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Recent developments in feminist debates around the ethics of care emphasise embodied mutuality and interdependence. These approaches are at times presented as new, in response to critique by disability activists and others concerning the capacity of control to masquerade as care. The argument of this paper is, simply speaking, that this "new" approach shows a clear affinity not only with Kropotkin's classic text Mutual Aid, but also with the long lines of anarchist theory and other practices which have followed since. The aim of the paper is not to undermine feminist arguments by questioning their originality, but to offer for a rich tradition of anarchist resources for the ongoing feminist project of practising caring social relations. The paper acknowledges both feminist wariness of macho versions of anarchism and historical and theoretical points of mutuality between the two traditions (e.g., Greenham Common, Emma Goldman and contemporary anarcha-feminisms). These historical and contemporary case studies resituate "new" approaches to feminist ethics of care emphasising embodied mutuality and interdependence as fitting neatly within anarcha-feminist thought and practice.

I made a note to myself a while ago: "Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them."

My fiction, especially for kids and young adults, is often reviewed as if it existed in order to deliver a useful little sermon ("Growing up is tough but you can make it," that sort of thing). Does it ever occur to such reviewers that the meaning of the story might lie in the language itself, in the movement of the story as read, in an inexpressible sense of discovery, rather than a tidy bit of advice?

Readers—kids and adults—ask me about the message of one story or another. I want to say to them, "Your question isn't in the right language."

As a fiction writer, I don't speak message. I speak story. Sure, my story means something, but if you want to know what it means, you have to ask the question in terms appropriate to storytelling. Terms such as message are appropriate to expository writing, didactic writing, and sermons—different languages from fiction.

The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.

If that were true, why would writers go to the trouble of making up characters and relationships and plots and scenery and all that? Why not just deliver the message? Is the story a box to hide an idea in, a fancy dress to make a naked idea look pretty, a candy coating to make a bitter idea easier to swallow? (Open your mouth, dear, it's good for you.) Is fiction decorative wordage concealing a rational thought, a message, which is its ultimate reality and reason for being?

A lot of teachers teach fiction, a lot of reviewers (particularly of children's books) review it, and so a lot of people read it, in that belief. The trouble is, it's wrong.

I'm not saying fiction is meaningless or useless. Far from it. I believe storytelling is one of the most useful tools we have for achieving meaning: it serves to keep our communities together by asking and saying who we are, and it's one of the best tools an individual has to find out who I am, what life may ask of me and how I can respond.

But that's not the same as having a message. The complex meanings of a serious story or novel can be understood only by participation in the language of the story itself. To translate them into a message or reduce them to a sermon distorts, betrays, and destroys them.

This is because a work of art is understood not by the mind only, but by the emotions and by the body itself.

It's easier to accept this about the other arts. A dance, a landscape painting—we're less likely to talk about its message than simply about the feelings it rouses in us. Or music: we know there's no way to say all a song may mean to us, because the meaning is not so much rational as deeply felt, felt by our emotions and our whole body, and the language of the intellect can't fully express those understandings.

In fact, art itself is our language for expressing the understandings of the heart, the body, and the spirit.

Any reduction of that language into intellectual messages is radically, destructively incomplete.

This is as true of literature as it is of dance or music or painting. But because fiction is an art made of words, we tend to think it can be translated into other words without losing anything. So people think a story is just a way of delivering a message.

And so kids ask me, in all good faith, "When you have your message, how do you make up a story to fit it?" All I can answer is, "It doesn't work that way! I'm not an answering machine—I don't have a message for you! What I have for you is a story."

What you get out of that story, in the way of understanding or perception or emotion, is partly up to me—because, of course, the story is passionately meaningful to me (even if I only find out what it's about after I've told it). But it's also up to you, the reader. Reading is a passionate act. If you read a story not just with your head, but also with your body and feelings and soul, the way you dance or listen to music, then it becomes your story. And it can mean infinitely more than any message. It can offer beauty. It can take you through pain. It can signify freedom. And it can mean something different every time you reread it.

I am grieved and affronted when reviewers treat my novels and other serious books for kids as candy-coated sermons. Of course there's a lot of moralistic and didactic stuff written for young people, which can be discussed as such without loss. But with genuine works of literature for children, with The Elephant's Child or The Hobbit, it is a grave error to teach or review them as mere vehicles for ideas, not seeing them as works of art. Art frees us; and the art of words can take us beyond anything we can say in words.

