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Title: Postanarchism
Author: Saul Newman
Date: 2011
Language: en
Topics: post-anarchism, post-structuralist, postanarchism, poststructuralist, politics, anti-politics, antipolitics, relations, ethics, authority, science, Foucault, practice, revolution, psychoanalysis
Source: *Journal of Political Ideologies*, Volume 16, 2011 — Issue 3: The libertarian impulse. DOI:10.1080/13569317.2011.607301

Saul Newman

Postanarchism

Abstract

This article outlines a politics of postanarchism, which is based on a

radical renewal—via poststructuralist theory—of classical anarchism’s

critique of statism and authority and its political ethics of

egalibertarianism. I contend that while many of the theoretical

categories of classical anarchism continue to be relevant today—and

indeed are becoming more relevant with the collapse of competing radical

projects and what might be seen as a paradigm shift from the

representative politics of the party and vanguard to that of movements

and decentralized networks—its humanist and rationalist epistemological

framework needs to be rethought in the light of poststructuralist and

postmodern theories. Here I develop an alternative understanding of

anarchism based on a non-essentialist politics of autonomy.

Introduction

How should we think about radical politics today, at a time strongly

marked by, on the one hand, the collapse of the Communist state

systems—and by, on the other hand, the crisis of capitalism, or at least

the ideological (and economic) bankruptcy of its neoliberal form that

predominated since 1989? The past two decades have seen the breakdown of

two rival political, economic and ideological worlds; and the so-called

Third Way, which provided the social democratic window-dressing for an

unfettered global capitalism, fared little better. Given these

conditions, what sort of horizon can radical political struggles today

draw upon? What kind of imaginary animates them?

This article contends that contemporary radical politics is

characterized by a ‘libertarian impulse,’ a heterodox anti-authoritarian

current that has always been present in radical politics, but that has

for a long time been overshadowed, marginalized and obscured by both

Marxism and social democracy.[1] This heterogeneous current, however,

has become more prominent today in the midst of new forms of politics

that take the shape of movements and decentralized networks rather than

political parties and vanguards, which are no longer organized around

defined class identities and issues, and which therefore no longer

conform to the Marxist or social democratic models. Various movements

and affinity groups that converge around the themes of

‘alter-globalization’ or ‘anti-capitalism,’ and that are organized

horizontally and in a de-centralized manner that defies hierarchy and

leadership, might be seen as an example of this libertarian

politics[2]—a politics that seeks autonomy from the state and rejects

the idea of representation within the formal channels of political

power.

Furthermore, a certain libertarian impulse can be detected in radical

political thought today, particularly that which comes out of the

continental tradition. Indeed, many contemporary critical thinkers, such

as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and

Giorgio Agamben, have, in very different ways, sought to theorize new

modes of political action and subjectivity that are no longer bound by

the categories of class, party and state.[3] It is not my aim here to

survey these discussions and debates on contemporary critical thought.

Yet it is worth remarking on the unacknowledged proximity between these

ideas and those of classical anarchism, and indeed, the debt that is

owed here to this much overlooked theoretical tradition.[4] Many of the

themes and preoccupations of these contemporary thinkers seem to

directly reflect the thought of the classical 19^(th)-century

anarchists, engaged as they were in major debates with Marx and his

followers over revolutionary strategy and the role of the state. Indeed,

Hardt and Negri’s claim that ‘We are not anarchists but communists’[5]

seems to belie a much closer affinity with the anarchist tradition than

they are willing to acknowledge, especially with regard to their idea of

a post-class collective subject—the multitude—that emerges spontaneously

in opposition to capitalism and sovereignty.

Therefore, the libertarian moment that conditions both contemporary

radical politics and theory might perhaps be thought as an anarchist

moment; at least it draws its inspiration, in part, from anarchism.

Therefore, present circumstances demand at least a substantive

re-engagement with the anarchist tradition. Indeed, it is my contention

that anarchism—or left-libertarianism—forms the horizon for radical

politics today, and has in a way always formed its horizon, being the

ultimate ethical and political expression of the twin imperatives of

equality and liberty that constitute the very language of emancipation.

