💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › john-moore-lived-poetry.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 11:26:32. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Lived poetry
Author: John Moore
Language: en
Topics: Max Stirner, poetry, art, anti-politics, language
Source: Retrieved on February 18, 2020 from https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/downloadpdf/9781526137289/9781526137289.00010.pdf

John Moore

Lived poetry

Introduction Editors’ note: this was the second draft of John’s

chapter, completed about two months before his death. Whilst we believe

that this stands as a finished piece in itself, because a substantial

proportion of the text is dependent on a translation of Max Stirner’s

The ego and its own from the German, there are a number of areas which

we hoped to clarify prior to publication. This should not be seen as a

weakness, but more in the spirit of ongoing debates about the

relationship between theory, method and practice, which were always

central to John’s concerns. We have edited the chapter sparingly and in

keeping with the writing style to which many around the world have

become accustomed.

At the heart of the new anarchism(s) there lies a concern with

developing a whole new way of being in and acting upon the world.[1]

Contemporary revolutionary anarchism is not merely interested in

effecting changes in socioeconomic relations or dismantling the State,

but in developing an entire art of living, which is simultaneously

anti-authoritarian, anti-ideological and antipolitical. The development

of a distinctively anarchist savoir-vivre is a profoundly existential

and ontological concern and one rich in implication for the definition

of contemporary anarchist practice, activity and projects. Central to

this process is the issue of anarchist subjectivity and

intersubjectivity, as well as related concerns about language and

creativity.

Hakim Bey, language and ontological anarchy

Hakim Bey’s essay ‘Ontological anarchy in a nutshell’ (1994) provides a

concise but landmark formulation of this issue. The opening passage of

the essay focuses on the existential status of the anarchist and

anarchist practice:

Since absolutely nothing can be predicated with any certainty as to the

‘true nature of things,’ all projects (as Nietzsche says) can only be

‘founded on nothing.’ And yet there must be a project - if only because

we ourselves resist being categorized as ‘nothing.’ Out of nothing we

will make something: the Uprising, the revolt against everything which

proclaims: ‘The Nature of Things is such-&-such’. (Bey, 1994: 1)

Drawing upon Nietzschean perspectivism, Bey mounts an

anti-foundationalist argument: given the collapse of the philosophical

concept of truth, there is no foundation, no basis upon which anarchist

subjectivity or activity can be grounded - no foundation, that is,

except nothingness itself. Developing his perspective from this

epistemological premise, Bey identifies a distinctively anarchist mode

of being: ontological anarchy. The anarchist hangs suspended in space

above the abyss, certain of nothing except the nothing over which s/he

hovers and from which s/he springs. But this existential condition,

rather than a cause for despair, remains the source of limitless

freedom. For, as Bey indicates, ‘Out of nothing we will imagine our

values, and by this act of invention we shall live’ (Bey, 1994: 1).

Being and nothingness are not binary oppositions in this formulation,

but elements of an overarching complementarity:

Individual vs. Group - Self vs. Other - a false dichotomy propagated

through the Media of Control, and above all through language . . . Self

and Other complement and complete one another. There is no Absolute

Category, no Ego, no Society - but only a chaotically complex web of

relation - and the ‘Strange Attractor’, attraction itself, which evokes

resonances and patterns in the flow of becoming. (Bey, 1994: 3)

Nothing can be said about the nothingness underlying existence. Language

cannot penetrate and organise this space, except tentatively perhaps

through poetry and metaphor: ‘As we meditate on the nothing we notice

that although it cannot be de-fined, nevertheless paradoxically we can

say something about it (even if only metaphorically): it appears to be a

“chaos”’. Through wordplay, through ludic and poetic language, Bey

attempts, not to define nothingness, but to evoke it. Nothingness

emerges in his account, not as an empty void, but as a chaos of

plenitude and abundance: ‘chaos-as-becoming, chaos-as-excess, the

generous outpouring of nothing into something’. Or, to put it more

succinctly: ‘chaos is life’. Binarist language, unable to constellate a

chaos which everywhere overflows its boundaries, seeks to control,

contain and domesticate it through the deployment of dualistic

categories. Against this language of order and stasis, Bey proposes the

language of poetry - a fluid language based on metaphor and thus

appropriate to the expression of the flows and patterns of passion,

desire and attraction which characterise chaos - and a ‘utopian poetics’

(Bey, 1994: 1-4).

Rooted in nothingness, the dynamic chaos that underpins existence,

anarchist subjectivity is a life-affirmative expression of becoming. For

Bey (1994: 1) ‘all movement . . . is chaos’ whereas stasis remains the

characteristic of order. But the anarchist subject is not merely a

subject-in-process, but a subject-in-rebel- lion, and as a result

remains nothing without a project. The anarchist affirmation of

nothingness simultaneously enacts a refusal of being categorised as a

(mere) nothing - or as a mere being. But, further, the anarchist

affirmation of nothingness is a ‘revolt against everything’ - in short

an insurrection against the totality, against the entire assemblage of

social relations structured by governance and control. In other words,

the anarchist project affirms nothing(ness) against everything that

exists, precisely because anarchy (or its synonym, chaos) is always in a

condition of becoming.

The anarchist subject - and by extension the anarchist project - is

necessarily in a constant state of flux and mutability. Characterised by

spontaneous creativity, anarchist subjectivity is marked for Bey by

imagination and invention, and hence finds its most appropriate mode of

expression in poetic language. Anarchist subjectivity emerges in his

work as a synonym for poetic subjectivity, and anarchist revolt as a

synonym for the immediate realisation of the creative or poetic

imagination in everyday life. Anarchy, in short, remains a condition of

embodied or lived poetry. The notion of lived poetry originates with the

situa- tionists, who contrast lived poetry with the language-form of the

poem. Lived poetry is a form of activity, not merely a mode of writing,

and springs up in moments of revolt and rebellion. It is life lived as

an act of spontaneous creativity and the complete embodiment of radical

theory in action (see Moore, 1997b; 2002).

