Stefano Bloch
THE KING OF THE ANARCHISTS DOESN'T FORGET A SPACE
We were sitting outside the Presta Coffee on the corner of 9th and 3rd ave because inside “reeked of dryer sheets.” It was the first real winter day in Tucson; being born in and raised out of the desert, I could barely keep from stuttering in the 50-degree air. Stefano was unbothered (if you disregard the dryer sheets), his eyes scanning our surroundings, taking in the space around us. Space, the central tenet of his work as a researcher and professor, is what defines his life. It defines all of our lives; he has made that abundantly clear as my professor.
One of those rare figures who is both book and street smart, Bloch, is more likely to be known, and unknown, as CISCO, the legendary graffiti writer hailing from the peak gang policing era of Los Angeles. CISCO tags have been spotted around the world, especially in L.A., where he has gone All City. Steven Spielberg owns the rights to his book about growing up in L.A., graffiti culture, losing friends, a mother addicted to heroin, guns, drugs, police brutality, and higher education.
For better or worse, Stefano explained the way his memory worked as a catalog of spaces. He can draw a map of any city he’s ever been to and pull information out of his mind because he can see where he first encountered it. Whether he saw it on the lower half of a page or heard it in front of a building, it’s the space he remembers.
Stefano is hard to pin down. Both in class and out. In class, his political leanings are ambiguous. He chastises the political left, right, and center, but his own politics are difficult to extract. Talking to another student after class is where I first heard him talk about anarchy; anarchy as a system of order, not chaos. Paired with a reference to the concept in an interview he gave to a graffiti magazine, I realized I’d found an anarchist in the midst of a higher education institution. I wanted to understand how his philosophies influenced his teaching and further, his parenting. It took a few weeks of badgering to secure a spot on his schedule, but it did happen; the resulting interview is below.
*This interview was condensed for narrative purposes. Great care was taken to preserve the original meaning of the spoken words.
C: What is anarchism?
S: There’s a historical understanding of anarchism, a structural definition of what it is or who they are, and then I have a more personal interpretation of it. More historically, anarchism is a back to the land movement that rebukes authoritarianism. It’s that easy, we rebuke authoritarianism in any form, and we return to the land to live off of that land. But as Noam Chomsky says, who just happens to be at our university, anarchism in that way looks a lot like libertarianism, and libertarianism was kind of hijacked by the more conservative right-wing end of the political spectrum, so he’s no longer comfortable with an anarchism that looks like classical libertarianism. Because libertarianism is more conservative and less inclusive than anarchism could be, but none of that really matters to me because, for me, anarchism is more of a cultural living philosophy about a perspective on power hierarchies and more so, dominant cultures that you practice every day to do without or remove yourself from. It’s about being iconoclastic against dominant cultural practices and forms of consumption, but it also relates to politics in that it's not a suspicion but a disgust with hierarchical power structures and the notion that some people in institutions and political structures all have more say over the dealings of your life than you are entitled to have. So those synthetic socially produced hierarchical structures are what anarchists tend to be against. In short it's a political, even environmental movement or ideology. For me personally, it’s a way of living. It’s a way of living that allows me to have a name for the disgust and distrust I have toward dominant structures, and those are also cultural structures. Like people who wear too much fabric softener on their clothes, and I’m being totally serious.
C: So it’s kind of the anti-majority of today?
S: Yeah, well, I mean the majority could be fine if the majority isn’t using dryer sheets. It’s anti-deferring, a normative way of living as conceptualized by people in power. People who engage in need creation, capitalists, and people who engage in political rhetoric that is supposedly authoritative. So politicians, even people in private institutions that engage in bureaucratic practices that manifest as hierarchies, that is, some people have more power than others when really the goal should be just to get the job done, whatever the job might be. So for me, it’s those things; I’m trying to mix the political, the economic, and the cultural. And it really is about lifestyle. And as an anarchist or adhering to this anarchist philosophy, it’s also about being able to articulate a distrust of or even a movement away from religion. I mean, the most hierarchical structure I can think of is this one in which there is this sky god controlling your universe. That’s pretty damn hierarchical, so I say I don’t trust kings, political leaders, and gods.
