An Anarchaotic Critique
This is in response to the previous entry “Original Anarchaos”. Taken from “Anarchaos and Order: On the Emergence of Social Justice” by Christopher Williams and Bruce Arrigo, the information provided here is a critique of the ongoing development of anarchaotic theory and action.
I want to start this critique and brief compendium with a strongly consumptive quote from Christopher Williams and Bruce Arrigo’s article: “Anarchism tells us why we should be there; and chaos theory shows us that we can be there.” Even more poignant might be: anarchaos theory shows us ‘how’ we can be there. While the term “anarchaos” inherently feels like an amalgamated term created by metal bands and for video games, or as a word instigating a massive deterrent to the beauty of golden ratios, objectified reliquaries and architecturally-massive monuments of monarchy, it’s not so. Anarchaos is “a beginning for integrative and critical theoretical approaches to understanding social problems…and the beginning of an outline for a new socially just order.” Anarchaos is also the activity of re-enlightening those attempting to define dynamism by subjugating it to any socially-just order. With every pendular sweep along what imagines to be complex order, the perturbations entangle us even further and more beautifully until there is no subjugation, monarchy, amalgamation or critique necessary.
In their article, the authors lay out four discrete hypotheses, of which three will be discussed herewith in. The fourth hypothesis about the integration of anarchy and chaos as anarchaos, is too consistently volitional for immediate critique and founds itself.
The hypotheses are as follows:
1. distinguish between anarchy as a negative element of popular discourse and anarchism as a social theory with positive ideological theories
2. chaos theory can enable the transition from an advanced capitalist society to an anarchist society by using non-linear dynamics as an invaluable reorienting process of social change
3. review self-organization
4. integrate anarchist thought with chaos theory (or anarchaos)
Hypothesis 1 – Anarchaotic Natural Negation
There are traditionally two, differing anarchist views: 1) anarchy vs. anarchism and 2) a social-theoretical conception of anarchy and the three essential components of anarchism: 1) a criticism of existing society, 2) a view of a desirable future society and 3) a means of passing from one to the other (according to George Woodcock).
The tendency to criticize society for those unclear with anarchy or anarchism results in what Williams and Arrigo state best: “The negation of order, then, is the negation of a negation; that is, a deliberate attempt to foster new and different possibilities for an enriched, life-affirming society.” The second view necessitates social-theoretical conceptions, so it must be asked: how is order considered a negation? Williams and Arrigo’s suggestion is by not allowing for social justice, or privileging those who follow state-mandates rather than those seeking voluntary commitments. Of course, within deliberation lies inherent failure when fostering novelty meant to dissolve prior oppressions. We cannot ‘heal’.
Personally, I run into issues with considering anarchy negative via any element, for the basic tenets of ‘anarkhein’ – whether ideological or actual – are not making such functionality a movement, as in what -ism tends to do to any idea. Once a remarkable fixture of human gathering is presented as a doctrine of structure, it enables corresponding accountability and solidifies excusability with quantity. Anarchy is social individuality and must remain so if it’s to reach a means of passing from existing society to a “desirable future society”.
There’s trifle uncertainty in what underlies anarchy from anarchism. To immediately label one negative and one positive is rash and can’t be defended simply by suggesting usage in “popular discourse”. How anarchism “always” refers to positive doctrine isn’t logically defended – for in-itself, ‘doctrine’-as-ism denotes ‘teaching’, of which anarchy inherently cannot support. To teach is to submit to hierarchy; as in the classical sense of teach, there is a learner who is assumed to not have the knowledge necessary to do ‘something’.
Marshall Shatz, one of many academician references within the piece, appears fallacious with clarification – anarchy isn’t a “stepping stone”, as he states, but is a continual process. There’s nothing elemental about its energy. When anarchy becomes anarchism, the hierarchy begins again, as there is aporia. Anarchism has become a dominant force, insinuating the ‘correct’ means to live by. Though the principles behind anarchy predicate positivity and natural ‘order’, to make such a nonlinear dynamic doctrine, or taught, is ironically and socially-imposed on individual stature; for even if the State is destroyed or deconstructed, a liberated society has the choice to retain that which is observed or experienced as natural. At this point, an argument can be made citing Murray Bookchin’s derivational first and second natures, and how deeply intimate chaos is with a cosmic and objective chaos or one rooted in human subjectivity. Selecting either path results in a homoplasic neuropathy leaving sociality to fend for itself. But attempting to implicate sociality alone for anarchy becomes a dangerous and poetic endeavor, albeit one with more hope and less realism than often expected from biological or psychological arguments.
