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Title: Postanarchism and Space
Author: Saul Newman
Date: 2011
Language: en
Topics: Insurrectionist, theory, insurrectionary, space, utopia, post-anarchism, revolution
Source: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7ae7/71b6ddfd5b6ed3a60d634d76d58ea1a7b7db.pdf?_ga=2.180764002.473639679.1574668928–1774856885.1574668928

Saul Newman

Postanarchism and Space

Abstract In this paper, I call for a re-consideration of anarchism and

its alternative ways of conceptualising spaces for radical politics.

Here I apply a Lacanian analysis of the social imaginary to explore the

utopian fantasies and desires that underpin social spaces, discourses

and practices – including planning, and revolutionary politics. I will

go on to develop – via Castoriadis and others – a distinctly

post-anarchist conception of political space based around the project of

autonomy and the re-situation of the political space outside the state.

This will have direct consequences for an alternative conception of

planning practice and theory.

Keywords

planning theory, (post)anarchism, Lacan, revolutionary politics,

autonomy ‘Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create

it’ (Bey, 1991: 100). Social theory has in recent times taken a spatial

turn. In the case of political theory, discussions about the spatial

dimensions and imaginaries of politics have drawn on political geography

in order to investigate the contours of pluralism, the public space,

democratic agonism, social movements, and the post-national spaces of

globalisation (see Massey, 2005; Sassen, 2008; Mouffe, 2000; Connolly,

2005). Here the question of planning – the planning of cities, urban

landscapes, autonomous spaces, aesthetic communities and so on –

inevitably arises. Indeed, politics and urban planning have always been

intimately connected, whether we think of utopian imaginaries of Fourier

or Saint-Simon, with their rationally planned communities, or the way

that the planning of modern cities and metropolises has always been

haunted by the spectre of insurrection and dissent. Planning practices

and discourses may be seen as a sublimation of politics, as well as a

crystallization of conflict. If one casts a parallax gaze on our cities

today, one finds traces everywhere of the repressed political

dimension.[1] Space is therefore always political. Indeed, as Henri

Lefebvre shows, space is a particular constellation of power and

knowledge that reproduces the social relations of production; space has

a political function in providing a kind of integrative framework for

the capitalist mode of production and for political power (1991: 9).

However, if space is seen as a framework for dominant political and

economic interests, my aim here is to explore the ways in which this

hegemonic space is challenged, contested and reconfigured, as well as

the fantasies and desires invested in political spaces. It is in this

context that I would like to consider the question of space for radical

politics, and, in particular, for that most heretical of all radical

political traditions – anarchism. After showing that anarchism is more

than simply the anarchic disruption of space – indeed, anarchist thought

and politics suggests an alternative construction of space – I will go

on to explore the way in which social and political spaces are imagined

in revolutionary discourse. It is here that a Lacanian analysis of the

social imaginary becomes important, as it not only reveals the utopian

fantasies and desires that underpin social spaces, discourses and

practices – including planning – but also makes visible the hidden

structural link between revolutionary politics and political authority;

between the desire for revolutionary transgression and the affirmation

of a new Master. Taking Lacan as a critical point of departure here, I

will go on to develop – via Castoriadis and others – a distinctly

postanarchist conception of political space based around the project of

autonomy. This will have direct consequences, as I will show, for an

alternative conception of planning practice.

1. Anarchism and Planning

Is radical politics simply a disruption of the existing order of space,

or does it invent its own alternative spatial imaginaries; and, if so,

what are these imaginaries? What is the space of radical politics today?

What spaces does it occupy, contest and imagine? In the once vacant

symbolic place left by the collapse of the state socialist systems, we

have seen the emergence of a new radical spatial imaginary defined not

so much by institutions and political parties, but by social movements

which create, in their practices, discourses and modes of action, new

political, social and economic spaces, new imaginaries. What shapes this

alternative political space is, I would argue, the idea of autonomy.

Rather than seeking to take over state power, or to participate in state

institutions at the level of parliamentary politics, many contemporary

actors and movements endeavour to create autonomous spaces, social

practices and relations, whether through the permanent or temporary

occupation of physical spaces – squats, community centres and

cooperatives, workplace occupations, mass demonstrations and

convergences – or through the experimentation with practices such

decentralized decision-making, direct action or even alternative forms

of economic exchange, which are not striated, conditioned or ‘captured’

by statist and capitalist modes of organisation. This new form of

politics demands a certain reconsideration of anarchism. I would like to

understand anarchism – or as I conceive of it, postanarchism – as a new

way of thinking about the politics of space and planning, one that I see

as becoming more relevant today. This no doubt appears a strange

undertaking. Anarchism is usually associated with a kind of wild

disordering of space, as a politics and practice of disruption and

spontaneous insurgency – the very opposite of planning. Should we not

recall the nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s dictum about

the ‘urge to destroy’? However, we should remember that, for Bakunin,

this ‘urge to destroy’ was also a ‘creative urge’. Anarchism is as much

a project of construction and creation as it is about destruction.

Indeed, for anarchists, it is the order of state and capitalist economic

power, with its depredations and disruption of autonomous social life,

which is violently destructive. If left to themselves, people would find

ways of peacefully cooperating with one another. Anarchy is order, the

state disorder – as the old saying goes. Therefore, anarchism has to be

considered as much a project of order as disorder; or perhaps a project

of ordered disorder (or disordered order). No doubt there will be a

moment of spontaneous revolt, of insurrection, of the tearing up of

paving stones and the erection of barricades; a confrontation – possibly

violent – with the mechanisms of state power. But this would be

accompanied by a process of rational planning, based around the

possibilities of cooperative and communal ways of life. We find in

anarchist writings many examples of utopian planning, despite the

assertion of the classical anarchists that they were not utopians but

‘materialists’. There were various models put forward of federalism and

libertarian collectivism; arguments for decentralized forms of

agricultural planning, and for local, small-scale rural production over

large-scale industry (see Kropotkin, 1985). Contemporary anarchist

thinkers have also engaged extensively with environmental questions,

analysing the link between human domination and ecological despoliation.

