditional Marxists,
the relevant subjects constitute the mythical working class, and the
desired modification of power is whatever enables this class to wrest
authority and wealth away from the capitalist rulers. Less orthodox
theorists, by contrast, view this economic antagonism as one element
within a wider constellation of struggles, in which power is contested
on a multiplicity of fronts, by a multiplicity of subjects, with a
multiplicity of weapons, under a multiplicity of flags and banners.
In breaking with Marxist orthodoxy, this latter tendency gains the
advantages of analytical comprehensiveness and tactical flexibility. The
mode of engagement called for in a particular situation might be
micro-political or macro-political; it might involve acts of direct
confrontation or acts of coordinated desertion; it might be carried out
through individual sabotage or through periodic mass mobilization; it
might unfold on the battleground of discursive control or on the plane
of regimented bodily discipline. However, these strengths do not
immunize post-Marxist politics against the same insidious
power-fetishism that afflicts traditional Marxism – in which the human
capacity for critical thought is diverted from its essential calling as
a vehicle of spiritual self-orientation and reduced to a mere instrument
of classification and conquest. The result is a theoretical choice
between a passive, eschatological pseudo-science (or a passive,
‘critical’ pseudo-science; the implications are the same) in which the
ultimate meaning of History is deciphered by a vanguard of heroic
intellectuals, and a panoptic mode of analysis in which the fissured
totality of power is mapped from the standpoint of a dislocated
spectator.
Both of these enterprises are infected with a paralyzing logic of
reification, in which the established order of power is treated as a
solid, independent reality, while all political agency is displaced onto
an objectified class of revolutionary subjects. This fosters a
dissociated condition in which theory is fundamentally estranged from
the living experience of political struggle. Thought no longer springs
from the individual’s ecstatic need to “question while she walks,” but
is reduced to an exercise of frozen simulation in which walking is
impossible. Meanwhile, spontaneous attempts to create common values, or
common arts of living, are ignored or thrown by the wayside.[1] Anyone
who recognizes the need for a self-conscious commitment to human freedom
in forging a path of collective praxis is dismissed as dreadfully
utopian or hopelessly naïve. As a matter of unspoken consensus, the
prophetic labor of experimental self-creation is banished from the realm
of politics in favor of a warlike geography of power, in which
self-ordained Generals plot strategic moves within a hypostatized field
of power-relations.
It would be easy, and certainly in line with the current fashion for
intellectual hero-worship, to accuse these fetishistic thinkers of
betraying the wisdom of their masters, most notably Marx and Foucault;
but, alas, the much greater indignity lies in their debasement of the
revolutionary life itself, and in their attempts to obscure the
relationship between ethical commitment and the everyday practice of
political experimentation. An old anarchist dictum reminds us that in
giving birth to a new world our success will depend on keeping our
chosen means commensurate with the desired ends. This ground-level
teaching is an apposite starting-point for our attempt to think beyond
the contemporary obsession with power. For as long as our professed
moral “ends” are regarded as distant goals to be reached through a
manipulation of the established order of reality, an incongruous variety
of “means” can be deployed under the guise of bringing those goals
nearer to realization. At no point in this process is there an honest
confrontation with the essential meaning of political life. At no point
do we take up the radical project of determining our own nature as human
beings, our own character as a “we.” The anarchist’s instinctive
distrust of this warlike style of thinking arises not from a
beautiful-souled wish to conserve the purity of abstract moral ideals,
but from the commonsense realization that human ends which are
continually deferred to a mythic future cannot be actualized as part of
a common way of life in the present.
One way to realize the full wisdom of this anarchist teaching is to
contemplate the phrase “desired ends.” The philosopher John Stuart Mill,
in the context of his own ethical reflections, wrote that “the sole
evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that
people do actually desire it.”[2] Mill’s academic interpreters still
wring their hands over the logical niceties of this statement, but in
doing so they lose their grip on a profound insight into the nature of
ethical commitment. Committing ourselves to a moral ideal is not a
matter of professing belief in the validity of an abstract rule or
principle, but of spontaneously enacting and embodying that ideal in our
engagement with the concrete situations of life. Our standards are
valuable only insofar as we stand up for them, take possession of them,
convert them into the materials for our self-critical experiment in
living. Only through this endless practice of valuing, choosing, and
desiring is our vision of human perfection transformed into reality;
only through our continual striving and affirmation does the highest
ethical ideal become the ground upon which we forge our path to a truly
ethical society.