The anarchist-as-poet aims to create and recreate the world endlessly

through motility and revolt. In part, this project becomes realisable

because the anarchist affirms (rather than denies) the nothingness that

underlies all things, and openly founds the anarchist project on this

nothing. This affirmation re-situates the individual within the matrix

of chaos and makes available - to itself and others - the plenitude of

its creative energy. Freedom consists of the capacity to shape this

creative energy in everyday life according to will and desire: ‘Any form

of “order” which we have not imagined and produced directly and

spontaneously in sheer “existential freedom” for our own celebratory

purposes - is an illusion.’ (Bey, 1994: 2). But in order to achieve a

generalisation of chaos, the anarchist needs to form affinities and

create insurrectional projects based on these affinities: ‘From

Stirner’s “Union of Self-Owning Ones” we proceed to Nietzsche’s circle

of “Free Spirits” and thence to Fourier’s “Passional Series”, doubling

and redoubling ourselves even as the Other multiplies itself in the eros

of the group.’ (Bey, 1994: 4). Anarchist subjectivity, then, is defined

by a complex web of interrelations between the autonomous individual,

passional affinities, and the matrix of chaos which ‘lies at the heart

of our project’. (Bey, 1994: 1). Anarchist subjectivity, in other words,

remains inseparable from anarchist intersubjectivity. The anarchist

project is formed through interactions that occur between those who

desire to dispel the illusory stases of order - those illusions which

obscure the unlimited creative potentials of chaos, which manifest

themselves as lived poetry in daily life. As Bey says of affinities

formed through free association: ‘the activity of such a group will come

to replace Art as we poor PoMo bastards know it. Gratuitous creativity,

or “play”, and the exchange of gifts, will cause the with- ering-away of

Art as the reproduction of commodities’ (Bey, 1994: 4). Anarchy, a

condition of free creativity generated through motility and revolt, can

only be conceived and realised by the poetic imagination and, as far as

words are concerned, can only find expression in poetic language.

In Bey’s formulations, the anarchist subject is simultaneously unary,

multiple and heterogeneous. Under conditions of power, the multiplicity

of the subject is denied and erased. Through the production of

psychosocial stases, power manufactures an apparently unified identity

for each individual, containing and channelling otherwise free energies

on to the territories of governance and control. These stases of order

are illusory, however, in that the organised appearance of unitary

identity is based upon the introduction of division into the subject.

Power disrupts the free flows of energy within the holistic field of

subjectivity: it carves up this field and delimits the split subject,

divided from and turned against itself in ways which enhance profit

maximisation and social control. A language structured around binary

oppositions - and principally the polarity between self and other -

maintains a regime based on separation and alienation. Anarchist revolt

seeks to abolish all forms of power and control structures. In terms of

subjectivity, this project entails destruction of the illusions of a

separate self and recovery of a free-flowing and holistic sense of

subjectivity. Insurrection aims to dismantle staticity, overcome

blockages and put the subject back into process. As part of realising

this project, the anarchist uses poetic language in order to combat the

language of control and its sociolinguistic construction of the divided

self. For the anarchist, poetic language - in all its apparent

illogicality - provides the logical mode of expression for the creation

of a life of lived poetry, a means for breaking through the dominant

logic, and a repository for the savoir-vivre necessary to live in

conditions of chaos.

Ontological anarchy, modernity and postmodernity

As a synthetic thinker, Bey constructs a bricolage of materials derived

from a variety of sources including anarchism, situationism,

existentialism and surrealism. However, his formulations concerning

ontological anarchy remain exemplary and indicative of the philosophical

underpinnings of the new anarchism(s). Although the range of sources

upon which he draws suggests that the ideational matrix from which the

new anarchism(s) emerge is not in itself particularly new, it is

nevertheless associated with newness.

In an important essay entitled ‘Anarchy as modernist aesthetic’, Carol

Vanderveer Hamilton (1995) has identified a discourse of anarchy which

runs through modernism and shapes and informs its aesthetics.

Subsequently obscured by liberal and Marxist interpretations of

modernism, Hamilton maintains that the discourse of anarchy structured

modernist representation through a cultural identification of the

signifier of the anarchist bomb with modernity. In modernism, then,

anarchy became a synonym for newness.

Hamilton’s groundbreaking text opens up crucial issues, but given its

preliminary nature the discussion inevitably remains generalised.

Although the analysis is remarkably wide ranging, the focus on

propaganda by deed and the bomb as metonym for anarchism is ultimately

restrictive. Hamilton has crucially identified the existence of a

discourse of anarchy and established its significance within modernity,

yet in her account anarchism emerges as a seemingly uniform doctrine.

The reasons for this are not hard to detect. A survey of the anarchist

figures who are namechecked - notably Kropotkin, Goldman, Berkman, De

Cleyre and Reclus - suggests that the focus of Hamilton’s essay is

effectively anarcho-communism. The Stirnerian individualist strand

within classical anarchism does not appear within Hamilton’s discussion

of the discourse of anarchy, despite the widespread acknowledgement of

the influence of this strand on modernist thought and aesthetics.[2] In

the current context, this remains unfortunate, as it is clear that

Stirner remains not merely a crucial influence on modernist anarchism

and more generally on modernity, but (more importantly for current

purposes) also the key figure underpinning the new anarchism(s) in the

period of postmodernity. Even Murray Bookchin, the major ideological

opponent of the new anarchism(s), admits the latter point in his

splenetic survey of current developments within contemporary anarchy,

Social anarchism or lifestyle anarchism: an unbridgeable chasm

(Bookchin, 1995).[3] In order to understand the significance of Stirner

to both modernist anarchism and (more pertinently) the new anarchism(s),

the nature and significance of his thought needs to be radically

revised.

Stirner and the anarcho-psychological episteme

In The order of things and The archaeology of knowledge, Michel Foucault

develops a discursive archaeological methodology which ‘attempts to

study the structure of the discourses of the various disciplines that

have claimed to put forth theories of society, individuals, and

language’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982: 17).

