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Title: Anarchism, Representation, and Culture Author: Jesse Cohn Date: 2003 Language: en Topics: anarchist aesthetics, art, avant-garde, culture, direct democracy, modernism, Naturalism, Realism, representation, social anarchism, social anarchist aesthetics Source: Retrieved on 2021-11-02 from https://www.academia.edu/233501/Anarchism_Representation_and_Culture Notes: Culture and the State, Vol. 4: Alternative Interventions. James Gifford and Gabrielle Zezulka-Mailloux eds. (Edmonton, Canada: CRC Humanities Studio, 2003): 54–63.
Over the last decade and a half, cultural historians like Patricia
Leighten, David Weir, David Kadlec, and Allan Antliff have rediscovered
the role of anarchism in the formation of modernist avant-garde
aesthetics. Their new historical narrative posits a “resistance to
representation” (Kadlec 2) and an embrace of “stylistic fragmentation”
(Weir 168) as thematic links between modernism and anarchism: modernist
moves toward abstraction and anti-art can be seen as informed by the
individualism of Max Stirner, founded on the uniqueness of the ego, that
irreducible fragment which belongs to no group and therefore cannot be
represented.
This new narrative is attractive in many ways, as it forces us to
rethink the politics of modernism. There are some important
relationships between modernist struggles against the limits of symbolic
representation and anarchist critiques of political representation
(which Proudhon called a “subterfuge” and Bakunin “an immense fraud”).
However, the emphasis that this new narrative places on Stirnerite
individualism might make many an anarchist squirm. Stirner has always
been marginal to anarchist theory, and largely irrelevant to anarchist
practice: the movements that constitute anarchism’s appearance on the
world stage—the First International, the Makhnovist rebellion in the
Ukraine, the Spanish revolution of 1936—were workers’ movements,
populist and communitarian rather than egoist, scarcely compatible with
Stirner’s declarations that “truth... exists only—in your head,” or that
“community... is impossible” (471, 414). “Fragmentation,” for an
anarcho-communist like Errico Malatesta, is simply the secret of
authority’s success: “the age-long oppression of the masses by a small
privileged group has always been the result of the inability of most
workers to agree among themselves to organise with others” (84).
Moreover, what glues any sort of organization together is precisely the
use of language to communicate, to make common—in other words, the use
of symbolic representation: thus Malatesta writes that “revolution is
the forming and disbanding of thousands of representative... bodies
which, without having any legislative power, serve to make known and to
coordinate the desires and interests of people near and far” (153,
emphasis mine). In this light, social anarchists rereading the history
of art and literature find the new narrative of modernism as an
anarchist “resistance to representation” unsatisfying: despite the
strangely disproportionate influence exercised by individualist
anarchist ideas on seemingly everyone from Mallarmé to Motherwell, the
long and rich tradition of social anarchism seems to have had nothing to
say about poetry. Where is a social anarchist aesthetic to be found?
Does it exist?
At first glance, the answer might appear to be no. Most of the
well-known social anarchists who remarked on art and literature seem
merely to rehearse some sort of utilitarian didacticism, reminiscent of
Socialist Realism. Thus, Peter Kropotkin calls for writers and artists
to “place your pen, your chisel, your ideas at the service of the
revolution,” to depict “the heroic struggles of the people against their
oppressors” and “fire the hearts of our youth with... glorious
revolutionary enthusiasm” (Kropotkin’s Revolutionary 278). It all sounds
a little too close to the kitsch mentality—“the people” are to be
represented as “heroic,” the “oppressors” as dastardly, and so on; when
Kropotkin advocates the “subservien[ce]” of “realism” to “an idealistic
aim” (Ideals and Realities 86), Milan Kundera would call this a
“categorical agreement with being,” a will to exclude from view whatever
is “essentially unacceptable in human existence,” and to impose this
representation on life (248). Hardly a conception worthy of the name
“anarchist.”
However, something changes when we reread these comments through the
lens of Murray Bookchin’s ecological version of dialectics. Bookchin
insists that
Reality is always formative. It is not a mere “here” and “now”...
reality is always a process of actualization of potentialities. It is no
less “real” or “objective” in terms of what it could be... [than in
terms of] what it is at any given moment. (Remaking Society 203)
This definition of reality as composed both of actuality and
potentiality, both “what it is” and “what it could be,” is kin to
Kropotkin’s assertion that “realistic description” should be
“subservient to an idealistic aim,” particularly when this is read in
context. Kropotkin is discussing the shortcomings of a particular kind
of “realism”—that of “the French realists,” particularly Émile Zola, for
whom “realism” means “a description only of the lowest aspects of
life”—the bestial misery of coal miners, alcoholics, streetwalkers.
