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October 29th, 2014

10/29/2014

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artists and their politics



I sometimes ask myself one of those stupid questions which should never be asked in the first place – namely, what kind of politics should an artist adopt? When I do, I am reminded of what Oscar Wilde said on the question of the kind of government an artist should live under. His exact words were these. “People sometimes enquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government which is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.” Good old Oscar; I always knew you had the right instincts. So when I ask myself what kind of politics  an artist should adopt I invariably come up with the conclusion, “No politics at all.” However, I say this not because I feel artists should ignore what’s going on around them, but because politics leads one to adopt all sorts of consistent viewpoints which are restrictive to artists, whose primary instinct is towards inconsistency rather than consistency, that is to say towards leaving themselves free to follow the logic of their own creative bent, which is at heart open-ended and wayward. Politics, on the other hand, leads you into all sorts of cul-de-sacs and fixed positions. One should be free to change one’s viewpoint whenever the occasion moves one, and adopting fixed political positions doesn’t allow one to do that. Better to be thought fickle and without conviction than be pinned down to a position one can’t wriggle out of. The trouble is that, when it comes to politics, I am much more often against something than for something else. So, in the end, I think that no politics at all – that is no definitive politics – is the best politics for an artist to adopt. That way, at least, you don’t have to be too consistent. (I remember someone once saying to me, “You are consistently inconsistent!!!” That person just didn’t get where I was coming from.)

However, I must confess that over the past 50 years or so my default position has been anarchist more than anything else. But I have so often strayed from that default position that one might be tempted to say that it is almost meaningless. But is it? After all, anarchism is primarily a philosophy of freedom and what could be more true to that than being free not to be an anarchist when the occasion demands. For example, I think we live in a sham democracy, which works rather like a religion, in which we worship this abstract god, called Demos, who is served in a temple called Parliament by a priesthood called the Members of Parliament. Nevertheless, I have in the past voted for one of these Members of Parliament - though not for a while, and probably never again. The last time was in 1997 when I voted to get rid of the Tories. I also voted recently in the Scottish referendum, but that wasn’t voting for a politician or party as such. I haven’t voted since 1997 because I saw that, with the election of Blair, it was out of the frying pan into the fire. I was euphoric about getting rid of the Tories, so I didn’t give too much thought about what was to replace them. I am now older and wiser. So, as you can see, I have been willing to move away from my default position. After all, it would be something of a contradiction for anarchism to become a prison. However, I always seem to find myself returning to it. Suffice it to say that I don’t believe in consistency and politics usually demands consistency of a kind – including anarchist politics which, when I delve into them, repel me no less than any other kind of politics.

All this notwithstanding, I find myself gravitating almost as a matter of course towards the idea of a society which is not organised around greed or political power, a society of people freely co-operating with one another because they need one another if they are to gain the fullest benefit which being part of a society might offer. The more I look at the world as it presently is, the more I am repelled by it and it is this sense of being repelled which makes me look for alternative ways of doing things – and that always leads me back to anarchism, though not an anarchism which has any definitive shape. More like an anarchism which grows out of my impatience with the existing order and which is the negation of that order rather than a blue-print for some new order to appear in the future. And I must confess that this impatience with the existing order is also an impatience with the left-wing ‘alternatives’ offered by that order that we are expected to vote for and through whose good graces the power of the state will be used to replace the direct-action of the people transforming their own lives themselves in their own self-directed ways.  The point is not so much to overthrow capitalism and the state but dissolve them in the self-activity of the people acting for themselves, responsive to their own needs and desires on a practical everyday level – a revolution of everyday life, to use a phrase the Situationists coined. How the economy and society might be organised – that is whether enterprises will be run by self-managed collectives, co-operatives, small family businesses, partnerships etcetera - how goods and services might be exchanged or co-ordinated, how commerce and trade might be carried on, how co-operation might be generated between different branches of an economy, how social questions might be dealt with and so on and so forth – these are things people will have to work out for themselves on the hoof, as it were, experimenting, developing and refining their ad hoc solutions as they evolve. It’s not for me in the present to say what will happen, but when you think of what began to emerge in Ukraine at the time of Makhno or Spain in 1936, it should be obvious that people can do better for themselves under their own direction and steam than when they’ve got others breathing down their necks telling them what they should do and how they should do it.

The important thing is not the precise detail of how this or that might be done, but the fact that there is the possibility of some kind of alternative to the way things are done at the moment. Many people say, “Yeah, well, we all know the system is shit, but what can you do? Capitalism is the only game in town.” To me, this fatalism smacks of a lack of imagination. One cannot, of course, spell out in detail what will happen and, even if one could, events in the future will take a different form than those we imagine they will in the present. What is important is not ‘the future’ as such, but the ever emergent unpredictable present.

