My dear anonymous friend,
Thank you for your lengthy response to my review of Days of War, Nights of Love (DoWNoL). You clarified your methodology, some of the ideas behind it and, thus, some of the differences in our perspectives. Since I do not accept the idea that one can determine the limits of how one's book will be perceived and used once it has left one's hands or consider the aims that you express in your letter to be worthwhile from an anarchist perspective, I won't give a lot of space to dealing with your explanations of who you intended to address with DoWNoL, nor to the question of its success in accomplishing your intended aim, but I will make a couple of brief comments on this before going on to the heart of our differences.
By publishing an explicitly anarchist text-regardless of your intended audience-you have entered into the discussion of anarchist ideas, of anarchist theory. By giving the potential effects of your words priority over the authentic expression of your ideas, you accomplish a few things you may not have intended: the ideas you express come to lack coherence; readers are unable to decipher what you actually think, desire and dream, thus precluding the possibility of developing relationships of affinity; your communication with the intended audience becomes unilateral (your words are the cause to the effects produced in the reader) and thus inherently hierarchical. When such communications enter into anarchist discussion, it should be hoped that they would provoke a critical response.
There is nothing particularly anarchist in aiming for a generic effectiveness, in seeking to "make things happen" when those things are nebulously defined or in using words in an attempt to manipulate people's behavior. These are the aims you say you have and they parallel the aims of any good politician or advertising executive. Thus, I would argue that these actions you compose with your words are the reproduction of the social relationships of publicity- the manipulative use of words and images to produce an effect. You not only fail to challenge this relationship, but, in fact, embrace it as a practice.
Though you state that "actions speak louder than words," your faith in words is evident since you believe that the fact that you tell people to avoid subcultural identities and to refrain from using DoWNoLDoWNoL is written in the form of a primer and encourages a practice that tends to create or function best in a subcultural context. I think the problem lies in the fact that you don't seem to realize that creating texts to simply "challenge the assumptions" of those who still accept capitalist/hierarchical values without also authentically expressing your ideas and desires produces a social relationship that is inherently hierarchical, using the methodology of a political party that has "the answer" and is thus justified in using every means to get people to act as the propagandists see fit.
So the question is not one of "objective truth" (which I never mention in my review), but of using words as a specific type of action with a specific aim- the creation of an authentic existence. When I speak of an authentic existence, I mean one in which an individual consciously creates her ideas, desires, passions dreams, projects, in short, his life as her own and seeks peers with whom to share and live this creative process.
Every institution, system and ideology, all the social relationships of domination and exploitation including those we reproduce in our practice, stand in the way of this aim. Thus, one of the central objectives of an anarchist practice, as I see it, is the subversion of social relationships. By this, I mean the destruction of current social relationships, which are based on domination, exploitation and hierarchy through active attack against the institutions, structures, systems and practices that embody these relationships and the attempt to carry out one's own projects and develop one's own relationships and struggle to reappropriate one's life in a consciously different manner.
When I communicate, I am thus not simply trying to "make things happen," but trying to make very specific types of things happen. I am, in fact, trying to discover and develop relationships of affinity that can provide a basis for an autonomous and informal self-organization of revolt against the ruling order. One of the most basic anarchist principles of struggle has been that the end must already exist in the means or the struggle is lost from the start- and this principle is maintained because the history of revolutionary struggle upholds it. In relation to how I interact with those whom I consider actual or potential comrades, this means communicating with openness, transparency and clarity. If this "triggers automatic responses" in certain people, that is not my problem. Clearly such people are not, at the moment, individuals with whom the potential for affinity exists. Since it would not presently be possible for me to develop a free and egalitarian relationship with these people- a relationship that truly challenges domination and hierarchy- their response to my communications would not interest me. It is those- whether they call themselves anarchists or not- with whom I can openly come to an understanding of similarities and differences and discover the possibility of affinities that interest me. As should be clear, this has nothing to do with a moral adherence to either "objective truth" or to honesty, since it clearly leaves the useful option of lying to our enemies quite open. Instead it is an attempt to create a different way of relating in the methods with which I communicate my struggle that carries the life and the world I desire within it.
In order to understand what I mean by the demystification of history, it is also necessary to understand the various conceptions of history as reflections of social relationships. The conception of history expressed in "The Dead Hand of the Past" and illustrated (however much in jest) by the historical vignettes throughout the book, in fact, uses history very much like the majority of mainstream historians- as a string of completed events that are like so many exhibits in a museum. They can be manipulated to one's ends in a mythological way, as a source of inspiration or provocation or a method of inducing awe, loyalty to a cause, mourning at a supposed loss or simply boredom, apathy and a sense of futility, that is, as something beyond us that we cannot change. In this view, the past defines and controls the present precisely as a dead hand. Such a view serves conservative ends far better than it does those of revolt to which you attempt to turn it.
Rather than replacing this view wjth that of some Marxists and Hegelians, in which a determined and inevitable future is the hand of history defining and controlling the present, the demystification of history recognizes it as nothing more nor less than the activity of human being attempting to create their lives and their world. The fact that this activity is largely unconscious is what permits a ruling class to control it in their own interests and what allows history to be mystified and transferred into myths supporting one or another oppressive system of social relationships. Revolts and insurrections are times when the apparatus of deception breaks down and people began to see themselves as protagonists of their own existence. But such times are reflective of an ongoing struggle -the struggle as old as civilization between those who rule and those they exploit. And, thus, the past in this view is not something that is completed, a museum piece to be viewed. From a revolutionary perspective, it is an unfinished task, an ongoing project, aspirations and desires which have yet to be fulfilled. This project which has not yet been fulfilled is the reappropriation and self-determination of life in all its aspects, and thus the destruction of everything that stands in the way of this goal- all domination, all exploitation, all hierarchy and delegation. Knowledge of the past, in this view, is thus a tool--or rather a weapon- for carrying out one's struggle in the present. Like any weapon, this one serves best when it is well honed. And its sharpness depends on having as accurate a conception as possible of the struggles of the past so that we can examine them critically and appropriate what is useful to us both in the negative and in the positive and struggle to complete the project here and now. From this it should be clear that the demystification of history is not the replacement of one revealed "truth" with another, nor the playful mockery of the dominant revealed "truth" using its own methods, but rather the reappropriation of the past as a tool for creating our present lives in revolt against the social order.
Ultimately, your response leaves me with the feeling that for you revolt, anarchy and desire are still causes outside of yourself for which you seek adherents, so that your communications are carried out for the effects they have on others, not in terms of what you desire to gain for yourself from them. This is what makes it more important that your words create a certain reaction than that they express your ideas, aspirations and desires as authentically as possible. As yet, you are not nearly selfish enough.
Wolfi Landstreicher
acraticus@yahoo.com