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Title: Language, Ideology, and Anarchism
Author: Leonard Williams
Date: 2011
Language: en
Topics: language, university, John Zerzan, theory, academy, ideology
Source: Retrieved on January 25th from http://aaaaarg.org/upload/leonard-williams-language-ideology-and-anarchism.pdf
Notes: Manchester College North Manchester, Indiana Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, San Antonio, Texas, April 20-23, 2011

Leonard Williams

Language, Ideology, and Anarchism

As an emancipatory perspective, anarchism aspires to replace forms of

domination with forms of freedom. Aspirations are wonderful things; they

push us toward new achievements, and they hold us accountable when we

act. The difficulties begin when our aspirations are not realized, when

we try and fail. The difficulties become apparent when we at last

acknowledge the staying power that forms of domination possess. One

response might simply be to resolve to “fail better”—as Samuel Beckett

suggested in WorstwardHo. The trial-and-error pursuits of activist

practice seem to reflect just such an orientation to the emancipatory

project. Another possible response would be to engage in the sort of

thinking that emerges whenever our expectations do not come to

pass—thinking that runs the gamut from pragmatic problem-solving to

academic theorizing. Regardless, anarchists have taken up both the

challenge to act and the challenge to theorize in various ways. A few

anarchist theorists have sought to meet these challenges, at least in

part, by exploring theories of language and ideology.

One among them has been John Zerzan, who devoted an essay to the topic.

His primitivist anarchism attacks civilization and culture generally,

asserts that “the origin of all symbolizing is alienation” (Zerzan 2006,

57). It regards language as an alien ideology, an externally imposed

form of domination.

Alternatively, theorists drawing upon post-structuralist strains of

thought have come to see language both as a significantly constraining

and as a potentially liberating force. By further exploring issues

related to language and ideology, then, this paper constitutes a set of

preliminary notes toward articulating an anarchist approach to the

theory of language. I certainly do not claim to have fulfilled any such

aspiration. My aim here is the more limited one of doing some conceptual

or philosophical work that might help further the discussion.

In many respects, language and political theory are coterminous. Plato

and Aristotle certainly ruminated about language as they debated a

theory of Forms or assessed competing claims to rule. Hobbes, cautioning

against the troubles engendered by any “abuse of words,” took particular

pains to set forth an explicitly defined vocabulary for moral and

political thought. Rousseau also made a contribution—his hypothetical

account of the state of nature gave language an important place in the

prehistory of civilization. Without it, there would be no lasting

communities or societies, and hence, none of the associated inequalities

resulting from property and power. More recently, countless

contributions to academic political theory have taken an explicitly

linguistic turn. This heritage makes it all the more interesting that

anarchist theory, with the exception of the postanarchists, has devoted

relatively little attention to the topic.

In this context, the essay on “Language: Origin and Meaning” by John

Zerzan (2006, 3143) might well be a useful starting point for

reflection. Zerzan’s primitivism is a good place for this study to begin

because in many ways his ideas represent a limit case. Critical of every

aspect of a symbolic culture that underlies civilization itself, he sees

language, thought, and culture as forms of mediated experience that take

us away from our natural essence (Guimaraes 2010, 340). Much as Rousseau

did, Zerzan regards domination and repression as the logically and

practically necessary outcomes of civilization. Because it represents an

aboriginal separation from nature, from direct experience, the advent of

language and other forms of symbolic culture marks nothing less than a

fall from grace. It marks the point where we become estranged not only

from nature and each other, but from life itself.

Beyond that initial estrangement, though, language constitutes another,

more insidious phenomenon. As a means for transmitting ideology,

language becomes the primary vehicle for the sort of subjugation or

domination that anarchists characteristically oppose. Operating through

the “closure of symbols,” language and ideology work simultaneously to

produce false consciousness, thought control, and unfreedom (Zerzan

2006, 32-34). In every society, language conceals and justifies,

monopolizes and shapes everyday life. “As the paradigm of ideology,

language stands behind all of the massive legitimation necessary to hold

civilization together” (Zerzan 2006, 35).

Aware that this very critique of reification is itself reified in

language, Zerzan does not see an immediate path out of the ideological

straightjacket in which we find ourselves. Language and ideology are

learned habits of thought, imposed from the outside. They constitute us

as part of an unnatural world. The more we are socialized, the more

embedded in that world we become; the more embedded, the more estranged.