This infinite labor of willing, imagining, and desiring is the spiritual
praxis through which the community of revolutionary agents creates
itself in the flesh. The starting-point for this labor is not a
determinate empirical class whose boundaries could be demarcated through
an analysis of objective social conditions. It is a not-yet community
whose engagement springs from a common desire to create and re-create
itself experimentally through the self-critical participation of its
members. It is a community that has no fixed identity, because it
reveals itself only from the inside, through its own work of autonomous
self-creation. It is a community that has no ideology, because its only
law is a passionate love of liberty, and its only authority is the
boundless emancipatory power of the human imagination. It is a community
that has no past or present, because it is by nature a movement, an
experiential work-in-progress. It is a community that has no limits,
because it travels the path of absolute freedom, and dissolves all
barriers by walking steadfastly into the horizons of the unknown.
All of this might sound rather romantic, and the idea of a not-yet
community might seem no better than a vaguely prophetic abstraction. But
in fact this spirit of democratic self-imagination marks a fundamental
departure from the prevailing schools of revolutionary thought, and its
implications are far-reaching. It is difficult to grasp the magnitude of
these implications, burdened as we are by the ossifying assumptions of
modern political ideology. But the need for a fundamental shift in our
orientation to revolutionary practice becomes clear when we examine the
Marxist-Leninist notion of communist revolution. To begin with, this
conception of revolution is the picture of an isolated event in time.[3]
Various strategic steps must be taken in preparation for the event;
others will be called for when it has finally come to pass. Yet what
matters above all is the single dramatic moment of revolutionary
upheaval: the expropriation of the means of production by the working
class and the transfer of property into the hands of the proletarian
state. And of course, this dialectical drama will be carried out at the
designated time by the objectively determinable working class, acting
under the enlightened guidance of a cadre of party intellectuals.
Simply put, it is the duty of the revolutionary party to tell the
working class what to do, and when. The intellectuals who comprise the
leadership of the party are uniquely qualified for this job, for they
alone have ascended to the privileged standpoint of total knowledge.[4]
They alone are equipped to know which social conditions are to blame for
human servitude and alienation, which classes must contribute to the
struggle for liberation, when the capitalist system will reach the point
of irreparable crisis, how that crisis will be overcome through the
emergence of a workers’ state, how that state will eventually whither
away, etc. In short, the party holds complete knowledge of the strategic
landscape of History; it knows which practical measures the revolution
will require, how those measures should be carried out, by whom, why,
and when.
This “revolutionary” formula is a recipe for disaster, and no individual
with a spark of liberty in her bones would ever dream of taking it
seriously. Yet it is typical of the bureaucratic-authoritarian outlook
that pervades modern political institutions, and its logic is replicated
in the managerial, power-building ethic that defines “revolution” for
many on the Left today. The ‘authoritarianism’ exemplified in this ethic
is not reducible to the belief that the revolutionary party must seize
state-power and establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Much like
the absurd image of the party-intellectual, the ambition to rule and
discipline the masses through the state-apparatus is merely symptomatic
of a perverted relation between revolutionary theory and revolutionary
practice – and, more generally, between theoretical thought and the
determination of human destiny. The impulse that leads the Marxist
intellectual to posit an Absolute point of view is the same impulse that
leads him to claim a unique authority in deciding how the political
order should be constituted. It is this conception of theoretical
thought as a source of absolute knowledge about what must be done that
threatens to cut off radical experimentation and reduce political
inquiry to a conversation about how society should be governed, and by
whom.
It is essential for those who aspire to this position of God-like
authority to propagate the belief that human relations are saturated
with power. Otherwise, how would the rest of us know that the protection
of the rulers is necessary for our survival? The fantasy of an Absolute
point of view aids in this manipulation by fostering the illusion that
hierarchical power is a function of superior vision and understanding,
thereby legitimizing the formation of a specialized class of political
experts. At the level of the modern bureaucratic nation-state, this
legitimation takes the form of a ruling-managerial elite whose wisdom is
seen as indispensable to the flourishing of the helpless population; on
the smaller scale of the Marxist sect, it is the authority of the
spokesperson or intellectual leader that is viewed as essential. Both of
these forms of organization are based on the assumption that the
imposition of political power is inevitable, that we must find somebody
to decide our fate, and so it had better be the leader who possesses
sacred knowledge about which social order is the right one.[5]
Of course, there is no such thing as the “standpoint of the whole” – or
rather, if there is such a thing, nobody enjoys greater access to it
than anybody else. Most importantly, it is not through the authorization
of a knowing subject that a political way of life is proven to be
desirable – as if by ascending to the mountaintop of knowledge one could
obtain a list of supreme commandments about how society must be
constituted. No – it is only through the common desiring of individuals
that a political experiment proves itself to be valuable, and the
ultimate challenge of revolution is to give birth to a community that
lives and sustains itself by the authority of this democratic desire.
