Links:
- E. Armand, What Is an Anarchist? (1908)
- E. Armand, The Anarchist Individualist Initiation (1923)
- Contr’un #3: The Anarchic Encounter (pdf) (2013)
- Anarchism, Plain and Simple / Propositions for Discussion (2015)
- Rambles in the Fields of Anarchist Individualism (2020)
- Constructing Anarchisms (2020)
- A Schematic Anarchism (2022)
ENCOUNTERS:
I am large, I contain multitudes. — Whitman, “Song of Myself”
After a rather lengthy delay, I’m settling down to some projects that I had initially intended to begin back in January. As it happens, all three of the tasks at the top of the pile — work on Proudhon’s Justice, an edition of E. Armand’s Anarchist Individualist Initiation and Sociology [Reconstructed], an anthology of the works of Lewis Masquerier — called for the careful comparison of multiple versions of the texts involved. It’s a variety of work that I really enjoy, “when the fit takes me,” but it doesn’t take me all the time. I needed a break from Proudhon — or at least from Justice — and what I had in mind for the expanded edition of Armand’s Initiation rapidly snowballed into something that is going to be all kinds of fun, but will take much more time than anticipated. There is now a completed draft translation, which I am in the process of revising. More about that soon… As for Masquerier, well, I love him, but I expect that even regular readers here will have a little trouble remembering just where he fits in the genealogy of mutualism. Lots of good progress has actually been made on that front, but it’s hard to imagine that anyone but me is particularly impatient to see the results.
The months seem to have been well-spent, based on the stack of draft translations completed, the progress on the Anarchy 101 series, the state of ongoing lawn-removal and the progress on various landscaping projects. But the promised “Encounters with Anarchist Individualism” have, I have to admit, proven harder to begin than I ever expected, in ways that have troubled me more than a little along the way.
As I said in the post announcing this series, the occasion for this new series on anarchist individualism was a new return to the idea of “the anarchic encounter,” which has served for me at various times as a kind of shortcut, trick or even cheat — a suggestive metaphor with some pedagogical power, which I have used in the past to suggest aspects of the emerging “neo-Proudhonian” account, but one that I will happily admit I was not yet prepared to articulate fully. Moving forward, more and more of my work looks to be related to general accounts of anarchist history, anarchist theory, etc., despite a fairly strong suspicion that “shortcut, trick or even cheat” might remain a pretty good description of most such general accounts. There doesn’t seem, however, to be any future in which we won’t have need of “suggestive metaphors with some pedagogical power,” so my sense is that the best we can do is to take the difficulties and the dangers seriously.
The mutualist revival depended heavily on that kind of pedagogico-rhetorical leverage, but I like to think that one of the strengths of the movement was the ways in which we were quite explicitly in “fake it til you make it” mode, simultaneously rediscovering and reinventing mutualism as a tendency. By the time it was possible to provide a really general account of mutualism (in the Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism chapter) it became clear that we were just doing more consciously what had been done right along.
As satisfying as it has been in other ways, nothing about that process has lessened my skepticism about general accounts in the realm of anarchist history and theory. If anything, the work simply underlined the various ways in which accounts have tended to achieve generality primarily by excluding the inconvenient bits — by imposing more or less ideological, more or less archic constraints on the anarchy of anarchism as it has manifested itself.
Again, however, that has not changed, for better or worse, my sense that “suggestive metaphors with some pedagogical power” are still necessary and that somehow we need to find a way to construct general narratives about anarchism that are “shareable” across different anarchist tendencies — without sacrificing the wealth of differences in the process. So I have been examining to what extent the exclusions in our general histories are simply unnecessary and considering the number of occasions in which rather small changes in clearly partisan narratives are enough to accommodate the excluded elements.