C: Does anarchism have central figures, or is that counter to the whole thing?
S: In each structure, and anarchism is no different, there are inconsistencies in hypocrisies, and so some of those hypocrisies within anarchism are very human, so it’s understandable that there are icons. People look up to Kropotkin, Reclus, Red Emma, and others. They’re not anarchist leaders, they're anarchist philosophers, and people look up to them. People, to too great a degree, look up to the iconography of anarchism, the anarchist sign, black band around one’s arm. It starts to look a lot like all of the other social structures that anarchists, from a social perspective, are supposed to distrust. They start to create their cliques, their gangs, and crews. I don’t like that; for me, anarchism is individualistic, but I always want to be careful of not starting to sound like libertarianism. Because libertarians, as people, just seem to be out of touch with what is needed in society. So I defer to anarchism which can be more philosophical about how one lives their life without sounding so incredibly out of touch. Mine is a lifestyle anarchism; that’s what I’m gonna call it. As opposed to a call for the destruction of all hierarchical structures or a call to do anything in particular. I mean, if you want to be really critical of me, you could call it a bourgeoisie lifestyle anarchism. Which I totally acknowledge, and that’s what it is. I shop at Whole Foods not because the food is healthier but because I don’t want to be around people who shop at Safeway. It’s an elitist bourgeois individualistic philosophical anarchism.
C: Do you know many other anarchists?
A: Yes. I feel like the people I’ve surrounded myself with or have been near in my life have always been iconoclastic in the sense of challenging or rebuking or having a distaste for dominant mainstream culture, and so I feel like all of my friends have sort of naturally been anarchists in the sense that they see something wrong in society and even if they can’t name it, they kind of live it. However they would never call themselves anarchists. My friends have always been graffiti writers, and these are people who write on other people’s walls, don’t care about the rules about what’s appropriate, are transgressive, and live these alternative lives; to me that is anarchistic. You know, punk rockers, people who don’t toe the cultural line are anarchists to me. So in that sense, yes, but people who actually call themselves anarchists, here and there yeah. But mostly people who live anarchist lives.
C: So you were an anarchist before you were an anarchist?
S: Exactly. And I think some of that being an anarchist before you’re an anarchist, I don’t know where it comes from. I think it’s kind of natural. Like some people are naturally put off by mainstream thinking. Mainstream thinking to me, is based on power hierarchies. So I mean I’ve never been one to use the latest slang or do drugs or get regular jobs or care more about how my car looks than how my internal organs look. All those things to me are kind of anarchistic. They’re rejecting what you’re supposed to be consuming and doing in society. And I don’t know maybe that comes from personality or anger. Maybe it comes from jealousy or hostility, I just don’t know. But I think it’s natural to some degree, and I think a lot of young people who are naturally anarchistic and could be taught the philosophy behind it to center them, instead of just being seen as outsiders and then they become marginalized. They become victims of the system that doesn’t tolerate that level of anarchy.
C: How did you end up in higher education?
