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Title: PostAnarchia Repertoire Author: Erick Heroux Date: 2010 Language: en Topics: ADCS 2010.1, Deleuze, essentialism, ethics, failure, post-anarchism Notes: From Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, Volume 2010.1
“PostAnarchia Repertoire” is a set of discrete propositions about
postanarchism. These can be read either as stand-alone units in any
order, or also as a linear development that unfolds from beginning to
end. The essay attempts to articulate the implied principles, themes,
and concepts from across a range of contemporary postanarchist writing.
Themes here include: transversality across acentric and polycentric
networks; the tension between the three revolutionary ideals of liberty,
equality, and solidarity; the potential consequences of taking equality
seriously; how the anarchist criticism of representation has been
complicated by the paradoxes of deconstruction; the necessity of
dissensus and the appeal of paralogy and the dialogical; and finally why
a polythetic definition of anarchism is more suitable than an
essentialist definition.
“We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it.
We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of
concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people
that do not yet exist [...] This people and this earth will not be found
in our democracies. Democracies are majorities, but a becoming is by its
nature that which always eludes the majority” (Deleuze & Guattari).
How did we get so sad? The 20^(th) century is the story of failed
revolutions against both capitalism and empire; that is, of the
communist and anticolonialist revolts. Instead, capitalism has never
been so widely embraced and embracing, meanwhile the empire
re-insinuates itself in neocolonial exploitation and postcolonial
nationalist regimes that grotesquely abuse their own citizens. The
century was a trap. When it wasn’t fascist violence that destroyed
anarchism as in Spain, then it was totalitarian violence. When it wasn’t
colonial violence, then it was postcolonial violence. When it wasn’t
nationalism, then it was terrorism. When it wasn’t overt violence, it
was an even more insidious, because covert, form of control: an economic
and technical control of populations and of individuals that was
difficult to name, much less to resist. We are sad because we were
seduced and abandoned, forlorn lovers of humanity. This last century was
not one of conspiracy, though many conspiracies succeeded. The only
conspiracies allowed to succeed were those that conformed to and
furthered the total drift into global capital. In an era of economic
hierarchy, only the violence of the economy is permitted.
Past, present, future. Anarchism, it is often said, has passed. It was a
19^(th) century ideology that found expression in a few bombs and
assassins, the “propagandists of the deed.” Its fullest communal
expression was in Spain before the fascists violently overthrew the
Republic in that ultimate prelude to WWII. Hence, all anarchism has is a
past, a hopeless cause in a mature world of democratic states. So goes
the managed folklore. Nevertheless, an awkward present throws in with a
certain return of anarchism, the “new anarchists”, the “black blocs”,
the intentional communities, the temporary autonomous zones, the
experimental social centers, the resurgence of publishing anarchist
anthologies, classics, rereadings, and the startling reappearance of the
symbol of anarchy everywhere: asserting that true order grows from
anarchic liberty. It is no small irony, historic irony, that the status
quo system of welfare state plus capitalism is the only one to have
announced its own lack of a futurity: this has been called the “end of
history” and “the end of ideology”. The present is the ultimate
attainment of human abilities, the wisest compromise is conveniently
located nearby: the status quo turns out to be unsurpassable, an eternal
present that would be useless to oppose, since all competing
alternatives have failed. Yet like an uncanny ghost, anarchism then
reappears to announce that reports of its demise are premature. On the
contrary, it now is reinvented as “post-contemporary theory”, calling
attention to a “coming community” (Agamben) a “democracy to come”
(Derrida) a “people that do not yet exist” (Deleuze & Guattari) in a
paradoxically “unavowable community” (Blanchot) in which the rising
“multitude” consists not of identities but instead of “singularities”
(Hardt & Negri). These theories of libertarian communalism do not name
themselves as anarchist — or at least only obliquely as can easily be
shown in particular allusions and footnotes. But they everywhere
reanimate the supposedly dead anarchist themes and rearticulate an older
lexicon in neologisms for new emerging conditions. Postanarchism,
therefore, asserts its future; while welfare state consumerism never
tires of asserting its eternal present without any future development,
in complete denial of history.