This means that what is desirable for “us” will always be an open
question, a question for endless experimentation, and that no
theoretical judgment will determine the correct blueprint for collective
action. Keeping the question of how to live perpetually open means
maintaining a constant vigilance over any authority that would impose
its will on the self-determining freedom of the individual. The exercise
of this self-determination involves a ruthless criticism of every
manifestation of power, a transvaluation of every false standard, a
sabotage of every system of exploitation – together with a
value-creating practice of freedom in which each individual puts herself
forward as a law and currency unto herself.
Such a critical-affirmative way of living can be developed only through
the growth of a spontaneous culture of individual self-mastery and
self-creation. Without the cultivation of concrete practices of
self-mastery, the impulse to wield mastery over others, or to imprison
oneself in a state of voluntary servitude, becomes an imminent threat.
This might seem an odd starting point for a path that seeks to overcome
collective enslavement. Domination and exploitation are usually
described in terms of systems of social organization and regimes of
social practice; the very concept of power refers to a process that is
intrinsically relational, whose operations become fully explicit only at
the level of socially constituted forms of behavior. But in fact it is
the individual agent, the human being as both subject of power and
subject of freedom, who must bear all responsibility for the
ill-constitution of the social order – for only the individual is called
upon, in each situation, to determine the ultimate meaning of the world
he inhabits. Diagnosing the sicknesses of power through an analysis of
forms of social mediation is thus a worthwhile exercise only insofar as
it bears directly on the world-transforming capabilities of free
individuals. And yet it is these very individuals – no longer in their
capacity as thinking agents, but in their incapacity as subjects
conditioned by power – through whom these deranged social forms are
constituted, and within whom their implicit logic of domination is
inscribed. What must be understood, therefore, in addressing the
problems of power and exploitation, is not only a certain way of
relating to the external world, or of interacting with one’s fellow
human beings, but also and especially a certain way of relating to
oneself.
Seen in this light, the creative nexus of power lies not in the
material-symbolic space constituted by the practical relations among
human beings – not in the realm traditionally conceived as the stage or
herding-ground of political action – but in the alienated, disoriented
self-consciousness of the individual agent. More specifically, it is in
the individual’s anxious, semi-conscious experience of himself as an
other, as an objectified value or commodity, that the operations of
power are expressed through the medium of his individual subjectivity.
In his condition of self-estrangement and self-projection, he becomes a
classifiable possession of the externalized power-image. He is no longer
an intrinsic possession of his own imagining self, no longer the
movement of his own self-creation, the boundless opening of his
freedom-to-live – for he is imprisoned within a fetishized world that is
alien to his own spontaneous thoughts and desires.
Such an individual experiences himself as subjugated or incapacitated –
but this does not mean that his body is shackled in iron chains, or that
he has lost all ability to lead a healthy and satisfied existence. The
most horrifying manifestations of power are indeed those in which
extreme human suffering is at stake – outright torture and imprisonment,
militaristic violence, mass poverty and starvation, death by preventable
disease – but in general the effects of our incapacitation are obscure
to us, hygienically removed from the scenes of our domesticated
life-world. The barbaric mechanisms of selection and exploitation in
which we are constantly implicated, the cruelty and predation concealed
within our everyday routines – all of these horrors are perceived only
dimly, through a phantasmagoric membrane of idle chatter and spectacular
mediation. The faceless individuals we pass on the street may be women,
immigrants, or children who encounter low-intensity, banalized violence
in every aspect of their daily lives. They may be poor inhabitants of
rich countries who are thrown into constant struggle against the
indignities of capitalism and imperial power. Or, they may be corporate
executives and white privileged sons of senators whose quest for
supremacy transforms them into monsters and reduces their life to an
anonymous rank within the commodified global system. All of these
experiences are characteristic of a world in which the individual human
being relates to herself not as the self-imagining practitioner of
freedom, but as a docile creature submerged within a reified order of
mass authority and classification. Even where a direct confrontation
with suffering is least in evidence – even in those harmonious regions
of life where a critical attitude seems least appropriate – the reifying
logic of power threatens to impose itself in the form of linguistic
tropes, patterns of attention, and habits of valuation that breed human
misery by subordinating the individual to a false order of identity and
normalization.