Philosophical insights into language offer no way out, either. To

Zerzan, poststructuralist theories simply drain language of meaning. The

only hope is to restore some form of authentic communication, which he

finds in the sorts of unmediated experiences where language itself is

unnecessary. There are but “two kinds of human experience: the

immediate, non-separate reality, and separate, mediated experience”

(Guimaraes 2010, 339), and Zerzan clearly prefers the former. In short,

the ideal situation would be “a world of lovers, a world of the

face-to-face, in which even names can be forgotten, a world which knows

that enchantment is the opposite of ignorance. Only a politics that

undoes language and time and is thus visionary to the point of

voluptuousness has any meaning” (Zerzan 2006, 43).

The task, it seems, is to delineate a perspective on language that

captures and reflects the aspirations of anarchists. Such an

understanding involves an effort to advance a theory of language that is

both attuned to abstract theory and reflective of common sense, that is

both accurate and emancipatory. This is no easy task, to be sure, but

Zerzan’s essay provides us with a starting point insofar as it appears

to make three critical claims: (1) language and ideology are unnatural,

external impositions on the freedom of subjects; (2) language and

ideology are hegemonic tools for the legitimation of domination; and (3)

language and ideology are closed systems of thought. In what immediately

follows, I will examine each of these claims as potential building

blocks for an anarchist understanding of language and ideology.

II

Zerzan’s core assumption is that language, like ideology, is an external

phenomenon, something imposed by an alien force. We encounter it as the

always already existing medium of communication between people. We are

given a language almost as a birthright, an inheritance from previous

generations. As people develop into subjects, language appears not only

as a vehicle for thought and expression, but also as the embodiment of

the force of society— in Lacanian terms, the Symbolic Order. Our choice

as a subject is to integrate and be content, or to rebel and remain an

outsider.

Karl Marx’s oft-quoted observation about history (that we make it, but

not as we please) seems just as apt as a characterization of our

encounter with language. Language stands outside the individual,

appearing as an external and restrictive force. As Max Stirner (1995,

305, original emphasis) put it: “Language or ‘the word’ tyrannizes

hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army offixed

ideas'” As we learn such things as the rules of a grammar or discourse,

one’s feral spirit is told either to conform or be crushed. Going one’s

own way, thinking one’s own thoughts, expressing oneself in a unique

manner—these are simply not possible in the context of a system of

communication based upon experiences and truths that are not our own.

Because language is a given, because it seems to stand opposed to

individual freedom, Zerzan believes that it can only have arisen from an

external source. It can only have appeared as a dastardly means to

unsavory ends. In this context, Zerzan (2006, 36-37) seems drawn to two

possible ends for the advent of language—one, lying or deceiving in a

world where intentions and emotions were otherwise transparently

conveyed, and two, initiating people into the division of labor that

serves as the foundation of civilization. Regardless of the end,

language and other symbolic forms of communication appear as a limit

upon what is natural and free.

One anarchist who took issue with that view was Rudolph Rocker. In one

chapter of his 1937 work, Nationalism and Culture, Rocker (1978) argued

against any notion that a given language represented the spirit of a

particular people, that language had an essentially national character.

In his view, though language was inextricably involved with social

relations. “In speech, human thought expresses itself, but this is no

purely personal affair, as is often assumed, but an inner process

continually animated and influenced by the social environment. In man's

thoughts are mirrored not only his natural environment, but all

relations which he has with his fellows.” Though Rocker believes that

language carries culture, he did not believe that either language or

culture represented something alien to humans in their natural state.

“For language in its widest sense is not the exclusive property of man,

but can be clearly recognized in all social species. That within these

species a certain mutual understanding takes place is undeniable

according to all observations. It is not language as such, but the

special forms of human speech, the articulate language which permits of

concepts and so enables man's thoughts to achieve higher results, which

distinguish man in this respect from other species (Rocker 1978).”

In other words, speech (understood as vocabulary) clearly has to be

taught; however, language (understood as thought and communication) is

entirely natural.