To achieve this aim, he introduces the notion of the episteme, which he

defines as follows:

By episteme, we mean . . . the total set of relations that unite, at a

given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological

figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems . . . The episteme is

not a form of knowledge (connaissance) or type of rationality which,

crossing the boundaries of the most varied sciences, manifests the

sovereign unity of a subject, a spirit, or a period; it is the totality

of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the

sciences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities.

(Foucault, 1972: 191)

On this basis, Foucault then attempts to ‘isolate and describe the

epistemic systems that underlie three major epochs in Western thought’:

the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and Modernity (Dreyfus and Rabinow,

1982: 18). In analysing these epistemic systems, however, he remains

largely concerned with the operations and regimes of power rather than

projects aimed at the abolition of power; and, where he is interested in

struggles against power, the struggles considered are usually of a

partial or reformist nature.[4]5 In examining any one epistemic system,

he is interested in conflicts and resistances, but the historical course

of these conflicts remain of limited concern, and he neglects entirely

to examine those discursive - and extra-discursive - practices which

seek to overthrow any ruling episteme and the social formation which it

articulates. In his account of modernity, for example, those anarchist

projects - and particularly the Stirnerian strain - which attempt to

initiate a total transformation of life are completely absent from

Foucault’s discussion.

John Carroll’s seminal study Break out from the crystal palace: the

anarcho- psychological critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky provides

an invaluable corrective to Foucault’s failures, and indicates the

centrality of the Stirnerian - or what Carroll more broadly calls the

anarcho-psychological - critique to both the anarchist project and

modernity/postmodernity. Although he does not frame his analysis in

Foucauldian terms, Carroll’s study investigates the discursive conflicts

that took place within the emerging episteme of modernity during the

nineteenth century. Carroll focuses on the struggle that occurred

between what he variously terms three different intellectual,

theoretical or ideological traditions, competing social theories,

perspectives, world-views, or bodies of social theory (Carroll, 1974: 1,

2, 3, 6, 13, 14 passim). Two of these conflicting perspectives -

British, liberal, utilitarian rationalist social philosophy and Marxist

socialism - are well known and widely acknowledged elements of the

episteme of modernity. The third, however, the anarcho-psychological

critique, has been scandalously neglected and written out of accounts of

the formation of modernity.[5]

Carroll’s text restores the anarcho-psychological critique to its

rightful place as a key element in the discursive - and by extension,

extra-discursive - contestations over the modern/postmodern condition.

Break Out convincingly demonstrates that although the

anarcho-psychological critique has been obscured by the political

conflicts of the two dominant paradigms of capitalist liberal-ration-

alism and Marxist socialism, its antipolitics has acted as a persistent

underground presence, exerting a barely acknowledged and sometimes

unsuspected but often widespread influence. Taking Carroll’s analysis

further, it can be argued that with the collapse of the Marxist

paradigm, the anarcho-psycholog- ical critique is finally emerging from

its subterranean hideout and, in contemporary anarchy, catalysing the

breakout from the crystal palace of the control complex.

Carroll argues that the anarcho-psychological critique commences with

the publication of Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum in 1845

(translated as The ego and its own). This text ‘inaugurates the

reconstitution of philosophical debate’ and constitutes ‘a crossroads in

nineteenth-century intellectual history’ (Carroll, 1974: 26, 88).[6] The

distinctive and innovative feature of Stirner’s formulations in

particular and the anarcho-psychological critique in general remains its

emphasis on a unique ontology or, rather, an ontology of uniqueness:

At the basis of the philosophical innovations of Stirner and Nietzsche

is ontology: their radically new perspective on religion, on morals, on

political and social life, stems from their attitude to being. Their

entire work branches out from the stem conviction that there is a

primary order of reality about which all that can be said is that the

individual exists, that ‘I am!’ The individual first exists, and then

begins to define himself [sic]. Essences, the communicable, socially

mediated dimension of individual character belong to the second order of

reality. Behind them lies an unconscious, irreducible, never realizable

or comprehensible force, an inviolable coherency: the individuum. This

is the ground of der Einzige, the unique one, the realm of what Stirner

calls his ‘creative nothing’. (Carroll, 1974: 39)

Carroll’s analysis proceeds from an examination of ontology to a

discussion of the epistemological anarchy developed within the

anarcho-psychological critique.

If this cluster of ideas seems familiar, this is because the

anarcho-psycholog- ical critique clearly underlies Hakim Bey’s

contemporary formulation of ontological anarchy in particular and the

new anarchism(s) more generally. Carroll makes it clear that the

antipolitics characteristic of the anarcho-psychological critique[7]

remains rooted in its ontological commitments, but this is evidently as

true for Bey as it is for Stirner:

The political anarchism of Stirner and Nietzsche is a logical

development of their ontological anarchism: their denigration of social

authorities represents one dimension of their endeavour to displace the

authority of essences and stress the primacy of the I. Both see the

springs of the human condition as anarchic, willful, problematical, a

complex of forces with their deeply individual source beneath the

superstructure of social mediation; both recognize what Plato referred

to as the ‘unutterable’ in each individual, a noumenal core which makes

of human thinking, of necessity, an isolated, introspective activity.

The social or essentialist superstructure is by itself lifeless; its

function is to provide the I with a means of expression. (Carroll, 1974:

39)

Stirner anticipates the Heideggerian/Sartrean emphasis on existence

preceding essence. In fact, ‘Stirner illustrates how the individual ego,

whose ontological ground is simply the self-reflection that it exists,

is fettered as soon as it subordinates itself to qualities or essences’

(Carroll, 1974: 21). Historically, the Stirnerian ego comes to

consciousness in a world of socio-existential alienation. Historically

this is the case because, as Stirner’s broad overview of history

indicates (1993: 15-151), individuals have always been subject to

governance, order and control. The anti-authoritarian insurrection

proposed in The ego and its own, however, aims to bring about a

historically unprecedented world in which socio-existential alienation

will be abolished. Born out of a creative nothingness (or

non-existence), the ego comes into existence by asserting itself,

affirming its existence - in other words, asserting the only thing

which, for the individual, has any ontological foundation: its self.