What I mean by this is that because anarchism combines liberty and

equality to the greatest possible degree, it serves as an endpoint or

limit condition for radical politics. For instance, the

post-revolutionary societies depicted by Marx and even Lenin—communist

societies of abundance and freedom, liberated from forced work, property

and centralized government, where ‘the free development of each is the

condition for the free development of all’—are precisely anarchist

societies and are virtually indistinguishable from many of the

aspirations of anarchist thinkers and revolutionaries. The celebration

by Engels of the radical and decentralized democracy of the Paris

Commune of 1871 is mirrored in the admiration for the same event

expressed by anarchists such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, even though the

interpretations differed (for Engels it was the first example of the

‘dictatorship of the proletariat’; whereas for Bakunin it signified

something different, an anarchist social revolution[6]). While it is

important to highlight the differences between anarchism and Marxism as

ideologies, we should be wary of drawing too sharp a line here: one

should, instead, recognize the heterogeneity and mutual influence of

both the traditions, which share, I would argue, a common imaginary of

statelessness.

The vital lesson that anarchism teaches, and continues to teach, radical

politics is that liberty and equality are inextricable, that they must

always go together, and that one cannot come at the expense of the

other. At the heart of anarchism, then, is a politics and ethics of

equal-liberty, which might be summed up in the following words of

Bakunin:

I am free only when all human beings surrounding me—men and women

alike—are equally free. The freedom of others, far from limiting or

negating my liberty, is on the contrary its necessary condition and

confirmation. I become free in the true sense only by virtue of the

liberty of others, so much so that the greater the number of free people

surrounding me the deeper and greater and more extensive their liberty,

the deeper and larger becomes my liberty.[7]

So, the condition for freedom is not only social and economic equality,

but also the equal freedom of others. Indeed, this could be considered

the political ethics of left-libertarianism or libertarian socialism

more broadly.

Yet, where this libertarian position departs from other forms of

socialism is not simply in its insistence that individual liberty must

not be sacrificed to economic and social equality, but also its

insistence that equal-liberty cannot be fully realized within the

framework of the state. The state imposes an inevitable constraint on

equal-liberty, and does so in two ways: its intervention in social

relations will always restrict liberty, imposing upon the people

unnecessary regulations and an arbitrary power that violates, as William

Godwin claimed, individual autonomy, self-determination and the ‘right

of private judgement.’[8] Similarly, the principle of equality is

violated if it is enforced by the state, since this would mean a

hierarchical principle of command and obedience, and thus the

institutionalization of a political inequality between the state and the

people over whom it exercises power. In this way, then, the thinking of

the politics of equality and liberty together—which as I have argued is

the central task of radical politics—necessitates at the same time a

thinking of politics outside the state. Indeed, the fundamental

contribution of anarchism to radical politics is the unmasking of state

power—and here anarchism proved much more radical than Marxism—and the

elaboration of a politics that is autonomous from the state. I shall

return to this point later.

However, if present conditions demand a ‘return’ to anarchism, what sort

of return is possible here? It cannot simply be the restating of

anarchism in its original 19^(th)-century form. While there are many

aspects of the classical anarchist tradition that should be retained,

not least of which is the political ethics of equal-liberty and

solidarity, there are other aspects that need to be revised in the light

of more recent theoretical and political developments. Indeed, this

would apply to all forms of radical thought—including anarchism and many

forms of socialism—which have their foundations in the discourses of

Enlightenment humanism and rationalism. While it is certainly going too

far to say that the Enlightenment is out of date—indeed, what is timely

here would be a rethinking and renewal of the Kantian spirit of immanent

critique[9]—the theoretical and epistemological conditions of what is,

perhaps problematically, termed ‘postmodernity’ demands at least an

interrogation of its limits and assumptions; assumptions about, for

instance, the liberating power of rationality and truth, and the

transparency of the subject. Indeed, a whole series of theoretical

interventions, from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to the

poststructuralist thought of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Deleuze and

Guattari, have cast doubt on some of the central categories of

Enlightenment and humanist thought. Yet, while these interventions have

important implications for classical anarchism, whose foundations do

indeed lie in a certain humanism and rationalism, they are not

necessarily inimical to it, and indeed, as I have suggested

elsewhere,[10] there is a certain continuity between the

anti-authoritarian impulse of classical anarchism and the desire,

central to poststructuralism and deconstruction, to expose the

inconsistencies in discourses of authority and the power effects of

ideas, practices and institutions that we have come to consider as

politically innocent.

In gesturing towards a new formulation of anarchism—what I call

postanarchism[11]—let us try to understand some of the main implications

of poststructuralist theory for anarchist political philosophy:

The crisis of ‘metanarratives’

The postmodern condition has been most famously and succinctly summed up

by Jean-Francois Lyotard’s definition: an incredulity toward

metanarratives.[12] The metanarrative is understood as a universal idea

or discourse that is central to the experience of modernity. This might

be found in the notion of a universal objective truth, and the idea that

the world is becoming more rationally intelligible through advances in

science. Or it might be seen in the Hegelian dialectic, whose unfolding

determines history. Here we might also think of the Marxist discourse of

proletarian emancipation. All these ideas derive from the Enlightenment,

and they imply a truth that is absolute and universal, and that will

(eventually) be rationally grasped by everyone. Moreover, the

metanarrative implies a certain knowledge about society: society is

understood either as an integrated whole or as internally divided, as in

the Marxist imagery of class struggle. Indeed, these two opposed

understandings of society are really mirror images of one another; they

are united by the common assumption that social reality is wholly

transparent and intelligible.