First of all, Kropotkin argues that Zola’s Naturalism, which purports to
render a panoptical “anatomy of society,” offers only a myopic view of
that society: “the artist who limits his observations to the lowest and
most degenerate aspects [of society] only... explores only one small
corner of life. Such an artist does not conceive life as it is: he knows
but one aspect of it, and this is not the most interesting one.”
Moreover, Zola’s focus on the “degeneracy” of life under capitalism is
merely the mirror image of “the... romanticism which he combated.” The
idealism of the Romantic poets led them to avert their gaze from the
ugly present, fleeing into a mystical beyond; however, the Naturalists
seem no more than their Romantic counterparts to recognize that the
“highest” manifestations of “life” are to be found “beside and within
its lowest manifestations” (86).
Kropotkin judges Zola’s Naturalism to be “a step backwards from the
realism of Balzac” (86) because it so rigorously adheres to the actual
that it appears to exclude any sense of the possible: the “anatomy of
society” that Zola renders in Germinal is one in which everything is
driven by fatal necessity: rebellion appears futile. Zola’s “anatomy” of
capitalist exploitation may indict the cruelty of the system, but it
inadvertently defends that system by making it appear unchangeable—even
“natural.” It evokes pathos, but not revolt. Ultimately, an
ultramaterialist representation which freezes living men and women into
immobile objects produces the same lousy results as an ultra-idealist
representation which turns away from the material world. Where
Romanticism mystifies reality, Naturalism reifies it.
For Kropotkin, as for Bookchin, it is the dialectical relationship
between material and ideal, between actual and potential, that is
indispensable to any genuine “realism” in art or politics. Kropotkin is
arguing for an aesthetic which is neither Romantic nor Naturalist,
neither idealist nor (in the corollary sense) realist—an aesthetic which
Proudhon called “critical idealism,” while carefully positioning himself
against both “idealist” and “materialist” metaphysics (Rubin 94;
Proudhon, System of Economical 16–17; Proudhon Oeuvres 11.59). For
Proudhon, art can and should represent “nature” as it is, performing its
mimetic function of “rendering things,” but at the same time present an
image of “things” as they “should” be—a potential which exists in a
dialectical relation to the actual within which it is always embedded
(SEC 434). Art which cleaves to one pole or the other of this dialectic
is a failure: since, as Proudhon remarks in Du principe de l’art, “the
real is not the same as the truth” (qtd. in Rubin 94), it is possible to
transcend reality by telling the truth, what Theodor Adorno called the
truth of “the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it”
(Aesthetic Theory 135). The reverse is also true: to merely reproduce
the real (as in Zola’s Naturalism) would be to fail to tell the truth,
i.e., to lie. “if [art] is limited to simple imitation, copies or
counterfeits of nature,” Proudhon insists, it will end up “dishonoring
the same objects which it would have imitated” (“S’il [l’art] se borne à
une simple imitation, copie ou contrefaçon de la nature, il ne fera
qu’étaler sa propre insignifiance, en déshonorant les objets mêmes
qu’ils aurait imités”) (Proudhon qtd. in Crapo 461; translation mine).
Thus, in the moment that art frees itself from mere imitation, it can
fulfill its deepest moral commitment, realizing the principle of justice
by revealing the “should be” within the “is.” What Proudhon calls the
“social destination” of art, in the end, is not only to reproduce what
exists, but also to criticize what exists by reference to what can and
should exist. This is Kropotkin’s “realist description” in the service
of an “idealist goal.”
In fin-de-siècle Paris, we find another group of social anarchists
working along very similar lines: the art social group of Paris, with
Bernard Lazare as one of its brightest lights. Against the Symbolist
aesthetes, partisans of “social art” maintained, with Proudhon, that art
has a “social mission,” but like Kropotkin, they rejected Naturalism as
an “incomplete” program (Lazare 5, 27). In his 1896 manifesto, Lazare
declared that
the reproach which had to be made to naturalism lay in its
incompleteness, its... considering only bodily functions and not mental
functions to be real; also its disfiguration [enlaidir] of pleasure with
ugliness [laid], instead of showing real things under their aspect of
perfection. (27–28)
Naturalist representation, by privileging the “material” over the ideal,
renders a picture of life in which there are objects, but no
subjectivity; in so far as Zola’s coal miners seem to live a merely
“animal life,” Germinal endorses that bourgeois ideology which depicts
the working classes as mindless brutes, incapable of rational
self-governance (29). Moreover, by subordinating “pleasure” to
“ugliness,” Naturalist writing encourages us to turn away from life in
disgust at least as much as it encourages us to revolt against social
conditions.