In this sense, then, language cannot be understood as an external

imposition. As he often observes, Noam Chomsky (2004, 85, 128, 429)

believes that language is the outward result of a mental faculty that

all humans naturally possess. This mental faculty represents a

fundamentally biological capacity—“an essential component of the human

mind” (Chomsky 2004, 578)—that allows us to interact with others, to

create ever new forms of expression. The capacity to learn a language

lies within us and enables us to generate an entire range of sentences

that may never have been uttered before. “A person who knows a

particular language has the capacity to speak and understand an

indefinitely large number of sentences, and uses this ability freely in

normal linguistic behavior: in communication, in expression of thought,

and so on” (Chomsky 2004, 350). Far from an alien imposition on nature,

then, language is a natural element of human life. As expected, Zerzan

(2009) regards Chomsky’s view of language as a “severely backward,

nonradical perspective, not unrelated to his unwillingness to put much

else into question, outside of a very narrow political focus.” Where

Zerzan takes the story of the Tower of Babel to be a metaphor for the

loss of innocence and the onset of alienation, Chomsky regards the

multiplicity of human languages to be an important indicator of the

freedom and creativity found in human nature.

The question of how natural language is or should be was certainly an

element in the debate over Esperanto during the late 19th and early 20th

centuries. Certainly, Esperanto is one the most artificial languages one

can imagine—designed to be a lingua franca for people from a range of

natural languages. Some anarchists and social reformers were convinced

that its widespread use would not only encourage international

understanding and cooperation, but would also “somehow make people more

free” (Guimaraes 2010, 339). Other radical theorists found that

Esperanto had little to recommend, however. Antonio Gramsci, who had

academic training in linguistics, asserted “the historicity of languages

in opposition to the illusory utopia of a language created artificially

without any ground or cultural participation” (Rosiello 2010, 32). In a

similar vein, Gustav Landauer (2010b, 277) observed how artificial

creations such as Esperanto could “never capture what is most important

in a language: the fine shades, the nuances, the unspeakable. In the

grown languages, a lot of what is said lives between the words as an

unutterable element.” Any insistence on the organic character of

language certainly suggests that not all that is natural is bad—even if

it supports civilization.

III

To treat language as natural, though, does not wholly undermine Zerzan’s

position on language and ideology. Like language, ideology can never

truly be neutral. Holding an ideology embeds one in and further

legitimizes a pre-existing community; holding an ideology, like speaking

a language, frequently puts one on the side of the established order. As

John Thompson (1984, 130-131, emphasis deleted) has observed, “to study

ideology is to study the ways in which meaning (signification) serves to

sustain relations of domination.” Functional analyses of ideology thus

have noted that, in addition to giving folks some cognitive purchase on

the world, ideological positions put people into relationships with

others. Beyond identifying a person with a particular community,

ideologies also serve a hegemonic function—they ratify the choices that

people make by ensuring their legitimacy or rightness.

Mention of hegemony naturally brings to mind the ideas of Gramsci. In

his view, language and ideology helped constitute what he called ‘common

sense’—an ordinary understanding of how the world works. For most

people, common sense functions as a kind of philosophy, and it provides

people with the cognitive frameworks through which they grasp the

meaning of social and political phenomena. Gramsci (1971, 377)

acknowledges that, as a “historically necessary” element of any social

structure, ideologies “have a validity which is ‘psychological’; they

‘organise’ human masses, and create the terrain on which men move,

acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.” Over time, this

common sense becomes second nature to people’s ways of thinking and

acting.

Gramsci’s discussions of hegemony examine language and ideology (or,

more broadly, culture) as a means for advancing the political and

economic interests of particular groups, parties, or social classes. In

his view, “the State is the entire complex of practical and theoretical

activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains

its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom

it rules” (Gramsci 1971, 244). If the ruling ideas of an epoch are

indeed the ideas of the ruling class, as Marx noted, then the ideas of

classes seeking to rule must somehow be invoked in ways that replace the

others. No revolutionary movement is possible without a revolutionary

consciousness, as we know. As a result, because symbolic systems are

never neutral, the crucial question in evaluating any particular

manifestation of language, ideology, or culture is: Who benefits?

Gramsci observed that all parties (and, we could say, all ideologies)

carry out a policing function—the function of safeguarding interests in

the context of maintaining order. It need only be asked whether the

function is performed for a reactionary or a progressive purpose. In

Gramsci’s (1971, 155) words: “Does the given party carry out its

policing function in order to conserve an outward, extrinsic order which

is a fetter on the vital forces of history; or does it carry it out in

the sense of tending to raise the people to a new level of civilisation

expressed programmatically in its political and legal order?” This

positional question necessarily focuses our attention on the role played

by language as a material force in the political contest between

classes, between the state and its antagonists.

