The history of anarchism has been one of progressive disenchantment, which somewhere along the way, has caused its intrinsic message to become lost in the complexity involved in answering its critics. It is curious that individual anarchists must recapitulate this sequence of ideological diffusion in their own personal trajectory. They emerge into the world blessed with an instinctive clarity, only to be gradually side-tracked by the detail of the subsequent rationalisations they must elaborate in response to those accidental interlocutors who stumble into their personal life history. Eventually, nothing remains of their earlier self but rationalisation and its concomitant relinquishments. Whilst fundamentalism, irrationality and solipsism are not appropriate responses to the process by which clear meaning is decomposed, the deprivation of the individual’s first relation to the world should not be understood as one of simple maturation. But then again, the danger which lies in refusing the objective process of disenchantment, involves the retention of neotonous features as a willed and manipulative childishness which is deployed as a survival strategy (e.g. Harold Skimpole) - who can now believe that the surrealists became old men and yet still maintained the ‘surrealist’ life-world? Similarly, anarchists as old men just seems incongruous, like aged circus performers pressed into performance by a poverty of other options. Therefore, it appears that the problem of metabolising the pressures of maturation cannot be categorically resolved in terms of whether it is truly possible to ‘hold on’ or to ‘travel back’.