I wish our teaching, our reviews, our reading would celebrate that freedom, that liberation. I wish, instead of looking for a message when we read a story, we could think, "Here's a door opening on a new world: what will I find there?" •

- Gilles Deleuze, Nietzche and Philosophy

In his fantasy story (press release), the police are knights in shining armour (and riot gear is shiny...) protecting vulnerable citizens from being recruited by dastardly political extremists. Together they would threaten Britain with a "summer of rage". Even normally rational middle-class people are vulnerable to manipulation at the moment, police say, because of their anger during this time of economic insecurity. "Known activists," kind of like known terrorists or known murderers, are set to take advantage of this anger-induced susceptibility to recruit "footsoldiers" for their causes. (Nevermind any minor distinctions between neo-fascist groups like Combat 18 and grassroots movements like the London Coalition Against Poverty. This might confuse the story of good cops versus violent extremists.)

It is clear to me that in this police fantasy, order means a certain economic order and violence is anything interrupting the flow of profit. How else can the recent action of Greek farmers blocking roads out of desperation be understood as violence? Ah, but, police say, "History shows" (and who can dispute History?) that disputes like the miners strike caused tension in the community. (Nevermind the histories which suggest tensions came from Thatcher's neoliberal policies combined with that age-old strategies of divide and rule.) The police also fear that more people may join with environmentalists to express their rage at "oil companies [who are] seen to be turning over billions of pounds profit in issues that are seen to be against the environment" (my emphasis).

When blocking the destruction of their livelihoods, whether in the immediate sense of their jobs or in the ultimate sense of the ecosystems of which they are a part, ordinary people are recast, in these State fantasies, as the source of violence. Meanwhile, the violence of the State is always told as legitimate, as necessary for order.

Reading these police stories, I suspect that they are not afraid of extremists. What they are afraid of is that people like me, who do not hold the official faith in State and Market, are not extremists at all. In the face of ecological and social devastation, belief in these institutions of power is crumbling while their faithful promoters are suddenly the ones at risk of appearing to be the extremists.

This shows most clearly in a lack of compassion for "victims of the economic downturn." Does Superintendent Hartshorn have any empathy for the rage of those who have lost their jobs, their homes and their hopes for climate stability? If so, he doesn't show it in his press release. Perhaps to do so would be unprofessional. It would certainly question the supreme value of law and (profit-centred) order. It would show a question of faith. And those in positions of authority who publicly question their faith are ridiculed. Witness the media response seven years ago when PC Brian Paddick "confessed" that anarchism has always appealed to him.

The activists I know (are they the same ones that Hartshorn knows?) value order, but not the stuff of his fantasies. The difference is, for those of us who support and help organise Climate Camps, Transition Towns, social centres, feminist health networks, grassroots unions and the like, order comes out of cooperation and mutual care. And even those normally rational middle-class people who might have been expected to laugh at the utopian idealism of these projects might see their appeal as the financial structures they have come to depend on for security stop working for them.

That might be a frightening thought, indeed, for those who only imagine order coming from control.

I just watched this film made by http://www.edinchiapas.org.uk/ & http://www.camcorderguerillas.net/ and am feeling overwhelmed. The feature film on the dvd is pretty gentle and I learned more about the Zapatista struggles which I really appreciate -- how the uprising of 1994 was a response to the FTAA not as an abstract injustice but as a direct assault on their livelihoods as it 'legalised' privatising their lands so that multinational corporations could take 'resources' to make profit and maintain an economic system of continuous growth. If these people lose their land, they will die. Groups in Scotland are raising money to support autonomous communities efforts to build self-organised hospitals and schools, to promote health and learning. These people are rebels and receive only violence at the hands of the State facilities -- they cannot go to the equivalent of the A & E or emergency room. I felt moved to do more to support the struggles of the Zapatistas, particularly as they remind me that they offer their solidarity to those of us around the world who are attempting to practice alternatives to Economic/State violence. I was moved to remember that I am not alone, that people who have never met me support me.

I went on to watch another video on the dvd and witnessed powerful images of State violence in Atenco, 2006 -- both as police brutality & sexual humiliation (Abu Graib all over again?) and as slick propaganda whereby State authorities justify their actions to sympathetic journalists on television saying basically that 'these people were asking for it' and that they are a 'minority' not representing the people of Atenco. How like justifications of rape is the first (the rebels were wearing short skirts...), and like any dismissal of profoundly different ways of seeing the world the second? The State authorities also spoke of restoring peace and order by which they meant a particular form of order that depends on violence to be maintained. And now I'm crying. I think I'm going to have a bath, breathe and cry and let this settle out so that I can act with some clarity and maybe do some more writing later.

