Five observations on the anarchist studies conference I attended last month and why I felt I couldn't be part of it:
1) It's curious that I saw only one or a few types of people there. I guess the conference welcomed a few hundreds of people for three days, but I met only a handful of Asian (American) people. However, the problem is not really about race but rather about a certain politico-cultural identity they showed almost unanimously. Despite the common claim that anarchism is diverse, multiple, open to possibilities and alternatives, the conference population was quite uniform at a certain level.
2) About 80 percent of the conference attendees wore black clothes. Of course black is "the" anarchist color, but there is something very stifling and depressing about this color preference, about this fact that nobody wore brighter colors. No doubt they aren't prohibited, but then why everyone wears darker colors as if that were the dress code?
3) Their embodied cultural references are surprisingly monolithic. Well, I might be wrong in this respect, because I'm ignorant of them and unable to tell nuanced differences that might have existed within them, but they appeared to me exclusively counter-culture things, punk-rock designs, tattoos, uncombed long hair, not neatly trimmed long beard, and so on. There would be many different internal variations, but they are nothing but variations based on the same or very similar themes. I do not think that the conference rejects such other types of people; there was no such issue of foreclosure and exclusion. Yet, I still wonder that whatever their noble and idealistic intention would be, that's meaningless when the end result was like what I witnessed.
4) Personally I didn't like the tone and attitude they assume. Their irony and sarcasm is sometimes too assertive and self-flattering. I can't share their conviction. To be sure they're right to say what they say and I do not disagree to it, but the ways in which they say that are not aesthetically satisfying. When they defy bourgeois euphemism, they seem to conform to other means of expression that recycle ready-made, age-old representations of revolt and resistance, which would result in boring uniformity in form. Well, if these representations are made purely for the sake of propaganda, I do not object. And I do not necessary demand that anarchist aesthetics should be (high-)modernist. But seeing that many people appeared to indulge in such blatant rhetoric and aesthetics, I got sullen. At least if that's "the" post-revolutionary aesthetics, I would definitely refuse to live in such a coarse world.
5) There are some disciplinary divides and unhappy indifference. Two representatives of contemporary anarchist studies are historians and political philosophers, that is, positivists and theorists. And this dichotomy (positivist/theorist) doesn't correspond to the common opposition of practice and theory, it seems. It's a question of small facts and minute details or big ideas and canonical texts. Anyway, both positivists and theorists were amazing. Historians could talk about very specific topics (ex. interethnic anarchists in the Bay Area in the early 20C) for hours, offering fascinating episodes, but such super-positivists were rather indifferent (though not hostile) to political philosophers who were trying to articulate bigger ideas so that they could serve for actual struggles or at least be useful to understand them. In this intellectual setting, you perhaps have a lesser chance to get heard and understood if you're working in some sort of in-between space of those rigorously disciplined areas in a rigorously inexact manner, .
In short, I'm complaining that I didn't find mon semblable! But a deeper truth would be that I'm a radical conservative, though what he intends to preserve is not the tradition that is naturally-historically passed down to him due to the given, taken-for-granted identity of his and his ancestry, but ones that he claims to arbitrarily, genealogically, and diagonally, as a result of free aesthetic elaboration and self-fashioning.