The focus of political action thus has to move from direct challenges to

state power (wars of maneuver) to indirect efforts aimed at undermining

hegemonic world views (wars of position). Because direct challenges to a

hegemonic world view are likely to fail, one must proceed instead with a

patient and difficult siege (Gramsci 1971, 239) that seeks to undermine

the legitimacy of domination by calling common sense into question.

Because language represents the source of identify and understanding in

a system of political and economic stratification, because it offers the

“concrete space for every possible hegemony” (Gensini 2010, 70-71), any

effort to undermine orthodoxies begins in the very domain in which we

are always already embedded. Superseding any hegemony will require

criticizing popular views and transforming common sense. Such a

reorientation is no doubt premised on a situation in which most people

are educated and open enough to hearing arguments, and then acting, on

the social and political questions of the day. Gramsci’s purpose,

according to Marcus Green and Peter Ives (2010, 296), “is to ascertain

the content and meaning of common sense, to understand how the masses

conceive life, the world and politics, with the point of radicalizing

common sense and providing subaltern groups with the intellectual tools

necessary to confront dominant hegemony, philosophy and power.”

Language thus becomes the tool for switching valences from the

reactionary to the progressive pole. Within any hegemonic configuration,

then, the goal must be to transform language from a conservative (for

anarchists, statist) force into a progressive (that is, anti-statist)

one. Logically prior to creating a receptive public, though, is

self-education—developing a critical perspective on one’s own conception

of reality or world view. Knowing oneself “as a product of the

historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of

traces, without leaving an inventory” (Gramsci 1971, 324) is where the

revolution begins. Breaking free of established world views thus becomes

the very essence of dissidence, the necessary precursor to political

transformation.

Loosening the grip of language and ideology in this way might seem

relatively easy, at first glance. All one need do is to take people with

sufficient education and provide them with the facts of the matter. This

rationalist approach to political awareness is what Chomsky (2006, 69)

has advocated: “With a little industry and application, anyone who is

willing to extricate himself from the system of shared ideology and

propaganda will readily see through the modes of distortion developed by

substantial segments of the intelligentsia.” All it takes is a sound

mind, a bit of intellectual effort, and ideological liberation will soon

be at hand. However, social scientific explorations of framing (Lakoff

2004; Nunberg 2007), our experiences with recent policy debates (e.g.,

health insurance reform in the United States), not to mention our long

delayed emancipation—all these suggest that the easy answer is not a

viable one. People often remain subject to, and at times reinforce, the

very prejudices and stereotypes that they might otherwise decry. How,

then, can hegemonic world views be undermined? What can be done to break

free of our linguistic and ideological chains?

A Gramscian answer would work through the socio-political nature of the

hegemonic situation. Even though a given hegemony seems well-established

and deep-rooted, it remains problematic at its core. Despite its best

efforts, “no matter how totalizing a system might be, it will never

achieve its ambition of totality—it is impossible to create a system

with no outside” (Day 2005, 175). Try as it might to subjectify

individuals in sundry ways, it cannot ever fully succeed; a symbolic

lack (some element that cannot be signified) will always remain. Most

conventional political projects have attempted “to ‘fill’ or ‘suture’

this fundamental lack in society, to overcome its fundamental

antagonism. But this is an impossibility: the Real of antagonism, which

eludes representation, can never be overcome” (Newman 2001, 147). In the

context of Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory, then, any hegemonic world

view must ever be incomplete, must always remain contestable. “That is

to say, while discourses endeavour to impose order and necessity on a

field of meaning, the ultimate contingency of meaning precludes this

possibility from being actualized” (Howarth 2000, 103). Through

political and linguistic activity, subjectivities and antagonisms

emerge; logics of equivalence and difference are thus configured and (in

moments of dislocation) reconfigured in various ways, as given political

situations warrant (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Laclau 1996).