Our Lost Continent and the Journey Back is the slowly-developing product of that work. It was also the first context in which the phrase “bigger on the inside” (with its tongue-in-cheek pop culture references) struck me as relevant. Without getting too deep into the historiographical questions, the thing that has seemed clear about even the most partisan historical accounts is that it is very hard, for example, to write a history of anarchism that excludes Proudhon. His contributions can be redefined — making him a “precursor to anarchism” — or his faults can be emphasized. We can try to set limits on the scope of the narrative, in order to exclude him, but still preserve some degree of generality, but, ultimately, histories of anarchism that start by excluding Proudhon are almost always doomed to do a whole lot more excluding — and often some rather questionable including — losing most of their claims to generality in the process. The most solidly factual rationales for inclusion and exclusion — the late emergence of anarchism as a keyword, decades after Proudhon’s rehabilitation of anarchy, for example — always seem to raise as many questions as they answer.
But the mileposts and watersheds seem likely to remain more or less the same, whether you think the “anarchy without anarchism” of 1840-1875 is part of your anarchist story or not. So there is no great narrative difficulty in explaining a much more inclusive account of the anarchist tradition to, say, someone who has learned the familiar “developmental” account of anarchistic progress (mutualism → collectivism → anarchist communism, etc.) or one of the more specific accounts, like the platformist history of Black Flame. At every point of differentiation and exclusion, we can — and often must — account for the excluded elements. So the “trick” in Our Lost Continent and the Journey Back is the narrative framing, starting with my own rather conventional, predictably eclectic early training in anarchist history, but treating that as an outward journey into the anarchist past, to be followed by a reconsideration on the return trip.
We want general accounts, whether they are historical or theoretical, to be general. We need a basic understanding, without all the messy, potentially confusing or conflicting details, but we want those basics to accommodate some not entirely predictable volume of details relevant to their application. Learning enough to begin as anarchists, without committing ourselves to positions and beliefs likely to constrain us when we most need to embrace a bit of anarchy, well, perhaps we have proven that the trick is not as easy as it might look. Often the answer seems to just be “add more anarchy.” Small shifts in perspective can open up otherwise closed perspectives.
But it would obviously be nice to provide ourselves — and the new anarchists and potential anarchists who come along — with simple, general accounts that they don’t have to fight so much as we try to make use of them.
I started trying to assemble some tools of that sort with the writings on “A Schematic Anarchism,” which were the starting point for the book I’ve begun to outline: The Anarchism of the Encounter: A Distillation. In some of that material, the general accounts involved are stripped down to the most general sorts of formulas — not accidentally, the only sorts of concepts that Proudhon believed could be really defined — with the result that, for example, the schematic anarchism will tell us something about constructions like “anarchist capitalism” and other improbable attempts to hybridize anarchy and archy. Not that it is likely to tell us anything terribly flattering about those would-be hybrids, but even that degree of inclusion is unquestionably a bit disturbing in the context of so many accounts shaped by ideological concerns. The problem with anarchy is that it is precisely archic capacities to control that it dispenses with. That’s also one of the main reasons that it is the Beautiful Idea, but that doesn’t make it a reassuringly safe idea. In the present, fundamentally archic context, dispensing with archy seems like a case of “everything must go!” — but perhaps the more interesting and potentially disturbing situation is that, for all we know, depriving ourselves of hierarchy and authority might open the door to much, much more than it excludes.
Anarchy is another of those things that might be “bigger on the inside” — or at least bigger than it has appeared from our present, archic point of view.
So what does all of this have to do with anarchist individualism and the much-delayed encounters with it that I had proposed?
Having long organized my forays into anarchist theory around the concept of an anarchic encounter, and having begun to relate that theory to the work I have been doing interpreting Proudhon’s Justice, I found myself trying to elaborate his theory of persons into an account of the anarchistic subject — the person understood in anarchic terms — if only so that I could more completely account for the elements of that encounter. And one of the obvious questions was to what extent the account that I was developing fell within the scope of anarchist individualism.
I have said on various occasions that I am not an individualist. I think that radicals like Pierre Leroux were probably right when, in the 1830s, they decided that individualism and socialism were just aspects of the analysis that would be necessary to really account for social relations — and that focusing on one or the other was a dangerous approach, likely to lead to false conclusions. On the other hand, I’m inclined to thing that the same partial character means that any really conscientious attempt at understanding either the human individual or society by itself is likely to reach a point where the focus has to shift. As a result, I’m happy to say that in my attempts at a very social sort of theory, my inclination is almost always to start from the side of the individual — and from my own individuality, such as it is. However, as the nature of individuality is, in this context, always subject to further consideration, starting from the side of the individual really means undergoing a series of encounters with the various aspects of individuality. Drawn over into the realm of historical-theoretical study, that entails a series of encounters with various sorts of individualism.