To portray such hope underlying social anarchism, Williams and Arrigo state, “In a dialectical form, a destructive spirit coupled with a creative passion gives way to something new, something better, something more human.” This begins to sound a bit like Kantian humanism, as if we can restrain or retrain ourselves to have transhuman duty, something beyond the natural order which has provided the capability for humans to attempt such logical and illogical thought. There’s no denying destruction and creation are inverse and continuous in a process of cyclical human traditions, but the harmonious whole is beyond the attainment of realistic mannerism, beyond Max Weber’s social actions. Society, especially in a present Western form, relies upon the separation of being and the rationalization of individuality, circumventing creative-passion-through-destruction for the positivity anarchism it’s so assured to possess. Destruction leads to immediate replacement and creative passion is urged to arrival from sophomoric, economic advantage.
Continuing the positive anarchistic trends, the authors quote Mikhail Bakunin, “There will be a qualitative transformation, a new living, life-giving revelation, a new heaven and a new earth, a young and mighty world in which all our present dissonances will be resolved into a harmonious whole.” From another classic statement of Bakunin’s, “Anarchists strive to develop something more human, i.e. a society governed by natural human inclinations toward co-operation…” we see anarchism not to be found in a “new heaven” because of the lack of realistic hope and scope. Spiritual ideology extends beyond the “pro-social interaction” necessitated by anarchy, a movement relying on human potential in ability, not presupposed metaphysicality.
Furthermore, the authors say, “The genuinely and naturally ordered society, then, is one that is without competition, selfishness, greed, and the fatuous destruction and violence that arguably result.” To state something is “genuinely” or “naturally” structured is suggesting it is in present form, in the state it currently exists, as praxis. To posit truly natural social behaviors such as competition or greed demands one of the first rules of traditional anarchy untrue. Errico Malatesta states, “Man, like all living beings, adapts himself to the conditions in which he lives, and transmits by inheritance his acquired habits.” Though this conclusion arrives from theories of natural selection in response to intra-specific comparison, it ascertains human society within Bookchin’s ‘first nature” and not society’s “second nature”. The anarchist principle further derived from Malatesta’s paragraphical continuance about being freed from bondage resounds with the final statement “How it would be possible to live, if there were no master over him?” While human plight is “naturally-selected”, what is often forgotten or disregarded is the coevolution of freedom from slavery with competition, selfishness, greed, etc., and how important each behavior can be to anarchy’s proliferation.
Hypothesis 2 – Anarchaotic Functional Time
“Anarchism…is defined by the conspicuous absence of external controls, constraints, and structure relations. This absence is not to induce a sustained period of disorder or chaos; it is a transitory stage of disorder en route to a new order that is not at all consistent with the misinformed portrait of anarchism…” The keystone in the authoritarian statement is a “transitory stage of disorder,” for who knows how long such a stage can and should exist? The perpetual necessity of chaos in relative terms is the only effective means of establishing anarchic restructuring. In fact, chaos is in vivo, around us as James Gleick reviews in his text “Chaos”. We experience the chaotic beauty of weather, tides, plant growth, human interaction, neural kinetics, and motion and function at the basest levels.
George Woodcock writes, “The anarchist ideal of society is brotherhood carried to its logical extreme, and, far from envisaging chaos, it upholds the idea that man has a natural capacity for mutual aid and voluntary order.” Assuming order voluntarily and directly negates the beauty and expectancy of chaos as a natural preconception to life. It is not imaginary to live amongst chaos’ ideals and expressions, either personally or socially, without involving social reification. Expecting crime, judgment, power and interference to derive from a misrepresentation of chaos-as-disorder is obvious, but to treat chaos outside of the self-organization assumed within social brotherhood’s truly “positive” reformation because of false semantics is naive. One cannot forge meaning to suit the reproduction of an ongoing, resultant state of being.
