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Title: Review of Constituent Imagination Author: Aragorn! Date: Fall/Winter 2008 Language: en Topics: academy, Autonomous Marxism Source: AJODA #66. Proofread online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=4630, retrieved on July 13, 2020.
Constituent Imagination
ed. Stevphen Shukaitis & David Graeber w/ Erika Biddle (AK Press 2008)
336 pages. Paper, $21.95
This is an eclectic book. While the central question lies in the
neighborhood of how to reconcile activism with academia, there are
plenty of plot points off the mean. DIY Punk Rock, anti-racism,
crocheting, tree-sits, and anti-globalization tourism are among writings
on real subsumption, praxis, ethnography, and the multitude.
Consistent Imagination is organized into four stanzas that comprise the
editor’s view of the relationship between radical theory and the
“movement of movements” of social change, each with an editorial
introduction. The first is titled Moments of Possibility//Genealogy of
Resistance and attempts to address the central question of this book:
how does one negotiate between the desire for and practice of a total
rupture of the existing order while working to understand the existing
order? In the parlance of the book “Where are the fault lines between
academia, activism, and the orgasms of history?”
Of the five articles within this section, the article by Colectivo
Situaciones (“Something more on Research Militancy”) is the most
important both to the first section and to the book’s central thesis.
In an era when communication is the indisputable maxim, in which
everything is justifiable by its communicable usefulness, research
militancy refers to experimentation: not to thoughts, but to the power
to think; not to the circumstances, but to the possibility of
experience; not to this or that concept, but to experiences in which
such notions acquire power (potencia); not to identities but to a
different becoming; in one word: intensity does not lie so much in that
which is produced (that which is communicable) as in the process of
production itself (that which is lost in communication). (81)
Colectivo Situaciones is an Argentine group originating in the radical
student milieu of the mid-1990s that, since then, has produced books on
unemployed workers’ movements, the question of power and tactics of
struggle, and conversations about how to think about revolution today.
In their own words “[We] intend to offer an internal reading of
struggles, a phenomenology (a genealogy), not an ‘objective’
description. It is only in this way that thought assumes a creative,
affirmative function, and stops being a mere reproduction of the
present. And only in this fidelity with the immanence of thought is it a
real, dynamic contribution, which is totally contrary to a project or
scheme that pigeonholes and overwhelms practice”(Perspectives on
Anarchist Theory, fall, 2003) .
Immanence is a concept that has gained a kind of trendy traction among
anarchists inspired by the political writings of Delueze, along with the
Negri-ists of the Autonomous Marxist tendency. The idea is rather
simple: rather than seeing history as a series of progressive changes
leading to an idealized future (as in dialectics), immanence sees no
transcendent future. Life is to be lived now, not after the revolution,
and not in the service of the historical active agent.
Here we see the great potential of post-structuralist and autonomist
ideas for current anarchist thought. Immanence provides a conceptual
framework as powerful (if not as historically rich) as dialectics, for
understanding our participation in this historical moment, and frames
the conversation on an appropriate scale. We are no longer for Great Men
and the inevitability of History. As Delueze puts it in his reading of
Nietzsche (quoted in Will Weikart, “All Gods, All Masters: Immanence and
Anarchy/Ontology”
), “Choose those things which you would have continuing forever, and
embrace them with your life. As a principle, this approach avoids the
direct negativity of opposition; and as such it allows for a very
positive affirmation of the world.”
The second section of the book, Circuits of Struggle, sets up a series
of metaphors about human energy and activism like ten-penny nails and
pounds away at them like a technophilic carpenter building a casket for
John Zerzan. As a matter of fact, this section is haunted by Zerzan,
with its defensive rhetoric about circuits, “turning cycles of struggles
into spirals and opening up new planes of resistance” (111), and the
process of composition and decomposition of knowledge.
The strained metaphors reach their nadir with the article “Reinventing
Technology: Artificial Intelligence from the Top of a Sycamore Tree” by
Harry Halpin. Set as a rant written from the top of a nameless tree-sit,
and declaring that “the re-enchantment of everyday life” will come
through technology — it turns out to be a new form of the old argument
about the neutrality of means. If you are a global justice activist then
communications technology is a new kind of alchemy. As a technologist in
the movement you have to “provide solutions that respect the very human
and ecological origins of these networks... to tear down artificial
divisions between technology, action, and theory” (162). Sounds like the
top sheet to a venture capitalist proposal.
The third section, Communities of/in Resistance, contains the
dreamy-eyed stories of how current activism, specifically around food
politics, social services, homeless organizing, and knitting, pertains
to “circulating moments of rupture, through circuits and cycles of
struggle, we find the processes through which communities are formed in
resistance.” (179)
The most engaging of these essays is “The Revolution Will Wear a
Sweater: Knitting and Global Justice Activism” by Kirsty Robertson. This
article doesn’t question the overarching logic of activism but does
discuss a practice that is far more interesting than traditional
grassroots activism or protesting. Although it doesn’t use the jargon of
immanence, knitting is presented as an immanent practice, which is a
correction many of the theoretical articles could have used.