The future as such does not exist. Nor will it ever exist. There is only the present and only living and acting in the present in response to events in the present (And even the ‘present’ does not exist in the present but a few micro-seconds later when it is registered!) and what ‘future’ will grow from that will emerge only as a continuation of the present. In my opinion there are only two valid tenses – the Present Perfect - immediate memory - and the Present Continuous – immediate experience, sensation, thought and imagination. All other tenses are pseudo-tenses, which is not to say that they do not have a practical purpose. The Present Perfect relates to memory and what has been or happened up to now without fixing a precise time in the past. Such memory really exists outside of time, like Proust’s madeleine cake. The Past tense relates to specific moments in the past, this tense is mediated memory, not immediate memory which exists in the present as the Present Perfect. The Present Continuous is the present we are always passing through. And again, nothing is fixed in it, in the way yesterday or tomorrow are fixed. Hence Descartes was wrong to say “I think, therefore I exist.” He should have said, “I am thinking therefore I am existing.” For whether the fact that he is thinking now means that he thinks (every day) cannot be really established. All he knows is that he is thinking now. The Present Perfect and Continuous are therefore the only two living tenses, the only two we ever really experience and these two tenses are the only ones we need to be able to think about when it comes to saying how an anarchist society might emerge and begin to function.

We exist in, or against the background of, these two presents, so that even an imagined occurrence in the ‘future’ is imagined now in the present. The keen anticipation or apprehension we feel in relation to it exists in the present. This present is all there is moving from ‘the past’ into ‘the future’, neither of which exists in its own right. Thus we have to think in terms not so much of creating a future society abstracted from the present, but finding ways of effectively responding to events in the present which foreshadow a possible future rooted in the present. That is to say that the institutional and organisational means we develop to carry us forwards out of this present into ‘the next’ one will have their origins in that present itself. Of course, it goes without saying that none of these things will come to pass without the right ingredients, ie without large sections of the population feeling that they have come to some kind of impasse with the present system, an impasse that prevents them moving in a forward direction towards a viable and more desirable ‘future’. For people are like sharks in this matter, which die when they cannot go forward. This impasse in the present system may – or may not - drive people to rebel against it and in the process create effective means of sustaining their rebellion sufficiently to overcome and provide an alternative to what they are rebelling against.

Whether or not anarchism will be the result of this is, of course, another question entirely. I don’t have a crystal-ball with which to see the ‘future’. All I have is a belief in the way I think society should be organised - or should organise itself - for the greater benefit of everyone in it. Whether it will ever come to pass, who knows? The important thing is that it might and those who believe in both its desirability and feasibility should argue for it in what ways they can and attempt to persuade others of its advantages.

For artists – poets, writers, musicians, etcetera – nothing has been written to tell them how they should respond to events or dictate what political philosophy they should adopt. I know such things happened in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and they certainly happen elsewhere today, but in the West artists only get marginalised if they say and do the wrong things – which are largely things the establishment frowns upon. They are not liquidated, imprisoned or forced to recant. Some artists have been anarchists, some have been fascists, some high tories, some have been communists, while others have had no politics at all. There is no actual default position for artists as such who, anyway, are probably more individual in these matters than most of the rest of the population. And, of course, they change from day to day, not only in response to the larger world around them, but also to whether they got out of bed on the wrong side that morning or not. An artist’s politics at any one time may entirely depend on how depressed, grumpy, paranoid or euphoric he or she feels at that time.  So in answer to the question, what kind of politics should an artist adopt, all I can do is shrug my shoulders and say, “Well that’s up to them at the time.” One gets a bit bored by people who condemn artists for their politics. Look at their work, not their politics. What I do believe is that at the creative source of all strong art is something Dionysian, something constantly breaking out of art’s given constraints. But it is in the work you see this, not in an artist’s politics. Nothing that’s going on in the psyche of the artist during creation can ever be faithfully translated into a political position.