So why are these metanarratives breaking down; why do we no longer

believe in them? Lyotard explores the reasons for their dissolution in

an examination of the condition of knowledge in contemporary

post-industrial society. According to Lyotard, scientific knowledge is

experiencing a crisis of legitimation, where the rules of truth which

determine what statements can be admitted to a ‘scientific’ body of

statements, no longer operate as authoritatively as they once did.

Because of certain transformations that knowledge is undergoing in the

post-Industrial Age, this process of legitimation has become ever more

questionable and unstable: the contingency and arbitrariness of its

operation—the fact that it is ultimately based on acts of power and

exclusion—are becoming apparent, thus producing a crisis of

representation. In short, it is increasingly difficult for scientific

knowledge to claim a privileged status as being the only arbiter of

truth. Does this not displace the universal position of scientific

knowledge; does science not become, under the conditions of

commodification and bureaucratization, just another form of knowledge,

another narrative? Moreover, Lyotard points to a breakdown of the

knowledge about society: society can no longer be adequately represented

by knowledge—either as a unified whole or as a class-divided body. The

social bonds that gave a consistency of representation to society are

themselves being redefined through the language games that constitute

it. There is, according to Lyotard, an ‘“atomization” of the social into

flexible networks of language games….’[13] This does not mean that the

social bond is dissolving altogether; merely that there is no longer one

dominant, coherent understanding of society but, rather, a plurality of

different narratives or perspectives. Here we might think of the

multiplicity of heterogeneous discourses, ideological perspectives,

religious sensibilities, moral positions and social identities that make

up contemporary societies.

This critique of the absolutism of scientific knowledge is also

reflected in Paul Feyerabend’s anarchist approach to science. His

argument is that the methodological rules imposed by science are

ultimately arbitrary and historically contingent, that they are not

based on any firm claim to truth. Indeed, many of the most important

scientific discoveries—the Copernican Revolution, for instance—were only

possible through a breaking of the existing methodological rules. This

tells us that the authority of scientific knowledge, based on rigid

rules of enquiry, is on a much shakier ground than it would like to

admit. It is much more productive, according to Feyerabend, and indeed

much closer to the truth of scientific enquiry, to take an anarchist

view of science—to question the authority and legitimacy of scientific

knowledge, and to violate its methodological rules. Indeed, Feyerabend

finds it extraordinary that anarchist political thinkers—and here he

cites Kropotkin—while questioning all forms of political authority,

uphold unquestioningly the epistemological authority of science, and

indeed base their whole philosophy on its rather uncertain claims.[14]

Why should the same freedom of thought, speech and action, and the same

scepticism about authority that anarchists demand in the field of

politics, not also translate into the field of scientific enquiry?

So the problem alluded to in Feyerabend’s critique is that classical

anarchism based itself upon a series of metanarratives, not only about

mankind’s inevitable revolt against state authority and the subsequent

flourishing of human freedom, but also about the emancipatory potential

of scientific knowledge. What is central to classical anarchist

philosophy is a positivism that sees social relations as constituted by

self-regulating natural mechanisms, laws, relations and processes which

are rational and which, if left alone, would allow a more harmonious

social order, free from the distortions and oppression of state

authority, to emerge. For instance, Bakunin posited the idea of

‘immutable’ natural laws and processes whose truth would be revealed

through science, and whose unfolding determined social progress and the

intellectual, moral and material development of humanity from a state of

slavery and ignorance to a state of freedom.[15] A similar idea can be

found in Godwin’s rationalist anarchism, in which social improvements

and the emergence of a more just and equal society are closely bound up

with the progress of science, as well as the inevitable development of

people’s moral and intellectual capacities.[16] This positivist approach

is also evident in Kropotkin’s theory of social relations and ethical

relations as being based on an innate tendency towards mutual aid and

assistance, something which we have inherited from the animal world and

which is a major factor in evolutionary survival.[17]

