Autonomies

Decolonising anarchism, according to Jesse Cohn, amounts to freeing it from its modernist assumptions: that culture is opposed to nature, that human culture progresses by an expanding autonomy from the heteronomy of nature, a progress grounded in the technological dominion over the natural world (and the human worlds closest to nature, e.g., those of the “indigenous” of the americas) and the freedom of human thought and life from the illusion of its dependency on transcendent sources (e.g., religion). To the extent that anarchism is imbued with or assumes such ideas, it is modernist and colonialist, susceptible to all of the hierarchies and forms of oppression that it has claimed to contest in its brief modern history.

It is for this reason that Cohn speaks of decolonising anarchism as a demodernisation of anarchism, something which then implies re-thinking and possibly repudiating notions of autonomy if conceived in opposition to nature (with this last equally in need of re-conceptualisation), that is, endeavouring to imagine freedom rooted in a nature no longer perceived as inanimate matter or as living, but “unthinking and unfree”. Technologies would also have to be evaluated on the grounds of their contribution to communities of conviviality rather than to a blind instrumental efficacy that threatens to engender new forms of ever greater and more intensive control. And equally significant, a non-modern anarchism could then, and should, re-evaluate its impetuous dismissal of religion or spirituality, if thesecan be thought of and illustrated historically by immanent and non-alienating forms (e.g., animism).

Liberated then from their modernist garb, anarchists and the historical tradition of anarchism may more fruitfully engage with and learn from, as well as contribute to, other ways of being in the world that fail or refuse to assume a place in the developmental narrative of enlightenment and capitalist progressivism.

Cohn’s essay is an important contribution to what will continue to be an ongoing theoretical reflection on and practical experimentation with other ways of living anarchy. It calls to mind the earlier work of the recently deceased anarchist, Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey on “spiritual anarchism”, or older “anti-modernist” and/or Christian anarchists.

Difficult questions however remain, it seems to us, for any effort to spiritualise anarchism. Contrary to what Cohn seems to suggest, there is not one modernism or a single story of modernity. European modernity was always a changing confluence of multiple intellectual tributaries, far too unstable to be reduced to the nature-culture divide, or to this divide being interpreted without ambiguity.

The invitation to explore the indigenous worlds of the “new world” and their “philosophies”, their “ontologies” and “ethics”, is of enormous significance, but if merely placed in opposition to a european modernity, it suggests two doubtful simplifications: european modernity versus indigenous “holism”. Europe’s modernity however was never homogeneous or completely totalising (however “genocidal” it could be, to speak with Pier Paolo Pasolini), as the indigenous worlds have never been a single cultural monolith from which could be read a single, ethically good way to be (as Cohn himself suggests when he cites Eduardo Galeano: “I believe in the legacies that multiply human freedom, and not in those that cage it . . .. I am not proposing a return to the sacrificial rites that offered up human hearts to the gods, nor am I praising the despotism of the Inca or Aztec monarchs.”).

Without wishing by any means to dismiss the idea of demodernising and spiritualising anarchism, it is by no means obvious that these later must or even can involve some form of animism, at least beyond the worlds where such forms no longer exist. But even if it were possible, and desirable, would this radically or completely eliminate the nature-culture divide if this latter is interpreted as a simplified conceptual reflection of something much deeper, namely, that distance that all reflexive thought must assume in relation to what is thought, as a condition for its very possibility. This is not to divorce thought, the mind, culture, from nature, but rather to point to the disharmony and dissonance that can always exist between these dimensions of human existence and which are the experiential sources of what we designate by the word “autonomy”.  One could imagine these different dimensions, and others, as modes of a singular reality (echoing Spinoza), in which case they would not be fated to produce the violent dualisms inherent in modern, colonial european thought and practice, but rather could serve as the basis for a critical ontology of that same modernism.

One can also ask whether or not anarchists really need to lose any time with these questions when what is at stake are matters of justice and that it is upon common issues of justice that more general political struggles can emerge. The anarchist theorist has to give way to the anarchist militant, and it will be in struggle that ideas will emerge, as has always been the case with anarchism.

In sum, the paths towards a decolonisation and demodernistation of anarchism are potentially many, and it is not even clear that these are the most appropriate terms for what is called for, or that if they are, they must be employed with considerable caution and care.

Jesse Cohn does just that and our questions are meant only to push along the debate.

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