It is argued by some that we should think in terms of an overall ‘social

ecology’: not only is the destruction of the natural environment a

reflection of the forms of domination, hierarchy and exploitation found

in social and economic relations; but also the possibilities of a free

and rational society. As Murray Bookchin[2] puts it: ‘Our continuity

with non-hierarchical nature suggests that a non-hierarchical society is

no less random than an ecosystem’ (1982: 37). At the heart of anarchist

theory is the image of a rationally planned society; but not one whose

order is imposed from above by a class of enlightened technocrats – an

idea anarchists absolutely despised – but, on the contrary, a rational,

non-hierarchical order immanent in social relations and emerging

organically from below. This concern for social ecology and the human

environment accounts for the interest anarchists take in geography,

physical spaces and the history and design of cities. The great

anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus wrote about the impact of the layout

of cities on their inhabitants, and the deleterious effect of

overcrowding, poor planning, pollution and the lack of hygiene. He

likened the city and its inhabitants to a collective organism whose

health and quality of life would be improved through good planning and

urban renewal, with attention given to street cleaning, rubbish

disposal, as well as the establishment of municipal parks. The idea of

the garden city was advocated by Reclus, and many other anarchists, as a

way of making cities more liveable.[3] What is important here is not

only the project of designing cities around the needs of ordinary

people, but also allowing the spontaneous and organic expression of a

city’s unique beauty, as appropriate to its individual natural

environment, rather than imposing upon it, bureaucratically from above,

a rigid, uniform design. As Reclus put it: ‘True art is always

spontaneous and can never adapt itself to the dictates of a public works

commission’ (cited in Clark and Martin, 2004: 193). Furthermore, the

city is often conceived of as a political space, a site – or a potential

site – for popular self-determination and decentralized democratic

decision-making.

Kropotkin, another geographer, saw the medieval city as an autonomous

political space with its own set of rules, customs, practices and

institutions, where individual freedom and cultural life flourished (see

1943). This autonomy, however, was gradually lost and obscured under the

looming shadow of the sovereign state. The city is therefore seen as an

important space of independent political life, in opposition to the

encroachment of the authoritarian, centralized state apparatus. In the

same vein, Bookchin explores the history of cities as spaces of public

participation in politics, looking back to the democratic traditions of

the Athenian agora. The city is thus imagined as the model for a renewal

of public life, as a form of political being-in-common, one that differs

from the anonymity of the bureaucratic processes of ‘statecraft’ (see

Bookchin 1995: [4]). Far, then, from anarchism simply being an

anti-politics of disruption, it is also – indeed, primarily – a politics

of planning. Central to anarchist theory is a conflict between two

opposed spatial imaginaries, two opposing ways of organising political

and social life: one the one hand, a rational and libertarian space, a

federation of free communes and cities; on the other, the

state-capitalist order, a space of irrational authority, hierarchy and

violence. The former spatial arrangement promotes individual freedom,

cooperation, equality, as well as the close involvement of ordinary

people with decision-making processes; the latter fosters domination,

inequality, servitude and the absolute alienation of people from

political power. Planning theory can therefore gain a great deal from an

engagement with anarchism. Indeed, as Peter Hall recognizes, anarchism

has historically had a strong influence on the planning movement,

inspiring an ethos of planning based around small-scale communities,

voluntary cooperation and free association: ‘The vision of these

anarchist pioneers was not merely of an alternative built form, but of

an alternative society, neither capitalistic nor bureaucratic-socialist:

a society based on voluntary cooperation among men and women, working

and living in small self-governing commonwealths’ (1996: 3). Perhaps the

clearest exponent of anarchist principles in questions of planning and

urban design was Colin Ward, who wrote extensively about the anarchist

inspiration behind direct action practices such as squatting, DIY

building, tenant cooperatives and community gardening. Central to these

practices, according to Ward, was the idea of people acting autonomously

and collaboratively to reclaim control of spaces in order to survive,

and, in doing so, radically transforming, from the ground up, their

physical environment (see Ward, 1982, 2000, 2002; Crouch and Ward,

1997). Furthermore, anarchism raises the crucial question of who plans?

Planning, as it is usually conceived, is an elite practice and

discourse: it is the idea of a certain order of space imposed from above

upon pre-existing social relations by a cadre who claim a superior

technical knowledge. The very notion of planning seems to convey the

idea of a technocratic activity, in which a particular vision is

bureaucratically forced upon society. Anarchists are particularly

critical of this sort of mentality. Bakunin, for instance, accused Marx

and his followers of scientific elitism: ‘scientific Communists’ sought

to organize the people ‘according to a plan traced in advance and

imposed upon the ignorant masses by a few “superior” minds’ (1953: 300).

Therefore, if we can speak of ‘anarchist planning’ it must be a form of

organisation that emerges spontaneously, and which people determine

freely for themselves. We have no reason to believe that this would be

chaotic, and, indeed, there are many examples of self-organized communes

and collectives which have arranged their own spaces in highly rational

and efficient ways. We think here of the anarchist collectives in Spain

during the Civil War, which were organized democratically and

non-hierarchically, and which provided services like free health care,

education, care for the elderly, as well as running cooperative

industries, workshops, farms, food distribution centres, restaurants,

hotels and public transport systems. Or, in our time, we might think of

the Zapatista autonomous communities, which provide schools and health

care facilities to the indigenous people of Chiapas. The point of an

anarchist approach to planning would be therefore to question and break

down the hierarchical structures and the intellectual division of labour

usually associated with the planning process; to show that people have a

capacity to plan for themselves and to act cooperatively in the

organisation of physical space. An anarchist approach is based around

what Jacques Rancière would call the equality of intelligence (see

1991); planning should be an expression of the presupposition of

equality, the equal capacity of everyone to plan for themselves, in

cooperation with others. Planning does not belong to an elite class or

discipline, nor should it be the prerogative of governments; it is not a

science or a professional discourse, but rather the active expression of

a politics of libertarian egalitarianism.

2. Revolution As a Spatial Fantasy

If anarchism gives us new ways of thinking about space and planning,

then how should we approach the question of revolution? Revolution would

suggest the violent disordering and de-planning of existing spaces, and

the replacement of one social plan – one spatial order – with another.

