Recent Reading, Rambles and Reflections: Daniel Colson, Learning about Anarchism and the Personalists
One text I have been engrossed in recently is Daniel Colson's A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze (2003/trans. 2019). Colson presents an “exploration of hidden affinities between the great philosophical heresies and “a thought too scandalous to take its place in the official edifice of philosophy”, with profound implications for the way we understand social movements”
Whilst contemporary anarchism presents itself primarily as “a radical critique of representation,” thus appearing to problematise the taxonomical aspects of such a project, it in fact proves to be a vital toolkit for exploring and conceptualising anarchism as an intellectual framework [strike through] tradition. As is evident from the “slight parody” of the title, this is a “Little Philosophical Lexicon” rather than an exhaustive, total and teleological system of thought. Rather than an “array [of] complete and authoritative” definitions, we are presented with “a rhizome – a centreless network of interrelated nodes between which meaning can be transmitted in multiple directions” (Cohn in Colson, 2019: 11). This is a hugely important distinction to make and captures something fundamental about anarchist thought; its practical idealism. Unlike Marxism, which presents a rigorous and often arboreal logic, anarchism problematises such dominatory and singular systems of thought. It is much more open to change, development, and differing perspectives. Such an approach is ethical and emphasises dialogue over dialectic, mosaic over singularity.
My foray into anarchist theory has been brief thus far and this Lexicon has really helped me to collate and connect the various threads, ideas and thinkers thus far floating freely around in my head. I'm familiar with the work of the Post-structuralists, especially Foucault and Deleuze, who are both integral to recent anarchist/post-anarchist thought, but in terms of “contemporary anarchist theory,” a lot of this is new to me. My introduction to anarchism was through Peter Marshall's Demanding The Impossible: A Brief History of Anarchism (1992). It's an enormous text and covers a staggering range of thinkers and concepts from Taoism to Murray Bookchin, taking in just about every major libertarian figure and current in between. That being said, it is a very accessible text and it's something I've only ever flicked through and consulted like an encyclopaedia, rather than sat down and studied like an intellectual history. I would really recommend it to anyone interested in anarchism, radical politics, or political philosophy – it's really very readable and a great resource to have lying around.
From Marshall's book I learned that several authors I was already into; Oscar Wilde, Ursula le Guin, Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, were considered to be proponents of/contributors to anarchist thought. Around this time I had been developing an interest in theories of spatiality, urban/rural geographies and liminality, and had discovered through my Social History degree the work of Colin Ward. Another text I had discovered and become enamoured with a bit later on was Hakim Bey's T.A.Z. [Temporary Autonomous Zone] (1991). Bey and Ward are very different thinkers, but are united in their left-libertarian politics and their work on spatiality. Towards the end of my degree and throughout my masters, I had become hugely interested in the links between literature and place – how literature shapes our understanding of place and vice versa.
I maintained a marginal interest in anarchism during this time, one of my term papers being a study of William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1791) (considered one of the first anarchist texts), but most of my mental efforts were put towards digesting vast amounts of post-structuralist, new materialist, and biopolitical theory. In this whirlwind of learning, attempting to digest as much edgy, continental philosophy as possible, it became difficult to maintain perspective. Theory can at first appear completely inscrutable, but after several hours of close study, when an idea finally clicks, it can become intoxicating in its horizons. Studying Literature can be a good bridge into theory, but piling abstract metaphysic upon abstract metaphysic, it can be easy to get burned-out. It's only then that you then realise that Literature can also be a good bridge out of and completely away from theory. Really it is Literature - poetry and prose - which I find to be the most exciting and the most promising in the way it reveals the human condition.
It was around the start of my masters that I had discovered the work of John Cowper Powys. I think I had first come across his name in a John Gray book. Gray's philosophy, one perhaps more indebted to wisdom than theory, aphorism rather than system, provided me with many thinkers and authors to go away and look into but it was Powys who has stuck with me the most. I've always had an inherent dislike of the literary canon, the idea of canons in general. Perhaps it is a kind of intellectual or creative narcissism on my part, but I've always been drawn more to the writers who are culturally, socially, psychologically, creatively, on the edge. From a very brief glimpse of any one of his gargantuan, bizarre novels, it is pretty obvious that Powys is one of these writers. The more I looked into him the more I found to love, an explicitly Pagan yet utterly unique approach to spirituality, a definite romantic sensibility sensitive to the elements, an obsession with particular places and, perhaps above all else, a complete lack of pretension coupled with a creative daring. Due to the scarcity of his works, it soon became my mission to snap up his works whenever I came across them. I became half-obsessed with discovering all there was to know about this person, to read every word he wrote. At the same time, I couldn't even begin to think of subjecting him to the scrutiny and deconstruction of academic study. His work operated by a different logic, completely different from the authors one usually studies academically, but it also felt sacrilegious to do so – to consider him in the same vein as Joyce, Woolf or Lawrence when his approach to prose-writing was somehow completely out of their time, maybe closer to Hardy in its Victorian style, yet completely of/beyond them in the themes it tackled with.
