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Title: What is Postanarchism "Post"? Author: Jesse Cohn Date: 2002 Language: en Topics: review, post-anarchism, Saul Newman, John Zerzan, Murray Bookchin, Max Stirner Source: http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.902/13.1cohn.html#foot1
Newly resurgent anarchist movements, shaking the streets from Seattle to
Genoa, are caught in a field of tension between two magnetic poles:
Eugene, Oregon, and Plainfield, Vermont. Eugene is the home of John
Zerzan, author of Future Primitive (1994), who has pushed anarchist
theory in the direction of an all-encompassing negation of
"civilization." At the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield in
1995, Murray Bookchin issued his much debated challenge to the
"anti-civilizational" anarchists, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle
Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. Bookchin's "social anarchism" is in
the tradition of the anarcho-communism theorized by Peter Kropotkin,
calling for the replacement of nations and markets with a decentralized
federation of self-managing communities. Zerzan's "primitivism" calls
for the destruction of the "totality," including the abolition of
technology, language, and history itself, in favor of a wild, primordial
freedom (Future Primitive 129).[1] The "chasm" between Eugene and
Plainfield is wide, certainly. Zerzan and Bookchin agree on one thing,
however: both hate postmodernism.
Bookchin calls it a form of "nihilism" tailored to "yuppie" tastes (19).
"Postmodernism leaves us hopeless in an unending mall," Zerzan
complains, "without a living critique; nowhere" (134). For Bookchin,
theorists such as Foucault and Derrida simulate a kind of
individualistic rebellion while vitiating social anarchist commitments
to reason, realism, and ethical universals (9-10). For Zerzan, on the
contrary, they bolster the reigning order by liquidating any notion of
the autonomous individual: "the postmodern subject, what is presumably
left of subject-hood, seems to be mainly the personality constructed by
and for technological capital" (110).
This dispute is one of the significant contexts in which Saul Newman's
From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of
Power arrives. Another is the rediscovery by the academy of the
anarchist theoretical tradition, where until recently anarchism had
endured an official oblivion even longer and deeper than its erasure
from public memory. The rediscovery of anarchist theory is a timely gift
for theorists such as Todd May (The Political Philosophy of
Poststructuralist Anarchism, 1994), who are eager to politicize
poststructuralism but leery of bolting their concepts onto ready-made
Marxist frameworks. Both May and Newman see Marxism, in all its
varieties, as an ineluctably "strategic" philosophy (to use May's term),
perpetually drawn to the postulate of a "center" from which power must
emanate (May 7; 10).
"In contrast to Marxism," writes Newman, "anarchism was revolutionary in
analyzing power in its own right, and exposing the place of power in
Marxism itself--its potential to reaffirm state authority" (6). Mikhail
Bakunin and Karl Marx tore the First International asunder in 1872 over
the question of the State: was it a mere instrument of ruling-class
power, as Marx thought, in which case it could be seized and used by the
proletariat, or was it an "autonomous and independent institution with
its own logic of domination," as Bakunin argued, in which case any
"transitional" State would merely constitute a new reigning regime
(Newman 21)? History has given a poignant weight to Bakunin's
premonitions of a "red bureaucracy," of course, but for a
poststructuralist rereading, his importance lies in his challenge to
Marx's method--the "strategic thinking" for which "all problems can be
reduced to the basic one" (May 10). Anarchist critique undermines the
confident assumption that power is merely an "epiphenomenon of the
capitalist economy or class relations," which in turn opens the way to a
post-Foucauldian apprehension of the ubiquity of power relations--the
"dispersed, decentered" power which comes from everywhere (Newman 2;
78).
At the same time, Newman and May concur, classical anarchism ditches its
own best insight: "anarchism itself falls into the trap of the place of
power" (Newman 6). Both Bakunin and Kropotkin found resistance on a
certain notion of human nature as an "outside" to power--a pure origin
of resistance. Power, as incarnated in the State, represses and distorts
the goodness of humanity; once it is eradicated by the revolution,
"human essence will flourish" and power will disappear (Newman 13). For
Newman, however, power is ineradicable, and any essentialist notion of
"human nature" is the basis for a new domination.
From the diagnosis, the prescription: for anarchism to become meaningful
once again, it must be detached from its investment in essentialist
conceptions of power and human identity, made to face the reality that
power is everywhere. But how to do so while avoiding the gloomy
conclusion that because power is everywhere, resistance is nowhere? If
"resistance to power cannot be conceptualized without thinking in terms
of an outside to power," how can this "outside" be thought without
resorting to yet another equally foundationalist theory of "the place of
power" (97)? Overcoming this "logical impasse" is the task Newman sets
for himself in the following chapters, as he scours the resources of
poststructuralism for "a non-essentialist notion of the Outside" (6).
