Monthly Archives: September 2014

INTRODUCTION TO PHONCUMLINGUIC WORDS

Anglophones, francophones, quechuaphones, arabophones. These are phoncumlinguic words.

The suffix -phone comes from a Greek root word meaning “sound”. The word is φωνή, which Wiktionary romanizes to «phōnḗ» – but none of that means much to me. In any case, there are plenty of other English words that share this Greek root, such as “phonics”, “phoneme”, “megaphone”, and “telephone”. The etymological reason that these words have a variation of «phōnḗ» within them is pretty straightforward. Phonics is the study of sound, a phoneme is the smallest distinct unit of sound in a word (“phoneme” itself has five), a megaphone is a tool for making a sound louder, and a telephone is a means to transmit sounds produced in one place to another place.

It’s less straightforward, though, with a word like “anglophone”, because an anglophone is not defined so much by sound as by language. Language and sound obviously have a lot to do with one another, but they aren’t the same thing. Some languages, for instance, do not have a spoken component; they are signed. Being fluent in a language, too, doesn’t necessarily mean that a person is capable of speaking that language – in the usual sense of what we think of as “speaking”, anyway. If ai was a person without functional vocal cords, for instance, ai would not be able to produce the sounds of a language, although there’s a good chance that ai’d be able to move my lips in a way that some people could interpret. In this situation, no ability to produce sound (or even necessarily to hear sound) is necessary for me or whatever person ai’m conversing with to be considered proper anglophones, francophones, whatever.

It’s not especially surprising that the -phone in “anglophone” would be so different from the -phone in “telephone”, though. A shorthand way of explaining the words “anglophone” and “francophones” to Americans who’ve never heard these words would be to say “English-speaking” and “French-speaking”. Ai don’t think this is particularly ableist or reductive, either. The straightforward sense of the word “speaking” involves making sounds with your vocal cords and your mouth parts, but it can also mean to perform a speech act, and it is evident enough that speaking in this sense does not require speaking in the other sense.

It’s a bit unclear, to me, what the origins of the phoncumlinguic words are – with “phoncumlinguic” being a word ai just came up to be describe this large group of words that share much in common with each other, and also have less in common with other words, like “microphone” and “xylophone”, then a person might first assume (especially if their first language was, like, Amharic or Lao or anything else equally distant from the Germanic and Romance languages). According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “anglophone” dates to 1895 and “francophone” dates to 1900, but no source is provided for either date. None of the other common phoncumlinguic words, such as “lusophone” or “sinophone”, have any entry at all. Also, with “anglophone” and “francophone”, there is no indication of whether the words were coined in English or in French in their respective years.

It’s my understanding that phoncumlinguic words have been particularly important in the Canadian social context, because of language conflict. This is almost always talked about in terms of anglophones, francophones, and allophones, which comprises everyone who isn’t an anglophone and a francophone – which is pretty fucking simplistic, of course, but that’s a different story. Beyond such specifically Canadian use, though, the use of phoncumlinguic words in English seems to be rather scant. One might show up here or there, but ai get the sense that these words aren’t used nearly as often in the vocabularies of other English-speaking people. It’s hard for me to imagine someone in Melbourne or Fresno describing the Åland Islands as “a swedophone part of Finland” rather than as “a Swedish-speaking part of Finland”.

Since the Online Etymology Dictionary has given me absolutely no information to go on, other than a rough date, ai’m going to make an educated guess and say that English got its phoncumlinguic words from French, specifically Canadian French. Ai would go so far to say that very early use of the words “anglophone” and “francophone” took place in the pages of English-language newspapers in Québec – perhaps in Montréal or Sherbrooke, which still have large anglo populations, but perhaps also in Québec City or (as some knew it at the time) Three Rivers, whose anglo populations are extremely small today. Many of the wealthiest anglophones in Québec (including those controlling printing presses) were not of principally English descent, but instead Scottish, and thus there is reason to think that they would personally chafe a bit at any discussion of Canadian language dynamics in terms of “the English and the French”. In any case, even beyond this primarily Scottish elite of Québec, English-speaking settlers in the Canadas were, on the whole, not principally English either. Even a proletarian writer, then, might have had reason to import the French word «anglophone», so much more elegant than “English-speaker”, into English itself. For «francophone» to follow would only be natural.