The subject, then, is self-created: it creates itself as an individual

by and through its assertion of its self. Language acquisition and use

remains crucial to this act of self-affirmation. In emerging from a

condition of non-existence to one of existence, a being issues forth

spontaneously, but then finds itself in a world requiring introspection

and self-reflection. Or, to put it another way: being emerges from a

condition of ineffability into a world of language. In some respects

this account of the construction of the self concurs with the theories

developed by Jacques Lacan (see Payne, 1993). However, on the issue of

language, the two thinkers diverge radically. Both agree that language

is the major force through which the individual is constituted and

structured. However, while Lacan maintains that the entry into language

entails a simultaneous submission to social authority, and the beginning

of alienation as the self passes from full self-presence to the

condition of absence characteristic of language systems predicated on

the signifier/signified division, Stirner’s perspective on this issue

remains rather more radical.

Emerging from non-existence into self-consciousness, the Stirnerian

being creates itself as an individual by appropriating language: or,

more accurately, by appropriating in the first instance only those words

which it needs to bring itself into existence as an individual and

express its self-affirmation: I am! The Stirnerian being possesses the

(self-)confidence to undertake this act of (self-) assertion because, at

the deepest levels of being, it never becomes separated from the

creative nothingness which is the ontological (non-)ground of its

existence. The creative nothingness of the unutterable void beneath all

existence underlies and precedes all notions of self, signifying

systems, social mediations and authority structures. But its

inexhaustible creativity remains a wellspring at the source of the

individual being and fills the latter with confidence in its capacities

and energy with which to fulfil its potentials:

I am owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the

unique one the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, of which

he is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it man, weakens

the feeling of my uniqueness, and pales before the sun of this

consciousness. If I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then my

concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself,

and I may say: ‘All things are nothing to me.’ (Stirner, 1993: 366)

This sonorous passage, the closing words of Stirner’s symphonic The ego

and its own, articulates some key themes concerning the self-creation

and self-realisation of the individual. The individual is defined by the

capacity to own, and primarily by the ability to own him or herself -

that is to say, to dispose of the self and act in any way congruent with

one’s will, desire or interest. Ownership of self is primary; other

forms of ownership are secondary and derive from this fundamental form.

As a subject-in-process (indeed, a subject-in-rebellion, for reasons

that will become apparent subsequently), the Stirnerian self is

constantly re-creating itself and revising its modes of activity in

accordance with its changing desires and interests, but throughout these

continual changes one constant persists: the need to own oneself or be

in a condition of ownness. Being in a condition of ownness means first

and foremost that an individual is able to draw upon the fund of

creative energies which are loaned to it by the nothingness at the basis

of its being. These energies are then available at the free disposal of

the individual. The capacity to make free and unhindered use of these

energies defines the individual as unique. The individual becomes a

unique one at the moment of self-reflexivity, in the instant in which

she or he realises his or her ownness.[8] The self-created individual

wilfully creates and destroys itself. Although the energies of the void

are inexhaustible, those energies loaned to the individual are finite.

The individual uses up those energies in its progress toward

self-realisation: it creates but also consumes and ultimately burns

itself out. The individual comes from nothing and returns to nothing.

The turning point in this voyage of self-creation and self-destruction

occurs at the apogee of its attainment. At the very moment when the

individual realises itself as unique, at the exact moment when the

maximum degree of individuation and differentiation has taken place,

then ‘the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, of which he

is born’. But at the peak of its powers the individual is less like a

comet than a sun - ‘the sun of this consciousness’ - a burning orb which

illuminates, by contrast, the dark void which contains it.

This process is set in motion with each individual’s primal assertion of

selfhood. By appropriating the words ‘I am!’, the Stirnerian self takes

ownership of language, or at least that little corner that she or he can

make their own at this stage of maturation. Confidently rooted in the

unutterability of the roots of its being, the Stirnerian individual

creates a self through owning language. The origins of selfhood are thus

indistinguishable from ownership. The self achieves its initial sense of

ownness through making language its own, and exalts in this first

victory of its will. The Stirnerian subject is neither intimidated nor

victimised by language as the individual is in the Lacanian schema. The

reasons for this are clear: the Stirnerian subject is not a split

subject, divided by language, because its identity is not wholly defined

by language, but remains rooted in the creative nothingness from which

it springs.[9] Hence the attitude of such a subject to language - as to

the world in general - is not one of victim or dependent, but that of

conqueror. Identity is not to be sought in and through language, because

it has not been lost; the Stirnerian subject does not need to search for

a self, but starts from it: ‘the question runs, not how one can acquire

life, but how one can squander, enjoy it; or, not how one is to produce

the self in himself, but how one is to dissolve himself, to live himself

out’ (Stirner, 1993: 320).

However, in seeking self-realisation, the Stirnerian ego is immediately

confronted with other wills and forces which seek to delimit, contain

and control the self-willed individual, and hence ‘the combat of

self-assertion is inevitable’ (p. 9). The Stirnerian ego maintains that

‘Nothing is more to me than myself!’ (p. 5), but finds itself in a world

where power, in all its varied shapes and forms, wants the ego to accept

that ‘It is more to me than myself’ (p. 305). In such a world, conflict

remains inevitable unless the individual consents to submit to a life of

alienation, subordination and self-renunciation. ‘A human life,’ the

opening chapter of The ego and its own, traces the stages of this

lifelong struggle which commences at birth: ‘From the moment when he

catches sight of the light of the world a man seeks to find out himself

and get hold of himself out of its confusion, in which he, with

everything else, is tossed about in motley mixture’ (p. 9) (all italics

are from the original work). The ego is born into a world of illusions

which ensnare and blind the individual, and from which the ego must

disentangle itself if it is to realise itself. These delusions are

caused by the dominance of abstractions - what Stirner calls spooks

(‘Spuke’) - over concrete individuals. Abstractions - concepts, ideas,

beliefs and so on - that were once attributes and thus possessions of

individuals, now control their one-time owners, and crystallise as fixed

ideas which prevent the free flows of subjective will and desire. They

are, in short, power relations. Stirner’s entire insurrectional

project - which, as Carroll indicates, is envisaged as a revolution

against the totality of power relations, not merely the State[10] - thus

directly derives from the ontological status of the individual. The

ramifications of this insurrectional project are manifold and beyond the

scope of this chapter. In what follows, attention will be limited to the

key issue of language.