Finally the last section, Education & Ethics, summarizes the defense of
the book’s central thesis — that usable knowledge for the social justice
movement has something to do with the institution of the university.
Each of these authors asserts that knowledge is a superset of the
university education production environment, but somehow that
environment is still there haunting us in the background, like an
employer whose paychecks are too small, or a dream of a goal never
accomplished. Sometimes this looks like knowledge is something that can,
should, and must be informed by other sources, like the Situationists:
“how we live our everyday lives has everything to do with the projects
we aspire to create and enact. Theory, analysis, and narration are a
central part of our daily actions, and these daily actions are, by
definition the materiality of politics” (254); or science fiction,“the
figure of the revolting knowledge-worker has not yet truly made its
presence known. Cyper-punk seems to have been overly optimistic” (272);
or anti-racist pedagogy, “the default pedagogic and epistemic modes of
the academy are, by virtue of being the historically developed and
promulgated modes of a Eurocentric and authoritarian institution,
antagonistic to the aims of anti-racist education” (295).
Uri Gordon’s article in the last section is the strongest of the book in
defense of the editors’ central thesis. “Practising Anarchist Theory:
Towards a Participatory Political Philosophy” eloquently draws together
the academic texts that have taken anarchist thought seriously with a
proposal for anarchist research. This article has a fascinating
contradiction at its center because it both argues from the most clearly
academic position (being a series of proposals, lists, and explanations)
and concludes, at odds with itself, that
[t]he lack of rational discussion is far from the norm in the movement
if we also count the everyday oral communication among anarchists, where
the bulk of discussion with the movement takes place. These oral
discussions, most often in the form of causal conversations among
activists, tend to be of a far higher quality that what McQuinn is
seeing in the narrow display box of anarchist print and Web-based
media... For this reason it is extremely important for whoever wants to
write about anarchism to be attentive to these oral discussions and
follow them in a consistent way. (285)
Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization is the subtitle to this
collection of autonomous marxist, anarchist, and unspecified radical
tracts. The subtitle is the high- handed way that the thesis is
communicated to the reader — and begs the question of what exactly is
militant about the investigations and what is collective about the
theorization in this book.
Their own definition of militant investigation is a short one. It is an
“intensification and deepening of the political... Militant Research
starts from the understandings, experiences, and relations generated
through organizing, as both a method of political action and a form of
knowledge” While this definition clearly draws a line in the sand, I am
not sure it is where the editors intend for it to be. For many of the
people interested in the question (or practice) of how to change the
world, the very word political has become suspect. In the same way,
organizing is a term of the same genre, expressing a certain view of
managing people — with method and goal already determined.
This way of framing the question — of asking the questions many of us
consider central — by already having determined the method and the
historical trajectory by which the questions will be answered — severely
limited the potential of this book. This said, some of the questions are
good ones and many of the authors are attempting to answer them to the
best of their abilities.
Among the authors there is a common nomenclature and set of political
markers and boundaries, but they are not expressed clearly by the
editors themselves; instead they must be gleaned by a close reading of
each of the texts (and by knowing a bit about the editors). While this
book was published by the ostensibly anarchist book publisher AK Press,
the editors clearly draw more inspiration from the events in France in
the 60s, Italy in the 70s, and Central and South America in the 90s than
they do Spain in the 30s. This isn’t a problem per se but conveying the
point that this volume largely comes out of the Autonomous Marxist
tradition, (while the editors refer to themselves as anarchists (16)),
and what exactly that entails, is a central point to this collection
that is never addressed, much less explained. Inquiring anarchists would
like to know.
As a result, the language used throughout the volume assumes a political
education and a set of motivations that will not apply to all, or even
most, readers who are actually interested in the relationship between
radical theory and social change. An education in 19^(th) century
Hegelian thought or 20^(th) century post-structuralist political thought
turns out to be not as relevant as is information about the lyrical
polemics of Subcommadante Marcos or knowledge of the context of
collective factory recovery movements in Argentina.
We can map the resonance and connections over physical space and
encounters through mediated machinations and communications, through and
around the disparate spaces that compose the university, the hospital,
the city square, and through all spaces of life. By looking at the
different circuits and channels through which information flows, we can
see that cartographies of resistance trace the multiple and overlapping
spaces and forms of struggle that exist, extending and expanding them.
(111)
What is a “cartography of resistance”? If you are familiar with groups
like bureau d’études and Multiplicity, you know that this term refers to
a subset of the formal discipline of geography — a radical critique of
modernist cartography a la the Mercator projection. Instead of simple
tweaks to Mercator to create a world map reflecting the actual size of
the continents (like the Gall-Peters projection), these radical
cartographers map the micro (like Multiplicity’s map of two routes
between the same two points in Israel — one for an Israeli, the other
for a Palestinian) and the macro (as in the power map bureau d’études
created of the US political system).