However, if we were to adopt a position of incredulity or at least

scepticism towards metanarratives generally, and to the epistemological

authority of scientific knowledge in particular, we would have to

reflect on the possibility of an anarchism without these deep

foundations in science and rationality; an anarchism that did not make

universal claims about human nature, natural laws or an unfolding

rationality immanent in social progress. We would have to conceive of an

anarchism that did not seek to make itself into a science. Instead, we

should ask Michel Foucault’s question, which he poses in response to the

scientific aspirations of Marxism: ‘…“What types of knowledge are you

trying to disqualify when you say that you are a science?”’[18] In other

words, we must interrogate the power effects and discursive gestures of

exclusion inherent in laying claim to the status of ‘science.’ It is not

so much a question of whether scientific knowledge is right or wrong,

true or false, but rather the way in which it promotes a hierarchization

of knowledge and thus a certain discursive authoritarianism. In

opposition to this we should assert, as Foucault counsels us to do, a

genealogical position, which is that of ‘anti-science.’ This does not

mean that we must disregard the use of scientific knowledge, or

celebrate irrationalism, but rather that we retain a critical

perspective that is always sensitive to science’s power effects:

‘Genealogy has to fight the power-effects characteristic of any

discourse that is regarded as scientific.’[19] It is a question of

politicizing knowledge, rationality and truth: in other words, rather

than according truth a universal position of abstract neutrality, such

that it can always be proclaimed in absolute opposition to the

epistemological distortions of power, it should be seen as a weapon

wielded in a battle, spoken from the partisan position of one directly

engaged in struggle. We should think in terms of, as Foucault puts it,

an ‘insurrection of knowledges.’[20] To do so would be to extend the

anarchist critique of political authority to the epistemological

authority of science.

A post-sovereign model of power

The second major implication of poststructuralist, and particularly

Foucauldian, theory lies in the formulation of a new concept of power,

one that can no longer be entirely contained within the classical

revolutionary model central to anarchist philosophy. Classical anarchism

concentrates its revolutionary energy on the state, a structure in which

power relations are said to be centralized and organized in a

hierarchical and authoritarian manner; a structure that intervenes in

social life in oppressive, irrational and destructive ways. Here the

state enshrines the principle of sovereignty—a ‘ruling principle’ of

absolute authority that stands above social relations, monopolizing

violence, and embodying an inequality of power relations and a symbolic

absolutism that is inimical to the idea of a free society.

There is thus imagined, in classical anarchist thought, a kind of

Manichean opposition between society and the state. Bakunin, for

instance, sharply differentiates natural laws, which are constitutive of

social relations and human subjectivity, from the ‘artificial authority’

of state power and political institutions. Governments and state

institutions were ‘pneumatic machines’ that were ‘entirely mechanical

and artificial,’ in contrast to freely formed social relations.[21] That

was why—in contrast to the Marxists for whom the state was an apparatus

that could be taken over by the proletariat and used in the

‘transitional period’ to build socialism—the state was seen by the

anarchists as a fundamental obstacle to the revolution which should be

abolished at the outset. As Kropotkin puts it: ‘And there are those who,

like us, see in the State, not only its actual form and in all forms of

domination that it might assume, but in its very essence, an obstacle to

the social revolution.’[22] As the anarchists correctly predicted, if

the state was not overcome in the revolution—which was imagined as a

social rather than political revolution, a revolution of society against

political power—then state power would be perpetuated and would give

rise to new class contradictions and hierarchies.

However, while this anarchist theory of the state as an autonomous

structure of power and domination that was irreducible to class

relations and the economic mode of production showed a greater

sensitivity to the dangers of power than was evident in the Marxist

tradition, it was at the same time confined to a classical paradigm of

sovereignty. The state machines described by the anarchists of the

19^(th) century, with their rulers, bureaucrats, soldiers, policemen,

gaolers, executioners and priests, were relatively crude and autocratic

apparatuses. While I am not of course denying that the state exists

today, or that its operation is often brutally violent and oppressive,

one would at the same time have to acknowledge that the operation of

power in contemporary societies is far more complex and differentiated

than was conceivable within the classical anarchist analysis. Can power

still be isolated within the state and within the symbolic framework of

sovereignty? Sovereignty itself, in our networked, global age, has

become partially deterritorialized and fragmented, spilling out beyond

the traditional borders of the nation-state; indeed, we see the

continual blurring of borders, where diffuse mechanisms of security,

surveillance and control are no longer strictly determined within

national boundaries. Prisons that are not prisons but camps, wars that

are no longer wars but ‘policing’ operations, global networks of

surveillance—we are in the midst of, as Giorgio Agamben would put it, a

zone of indistinction,[23] in which national sovereignty blurs into

global security while at the same time reifying and fetishizing existing

borders, and mobilizing new ones everywhere.

