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Title: Anarchy without Opposition Author: Jamie Heckert Date: 2012 Language: en Topics: Queer, anarchy Source: Taken from Queering Anarchism: Essays on Gender, Power, and Desire © 2012 Edited by C. B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano
I have a memory. It was 1984: a presidential election year in the United
States. We had a mock election in school. To learn about the process? To
start practicing early? I was eight years old. Only one person in our
class voted for Walter Mondale against Ronald Reagan. When these results
were read aloud, the girl in front of me turned around and pointedly
asked, “It was you, wasn’t it?” It wasn’t.
After school (that day? another?) a boy from my class asked me if I was
a Democrat or a Republican. When I said, “Neither,” he was perplexed.
“You have to be one or the other,” he responded, with all the assurance
of one stating an obvious and unquestionable Truth. “Well I’m not,” I
insisted. I knew you didn’t have to be; my parents voted, but they
didn’t identify themselves with either party. In my mind’s eye, this
boy’s face screws up with outraged and frustrated disbelief. “You have
to be one or the other!”
Democrat or Republican? Gay or straight? Man or woman? Capitalist or
anticapitalist? Anarchist or archist?
Us or them?
I have a memory from a very different time and place: London, 2002. I
traveled down from Edinburgh with a woman from ACE, the social centre we
were involved in, to attend Queeruption. It was my first queer anarchist
event. On the way, I learned loads about menstruation. Once there, I
remember chatting to another guy. He found out I identified as an
anarchist and started asking me, were you at such and such summit
protest? Nope. How about this one or that one? No. No. He looked really
puzzled and maybe even asked how I could be an anarchist without
converging outside the G8, WTO, IMF, or other gatherings of elites.
Isn’t that what anarchists do?
Anarchist politics are usually defined by their opposition to state,
capitalism, patriarchy, and other hierarchies. My aim in this essay is
to queer that notion of anarchism in a number of ways. To queer is to
make strange, unfamiliar, weird; it comes from an old German word
meaning to cross. What new possibilities arise when we learn to cross,
to blur, to undermine, or overflow the hierarchical and binary
oppositions we have been taught to believe in?
Hierarchy relies on separation. Or rather, the belief in hierarchy
relies on the belief in separation. Neither is fundamentally true. Human
beings are extrusions of the ecosystem—we are not separate, independent
beings. We are interdependent bodies, embedded in a natural world itself
embedded in a vast universe. Likewise, all the various social patterns
we create and come to believe in are imaginary (albeit with real effects
on our bodyminds). Their existence depends entirely on our belief, our
obedience, our behavior. These in turn are shaped by imagined divisions.
To realize that the intertwined hierarchical oppositions of hetero/homo,
man/woman, whiteness/color, mind/body, rational/emotional,
civilized/savage, social/natural, and more are all imaginary is perhaps
a crucial step in letting go of them. How might we learn to cross the
divide that does not really exist except in our embodied minds?
This, for me, is the point of queer: to learn to see the world through
new eyes, to see not only what might be possible but also what already
exists (despite the illusions of hierarchy). I write this essay as an
invitation to perceive anarchism, to perceive life, differently. I’m
neither interested in recruiting you, nor turning you queer. My
anarchism is not better than your anarchism. Who am I to judge? Nor is
my anarchism already queer. It is always becoming queer. How? By
learning to keep queering, again and again, so that my perspective, my
politics, and my presence can be fresh, alive.
Queering might allow recognition that life is never contained by the
boxes and borders the mind invents. Taxonomies of species or
sexualities, categories of race or citizenship, borders between nations
or classes or types of politics—these are fictions. They are never
necessary. To be sure, fictions have their uses. Perhaps in using them,
we may learn to hold them lightly so that we, in turn, are not held by
them.
If everyone inspired by anarchism agreed exactly on what it was, how it
worked and how it felt, would it still be anarchism?
I notice how often anarchism, and anarchy, is defined in opposition to
the State, capitalism, and all other forms of hierarchical structure.
Not domination, but liberation. Not capitalist, but (libertarian)
communist. Why?
Oh, I’m not opposed to opposition! I just have some questions. One is
about borders—drawing lines on a map and then claiming that they are
real. Isn’t this the operation at the heart of the state? And isn’t this
what happens when you or I want to draw a clear line between us, good
anarchists, and them, evil archists? We this, they that. The questioning
of borders is at the heart of queer theory.