Stirner, language and subjectivity

Stirnerian ontology postulates a radical monism. The Stirnerian ego, as

indicated above, embodies a paradoxical reconciliation of opposites, as

it is simultaneously being and nothingness: a self-created autonomous

but ephemeral individual and an inexhaustible creative nothingness. The

crucial moment in the emergence of the former from the latter, however,

remains the simultaneous act of self-assertion and the subject’s

insertion (or perhaps more accurately, incursion) into language. At this

moment, the primary instance of self-expression, but also the moment

when self-expression and self-assertion become identical, the ego moves

from the realm of the unutterable into the world of utterance (while

not, of course, entirely abandoning the former world). From that moment

onward, however, the ego increasingly discovers that the world of

utterance is characterised by conflict and delusion, and that she or he

must adopt a combative stance and a contestatory mode of procedure if

self-realisation is to occur. In the first instance, this contestation

takes place within language or in activities whose structures and

parameters are defined through language. Language, then, becomes a key

area requiring mastery by the Stirnerian ego because it remains

essential to the devising of insurrectional projects.

The importance of language in Stirner’s work cannot be overestimated.

The world of utterance (or, at least in historical terms, the world of

power) is a world haunted by spooks - disembodied ideas, principles and

concepts, abstractions which take the form of words. The spook is a

revenant who assumes the insubstantial shape of the dominant discourse,

the language of governance, before it manifests itself in more material

forms. It is the language of order, management, utility and rationality.

Hence, the ego seeks to find and express itself in a language of

insurrection, a language of radical otherness which negates dominant

discourses and their expressive modes, as well as embodying the ego’s

selfaffirmation in a style commensurate with its uniqueness.

Carroll refers to Stirner’s ‘constant concern with revitalizing

language, repossessing it as a creative force’ (Carroll, 1974: 36).

Power drains language of its vitality and creativity: it captures words,

domesticates them, debilitates them, debases them, instrumentalises

them, makes them prosaic, so that they may act as a means for

maintaining social control. The Stirnerian ego seeks to liberate

language, or rather repossess it so that it once again becomes available

for the free self-expression and enjoyment of the individual. However,

it is not sufficient for the egoist merely to reappropriate an enervated

or aridly rationalistic language: in making language its own, the egoist

must regenerate and reinfuse it with the creativity which lies at the

depths of his/her being. The Stirnerian ego, in other words, transforms

language: she or he does not speak in the prosaic language of authority,

but in the only language suitable for an insurrection against authority:

the language of poetry.

Stirner dreams of a ‘literature that deals blows at the State itself’

(1993: 226) and The ego and its own is an attempt to generate such a

text. Even in transla- tion,12 Stirner’s distinctive, poetic style of

writing remains evident. Although it is a work of philosophy, it is not

composed in the ‘stiff, concept-strictured’ writing style characteristic

of the discourse, but has instead a ‘highly flexible aphoristic style’

full of ‘gaiety and buoyancy’ (Carroll, 1974: 27-35). As in many other

respects, Stirner anticipates Nietzsche in becoming the first

Dichterphilosoph (poet-philosopher), penning passages of pure poetry,

such as the following indictment of the ego’s historical self-alienation

and dispossession:

I, who am really I, must pull off the lion-skin of the I from the

stalking thistle-eater [Power]. What manifold robbery have I not put up

with in the history of the world! There I let sun, moon, and stars, cats

and crocodiles, receive the honour of ranking as I; there Jehovah,

Allah, and Our Father came and were invested with the I; there families,

tribes, peoples, and at last actually mankind, came and were honoured as

I’s; there the Church, the State, came with the pretension to be I - and

I gazed calmly on all. What wonder if then there was always a real I too

that joined the company and affirmed in my face that it was not my you

but my real I. Why the Son of Man par excellence had done the like; why

should not a son of man do it too? So I saw my I always above me and

outside me, and could never really come to myself. (Stirner, 1993:

224-5)

Due to the central value placed upon creativity by Stirner, Carroll

maintains that ‘the artist is the most appropriate paradigm for . . .

the egoist’ (1974: 4). But this formulation could equally be reversed so

that the egoist becomes the paradigmatic artist. However, the art with

which the egoist remains primarily concerned is the ars vitae (the art

of living) because as a subject in process (of constant self-creation) -

‘I am every moment just positing or creating myself’ - his/her life is a

work of art (Stirner, 1993: 150). But an authentic ars vitae remains

impossible without a certain savoir-vivre - and such knowledge can only

be born of reflection; hence, given the decisive role of language

acquisition to individuation for Stirner, the importance of the text as

a means for self-expression. The ars vitae and the ars poetica are not

antithetical in Stirner, but intimately interconnected.

Although presumably possessing some kind of genealogical link with the

eighteenth-century German Romantic prose poems of Novalis, The ego and

its own is appropriately sui generis. It is not a work of poetry in the

conventionally accepted sense of the term at the time of its

publication.[11] Nevertheless, it remains a work couched in poetic

language. In order to appreciate the significance of Stirner’s

innovation and the magnitude of his achievement in this text, it is

necessary to relate The ego and its own to the analysis of literary

discourse undertaken by Julia Kristeva in Revolution in poetic language.

Stirner and poetic language

For Kristeva, poetic language and poetry are not coterminous: ‘neither

confined to poetry as a genre nor inclusive of all poetry, poetic

language inscribes the signifying process and manifests the negativity,

rejection, and heterogeneity of the subject’ (in Payne, 1993: 40).