A different approach draws on the Situationists, who relied upon such

tactics as the detournement (subversive misappropriation of images and

artifacts) and the creation of “situations” (occasions for unmediated

play) to help people break out of their intellectual imprisonment by the

“spectacle” (Sheehan 2003, 122-124; Knabb 2006). By creating enough

disruption of our everyday consciousness, we will doubtless be shaken

out of our ideological stupor. Thinking along these same lines, for

example, Hakim Bey aims to disrupt the routines of everyday life, to

disrupt the normal course of business, through such mechanisms as Poetic

Terrorism, Art Sabotage, and most notably, the Temporary Autonomous

Zone. Bey (2003, 33, original emphasis) thus seeks to “murder the

IDEA—blow up the monument inside us” in order to shift the balance of

power; he sees this “sabotage of archetypes as the only practical

insurrectionary tactic for the present.” Bey eventually denies having

any overtly political intent or instructional purpose, however. By

focusing on art, imagination, immediacy, and experience, his approach

concludes with a Nietzschean emphasis on “pure expression” ("Peter

Lamborn Wilson Interview, Part 2" 2009, section 7).

As Richard Day (2005, 8-9) has noted, anarchist theory and practice has

thus moved from an approach based on the logic of hegemony (taking or

influencing state power) to one based on the logic of affinity (working

with others in ways that prefigure new social relations). Political

theory and action are no longer understood to occur on the large scale

associated with narratives that focus on a cataclysmic political and

social event—“the Revolution.” Instead, political activity occurs over a

variety of localized domains and emphasizes a micropolitics that calls

“for social, personal, and political experimentation, the expansion of

situated freedom, the release of subjected discourses and genres, and

the limitation and reorientation of the role of the intellectual” (May

1994, 112).

As noted above, Zerzan saw language and ideology as a linked system of

hegemonic justification. From Gramsci forward, the question has always

been how exactly one goes about undermining a given hegemonic world

view. An early response was to suggest that one’s opponents were in the

grip of a false consciousness, that they were mired in the distortions

of ideology. Such a restrictive or negative conception of ideology

(Seliger 1976) falls, though, when it becomes evident that there is no

privileged social class, that no one has a monopoly on either science or

truth, that one’s own world view is just another ideology among many. In

such a context, the radical political task is “to disarticulate the

ruling discursive structures that guarantee the reproduction of

relations, that is, to undertake an educational work that rearticulates

these discursive structures in the perspective of social transformation”

(Maas 2010, 92). Here again, though, difficulties abound. We soon come

to face the fact we willingly submit to our own subjection—whether

conceived as giving in to the spooks of fixed ideas (Stirner), as

falling prey to the machinations of desire (Deleuze), or as some other

phenomenon. Undermining the legitimacy of a legitimizing ideology

therefore is not easy, nor can the goal be achieved in any direct way.

For many, the aim can be attained only through fostering clever breaks

with the flow of mainstream ideas, patiently organizing ideological and

political coalitions, or crafting new forms of social relations built on

the principle of affinity.

IV

Zerzan’s approach to language seems to foreclose such options for

turning around hegemonic configurations, however. His prevailing view

seems to be that, fundamentally, language and ideology operate as closed

systems. Because they are closed systems, there is no point of working

within them or trying to transform them. The only truly radical option

for Zerzan is to go outside them—to (re)create a world beyond ideology,

beyond language. In making this move, he retraces a familiar route that

insists on “a radical conceptual division between two ontological

orders—that of ‘natural authority’ and ‘artificial authority’”—the

Manichean route taken by the classical anarchists (Newman 2005, 36).

Zerzan has, in other words, sought to locate nature as the radical

outside of civilization, as an anti-language position from which to

attack symbolic culture.

In a world where our worldviews and identities have all been constructed

by language and ideology, can an emancipatory politics even be conceived

on such a basis? In a world where domination characterizes the vast

range of social relations, is such radical freedom ever really possible?

If we are embedded within language and ideology, are we not also

permanently mired in them? Can radical theorists and activists identify

a language that operates contra language itself? Such questions are at

the heart of recent thinking about language, ideology, and politics;

they are the ones to which we now turn.

Of course, poststructuralists, post-Marxists, and postanarchists alike

have tilled these fields for some time now. Remarkably, for all their

work highlighting the power that linguistic, discursive, and ideological

systems have over us, most such thinkers have not reached the sorts of

conclusions advanced by Zerzan. Poststructuralist thinkers suggest

instead that not only are such linguistic and discursive systems

essentially contestable, they are contingent and open-ended—if not

altogether entropic.