If this sort of realism is a dead end for Lazare, so is Mallarmé’s
Symbolism, which he sees as an “idealist reaction against Zola and
naturalism”: the Symbolist “error,” he asserts,
was to turn one’s back on life, it was to return to the old romantic
theory, whose basis [fond] is christian: life is abject, one must go
beyond life [il faut aller hors la vie]. Starting from this point, one
cannot but end up in the mystico-decadent swamp [au marais
mysticodécadent]. (28–29)
The same revulsion with life that is evoked by objectivist
representation is the starting point for an anti-realist, subjectivist
aesthetic—a flight away from representation. In place of Naturalist
reification of reality, all Symbolism can offer is mystification.
Neither aesthetic offers enough to revolution.
The alternative to Naturalism and Symbolism, for Lazare, is a “social
art,” “neither realist nor idealo-mystical,” whose “principle” is “that
life is good and that its manifestations are beautiful,” while
“uglinesses are the product of the state of society,” and which
“represent[s] not stable beings, fixed in a chosen pose, but beings in
evolution”; this art, in accordance with Proudhon’s critical idealism,
“must not content itself with photographing the social milieux... it
must release from them the ideas which they contain” (29–30). In short,
social art is a representational aesthetic, a modified realism which
embraces both of those aspects of reality which are polarized and
isolated by Naturalism and Symbolism: where Naturalism excludes the
dimension of potentiality and Symbolism excludes the dimension of
actuality, social art insists on including both, activating the
dialectic between them. In so doing, it provides a stimulus to revolt,
engaging both writer and reader in a historical process of change,
thereby overcoming the “artistic egotism” which results from the
alienation of artists from their community context (19).
But does art social escape the trap of kitsch aesthetics? What does it
mean to insist that “life is good and that its manifestations are
beautiful,” while ”uglinesses” are merely transitory? Is this not a
“categorical agreement with being,” repressing the “essentially
unacceptable in human existence”? I don’t believe that Lazare’s social
art suffers from the kind of blinkered mentality that Kundera rightly
criticizes. For elucidation, I’d like to turn to a more recent anarchist
theorist.
Peter Lamborn Wilson, better known by his nom-de-plume of Hakim Bey, is
usually associated with the anti-representationalist aesthetic of
individualist anarchism. However, in a 1991 essay titled “Amoral
Responsibility,” Wilson expresses a social anarchist vision of art.
Wilson insists that every text, no matter how fictional, inevitably
offers a “representation of life,” and that its politics are to be found
here (57). It is important to note that Wilson’s concept of
“representation,” here, is very different from Zola’s: where Zola wished
to neutrally record what happens, Wilson argues that “nothing ‘just
happens’ in a book” (54). The power of the writer to shape and condition
even the most referential reportage of reality is considerable, and
confers on the writer a corresponding “responsibility for the text’s
representation of life” (57). On this basis, Wilson offers a critique of
horror fiction from Victorian times to the present that mirrors, in many
ways, Lazare’s critique of Naturalist fiction.
“Every fiction,” Wilson asserts, “prescribes as well as (or more than)
it describes.” How so? As Peter Marshall reminds us, “there is no
unbridgeable gap between normative and prescriptive statements”—that is,
between claims about “what is,” “what could be,” and “what should
be”—“since the former contain the moral and practical potential of the
latter” (138). What must be avoided is collapsing this dialectic between
is, could, and should into the flat “logical fallacy” of “maintaining
that because something is, it follows that it ought to be” (144). Wilson
sees this reduction of values to fact as an almost inescapable tendency
in fictional representation. Because a fiction presents itself as a
microcosm, “a kind of world,” it posits at least an implicit claim to
represent the macrocosm, i.e., the world, “reality” per se (54). That is
to say: a fiction embodies “a worldview,” a “view of what life ‘really’
is—or should be” (54–55). Where Lazare accused the Naturalist novel of
representing life as irredeemably ugly, Wilson sees the radical ugliness
of Horror fiction, its tendency to represent “life” in terms of
suffering and nausea, as evoking a worldview in which “sensuality
connects only to disgust” (56). Instead of projecting a critique of the
negativity present in life as it is constituted here and now, it
expresses a universal loathing for life in general: “Life, love,
pleasure—all is death, all is shit and disease” (56). Wilson suggests,
in other words, that the typical horror text is a secular revision of
Christian dualism—as Lazare put it, the notion that “life is abject, one
must go beyond life.” That is to say, “by its very nature,” this sort of
writing is “politically reactionary” (Wilson 56) because it suggests not
a categorical agreement with being, but a categorical disagreement with
being, and an embrace of nothingness.