Poetic language ‘stands for the infinite possibilities of language’

whereas ‘all other language acts are merely partial realizations of the

possibilities inherent in “poetic language”’ (in Roudiez, 1984: 2).

Kristevan textual analysis consists of investigating the relations

between two interdependent modalities within the signifying process that

constitutes language: the semi- otic and the symbolic. These modes

manifest two aspects of the subject. The semiotic refers to the rhythms,

flows and pulsations which play across and within the body of the

subject prior to language acquisition. Semiotic rhythms are never

entirely lost, even when they are overlaid and hidden by the symbolic -

the order and syntax characteristic of language. Indeed, Kristevan

textual analysis focuses on the interplay between semiotic and symbolic

dispositions within any text. When the symbolic disposition

predominates, a text becomes a phenotext, in other words bound by

‘societal, cultural, syntactical, and other grammatical constraints’ (in

Roudiez, 1984: 5); when the semiotic disposition predominates, a text

becomes a genotext, a space for the actualisation of poetic language, an

anarchic language which irrupts in rebellion against the constraints of

social and semantic order. ‘By erupting from its repressed or

marginalised place and by thus displacing established signifying

practices, poetic discourse corresponds, in its effects, in terms of the

subject, to revolution in the socioeconomic order’ (in Payne, 1993:

165).

Historically, commencing with the texts of Lautreamont and Mallarme in

the last third of the nineteenth century, Kristeva discerns in the work

of certain avant-garde writers a shift in emphasis towards the

deliberate creation of geno- texts which, by actuating the revolutionary

potential inherent in poetic discourse, brings about a revolution in

poetic language. This kind of avant-garde text ‘may be interpreted as an

affirmation of freedom, as an anarchic revolt (even though it openly

advocates neither freedom nor revolution) against a society that extols

material goods and profit’ (in Roudiez, 1984: 3). This remains precisely

the problem which Kristeva, her focus inclined entirely on literary

texts, remains unable to resolve. Although it

dissents from the dominant economic and ideological system, the

[avant-garde] text also plays into its hands: through the text, the

system provides itself with what it lacks - rejection - but keeps it in

a domain apart, confining it to the ego, to the ‘inner experience’ of an

elite, and to esotericism. The text becomes the agent of a new religion

that is no longer universal but elitist and esoteric. (Kristeva, 1984:

186)

The avant-garde text, lacking any commitment to revolutionary social

transformation at the level of content, confines its revolution to

language and form, and thus remains subject to recuperation. Equally,

the conventional political tract, failing to draw upon the revolutionary

capacities of poetic language, confines its incendiary appeals to the

level of content, and moreover stultifies itself by embodying them in

the language of order and rule. Opaque to one another, these two forms

of discourse remain trapped within their limitations and thus incapable

of enacting radical psychosocial transformation.

Kristeva borrows from Plato the term chora to designate the space which

Stirner calls ‘creative nothingness’. The chora is ‘the place where the

subject is both generated and negated, the place where his [sic] unity

succumbs before the process of charges and stases that produce him’

(Kristeva, 1984: 28). Like the creative nothing, it remains

unrepresentable because it is impermeable to language: ‘although the

chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitively

posited’ (Kristeva, 1984: 26). ‘Indifferent to language, enigmatic and

feminine, this space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered,

irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation; it is musical,

anterior to judgment, but restrained by a single guarantee: syntax’

(Kristeva, 1984: 29). While language (and the realm of the symbolic in

general) tends to generate a fixed identity around the personal pronoun

I, the semiotic rhythms derived from the chora undermine these

tendencies and ensure a heterogeneous subjectivity which ‘cannot be

grasped, contained, or synthesized by linguistic or ideological

structures’ (in Payne, 1993: 239). As a result, the heterogeneous

subject remains continually in process, free of the stases typical of a

unary subjectivity; but, further, in terms of representation, the

signifying practices produced by such a subject set off an ‘explosion of

the semiotic in the symbolic’ (Kristeva, 1984: 69).

Kristeva’s discussion helps to clarify the revolutionary nature of the

charged poetic language which runs through The ego and its own as well

as the significance of Stirner’s concern with subjectivity and the

emergence, formation and ongoing development of the subject. Stirner’s

consideration of these issues, however, extends beyond issues of

subjectivity to encompass an interest in intersubjectivity and its role

in shaping the self and projects for self-realisation. Contrary to the

opinion of Stirner’s detractors, the Stirnerian egoist is not an

isolated, selfish egotist. The egoist seeks self-realisation through

owning him/herself and thus becoming unique. But from the beginning this

project is thwarted, and thus the egoist declares war on society, the

State and all the other forms of power which attempt to obstruct or

limit his/her will to self-enjoyment. At a certain stage, however, the

egoist realises that she or he does not have the capacity to combat

Power on her/his own, but must link up with other egoists who are

similarly seeking self-realisation through free activity. Stirner

recommends that the egoist seek affinities within a union of egos. The

individual egoist cannot achieve self-realisation in isolation, nor

within current social arrangements, and so, through union, egoists

mutually pursue the insurrectionary project of ‘the liberation of the

world’ (Stirner, 1993: 305) - but each for entirely egoistic reasons.

Stirner does not regard the union, however, as merely an unavoidable and

perhaps unpleasant expedient, but as a mode of affinity rooted in the

subject’s ontological condition:

Not isolation or being alone, but society, is man’s original state. Our

existence begins with the most intimate conjunction, as we are already

living with our mother before we breathe; when we see the light of the

world, we at once lie on a human being’s breast again, her love cradles

us in the lap, spoon-feeds us, and chains us to her person with a

thousand ties. Society is our state of nature. And this is why, the more

we learn to feel ourselves, the connection that was formerly most

intimate becomes ever looser and the dissolution of the original society

more unmistakable. To have once again for herself the child that once

lay under her heart, the mother must fetch it from the street and from

the midst of its playmates. The child prefers the intercourse that it

enters into with its fellows to the society that it has not entered

into, but been born into.