My conjecture, then, is that phoncumlinguic words emerge in French, though ai can’t really be certain of this. Ai haven’t been able to find any French-language etymology resource that can actually give me a date for when «anglophone» or “francophone” first started showing up in print. Ai suspect again, though, that within the francophone world, it is probably within a specifically Canadian context – and probably a specifically Québécois context – that phoncumlinguic words were first used widely, if not necessarily coined (though ai bet they were probably coined in Québec too).

A tangent: words like «anglophone», «francophone», «italophone», and others may very well have been coined by academics in France and used for centuries to describe, with some precision, the language dynamics of Europe. Hell, there’s no reason to assume that it’s only France that could have originated phoncumlinguic words; equivalent words might have a long history in Portugal, for instance. Ai suppose ai don’t know. All this seems unlikely to me, though, because such academics would probably be more snooty about using the Greek root “phōnḗ” in an appropriate manner. It’s long past us now, but Károly Mária Kertbeny got a lot of grief from “men of letters” back in the day because he put a Latin root and a Greek root together in his coining of the word «Homosexualisten» (as it was written in the original German); it’s worth remembering that this shit mattered to highly literate people. This was a time of widespread dictionary compilation and grammatical codification in Europe, which itself was born of a strong sense that nationality corresponded more or less perfectly with language. Thus there’s reason to think that phoncumlinguic words would neither be particularly accepted among literati (since they insulted the ancient Greeks or whatever) nor would they be particularly necessary for anyone if the common understanding is that a person who grew up speaking Czech is a Czech and a person who grew up speaking Basque is a Basque.

(Two side notes on this tangent: FIRST, it’s pretty obvious that the word “phoncumlinguic”, coined by me just now, would also piss off nineteenth-century European literati, and ai am okay with that; and SECOND, the United Kingdom is obviously an exceptional circumstance in regards to the dynamic just described, but ai can’t imagine that too many people on the Continent were, back in the day, giving very much thought to overwhelmingly English-speaking places under the sovereignty of a capital city that was located in a country called England.)

The strongest case for a non-Québécois coining is that these words were, instead, coined in one of the Portuguese-speaking countries. It’s a very weak case, but it’s worth discussing.

What ai know, and all ai know, is that the Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa, an organization formed in 1996, declared in the year 2005 that, from forever hence, May 5 would be celebrated as «o Dia da Cultura Lusófona», with the lusó- in «lusófona» referring to Portugal, derived from “Lusitania” (the name of an ancient Roman province whose territory roughly corresponded with the present-day territory of the Portuguese state), and the -fona being a Portuguese derivative of the Greek «phōnḗ». To me, this seems like a possible indication that the word «lusófona» has been widely-known and widely-used within Portuguese discourse for quite a long time.

Ai don’t think so, though. First, the people who work for that organization, and decide its policy, can reasonably be assumed to be both language geeks and students of other countries’ language policies, which means that we can further assume that they may have used the word «lusófona» instead of «lusóparlante» (also used in Portuguese, literally meaning “Portuguese-speaking”, and lacking the ugliness of that expression in English) simply because they were familiar with the terminology that is used in the Canadas. Secondly, when ai look up «lusófona» on Google, one of the things that comes up is an institution called the Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, which was founded in 1987. The Parti Québécois had won its first election and lost it by then! A lot of results come up, in fact, and ai’m not claiming to have looked through them all, but none of the institutions seem particularly old, and ai haven’t found any Portuguese equivalent of Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples that rocks a phoncumlinguic word in its title.

Let’s be clear: my research doesn’t constitute a sufficient proof that these words aren’t actually quite old, and to be frank, ai don’t even know how ai would do that research. Ai don’t have the means to scan medieval manuscripts for signs of phoncumlinguic words. Ai’d argue, though, that while there is no particularly strong reason to think that phoncumlinguic words emerged anywhere in the lusophone world, there’s a pretty good reason to think that they were produced in the Canadian context, most likely in Québec.

Neither Portugal nor any of its former colonies have a language conflict that resembles anything like the situation in northern Turtle Island. What is that situation? To be more precise, what is that situation in the late nineteenth century, when both “anglophone” and “francophone” probably showed up in print in the English language? (Ai have decided to just trust Online Etymology Dictionary on this.)