After feeling alienated by the strange lack of Powys's presence in academic study, coupled with some unhelpful comparisons with Tolkien, I soon learned of Powys's anarchist credentials in Elliot Murphy's Unmaking Merlin: Anarchist Tendencies in English Literature (2014) and David Goodway's Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow (2006), both of which do much to uncover a lineage of left-libertarian authors in Britain, indicating the enduring presence of anarchist thought throughout at least the last two centuries. Yet, besides these studies, in terms of academic monographs there remains very little work on Powys and the anarchist tradition in English literature. There is a journal dedicated to the study of Powys as well as the work of his siblings (several of whom are worthy authors in their own right – T. F. Powys, Llewellyn Powys...), and a handful of devoted scholars. But Powys is still considered something of a provincial writer, a “minor” modernist with what boils down to a cult following. This is something George Steiner picked up on but found to be an ambivalent legacy:
“In one sense it is supreme good luck for a writer to be loved and studied by a group of human beings who share a delight in his genius, who feel that the different aspects of that genius, just because they're so different, are almost made for them. So that for almost everyone in this room there is something in Powys so important that he says, “Look, he wrote that just for me,” or “He knew my life without ever having met me.
But it is also a danger; when that coterie is at several crucial points isolated from the general stream of feeling. With regard to John Cowper's reputation, with regard to his being read, by people who don't regard this a special exercise or as a strange esoteric hobby: the chance for that depends in part on a meeting like this, but it's also in part endangered by it. This is the fascination of our adventure here; it is an ambivalent adventure. In one sense it's marvellous that there should be a celebration, for his birthday of one hundred, in another sense there shouldn't be. It should be an obvious fact, in the history of literature, in the sense that small groups don't gather to mark the birthday of Conrad or James or Lawrence – that is just part of the accepted curriculum of our civilisation.”
(Steiner, 1977)
Given the fact that this is from a talk given in 1972, the situation is hardly much different half a century onwards. Powys still has a small, dedicated following, but yet remains separate to that cultural mainstream of canonicity which boasts the other “greats” of literature. Some Powys readers see this as just, claiming that what is so satisfying about reading him is his very status as an outsider, perhaps a judgement which is more reflective of the reader's own sense of alienation than it is an estimation of the author's worth. Whilst I share much of this sentiment, this being partially the reason I bothered to read him in the first place, it also has the effect of re-enforcing his separation from the canon. As indicated earlier, I am no fan of the “canon,” but given how valuable Powys's work has been to my own life and to the lives of many others, it is supremely unfair that most of his work is out of print and his innovations to literature overlooked.
I bring this aspect of Powys and his readership up because, having looked more and more into the intellectual and cultural history of anarchism, there are many ways in which Powys is completely a writer of his time, and part of a larger conversation about the direction literary modernism would take. Discovering the work of Herbert Read, the poets of writers of the “New Romanticism”, it becomes clear there is another history of modernism to be written. These writers and thinkers share with Powys an interest in myth, romance, Personalism, formal innovation, and left-wing emancipatory politics. They do not form any sort of vanguard or collective group as such, rather they are a set of writers, poets, and artists with interlocking interests and similarly anarchistic politics. A useful comparison, one that certainly helped me, might be with The Inklings. I had long puzzled over the exact contours of the Personalists' thought; much of their work discusses the themes of religion, individualism, and the dehumanising aspects of modernity. Yet these categories of thought aren't invoked in any sort of reactionary or conservative way, rather they are in support of an anarchist conception of society. Many might be familiar with Tolkien's 'On Fairy-Stories' (1939), C.S. Lewis' Christian apologetics, or Owen Barfield's theory of poetic diction. The Inklings were both an intellectual and a cultural force, revolutionising the fantasy genre, whilst also putting out the conservative/Christian philosophy to underpin and justify it. Likewise, the Personalists revolutionised the fantasy genre, but their intellectual justifications were very much more left-wing and emancipatory.