As we have seen, anarchism seeks the abolition of the political space of

hierarchy and authority – the space constituted by state power and

capitalism – and the creation of an alternative social space of free

communal arrangements. However, when we think of revolution – a concept

central to the radical political tradition – in spatial terms, as a

political space, the picture becomes somewhat ambiguous. What exactly is

a revolution? What sort of space does it imagine and occupy? The

classical model of revolution is constructed around the image of a

centralized place of power – the political space of the state – which

can be seized, taken over, mastered by a revolutionary vanguard. This

particular conceptualisation of the revolution, it should be noted, is

not the anarchist one but rather the Marxist one, or, to be more

accurate, the Leninist one.4 It is based on the Jacobin model of the

revolutionary leadership which seizes control of the state, and uses

state power to revolutionize society. As Gramsci perceived, the Leninist

strategy was based on a certain spatial mapping of society, one that was

suited to the conditions of Tsarist Russia at that time: a centralized,

autocratic state, with the Winter Palace as its symbolic place of power,

which would be seized in what Gramsci termed a war of ‘movement’ or

‘manoeuvre’. This was in contrast to the ‘war of position’ which

involves building counter-hegemonic practices and institutions at the

level of civil society, a strategy that was better suited to the more

complex and developed society/state structures of Western democracies

(see Gramsci, 1971). However, if the revolutionary strategy thus

diagnosed by Gramsci was not suited to more complex societies in his

time, it is perhaps even less so today, where new forms of ‘networked’

sovereignty have proliferated in an increasingly globalized and

integrated world, and where a symbolic centre of power is much harder to

discern (see Hardt and Negri, 2000). There is no more Winter Palace to

storm, and radical political theory is faced with the task of mapping a

much more complex and fragmented field of power relations.[5] In

thinking through this problem, psychoanalytic theory may be of help – in

particular the thought of Jacques Lacan, which has been applied to an

analysis of the social imaginaries, utopian fantasies and desires which

underpin the practices and discourses of both politics (see Žižek, 1989,

2000; Stavrakakis, 1999, 2007; Dean, 2009) and planning (see Gunder and

Hiller, 2004; Hillier, 2003; Gunder, 2004, 2010). There are two main

aspects of Lacanian theory that I see as particularly useful for

critically reflecting on this idea of revolution. Firstly, Lacan’s

theory of the four discourses, articulated in response to the radicalism

of May ’68, reveals the structural link between revolutionary desire and

the position of authority that it contests. We might recall here Lacan’s

ominous warning to the student militants: ‘The revolutionary aspiration

has only a single possible outcome – of ending up as the master’s

discourse. This is what experience has proved. What you aspire as

revolutionaries to is a master. You will get one…’ (2007: 207).[6] What

exactly did he mean? Lacan sought to understand communication, and

social relations generally, in terms of structural positions or

‘discourses’: discourse refers to a structural position constituted by

relations of language, but which is nevertheless beyond actual words and

utterances (see Verhaeghe, 1995). There are four discourses – the

University, Master, Hysteric and Analyst – and they might be seen as

different ways of articulating social relations and functions. In this

sense, they are crucial to the question of radical politics because they

are a way of explaining social changes and upheavals. For the purposes

of this discussion, I shall focus on two of these discourses – the

Master and the Hysteric – and the paradoxical relationship between them.

The discourse of the Master is the discourse that embodies self-mastery

– the attempt to constitute an autonomous ego, one whose identity is

secure in complete self-knowledge. This discourse is characterized by

the dominance of what Lacan calls the Master Signifier, through which

the subject sustains the illusion of being identical with his own

signifier. In order to sustain this self-identity, this discourse

excludes the unconscious – the knowledge that is not known – as this

would jeopardize the ego’s sense of certainty and autonomy. Therefore,

the discourse of the Master stands in a particular relation of authority

to knowledge, seeking to dominate it, and exclude the knowledge of the

unconscious. The Master’s position of authority over knowledge also

instantiates a position of political authority: political discourses

are, for instance, based on the idea of being able to grasp the totality

of society, something that is, from a Lacanian point of view,

impossible. Implicated in this discourse, then, is the attempt to use

knowledge to gain mastery over the whole social field; it is a discourse

of governing (see Bracher, 1997: 107). In this sense, we might see

top-down planning practices as examples of the Master’s discourse.[7]

The discourse of the Hysteric, by contrast, is associated with the

practice of protesting, and in this sense it is always pitted against

the authority of the Master. In psychoanalytic terms, the Hysteric is

the figure who identifies with her lack, with the absence of the objet

petit a – the lost object of desire, the impossible jouissance – and who

demands of the Other to fill this lack; her lack is thus address to the

Master, of whom she demands to be told the truth of her desire. However,

the Master is unable to give her this knowledge which he himself does

not have, and so through this (knowing) demand of the Hysteric’s, the

Master’s impotence and imposture, his symbolic castration, is exposed.

As Kirsten Campell explains: ‘the Discourse of the Hysteric articulates

the ‘truth’ of the Master’s Discourse: namely that it is founded on the

operation of castration and that its effect is the unconscious’ (2004:

52). What might be the political implications of this paradoxical

relationship between the Master and Hysteric? What is being explored

here is the dialectic between the law and transgression, between

political and social authority and revolutionary desire. Lacan shows

that these two positions are actually dependent on and sustain one

another, much like the Master/Slave dialectic in Hegel where the

identity of the Master is dependent on its recognition by the Slave.

Radical political thought must thus come to terms with the possibility

that revolutionary practices might actually sustain the symbolic

position of authority – the place of power (see Newman, 2004b) – that is

being challenged here. We can see this in a number of ways: for

instance, the act of protesting and resisting can actually symbolically

legitimize the state as ‘democratic’ and ‘tolerant of dissent’[8] ; or

the way that in making radical demands on the state – demands which by

their nature cannot be met – activists might in a sense be playing a

hysterical game with power, a game that only reaffirms it. As Slavoj

Žižek puts it, in his criticism of Simon Critchley, whose position is

more characteristic of anarchism: ‘Critchley’s anarchic ethico-political

agent acts like a superego, comfortably bombarding the state with

demands; and the more the state tries to satisfy these demands, the more

guilty it is seen to be’ (Žižek, 2007). However, it seems to me that

Žižek’s alternative neo-Leninist strategy – which he sees as breaking

out of this deadlock of mutual parasitism in ‘passing to the act’ and

seizing control of state power, rather than impotently resisting it –

fares little better. While this might escape the Hysteric’s stance, it

only ends up in the lap of the Master: indeed, in seizing control of the

state and using it to revolutionize society, the vanguardist strategy

only reaffirms and reproduces state power. So, from a Lacanian

perspective, the discourse of the Master encompasses even those

revolutionary theories and political strategies which seek to overthrow

it. As Lacan says:

What I mean by this is that it embraces everything, even what thinks of

itself as revolutionary, or more exactly what is romantically called

Revolution with a capital R. The master’s discourse accomplishes its own

revolution in the other sense of doing a complete circle (2007: 87).