To point to such transformations is not a matter of placing in doubt the

existence of the state as an assemblage of power and domination, but

rather of understanding what ‘the state’ means today. Here I think it is

more productive to adopt Foucault’s approach and analyse the various

permutations of state power from the classical age onwards; and

therefore to see the state in terms of various discourses, rationalities

and mechanisms of governmentality, security and biopolitics.[24]

However, this way of thinking about the state—not as an essence, but as

a strategy (or strategies)—implies a more ambiguous relationship with

the social state: one of intense interaction rather than opposition and

oppression. We need to get away, as Foucault says, from a certain

classical image of state sovereignty. In developing an alternative

theorization of power based on war and the strategic mobilization of

force relations, rather than around questions of legitimacy, Foucault

famously proclaimed that ‘we need to cut off the king’s head.’[25] In

understanding power in terms of war and strategy, rather than legitimacy

and consent, Foucault shares much with the anarchists, who also rejected

social contract theories of sovereignty in order to unmask the

domination and violence behind these ideological veils.[26] However, in

calling for the symbolic decapitation of the sovereign ‘image’ of power,

Foucault is also making an important methodological point that in some

ways takes the analysis of power beyond the terrain of classical

anarchist thought: rather than seeing power as emanating from a certain

symbolic structure of sovereignty—a ‘ruling principle’—power should be

studied from the ground up, at the level of its capillary workings and

at its infinitesimal limits. This does not mean that state power no

longer exists, but that it should be seen as the culmination of power

relations rather than their source. Power, from a Foucauldian point of

view, should be seen as co-extensive with society, running through the

social body and in everyday relations, and making possible diverse

social practices of punishing, absolving, disciplining, educating,

healing, classifying, training, guiding, and so on. As Foucault tells

us, ‘power is everywhere because it comes from everywhere.’[27]

Where this ‘post’-sovereign notion of power as dispersed, diffuse,

differentiated and, indeed, constitutive of social relations and

identities, creates conceptual difficulties for classical anarchism is

that it makes problematic a state-centric view of power as well as

disturbing the idea of an ontological opposition between the power and

society. If power weaves itself into the fabric of society, then upon

what sort of foundation can the social revolution against power be

imagined? Also, if power is to be overthrown, where is it to be

isolated? There is no more a Winter Palace to storm or to destroy here,

and any revolutionary discourse, in the light of this revision in the

theory of power, is faced with the much more complex task of mapping the

diverse forms of power that are found throughout the social field.

Indeed, the very idea of a revolution as an all-encompassing event that

throws off the shackles of power once and for all is much more difficult

to conceive now. Perhaps it makes more sense to think in terms of

localized forms of resistance around and against specific forms of

domination, as well as the creation of autonomous sites, practices,

discourses and relationships in cracks of power and at its limits,

rather than imagining that state power can be grasped and overthrown in

a totalizing sense.

Moreover, if we accept Foucault’s insight that power in one form or

another will always be with us—in the sense that power is constitutive

of all social relations—then we also have to question the idea of a

final liberation from power. We do not pass from a society of power to a

society of freedom—as was the case in the classical anarchist

revolutionary narrative—but rather we engage in an ongoing modification

of relations of power through ethical practices of freedom. Foucault

makes the important point that the idea of liberation—while it should

not be abandoned—does not sufficiently take into account the forms of

power that will inevitably emerge in a post-liberation society.

Therefore,

…this practice of liberation is not in itself sufficient to define the

practices of freedom that will still be needed if this people, this

society, and these individuals are able to define admissible and

acceptable forms of existence or political society….[28]

While anarchism, with its ethics of anti-authoritarianism and

equal-liberty, is best equipped to develop these sorts of practices of

freedom, this would at the same time involve a certain modification of

its revolutionary grand narrative into a new kind of micro-politics and

ethics.

The displacement of the subject

A reformulation of anarchist theory would also involve a relinquishment

of its ontological foundation in a certain humanist and Enlightenment

conception of the subject—the subject who bears an essential humanity,

understood in terms of an innate goodness and rationality. This

conception of the subject was very much part of the discourse of

classical anarchism, where its key proponents spoke of the flourishing

of humanity and the progressive enlightenment of mankind, as well as an

innate tendency towards solidarity and mutual aid. To cast doubt on such

claims is not to say that there is no possibility of mutual aid,

rational action, free association and voluntary cooperation—anarchism

would not be thinkable at all without this potential for radically

different forms of social existence. However, I think it is assuming too

much to claim that these possibilities are somehow innate or inherited

human tendencies that exist latently within us as—to use Murray

Bookchin’s naturalistic metaphor—a flower waiting to blossom.[29]

Moreover, to remain sceptical of such ideas does not mean, on the other

hand, that one propagates a dark, pessimistic, Hobbesian vision of

humanity; this is equally essentialist, a kind of inverse idealism.