Any synoptic discussion of poststructuralist views of language naturally

must be beyond the scope of this paper. Because capable scholars have

explored the territory so well, it should suffice here merely to review

some of their findings. Perhaps the best place to start is with Saul

Newman (2001; 2005; 2010), whose work provides a thorough examination of

poststructuralist thought from an anarchist perspective. Acknowledging

that it undermines or deconstructs linguistic, political, and other

structures, Newman provides us with an account of the two main positions

in poststructuralist thought. “The first position, exemplified by

thinkers like Foucault and Deleuze, suggests that rather than there

being a single, centralized structure, there are instead multiple and

heterogeneous discourses, power relations or ‘assemblages of desire’

that are constitutive of identity, and are immanent throughout the

social field” (Newman 2005, 5).

Michel Foucault’s work, it seems to me, primarily has outlined how power

operates in a constructive manner to constitute different subject

positions. Discursive and disciplinary mechanisms fashion the different

sorts of identities that are possible within any given social

configuration, and these identities both enable and constrain us.

“Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of

truth—that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as

true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true

and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the

techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth;

the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true

(Foucault 2006, 168).”

Like Marx before him, Foucault’s contributions also highlight the

evolving nature of social and political institutions and discourses. To

know that life could be otherwise, to abandon a fatalistic point of

view, is doubtless an important step toward emancipation. If other

identities are possible, and I can choose which ones to adopt, then we

are surely pointed toward one possible exit from the cycle of

subjectification and reproduction. The range of identities available to

us is theoretically quite vast because the linguistic and ideological

systems that we confront are not only filled with contradictions, they

are never wholly systematic. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987,

161) suggest that a different social order, a different machine is

always possible. “Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the

opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find

potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight,

experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out

continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new

land at all times.” Because multiple codes pervade systems of discourse,

because there exist smooth spaces to contrast with the striated ones,

people have more many options to explore than they realize.

Returning to Newman’s typology, we find that the “second position,

exemplified by thinkers like Derrida and Lacan, places more emphasis on

the structure itself, but sees it as indeterminate and unstable” (Newman

2005, 5). Indeed, one of the chief contributions that Jacques Derrida

makes is to identify language as a realm of undecidability, “an

indefinite fluctuation between two possibilities” (Derrida 1991, 194).

Even in the most carefully constructed text, there remain concepts and

ideas that do not cohere, problems that are left unstated and

unresolved. The contradictions and aporias that Derrida frequently finds

in literary and philosophical texts suggest that no impregnably closed

system of thought could ever be devised. Jacques Lacan similarly regards

the external orders that constitute subjects as highly capable, but

flawed. They effectively constitute the identity of any subject, but

that identity must ever remain incomplete or inadequate. For example,

once I identify as a _____, it is always in order to ask if being a is

all there is to life. One is always left wanting more, so identification

thus becomes the process of trying to fill the lack at the heart of the

subject (Olivier 2004; Laclau and Zac 1994).

The political implications of poststructuralist thought no doubt are

many, but the one that matters most is this: the subjects, structures,

and discourses that constitute the political are all contingent,

indeterminate, and open-ended (Newman 2005, 140, 154). At this point,

poststructuralism reveals its affinities with anarchism; indeed, under

the influence of poststructuralist critiques of identity and ontology, a

postanarchism that is simultaneously antipolitical and political has

emerged. As an anti-politics, postanarchism shares with traditional

anarchism “its rejection of the state and its suspicion of political

representation, and it endorses its fundamental ethical critique of

political power” (Newman 2010, 69). As a political theory and practice,

postanarchism endorses any number of revolutionary projects (insofar as

they are rooted in an ethics that shuns hierarchy and adopts a

prefigurative stance) without having any guarantee that they either will

be successful or will avoid replicating the domination they seek to

replace.