The people to come, those evoked by the great visionary artists, poets,
philosophers — and here I refer to the likes of Blake, Whitman and
Nietzsche — will not be clones of the proletarians, or preservations of
beleaguered working class culture, or back to the severed roots of
native tribes, or any essentialist identity (or foundationalist
identification) whether masculine or feminine, black or white, true or
false. These contemporary stylizations of radical imagery are rejected
in postanarchist theory (and indeed essentialism was most often rejected
in classical anarchism too). Instead, the new accent in all
postanarchism is on neither preserving nor returning, but rather on
becoming. The pure image of authentic proletarians or aboriginals or
precolonial subalterns is now transformed and opened up to future
“becoming-minor”. Neither majority nor purity; but of vital concern here
is the endlessly open process of becoming different from what one
already was, creating a singularity rather than being an individual,
branching outward rather than digging for roots. Singularities are
unique clusters formed of both pre-individual elements and
trans-individual elements, making up their own spaces and times.
Nevertheless, what is affirmed and carried forth from the various
marxisms, anti-colonialisms, and classical anarchism is what Deleuze and
Guattari have listed as the source of the people to come: “an oppressed,
bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race”.
Where are we today? Caught like pawns between the two dominant and
dominating institutions that have competed with each other and
cooperated with each other for access to our domination: the State and
the Corporation. Our political alternative will not be to take over and
become the corporation, nor the state. But rather to sidestep these
institutions by way of decentralization, which undercuts both. Both of
these dominating institutions operate as hierarchies. More and more they
also appear to operate like networks, a diffuse power that seeps into
the fabric of society itself as “governmentality” or a “biopower” that
subjects us not through discipline or conformity to norms, but rather
through suffusing its model of our supposed “interests” deeply and
seductively into our own dreams and desires. This network power
collapses the boundaries between public and private, between work and
play, between home economics and the Economy. But this power,
insidiously effective, is merely a contingent strategy, a screen that
maintains the quite obvious hierarchies that it supports. Our
alternative operation is networks too, but networks that are not screens
but rather redistributions of power. Who speaks, who can be heard, who
can see, who can be seen, who can decide, what is allowed to be decided
upon — all of these are redistributed in genuine networks.
Networks. All kinds of networks for different purposes, using different
kinds of connectivity. Oddly, network studies have shown that not every
node on a network is equally decentered. Networks are potentially
acentric, but in fact they evolve as polycentric: where some nodes are
much more used and useful than others. The completely acentric
interconnectivity is virtual, is available to be enacted; however in
practice, most interconnections go through a smaller number of major
hubs. The larger number of other nodes become relatively marginal, even
though they are still connected to every other node, and are still
potentially capable of becoming more “central”. The result is a hybrid
of hierarchy and equality: both/and yet neither/nor vertical and
horizontal: something in-between. A new concept is called for. A
diagonal, or better, transversal interaction. Networks instantiate the
hybridity and the equality and the liberty and the mutual
interconnectedness and the dialogical polyphony of the key postanarchist
transvaluation of all values. The coming community is networked and it
arrives through networked structures, and it enacts a network:
polycentric when it wants to be, and yet always already decentered or
acentric if wants to be. The network both enables and results from the
self-organizing system of singularities in mutual connectedness.
Multinational conferences, held to official fanfare in cities named
Kyoto, Seattle, Genoa, Copenhagen, etc., have repeatedly shown the
failure of elite managers to come to any viable agreement about how best
to partition the spoils, how to preserve privileges, how to guarantee
the sustainability of capitalism, how to make power seem appealing, in
sum how to save the status quo from its own poisons. This remarkable
series of failures has been met by an equally remarkable series of
forgettings in the muddle minded media. Whether amnesia or a wilful
malice, the result has been that only an inspired group of protesters
has called for an awakening from this stupor, albeit protesters usually
depicted while being kicked and sprayed by the various national guards
of the world, now indistinguishably attired in the uniforms of the
stormtroopers from Star Wars. (The new Empire is not subtle in its
symbolism.) The official negotiations attempt to preserve the status quo
while making deals to cover the contradictions between nationalisms and
global governance. It is only the protesters who have been able to
propose an alternative to these failed negotiations: an alternative
world to the business as usual model of globalization. The most acute
analysis shows that another world is not only possible, but that another
world is necessary. This necessary alternative is aligned with the
principles of postanarchist governance.