Most critically, the situation in northern Turtle Island was nothing like the situation in Europe. Speaking English did not make you English – and while this attitude to things was probably shared in Ireland, it probably wasn’t particularly well-known nor well-understood in Portugal nor anywhere else on the Continent. But northern Turtle Island’s language dynamic also differed in a very key way from that of Brazil’s. Speaking in broad strokes, because Spain and Portugal generally respected each other’s respective spheres of influence in the Americas, the predominating European language in the area of Brazil was, and always has been, Portuguese. This is not the case in northern Turtle Island, where the status of French and English shifted quite a bit during the wars between Britain and France over that territory. Even after 1759, when the British defeated French forces at Québec City, there were still large populations of francophones hanging about, many of whom were so determined to stick around as a “distinct society” that revanche-des-berceaux natalism came to prominence in many places.

In Brazil and in northern Turtle Island, you have the same four broad demographics (constituent populations, they could be called) at the end of the nineteenth century: 1) the descendants of early European settlers; 2) the descendants of people who were present before Europeans started arriving; 3) the descendants of slaves brought from Africa by force; and 4) and new settler populations, many of them coming from more distant parts of Eurasia than the Atlantic seaboard of Europe. In Brazil, all of these populations had different relationships to the Portuguese language that we can generalize about, but in northern Turtle Island, we need to generalize about both English and French – and this complicates the picture.

Ai am not going to make a bunch of generalizations right now, but instead, ai would like to call attention to the fact that people, in this time period, were making generalizations themselves. That’s because language dynamics were something that they discussed, or at least something that some of them discussed some of the time. What terminology did they use, though? Well, it’s likely that many of them used terminology that some people are still using today. When ai was growing up in an anglophone village in south-central New Brunswick, francophones in New Brunswick and elsewhere in the Canadas usually got described as “the French”, whereas some well-meaning Americans ai’ve met seem to use the word “Québécois” to describe the entire francophone population of the Canadas. Both of these terminologies are problematic in their own way, but the problematicness may be something neither evident nor important to the people using the terms. There’s a good chance that an American (from anywhere but Louisiana or Maine) has never even heard of Acadian people, after all, and regarding the place where ai grew up, the normative attitude was anglo chauvinist: all French people suck, so who gives a fuck about distinguishing between them? Most people knew better, but used the word “French” anyway.

Ai think that, in the anarchist scene, we have a very similar attitude about Ku Klux Klan members and self-described Nazis – two groups that are actually quite distinct from one another, and have a sense of being different from one another, but which are all the same shitpile of Nazis to us. And then the Nazis themselves, of course, are rather unlikely to pay heed to the oh-so-important differences between anarchists, Marxists (both Leninist and non-), George Soros, and whoever else. We’re all communist scum in their view.

Getting back to francophones, though, using terms like “French” or “Québécois” to describe all francophone components of all four constituent populations of northern Turtle Island would have been something that francophones generally both knew to be inaccurate and also probably cared about – at least a little bit. This is where phoncumlinguic words come in.

It is my theory that, at some point in the nineteenth century, some literate francophone person on Turtle Island somewhere – perhaps a person like Kertbeny, literate but not an academic – came up with the first phoncumlinguic word, and probably the second as well, in order to have a more accurate, more respectful terminology for a population that people were talking about anyway. Like Kertbeny, ai feel that this person probably gave no fucks about the proper methods of word generation, which were so important to the dictionary compilers and grammaticians of the day. Like «Homosexualisten», «francophone» probably showed up in some pamphlet that was circulated in Montréal and elsewhere, and from there, it spread. Pamphlets were something like zines are today: more accessible and easily produced than fat tomes or bound books, and perhaps more capable of disseminating ideas (and terminologies) in a population than some people think.

In comparison to anglophones, the francophone population was certainly more ethnically homogenous – but it wasn’t absolutely so. There were francotropic immigrants to Montréal, mainly those coming from similarly Catholic societies (Italy in particular), and there were kids adopted into Québéc’s francophone and Catholic society who weren’t of principally French descent, most of whom were Irish or onkwehón:we. (Note: this adoption was not a cool thing; besides the fact that this was, for onkwehón:we peoples, a very significant part of the genocidal process, there’s also the fact that kids of any race should never be left alone in the same building as Catholic priests.) There were the Métis out West, too. People would talk about these populations, and sometimes talk about their common use of the French language. So what words did people use?