S: Have you read my book yet? It’s very easy. I had a very hard life. My dad died of AIDS when I was a kid, my mom was a heroin addict, we were homeless. I was surrounded by chaos and cops and gangsters. By the way, gang members are often as conservative as cops. They want control over other people’s lives. They’re not different people. I’ve grown up with people who were like yeah you’re one decision away from either becoming a cop or a gangster. A cop or an inmate, they’re the same people. And I mean that in a disrespectful way. So growing up around all these people who were always trying to control my life while I was impoverished, building managers, truant officers, and police officers, and gang members. I pulled away from it by being a graffiti writer. Which is someone who goes off, usually by themselves, to write their names on stuff because they’re egomaniacs who are hostile to society. I was an egomaniacal hostile person, and that kind of kept me away from the bad things society has to offer. Which is both drug addiction and a 9-5 job. I mean both of those things, I really believe, are equally diminishing of the soul. So I say just as cops and gangsters are the same, 9-5 dead-end jobs and drugs are the same thing. They’re a way to hold you captive to something. So as a graffiti writer I was able to thrive in those margins and move away from the mainstream and eventually, I mean it’s a longer story but I got kicked out of high school for writing on the bathroom wall which I honestly didn’t do. So they were like you can’t come back to school until you come back with your parents for a meeting. Well I didn’t have parents so I dropped out. To this day, I’m a dropout. I don’t have a diploma, I’m a total dropout. Then about two years later, I walked onto a community college campus and I started taking community college classes. I enrolled that day and it changed my life forever and I thought I never want to leave this place, you know campus, you read books and people respect you for it sometimes. It just felt like a safe inclusive wonderful intellectual space and I decided my first semester in community college that I was never going to leave a college campus again and it’s 2022 and I’m on college campus everyday of my life. And it’s a different kind of space, where the values feel different. As much as you know, the neoliberal institutionalization of higher education and business schools and people being motivated by jobs and money are always trying to ruin what college is in my opinion. It’s still a place that’s different from other institutions and spaces in society, in that you can lay on the grass while reading Don Quixote or Camus or bell hooks teaching to you transgress with a coffee at your side and people think you’re getting your work done. That is beautiful to me. So if anything, college campuses are the most anarchistic spaces we have in this conservative neoliberal society we’ve constructed because you can get away with that stuff, and I value it for that. As much as there’s a lot of people on college campuses who work there and go there who don’t value it for that; they see it as a stepping stone to more money or power. Well, they can have their space there too.
C: I feel very similar about college campuses. I’ve been away for a few years, but it’s just so nice to be back and around other people who are learning and in a space where learning is cared for.
S: Yes! I just took my kids to the main library last night, and it was so beautiful.
C: I spend most of my nights there.
S: Oh you do? It was my first time there and it was so wonderful. There were all these tables of nerds just talking about stuff. I loved it. I loved the feeling of it.
C: When did you first get exposed to anarchism as anarchism? Or when did you decide you label yourself an anarchist?
S: Well I’d say I never really embraced the title. For the sake of conversation, like right now, I’ll articulate it. But mostly I’ll say something like I agree with anarchist approaches or principles or philosophies, but I’m very hesitant to, in fact, I don’t think I ever talk about it as a thing to which one belongs. But when I was living in Minnesota is where I first saw that there were anarchist collectives and groups who ran cafes and breakfast places. Who all got together and met and talked about growing kale and would go across the country to go to protests and would do black bloc style protesting. So I got really involved when I was going to school in Minnesota. I’d never met so many white people in my life, and I’d never met so many white people who were so rowdy and iconoclastic, rebelling against society. I was amazed by them, and my now partner and I kind of started aligning ourselves with them for the sake of finding out information; where’s the protest, where’s the thing going to happen, etc. That was the only time in my life where I kind of almost felt like I was part of the group, but I didn’t feel comfortable with it being a group or with any kind of membership. They called themselves the black bloc. Black bloc is a protest tactic, it’s not a group, but it’s almost becoming a group because they all dress alike and act alike. And that’s what I kinda don’t like about society. Like ANTIFA is not a group; it’s an ideology, and it’s ANTIFA people’s fault themselves; they’ve kind of become a group because they act alike and talk alike and do the same things. But I also value it because you sort of have to be organized in order to do stuff. So it was in Minnesota when I kind of aligned myself with what could be considered a social group of anarchists doing anarchy under the banner of anarchism. I flew to Florida as part of this big protest, had hand-to-hand combat with the police, and got arrested. The headline on the front page of the Miami Day Herald the next day was “18 anarchists arrested”, and I was one of them. I was in jail, and I loved every minute of it. I was scared, but I loved it. At the same time, I was like, the reason I’m here is because I align myself with a group. I didn’t accomplish anything; this wasn’t about my ideology; it’s like I joined a gang in a way. I felt a little bad about it in a weird way, but I loved anarchists who do organize. Who was it who said I never want to be part of a club that would accept me as a member? That’s kind of how I feel; I never want to be part of a group that I could be a member of. The fact that it becomes a group means that I have to remove myself from it. But I never want that to sound libertarian or like I’m this, you know, man on his island individual. Not at all; I think there are more possibilities for community and collectivity by being a bunch of individuals who closely orbit around each other as opposed to being an individual in a group that has a name and a code and a boundary. In fact I’ve even written about this in my scholarship. That the word community is supposed to be so inclusive and everyone talks about trying to make community. I’ve actually written about how in order for there to be a community that is inclusive you have to have exclusivity, so even the notion of community itself is too conservative for me. I don’t like the word community, “It’s a wonderful community we have here” to me that sounds exclusionary, it sounds exclusive. How about just chill out with the terms, with the names. So my anarchism when it comes to names or labels I tend to walk away from.