Anarchism inspired and is inspired by that old revolutionary trinity of
equality, liberty, and solidarity (I prefer this latter term to the
patriarchal “brotherhood” of fraternity). Anarchism is never fully
realized, but is the political ideal to be worked toward continually,
more democratic than “democracy” as currently established in systems of
state representation. As an ideal, it is never fully present but always
a potential to bring out the best in forms of free sociality. Even amid
our current States, it is anarchistic practices that thrive between the
cracks of failing systems. Anarchism as a theory and praxis has been the
most faithful to the old ideal trinity, and has worked to evolve
practices of everyday life that cultivate a viable community — one that
can negotiate the very real tensions between the three: when equality
violates liberty or vice-versa; or where liberty violates solidarity,
and so forth. Anarchism at its best was never just about “freedom” nor
about “equality” nor about “mutual aid” in and of themselves, but rather
about affirming all three despite the tensions. Acknowledging that the
tension will always remain between these three revolutionary ideals, and
affirming this tension as productive and valuable, is the revolutionary
tense of postanarchism.
Classical anarchism radically rejected representation, that is,
representatives who speak in place of others. Poststructuralist theory
adds a few layers of critique to this. Postanarchism will continue to
read the anarchist rejection with/through/against the poststructuralist
complication of representation. The issue of representation will never
be settled once and for all, as we discover that language itself is
representation, and as such cannot simply be discarded, but only seen
through as a construct even as it is necessarily employed. There is no
pregiven natural presence that guarantees the ultimate truth of a
re-presence of representation; nevertheless this also implies that all
we have in terms of meaning are representations. Presence we can assume
is indeed there, but the meaningfulness of this or that meaning is
always a re-presentation. And representations have consequences. So far,
this is Derrida in a nutshell, and begins with his point that there is
no transcendental signifier, yet signification is always already
underway in an interminable system of differences, where each difference
that makes a meaningful difference can only do so in this very
relational distinction to all the adjacent differences — which are
themselves not present and not presences, but rather also relational
differences. This will be a postanarchist topic, inexorably corrosive of
all naturalist assumptions about identity and the proper place of my
property. Representations are always de-naturalized, non-natural. Even
mimesis as the direct mirroring of nature has proved to be historical
instead of natural, as the history of the arts and sciences has shown.
Collingwood’s history of The Idea of Nature, alongside Auerbach’s study
of Mimesis in the history of literary representation come to mind as
decisive illustrations of my theme: “nature” is given diverse meanings,
the representation of nature slides over a range of equivocations,
connotations, contradictions, modes, epistemes, genres, and does this ad
infinitum. The consequence is a range of diverse meanings.
My mirror, my self. There is no essential guarantee that an authentic
subject will give the true representation of that position from that
position. Self-representations are just as susceptible to self-deception
as are representations of the Other, and the Other’s representations of
myself. Misrecognition is sometimes a projection of one’s disowned
characteristics onto some other, as in Jung’s metaphor of “the shadow”;
but also to misrecognize is a mirror experience. That is, to see
yourself and yet not to see at all what others see when they see you. A
dramatic example of the mirror as misrecognition, literalized too much
no doubt, is in the Taiwanese film Yi-yi (translated as A One and a One)
by the late director Edward Yang. In the film, a little boy snaps dozens
of photographs of persons “behind their backs” so to speak — literally
photos of their backs. The boy then presents these photos to each person
as an uncanny gift. Late in the film, he is asked about this peculiar
hobby. Speaking like a true artist, the boy’s answer is both precocious
and yet innocent; he explains that he wants people to see a side of
themselves that they normally cannot see. We don’t know what we look
like to others from behind. The boy’s representations are the Other’s
point of view, unavailable in the mirror. This too explains the
creepiness of the famous painting by the Surrealist, Magritte, in which
a man stares into a mirror and is stunned to find that he can only see
his backside, but in a typically surrealist reversal, not his face. The
wit here is in the implication that the real situation in everyday
normality is simply a reversal of this maddening blind-spot. So
likewise, cinema has the potential, sometimes fulfilled, to represent
ourselves better than we have been able to see ourselves without this
apparatus and without this Other perspective.