But what does Newman mean by "power" when he seeks its "Outside"? It's
not always clear what Newman means by this key term. Throughout the
book, he seems to engage in a certain code-switching--sometimes
conscious and clearly marked, sometimes surreptitious or
unconscious--alternating between at least two senses of the word. In the
first chapter, Newman alerts us to the possibility of confusion; while
thus far he has used "power," "domination," and "authority" as synonyms,
"by the time we get to Foucault, 'power' and 'domination' have somewhat
different meanings," and often Newman seems to follow Foucault in
defining "power" as "inevitable in any society," while characterizing
"domination" as "something to be resisted," At other times, he retains
the definition of "power" as "domination" (12). Leaving this ambiguity
open weakens the argument that follows.
A second weakness stems from a misreading of classical anarchist theory.
Newman's argument is premised, in the first place, on his reading of
Bakunin and Kropotkin as wedded to the notion that the human subject is
naturally opposed to "power." He then notes that they also have recourse
to a characterization of this human subject as fatally prone to "a
'natural' desire for power." From this, he draws the conclusion that
classical anarchism is riven by a fundamental inconsistency, a "hidden
contradiction" (48-9). The unstated assumption which warrants this move
from premise to conclusion is that these two representations of the
human subject are mutually exclusive--that Bakunin and Kropotkin cannot
possibly intend both.
This assumption should raise the question: why not? A close reading of
Bakunin and Kropotkin would more strongly support a different
conclusion--that for both of these thinkers, the human subject itself,
and not their representation of the subject, is the site of what
Kropotkin calls a "fundamental contradiction" between "two sets of
diametrically opposed feelings which exist in man" (22). In other words,
as Dave Morland has explained, these thinkers' "conception of human
nature" is not statically unified, but dialectically "double-barreled":
human beings are possessed of equal potentials for "sociability" and
"egoism" (12). Since neither of these potentials is necessarily more
likely to be expressed than the other, ceteris paribus, neither
constitutes a species destiny: "history is autonomous" (21).
The (arguably mistaken) discovery of a "hidden contradiction" at the
core of anarchist discourse prompts Newman's fear that classical
anarchism is dangerously open to the potential for domination, which in
turn forms the rationale for the rest of his project. Errors propagate
through this system, as the logic of an undertheorized
"anti-essentialism" prompts him to ask the wrong questions and get the
wrong answers, or to ask the right questions without looking for answers
at all. If "humans have an essential desire for power," Newman argues,
"then how can one be sure that a revolution aimed at destroying power
will not turn into a revolution aimed at capturing power? How can one be
sure, in other words, that an anarchist revolution will be any different
from a Marxist vanguard revolution?" (49).
There are a number of problems with this question. First of all,
depending on which version of "power" Newman is referring to, the
question may depend on a false assumption. If "power" as an endless play
of mutual influence, action, and reaction is distinguished from
"domination," then neither Bakunin nor Kropotkin have any pretensions
about "destroying power" per se. Indeed, to a surprising extent, both
are aware of the ubiquity of "social power," which no revolution can
(nor should) abolish; both understand that it is a "natural" product of
human subjects, rather than an artificial imposition from outside; and
both distinguish it from force, coercion, or domination, while
acknowledging its potential to generate these effects, particularly when
it is allowed to accrete (Bakunin, God and the State 43n).
Apart from its problematic premise, however, Newman's question is also
needlessly framed as merely rhetorical or unanswerable, when it really
does admit of an answer in political practice. Anarchist practices,
conditioned by a theoretical emphasis on the immanence of ends within
means, are distinguished from those of "a Marxist vanguard revolution"
by the insistence that the immediate form of revolution (direct action,
direct democracy, egalitarian self-management, the leaderless group,
etc.) be its future content. Thus the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial
Workers of the World union named as their project "forming the structure
of the new society within the shell of the old" (Renshaw, frontispiece).
Newman, however, focuses more on theory than on practice. And this is
why he fails to ask the following question: if classical anarchist
theory is so wedded to this notion of the natural harmony of human
subjects in society, why is it so deeply preoccupied with questions of
action and organization? Why bother to organize, to intervene, unless
something is in need of this intervention, i.e. unless it is
disorganized? In fact, these theorists do not regard anarchy as
something merely spontaneous, natural, biological, given, but as
something that had to be evoked, elicited, created, made from the
materials of history and biology. What "every individual inherits at
birth," according to Bakunin, is "not ideas and innate sentiments, as
the idealists claim, but only the capacity to feel, to will, to think,
and to speak"--a set of "rudimentary faculties without any content";
this content must be supplied by the social milieu (Bakunin 240-41).
