joseph lee taylor writes: "Here is an article I wrote for a tour me and some mates did last summer on poststructuralism and anarchism in Eastern Europe and Turkey. It was also presented in Northern Ireland and Belgrade at the PGA."

"To Build One's House Upon the Sea"

Joe Taylor

Man created both "point" and "line" concepts. But once he understood these concepts' undeniable meanings, the rest of geometry consisted in exploring the logical implications that arose from this. This creates truth and discourse. And the "truth" was already there waiting to be "discovered" right, but this is one measure of the world, one truth that dominates, it excludes and displaces, marginalizes as we learn from Husserl in his work on geometry.

To build your house upon the sea is to build your "self", your foundation, your base, and thus your approach to the world, from a constant undulation, a moving unknown sea; Narcissus leans over to the pool and looks in, a marine lover maybe.You ask "is this a discussion on anarchism?" Typically I interpret anarchism as an objective approach to truth. How does relativism play a role in such an objective? Or even Nietzsche a.k.a. Irrigaray’s marine lover? Who offers us no objective or empirical truth as anarchism strives for — when we say truth, we mean Plato’s forms, Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason"; these all look for a core measurement, a center. Narcissus looks into the water and sees himself. Now he has a measurement, but a center that has always been haunted by an absence, marginality. It seems that all Western thought, let alone metaphysics, was interested in a center. Whether it was dualistic or truth as a fixed point like God was, and as science and positivism is now, Narcissus had a fixed point from which to approach the world, even hierarchy, subject-object dualism. But people approach the world fragmented as subjects, yet objectively become anarchists, usually because of a confrontation with the political, and always with a pre-thought in Heidegger's sense.

This is often how people become anarchists with "thought", but not with "thinking", inspired by some others thought, when approaching the world. But we must approach ourselves first, a "know thy self", an essentially relativist approach that we can see with Max Stirner "ownness", or Foucault’s continuous plane of variation; relativity, subjectivity, selfhood, or specific subjectivity (read ego), that is contingent to larger social relations. In other words, we might say that someone becomes an anarchist in order to confront. A politics of reaction, so to speak, a crisis, it never seems to be because of an encounter with the "self" or with "Dasein." I never felt comfortable with the term "post anarchism". It denotes a hierarchy, a category, a very linear heirloom from Marxism, a center to approach the late capitalist world, a label. It's true; you need this categorization to understand the world.

But lets try something more like a homelessness, like water pooling in cracks and in the holes of surfaces. Stirner’s idea of the self and Heidegger’s Dasein and the self, Stirner’s interrogation of being, in the "ego", his concept of self is not a self at all, but an assemblage of singularities affects and intensities, explanations, not complete at all, its an in-between in the Deleuzeian sense. The self according to Deleuze is imperfection, the identity crisis of Stirner; looking in a pool of water he sees himself, looking into the mirror he see the other and his own, so we are starting to sea a house being built upon the sea, slowly being built from pieces of wood floating on its crust pieces of sunk in ships and drift wood, building your house, Irrigaray’s marine lover, a nomadic house.

Multiplicities are prevalent here; no totality, its subjectivity; liberating, not culturally liberating; armed with Heidegger's concept of "thinking” not "thought", and Stirner’s chaotic multi-directional moving egos, we move away from the Hegelian of base thought, so that anarchism becomes a response to modernity and a reaction to the modern state, and its practices of normalization.

So anarchism therefore mimics its father, a lot of "thought" but no "thinking"; remember, thinking is movement upon a sea, but thought is land base, more architectural. Instead you must drift like Irigaray's marine lover, so back to nomadic homelessness, discourse and a way to approach the self. "Socrates was one with no home". Or "atopos", no foundation, a "house upon he sea" always being built, but selves according to Stirner are different from what they are and what they wish they are, much like anarchists. An inside/outside identity is created by the State; Narcissus looks into the pool an inside/outside of hierarchical thought, and anarchists emerge as the politics of reaction and identity; atomized fragments, a network of selves, pieces of floating driftwood and sunken ships that were the lives and faces of others.

I build my house, we confront the world with this identity, this self consciousness, whether it is "anarchist" or not, it's always atomized within a margin, an excluded, an unseen, the self vs. the world, like Stirner’s union of egoists but not really as a union, but as one body with many bodies that moves on different plateaus of identities, ever shifting, many worlds in the one as the Zapatistas say. So for anarchism, as its moves in reaction to the state, anarchists attempt to escape from the state are ultimately led right back to the state.

A product of modernity, anarchist identity as such is closely tied to the State and its discourse then becomes "post-anarchist", so back to the margin, the nomad, the in-between. An identity that moves between borders; a homelessness, a union of egos, a multiplicity, multi-directional, always rhizomatic, non-hierarchical, always a becoming (a house), but never a beginning (of the house), or an end (to the house). Rather its always being built, from the driftwood of ideas and practices, Narcissus and Stirner never fell into the pool — they did not need to. They both saw the self and their own in the water, the liquidity that acts like a mirror.