C: Before coming back to school, I was part of an organization called El Grupo, which literally translates to the group, and I left because I felt like it was too exclusionary.
S: Exactly. And again I’m inconsistent because of course I belong to some groups. I see the benefits of groups, it's just that I don’t like standing in line for things. If there’s a line in a coffee shop, I’ll sit down until the line goes away. Just the fact that I’m in a line means I’m doing what everyone else is doing and that’s just embarrassing to me. So it’s totally a personal thing. That’s why I’ve never done drugs, because I see people buying and using drugs like every other drug user, and I’m like you’re all starting to act alike, you move alike. To this day I could tell you what drug someone is on from half a block away because your body transforms in response to the drug. And to me that’s so gross, but I also acknowledge that I’m part of a group of guys that look like me. Bald guys who wear flannels and listen to Metallica at a reasonable volume in our Subarus. I can’t have revolution everyday.
C: Just some days. Let’s transition to teaching. There’s a much higher level of engagement in your class than in any other class I’ve had. It feels like it’s by design,
S: Very much so.
C: I think it comes down to the fact that the hierarchy has been shifted; you always offer opportunities for questions, you answer every question, you don’t look down on people for their ideas,
S: I play with them, but I don’t bring them down. I play with them, but that’s treating them as equals.
C: It’s humorous, and that breaks the barriers down. Can you talk about how you have thought about constructing your class and teaching the way that you do?
S: I want the classroom, the physical space and the time we’re spending there together to be somewhere where people can let down their guard, be themselves, and think thoughts that maybe they feel like they’re not allowed to think in other spaces and try out new things, really for the long term purpose for them being better at thinking thoughts. The reason I want people to be themselves and let down their guard is because groups create barriers. So if you come into class and you’re a right wing Christian, well then you’re going to act like one, and be like one just as you entered as one, and if you come in as a left wing pro-choice, I don’t know, poet, well then you’re going to come as one and you’re going to leave as one and nothing is ever going to happen, but if I insist upon people being vulnerable and honest and asking questions that haven’t been answered by their group, it breaks down those barriers and allows them to be almost like return to being children in a way. Being open and ignorant and acknowledging that ignorance is actually a good starting point. Being smart isn’t a good starting point, being smart is the ending point. Being ignorant is the starting point so I always try to find a way throughout the semester to encourage ignorance and being wrong and being open and honest and vulnerable and not holding other people accountable. And the reason I do that is because that breaks down the barriers set up by their groups. I feel like that creates a more inclusive space for everyone to think new thoughts as a group as opposed to thinking the thoughts that the group that they're in allows them to think and I think that’s done by just being honest and self deprecating at times and showing my own ignorances. By being human, the starting point is an ignorant human. It isn’t a republican or a christian or even an anarchist, the starting point is being an ignorant baby. So I wish every student would come into class being an ignorant baby like me.
C: You really try to answer every question to the best of your ability,
S: Yeah, given the amount of time I’m able to have. Some students ask questions and they’re so good that we could literally spend a semester on that question.
C: But you even give good answers to the bad, or more so, ignorant questions. Whereas generally, in the classroom the professor is the authority, and people in that position will often diminish your question because it doesn’t meet their standard of knowledge. You don’t do that and I think that makes kids a lot more open to exposing themselves and being vulnerable.