Rather, we should think of subjectivity as an indeterminate field of

possibilities, potentialities and often conflicting desires and drives.

For instance, psychoanalytic theory shows us that the subject is not a

stable or transparent entity, but, on the contrary, one that is

thoroughly destabilized by the unconscious—whether understood as the

place of the drives, in Freudian terms, or the constitutive limit of the

symbolic order, as Lacan sees it. In neither formulation can the subject

be understood as an autonomous source of rational and moral agency or as

a series of intrinsic interests and properties that exist in opposition

to power. Therefore, one of the major questions that psychoanalysis

presents to classical anarchism is that of voluntary servitude—in other

words, the possibility that, at some level, the subject desires his or

her own domination.[30] From Freud’s psychoanalysis of groups, whose

members fall in love with the figure of the Leader,[31] to Lacan’s

ominous warning to the revolutionaries of May 1968 that what they

desired was a new Master,[32] psychoanalysis has revealed what might be

considered a blind spot in classical revolutionary theory—the subject’s

psychological attachment to the power that dominates him. Psychoanalysis

by no means discounts the possibility of human emancipation, sociability

and voluntary cooperation: indeed, it points to conflicting tendencies

in the subject and in social interactions between the desire for

harmonious coexistence and aggressive desires for power and domination.

It nevertheless serves as a warning to radical politics about the

difficulties associated with dislodging these more authoritarian drives

simply through a transformation in social and political conditions. In

other words, the revolution must go ‘all the way down’ to the psyche,

suggesting the need, once again, for a micro-politics and ethics of

freedom—a politics or, indeed, an ‘art,’ as Foucault would put it, of

‘voluntary inservitude.’[33]

So we need to take account of the decentring and destabilization of the

subject, not only in psychoanalytic theory, but also in

poststructuralist theory, where the subject is constituted, albeit it in

an indeterminate manner, through relations of language and text

(Derrida), assemblages of desire (Deleuze and Guattari), and discourse

and power (Foucault). Again, all this has important implications for a

revolutionary narrative based around the liberation of the subject from

external forces of oppression. The disciplinary and normalizing

techniques and discourses that, in the case of Foucault’s analysis, form

the subject’s sense of him- or herself—even the sense of himself as

repressed—complicate any politics of emancipation: ‘[t]he man described

for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of

a subjection much more profound than himself.’[34] All this is not,

however, to deny agency to the subject; indeed, it is to make possible

new ways of thinking about agency, no longer as based on an essential

set of interests or properties, but rather as practices and modes of

action in which we create for ourselves new subjectivities. The focus

should not be on the unfolding of some sort of human essence or immanent

rationality, but rather on processes of subjectivization. Here we should

pay particular attention to Max Stirner’s vital distinction between

revolution and insurrection, in which the latter involves a kind of

self-transformation:

Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The

former consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established

condition or status, the state or society, and is accordingly a

political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable

consequence a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from

it but from men’s discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising but

a rising of individuals, a getting up without regard to the arrangements

that spring from it. The Revolution aimed at new arrangements;

insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to

arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on ‘institutions.’ It is

not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the

established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me out of

the established.[35]

A political anarchism?

In the earlier section, I have given a brief summary of the main

implications of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory for

classical anarchism, implications that, I would argue, should be taken

into account in any attempt to renew anarchism as radical politics. What

emerges here is an understanding of anarchism that retains a political

and ethical commitment to equal liberty, anti-authoritarianism and

solidarity, but that is no longer reliant on ontological foundations in

science, biology, human nature or universal rationality. What emerges

through this deconstruction, then, is a post-foundational understanding

of anarchism: anarchism, no longer as a science, but as a politics. This

is what I propose we call postanarchism.

Yet, to speak of anarchism as a politics brings to light a strange

paradox: classical anarchism, in its rejection of state power and in its

shunning of involvement in state or parliamentary politics, often

characterized itself as an anti-politics. Indeed, Bakunin describes the

main difference between socialists and anarchists in terms of the former

wanting to ‘pursue politics of a different kind,’ and the latter aiming

at ‘the total abolition of politics.’[36] While the former strategy

inevitably imprisons one within the paradigm of the state, the latter

allows one to transcend and emancipate oneself from the state entirely.