My specific interests in that field are, at this point, no mystery: Proudhon’s theory of the human individual as free absolute; Whitman’s self, which “contains multitudes” and is not contained between its hat and boots; Stirner’s einzige, who is both the unique and the only one. The “Rambles in the Fields of Anarchist Individualism” have introduced important elements of my own synthesis. The preliminary outline for The Anarchism of the Encounter introduces a slight twist on some elements from Proudhon’s work, explicitly situation that free absolute in a universe where “the center is everywhere and the center nowhere.” I expect that those references will remain the most important ones, but my hope is to draw much more broadly from the various forms of anarchist individualism moving forward, making use at times of texts for which I have a considerably more tempered fondness.
I’ll admit that some of my favorite individualist texts are probably not particular good general theory, but manage to push some aspect of individualism toward its breaking point, highlighting both strengths and weaknesses. John Badcock, Jr.‘s “Slaves to Duty,” for example, was one of the first egoist texts to elicit any kind of positive response from me, initially based simply on the obsessive character of the line it tries to draw in the sand. I’ve never been entirely convinced by it, but there is a certain pleasure in letting oneself be carried along for the duration of the piece. John Beverley Robinson’s 1915 essay “Egoism” is another “favorite,” but for even more complicated reasons. I’m convinced that Robinson sort of mangles the notion of the einzige as “the only individual,” but the account that he gives was the one I found myself pushing against for a long time, until my own synthesis began to take shape.
I want to wrap up this post, and really start our series of encounters with anarchist individualism, by looking at a couple of passages from Robinson’s essay. Here is the opening:
There is no word more generally misinterpreted than the word egoism, in its modern sense. In the first place, it is supposed to mean devotion to self interest, without regard to the interest of others. It is thus opposed to altruism — devotion to others and sacrifice of self. This interpretation is due to the use of the word thus antithetically by Herbert Spencer.
Again, it is identified with hedonism or eudaimonism, or epicureanism, philosophies that teach that the attainment of pleasure or happiness or advantage, whichever you may choose to phrase it, is the rule of life.
Modern egoism, as propounded by Stirner and Nietzsche, and expounded by Ibsen, Shaw and others, is all these; but it is more. It is the realization by the individual that they are an individual; that, as far as they are concerned, they are the only individual.
Here is the einzige as “the only one.” The bold claim obviously requires some explanation, but it seems as clear as it is bold.
For each one of us stands alone in the midst of a universe. We are surrounded by sights and sounds which we interpret as exterior to ourselves, although all we know of them are the impressions on our retina and ear drums and other organs of sense. The universe for the individual is measured by these sensations; they are, for him, the universe. Some of them they interpret as denoting other individuals, whom they conceive as more or less like themselves. But none of these is himself. He stands apart. His consciousness, and the desires and gratifications that enter into it, is a thing unique; no other can enter into it.
I’ll set aside for now whether any of this is a reasonable interpretation of Stirner, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Shaw, etc. It is at least a position that has found some traction in anarchist egoist circles — and, in that context, it amounts to a kind of libertarian solipsism. Even if this solipsism is only methodological in character, simply a strong sort of skepticism, we can easily see how it would manifest itself in a rejection of claims regarding external authority.
We can also note that if one of the other accounts we are going to explore places the individual as a free absolute in a universe where “the center is everywhere and the center nowhere,” this account, in which “each one of us stands alone in the midst of a universe,” looks like it will allow for some fairly direct compare-and-contrast action. The obvious contrast, of course, would involve the difference between some kind of omnicentricity and what appears so far to be a monocentric conception, centered around “the only individual.”