It's got me thinking in new ways about connections between State authority, sexuality, violence & autonomy.

Love & solidarity,
Jamie

PS: for more on Atenco, you could start at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_civil_unrest_in_San_Salvador_Atenco

( More? )

I To imagine a future of radically diminished hierarchy, of widely practised egalitarian patterns of mutual aid nurturing diverse potentials, of daily practices of cooperation and connection, of ecological and emotional sustainability. To see through the 'false futures' (Ernst Bloch) projected by dominant discourses encouraging belief that life will carry on pretty much as it does now, that we have indeed reached the 'end of history' (Francis Fukuyama).

II To see, like Petr Kropotkin, mutual aid in action all around, always. To see, like Colin Ward, the seeds beneath the snow. To look, with Vital Eyes, like Mary Daly, and see the vibrancy of life despite patriarchal States of Boredom, States of Depression & States of Dis-ease.

III To see with compassion no enemies, only possibilities of connection, of understanding (including connecting with ones own needs for security). To see oneself and others not as beings with essential truth, with identity (i.e. sameness with something; identical), but as beings-becomings containing patterns and also always existing within patterns, patterns that can, and always do, shift. Through practice, they shift. Anarchist Vision, then, is perhaps in this sense, to see patterns within and between beings-becomings and to imagine (to image, to see through Anarchist Eyes) practices to aid the shifting of patterns into anarchies (patterns themselves which are processes rather than achievements). Like permaculture or witchcraft, cultivating Anarchist Eyes is a practice, a craft, or rather comes through the practice of craft, of crafting oneself through ritual or meditation, gardening or facilitation, knitting or filmmaking, poetry or football, through care of the self (Michel Foucault).

-- Peter Marshall in the Riding the Wind (pp64-65)

Its election day in Scotland, and I've just come home from the youth club in a former coal mining village where I work. I spent a wee while while chatting with one young man about how the group of young men he hangs out with relate to each other. There's a pretty clear hierarchy, with the ones at the top pretty much setting the rules. He's not really happy about it because he wants to be listened to, but he stays in the group because it gives him some protection. At the same time, there is a lot of violence and control interwoven in these relationships. He said he only really likes a couple of them, and I asked why he didn't just hang out with them. 'I'd get called gay,' he replied. He didn't feel like he had any choices except to leave when he could get a job.

This morning I had a headache and went out into the garden to enjoy the sunshine and have a stretch. I overheard my neighbours over the hedge talking about how they would vote for the BNP (the far right British National Party) because foreigners were coming here and stealing their jobs. I climbed on a bench, stuck my head up over the hedge and said "there's a foreigner right here." Apparently, 'Yanks' are different. One of my neighbours, who works in the building trade, is getting turned away from work because people from Eastern Europe are working for less money. I didn't think of it at time, but it really sounds to me like he really wants security and he was definitely angry because it's at risk. That bit I can totally empathise with. At the same time, I felt pretty upset because I also really wants security and don't think I would get it from any political party, especially a far right one, or from more rigid border controls. It was funny, because like me, he thinks politicians are corrupt and the whole system is pretty crap. When I suggested that things could be otherwise, he basically said that the state and capitalism would always exist.

Now, I've sent off yet another abstract for a conference in September (which seems a little funny since I don't even know where I'm going to be living then -- I'm moving to Dorset for those who haven't heard). For those who like that kind of thing, here it is.

Space, Time & Desire: Notes Toward a Prefigurative 'Politics' of Sex/Life
Jamie Heckert

Drawing on, and developing, recent playful/productive intercourse of anarchist and poststructuralist traditions, this paper develops a spatial and temporal analysis of 'sexual orientation' through a reading of intimate stories. The empirical basis for the paper is drawn from PhD research interviews with 16 individuals whose intimate relationships cross borders of sexual orientation. In reading these stories, the spatial is both metaphorical (inspired by Deleuze & Guattari's concepts of state-form, nomad and smith) and embodied in participants accounts of different spaces which I retell as stories of policing, resistance and empowerment. The temporal element of the analysis stems largely from an anarchist ethic of prefiguration: because time is a continuous process, 'ends' and 'means' are ultimately inseparable. Consistent with much poststructuralist thought, prefigurative politics involve the immediate practice of desired forms of social relations. In this paper, I draw connections between the everyday practice of sexual relationships with the more overtly ' political' practices of carving out spaces to express, experiment and experience desires for radically different forms of social organisation simultaneously in the present and for the future.