The revolution remains trapped within the Master’s discourse and thus

fails to effect a genuine transformation. The revolution believes that

it can master the state, to seize and control it at its helm; but what

always happens is that the state masters the revolution – or rather the

revolution installs itself on the throne of power, becoming the new

Master (which is the same thing). The circle is completed. It may be

that revolutions ultimately fail precisely because they are totalising

discourses – because, in other words, they propose an absolute break

with existing conditions and a radical transformation of the totality of

social relations; they imagine an Event that encompasses everything,

that emancipates us from existing conditions and oppressions and

produces a different kind of social order. This brings me to my second

point: Lacan allows us to perceive the utopian fantasy underlying any

notion of social wholeness or totality, including, and especially, that

imagined in the narrative of revolutionary transformation. Central to

Lacan’s theory is the notion of the real, that which cannot be

represented or signified – a kind of void or absence in the chain of

signifiers that create meaning. Indeed, this gap in signification is why

the subject cannot form a complete, whole identity – while he or she is

forced to seek meaning within the external world of language, there is

always an absence in the field of meaning, an absence that corresponds

to the lack of the object of desire: ‘This cut in the signifying chain

alone verifies the structure of the subject as discontinuity in the

real’ (Lacan, 1977: 299). The real, in Lacan’s sense, has nothing to do

with ‘reality’ as such; rather, it is what displaces what is commonly

understood by reality. Our reality – the reality of our identities and

our way of seeing the world – is fundamentally conditioned by symbolic

and fantasy structures; and it is the real – that which cannot be

integrated into these structures – which jeopardizes this reality,

making our identities precarious and at times incoherent. The real is

therefore the point at which these symbolic structures break down and

the contingency of their operation is exposed. It may be seen as an

irreducible void around which identity is both partially constituted and

dislocated. Thinking about the relationship between the real and reality

in these terms has important consequences for any understanding of

social and political relations. Lacan’s theory shows that not only is

the subject lacking – in the sense described above – but also the

external objective order of meaning, the Symbolic Order, is itself

lacking and incomplete; there is no Other of the Other (see Stavrakakis,

1999: 39). This means that ‘society’ itself can never be realized in its

fullness, that social relations can never be grasped in their totality,

precisely because of this structural void that interrupts the closure of

meaning. This is why the Master’s discourse, which seeks to express the

totality of social relations, fails – there is always an excess of

meaning that escapes it. Here, however, the role of fantasy –

particularly as it functions in ideological systems – is to obscure or

cover over this void in meaning, to disavow the real, and to present an

image of society as a graspable totality (see Zizek, 1989: 127).

Fantasies, of course, function in all political discourses. Indeed, we

might say that the fantasy of achieving some kind of social harmony –

whether through the idea of the rationally functioning market, or

through communist modes of organisation – coupled with the structural

impossibility of achieving this, is a dialectic of desire which

continually produces new political identifications and renewed attempts

to grasp social totality. As Stavrakakis says: ‘Our societies are never

harmonious ensembles. This is only the fantasy through which they

attempt to constitute and reconstitute themselves’ (1999: 74). Thus,

every revolutionary project of instituting a new society has to be seen

as ultimately a utopian illusion.

3. Open Spaces: Politics and Planning

The above conclusion would seem to have rather depressing consequences

for radical politics. However, I shall propose instead that it leads to

an opening up of new conceptual spaces for political activity, while at

the same time forcing us to re-think the notion of revolution as a

totalising event. I shall say more about this later, but it is important

to consider here the implications of Lacan’s theory not only for the

conception of political space, but also for the practice of planning,

which is also a form of political practice. Indeed, we could say at this

point that Lacanian theory can lead to a certain radicalization – even

‘anarch-ization’ – of the discourse and practice of planning. For

instance, the position of mastery implicit in most conceptions of

planning would be exposed as an impotent gesture, one of absolute

imposture, one, moreover, that is blind to its own failings and to the

social knowledge that eludes the planner, or the element of contingency,

unpredictability and antagonism that simply cannot be planned for. As

Michael Gunder says, planners (along with everyone else).

Construct a shared social reality that creates illusions and fantasies

of clarity and completeness that are readily acceptable, while somehow

at the same time blindly overlooking, or at least not challenging, what

is lacking and contradicting, so as to make like appear more readily

predictable and stable (2004: 302).

Furthermore, Lacanian theory allows us to perceive the utopian fantasies

at work in planning theory, particularly the fantasies of consensus in

planning decisions. Here Jean Hillier uses the Lacanian notion of the

real to problematize the idea that through a Habermasian-style process

of rational communication – based around the fantasy of the ideal speech

situation – planning decisions can be arrived at in a consensual and

transparent way, without the distortions of power, ideology and

disagreement, in other words, of politics: ‘Deliberation is thus “a kind

of purification”… which leads to consensus and certainty through

critical reflection. Lacanians would argue that this is impossible’

(Hillier, 2003: 48). The real as the lack or void in discourse,

preventing perfect and transparent communication, is therefore what

disrupts this consensual model of decisionmaking in planning. It is not

that the real makes consensus impossible, but rather that it forces us

to question the assumption that consensus based on rational deliberation

is the only legitimate model for planning or politics to follow. What

becomes apparent in this application of Lacanian theory, is a certain

‘anarchic’ displacement of the authority of planning discourse: not only

is the Master’s gesture of epistemological authority exposed in all its

impotence and imposture, but the claim to consensus – which is at heart

simply another claim to mastery and authority in the guise of democratic

and rational dialogue – is shown to be a utopian fiction.

4. Revolution/Insurrection

In light of this Lacanian intervention, it is necessary to rethink the

notion of revolution. I am not suggesting that the term be abandoned

altogether, but that its spatial contours be redefined. No longer

sustainable is the vanguardist-Jacobin model of the revolution imagined

as the seizure and control of state apparatus, despite a number of

recent attempts amongst continental philosophers to resuscitate this

notion (see, for instance, Žižek, 2001; Dean, 2010; Hallward, 2005).

However, we also have to question the broader notion of revolution as an

all-encompassing event that emancipates us from all social, political

and economic oppressions and ideological obfuscations, and which

transforms the entirety of social relations; we have seen how this

presupposes a utopian fantasy of social wholeness and harmony. Rather,

we might think of revolution in terms of a multiplicity of

insurrectional and autonomous spaces. Indeed, this alternative mapping

of the political space is what is implicit in the anarchist idea of the

‘social revolution’, in which Bakunin called upon people to ‘organize

their powers apart from and against the state’ (1953: 377). If we try to

think what this might mean today, it can only be the creation of

autonomous spaces which are heterogeneous to the order of the state and

capitalism. Creating and defending these spaces would no doubt involve

moments of confrontation with the state – and we see this all the time,

in the clashes between police and those who occupy workplaces and

universities, or between the military and indigenous collectives – but

the emphasis would mostly be on fostering alternative ways of life, new

relations and intensities. These are what might be called insurrectional

spaces, and they can be seen as so many cracks within the dominant

social, political and economic order.[9] This idea of insurrection has a

number of resonances. We should see it as a micropolitics which, rather

than supplanting macropolitical practices (in which case it would become

simply another form of macropolitics), acts to supplement them.[10] It

is here that we should pay careful attention to Max Stirner’s

distinction between the revolution and the insurrection:

The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no

longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets

no glittering hopes on ‘institutions’. It is not a fight against the

established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself;

it is only a working forth of me out of the established (1995: 279–80).