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October 04th, 2014

10/4/2014

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Rumbling the unique one


Sometimes, I ask myself what makes us human rather than animal. We are, of course, animals, no less than other animals, but we are also ‘more’ than animals because we possess faculties and abilities which animals do not and these faculties and abilities are not just add-ons to the animal in us; they also divide us from the animal in us and, in the process, make us specifically human. In a sense animals are more complete than we are, but they are more complete because their world is poorer than ours; and it is poorer than ours because they do not live in a mediated world which divides them from themselves. Their world and their relation to it is much more immediate and this very immediacy creates something akin to tunnel-vision in them. It is a world with few of the distractions which are common to us. For example, a wildebeest’s life is almost totally devoted to chomping grass for 23 hours every day. Its digestive system apparently requires almost total devotion to chewing the cud. Imagine if we had to do that. Of course, it must keep an eye out for lions and therefore lives in a herd, since many pairs of eyes are better than one. But I often wonder if it registers the actual being of the other wildebeests in the herd, or whether it simply co-exists with them the way we might co-exist with furniture which we are not paying attention to at the time. Does it feel anything in common with these other wildebeests the way we obviously do with other people because our being self-conscious involves being conscious of others? I wonder. When a lion kills a wildebeest, the others who have escaped seem simply to look on at the fate of their fellow wildebeest impassively, as if they were more concerned to keep the lions in view and themselves at a safe distance than about the apocalyptic fate of their fellow wildebeest now being torn apart. The behaviour seems blissfully selfish to us and it probably is. Each wildebeest is concerned only for its own wellbeing. However, it does not think of itself as such, it just acts in accordance with an imperative to preserve its well-being, with the minimum of conscious input.

The lion that hunts it is more genuinely social, but that doesn’t mean it is any less selfish. It co-operates when it comes to the hunt, but when it comes to feeding-time it is every lion for him or herself. For most of the rest of the time, it sleeps. It has secured the means to continue existing so why should it stay awake. If I was a lion, I’d probably do likewise. After all, there’s no point in being “King of the Beasts” if you can’t sleep when you want to. It enjoys its own satiation and its present horizons seem to end there. As long as it is full, it is happy. It doesn’t, however, appear to actively enjoy its environment, its world. It doesn’t look up at Kilimanjaro on the horizon and wonder about it, any more than wildebeests do. The distant mountain probably doesn’t even exist for it in the way it does for humans who live there, and who may think of it as the abode of the gods. This is what I mean when I say that its world is poorer than ours. Of course, the more intelligent an animal is, the richer the world it exists in is, but the principle basically holds, for what we are really talking about here are not all animals but the difference between a creature which is paradigmatically animal and one which is paradigmatically human. Some animals like dolphins and whales seem to belong more to the human end of this animal-human continuum.

The important point is that animals are primarily selfish; even when they are social, they are so only because they need one another to survive as individuals. Wolves and wild dogs share the spoils of the hunt in ways lions do not, but it is largely instinctive. They haven’t thought it all out. They don’t see sharing as an investment – which, from an evolutionary point of view, it undoubtedly is. They just do it and are focussed only on the immediate aspects of doing it. Thus when I say that an animal is selfish, I do not mean that it is selfish in the way human beings can be selfish, but that this selfishness is part of an unbroken continuity between itself and its world which makes it act automatically to secure its own well-being. Humans, on the other hand, think about it and have the conscious ability to separate the thought of themselves from their thoughts of the world. Therefore, if they are selfish, they are consciously selfish, although, of course, it can become second nature, while with the animal it is always first nature.

So animal selfishness and human selfishness are two different things, though there are no doubt connections between them, the one being a more rudimentary, less consciously mediated, form of the other. Animals can’t help it and will never feel any qualms about it. Nor will they ever be held to account by their fellow animals for behaving in selfish ways; whereas human selfishness is often accompanied by condemnation and regarded with disfavour by other humans, because human society is based on a solidarity which takes a degree of altruism for granted. If that can’t be secured, then feelings of anxiety emerge in the others, which might lead to sanctions against the offending party. So in societies where solidarity matters, there is a taboo against selfishness, without which they could not properly function. Wolves, elephants, buffalos, et al, may instinctively help one another, but I don’t think they create taboos against selfishness the way we do, since their sense of solidarity is on a less conscious level and isn’t reinforced by a culture. (NB, it is probably for good evolutionary reasons, rather than envy, that less well-off people excoriate the greed and selfishness of the capitalist-class. Sharing both the products of work and its burdens is probably how we originally survived, and that may be inscribed in our DNA.)

In the middle of the 19th century, a book appeared called The Ego And His Own – The case of the individual against authority. The last chapter of which was called The Unique One. It was written by an anarchist by the name of Max Stirner and was roundly abused by Marx and Engels in their German Ideology. It is well worth reading, if a little tiresomely repetitive
 at times. Stirner takes the case of the individual to its ultimate extreme. He called his philosophy egoism and he attempted to make a case for egoism against such abstractions as God, The State, The Law, Society, Morality, Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, Rights, Duties, Freedom, The People, Man, Humanity, The Monarch, The Sovereign, the Nation, Democracy and so on and so forth. He cited the apparently unbroken continuity between the selfishness of animals and humans in defence of his notion of egoism. What he didn’t take into account was that animal selfishness, as I have pointed out already, is not conscious selfishness, whereas human selfishness is. In fact, human selfishness is often very self-conscious, which animal selfishness isn’t. Human selfishness may be accompanied by defensive strategies against disapprobation. The ‘guilty’ parties usually go to some extent to defend and justify their selfishness. This, in effect, is what being egoistic means. Animals may be selfish, but they are not egoistic. But human selfishness generally tends to be fortified by means of an egoistic philosophy which justifies egoism because, well, it’s just yuman nature, innit? 

