From Larval Subjects
Just a random thought before making dinner. I often find myself reflecting on Book IV of Plato’s Republic and how he cautions against the city becoming too large. What is the problem, I wonder, with a large city? In the context in which Plato was writing, I suspect the problem was one of the materiality of media. To form a collective, the elements that make up your collective must be able to relate to one another. In Plato’s context, these relations can be forged by sound-waves/speech or writing. Sound-waves dissipate quickly in the air or medium through which they travel, and as we all know from the game of “telephone”, messages transmitted by speech quickly undergo random variation becoming something quite different than what they first were. As a consequence, it becomes difficult to form a collective out of a large and geographically separated population based on speech alone. Your collective can only grow to a certain size when it’s based on the medium of speech/sound-waves.
Things fare better with writing. It is durable so the message is preserved allowing for collective identify formation (cf. Anderson). The problem in this historical context is that only a small portion of the population is literate and writing is both expensive and a rare skill. Following Derrida and ethnologists such as Vernant, I accept the thesis that writing– in its sheer materiality (not content) –fundamentally transformed social relations, making things like formal law, the idea of universal justice (i.e., the indelibility of temple inscriptions and marks), mathematics, philosophy, science, and so on possible; but the problem was that given the institutional infrastructure pertaining to matters like education, writing just couldn’t travel far. It was restricted to an elite few that learned how to read and who could afford writings. If, then, Plato is led to defend the thesis that cities (collectives) shouldn’t grow beyond a certain size, then this is based on a claim about the materiality of media that dominate in his historical context: speech. The material features of that medium prevent certain forms of social relation from emerging.
This is the major argument against anarchism. Anarchism, the argument runs, works well in small tribal communities where everyone speaks to everyone else and knows everyone else, but when collectives reach a particular size this sort of communist form of relation can no longer function because there’s too much separation among the elements (people) that compose the collective. We require a party or a state to manage social relations because of limitations communicative possibilities. In other words, the argument is that the Party and the State are mediums. The Party, for example, is a centralized agency that observes what is going on throughout the world and transmits it to people that are communicatively disconnected from one another and who are unable to see all that is going on throughout the world. Parties are necessary in the same way that we once required telephone operators to connect people with one another. The argument is the same with the defense of the State. The State and the Party see and relate, the thesis runs, where we cannot. Due to limitations on connectability, we need a central eye that will both gather information and distribute it, coordinating action among those that cannot see. While the Party and the State might be problematic because often they come to function in such a way as to only promote their continued existence and not the interests of those they claim to represent, this is nonetheless an evil we must accept– the argument runs –because we need this medium, this angel or daimon, this intermediary, to relate and coordinate that which is unrelated. In other words, the necessity of the State and the Party are utilitarian and pragmatic, based implicitly on considerations of connectability. A Party is not the “position of the analyst”– how could something occupy the position of the analyst outside the clinic? –but is a medium of relation or connection.
The question is whether or not this medium or telephonic switchboard is still necessary in our current historical moment. The dominance of Party and State politics takes place in material conditions where some medium of relation is required to connect that which is geographically separated. It could be that historical conditions have changed due to the material possibilities opened by various technologies. There were already glimmers of this decades ago during the revolutions of the 60′s, where Party apparatus failed to side with the transformations taking place, actively fighting against them, because they didn’t accord with the ideology of the Party and spoke to issues that both pertained to class politics, economics, and a whole range of issues that simply couldn’t be understood within a traditional Marxist (not Marx) framework. Yet in the activism of OWS, the events in Greece, and the Arab Spring, we’ve also seen the emergence of an acephalous (non-party, non-vanguard, politics) that doesn’t pass through the medium of a party. This is also the first form of politics that has made significant change in the social field in decades… Without the mediation of a medium like the vanguard. Have these movements gone as far as we’d like? No. Have they introduced entirely new possibilities in social assemblages? Absolutely.
The tenor of these politics has been anarchist through and through insofar as they haven’t relied on either the Party or the State. They’ve eschewed the microfascists that would subordinate liberty to the mission of a Party that aims only to perpetuate its own continued existence. They’ve challenged the State in all contexts. They’ve instead set about creating alternatives or engaging in what I call “terraformation”. What is it that’s made this possible? I suspect that part of the answer is that the conditions of information exchange– at the material level alone –have become such that it’s now possible to coordinate action and form collectives among those that are geographically separated. In other words, with the new technologies the Party and the State are no longer needed as a medium of communication and coordination. The objects– transatlantic cables, satellites, smart phones, the internets, and so on –have made a difference in what is materially possible and what we’re increasingly witnessing is the possibility of anarchism or a truly communistic society. Indeed, with the rise of “big data” technologies (thanks Nick Srnicek), we’re now even in the position to respond to the capitalist arguments regarding distribution and production, because we’ve developed a technological framework capable of solving the problems of “planned economy” without the mediation of the invisible hand of the market. We now learn that we no longer need a vangard to educate and discipline the rest of us dopes– we wish the folks who defend such things would attend to Lacan and D&G on the desire for authority and charismatic leaders; but they’re too busy dismissing these worries as “neoliberal” conspiracies –but can now begin to engage in truly communistic (common/democratic) formations of social relations. The city, under these conditions, can become much larger but it also requires us to recognize that infrastructure is a political issue.