But the dissolution of society is intercourse or union. A society does

assuredly arise by union too, but only as a fixed idea arises by a

thought . . . If a union has crystallized into a society, it has ceased

to become a coalition; for coalition is an incessant self-uniting; it

has become a unitedness, come to a standstill, degenerated into a

fixity; it is - dead as a union, it is the corpse of the union or the

coalition, it is - society, community. (Stirner, (1993: 305-6)[12]

In Kristevan terms, the Stirnerian subject can be seen to inhabit the

realm of the semiotic before and immediately succeeding birth.

Intimately connected with the chora, the mother’s body, the

pre-linguistic subject lives in a condition of immediacy. However, in

the course of time, this condition comes to be regarded as a

restriction, a limitation, a shackle. The subject, made aware of its

individuality through the self-assertion and self-reflexivity provided

by language acquisition, asserts its independence in order to quit a

narrow for a wider form of interdependence. The (speaking) subject

prefers (social/sexual) intercourse or union with companions in a sphere

that has been chosen or willed, rather than one that has been purely

given. Language, openly but playfully conflated with sexuality, provides

the means whereby erotic energies are directed away from the mother’s

body and into the space of the union.[13] However, as these energies

derive from the chora, they are not lost or denied, but incorporated

into the union. As a result, the union is not a fixed but a fluid mode

of practice. The subject is formed by the synergy of the diverse erotic

fluxes which flow in and through the intercourse of the union, just as

much as, if not more than, in the initial condition of sociality with

the mother. The union acts as a means for multiplying and magnifying as

well as diversifying these motile flows and directing them toward a

maximisation of uniqueness for each participant. Language more

specifically, poetic language - plays a central role in achieving this

aim. As a fluid mode of practice, the union requires a signifying

practice commensurate with its form. The union is not based on unanimity

(‘unitedness’) but resemblance - a resemblance of interests. If

metaphor, the basic figure of poetry, comprises a pattern of

resemblances, then the union is a living metaphor, an embodiment of

lived poetry, and the words spoken in the union are in the (m)other

tongue of poetic language.

Conclusion

In terms of representation, Kristeva claims that investments of erotic

energy in revolutionary or reactionary projects are ‘textually enacted

processes that are manifested in prosody and syntax’ (in Payne, 1993:

193). Although a close analysis of the physical, material aspects of the

language of The ego and its own would be necessary for purposes of

substantiating the presence of the genotext in Stirner’s work, it is my

contention that this text constitutes a veritable embodiment of the

revolution in poetic language. Further, I maintain that Stirner’s text

not only prefigures but initiates the revolution in poetic language

which Kristeva detects in late-nineteenth-century avant-garde writing.

Stirner’s key role in the formation of the episteme of modernity has

already been established: his inauguration of the revolution in poetic

language can now be recognised as an important aspect of that epistemic

shift. Further still, I contend that Stirner has, in advance,

anticipated and resolved the issues which for Kristeva stultify the

revolutionary impetus in textual and by extension extra-textual terms.

These are large claims, but following Carroll’s recovery of Stirner’s

unacknowledged but seminal participation in and influence on the

discursive formation of modernity/ postmodernity, I would go so far as

to claim that the insurrectionary impulse articulated and embodied in

The ego and its own constitutes - to adapt Conrad’s term - the secret

agent of (modern) history. Although driven underground by the clash of

rival political ideologies for much of the twentieth century, the anti-

ideological antipolitics of this revolutionary perspective is once again

surfacing in the new anarchism(s). And the revolution in poetic language

at the core of its textuality remains central to its insurrectionary

purpose.

[12]Green, who has himself translated the opening passage of The ego and

its own, regards the standard Byington translation as ‘hopelessly

turgid’ (Green, 1989: 241). Editors’ note: having referred to the

original German ourselves, we feel that Byington’s translation is a

reasonably faithful representation of Stirner’s (complex and technical)

original; therefore, we would have sought to question and clarify John

Moore’s (secondhand) claim here. Again, we believe that John would have

relished the debate.

[1] The usefulness of the term ‘new anarchism(s)’ - or indeed

‘anarchism’ per se in the current context remains somewhat dubious. Like

many contemporary radical antiauthoritarians, Stirner refused any

reductive ideological labelling, and neither referred to himself as an

anarchist nor labelled his perspectives as anarchist. This label has

only retrospectively - and rather unfortunately - been appended to his

writings. Some contemporary radical theorists (notably Fredy Perlman)

have not only refused labelling but have distanced themselves from the

(classical) anarchist tradition. Others have attempted to define various

post-(classical) anarchist positions and terminologies. Bob Black, for

example, has posited a ‘Type-3 anarchism’, neither collectivist nor

individualist - a label which Hakim Bey has characterised as a useful

‘pro-tem slogan’ (Bey, 1991: 62). Black also authored an essay with the

self-explanatory title ‘Anarchism and other impediments to anarchy’ and

in a subsequent critique of ‘anarcho-leftism’ termed contemporary

proponents of anarchy as ‘post-leftist anarchists’ (Black, 1997: 150).

Bey has similarly written an essay entitled ‘Post-anarchism anarchy’ (in

Bey, 1991) which distances contemporary anarchy from a moribund,

dogmatic and outdated classical anarchism, and has attempted to launch

the term ‘chaote’ (a proponent of chaos) as an alternative to the term

‘anarchist’. In my 1998 essay ‘Maximalist anarchism/anarchist

maximalism’, I adapted the terms ‘maximalist anarchism’ and ‘minimalist

anarchism’ to draw a comparable distinction between the first wave of

(classical) anarchism which effectively climaxed at the moment of the

Spanish Revolution, and the second wave of post-Situationist anarchy

which emerged in the wake of May 1968 (Moore, 1998a). I have since

abandoned the use of the terms ‘anarchism’ and ‘anarchist’ in my

theoretical and creative work, although like Perlman, Black and Bey

(among others), I have retained the use of the word ‘anarchy.’