A social anarchist aesthetic, in short, does not simply map the ideal
onto the real, or take the ideal for the real; rather, it discovers the
ideal within the real, as a moment of reality. This goes beyond merely
preaching a social gospel, beyond “dull moralisation,” as Kropotkin
called it (Ideals and Realities 86); it is a complex, dialectical
interplay between the imperatives of realistic reflection and idealistic
persuasion. Thus, George Woodcock speaks of “the constructive artist” in
whose work “some living quality can be apprehended growing out of the
ruins of tragedy and evil” (The Writer and Politics 183; emphasis mine).
This “living quality,” the “seed beneath the snow,” as Colin Ward puts
it (22), is what a social anarchist seeks in art no less than in life.
The lessons that this social anarchist tradition has to teach us extend
beyond the aesthetic. Right now, large sections of the anarchist
movement in the U.S. and elsewhere are influenced by the theoretical
work of John Zerzan, whose opposition to all forms of “representation,”
symbolic and political, runs so deep as to include a call for the
abolition of art and language itself. To represent, for Zerzan, is
simply to mediate, reify, and alienate. Since every form of organization
depends on symbolic mediation, Zerzan’s anti-representationalism is also
highly anti-organizational. If Zerzan is right about representation,
then it follows that revolt must either be recuperated into some
representational system or else remain unorganized and fragmented, in
which case it can be easily contained—a dead end either way. However,
what if Zerzan is overlooking the possibility of other, non-reifying,
non-alienating forms of representation—dynamic forms which, as Lazare
wrote, “represent not stable beings, fixed in a chosen pose, but beings
in evolution”? This kind of aesthetic representation corresponds to a
kind of political representation: direct democracy. Direct democracy is
precisely the sort of representational system one would create if one
believed, as Bookchin says, that “Being is not an agglomeration of fixed
entities and phenomena but is always in flux, in a state of Becoming”
(“A Philosophical Naturalism”)—or as Proudhon said, “that the true,
real, [and] positive... is what changes, or at least what is capable
of... transformation, while what is false, fictitious, impossible and
abstract appears as fixed, complete, whole, unchangeable” (Philosophie
du progrès 247–248).
Radical direct democracy is not “resistance to representation”; it is an
alternative model of representation that is dynamic, which does not seek
to escape the world of multiplicity and motion but embraces these
phenomena as the essence of living. It not only allows us to create
policy directly, but keeps open the possibility of our intervening our
own representation, empowering us to quickly withdraw the authority of
spurious representatives and replace them with better ones. The
recallable “delegate” is more truly “representative” than an elected
official, because the system does not assume that the popular will is a
reified object. Direct democracy assumes that what must be represented
is complex and changeable, and therefore provides as many opportunities
as possible for it to manifest itself in a fuller, more all-sided form.
Zerzan writes that art begins in the “substitution” of an “abstract...
representation” for “the real object, in its particularity,” suggesting
that “in the transfiguration we must enact, the symbolic will be left
behind and art refused in favor of the real” (56, 62). On the contrary,
wrote Bakunin, “Art is... the return of abstraction to life”; while it
is “concerned... with general types and general situations... [it]
incarnates them... in forms which... if they are not living in the sense
of real life, none the less excite in our imagination the memory and
sentiment of life; art in a certain sense individualizes the types and
situations which it conceives... it recalls to our minds the living,
real individualities which appear and disappear under our eyes” (God and
the State 56–57). I think Bakunin’s vision of art, the art that
represents living beings in evolution and releases from them the ideas
which they contain, is still a viable one: a social anarchist aesthetic.
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