For Stirner, a revolution is the attempt to arrange the social space in

a certain way, according to a rational plan. The insurrection, by

contrast, defies the idea of a plan imposed upon society by

institutions; instead, it consists of autonomous self-arrangement. This

voluntary assertion of the freedom of self-arrangement means that one is

no longer bound or enthralled to power; one disengages from established

political institutions and discourses and invents something new. The

insurrection, understood in this sense, is the unbinding of the self

from his or her attachment to power. What Stirner is getting at with his

notion of insurrection is what might be termed a revolution of everyday

life. This is, of course, a thematic that was taken up by the

Situationists, notably Henri Lefebvre and Raoul Vaneigem, for whom the

revolution was something that occurred at the level of everyday

practices and lived experiences. For Vaneigem in particular – and here

his thought bears a striking resemblance to Stirner – it involved an

insurrection of individuals against the established identities or

‘roles’ conferred upon them by consumer and statist society, and a kind

a release of excess energy invested in everyday actions, driven by the

creative and poetic power of one’s imagination (see 2006). Furthermore,

there is a call for revolutionizing the space–time relationship, for a

kind of authentically lived experience that is no longer bounded and

appropriated by capitalism and divided into measurable, quantifiable

units that are constantly being counted down (see Vaneigem, 2006: 228;

Lefebvre, 2008: 10).

In emphasising the singularity of experiences and desires, one also

finds a certain parallel here with William Connolly’s ethos of

pluralization (see Connolly, 1995, 2005), which is understood as a form

of micropolitics and ethics based around an agonistic respect for

difference, singularity and heterogeneity. This is something that goes

beyond liberal tolerance; rather it is a deep pluralism, embodying an

ethos of generosity towards difference, multiplicity and becoming (see

Connolly, 2005: 121–7). Central to this pluralistic ethos is some idea

of autonomy – in other words, enabling spaces for difference and

singularity, and indeed, Connolly believes that agonistic politics would

work towards the fostering and deepening of such spaces: ‘Spaces for

difference are to be established through the play of political

contestation’ (Connolly, 1991: 211). Connolly’s conception of agonism

works through intensities, affects, singularities and becomings –

showing that social and political transformation cannot come about

unless there is a transformation at the level of micropolitical

relationships as well. We are reminded here of the spiritual anarchism

of Gustav Landauer, who argued that the state is not an institution that

can be overthrown in a political revolution, but a certain relation

between people, and therefore it can only be transcended through a

spiritual transformation of relationships: ‘we destroy it by contracting

other relationships, by behaving differently’ (Landauer in Buber, 1996:

47). This also implies a further distinction between revolution and

insurrection: in its totalising spatial logic, which seeks to remake

everything according to a rational plan, revolution is in some respects

insensitive to what already exists. Not everything has to be remade,

and, indeed, the idea of autonomy draws on a certain ethos of care and

conservation. For instance, anarchists have been sensitive to the

dangers of technology: to the way that during the nineteenth century,

technological development and industrialisation was uprooting and

destroying artisan and peasant communities and ways of life; and the way

that, in our time, it is devastating the natural environment (see

Gordon, 2008: 111–38).[11] So, perhaps we might see an insurrectionary

politics of autonomy as involving a sensitivity to the fragility of what

exists and to the different forms of natural, social and cultural life

that should be preserved, along with a desire to radically modify other

social forms. Here I find useful Bruno Latour’s notion of design as

embodying a degree of caution and modesty, and as a way of tempering the

Promethean, modernist impulse, characteristic of revolutionary politics,

to radically break with the past and build anew. Latour explains:

If it is true that the present historical situation is defined by a

complete disconnect between two great alternative narratives – one of

emancipation, detachment, modernization, progress and mastery, and the

other, completely different, of attachment, precaution, entanglement,

dependence and care – then the little word “design” could offer a very

important touch stone for detecting where we are heading and how well

modernism (and also postmodernism) has been faring. To put it more

provocatively, I would argue that design is one of the terms that has

replaced the word “revolution”! (2008).

While I am resistant to the element of technological fetishism implicit

in this notion of design – and certainly with respect to Latour’s idea

that nature must be ‘designed’ or ‘redesigned’ – I think we can see a

difference emerging here between two radical approaches to space: the

revolutionary, modernist idea of the plan, which suggests an ordering of

space imposed from above, and which therefore involves, at some level, a

degree of coercion (the Five Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward); and the

more ‘postmodern’ – and I would say (post)anarchist – idea of design

which, if we can rescue it from its technologically driven (and

therefore at some level technocratic) connotations, suggests forms of

autonomous self-ordering from below, and a practice of caring for,

conserving, incorporating, and, only where necessary, modifying existing

ways of life, practices and traditions.

5. Postanarchist Spaces and the Project of Autonomy

Design, if applied in this way, also suggests that there is nothing

immanent or naturally pre-destined about the emergence of anarchist

spaces. That is to say, the autonomous spaces of communal free

association are always political spaces – they have to be constructed,

fought for, negotiated, ‘designed’. They do not result from a certain

rational plan that is somehow immanent in nature or social relations,

and which unfolds dialectically as, for instance, Bookchin believes (see

1982: 31). This is where my postanarchist approach departs from the

essentialist categories and positivist approaches of classical

anarchism.[12] Postanarchism, or if you like, post-foundational

anarchism, conceives of a political space which is indeterminate,

contingent and heterogeneous – a space whose lines and contours are

undecidable and therefore contestable. Postanarchist political space is,

in other words, a space of becoming. [13] This motif of becoming allows

us to reflect more carefully on the idea of autonomy, which I have seen

as central to insurrectional politics today. We cannot understand

autonomy as a fully achieved, consistent, fixed identity. We know from

Lacan that there can never be any pure autonomy, as the subject derives

meaning only through external structures of language over which he or

she has no real control; desire is always the desire of the Other (see

Stavrakakis, 2007: 47). This does not mean, of course, that one cannot

use linguistic, symbolic and social practices to create spaces for

greater freedom and autonomy, both individual and collective; but the

point is that these are always shaped and realized in relation to

existing social structures. Indeed, we could say that the dimension of

the real is, paradoxically, what makes autonomy both possible and

impossible: insofar as it is external to the symbolic order, it provides

a certain distance, a critical point of departure, or even a possible

space of resistance to existing socialpolitical-economic structures; at

the same time, it is what prevents an autonomous space from being

completely realized. Indeed, the real itself is characterized by Lacan

as an ‘excluded interior’ or ‘intimate exterior’ – both inside and

outside the symbolic order simultaneously (see Miller, 1996). Thus, a

particular space can never be said to be fully outside in a

self-enclosed, autarchic way. Rather, we should see spaces of autonomy

as always contingent and indeterminate. As Marcus Doel says, referring

to the spatial practice of poststructuralism:

[it] would not constitute a unique and self-contained position. Rather,

it would take the form of a Möbius (s)trip, through which the apparently

secure threshold between what is inside and what is outside gives way to

an undecidable and open multiplicity in continuous variation (1999: 34).