Conventional lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender politics is based
on opposites: we an oppressed minority and they the privileged majority.
In this version, the problem is inequality and the answer is legal
protection. Queer theory troubles this, suggesting instead, in my mind,
that the problem comes from belief in the identities. The thing about
opposites is that they depend on each other to exist: straight is not
gay, gay is not straight and bisexuality still confuses people. This
leads to all sorts of possibilities for control—we learn to ask
ourselves and each other, is he really...? Is she really...? Am I
really...? We’re encouraged to believe that our sense of gender and who
we fancy tell us who we are and where we fit in a sexual hierarchy
imagined to already exist. Whereas a stateoriented LGBT politics tries
to challenge the hierarchies of heter/ homo, cis/trans, while keeping
the identities, queer politics might ask how the identities themselves
might already be state-like with their borders and policing.
I have similar questions about anarchist and other identities. How much
energy that could go into creating other-than-state-like ways of living
gets lost to efforts to appear anarchist enough? I know I’m not the only
one who suffers from anarcho-perfectionism! Likewise, I’ve seen loads of
energy go into arguments about whether so and so is really anarchist or
not, or such and such is really anarchism.
On the flip side, I once had a very interesting conversation with a man
who owned a furniture making company. We had a lot of areas of agreement
and he seemed very interested in anarchism. I suggested that when he
retired he could leave his factory to all of the workers to be run as a
cooperative. He responded, plaintively, “but I’m a capitalist.”
What kinds of politics might become possible if we all learn to be less
concerned with conforming to certain labels and more capable of
listening to the complexity of our desires? My concern, here, is that
opposition—a politics of opposites that push against each other, lean on
each other—might get in the way of the listening.
A memory-story [1] : a few years ago, I lived in a former mining village
outside of Edinburgh. I was greatly distressed at hearing the single
working-class woman next door shouting horrific things at her children
nearly every morning. She would curse at them, sometimes shouting how
she hated them. It was nearly unbearable. How could I talk to her about
it? Then, I took a course on non-violent communication—a strategy
without opposition (more on this below). It taught me to communicate in
a way that made it easier for her to hear my feelings and desires. The
opportunity came when I found a ball in “my” garden (we don’t own land,
we are part of land) and she was in “hers.” I threw the ball over the
privet hedge and asked her how she was finding single parenting. “It
must be hard,” I said. I then told her that when I heard her shouting in
the mornings I felt frightened because it reminded me of things from my
own childhood. [2] She didn’t say anything to me then, but the shouting
stopped and her daughter started talking to me.
More recently, this skill again served me well. On my way to London,
where I was going to speak about academia and activism, I got into a
conversation about politics with a man who identified as conservative.
Terrorism came up and I asked if we were any better than them; quoting a
Chumbawamba t-shirt I said, “War is terrorism on a bigger budget.” He
looked thoughtful and a hippie-looking French guy behind him laughed and
wrote it down. Then, a very big and very angry looking man stood up and
asked if I had just said that war is terrorism. I nodded and he said,
“I’m in the Army.” He looked furious and I thought there was a good
chance he might punch me. I suddenly found myself in his shoes, sensing
what he might be feeling, wanting. I looked him in the eye and asked,
gently, “Are you angry because you want respect for yourself and your
fellow soldiers?” He looked away, his face and shoulders softening, and
muttered, “I guess everyone is entitled to their opinion.”
What might have happened if I had opposed him?
What might an anarchy refusing to be contained by the borders of its
opposites look like? How might anarchism be continually queered,
listening across lines of identity and ideology? Now, I’m not saying
that anarchism should include everything. I am saying that interesting
things are likely to happen if folk inspired by anarchism make
connections with folk who see things differently, who do things
differently. To do so is not simply to try to convince others that
anarchism is right, but perhaps even to let go of such judgments.
I yearn for honesty, complexity and compassion. I don’t want to be
asked, or told, to choose from a list of options already defined,
already decided, already judged. I want to have a discussion.
Connection. Intercourse. A chance to listen and to be listened to:
giving and receiving, receiving and giving. Let’s experience different
possibilities for identities, for relationships, for politics. Let’s
meet.
It is this which draws me again and again to anarchism. And not just to
anarchism; I am too promiscuous for that. [3] My anarchism has no
straight lines, no borders, no purity, no opposites. No living things
do. And I like my anarchy alive.
Ok, I’ll be honest. My anarchism can grow rigid, bordered, oppositional.