But things are already complicated, since, according to Robinson, individuals interpret some of the sensations that they experience “as denoting other individuals, whom they conceive as more or less like themselves.” So, while in some sense “each one of us stands alone in the midst of a universe,” we still apparently have to account for quite a crowd of other quasi-individuals.
However near and dear to you may be your spouse, children, friends, they are not you; they are outside of you. You are forever alone. Your thoughts and emotions are yours alone. There is no other who experiences your thoughts or your feelings.
But apparently there are others — and, as we might expect from reading Stirner, our intercourse with them is important to us.
No doubt it gives you pleasure when others think as you do, and inform you of it through language; or when others enjoy the same things that you do. Moreover, quite apart from their enjoying the same things that you enjoy, it gives you pleasure to see them enjoy themselves in any way. Such gratification to the individual is the pleasure of sympathy, one of the most acute pleasures possible for most people.
According to your sympathy, you will take pleasure in your own happiness or in the happiness of other people; but it is always your own happiness you seek. The most profound egoist may be the most complete altruist; but he knows that his altruism is, at the bottom, nothing but self-indulgence.
Returning to the question of « our intercourse », let’s underline the idea that “the pleasure of sympathy” is “one of the most acute pleasures possible for most people,” presumably including conscious egoists.
But egoism is more than this. It is the realization by the individual that he is above all institutions and all formulas; that they exist only so far as he chooses to make them her own by accepting them.
When you see clearly that you are the measure of the universe, that everything that exists exists for you only so far as it is reflected in your own consciousness, you become a new person; you see everything by a new light: you stand on a height and feel the fresh air blowing on your face; and find new strength and glory in it.
Whatever gods you worship, you realize that they are your gods, the product of your own mind, terrible or amiable, as you may choose to depict them. You hold them in your hand, and play with them, as a child with its paper dolls; for you have learned not to fear them, that they are but the “imaginations of your heart.”
All the ideals which people generally think are realities, you have learned to see through; you have learned that they are your ideals. Whether you have originated them, which is unlikely, or have accepted somebody else’s ideals, makes no difference. They are your ideals just so far as you accept them. The priest is reverend only so far as you reverence him. If you cease to reverence him, he is no longer reverend for you. You have power to make and unmake priests as easily as you can make and unmake gods. You are the one of whom the poet tells, who stands unmoved, though the universe falls in fragments about you.
I’m struck by the contrast between the two realizations that characterize Robinson’s egoism. On the one hand, the egoist is subject to no power — “you can make and unmake gods — while, on the other, the individual self is fundamentally a prisoner of consciousness, for whom “the most acute pleasures possible,” such as sympathetic relations with others, seem hollowed out by the fact that those others remain “outside,” reaching the individual only as sensations, which “they interpret as denoting other individuals.”
All things are nothing to me — and hanging out with my possibly imaginary friends is pretty cool, too.
What strikes me first is the real poverty of it all. If it is true that this unique “stands alone in the midst of a universe” — if it is true that there is a universe, which provides us with the sensations that we must then interpret — then it seems fair to characterize our relations with that universe as a kind of haunting. For every phantom this egoism chases away, it seems to add many more, situated perhaps even more inescapably in the parts of our lives that we would like to be something. The creative nothing seems forced to cobble together a world from interpretations of some “outside,” which presumably contains the objects of sympathy, the sources of “the most acute pleasures possible” — but who knows…?
Not the conscious egoist, presumably.
Robinson ends his essay in a triumphal tone:
In brief, egoism in its modern interpretation, is the antithesis, not of altruism, but of idealism. The ordinary person — the idealist — subordinates their interests to the interests of their ideals, and usually suffers for it. The egoist is fooled by no ideals: he discards them or uses them, as may suit his own interest. If he likes to be altruistic, he will sacrifice himself for others; but only because he likes to do so; he demands no gratitude nor glory in return.
But it’s hard to treat this triumph — an escape from ideals, here perhaps best understood in terms of ideology — as anything but a bit hollow. Certainly, to sacrifice oneself for “others” who may or may not be more than a misinterpretation of “our” sensations — which themselves seem to be provided to us by the the universe that surrounds us, without clear means of making sense of them — certainly that is a thing that might give us pleasure to imagine. Or not. It all depends, in the end, on whether we are or are not, as they say, that way inclined. But inclined towards what? And for what reasons?