Comments
It's hard to deny that new
It's hard to deny that new communication technologies have had a big impact on anarchists and social movements, but I wonder about how direct the connection is. Aside from facilitating communications and spreading propaganda, the these gadgets themselves aren't terribly helpful and are often big liabilities. The real benefit, IMHO, is in how they've changed the way we think. The internet provides real examples of decentralized networks that people can directly experience - that wasn't so common for most of the last century. In the last fifteen years, large centralized organizations have been dropping like flies - anyone else remember AOL? Even capitalists are starting to admit that big autocratic institutions aren't as efficient as they always pretended. That gives me hope for the city's future.
... Mmmm... yeah no anarchism
... Mmmm... yeah no anarchism really really only work well in small communities. Get over it. This is not a liability. Embrace it.
Even without these
Even without these technologies, wouldn't it be possible to have various small, self-sustaining communities (neighborhoods/districts) functioning within a cohesive whole (cities)? If not, wouldn't that imply the feasibility of an anarchist society is entirely contingent and reliant upon modern technologies?
Or only possible in their
Or only possible in their absence.
after just watching the nova
after just watching the nova special ‘earth from space’ where satellite data shows that everything is thoroughly connected with everything else in fluid flows like ‘space weather’. the inorganic and organic are connected [they are like two phases within a single circular process] in our continually transforming relational spatial world. like Mach, lamarck, nietzsche et al said, there are no ‘starting points’ for life as if ‘life’ were an internal candle [local process] that ‘blesses’ only certain forms [life is the overall process that does not descriminate between the inorganic and organic]. the question arises as to why human beings, who are continually emerging flow-forms in this continuum, should ‘have trouble’ with shifting gears from local to global organization. nature doesn’t have a problem because it is a relational dynamical continuum, and the stuff that is local, is the nonlocal stuff that the conscious observer merely imputes locality to. for man to claim that he cannot scale up a purely relational organizing without limit, while nature can suggests that man has a different idea about organizing than nature. it may be different but is it more powerful, so that it can 'tame nature'? [not bloody likely]
actually, the narrator says something at the very end which may provide a clue; he says; ‘unlike all of these fluid interconnected processes, human activities are different because “we make conscious decisions about what we do”.
that is a very curious remark to make after showing how the whole of space including and going far beyond the earth is relationally interconnected in one big energy-charged fluid-dynamic. how does man escape being caught up in the continuum? how can man change the climate-dynamic he is included in? mach says that the climate-changing inhabitants are conditioning the climate change dynamic at the same time as the climate change dynamic is conditioning the climate changing inhabitants. al gore and the majority believe that an emergent form that is in the flow, namely 'man', is capable of building technology that determines the future of the flow. lol. Western man's hubris is measured by the long tonne.
but “we make conscious decisions about what we do”, so, the world of conscious decisions, must put us into a world of our own, a world where conscious decision making ‘makes sense’ [it doesn’t make sense in the physically-real world, since everything is connected with everything else and ‘making decisions or choices’ makes no sense, ... not in a physically real phenomenal sense]. of course, philosophers like nietzsche have been saying this very forcefully for over a century, and few Western acculturated people are going for it, ... yet!
scaling up anarchism is no problem; it is nature’s way. all we have to do, to do the same, is to suspend putting our reasoning and decision-making into an unnatural primacy over our intuition. reasoning is ok as a guide, our problem comes when we insist on following through with it on a collective basis. anarcha-indigenist ‘circle processes’ are all about letting the centre become informed by the intelligence in the relational space around it, rather than trying to direct everything from a rational 'decision-making' centre. the circle processes scale up gracefully as far as you want with no end in sight as 'earth from space' shows. the central authority directed processes are strictly human, and they scale up over the dead bodies of those on the periphery. the scaling up process is known as 'competition' to which Western acculturated people attribute magic powers. it is an anthropocentric fetishism that is autotoxic.
No offense, but, just that we
No offense, but, just that we're all clear, and I'm pretty sure we made this clear a decade ago, but, if the state is smashed, we're taking civilization down with it.
Just so we're clear.
just so we're clear (another thing)
Just so we're clear, the absolute association of communism with State and Party is total nonsense. Just so we're clear.
Just so we're clear, if there
Just so we're clear, if there's some confusion there, it's the fault of at least a few communists.
Clearly.
Clearly. And if we don't pay attention to political ideas and things that have actually happened in the world, and decide instead to feel smug about not being Stalin in exchange for crazy-reductivist stories, that's our fault.
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