I know the satisfaction of imagining myself more radical than others.
The thing is, this comes with the risk of being not-radical-enough, or
even, not-really-an-anarchist. It also gets in the way of getting along
with people, of working together, of even meeting. So, when my anarchism
is rigid, what are the chances of experiencing anarchy?
A friend of mine, who does both activisty and scholarly things, recently
made disparaging comments about the queer theory that is only about
“learning a different way to read a novel.” And indeed, one of the first
books to be labeled queer theory was Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men, a book
about nineteenth-century English literature. It was, at the same time,
an exploration of patterns of oppression in particular cultural norms of
love, sex, friendship, gender, and intimacy. Recognizing these patterns
came from learning to read novels differently. In drawing attention to
love and desire between men in apparently heterosexual novels, the point
is perhaps not to say that this is really what the story is about.
Rather, it unsettles our notion of how things really are and, therefore,
what is possible.
Is this so different from the storytelling of Peter Kropotkin? Mutual
Aid: A Factor in Evolution, invited a different reading of Darwin’s
theory, different from those who saw evolution as justification for
Empire, those who imagined that survival of the fittest meant the most
fit, the most dominant, the most masculine, the most “advanced.” For
Kropotkin, and I think for Darwin, too, fittest meant best able to fit
in with other beings in an ecosystem. In other words, to cooperate.
So, is cooperation better than competition? Is queer better than
straight? Are those the right answers? Is that how I should live my
life?
The way I see it, at the moment anyway, neither queer nor anarchy is
about finding the right answers or working out the right way to live.
Both are about the experience of connecting with others, with self. I
almost always find it harder to connect with someone who is insisting
that their story is THE story, their truth THE truth. Where’s the space
left for my story, my truth? Your story, your truth? How can different
people, different creatures, different stories and voices learn to fit
together if any one story tries to take up all of the space? Like the
Zapatistas, I want to live in “a world where many worlds fit.”
One of the principles of permaculture, an ethical design system or
perhaps a revolution disguised as gardening, is that edges are the most
productive areas in a system. Where the river meets the bank, the forest
the meadow, or the sea the shore, there will be an abundance of life.
The more that anarchism, a many branched river in our social ecosystem,
mixes and mingles with swamp and stone, soil and soul, the more diverse
forms of life will benefit.
Conversely, moral high ground is a cold, barren, and lonely land. I
know—I’ve been there and I return from time to time. Highly rational and
fiercely intellectual, it leaves no space for doubt, for complexity of
feeling. Warmth toward self and other dwindles, for the cold numbs the
heart. Shelter from pain, numbness, may be a form of protection from the
horrors of witnessing violence and violation. Ah, but the numbed heart
is also impervious to joy. And how queer can life be without joy?
Seeking further distance and separation from the pain by climbing that
moral high ground, I risk forgetting that my heart yearns for community,
vitality, and play. Perhaps it is less of a forgetting and more of a
learning not to listen. For pain is a signal, an awareness of being
alive, a reminder of what is desired. Learning not to listen. Isn’t
that, too, the nature of the State?
In a queerly anarchist paper, Sian Sullivan asks, is an other world
possible? [4] When state/empire/capital depends on carefully and
continuously producing clear and hierarchical divisions between and
within people, how can we make space for that which has been designated
other? Declaring a politics to be non-hierarchical, anarchist, feminist,
safe, or queer does not magically make this happen. It takes a different
kind of magic—practice.
These hierarchies aren’t just “out there.” They are also in here: in the
way we hold our bodies, in our thoughts, in our emotional reactions, in
the ways we learn to see the world and to imagine what is real and what
is possible. These hierarchies arise in the ways we relate to ourselves,
to other humans, and to the rest of the natural world. And that’s okay.
(Bear with me, here!)
There’s this social psychologist called Thomas Scheff who was trying to
understand why people conform (or, perhaps, why it’s hard to be queer).
[5] Drawing on a rather Kropotkinesque view of evolution, he reckoned
that humans are basically cooperative and that maintaining this
cooperation is a basic function of our emotions. We feel good (“pride”)
when our social bonds are strong and we feel bad (“shame”) when
relationships are at risk, because we depend on these relationships to
live. Now, this is all well and good for getting along with each other.