Let’s stop there in our examination of Robinson’s text — at least for now — and return to the larger project.
My intention is to provide a very simple, very general account of anarchy. My chosen metaphor is the anarchist encounter, presented by Proudhon as the whole of the “social system.” My intuition is that the account I am proposing can be constructed “from the side of the individual,” opening up a more narrowly individualist account to accommodate what is inescapably social (ecological, etc.) about the life of the human individual.
In an attempt to present the account in its simplest and strongest form, I have already begun to explore how the conception of the individual as “the only one” — with appropriate references and apologies to Stirner — my serve as a starting point. But, however promising the work I have done in the “Rambles in the Fields of Anarchist Individualism” may have been, it still seems necessary to address this other, widely disseminated and apparently very different conception of the einzige as “only one,” which we find in Robinson’s essay.
At this point, it simply becomes a question of whether or not this particular account can be opened up enough to accommodate the kind of neo-Proudhonian social individualist theory I’ve been pursuing.
At first glance, well… At first glance it appears that Robinson’s account is itself not terribly coherent or robust. So the first order of business is deciding whether that is itself a deal-breaker. And a first answer might be that contradiction as such didn’t necessarily look like much of an obstacle to the individualists of the Proudhon-Stirner-Whitman era. If we insist that an account of « the unique and its property » account for things solely in terms of a well-behaved, neatly ordered self and a property that is always exclusive, then we can easily find ourselves wrestling with the kinds of problems that seem to haunt Robinson’s account. But we can just as easily take our cues from Whitman:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then . . . . I contradict myself;
I am large . . . . I contain multitudes.
at which point we seem to have other options.
In the context of Robinson’s account, and the problems that seem to plague it, perhaps some combination of non-exclusive property, together with a conception of a self that “contains multitudes,” will allow us to avoid some of the problems he seems to face. It should be obvious that that combination poses its own set of difficulties, but I have already made a start at addressing them in the “Rambles” — and I expect to follow this post with one reviewing that progress, with particular attention to the notion of self-separation introduced there.
For now, however, let’s just imagine that it is not Robinson, but Whitman who finds himself alone at the center of a universe, confronted by sensations — « his own sensation » — which he is tempted to interpret as another self like his own. Do we expect all of this awkward navigation of insides and outsides, which always seem to leave us a bit uncertain regarding the arrangements? Isn’t it more likely that Whitman, who it is probably fair to say had trouble with boundaries, would simply ask himself, as he did in “Salut au Monde!”
What widens within you Walt Whitman?
What waves and soils exuding?
What climes? what persons and cities are here?
If we take our cues from works like the “Song of Myself,” which is ultimately a song about everything, we might imagine that there are few if any limits to the widening within of which Whitman was capable and the persons, among other things, for which he might find room inside. So there are no shortage of potential paradoxes to confront, but, if we are to take Whitman’s word for it, there certainly doesn’t seem to be any boundary that he will recognize to the pleasures of sympathy.
So we can have our encounters. That is, the unique can have its encounters…
STILL though the one I sing,
(One, yet of contradictions made,)…
…without ceasing, in the process, to be “the only one” and employing no means, it would seem, beyond a particular kind of self-creation, though perhaps one heavier on accommodation and restraint than we are accustomed to expect from conscious egoists.
That’s a small step, but maybe it’s enough for this first installment of the new series. Things are bound to get complicated moving forward, but perhaps the complications will be fewer and more manageable if we move deliberately through these first steps. So let’s plan to keep our focus relatively narrow, starting with the opposition we have established between Robinson’s account of the egoist and our potential Whitmanesque alternative, and talk next about this process of widening within, returning in the process to the ground first explored in the “Rambles in the Fields of Anarchist Individualism.” That will bring in the thought of E. Armand, and bring us closer to what seems like an inevitable confrontation between the elements we would like to draw from Stirner and those we are borrowing from Proudhon, but perhaps, if we are careful in the meantime, that confrontation needn’t end in an impasse.
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