An anarchism built on poststructuralist insights into language and

discourse can take us in any number of directions. One direction would

have us pay attention to the performative aspects of identity suggested

by Foucault and deftly developed by Judith Butler (1999). In her view,

gender—and by extension, ideological identity—is neither a substance nor

a set of attributes; rather, “gender is always a doing.” It is

constituted by “a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory

frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of

a natural sort of being” (Butler 1999, 33, 44). In this context,

processes of repetition and iterability, not singular acts of decision,

provide the route to new constructions of one’s identity (Butler 1999,

179-188). From this point of view, then, one is not born, but becomes an

anarchist. Becoming an anarchist does not mean joining a party, taking a

vow, or making a decision; rather, it likely involves succumbing to a

seduction, giving oneself over to “the feeling of anarchy’s lure” (de

Acosta 2009, 27). Becoming an anarchist simply means doing the things

that anarchists do (whatever that might be)—and doing them over and over

again.

A second theoretical direction suggested by poststructuralism affirms

not only that language is contingent and open-ended, but that the

struggle against the State is similarly so. For example, in conceiving

their political practice, postanarchists have settled for “a nomadic

agent of change: one that can disappear, who is not bound by place, or

past experiences” (Franks 2007, 138). As nomadic agents learned to flow

in and out of vortices, as they began to explore the smooth spaces in

any social configuration, they recreated the model of revolutionary

struggle. Rather than direct, frontal assaults on the citadels of

power—assaults designed to acquire power—they preferred indirect

encounters focused on creating room for autonomy. In this context, then,

Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 353) certainly altered the metaphors of

political struggle. Traditional images of revolution call to mind a game

of chess: “Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated,

coded war, with a front, a rear, battles.” A better image, they suggest,

is that of Go—a game marked by “war without battle lines, with neither

confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas

chess is a semiology.” The problem with this approach, of course, is

that traditional organizing gives way to expressive acts—resulting in

the tension between “social anarchism” and “lifestyle anarchism”

featured in the famous polemic by Murray Bookchin (1995).

A final theoretical direction suggested by poststructuralism focuses on

Lacanian psychoanalysis. Famous for having observed that the unconscious

is structured like a language, Lacan reinterpreted Freud’s theories of

psychosexual development in order to account for its linguistic

character. Resolving the Oedipal situation, then, becomes a matter of

integrating into the Symbolic Order or not. Nevertheless, a Lacanian

route to social and political liberation is not immediately obvious.

Ernesto Laclau (1996, 52), for example, points us toward the lack at the

heart of any subject—a conception in which “antagonism and exclusion are

constitutive of all identity.” To put it another way, “identity is

constituted around a fundamental lack at the heart of the subject, and

that identity is constituted through the identification with external

objects, thus temporarily filling the lack” (Thomassen 2004, 558). The

lack, though, can never be successfully overcome. Just as soon as one

identifies as an anarchist, for example, then the expansive content of

what being an anarchist involves beckons; perpetual dissatisfaction and

alienation ensue.

Another Lacanian, Slavoj Zizek, observes that any ideology can only be

maintained by illusion or fantasy—the illusion that people make

conscious decision; the fantasy that obscures ideology’s role in

structuring our outlooks. If any ideology functions through fantasy,

then, just how is it possible for individual subjects to emerge from its

grip? The answer that Zizek (1989, 84, original emphasis) offers is to

traverse the fantasy; as “soon as they perceive that the real goal is

the consistency of the ideological attitude itself, the effect is

self-defeating.” In other words, “because ideology expects to be taken

cynically, the ultimate act of transgression is perhaps to follow it to

the letter, to thoroughly identify with it” (Newman 2005, 67). From a

psychoanalytic standpoint, traversing the fantasy of ideology might make

therapeutic sense.

From the standpoint of political practice, though, the advice seems

problematic. Consider this: In the face of an omnipresent state, how

should an anarchist behave? Taking Zizek seriously would suggest that an

anarchist, opposed to all forms of coercive authority, should embrace

the state to the fullest—become its cheerleader, campaign and vote for

candidates, get a degree in public administration, and pursue a

bureaucratic career.

A number of French feminists also found inspiration in Lacanian theory,

as they pondered what it meant for women to be in but not of the

Symbolic Order. In their view, women—whose status is outside of

language, who possess a jouissance beyond signification— would never be

liberated unless a new language could be developed. For Helene Cixous

(2000), this meant creating a feminine writing (I’ecriture feminine) in

which women could write themselves as women, and thereby, break out of a

masculine libidinal and cultural economy. For Cixous (2000, 261,

original emphasis), writing thus represents “the very possibility of

change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive

thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and

cultural structures.” If women need to “write through their bodies”

(Cixous 2000, 267), perhaps anarchists should begin to “write through

their freedom.” Perhaps this has already been done, as one could point

to countless examples of writing for anarchist papers, zines, and other

unconventional outlets. Still, might not a postanarchist who is

prescriptive about what form of writing is sufficiently anarchist

ironically fall victim to the very essentialism postanarchism critiques?

