Bouvard on Reformist Absolutism and Democratic Fragility
Well this piece seems to contest your recent blog that the anarchist imaginary only makes sense as resentment of the absolutist.
How so? I wasn't thinking about it in that connection. It interested me for two reasons: one, it suggests the possibility of a kind of "reformist" absolutism, that can "inhabit" any system and build up its authority structures; two, the inability of the Western democracies to put up even a feeble defense of their systems against even so unimpressive a challenger--just about anything you could say about China could just as easily be said about the West. But what do you have in mind?
I was just thinking this writer sees the Western left as but a short step to authoritarianism, while you, though wanting to show that leftist wish fulfillment requires a certain sovereign, nonetheless see the fundamental impulse on the left as anarchistic, at least that's how i read the last post. What worries me is that our discourse on absolutism may well support some silly attempt at socialism and not a frank and therefore meaningful hierarchy.
Well, the anarchist imaginary leads to the totalitarian state--there's always some violation of natural equality that needs to be suppressed. Totalitarianism is when you imagine the entire people rising up and remedying such a violation. At a certain point, if China wants to normalize a hierarchical order, they'll have to jettison even the rhetorical socialism, and, of course, we need to think through state control over the economy carefully. I still think the best way to approach that is through constraints, so all exchanges embed and refer to sovereignty precisely while going their own way in the space maintained by the sovereign.
Thrilled to see some action happening at last below the salt! I am uncertain as to where I might best place my present enquiry, which is to ask of Adam if he might care to state in some way how he sees the difference(s) between his understanding of power as the product of a kind of 'accreditation' in the midst of a fast-breaking event, a sort of 'selection' that somehow identifies the *One Most Likely To* etcetera, and the commonest notion of power as simply the most credible (use of) force? I was thinking about this in relation to a particularly tendentious piece by Jim Goad in Taki's Magazine recently, regarding the outpouring of leftoid desire to 'disassociate' Charles Manson (in the wake of his death) from "the 1960s". I say tendentious because the heavy concept here was the idea that someone could really be a "product of" an unspecified series of events (alcoholic mom, an epoch, &c) and not the 'product' before anything else of his own personality. This in turn got me thinking abo
I don't know much about Manson, but in my understanding he was chock full of "charisma." Charisma is clearly a form of power. Now, my authority here is Philip Rieff, whom GAers unafraid of dipping their toes in reactionary water, might find interesting. Rieff has a book entitled Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How it Has Been Taken From Us (very cheap on Amazon or AbeBooks), and he argues that charisma was originally a product of abstention and self-discipline--the one who could withstand temptation better than others, obey a higher imperative, exercised the power of charisma (which really means "gift") over his fellows. However, the modern age reverses this, and redefines charisma as transgression--obeying the law, being moral, resisting desire, etc., that's easy and makes you easily controlled--a sucker. The one worth following now is the one who breaks the law, ridicules convention, upsets the squares. That's freedom, that's the source of a truer insight and more authentic experience. I suspect that would go some way toward explaining Manson.
sniffing around Abebooks for this Rieff title even as I write ... but AK, please tell me what you think - is not the bromide "product of his/her generation (or epoch)" fatuous and quite useless to any reflective mind? Implying as it does that this person/product' comes off the end of an assembly-line into which have been fed all the exact same components comprising everyone else pumped out at that time? Again, how we eventually come to (habitually) talk about such things swamps everything that might ever poke its own little real head out... Do Chinese bang on about which 'generation' they think they belong to? Seeking labels for it before it has even 'come of age', or whatever? I still don't think what you have said quite grasps the enormity of the what, 'media-creation' that was Manson? How the essentially small-time activities of this fellow came to carry the fantastic, sustained symbolic power they did?
"generational" talk is always a marketing strategy, so the question would be, what kind of marketing strategy ("media creation") constructed Manson in this way. One prominent narrative in the late 60s was that the earlier, pacifistic, liberal social movements (civil rights, anti-war, etc.) had become violent, anti-social and revolutionary. Obviously there were plenty of events conforming to this narrative--SDS becoming the Weathermen, for example. It seems to me the Manson murders were slotted into this narrative; then, it's a question of which details, what context, which responses, made it easy to do so.
Bouvard on Reformist Absolutism and Democratic Fragility — https://center.study/post/reddit-viral-authoritarianism