The trouble starts when we feel ashamed of our shame and get into this
nasty spiral of beating ourselves up. He calls this pathological shame
and offers it as a suggestion for understanding all the ways in which
people conform to things that we know aren’t good for us, for other
people, or for the rest of the planet. This is why I say it’s okay that
hierarchies arise. If trying to be a good anarchist means always being
anti-hierarchical, then anarchist relationships are always at risk of
not being anarchist enough, thus feeding the spiral of pathological
shame, of rigidity, of the State. Modesty may offer the middle ground,
the convivial edge, between excessive pride and pathological shame.[6]
Since then, another radical social psychologist has developed a more
complex emotional model of domination. Marshall Rosenberg, the founding
practitioner of non-violent communication (NVC), also reckons that
conformity and domination start in our everyday relationships. [7] He
talks about the concept of emotional slavery—feeling responsible for
other people’s emotions. What happens when the beautiful anarchist
desire for freedom and equality is held in this cage? I see in myself
and in others an overwhelming compulsion to try to make everything
equal, to make myself and others free. To make everything okay.
What if everything is already okay, even pain and shame? Rosenberg
offers the radically compassionate perspective that absolutely everyone
is doing the best thing they can imagine to meet life-serving
desires/needs (e.g., order, community, play, food, shelter, etc.). There
is no such thing as evil; there is nothing to oppose. Instead, we might
learn to both empathize with the desires of others and to express our
own. Sure, we might disagree about strategies for meeting those needs. I
still get angry, sometimes, when seeing strategies that meet some
people’s needs while ignoring others (like war, private property, or
bullying). And blaming someone for that can be temporarily satisfying.
The thing is, if I blame other people for not being perfectly anarchist
already, then I end up blaming myself, too. I’m no perfect anarchist,
either. How could I be? Where would I have learned these skills? Like
everyone, I’m still practicing.
This is why I invite you to consider the very queer notion of an
anarchism not based on opposition, but a politics that starts off
accepting everything just as it is. From the basis of acceptance, we
might then ask, what service can be offered? How can anarchy be
nurtured, rather than demanded, forced? What ways of living and relating
can we practice that are even more effective at meeting the needs of
everyone for life, love, and freedom? And in what ways might we learn to
accept the pain we feel when that doesn’t happen, instead of distracting
ourselves with resentment or chocolate? And in what ways might we learn
to be gentle with ourselves when we realize we’ve been drawn to
strategies of distraction or even domination?
Bodies need to move, to play, to be well. Sedentary culture leads to
great suffering. Bodies kept in line, in chairs at work stations or
school desks. Bodies kept in order. The same goes for thoughts, for
feelings.
To hold tightly—to shame, resentment, or any emotion or any story of how
the world really is—is to be held tightly. This is not freedom. To hold
gently is to be held gently. This, to me, is freedom. No opposition, no
tension, between intimacy and spaciousness. Instead, there is a gentle
dance that comes from a deep stillness.
To become anarchist, to become queer, is not easy. To learn to cross
lines, to see that the lines are not even real, is a radical
transformation for those of us who were raised to believe in them. But
it need not be a struggle. Struggling against the world as it is,
struggling against my experience, gets in my way. Sure, the world is not
the world of my dreams. Why should it be? To stop my pain, or yours?
Running from pain is a noisy affair. It distracts.
To learn to listen to yourself, to “let your life speak” [8] requires
silence, peace. Otherwise, I know I get caught up in a rush of stories
and feelings about what I should be doing, how I’ve not done enough. I
forget to rest, to play. Is that radical?
Hold on, you might say. Of course we all need to rest and play. But how
can we not oppose, for example, the Wall in Palestine/Israel? How can
you say it’s a fiction? It’s concrete. Material. So, too, are the
bullets and the tanks that maim and kill.
Bodies and the bullets are real. Painfully real. The concrete does not
self-organize into a Wall. No border, invented by human minds, asserts
its own existence. No gun shoots itself. There is human action behind
every border, every wall. And behind these actions: emotions, beliefs.
Why do some Israeli people support the Wall? Because, as I understand
it, they are afraid. They are taught to believe that at least some
Palestinians are dangerous enemies. They desire security, life. When
people act as soldiers, they believe, perhaps, that the border is real
and must be defended. They may believe that those on one side are
inherently different from those on the other. Or perhaps they believe,
with their hearts and minds, that they have no choice other than to
follow orders. To do otherwise, to relate otherwise, might simply be
unimaginable.
I find myself coming again and again to what seems to me as a very queer
conclusion. The most radical thing I do is meditate daily.