Yet, while calling for the abolition of politics in this way, classical

anarchists also went into considerable detail in discussing

revolutionary tactics, questions of organization and the mobilization of

people, as well as the shape of post-revolutionary society—all of which

are, of course, political questions, indeed questions of power. So,

classical anarchism found itself in the slightly paradoxical position of

affirming an anti-political politics or a politics of anti-politics.

At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical

anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and

ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might

be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one

proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true.

Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a

consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is

also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political

frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense

if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing,

organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where

questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this

proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a

greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as

mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which

power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation.

Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political

pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is

the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of

possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different

sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian

dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be

utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian

element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of

radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an

alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a

different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an

alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme

for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of

interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is

it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a

displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the

crushing name of “reality”?’[37] We are crushed under the weight of the

current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we

have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an

escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it

opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight.’ Here, we should

think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of

creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather

than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in

political struggles themselves.[38]

Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different

sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the

existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to

an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the

application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual

disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and

institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of

something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what

disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the

Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an

arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making

possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’[39]

The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics,

and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an

anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that

disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed

by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone

like Carl Schmitt maintained.[40] If there is to be a concept of the

political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension

with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically

articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and

engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way

of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through

victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while

anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot

be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and

this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an

active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of

freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom

within the context of power relations.

However, the necessity of engaging with and thinking through power

relations does not mean that anarchism today has to abandon the ethical

and political horizon of the transcendence of governmental power. What I

am suggesting is that this is more productively thought in terms of a

project of autonomy. Rather than the attainment of an eternal society of

freedom beyond the world of power, anarchism should be understood as an

ongoing project in which the limits of power are critically

interrogated. Liberty is something to be continually and collectively

reinvented, rather than simply discovered at the bedrock of human

nature. Central to this project is the re-situation of politics outside

the representative framework of the state. We should no longer regard

the state—an increasingly ambiguous and fragmented arrangement of power

in any case—as the basic site of the political. On the contrary, the

state is often the order of de-politicization, where the insurgent,

anarchic dimension of politics is policed, controlled, regulated and

domesticated, channelled into, and thus vitiated within its symbolic

structures.

Indeed, if we look around us, and if we look with a different gaze—one

that is less focused on the symbols of sovereignty and the formal

institutions of power—we can see the emergence of an alternative

conception of the political on the terrain that is (inadequately)

referred to as ‘civil society’: not only massive mobilizations against

global capitalism and war, but also, at a more micro-political level,

diverse affinity groups, autonomous movements, social centres, communes,

independent media centres, political practices, symbolic gestures and

direct action techniques. These constitute alternative sites of

decision-making and collective action, and alternative forms of

political existence. So if we take, as Foucault counsels us to do, a

less universalistic and more partisan gaze—the gaze of the militant

rather than the jurist or philosopher-king—we find in this alternative

and dissenting world, new possibilities of autonomous political life.

Indeed, one could say that the autonomy of the political—so long a

preoccupation of political theory, from Machiavelli to Carl

Schmitt—today only makes sense as a politics of autonomy.

Conclusion

Postanarchism thus effects a displacement of the political from the

state order, renewing the possibilities of anarchism today as a practice

of politics and a project of autonomy. As I have shown, this is only

possible through rethinking some of the conceptual categories and

epistemological foundations of classical anarchism. However, this

modification of anarchism along post-foundational lines does not in any

sense suggest that anarchism as a political ideology is somehow out of

date. On the contrary, it is to affirm anarchism’s relevance today to

social movements and new forms of struggle—indeed, to affirm anarchism

as the politico-ethical horizon in relation to which radical politics

today must situate itself—that this theoretical study has been carried

out.

[1] Daniel Bensaid, in a review essay some years ago on John Holloway’s

book Change the World without Taking Power, spoke of a ‘libertarian

current,’ a heterogeneous anti-authoritarian impulse that runs through

the tradition of radical politics, intersecting at times with Marxism

and at other times departing from it. Bensaid identifies three key

moments in libertarian thought: the classical anarchism of Bakunin,

Proudhon and Stirner in the 19^(th) century; the anti-institutionalism

and anti-parliamentarianism of Luxemburg, Sorel and the syndicalists;

and what he calls the neo-libertarianism of contemporary thinkers such

as Hardt and Negri. See D. Bensaid, ‘On a recent book by John Holloway,’

Historical Materialism, 13(4) (2004), pp. 169–192.

[2] See for instance M. Rupert, ‘Anti-capitalist convergence? Anarchism,

socialism and the global justice movement,’ in M. Steger (Ed.)