S: Because they don’t feel judged. I said I was skeptical of the notion of community. Well communities or groups within communities are about what’s right and wrong because they have boundaries. They have ideological and physical boundaries, you’re either with us or against us. All these groups are about what's appropriate within and what should be pushed to the outside. So if you let someone be themselves you’re breaking down a boundary by putting their humanity and their interest before the party line. That’s what breaks down boundaries. That’s why I always answer everyone. In fact I really like ignorant uninformed questions, because it's a more natural honest starting point than a question that has a point they’re to prove embedded in it. “What is a tree?” yeah let’s talk about that. As opposed to why don’t you like those trees in your front yard. It puts you on the spot but honest questions that are naive and ignorant are just so pure. I hope students feel comfortable asking pure questions. And to me, again, it’s part of the anarchist philosophy. The purity is almost like the return to the land, like what actually matters is water, food, procreation, mastication, defecation, urination, everything else is made up.
C: You’re teaching something that aligns with your beliefs,
S: Or I’m teaching something in a way that aligns with my beliefs without trying to convince people. My entry point is my beliefs.
C: Let’s move to your kids. Did you always want kids?
S: I don’t remember ever not wanting kids, but I remember thinking god I could never have kids because if they did something like knock over their juice at breakfast, I’d have a panic attack. Or I wouldn’t be able to handle the whining and incompetence and stupidity and not being able to tie their shoes, so I could never have kids. And I was 100% wrong, nothing makes me mad. My kid knocks over his juice and I’m like oh look gravity at work, it doesn’t faze me. What fazes me is when they’re acting crazy. Before I had kids, I was afraid to have kids thinking I would be outrageously judgmental and that just didn’t happen. I had kids and started to see the humanity in their ridiculousness and I started to see the process of learning and how natural it is to knock over your juice or not be able to tie your shoes or act like an imbecile all day. But then I’m also kind of hard on them in that I expect them to not act like jerks. I’m a little authoritarian in my parenting, in that my job is to keep you from being your worst self. People think I’m terrible for saying this, I say it to parents all the time and I mean it, I think your job as a parent is to kind of crush your kid’s soul just enough that people want to invite them to parties. Your job isn’t to have them live your best life, no, your job as a parent is to crush them just a little bit so that they’re not the worst person in the room. And I really do believe that. Which is so not anarchistic, but I think it is, I really think it is. For me being a good anarchist is knowing your boundaries and your body and knowing social rules to live by so everyone can participate and in fact the anarchist symbol, as it’s said, means anarchy in order. It’s about order, that’s what anarchy is. People who use anarchy to mean chaos or destruction are just absolutely wrong. That’s not what it means. The A and the O is anarchy in order. You have to have order to grow kale and have a collective, you have to have a lot of order. You have to know your boundaries, how to collaborate, how to rely on each other, you have to know that you’re not being sold snake oil by your neighbor. You have to all know that you’re all going to look out for each other. So with kids it’s not about them living their best lives and being feral because I’m so progressive. It’s about don’t be crazy, don’t be the biggest jerk in the room. Don’t flail your arms in crowded space because you’re going to hit someone else in the face. That’s starting to sound libertarian again but I don’t mean it to.
C: So you crush them so that they understand how to participate in society?
S: And not just participate, crush them just enough that people want to invite them in and allow them opportunities, the social contract kind of thing. But not crush them so that they’re good workers. So my crushing is different crushing. I don’t crush them so they can get a job or be polite or worship god or say their prayers. That’s a form of crushing too but people forget that that’s a form of crushing. They think that’s good parenting and make their children believe in sky gods. That’s crushing, so for me it’s the opposite. It’s like no you don’t have to subscribe to any particular thing, you don’t have to believe in anything, you don’t have to live your life any particular way but you’re not allowed to be a jerk and you’re not allowed to flail your arms around to the point where you spill your juice. So it’s a different type of crushing but we’re all crushing our kids, we’re all crushing each other, but in what way do you choose to crush people around you. I think that’s the question you have to ask yourself. So I’m a bourgeois fascist anarchist. How many contradictory words can I put in my title, I’m a king of the anarchists.