We must be suspicious of representation, even against it — but the
paradox, probably the aporia, is that we cannot exist without
representation. Anarchism was right to take sides against
representation, and it should be emphasized that this is still
important. In politics, equality and representation are in a
contradictory tension, as too are liberty and representation. We must
reaffirm the principle of open participation in decision making,
especially enabling those who will be most affected by a decision to
have the most participation in making that decision. Nevertheless, the
issue of representation remains unresolved. Every representation is
partial at best, distorted, perverse — including self-representation. We
do not always give the best or rather only representations of ourselves.
Representation itself is indeed a vexing problem — above all for
anarchism — in that it isn’t a psychological or aesthetic phenomenon
merely, as my allusions so far have suggested, but also an enormous
political problem. I propose that we experiment in thinking further
about these problems of representation by bringing in the notion of
equality, from behind so to speak, to supplement the notions of
individual liberty and solidarity. My emphasis on equality may seem
oddly perplexing, unless you have read Rancière, who I am nominating as
a postanarchist, in my representation. “Equality” is the keyword to his
many works, and is the principle by which Rancière proposes to rethink
democracy, education, art practice, literary interpretation, and so on.
He has insisted several times that equality is not an ontological claim,
nor it any kind of normative, biological, or essentialist assertion.
This is a political principle, not ontological. Instead, egalité is a
theoretical hypothesis to be tested: What if we, regrettably for the
first time, began to take seriously the principle of equality in as many
situations as possible. What if for instance, we assumed that students
really are equal to their teachers — just as a thought experiment and
then perhaps as praxis. We might be surprised, as Rancière’s book on the
18^(th)-century educator, Jacotot, shows us (The Ignorant Schoolmaster).
The political and pragmatic assumption of equality can lead to classroom
experiences where this equality is manifested, that is, where students
can teach themselves just as much as the teacher.
What if we assume that the reader is equal to the writer? What if the
viewer is equal to the artist? What if everyone had in principle the
same fundamental capacity to understand, to speak, to interpret?
Representation, thence, would nevertheless remain problematic, but it
would become, as if for the first time in history, a game of equals.
Your representation of me, let us assume at the start of this game, is
equal to my representation. One’s representation of one’s self-interest
is equal to, not always better than, the other’s representation of that
interest. Both enter the game or contest as assumed equals, vying for
attention. Again: this is not a claim about truth or eternity or reality
or ontology. Being none of those, it is a political claim to think and
to practice democracy. There shall be no hierarchy, and not even an
overturned hierarchy in which the free individual is the monarch of his
castle. Instead, we live together in a world of inevitable conflicts and
competing representations. The merit of any claim informing our decision
will be based on other criteria but not on the origin of that argument,
whether from the subject or from the other.
Consensus or dissensus? What I have argued so far does not propose that
all opinions are equal, as is sometimes said by college sophomores.