Rethinking Globalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), pp.

121–135.

[3] For instance, Alain Badiou has suggested that what is needed today

is a radical politics that is autonomous from the Party form, which he

sees as being linked inexorably to the State—a politics that ‘puts the

State at a distance.’ A. Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. J. Barker (London:

Verso, 2005), p. 145.

[4] Elsewhere I have suggested that classical anarchism is the ‘missing

link’ to both poststructuralism and contemporary continental theory. See

also, S. Newman, ‘Anarchism, poststructuralism and the future of radical

politics,’ SubStance, 36(2) (2007), pp. 3–19.

[5]

M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2000), p. 350.

[6] See K. Marx, F. Engels, M. Bakunin, P. Kropotkin and V. Lenin,

Writings on the Paris Commune (St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black

Publishers, 2008).

[7]

M. Bakunin, Political Philosophy of Mikhail Bakunin: Scientific

Anarchism, ed. G. P. Maximoff (London: Free Press of Glencoe,

1953), p. 267.

[8]

W. Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1985 [1793]), pp. 204–205.

[9] Indeed, as Michel Foucault shows in his essay on Kant, the

Enlightenment embodies a critical ethos and the free and autonomous use

of reason—something that can work against other rigidifying tendencies

within Enlightenment thought. It is this ethos that allows us, as

Foucault says, to refuse what he calls the ‘blackmail of the

Enlightenment,’ by which one either accepts or rejects it as a unified

whole. See M. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Ethics, Subjectivity

and Truth: The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1, ed. P.

Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 313.

[10] See S. Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-authoritarianism and the

Dislocation of Power (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001).

[11] See S. Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2010).

[12] J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,

trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 1991), p. xxiv.

[13] Lyotard, ibid., p. 17.

[14] See P. Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1993), p. 14.

[15] Bakunin, op. cit., Ref. 7, p. 146. This notion of unfolding of an

immanent rationality that is at the core of social and human relations

is also present in Murray Bookchin’s idea of ‘dialectical naturalism.’

See The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy

(Paolo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982).

[16] Godwin, op. cit., Ref. 8, p. 740.

[17] See P. Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development, trans. L. S.

Friedland (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1947); and Mutual Aid: A Factor

of Evolution, ed. P. Avrich (New York: New York University, 1972).

[18]

M. Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De

France 1975–76, trans. D. Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003), p. 10.

[19] Foucault, ibid., p. 9.

[20] Foucault, ibid.

[21] Bakunin, op. cit., Ref. 7, p. 212.

[22]

P. Kropotkin, The State: Its Historic Role (London: Freedom Press,

1943), p. 37.

[23] See G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.

D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

[24] See M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the

College de France 1977–1978, ed. M. Senellart

(Houndmills/Basingstoke/Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

[25]

M. Foucault, ‘Truth and power,’ in C. Gordon (Ed.) Power/Knowledge:

Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77 (New York: Harvester

Press, 1980), p. 121.

[26] See Foucault, op. cit., Ref. 18.

[27]

M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality VI: Introduction, trans. R.

Hunter (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 93.

[28] Foucault, op. cit., Ref. 9, pp. 282–283.

[29] See Bookchin, op. cit., Ref. 15, p. 31.

[30] The problem of self-domination was identified not only by

Freudo–Marxists such as Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism

(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), but also by

poststructuralists such as Deleuze and Guattari, for whom one of the

central questions for politics was how ‘desire can desire its own

repression….’ See A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

trans. B. Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 236–237.

[31] See S. Freud, ‘Group psychology and the analysis of the ego,’ The

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,

vol. 18, trans. and ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955 [1920,

1922]), pp. 69–144.

[32] See J. Lacan, ‘Analyticon,’ The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book

XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller and trans. R.

Grigg (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007), p. 207.

[33]

M. Foucault, ‘What is Critique?,’ in J. Schmidt (Ed.) What is

Enlightenment: Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century

Questions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), p.

386.

[34]

M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A.

Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991 [1977]), p. 30.

[35]

M. Stirner, The Ego and its Own, ed. D. Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1995), pp. 279–280.

[36] Bakunin, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 113–114.

[37]

M. Abensour, ‘Persistent utopia,’ Constellations, 15(3) (2008), pp.

406–421.

[38] See my rethinking of the relationship between anarchism and utopia

in: ‘Anarchism, utopianism and the politics of emancipation,’ Anarchism

and Utopianism, eds. L. Davis and R. Kinna (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 2009), pp. 207–220.

[39]

E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, trans. A. Lingis (The

Hague/London: M. Nijhoff, 1981), p. 194.

[40] See C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab

(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).