How then should we think about autonomous political spaces in our

contemporary world – spaces in which alternative practices,

relationships and modes of organisation are actively produced, and in

which we see a conscious effort to live in ways that are

non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian and non-exploitative? We think of

the multiplicity of experiments in alternative, non-statist forms of

organisation – whether in the form of squats, occupied buildings,

factories and universities, reclaimed physical spaces, climate camps,

independent media centres, localized and transnational activist

networks, communes, food co-ops, community action groups, indigenous

autonomous communities, and so on (see the work of Chatterton, 2010;

Esteva, 2010; May, 2010; Fuller et al., 2010; Kasnabish, 2010).[14]

However, surely we can only rarely speak of an absolute autonomy here –

those involved in these alternative political spaces still engage with

the ‘outside’ world, including with the state; people move and live in

different social spaces, often simultaneously. Indeed, the relationship

between autonomous spaces and the state is particularly ambiguous and

problematic: what does it mean to be autonomous from the state; and,

moreover, to what extent does this autonomy actually threaten the state?

My answer here is that we should think about such spaces not as

fully-formed totalities, but rather as an ongoing form of

experimentation with what Foucault would call ‘practices of freedom’ or

‘counter-conducts’ (see 2002b),[15] or what Alain Badiou, in a different

2005: 145).[16]

6. Radical Imaginings and Utopian Desires

In this sense, I prefer to see autonomy as an ongoing project of

political spatialization, rather than a fully achieved form of social

organization. Despite the important differences between Lacan and

Cornelius Castoriadis (see Stavrakakis, 2007: 37–65), Castoriadis’s

psychoanalytically based conception of autonomy is particularly useful

for thinking through what autonomy in a political sense means. For

Castoriadis, autonomy is central to any genuinely revolutionary project,

as it implies the freedom and capacity of people to determine their own

conditions of existence – to consciously re-make their social world, a

world that they usually experience in the alienating form of anonymous

social, political and economic institutions over which they have no

control. In this sense, for Castoriadis, the project (of autonomy) must

be distinguished from the plan: the former is ‘a determined praxis,

considered in all its ties with the real’; whereas the latter

‘corresponds to the technical moment of an activity, when conditions,

objectives and means can be and are “exactly” determined’ (1997: 77).

While revolutionary projects always require planning, the creativity and

spontaneity of project should not be subordinated or reduced to the

‘rationality of the Plan’, as has often been the experience of previous

socialist revolutions (1997: 109). Castoriadis, furthermore, bases the

project of autonomy on the Freudian psychoanalytic narrative of the

subject gaining a clearer understanding of, and thus a certain

reflective distance from, the unconscious fantasies and heteronymous

desires that otherwise have such a determining effect upon him or her.

However, it is not a matter, of course, of ‘freeing’ the subject from

the unconscious – the unconscious is a vital source of creativity,

allowing the subject to create new social meanings out of the

multiplicity or ‘magma’ of significations; the unconscious is the source

of the radical imaginary (Castoriadis, 1997: 370–73). Moreover, the

social dimension of the unconscious (for Castoriadis, the radical

imaginary refers to both the dimension of the social-historical and the

psyche-soma [1997: 339]) shows that autonomy is always a collective

experience: just as the subject becomes autonomous precisely through the

recognition of his rooted-ness in the unconscious, and just as he uses

unconscious as a resource for creativity and freedom, his autonomy is

only realized collectively through relations with others (see

Castoriadis, 1997: 107). What is important about Castoriadis’s

understanding of autonomy is not only this collective dimension – that

demonstrates that autonomy is meaningless if it is only the freedom of

atomized individual – but also the emphasis on desire, creativity and

imagination in consciously creating alternative social relationships.

Here, the question of utopia arises again, albeit in a different form.

This might seem odd, given that I have used Lacanian theory precisely to

interrogate the utopian fantasy of revolutionary projects; but

nevertheless, we must recognize the utopian desire that fuels every

insurrectionary project. We should not dismiss the powerful drive and

political value of the utopian imaginary as a form of critical

reflection on the limits of our world. However, rather than seeing

utopia as a rational plan for a new social order, we should see it, as

Miguel Abensour puts it, as an ‘education of desire’: ‘to teach desire

to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and, above all to desire in

a different way’ (see Thompson ,1988: 791). Does not Lacan himself

formulate fantasy in the same way, as the means by which the subject

sustains his or her desire? However, insurrectionary utopianism, in my

understanding, subscribes to a different logic: whereas fantasy in the

psychoanalytic sense is always the same ‘fundamental fantasy’ around

which neurotic desire endlessly circulates and repeats itself –

something which as we have seen characterizes the revolutionary fantasy

– the utopian insurrectionary ‘fantasy’, by contrast, teaches us to

desire differently; it disrupts the usual circuit of desire, opening it

up to the Other, to what is different, to what is outside itself.

7. Conclusion: Towards a Postanarchist Theory of Planning

I have developed a postanarchist conception of politics, understood in

terms of an ongoing project of autonomy and a pluralization of

insurrectional spaces and desires. Does this point towards a new way of

thinking about planning? I have argued above for an alternative,

(post)anarchist-inspired conception of planning, based on autonomous,

ground-up practices of direct action – in opposition to traditional

conceptions of planning as a top-down technocratic activity and

discourse (the Master’s discourse). But how does postanarchism

distinguish itself from other, more seemingly democratic approaches to

planning, where there is a greater emphasis on collaboration and

consultation with those outside the planning profession? The

collaborative model of planning (see Healy, 1997; Innes, 2004; Innes and

Booher, 1999, 2004) is problematic on a number of grounds. As argued

above, it presupposes a fantasized utopia of undistorted rational

communication, something that is not only structurally impossible from a

Lacanian point of view, but also works to occlude the properly political

dimension of antagonism and disagreement. Moreover, as Mark Purcell

contends, the collaborative planning model is not only insufficient for

resisting neoliberal rationalities at work in economic policies and

planning strategies, but might actually serve to legitimize them by

providing them with a veneer of democratic inclusiveness which, in

reality, suppresses and disempowers more marginalized voices (see 2009:

140–65; see also Gunder, 2010). In assuming that communication and

dialogue can operate in a neutral framework, collaborative planning

theory imagines a level playing field where differences in power and

wealth are somehow counteracted. Innes and Booher describe the approach

in the following terms: ‘The proposal here is that participation must be

collaborative and it should incorporate not only citizens, but also

organized interests, profit-making and non-profit organizations,

planners and public administrators in a common framework where all are

interacting and influencing one another…’ (2004: 422). Yet, we see how

this formal neutrality and equality – where everyone is included as a

‘stakeholder’ – can function in an ideological way to legitimize an

already assumed economic consensus, while de-legitimizing antagonism and

dissent as irrational, violent and undemocratic. As an alternative to

the collaborative/communicative model, Hillier has proposed a model

based around the recognition that contestation and antagonism are

central to the political, and which seeks to create a forum whereby

these antagonisms can be brought to the surface and mobilized in a

democratic form:

Since we cannot eliminate antagonism, we need to domesticate it to a

condition of agonism in which passion is mobilized constructively

(rather than destructively) towards the promotion of democratic

decisions that are partly consensual, but which also respectfully accept

unresolvable disagreements (Hillier, 2003: 42).

This agonistic model is derived from Connolly, and from Chantal Mouffe,

who has sought to revitalize democratic theory through a combination of

pluralism and the Schmittian friend–enemy opposition (see 2000, 2005).

The advantage of this model over the collaborative one is that it seeks

to make visible what Mouffe calls ‘the ineradicable dimension of

antagonism which exists in human societies’, and which is central to the

category of the political (2005: 119). At the same time, however, I find

this model, particularly in the form presented by Mouffe, itself

insufficient for thinking about a genuinely radical politics today. In

this model, democratic agonism always takes place within the

unacknowledged framework of the state, and it is unable to conceive of

politics outside this framework. We can see this in a number of aspects

of Mouffe’s thought – for instance, in her hostility to notions of

transnational activism and cosmopolitan politics. While she is perfectly

correct in her criticism of certain neoliberal, as well as social

democratic, visions of cosmopolitan globalization, her approach seems to

reaffirm the concept of state sovereignty, and regards the nation state

as the only legitimate site of democratic politics, thus ruling out any

conception of transnational political spaces.[17] Furthermore, we find

in Mouffe’s theory of democracy a strong defence of parliamentary

institutions because of the way that they stage antagonistic

relationships, transforming them into ‘safe’ forms of agonism (see 2005:

23). This seems a somewhat limited model for a radically democratic

politics to follow. By situating democratic agonistic struggles

primarily within the state and its parliamentary institutions, Mouffe

leaves the actual political space of the state unchallenged. Instead of

this, I would like to propose an alternative theoretical model based on

the politics of autonomy, which contests the idea of the state being the

exclusive site of the political; on the contrary, I see the state as a

machine of depoliticization and governmentality, what Rancière would

call ‘the police’ (see 1999). Moreover, it contends that genuinely

political relationships always stage a confrontation with the state and

can only be realized in opposition to it. The existence of autonomous

movements, organizations and political spaces forces us to re-situate

the political dimension away from the centricity of the state and

towards alternative practices and forms of decision-making. If I could

formulate it in this way: the autonomy of the political – the category

central to Mouffe (and Schmitt) – only makes sense if it is thought of

in terms of a politics of autonomy. The re-situation of the political

dimension away from the hegemony of the state is what I see as central

to postanarchism (see Newman, 2010a). Moreover, if we are to think about

democratic politics as autonomous and as not bound by the state, we can

take heed of Abensour’s argument that genuine democracy articulates

itself in opposition to the state; indeed, he posits a notion of

‘insurgent democracy’ as a democracy against the state – ‘democracy is

anti-statist or else it is not’ (2011: xxxiii). Indeed, Abensour

distinguishes ‘insurgent democracy’ from what he calls ‘conflictual

democracy’, or what I understand as ‘agonistic democracy’:

Insurgent democracy is not a variant of conflictual democracy, but its

exact opposite. Whereas conflictual democracy practices conflict within

the State, a democratic State which in its very name presents itself as

an avoidance of the original conflict, inclining as a result

conflictuality towards permanent compromise, insurgent democracy

situates conflict in another space, outside the State, against it, and

far from practicing the avoidance of the major conflict – democracy

against the State – it does not shrink from rupture, if need be

(Abensour, 2011: xl [italics are mine]).

Just as it is claimed (rightly) by proponents of agonistic democracy

that the communicative/ consensus model occludes or disavows the

antagonistic dimension present in social relations, could we not say

that the agonistic model itself is based on a disavowal of a more

fundamental antagonism – that between an ‘anarchic’ democracy and the

order of the state itself? If radical models of planning are to give

space to political antagonism – to not shy away from it or try to

domesticate it under some imagined consensus – then they must recognize

the genuinely political (and democratic) moment of opposition to the

state. A planning model of this kind would acknowledge and, indeed,

construct itself around autonomous planning practices engaged in

everyday by people and movements of resistance to statism and

capitalism. Here I am inspired by the idea of ‘insurgent planning’ as

explored by Faranak Miraftab in her account of an anti-eviction campaign

on the part of slum-dwellers South Africa (see 2009: 32–50). These were

grass-roots mobilizations of ordinary people who built makeshift shacks

and community centres on the side of the road in protest against the

neoliberal policies of slum-clearance that had made them homeless.

Importantly, they were acting directly and autonomously, rather than

voicing their grievances through the official channels and through the

usual representatives, such as the NGOs, who would no doubt be regarded

as the only legitimate participants in the dialogue under the

collaborative model. Thus, for Miraftab, the insurgent planning model

challenges the notion of ‘citizen participation’ central to neoliberal

governance. Moreover, while it is clearly agonistic rather than

consensual, its rejection of representation and the formal institutions

of power, and its emphasis instead on direct acts of resistance and

self-organisation, opens up a new kind of autonomous political space

which is no longer adequately accounted for in the agonistic model.

An important element of autonomous, postanarchist planning practice is

what might be referred to as prefigurative practices, which seek to

realize alternatives to capitalism and statism within the current order

– a kind of moment of utopian rupture within the present (see Gordon

2008, 34–40). We might think here of directly democratic forms of

decision-making employed by activists, or cooperative practices employed

by self-organized communities, or even the organization of protests and

mass convergences, in which the carnival like atmosphere and the

reclaiming of physical spaces is just as important as the voicing of

demands and grievances (see Graeber, 2002; Day, 2005; Pleyers, 2010).

