what have I been doing the past few months?
Usually I will not repost my blogs from http://anarchymag.org/aragorn but sometimes I will.
If you haven't noticed I haven't been around much lately. When I started blogging a bit more regularly it was in the context of traveling and made a lot of sense in that context. I was doing interesting things that I wanted to share with my friends (and possible friends) and didn't want to have to tell the same story over and over again. The last two months have been filled with a lot of drudgery that I would hate to bore people with (as it usually bores me to tears) but there have been some exciting things too.
Let's start over. For about the last 4-5 years the months of January to March are filled with preparations for "the big event" of the year (for anarchists) which usually happens in March. Because of some decisions made by the organizers of this event this year was pretty different than other years (for me). I, and the projects I'm involved with, decided not to explicitly table inside the event (we still set up our "Critical Carnival" outside of it). Instead I vigorously prepared for 8 days of events for the middle of March which took no small amount of effort. We also prepared an issue of Anarchy to be published in time for the 8 days period which brought its usual amount of grief. I finished the second part of my "Anarchist Mythologies" which I shared with quite a few friends. A few of us started a new anarchist publishing project that I will talk about more when our first book is delivered from the printer (which could be any day).
Along with all this I also started one of the largest projects I have ever undertaken. It is a deceptively simple concept but beneath the simplicity lays chaos. Simply put I have begun the process of putting together an anarchist e-commerce site. This site will reflect what I consider to be the wide variety of the anarchist press and will take advantage of modern technologies and distribution methods. Hopefully it will grow into a useful addition for the anarchist press. It will be launching during April and I will talk more about it then.
On the one hand each of these projects is really exciting and I could go on and on about how awesome it is to be able to spend my time working on them, I want to be circumspect. Tempering all of these exciting things are the real tensions of working with people who are ambivalent when I am excited, who focus on what I consider to be errata instead of what I consider to be important things, and the fact that I am in the middle of building infrastructure (for lack of better language) for people who are no longer there.
The bottom line is that the anarchists appear to have left the building.
Maybe it is just me but outside of the pettiness that is endemic to radical politics is a real sense that we are on a smaller and smaller stage. We are talking to fewer people. The tone of our discussions seems a bit more shrill due to the lengthening amount before we hear the echo. Even our conflicts seem to peter out due to lack of interest far earlier than they used to. We can't even summon the energy to disagree with each other any more.
Thinking about this eats at the borders of my projects. It isn't that I feel like what I am doing is doomed but that it just may not be relevant. This isn't because the content of what anarchists are talking about is any less relevant than it used to be but that something has happened. Call it the end of post-irony, the myspacification of social formations, or the irrelevance of radical politics in affecting anything like change in the past decade (or 6) but add my name to those looking for something inspiring. Something more inspiring than the latest pretty picture on the same old boring activism, the same old incoherence defended in the name of individual freedom (dude), or of the suffocation of politics by cliques.
If you haven't noticed I haven't been around much lately. When I started blogging a bit more regularly it was in the context of traveling and made a lot of sense in that context. I was doing interesting things that I wanted to share with my friends (and possible friends) and didn't want to have to tell the same story over and over again. The last two months have been filled with a lot of drudgery that I would hate to bore people with (as it usually bores me to tears) but there have been some exciting things too.
Let's start over. For about the last 4-5 years the months of January to March are filled with preparations for "the big event" of the year (for anarchists) which usually happens in March. Because of some decisions made by the organizers of this event this year was pretty different than other years (for me). I, and the projects I'm involved with, decided not to explicitly table inside the event (we still set up our "Critical Carnival" outside of it). Instead I vigorously prepared for 8 days of events for the middle of March which took no small amount of effort. We also prepared an issue of Anarchy to be published in time for the 8 days period which brought its usual amount of grief. I finished the second part of my "Anarchist Mythologies" which I shared with quite a few friends. A few of us started a new anarchist publishing project that I will talk about more when our first book is delivered from the printer (which could be any day).
Along with all this I also started one of the largest projects I have ever undertaken. It is a deceptively simple concept but beneath the simplicity lays chaos. Simply put I have begun the process of putting together an anarchist e-commerce site. This site will reflect what I consider to be the wide variety of the anarchist press and will take advantage of modern technologies and distribution methods. Hopefully it will grow into a useful addition for the anarchist press. It will be launching during April and I will talk more about it then.
On the one hand each of these projects is really exciting and I could go on and on about how awesome it is to be able to spend my time working on them, I want to be circumspect. Tempering all of these exciting things are the real tensions of working with people who are ambivalent when I am excited, who focus on what I consider to be errata instead of what I consider to be important things, and the fact that I am in the middle of building infrastructure (for lack of better language) for people who are no longer there.
The bottom line is that the anarchists appear to have left the building.
Maybe it is just me but outside of the pettiness that is endemic to radical politics is a real sense that we are on a smaller and smaller stage. We are talking to fewer people. The tone of our discussions seems a bit more shrill due to the lengthening amount before we hear the echo. Even our conflicts seem to peter out due to lack of interest far earlier than they used to. We can't even summon the energy to disagree with each other any more.
Thinking about this eats at the borders of my projects. It isn't that I feel like what I am doing is doomed but that it just may not be relevant. This isn't because the content of what anarchists are talking about is any less relevant than it used to be but that something has happened. Call it the end of post-irony, the myspacification of social formations, or the irrelevance of radical politics in affecting anything like change in the past decade (or 6) but add my name to those looking for something inspiring. Something more inspiring than the latest pretty picture on the same old boring activism, the same old incoherence defended in the name of individual freedom (dude), or of the suffocation of politics by cliques.