Ai think it’s pretty likely that phoncumlinguic words didn’t become particularly important, neither in French- nor in English-language discourse, until much closer to the 1960s, when the language conflict entered its post-Duplessis phase. At this time, and ever after, a lot of discussion about anglophones, francophones, and allophones (because apparently the rest of y’all don’t get to have your own words for yourselves) started to happen – and the discussion is still going on today. Before that, though, people probably spoke in terms that, more or less, were less scientifically clear, but which probably made as much sense as was necessary for the conversations being had.

Phoncumlinguic words, in my estimation, make more sense than the alternatives – at least the alternatives that have been used so far. This is important. While phoncumlinguic words are certainly less ableist than words like “English-speaking” and «lusóparlante» (given that, despite the thing ai said about speech acts earlier, the word “speaking” and the suffix -parlante can still be taken to mean the physical act of producing sounds with your vocal cords and the parts of your mouth), ai don’t think that this word was selected for reasons we’d recognize today as actively anti-ableist. Even if it was, the person who coined the word did a bad job, considering that «phōnḗ» still refers to sound!

Using “anglophone” or “English-speaker” as the starting point, better words might include “an anglolingual (person)”, “an anglolinguic (person)”, or “an anglolingue”, and we could also use some ridiculous constructions like “anglomemetic (person)”, “a memetically anglic (person)”, “an anglomemer”, or whatever else we can come up with. Given that many languages use a derivative of the ancient Greek ἴδιος (romanized as «ídios» by Wiktionary) for “language”, we could also use “anglo-idiotic”, haha. We shouldn’t be limited to Greek and Latin, either, for our word generation – but ai’m not going to offer any examples of possible constructions myself, since ai wouldn’t be sure whether or not the terms used for “language” in these other language make reference to sound, to the physical act of talking, or whatever else. Ai was going to offer “an angloyuyanic (person)” as an example based on a Chinese term, but it seems that 言 (pinyin: «yán») can refer to the physical act of speaking, too.

In any case, all these less ableist alternatives seem a bit complicated, and also unlikely to catch on – in English, French, Portuguese, and related languages, at least. That’s because phoncumlinguic words have already entered the lexicon of such languages and have, it seems, actually established themselves a fair bit.

Let me make an argument, then: the genealogy of words and symbols does not matter; what matters is the meaning they carry today. No one knows, or cares, about the Greek root anymore. Similarly, no one cares about the fact that the swastika was, for centuries, used for completely non-Nazi reasons in the religious practices of all sorts of people everywhere. Today, who gives a fuck? The answer is these people, but they also believe in intelligent design by aliens. Most of us are comfortable with the idea of swastikas being bad and those who like swastikas being made uncomfortable.

Regarding phoncumlinguic words, this is obviously easy for me to say as a person who doesn’t have personal reason by problematic components of these words’ origin (ai am not deaf, ai have functioning vocal cords, etc.), but ai think that an analysis of these words’ genealogy reveals that, in the creation of these words, there was a mutation and a complete break from the Greek, to the point that we should see the -phone suffix in a word like “anglophone” as having nothing to do with the -phone suffix in “saxophone”.

My next post on phoncumlinguic words will deal with some of the problems of these words, with a mind to smoothing them out as many as possible, and also indicating where there are problems that are, to some degree, irresolvable. Yet this exercise will be conducted from a starting point where phoncumlinguic words are, on the whole, deemed valuable already, and worth improving – rather than as words that are irresolvably problematic and which should be jettisoned from our regular lexicon.

ON MULTICULTURALISM

For one second, please, think hard about what comes to mind when you say the word “multiculturalism” in your head. Take at least a few seconds.

Once you have some sense of what multiculturalism is, forget it, at least temporarily. Forget it as hard as you can.

Ai don’t know what multiculturalism is – and now, ai hope, you also don’t know what it is, at least for a moment. If there’s still some notion still visible in your head, please try to shake it out now. It’s time to delve into the heart of this matter.

Ai have heard many things, and read many things, about what multiculturalism is, how it has failed, how it has succeeded, how it’s part of what makes Canada the greatest country on Earth, how it’s a white supremacist farce, how the concept has good points and bad points (though it is rarely said which specific parts are good, which specific parts bad), and so on. I have also many conversations with leftists, and even some non-leftist anarchists, where the term “multiculturalism” is mentioned as a positive even though the term was never been qualified, let alone explained. When it comes to any term that is also the name of a key doctrine of the Canadian state’s domestic policy for the last half-century, it is critical to be more critical.