Nature is a set of potentials, not a telos; social construction is the
determining factor. In this sense, classical anarchist theory goes
beyond the binary opposition of essentialism/non-essentialism.
Rather than dwelling on the ostensible limitations of anarchism as
articulated by its most influential theorists, Newman turns his
attention to what he sees as the untapped potential of a relatively
marginal figure in anarchist history: Max Stirner, the fellow "Young
Hegelian" whom Marx so viciously assails in The German Ideology. In his
1845 Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (variously translated as "The Ego and
His Own" or "The Unique One and Its Property"), Stirner uses the stick
of nominalism to beat every philosophy built on abstract ideals or
categories, including not only the religious submission to God but also
the fetishization of "Man" in liberalism and communism: "no concept
expresses me, nothing that is designated as my essence exhausts me; they
are only names" (490). The self in Stirner is a subject to which all
"predicates" are merely properties, so that it cannot be said to have an
identity or essence (450)--leaving, as Newman sees it, 'a radical
opening which the individual can use to create his own subjectivity,"
unhampered by essentialisms.
This proto-Nietzschean insight excites Newman: "The importance of
Stirner's notion of becoming for politics, particularly
poststructuralist politics, is great indeed: he has shown that
resistance to power will never succeed if it remains trapped within
fixed, essential identities" (68). Ultimately, Stirner provides Newman
with a non-essentialist account of how the self, rather than
encountering a power which is imposed upon it, actually produces the
power to which it submits by binding itself to "fixed ideas" (ideologies
and essentialist identities) and annuls this power by dissolving these
abstract chains through analysis (Newman 64).
Newman does consider the charge, leveled at Stirner by numerous
anarchist critics, that Stirner's "unique one," abstracted from all
history, disembedded from every relationship, and detached from all
context, simply constitutes a new "essentialist identity" (and a
mystified one at that) but he does not really spell out why this
critique is mistaken (71). Not only does the Einzige closely resemble
Sartre's classless, genderless, cultureless, ahistorical cogito a little
too closely--it also bears some resemblance to the protagonist of
laissez-faire marketplace economics, the Rational Actor, whose infinite
desire and arbitrary caprice (i.e. "selfishness") are likewise purported
to be the very measure of freedom.
None of this prevents Newman from moving forward with his project--the
reconstruction of anarchist theory within a poststructuralist framework.
Four chapters provide a creative, suggestive, and relatively accessible
rereading of work by Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, and Lacan as
Newman searches for a "non-essentialist notion of the Outside."
Foucauldian genealogy and Deleuzo-Guattarian schizoanalysis extend
Stirner's insight into the abstract nature of the State, "whose
formidable omnipresence exists mostly in our minds and in our
subconscious desire to be dominated," by demonstrating that "the
individual represses himself," and that "we subordinate ourselves to
signifying regimes all around us" (79; 83; 100). Derridean
deconstruction adds a "strategy" for "undermining the metaphysical
authority of various political and philosophical discourses," releasing
action from its obligation to any "founding principle" or arché (130).
In the end, Newman stakes his money on Lacan as presenting the most
persuasive "non-essentialist figure of resistance" (111).
Here, I suspect, will lie one of the primary points of interest for
readers of poststructuralist theory, as Newman draws on Lacan's account
of how "the subject is constituted through its fundamental inability to
recognize itself in the symbolic order" to explain how this apparently
omnipresent and omnipotent order creates its own other--its own utopia,
actually: a non-originary origin or "nonplace" (ou-topos) of resistance,
blossoming in the heart of power itself (139). This nonplace is the
"leftover" which is continually and necessarily generated by the
operation of "the Law," which "produces its own transgression" (140;
144). In effect, Newman uses Lacan to clarify what Foucault seemed to
have left mysterious--the logic whereby power never appears without
resistance appearing as well.
But wait--isn't this a little too close to Bakunin's declaration, which
Newman cites as evidence of his "essentialism," that "there is something
in the nature of the state which provokes rebellion" (qtd. in Newman
48)? If Newman argues that these two antagonists, the "state" which
provokes and the "subject" who rebels, could not "exist without each
other" (48), how can he avoid concluding that this goes double for the
Lacanian struggle between the constitutive "Law" and the "transgression"
it produces? Moreover, one might ask what it has meant to discover this
"concept" or "figure" if what anarchism opposes is not "power" but
"domination." Was the quest in vain? Has all of this culminated in yet
another insurgent subject which just can't seem to do without the power
that dominates it?
These important questions remain unresolved. More important for
anarchist readers, however, is the question of what practical
consequences might ensue from the "postanarchism" which Newman
formulates in his final chapter (157). How can a politics, which
presupposes cooperation and joint action, found itself on Stirner's
notion that my unique ego has literally nothing in common with yours?