Meanwhile, this estrangement and mystification of our souls blinds us to
possibilities that exceed the dominant spectrum of human experience. Our
desperate will for survival – inverted and expressed as a vertiginous
fear of freedom – keeps us locked into ritualized cycles of behavior
that reinforce our condition of enslavement, in part by hiding the
sources of our acquiescence in this miserable condition. Our dormancy
amidst the destructiveness of everyday life leaves us imprisoned in a
counterfeit world that does not reflect our own authorship. We sacrifice
our freedom on the altar of power, relinquish our sovereignty to the
idol of reification. Our lives degenerate into patterns of mindless
submission; our creative energies give way to paroxysms of dislocation
and despair. And yet these circumstances are not simply imposed on us
from the outside; they come from within us, from a part of ourselves
that we do not yet understand, and whose grip on our souls we have not
yet overcome.
Freeing ourselves from this misery is neither an easy nor an
instantaneous task, but the necessary starting point is clear enough.
Instead of serving power through a mindless renunciation of our creative
capacities, we should stand up for ourselves and think: Who am I? What
are my cares and desires? What is the measure of my value as an
individual? To what extent does the world depend on my thoughts and
actions? Critical thinking is our sharpest weapon in the struggle to
imagine the world anew – for it is the only weapon that enables us to be
born again without first being destroyed.
This brings us back to the need for a utopian culture of the self – and
to the demand for a fundamental break with the norms of bourgeois civil
society. Traditional bourgeois notions of consensus and mutual
recognition can be useful when backed up by unconstrained democratic
practice, but their ideological function is to presuppose as
already-constituted a political community that exists only in the
experimental process of creating itself. At each step in this process,
it is necessary to ask oneself who it is that is willing to consent, who
it is that presents herself as recognizable; it cannot be assumed that
this ‘someone’ is the obedient subject of modern political theory, a
“rational,” law-abiding citizen endowed by tacit contract with
inalienable rights and liberties. Neither can it be assumed that the
established political institutions of rich industrialized “democracies”
– with their borders, laws, and regimes of police discipline – will
accommodate a globalized culture of radical self-creation. As long as
institutionalized mechanisms of hierarchy, theft, and militarization are
allowed to intervene in the process of democratic self-creation, there
can be no genuine autonomy in the “public sphere.” This is not simply a
reminder of the billions of subjugated people who have been
systematically excluded from public life over the years; they do not
need to bow before any Constitution in order to claim their freedom. The
very idea of a state-instituted, corporate-managed framework for public
discussion is alien to the possibility of free and open experimentation
among self-governing individuals. The historical attempt to confine this
practice of experimentation to the realm of “civil society” is itself
rooted in the violent enforcement of private property and the surrender
of decision-making power into the hands of centralized bureaucracies.
Now the question inevitably arises: How can any society pursue a project
of radical self-criticism when its central institutions are built on the
foundations of economic exploitation, political specialization, and
social hierarchy? How can any of us speak of “consensus” and
“recognition” when the very form of subjectivity that defines public
life is infected with false authority and false value at every level of
its constitution? These are questions for which the bourgeois tradition
of political philosophy – with its authoritarian belief in rationality
as the basis for rule – can provide no answer.
A culture of anarchic self-creation would begin by putting an end to all
of this – not only through the invention of radically self-governing
political and economic forms, but through techniques of communal
experimentation, arts of individual self-expression, and pursuits of
democratic beauty as the animus for a collective art of living. To say
that a culture of the self is essential to overcoming the dominant cult
of power is to say that our everyday submission to false authority and
false value is inseparable from our spiritual tendency towards
self-renunciation. The ultimate nihilistic expression of this tendency
is a generalized condition of self-dispossession – dispossession of
individual desires, dispossession of individual creative powers,
dispossession of responsibility for deciding who we are – and this
condition is the starting point of “politics” as practiced by the heirs
of modern political theory.