I certainly agree with a lot Stirner has to say about God, Man, Democracy, the Rights of Man, the State and so on and so forth being abstractions, but then so is his account of the ego. Animals, properly speaking, do not have egos. They might have a very rudimentary sense of themselves, which impels them to act on behalf of themselves and secure their own well-being, but their consciousness of it must be extremely limited compared to that of human beings. Mammals like dolphins may be the exception, since dolphins have been known to recognise themselves in mirrors and sport themselves to advantage almost as if preening. But they are, after all, social animals with intricate languages, and so cannot really be said to fit the paradigm of animal that I’m using here. They are probably closer to us than to other animals which do fit the paradigm more. What is involved in having an ego is the ability to separate oneself from the world, as one does when one looks in the mirror. (Tigers, when they look in the mirror, just see other tigers; they don’t associate the image they see with themselves.) In other words, the ego is not naturally given, but something constructed in the process of our becoming aware of ourselves in the world. And we become aware of ourselves as we become aware of others, and in the process our egos separate off from our more rudimentary animal selves in order to represent us in a world of similar egos which we become equally conscious of. Such an ego becomes an abstraction when viewed as somehow isolated from all of the others, in a cocoon-world of its own. Stirner’s egos are not living breathing entities which need one another, except in as far as they can use one another. The truth is that we can only at best partially separate ourselves off from each other. Some more than others of course. One needs to be alone, for instance, to write poetry and that might entail a more solitary or reclusive life. Normally, however, we are interdependent and have no choice in the matter. In its very constitution, the ego is acutely social, and cannot be anything but.

Sigmund Freud posited an ego which was highly vulnerable to attack and therefore anxious to keep its head down so as not to have it chopped off. He also posited a superego which represented society and its mores. Such a superego contributed even more to the ego’s sense of vulnerability and anxiety. Freud had a much more complex and realistic idea of what it actually meant to be an ego than Stirner. He saw that it was intrinsically paranoid because of its inherent vulnerability. Stirner’s idea of an ego that could stand up alone against the world, come what may, doesn’t really hold up. The ego we know today is, thanks to Freud, a lot more problematic than that. Such is the ego we’re stuck with. And oddly enough, such an ego has more in common with an animal’s rudimentary sense of self, in which fear, hunger, stress, anxiety, appeasement, anger, aggression, etcetera play important roles, than it does to the abstract ego Stirner imagined.

But while recognising these limitations of his conception of the ego, I don’t think Stirner should just be dismissed, especially when he’s in a more critical mode. We are ruled by all sorts of sacred abstractions - God, Man, The State, the Law, The Human Species (species-being), Society, the People, Gender, the Family, Rights, Duties, Morality, Humanity, Blood, Race, Nature, DNA and all the rest of the crap. All these things stand above us as individuals and demand to be worshipped. The Ego And His Own gives a savage mauling to all of these sacred shibboleths. It fails only in the alternative it offers based on its own sacred abstraction – the ego standing by itself alone, confronting other egos, uniting with egos which serve its purposes and opposing or resisting egos that don’t and want to impose their own egoistic wills on them. In this non-society of egos interacting with each other in various ways, rights, duties, privileges and so on, do not enter the equation. What does is the power you have to assert your own will against others and the devil take the hindmost. It seems to me that the paradigm being used here is a sort of reverse Hobbesian one
 of all against all, but without arriving at the Social-Contract which takes away the freedom of each to enhance the security of all. Stirner has simply taken Hobbes and run the process backwards. This makes sense because Stirner's atomistic egoist is on the same level of abstraction as Hobbes's atomistic man-in-a-state-of-nature. And the ultimate irony is, of course, that this Hobbesian/Stirnerian scenario of all against all is how states came into being in the first place – not by way of a social-contract through which all agreed to forgo their freedom for the sake of security, but through conquest and subjugation, that is through the agency of certain ‘unions of egoists’ (the conquerors) dominating certain other ‘unions of egoists’ (the conquered). And, of course, conquest led to exploitation and the need to keep the exploited from rebelling by the use of superior force. So, while I can certainly accept Stirner’s critique of all sorts of ‘sacred’ authority, I think what he proposes as an alternative – unions of egoists – would ultimately lead to precisely the kind of situation he seems at pains to avoid.

 


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    Author

    Richard Livermore is a poet, who also edits Ol' Chanty. 

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