A cartography of resistance moves from the work of radical cartographers
into a practice that is technically capable of evaluating relationships
of probably disparate actors onto a stage where their actions can be
understood, clearly conveyed to others, and proliferated. Nearly every
article in this book has a few new turns of phrase along these lines,
demanding further research to understand the context that they come out
of and more than a little patience to understand where the reference
ends and the stylistic flourish begins.
This dense “discursive regime” dominates especially the editorial voice,
but also the book as a whole. The result is a book of and for
specialists in this kind of language. Who are these people? Where did
they go to learn this jargon? Having trained themselves in this kind of
language, what do they do with it and the marginal kind of power they
gain as a result?
How can we open the university to use its resources for the benefit of
movements and organizing? How can we use it to create a forum for
collective reflection, to re-imagine the world from where we find
ourselves? It is through this constituent process of collectively shared
and embodied imagination that the boundaries of the classroom, of where
knowledge is created and struggles occur, start to break down. (251)
David Graeber is a well-known figure in anarchist circles. He was one of
the media spokespeople during the NYC RNC in 2004 and then made
headlines (at least in the anarchist press) for his release from his job
at Yale. An “out” anarchist who was also a renowned college professor in
anthropology made his expulsion dramatic for many anarchists. Graeber
recovered his professional standing and is currently teaching in the UK.
Shukaitis is a graduate student also in the UK. Clearly these two are
not evaluating the university from a distance or from a total rejection
of it, but as participants who are trying to reconcile their a priori
decisions.
The usual argument made by radicals who become professors is that every
person in this society must work, and that they are just making a
choice; it is one that can be criticized, but it is hardly the worst
choice to be made within capitalism. Additionally, several of the
authors within this collection argue, research militancy is a project
that is defined by the tension of its relationship with academic
knowledge. Who better to have this tension than self-defined radicals in
the university?
But there is something about the assumption that the classroom is a
locus for struggle, for the creation of knowledge, that frames the
presenter(s). Is it really possible to reclaim something — anything —
from the hierarchical atmosphere of the Euro-American university
structure? Is this question answered differently if you are on the cusp
of being a professor yourself? A concern of this book is on the
relevance of the university and the inter- and intra-struggles therein.
An article that deserves special mention as a contrast to the rest of
the book is by CrimethInc. called “No Gods, No Masters Degrees.” Besides
the witty title, this article asks many of the questions that the rest
of the authors seem either oblivious to or antagonistic towards.
Specialization, tradition, and the conflict between
anarchist-as-researcher and anarchist-as-revolutionary are topics given
only short shrift in this article but are glaring in their complete
absence in the rest of the book. Like most CrimethInc. writing, this
serves as a polemic “to life” rather than the kind of sober yet
obviously engaged analysis of most of the other articles, but again this
contrast is refreshing. When you have traveled through 300 pages of
articles that you suspect are central to a term paper or a doctoral
thesis, reading a cry for action rather than a description of a
near-action is welcome relief.
Constituent Imagination succeeds. It demonstrates that there is a
relationship between radical theory and what remains of the movements
for social change. Some good news results from this success: there will
continue to be interesting thinking done about the political
consequences of some of the more abstract notions of post-structuralist,
autonomous, and anarchist ideas into the next few decades, by these
thinkers if no one else. While many readers, and perhaps the authors
themselves, may disagree, the bad news of this book is the outlook for
the “movement of movements.” The gains that are struggled for in these
narratives are small, if not minuscule. The vision of the constituent
movements is myopic to the point of severity.
The most paradigmatic movements — to the extent that they are even
treated in this text — are the series of struggles in Argentina in the
first part of this decade. They are little known, and were immediately
claimed by liberals and defeated by globalization. This series of
events, popularized by the Naomi Klein documentary “The Take,” do indeed
hearken back to a time where workers’ power, conscious human subjects,
and hope-above-all were elements of our political experience. We should
not even feel nostalgia for the incongruity of this incomplete view of
this moment. We should feel a cultural disconnect.
As is often the case when ideas from one part of the world are shared
(often by exuberant fans of those ideas) with another culture, something
is lost in translation. In the case of Colectivo Situaciones, who are
impressive in their articulation about practice and thought and have
very little exposure in North American radical circles, their ideas
about affective experiments, research militancy, and the “sad militant”
are exciting but odd. Can even the North American radical academic get
much out of becoming “militant” when expressing vague anti-war beliefs
is enough to get them on a right-wing radical watch list? Are the ideas
of Colectivo Situaciones being properly understood when they are evoked
as in the article “Drifting Through the Knowledge Machine?” The article
cites Colectivo Situaciones as an inspiration in its description of a
Labor Day protest where certain University employees where not given the
day off work (because they weren’t properly defined as workers). Their
protest involved creating an “ad hoc intervention group” vis à vis a
group of employees (a.k.a. knowledge workers) protesting their exclusion
by doing “militant research.” This entailed having students and
passersby fill out questionnaires and walking around campus in a
“stationary-drift.” North Americans’ lack of a social movement of their
own translates as a hunger for the social movements of other peoples and
places.