Conversion to a path of self-valorization begins with the suppressed
possibilities contained within our existing way of life; the initial
movement towards an examination of the self is already present in the
individual’s ability to find a path, to step back from her habitual
involvement in the world and ask herself where she is, how she got
there, and where she is going. The alternative to this self-critical
attitude is a life of quiet desperation – a life in which we carry on
without taking an interest in our own characters, the characters of our
neighbors, or the character of the world in general. A person who lives
without taking responsibility for what is his own, without caring for
himself or making himself at home in the world, becomes nothing more
than a slave to false authorities and false values. If such a person
goes to work and receives a paycheck, then, sheep-like, he accepts the
payment as a measure of his individual worth. If he is asked by the
President to drop bombs on faraway nations, or pay taxes that will
subsidize those bombs, he pounds his chest and immediately complies. If
he receives orders not to cross the state-boundary, or transgress the
official police barricade, he obeys cheerfully and without question. All
of us are reduced to this condition of slavery at some time, but the
condition cannot be enforced without our voluntary or unconscious
submission. We can put an end to our enslavement by inventing practices
in which our refusal to obey becomes the vehicle for our own diverse
projects of creative self-valorization. A practice of self-valorization
can be simple or sophisticated; it can be a spontaneous form of
counter-conduct or counter-discipline that affirms our indomitable
singularity in the face of power and exploitation; it can be an
unpremeditated spiritual exercise in which the individual resists the
material forces of self-dispossession and actively constitutes himself
as the sovereign ruler of his own destiny. Workers’ self-management,
general strikes, self-sustaining local technology, community
skill-sharing, military desertion, civil disobedience, creation of
autonomous zones, renunciation of citizenship, experiments in absolute
democracy: all of these practices can be undertaken in the spirit of
radical self-mastery, self-valorization, and self-creation. When these
practices are rooted in cooperative networks of mutual aid and
solidarity, we gain the ability to cultivate a revolutionary way of life
without fear of repression, starvation, or despair.
Within the soul of the individual, the culture of self-creation begins
with a spirit of radical critique – a spirit in which the individual
relates to herself, and takes possession of herself, through the act of
differentiating her own nature from the nature of everything around her.
By engaging her inalienable power to think, she enacts and refines the
autonomous force of her own unique character and negates those aspects
of the world that do not pass its test. She constitutes herself as an
autonomous being – a being whose value is determined only from the
inside, only through the exercise of her own creative capacities. As she
proceeds in this way, she cultivates an attitude of engaged openness to
the world – to its meanings, its lessons, and its possibilities – and
thereby ensures that her life will be determined by no force outside her
own path of self-creation. By maintaining this critical self-possession
she arms herself against any tyrannical gods or masters that would bind
her to an extrinsic authority. She is thus able to maintain absolute
freedom in the face of violence, conformity, and domination – all in
such a way, and with such an intensity, that when she associates with
other individuals on the basis of these common practices, an
ungovernable revolutionary culture is born.
[1] Here sectarian fulminations against so-called “lifestyle anarchism”
only serve to conceal what is at stake in the question of common values.
Reasoned contempt for neo-dandyist campaigns to reduce politics to
subcultural style does not justify abandoning the Bakunian standpoint of
absolute liberty. Unconventional sartorial habit is one thing; creating
the values that will determine the direction of our common life is quite
another.
[2] John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Hackett, 1979, p. 34.
[3] I will not address the claim, which still echoes in certain circles,
that “Marxist science” has discovered strict socio-economic laws and is
therefore capable of predicting the future development of capitalist
civilization. Any theory that claims advance-knowledge of what a society
of human beings will do ignores the capacity of those human beings to
determine the conditions of their own future. Even if knowledge of
social and economic systems is bound to play a part in shaping our path
of self-determination (as is undoubtedly the case), the work of politics
begins when we ask ourselves how this, or any other knowledge we might
possess, will help us constitute ourselves as a self-creating political
community. Any perspective on human life that ignores the necessary
priority of human freedom to all the results of scientific knowledge is
more akin to fortune-telling than to political theory.
[4] Perhaps the most sophisticated version of this idea comes from
Lukács (History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge, MA, 1971, p. 27):
“It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation
that constitutes the decisive difference between bourgeois and Marxist
thought, but the point of view of totality.”
[5] A similar logic is found in the growing sector of non-profit
organizations, where the intense professionalization and managerial
training of activists endows them with specialized coordinator status.