Equality is a political strategy, not pure relativism. Dissenting
opinions, however, are now presumed to have equal capacity and equal
rights to expression as are those by established experts. Dissensus is
affirmed, neither as a noble end, nor as a means to some other end such
as consensus, but rather more immediately as a necessity that follows
upon equality in a world of alterity. A better name here is dialogue —
and not simply any old dialogue, but following Bakhtin, “the
dialogical,” a logic of polyphony that includes dissonance. Moreover, in
postmodern science this dissensus-as-polyphony becomes what Lyotard
called “paralogy” — in which scientific models and paradigms pursue
paradoxes and proliferate a broad array of theories, approaches,
objects; branching out and away with innovative modes of representation,
multiple epistemologies and discourses. Lyotard saw the value of
dissensus not only for avant-garde scientific knowledge, but also for
justice. In a world of alterity, of proliferating identities, of fluid
subjectivities, of incommensurable worldviews, then how are we to arrive
at justice. Which language game ought to decide this? Which epistemology
ought to dominate? Lyotard and Bakhtin agree with the anarchist approach
to this problem: none ought to dominate. Incommensurabilty is not the
problem; domination is the problem. The problem that modernity
bequeathed to us is the hegemony of a single way of thinking, of talking
about truth, goodness, and beauty. The monolithic monologue of
technocracy, mass production, mass media, disenchantment, Weber’s iron
cage of rationality and materialism, the reduction of peoples to homo
economicus delimited as a competitive self-interest, and so forth. But
within this all-too-familiar modernity was a potential postmodern
opening outward, sometimes activated as an oppositional modernism. The
upshot is that Lyotard points out how today we could make all
information equally available, and then let the games begin. The
monological condition of postmodernity bears the seeds of an alternative
postmodernism, a dialogical anarchism manifested on the Internet — that
vast virtual world without a State, comprised of cooperating techniques
and shareware, of free content freely contributed by anyone equally. The
Internet is the clearest manifestation of spontaneous cooperation
cutting across nations, above and beneath nations, a manifestation of
the dialogical and of dissensus. The net and its world wide web do not
so much prefigure a postanarchist community to come, but rather is today
the planetary communicational commons of an actual postanarchist
society.
How does postmodern dissensus avoid the still serious charge of careless
relativism? To assume in principle the equality of potential is not to
conclude in haste that this potential is automatically realized, much
less that everyone’s opinion is “equally correct” or even “equally
incorrect”. Although this latter negation is very tempting, it too
misses the mark badly. Let us assume more precisely that everyone has
the equal potential to arrive at a better view or fuller view — you and
me, experts and novices, minorities and majorities, host and guest, male
and female, both Kant and Hegel, Darwin and Kropotkin, Marx and Bakunin,
and at the far limits of our ability to imagine even Sarah Palin and
Osama bin Laden have after all is said and done, the same potential to
develop an adequate representation of themselves and others. This is
very far from the careless claim that all of these representations are
equally true, good, or beautiful. Neither are they equally false, bad,
and ugly. Again this is a great temptation that must be overcome. The
principle of a politics of equal representations necessarily affirms
also the value of dissensus. To the degree that this is an uncomfortable
or disappointing conclusion reflects the degree of one’s mistrust in
equality itself. Alternately, to the degree that this becomes
acceptable, personally and politically, is the degree of trust in
postanarchism.
Polythetic set: or, how to define anarchism? As a tradition, anarchism
was never simply one thing. It too has a history of disagreements and
even sectarian splits and at least varying emphases on any number of
issues. Certainly anarchism is against domination — but then some
anarchists believe in god or in the benefit of parental authority over
their children. Others do not. Certainly anarchism is anti-State. Still,
some anarchists argue that since transnational corporations are in many
cases more powerful than the State, it would then behoove us to modulate
this anti-state position to be more practically tactical in approaching
social crises where the State can regulate and ameliorate some of the
abusive practices of capitalism. The main tradition of anarchism was
anti-capitalist and even communal. Yet some anarchists support free
enterprise and even individualism. Most are modernist, but some are
primitivist. Some anarchists are pacifist, while others practised
“propaganda by the deed” with Molotov cocktails and more. Among the
latter, some believe that violence is only to be applied against
property but not against persons, while others traditionally practised
assassination. Some anarchists believe in gradual reform, others in
sudden revolution, while others reject both reform and revolution in
favour of rebuilding the social fabric from an outside position, or
perhaps inside out with alternative services, groups, and practices.
These many differences are extensive and perennial, despite the
occasional attempt to gather an ecumenical all-embracing “Anarchism
without Adjectives” as Fernando Tarrida del Mármol called for in Cuba
and also Voltairine de Cleyre in America in the late 19^(th) century.