C: Perfect. What do you want from your children?
S: I want them to have a good enough life that if someone presents them an opportunity to do something as simple as go camping for a week in Utah that they have the resources and the freedom to be able to do it. The freedom comes by not being beholden to mainstream jobs or being a sucker to, to put it in anarchist terms, the capitalist system of reproduction, but also having enough resources which includes money obviously to take that trip. So how do you both not become indebted to a system, but also allow that system to pay you enough to make those decisions? That’s all I want for them, and what that is, is freedom. I’m uncomfortable with the word freedom because I feel like even that word has been hijacked by right wing libertarianism, but it shouldn’t have. Maybe it’s in my own head but I feel like it’s been hijacked. It’s not about freedom, it’s about being able to jump at opportunity and having the resources to facilitate taking that opportunity. That’s all I want for them, is that level of freedom.
C: Do you punish your children?
S: No, never. In fact, my daughter the other day was talking about how her friends at school get punished or grounded, and my 11-year-old daughter is the most insightful human being on earth; she was like you’ve never punished us before. Everything is about educating so I can get a better outcome from you for myself. What is punishment going to do? Make you upset to teach you how to do something better. So no I’ve never punished them, I’ve gotten mad, I’ve told my son I’m done with you go to your room. But punish no, there’s no learning through punishment. There’s only learning through educating or showing or facilitating or providing opportunity. Punishment seems so pointless. And I can’t imagine them doing anything that would warrant punishment in a way that is vengeful or to teach a lesson. I can’t even imagine what that would look like. So no, never. But I also don’t let them get away with things, so I guess my punishment is alright we’re going to have three minutes of eye contact where we talk about why that is not ok and you should never do it again. I’ve had that relationship with my kids since they were tiny. I will tell them don’t ever do that thing again and let’s talk about why you think that is and let’s eye contact and don’t let me catch you doing it again. I’m stern with them, and they never do it again. It’s worked so far.
C: I don’t have kids, but I’ve worked with kids for a long time, and I agree. I don’t think you can punish kids and expect anything else out of them or expect anything better. They have to learn and they have to understand what they’ve done or haven’t done and that’s how you move on.
S: Kids need red lines, they need to be told do not do this thing ever in your life. There’s no punishment, there’s no negotiation. If you can’t understand that there are red lines because of nature, then I wash my hands of you forever.
C: Well, that’s all of the questions I have. Thank you for the time.
S: Of course.
After our interview, I brought out a book I had been struggling with for some time, Humanism and Terror. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to understand the separation of Humanism and Marxism in post-WWII France and a response to Arthur Koestler's novel, Darkness at Noon. It was the book that prefaced the first questions I emailed Stefano with after our first class of the semester. Correlations between liberalism and violence, law and morality, order and suppression were known to me, but the facets of their relationships were murky, and Stefano had explanations. Those titles, Humanism and Terror and Darkness at Noon, express the moral dilemmas faced by their authors and protagonists; a facing of the hypocrisies of the system of one’s morality, beliefs, perceptions, and subsequent actions. It is a turning into the wind and away from the mediocrity, banality, and ensuing brutality that is dominant Western culture.
The moral dilemmas are what define our lives; they are the decisions requiring a transgression of the space we had previously occupied. More than anyone I have met in a long time, this is what Stefano does. He understands that his beliefs have holes and his morality is exclusionary, yet he moves through life in a way that takes responsibility for his actions and does not introduce more harm into the world. He cares about people, and it’s clear. He doesn’t care for your groups, but he cares for you, and I believe that’s a model we could all do a little better to accept.
Stefano Bloch is both a self-obsessed egomaniac who spent his formative years brushing shoulders with death to write his name on walls, and a selfless caretaker, teacher, and father willing to do anything for his people; himself, a perpetual moral dilemma.
A king for the anarchists.