Newman calls attention to Stirner's proposal for a "union of egoists," a
merely voluntary and instrumental association between individuals, as
opposed to a "community" which one is "forced" to participate in (70),
but this amounts to a universalization of the instrumentalist logic of
capitalism: "For me," Stirner writes, "no one is a person to be
respected, not even the fellow-man, but solely, like other beings, an
object in which I take an interest or else do not, an interesting or
uninteresting object, a usable or unusable person" (414-15). Indeed, for
Stirner, "we have only one relation to each other, that of usableness,
of utility, of use"; everything else is ideology (394). While Newman
wants to read Stirner as "not necessarily against the notion of
community itself" (70), it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Stirner
himself flatly declares: "community . . . is impossible" (414). This is
precisely the hyper-individualism that placed Stirner outside the
mainstream of the anarchist movement, which remained committed to
community and collective practice, constituting itself as "social
anarchism" rather than mere individualism. "Needless to say," Newman
admits in a footnote, "some modern anarchists do not exactly embrace
this postmodern logic of uncertainty and dislocation" (175 n7).
In any case, it's a relief to find someone willing to think seriously
about the political outside of the confines of Marxism, rather than
continually fiddling around with Marxist texts in yet another attempt to
take Marx beyond Marx (as Antonio Negri has put it) or else completely
scrapping that urge to "change the world" in favor of some ironic or
nihilistic embrace of the world as it is (the Baudrillard solution).
Post-Marxist theorists have stripped away one key concept after another
(historical stages, centrality of class conflict, "progressive"
colonial/ecocidal teleology, productivism, materiality/ideality binary,
ideology, alienation, totality, etc.), peeling away the layers of the
onion, driving Marxism further and further in the direction of its old
repressed Other, anarchism--protesting all the while that "we are not
anarchists" (Hardt and Negri 350).
As refreshing as it is to step outside this endless Marxist monster
movie, with its perennial Frankfurtian pronunciations of death, periodic
Frankensteinian re-animations, and perpetual "spectres," I would argue
that anarchism has more to offer poststructuralism than Newman and May
seem to recognize, and that poststructuralism affords other and better
resources for the development of anarchist theory than their example
would imply. In fact, it could do much to redress the damage done to the
core ethos of social anarchism, as cataloged by Bookchin, by post-1960s
theoretical tendencies which regard all structure, organization, and
coherence as repressive. It offers a weapon for the Plainfield social
anarchists against the politically and intellectually sterile
primitivism of Eugene.
Foucault's demonstration of the poverty of the "repressive hypothesis"
and of the positive potential of self-structuring askesis could be used
to neutralize the influence of left-Freudian theories of liberation as
antisocial "de-repression" (Benello 63). The wisdom of Derrida's "there
is nothing outside the text"--as Zerzan is well aware (116-17)--could be
marshaled against the primitivist quest for a pure pre-social origin.
Even Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its narrative of the construction of
the self in and through the Symbolic, could reinforce Bookchin's
distinction between "individual autonomy" and "social freedom" (4).
From Bakunin to Lacan is overly eager to get from Bakunin to Lacan--a
perhaps too uncritical teleological trajectory--but at least it inquires
about the way from one point to the other, which is a siginificant
contribution in itself. As anarchist movements, roused from their long
slumber, attempt to orient themselves in a world of globalizing
capitalism, sporadic ethno-religious violence, and growing ecological
crisis, they will find themselves in need of more such contributions.
Bakunin, Mikhail. Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the
Activist-Founder of World Anarchism. Ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff. New
York: Knopf, 1972.
---. God and the State. New York: Dover, 1970.
Benello, C. George. From The Ground Up: Essays on Grassroots and
Workplace Democracy. Boston: South End, 1992.
Bookchin, Murray. Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An
Unbridgeable Chasm. Edinburgh, Scotland: AK, 1995.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
2000.
Kropotkin, Peter. Ethics: Origin and Development. Trans. Louis S.
Friedland and Joseph R. Piroshnikoff. Dorset: Prism, 1924.
May, Todd. The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism.
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1994.
Morland, Dave. "Anarchism, Human Nature and History: Lessons for the
Future." Twenty-First Century Anarchism. Ed. Jon Purkis and James Bowen.
London: Cassell, 1997. 8-23.
Renshaw, Patrick. The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United
States. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967.
Stirner, Max. The Ego and His Own. Trans. Steven T. Byington. New York:
Benj. R. Tucker, 1907. May 18, 2002.
<http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/stirner/theego0.html>
Zerzan, John. Elements of Refusal. Seattle: Left Bank, 1988.
---. Future Primitive and Other Essays. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1994.
[1] See Zerzan's Elements of Refusal, particularly chapters 1-5, for the
full extent of his "anti-civilizational" project.