Post-anarchism obviously re-attaches an adjective. This adjective upsets
some anarchists. Nevertheless, it is the noun “anarchism” not the
adjective that has traditionally required this or that modifier:
individualist, social, syndicalist, green, libertarian, communal,
activist, pacifist, nonwestern, and so forth. I propose to think this
controversial issue of definition by way of the scientific approach
called “polythetic classification”. A polythetic definition is not
monothetic, as in Aristotle’s approach to defining a category by its
properties, which must be both necessary and sufficient. There is no
monothetic definition of anarchism, since some of the aspects above are
necessary but not sufficient, while others might seem sufficient, but
they are not necessary. Rather than disciplining the tradition of
anarchism to make it fit an essentialist definition, I suppose we could
use an anarchist approach to definition, one that is non-essentialist,
more inclusive, and that deflates authority. Polythetic classification
appears helpful, and it is used rigorously in several branches of
biology. The approach is not difficult. One notes a set of
characteristics or qualities that pertain, in our case to anarchism. We
then agree that so long as something has a certain number of those
qualities, probably most of the qualities though not all, then it is by
definition anarchism. But the set of qualities are all equal in a
specific manner: none is necessary in itself. Any might be absent, but
the definition would still apply if most of the characteristics applied
— in any possible combination. Rather than an anarchism without
adjectives, this is an anarchism with many possible adjectives.
Depending on the number of qualities or aspects of anarchism one would
include in this polythetic set, the possible permutations would be
either few or many, delimited and strict, or extensive and lax. Here
again we encounter one of the open secrets of deconstruction: on the one
hand, definitions are not set in stone, while on the other hand, they
are not meaningless. Definitions do things in the real world even though
they are not given as commandments on Mount Sinai. Definitions
frequently slide as if slippery to our cognitive grasp. We ourselves
frequently equivocate in discussion, not to mention the way definitions
change in debates among the multitude. The representation of anarchism
itself should be an anarchist representation, as it will have
consequences. Even if we put a term under erasure in our discussion
(Derrida used the Latin sous rature), even when we cross out an
essentialist ~~definition~~, it continues to function in a way, so that
we are forced to mark its consequences for our thought. Or, it continues
to be necessary even as we acknowledge that it is inaccurate. So for
example, the signifier “race” might be marked as unhappily as ~~race~~
because even though it has been deconstructed (in effect showing that
its social construction is not fundamentally grounded in any biological
signified but is rather based on binary oppositions and hierarchical
social formations), still the inadequate term continues to be necessary
even if only in some newly distanced manner. In contemporary science,
“race” is a very loose polythetic category. There is no monothetic
definition for race at the level of DNA, since the necessary and/or
sufficient genes don’t correspond to any social definition. Instead
there is a surprising range of variation in clusters that are more
polythetic. No one today really believes in race as a reified
thing-in-itself, some essentialist noumenon, and yet race continues to
operate with genuine consequences: sometimes as self-affirmation for
ethnic groups (or what Gayatri Spivak calls “strategic essentialism”)
and other times used to oppress those groups. Sometimes ~~race~~ is used
to identify actual clusters of genetics that make a real difference in
the medical treatment of disease, but always polythetically. The
clusters tend to be much smaller specific populations inside of the
larger groups we have learned to think of as “racial”.
In terms of the problem at hand, my suggestion is that a polythetic
definition of anarchism is consonant with what anarchism aims at. This
slippery yet consequential sensibility about “anarchism” itself is
partly what is meant by the signifier “postanarchism”. And it should be
of further interest to anarchists that this approach is itself faithful
to an ~~post~~-anarchist epistemology, wherein most of the set of
characteristics that variously define anarchism are now retroactively
shown to be applicable to an epistemology: how do we know, and how do we
adequately represent our reality? Well, without authoritarianism,
domination, or monologue; but with liberty, equality, and solidarity. In
sum, with genuine respect for the dialogical principle, for
participation, for the equality of potential, for innovation,
proliferation, dissensus, paralogy, polycentrism, transversality of
connections, and openness to the sharing of information by all, from
all, to all, without limits. With this as our repertoire, let the games
commence.