Perhaps the most stunning example of this prefigurative planning was

seen in the recent democratic insurrection in Egypt, where Tahrir

Square, the symbolic centre of the protest, was transformed into an

autonomous liberated zone. This was something that suggested, in the

words of Richard Seymour, a ‘new model commune’:[18]

First of all, they took over a nominally public space which the state

wished to exclude them from access to, Tahrir Square. Having taken it

over, and affirmed that they wouldn’t simply go home at the end of the

day – something we might want to think about – they saw off wave after

wave of assault on the protests, from police and plain clothes thugs.

They set up committees to keep watch for government men… They set up a

network of tents for people to sleep in… There are toilet arrangements –

no small logistical matter when there are routinely hundreds of

thousands of people occupying the capital’s main intersection. They rig

up street lamps to provide electricity. They set up garbage collection,

medical stops – they occupy a well-known fast food outlet and turn it

into somewhere that people shot at or beaten by police can get treated.

They set up a city within a city, and collectively coped with many more

challenges than the average city would have to face in an average day

(Seymour, 2011).

Can there be any better demonstration of autonomous planning – of the

utopian desires, insurgent energies and organizational capacities of

ordinary people to transform their social space?

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Author Biography

Saul Newman (PhD UNSW 1998) is a Reader in Political Theory at

Goldsmiths, University of London. His research is in continental and

poststructuralist political thought, postanarchist theory, contemporary

radical politics and critical IR. He is the author of From Bakunin to

Lacan (Lexington Books, 2001); Power and Politics in Poststructuralist

Thought (Routledge, 2005); Unstable Universalities (MUP, 2007); Politics

Most Unusual (Palgrave, 2008); The Politics of Postanarchism (EUP,

2010); and Max Stirner (Palgrave, 2011), as well as many journal

articles.

[1] Steve Pile explores the repressed unconscious of cities and urban

spaces, suggesting a kind of Freudian ‘dreamwork’ to bring this

dimension to light (see Pile, 2000: 75–86). In a similar vein, could we

not say that central to radical politics is a kind of dreamwork that

seeks to reveal the antagonisms that underlie and continue to haunt our

pacified social spaces?

[2] For an evaluation of Bookchin’s impact not only on anarchist theory,

but also on ecology and urban planning, see White (2008).

[3] Reclus’ ideas of social solidarity and ecological balance had a

strong influence on the sociologist and town planner, Patrick Geddes,

whose plans for urban design were adopted in different cities of the

world in the early twentieth century (see Law, 2005: 4–19; Geddes,

1927).

[4] One should be wary about drawing too sharp a line here between the

anarchist and Marxian traditions here. We must remember that Marx shared

the same aspiration as the anarchists for a stateless society based on

free association. We should also recall that even Lenin, despite his

vanguardist strategy of seizing control of the state, nevertheless

declares a certain affinity with the anarchists in regarding the state

as an instrument of domination whose eventual transcendence was the

ultimate aim of a communist revolution: ‘We do not at all disagree with

the Anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as an aim.

We maintain that, to achieve this aim, temporary use must be made of the

instruments, means, and methods of state power against the exploiters,

just as the dictatorship of the oppressed class is temporarily necessary

for the annihilation of classes.’ (see 1990: 52).

[5] Of course, Foucault’s understanding of power as dispersed and

co-extensive with social life, has made the classical revolutionary

narrative far more ambiguous. The idea that there is a symbolic centre

of power to be seized disguises the fact that power relations have

permeated the social fabric in a much more infinitesimal way, and that

therefore revolutions are often unable to address the problem of power

(see Foucault, 2002c: 123).

[6] For a more extensive discussion of importance of Lacan’s four

discourses to radical political theory see Newman (2004a).

[7] For an extensive discussion of Lacan’s four discourses and planning

see Gunder (2004).

[8] Žižek gives the example of the mass protests against the war in Iraq

in 2003, showing how they allowed George Bush to actually legitimise the

war, claiming that it will bring the same democracy and the freedom to

dissent to the Iraqi people (see Žižek, 2007).

[9] I borrow this metaphor of cracks from John Holloway’s book Crack

Capitalism, in which he argues that social relations can only be

transformed in a micropolitical way through the multiplicity of everyday

acts of resistance that are like so many cracks in the edifice of power

(see 2010).

[10] See Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the micropolitical, or

‘molecular’, and macropolitical (2005: 208–31).

[11] See the anarchist-primitivist critiques of technology from thinkers

such as John Zerzan (1996) and Fredy Perlman (1983).

[12] For a more extensive discussion of postanarchism and where it

departs from classical anarchism, see Newman (2010a).

[13] This idea of a postanarchist space of becoming is influenced by

poststructuralist approaches to space, in which space is seen as an

event that takes place, and is characterised by flows, fluxes,

intensities, blurred lines, differences and multiplicities, rather than

fixed identities and borders. See Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of

‘smooth’ as opposed to ‘striated’ spaces (2005: 474–500); see also

Hillier’s application of Deleuze to planning theory (2008).

[14] Another important theoretical intervention here is that of Italian

autonomia – a heretical form of Marxism that emphasises the militant

self-organization of workers as separate from representative agencies

like trade unions and political parties. For a survey of this tradition

see Steve Wright (2002) and Lotringer and Marazzi (2007).

[15] Of course, Foucault was particularly sensitive to the relationship

between power and space, and therefore to the power implications of

particular spatial configurations and architectural designs, both in the

‘institutions of confinement’ as well as in what might be called

‘liberated’ spaces and ‘heterotopias’. In an interview on ‘Space,

Knowledge, Power’, Foucault says, ‘I think that it [architecture] can

and does produce positive effects when the liberating intentions of the

architect coincide with the real practice of people in the exercise of

their freedom’ (see Foucault 2002a: 355)

[16] Here Badiou refers to a politics that exceed the Party-State form,

such as the Paris Commune and the Shanghai Commune – events that posit a

moment of rupture with statist modes of organisation and prefigure

alternative forms of politics. Yet, what is curious about Badiou is

precisely his ambivalence on this question, expressed in his sense of

discomfort about the proximity of his thought to anarchism (see Newman,

2010b).

[17] For instance, Mouffe is particularly critical of Hardt and Negri’s

politics of the multitude, which invokes the idea of a form of global

democracy beyond the nation state (see 2005: 113–14).

[18] For a different vision of an autonomous commune organised as an

insurrectional urban space, see ‘The Coming Insurrection’ (Invisible

Committee, 2009; see also Merrifield, 2010).