Fantasy is often regarded as an inherently reactionary genre, and this is a perspective I struggled with in my earlier engagements with their work. Owing to the supremacy of Marxism and marxist-adjacent criticism in academia, this perspective has been hugely influential to the detriment of the Personalists. Looking at work such as Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy (1946-59), Powys's Porius (1951), Read's The Green Child (1935), or Henry Treece's historical romances and, even earlier, the Late-Victorian/Edwardian re-engagements with the romance genre, William Morris' News from Nowhere (1890), Hope Mirrlees Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) and Lord Dunsany's Time and the Gods (1906), the notion that fantasy must be inherently reactionary starts to fall apart. All of these works present a continuing left-leaning persuasion in early fantasy fiction, be it in the internal politics of the narrative or the formal innovations of the genre. The Inklings are a hugely dominant force in fantasy today. The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia are bound to be amongst the first to meet your eye at any bookshop fantasy section, whilst the above-mentioned works are only variously available. More often than not they are described as "underrated classics", but they don't seem to be beloved in the way the Inklings are.
This post has been a bit of a ramble, but I want to bring it to a close by saying that I think there are histories to be written which will change the way we look at the course of the cultural and political life of the 20th century. Looking at writers like Powys and Read, one begins to see links between modernism, anarchism and fantasy, links which don't exist in our current accounts of these things. There is the promise, in these works, of a 20th century which looks very different to the one we have ended up with – both in terms of actual cultural evolution and in terms of the histories of this culture. Perhaps this is hauntological – a lost future which never occurred, but I would avoid the melancholia associated with such a term. Read seems to have been written out of modernism, his place in anarchism considered marginal when compared with the earlier “classic” thinkers like Kropotkin and the later, more systematic thinkers like Murray Bookchin. A similar fate has befallen Powys. Yet, Bookchin has cited Read as a major influence on his Social Ecology. Powys also went on to inspire writers like Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, or critics like George Steiner and G. Wilson Knight. These are figures whose influence, however seemingly slight, is still with us today. They grappled with topics which we still grapple with today – the purposes of spirituality and the search for meaning, the relationship between nature and culture, the effects of modernity on individuality. These are works that have had a hand in shaping the world we now live in, but their legacies are severely under-acknowledged.
Having begun my foray into the field of contemporary anarchist theory, I have started to acquire the tools to properly discuss these works in their true depths. Much of my reading of the work of the Personalists has been driven by intuition – a definite yet rather general apprehension of their literary and intellectual value, but I have struggled to find a nuanced and precise language with which to explore that with. The theoretical anarchism, as presented in Colson's Lexicon, promises to be such a language. It is a language that resists totality and domination, which I think will allow me enough space to read the texts on their own terms (rather than imposing meaning onto them), whilst hopefully not experiencing that sense of intellectual burn-out which happens when one sinks so far into theory that they become disconnected from the text. I have lined up to read Iwona Janicka's Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism, which draws on two thinkers I have been wanting to look into for a while; Rene Girard and Peter Sloterdijk. And I would also would like to return and read Jesse Cohn's Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation. For now, I will end with this quotation from Read's Reason and Romanticism on how the critic's relationship with the text:
"The danger is, that the critical faculty, elaborating its laws too far from its immediate object, may construct categories or ideals which are in the nature of impassive moulds. The critic then returns to the plastic substance of art and in a moment, in the name of science, he has presented us with a rigid shape which he would persuade us is the living reality. But obviously it is dead; it no longer pulses with that life and variability which we ascribe to emotional facts.
To guard against this false method, the critic has to maintain an attitude which we must describe in another metaphor. He is a man who has carefully elaborated a few dogmas, in the sure belief that without such fixed points no course can be steered, no height measured, and no distances maintained. But having fixed his points, he does not stand still; he is impelled in some direction, and the force that drives him is feeling or emotion. That is the final test of criticism: that its methods are perfected in science, but that the motives are spontaneous, impulsive – aspects of courage, constancy, and devotion. The real act is instantaneous, and the course of history is directed not so much by foresight as by insight."
(Read, 1926: 27-28)
Further Reading:
Cohn, J. (2010) Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics, Cranbury: Associated University Press.
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