In the present chapter, however, I use the term ‘anarchist’ and the

label ‘new anar- chism(s)’ as a kind of shorthand and for the sake of

convenience. They are not necessarily the most accurate or suitable

terms, not least because they do not do justice either to Stirner’s

thought or the range of contemporary radical antiauthoritarian

formulations, but they are perhaps the best currently available. Readers

should bear this caveat in mind.

[2] Malcolm Green, for example, notes that Stirner ‘was forgotten until

the turn of the [twentieth] century when his work influenced among

others: Scheerbart, Hausmann, Wedekind, B. Traven, Shaw, Gide, Breton,

Picabia, Kubin, indeed the whole November 1918 generation, and later

Sartre, Camus and Heidegger. Also, of course, the Vienna Group’ (Green,

1989: 241). This roll call of modernist figures influenced by Stirner

remains very selective, however, and excludes several major names (e.g.,

Nietzsche), as well as a diverse range of individuals and currents

within the radical anti-authoritarian milieu (e.g., John Henry Mackay,

Otto Gross, Albert Libertad, and the Bonnot Gang). Stirner’s influence

on modernism should not - perhaps cannot - be underestimated.

In scholarly terms, Redding (1998) continues the tradition of

marginalising Stirner in terms of both anarchism and modernism, but Weir

(1997) and Antliff (1997, 2001) redress the balance somewhat by

re-establishing Stirner’s significance in both discursive spheres and at

their points of intersection.

[3] ‘Today’s reactionary social context greatly explains the emergence

of a phenomenon in Euro-American anarchism that cannot be ignored: the

spread of individualist anarchism . . . In the traditionally

individualist-liberal United States and Britain, the 1990s are awash in

self-styled anarchists who . . . are cultivating a latter-day

anarcho-indi- vidualism that I will call lifestyle anarchism’ (Bookchin,

1995: 8-9). Bookchin’s jaundiced and distorted account has rightly

received numerous trenchant critiques within the anarchist press,

notably Watson (1996) and Black (1997). The accuracy of his observation

concerning the resurgence of Stirnerian anarchist individualism, even

though he sees this as a negative phenomenon, cannot be contested.

[4] See for example pp. 211-13 of Foucault’s ‘Afterword on “The subject

and power” ’ in Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) which focuses entirely on

‘forms of resistance’ (p. 211) - i.e., struggles which are essentially

negotiations with power instead of seeking its abolition.

[5] And accounts of anarchism too. Bookchin, for example, devotes

several ill-tempered pages vainly trying to dismiss individualist

anarchism or cast it as reactionary (Bookchin, 1995: 7-11).

[6] Others - notably, for Carroll, figures as diverse as Nietzsche and

Dostoevsky (but also Freud and the existentialists) - are to develop the

anarcho-psychological paradigm in various directions, which are beyond

the scope of this chapter, but Stirner’s formulations are originary.

[7] On the contrast between politics and antipolitics, I refer the

reader to my text Anarchy and ecstasy: ‘by antipolitical I do not mean

an approach that pretends it has no ideological dimensions. I do,

however, mean an approach that is not political. The Concise Oxford

Dictionary defines politics as the “science and art of government” and

political as “of the State or its government”. Political praxis, in this

definition, thus remains the ideology of governance, and as such it

remains appropriate to the shared discursive territory of the forces of

control and counter-control. In attempting to transcend that territory,

therefore, it is necessary to construct an antipolitics, an anarchic

praxis that is more germane for those whose aim is the dissolution, not

the seizure, of control’ (Moore (1988: 5-6)).

[8] The issue of gender - i.e., the question of whether the Stirnerian

notion of the individual is gendered or whether it escapes gendering, as

well as the question of the relationship between language acquisition

and gender identity in Stirner’s work - requires consideration in its

own right, and unfortunately lies beyond the scope of this chapter.

[9] The Stirnerian entity appears to be a divided or unary subject, but

might more appropriately be characterised as a heterogeneous subject.

Despite the emphasis in The ego and its own on the ego and uniqueness,

the Stirnerian subject is not unitary because it has no essence, no

basis in being. ‘Nothing at all is justified by being. What is thought

of is as well as what is not thought of; the stone in the street is, and

my notion of it is too. Both are only in different spaces, the former in

airy space, the latter in my head, in me; for I am space like the

street’ (Stirner, 1993: 341). The Stirnerian subject remains a space, a

void, within which heterogeneous desires, wills and impulses arise and

are then consciously owned. Hence Stirner’s paradoxical

self-characterisation as ‘I the unspeakable’ or the assertion that

‘neither you and [sic] I are speakable, we are unutterable’ (Stirner,

1993: 355; 311). In this way, Stirner eludes the Derridean charge of

logocentrism, despite the importance of the logos in his work.

[10] ‘Stirner at times uses “State” as no more than a convenient

shorthand for supraindi- vidual authority’ (Carroll, 1974: 136n).

[11] The specifically French tradition of the prose poem, made famous

later in the nineteenth century by Baudelaire, Lautreamont and Rimbaud,

seems to have been initiated by Aloysius Bertrand in 1842 - only three

years prior to the publication of The ego and its own — and is therefore

unlikely to have influenced Stirner.

[12] For sound rhetorical reasons, Stirner employs the same term -

‘society’ (‘Gesellschaft’ in the original) - to designate both the

mother-child relationship and the organised social aggregation of

individuals and groups.

[13] The dissolution of the initial mother-child ‘society’ forms a

paradigm for the disintegration of (the totality of power relations

which comprise) society. For Stirner, however, society is a form of mass

psychological regression. Social formations arise when unions lose their

motility and become subject to stasis. The erotic energies invested in

the union are no longer fluid but ‘crystallised’ and fixed - or, rather

fixated on a reunion with the mother’s body. In contrast to the

life-affirming erotic drives characteristic of the union, society

constitutes a mass reactivation of death drives, a psychological atavism

whose sociopolitical expression is obedience to authority and support

for totalitarian projects (here, John is paraphrasing p. 306 of Stirner

(1993)).