The only multiculturalism ai have experienced in meatspace is multiculturalism-as-domestic-policy, this meme-called-“multiculturalism” that is actually codified within, and replicated and promoted by, the institutions of the Canadian state (including the military and the police forces) and many institutions closest to the state (including conservative charities, right-leaning news media conglomerates, and all the major political parties). Although there are several permutations on the meme, they have, collectively, been assimilated by a significant percentage of Beaver Empire’s settler population – even in areas that are frequently considered to be a bit more unfriendly to “foreigners”, like in rural Alberta or the industrialized second-cities and exurbs of southern Ontario.

Ai don’t want to talk too much about the history of this multiculturalism, but a bit needs to be explained. The doctrine was devised/adopted/developed by the Liberals of the 1960s and ’70s. They probably came up with the thing, and stuck with it, for a reason, like thinking that it made sense as part of an overall plan of governing the country in the context of their political objectives and the social crises they faced at the time. It was closely related to the doctrine of bilingualism, and could, at least at that time, perhaps be considered one part of a single cultural-linguistic doctrine aimed at creating a specifically Canadian national identity. Since multiculturalism is still part of Canadian domestic policy today, even with self-conceived opponents of Pierre Trudeau’s legacy in power, it must have had some use towards that end.

The doctrine of multiculturalism is the meme as it exists in the state’s policy. The meme as it exists in the population is probably better to just call a meme. Calling it a doctrine doesn’t make sense, since few people live by doctrines. They live by rules, perhaps, or guidelines, or values, or ethics, or principles, or impulses, or inclinations, or whatever. As ai said, it’s better to call it a meme, though ai sort of think it would be better to call it a memetic idea. In any case, it may not actually be called “multiculturalism” by an individual person, or it might even have mutated into something a little different from the plank of any major federal political party, or it might even be living comfortably in the same brain as some rather subversive ideas about the function and role of the police. None of this matters! Or, to be more precise, it doesn’t matter if this meme, this idea, has nothing in it to challenge the police and all other manifestations of state power.

Ai don’t really think it’s necessary to point to all the problems that come with a population’s assimilation of this memetic idea, especially since it comes in so many permutations. Ai’ll just name a few things that seem to be particularly important points of analysis, at least to me.

First, it invisibilizes both the continued existence and rampancy of white supremacy, xenophobia, anti-black racism, and other racisms in the Canadas.

Second, it offers a false solution to the problem of colonization and decolonization.

Third, it weaksplains, and/or makes it easier to evade, the fact that Canadian immigration policy is fundamentally fucked up, and always has been.

Fourth, in other countries, it helps to improve Canada’s image, which can help to both attract the “high-quality immigrants” it wants and to inculcate foreign populations against the potential appeal of a boycott against Canadian goods (and this, friends, is definitely something that politicians worry about happening on their watch).

Finally, in the Canadas themselves, it helps to construct an image of Canada as adequately progressive – something that can go a long way towards undermining the potential for revolt in any population that believes in progress.

All this being said, the Canadian state’s multiculturalism meme isn’t wholly or uniquely evil. It sucks, sure, but in contrast to the doctrine of laïcité that the Parti Québécois has promoted since the 2007 general election, ai’d be hard-pressed to say that multiculturalism is the worse of the two. It’s unfortunate, of course, that since ai’m now a “critic of Canadian multiculturalism”, ai now share company with ethnic nationalists, “new atheists” and dogmatic secularists (like, in the Québécois context, Djemila Benhabib), and all the people who are actually more afraid of Muslim theocrats taking over their villages and neighbourhoods in northeastern Turtle Island then they are of threats that are much closer to home.

This is uncomfortable company for me. Ai don’t want to be associated with these people – all of whom ai think are stupid, or whom ai think should die, or (if ai happen to have a really low opinion of them) perhaps both! Ai hope it’s clear that what ai’m saying about multiculturalism is coming from a very different place than any of these folks. Their goals are fucked, their priorities are messed up, their analysis is skewed. On the other hand, ai don’t actually know what a valorization of multiculturalism is supposed to do to fight all of these people in accordance with anarchist goals.

The word “multiculturalism” doesn’t need to refer only to what’s been analyzed for most of this post. Maybe we should just use the word in a different sense, not to refer to something ideological or memetic, but instead as a descriptor of a situation, such as one where multiples cultures are existing together. Ai like straightforwardness! We can see, then, an anarchist appropriation of the word “multiculturalism” by making an argument against “top-down multiculturalism” and in favour of “bottom-up multiculturalism”. This is similar to how “democracy” has been appropriated by some anarchists: the good thing is “direct democracy”, the bad thing is “representative democracy”.