Raised in Settler society, I’ve learned to resist looking inward, to be
frightened of what I might find there. But it’s the best way I’ve found
“to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with
all human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic qualities,”
as Emma has called us to be, to feel. And so I invite you to consider,
just to consider, meditation as an anarchist practice of freedom.
Here’s a queer proposal: the State is always a state of mind. It’s
putting life in boxes and then judging it in terms of those boxes, those
borders, as if they were what really mattered. It’s trying to get other
people to do what you want them to do without so much regard for their
needs, their desires. It’s self-consciousness, self-policing,
self-promotion, self-obsession. It’s anxiety and depression. It’s
hyperactivity stemming from the fantasy that being seen to be doing
something is better than doing nothing, even if what you’re doing might
cause more harm than good. It’s resentment at self and others for not
doing it right, for not being good enough. It’s the belief that security
comes from control. And it’s a source of tremendous suffering in the
world.
It’s also something I do. When I look inward, when I meditate, I can see
how much the mind is attached to individualistic stories of myself: as
important, as weak, as wonderful, as useless, as victim, hero, or
villain. The stories fluctuate and change form. And when I believe them,
they affect all of my relationships. I, too, can perform the State.
Judith Butler may have taught me that the performance of a role is
merely a copy without original, but it is meditation that lets me see it
with clear vision. Sitting down each morning, focusing my mind,
observing the thoughts and emotions that pass through, I learn to not
identify with them, to not get caught up in them, to not reject them.
I’m learning the “art of allowing everything to be as it is,” [9] which
in turn helps with the many challenges of caring “for the world as it
is,” of seeing beauty in wounds. I’m learning to be playful with my
sense of who I am, to let go the borders, the policing. It’s so much
easier for me to connect with others when the walls of the heart, of the
individualized self, come down. And it’s easier to let go of the walls
if I don’t judge them. Of course we learn to protect ourselves.
I practice meditation, not just for myself, but so that I can go out
into the world unarmed. Unarmored. Enamored. When I feel a love for life
itself, I see anarchy everywhere. I notice all the little ways, and
not-so-little ways, that people already support each other, already
speak for themselves, already listen to each other, already make
decisions, and act together. These aren’t just “seeds beneath the snow,”
as Colin Ward put it. They are blossoming flowers. An other world is not
only possible, it already exists. I’ve felt it.
And when I again get caught up in my own thoughts, my own desires, my
own stories about who I am, and who you are, what should have happened,
how the world should be...then I see so little outside the dramas of my
own mind. Everything I see, everyone I meet, I reinterpret through the
lens of those fictions. I take myself and my beliefs very, very
seriously. Just like the State.
Is it radical to hate myself for that? Is it radical to hate “cops,”
“capitalists,” “politicians,” “racists,” or “homophobes” for that? In my
own experience, the two are intimately intertwined. Inseparable.
And so I go inward before going out into the world. Letting my mind grow
still, I am not ruled by my thoughts. Letting my heart open, I am able
to love myself and others. And if I am called to fight, to protect those
under threat, let me do it with love. Because if I’m not loving, it’s
not my revolution.
[1] I borrow this term from Kristina Nell Weaver whose anarcho-buddhist
geography writing reminds me that memories are not the truth of what has
happened in the past, but the stories that our minds create in the
present.
[2] I’ve written about this in an essay. See “Fantasies of an Anarchist
Sex Educator,” in Anarchism and Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and
Power, ed. J. Heckert and R. Cleminson (London: Routledge, 2010).
[3] See D. Shannon and A. Willis, “Theoretical Polyamory: Some Thoughts
on Loving, Thinking, and Queering Anarchism,” Sexualities, 13(4) (2010):
433-443.
[4] See S. Sullivan, “An Other World is Possible? On Representation,
Rationalism and Romanticism in Social Forums,” Ephemera, 5(2) (2005):
370-392. Online at
http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/5-2/5-2ssullivan.pdf (accessed
January 25, 2012).
[5] See T. J. Scheff, Microsociology: Discourse, Emotion, and Social
Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
[6] See Ursula K Le Guin, “The Conversation of the Modest” in Wild Girls
(Oakland, California: PM Press, 2011).
[7] See Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
(Encinitas, California: PuddleDancer Press, 2003).
[8] See Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice
of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999).
[9] See Adyashanti, True Meditation: Discover the Freedom of Pure
Awareness (Louisville, CO: Sounds True, 2006).