In divergence from “order-out-of-order”, “spontaneous order” and “faith in the human spirit alone” as reliance techniques for anarchic persuasion, social life and sociality are so naturally engrained in prehistoric and modern Homo livelihood, the only extraneous variable to consider is time: how long will it take for consciousness of said “spiraling” to even itself to sincere flotation? There is an undermining fear, neglect and disrespect in assuming citizens cannot “self-organize”, but even with a wealth of non-dynamical transitional theory, the factor remains – space is abundant and time works against humans within chaos. What must be accomplished is a transcendence of classical renditions of temporality – removing absolutism and remembering relativism, though many think with the advent of chaos that even Albert Einstein is archaic.
Hypothesis 3 – Systemic Anarchaos
“Understanding how systems respond to such disorder [i.e. non-linearity in behavior] is the role that chaos (and complexity) theory have assumed in the contemporary discourse regarding physical and social systems.” The tenets of chaos theory are subsumed with a lack of understanding and initiation – a new language must be established to describe what we “think” the understanding or how of nonlinearity is: perturbations, attractors, bifurcations, branching, basins, sequencing, flow, and on. To place such a lexicon into a sociological or psychological framework invades consistency, which will remain the most honest form of faith during disorder and deconstruction. To tell one their physical and social systems are in chaos, rather than “are chaos” will demote true emotional renderings into absolute uncertainty, and merely with the fact they can’t understand anything we’re saying. Simplification is a great result of chaos theory, as mentioned in the article’s note 12, but cannot begin simply with the dissipation of law by force or action. The dispensability of law must result from personal and psychological simplification – becoming conscious of it isn’t needed. An example would be someone who has discovered a need to read both written pieces here to understand how to be anarchy.
“The twofold failure of the existing system” is based upon 1) the lack of order maintenance and 2) public disenchantment. The two conditions, seen as perpetually initial through societal or civilized history, offer chaos a “prophetic role” according to Williams and Arrigo. By prophetic, we are ensuing the unrealistic viewpoint that an abundant disordered or chaotic shift will take place in which an anarchic society can result from open-ended visualizations of transference. The lack of the State’s ability to fulfill its portion of the social contract thus enables consciousness of necessary social change and hence, the default state being an oppositional, or contractually-diverse and naturally-divergent reformation based on self-organizational qualities of chaos theory. What thrives in inspirational rhetoric lacks in realistic mandate, as the expunging of control-ordered institutions often results in reactionary compensation due to the hierarchical attachments derived from longstanding arrangements. The transition of social contraction from those in power to those never exhibiting control in actuality or a noospheric existence is rare in documented civilized history. To remain in a state of disorder while relying upon “large-scale systemic transitory dynamics” still forgoes and remains outside of idealized or potentiated anarchy and chaos. The process is fulfilled without-system, or in a state of body-without-organs as per Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. Any utilization of systematized disorder fails to correlate the expectancies of chaos with its natural affiliation for systems, logical fallacy to and within a semiotic argument and a stretch of social dynamic reorganization, which is ongoing within the coexistence of ordered and disorder statuses.
Hypothesis 4 – State-oriented Behavior
The theory of spontaneous order according to Colin Ward suggests a necessity-driven symmetry sufficing immediate needs rather than long-term goals or oppressive tactics. What social evidence is there for such a transition and can such transitions exist long enough to be declared anarchaotic societies?