Bottom-up multiculturalism either exists, in concrete reality, or it doesn’t exist, in which case it is potentially something that we’re trying to make happen. In the Canadas – as opposed to, ai don’t know, Iceland or North Korea – ai would argue that bottom-up multiculturalism is simply a component of the existing social situation; it existed before top-down multiculturalism became state policy. It’s also not really something that needs to be valorized, just acknowledged.

When we hear calls for multiculturalism to be destroyed, we should understand this as a call to destroy the reality of bottom-up multiculturalism, not as a call to get regular Canadians to stop believing in the multicultural myth promoted by the Canadian state. You can’t destroy a meme, but you can destroy a reality. Such a call for destruction should properly be understood as a call for assimilation and/or ethnic cleansing and/or genocide. It obviously fits in nicely, too, with a citizenist call for the strengthening of borders and passport controls, the most essential mechanisms for maintaining the global apartheid of citizenships.

DESTROY MULTICULTURALISM, then, is a slogan best left to white supremacists. But as anarchists, we shouldn’t necessarily respond with PROMOTE MULTICULTURALISM, which is basically the same as PROMOTE DIVERSITY. Multiculturalism, and diversity, don’t need to be promoted. They don’t even need to be defended! They just are, or they aren’t. It varies from place to place, and it always will. Diversity, or its absence, isn’t the thing that matters. What matters is whatever comprises the diversity or homogeneity in question – which, for the record, are rather vacuous concepts. Like yin and yang, there is diversity in every homogeneity, and vice versa.

The image of Canadian society that gets promoted in the educational films shown to kids in middle school and high school in most parts of the Canadian state’s territory, or that shows up in the texts that those preparing for the Canadian citizenship test need to study, constitutes an obvious example of diversity – but it is homogenous in its adherence to democracy, in its respect of private property and colonial law, in its rejection of “extremism” as a means to achieving political objectives, and so on.

Let’s counterpose this, then, to another image, equally fictitious, but which anarchists and fellow travelers could actually have reason be stoked about. Let’s imagine all sorts of people, speaking all different languages, having all sorts of different philosophies about how the world works (atheism, belief in woo, Jesus was a gay communist who literally performed miracles and we should follow his example, etc.), wearing all different sorts of clothing (from burqas to loincloths), eating all different manners of food, doing all different manners of things to produce rhythmically interesting sounds or play with each other or otherwise entertain themselves without technological mediation, and so and so forth. In sum, a diffuse, multicultural, and anarchistic society.

This is, thus far, an image of diversity on the face of it – but there is at least one homogenous substrate to it. Though we might imagine that people also adhere to the Golden Rule or something, it is certain that this image can only make sense if there is, just below the superficial level, a generalized refusal of centralized authority, of states. It is, after all, authorities such as these that are going to be both the most inclined, and the most capable, of enforcing their notions about hijabs (whether pro or con) on populations of women, to name just a single relevant example. But states are homogenizing forces even when they don’t explicitly aim to shape visible aspects of culture like dress, language, or religious practice. This is certainly true in the case of Canada. The state promotes certain ideas and practices (which, together, basically are culture) that benefit it. That’s why basically everyone speaks English and/or French, and needs to speak one of these languages in order to achieve citizenship. That’s why almost all of us rely on the capitalist market for our food (including those of us who get our food from food banks and soup kitchens).

If we understand a culture to be more than its more immediately visible components, as something that includes an economic aspect and a way of relating to land and a lot more, then it is clear that bottom-up multiculturalism and states are, to at least some degree, opposed to one another. States cannot help but be opposed to any cultures that are not state cultures, that cannot exist in state space without disrupting/negating that space. The image of multicultural diversity and anarchy, as described earlier, is a possibility to which we can strive, if we so choose – but to the extent that it is diverse, there is within it a corresponding degree of absence of stateness there, a negative homogeneity that is an integral aspect of the whole.

Afterword for the confused

You might get more out of this post if you read some or all of The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia by James C. Scott. He’s the dude from which ai lifted the term “state space”, and the fictitious image of multicultural anarchy that ai presented is more or less similar to some aspects of the human reality in Zomia, the focus of that book.