The examples Ward uses to defend mutual aid through spontaneous order includes “revolutionary situations,…adhoc organizations…after natural disasters, or in any activity where there are no existing organizational forms or hierarchical authority.” Unfortunately, there appears to be stratum situational effects not explained. Take a revolutionary situation. In many or all cases, revolution is initiated by social inadequacy, or what Williams and Arrigo call “a failure of…obligatory functions” by the State. In such a circumstance, groups of oppressed and alienated people form ideologies, planning tactics and activities which best suit immediate attainment of their needs. In such a process, natural leadership controls, and underlying or unconscious influences of history’s traditionally-radical thinkers takes root, as if passed through some morphic or collective psychologizing. The substratum appearance then typifies more hierarchical influences, bearing epistemological derivatives not as mutually exclusive as supported by Ward’s theory. The same analysis can be attributed to adhoc natural disaster teams – those with the resources and natural power and ability to help those without – and the generously general non-organizational and non-hierarchical groups lacking authority, of which none exist. I think what tends to be missing in the social expectations or “wishing” for anarchaos to revolve out of chaotic or unmet needs, is the realization of anarchy’s potential to be as-is rather than an agent of formal change. There materializes a visualization of a particular “body” of given anarchists rather than the personal and intimate self-declaration anarchy ensures. Once anarchist deems herself affiliated, she no longer bears semblance to the non-judgment inherent in anarchaotic living. A team of two quantitatively overpowers the one.
One of the deepest engrained issues within Williams and Arrigo’s text is the constant use of the “State” as an institution so reactionary as to necessitate immediate order within any impending possibility of chaos. There’s no attention paid to the sects of nameless individuals and groups currently living the words and descriptions so reverently referenced in order to apply academic credence to remedial representations of State-oriented behavior. What is also omitted is the general negligence and inaptitude of the State to contain any remotely invasive perception of the ongoings of true anarchaotic flow.
Discussion of Ludwig Von Bertalanffy’s general system theory is quite an interesting scientific end and offers a nice insight into how chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics works, until Williams and Arrigo state, “We note that the transformative state is always but a temporary state of disorder giving rise to a new, more effective, order.” This falls back into the State-oriented behavior mentioned above. As Von Bertalanffy suggested two conditions of systematic behavior – steady or transformative – the authors suggest transformative as only a guiding circumstance for steady-state operations, explaining perturbations within unsteady parameters as used to retain order once again – flexibility rather than alteration. Furthermore, with Ilya Prigogine’s research exemplifying order-out-of-chaos, there’s more evidence of order taking precedent within dynamical natural systems and thus being collated onto social behaviorism. Again, temporal arguments are omitted for spatial considerations of material diversity. Prigogine also made it clear that while a “new state of stability self-organized from the chaos”, the pattern developed out of far-from-equilibrium conditions remained within the realm of chaos only to be given a proper signifier via neoteric lexicon – a lack of self-awareness from a psychological perspective. Again, academia decided the model representation of numerical symbolism or of graphical depiction superseded the far deeper complexity of organismic behavior and momentary, dynamic influence.
How does a greater complexity of the new order engender greater adaptability? Something with more steps means a longer temporal and larger spatial path. If we take it out of the level of spacetime, any thing more complex qualitatively means more difficult and more uncertain about its means and ends.
The strange attractor is the zero point of the article. Attractors, according to chaos theory, form parameters of natural limitation, and the strange attractor fits the nonlinear typecast best because it is wholly original within every revolution, yet remains faintly describable. Hence, it provides comfort rather than coercive convenience. There’s still an err of inconsistency when bonding anarchy and chaos – suggesting chaos fits into the social standards of anarchism as a molded structure of natural order. A micro-level amount of chaos patterning does fit unpredictable behavior and tends to be actual because it’s concurrent with reality. When taken to a macro-level representation – say on a magnitude one times that of a person, the supposed consistency of “generating order from within” is no longer relative but substantially representative. The simplest notion with which to make sense of the this is the ‘relationship’ of two persons – already given linguistic framing, sensory expectation and emotional judicature. Extending beyond individuality means anarchy annulled while submitting to scaling theory.
In entirety, there’s nothing beyond absolutely dazzling within a sociological adaptation of anarchaos. Just as anarchaotic psychology would seem rather inane in light of the true happenings of anarchy, there’s at least a formal understanding and desire for emotional retention of a revolutionarily, basic mentality. The issue or program is now to mutually recognize personal parameters and approve or deny of one’s ability to be anarchy without necessity for grouping. In the barest scope, we can support the notion a true and passionate collection of individuals has persisted within and outside of societal and natural preconditions to assess and act anarchaos. Rather than expect order-out-of-chaos or order-within-chaos, one might entice the idea anarchaos is best suited for chaos-within-order, and anarchy as the behavioral co-dependent under strenuous and revolutionary events.