Can one even identify a specifically anarchist style, as opposed to a

liberal or Marxist one?

In sum, postanarchism generally offers a useful corrective to the

essentialist ontology held by theorists like Zerzan. As noted above,

Zerzan regards language as the decidedly closed system that undergirds

civilization and its ills. Without any hope of reforming it, or any way

to work within it—doing so would be akin to collaboration with the

enemy—there is but one path to liberation, which is to abandon language

altogether. Zerzan urges anarchists to strive for an authentic form of

communication that is beyond words, that is outside symbolic culture.

For poststructuralist theorists, and the postanarchists who have learned

from them, such a pure radical outside is but an impossible dream. As

Newman (2010, 13) observes, anarchist politics should not be based “on

essentialist identities, processes of dialectical unfolding or on a

certain organic conception of the social body; rather the possibilities

of radical transformation should be seen as contingent moments of

openness that break with the idea of a naturally determined order.”

The antiessentialism that makes poststructuralist thought appealing

carries within it this “theoretical impasse: if there is no

uncontaminated point of departure from which power can be criticized or

condemned, if there is no essential limit to the power one is resisting,

then surely there can be no resistance against it” (Newman 2001, 5).

Newman and others suggest that poststructuralism nevertheless contains

the answer to the very problem it presents. An outside is possible, but

it is not a permanent or radically exterior outside. Instead, “an

outside can emerge, paradoxically, from the inside—that is, from within

these very structures of language, discourse, and power” (Newman 2005,

159). In this way, poststructuralist ontologies that highlight the

limits of signification and subjectification might provide a suitable

self-understanding for anarchist theory and practice.

V

In his review of Saul Newman’s From Bakunin to Lacan, though, Todd May

(2002, par. 11) observed that he was “not convinced that by utilizing a

deconstructive approach to language and politics there is room for the

kind of collective action that seems necessary for political success.”

The indeterminacy intrinsic to such theories, he suggested, would be

more likely to drive people apart than to bring them together. A better

approach, in May’s view, would be to “articulate a conception of

language that sees meaning—and the political categories that arise from

it—as determinate but contingent, rather than necessarily

indeterminate.” In discerning an anarchist theory of language, one has

to take this concept of “contingent determinacy” very much to heart.

Certainly, the analysis above suggests that we need an account of

language that comprehends it as simultaneously natural (rather than

external), hegemonic (rather than politically neutral), as well as

contingently open-ended (rather than closed). The anarchist theorists

treated above appear to provide us with ideas that meet these criteria.

Chomsky, for one, tells us that the language faculty is a natural one

for human beings. It need not be interpreted as natural in the

essentialist sense, but rather, it should be seen as natural in the

biological sense—in other words, the ability to work with language is as

natural to us as the ability to grasp with opposable thumbs. Language is

a great existing social fact; it is one of the most natural things in

the world. As Landauer (2010b, 277) observes: “Anarchists need to

understand that the basis of both individual life and human co-existence

is something that cannot be invented. It is something that has to grow.”

Human communication is necessary, but there is no reason to assume (as

does Zerzan) that it has to be non-symbolic communication; even if there

were such a reason, the possibility of returning to a proto-human form

seems remote at best.

Even though language is natural, it nevertheless confronts us as an

external force because it is always already here. We are embedded within

its rules and discourses as soon as our linguistic faculty begins to

operate. In that context, it becomes easy to regard language and

ideology as agents of social reproduction, as vehicles of and supports

for domination, as “screens of power” (Luke 1989). The great problem for

anarchist and other forms of radical political thought is to show how it

is possible to resist and remove domination. Whether the spark of

resistance stems from conceptual breaks fostered by autonomous practices

and situationist detournements, or from the ontological fissures

highlighted by poststructuralist theorists, anarchists and others have

argued that the existing order need not be a permanent one. As we have

been often reminded, another world is possible.

Reviewing the interactions among language, ideology, and anarchism

traced above, I am reminded of Chomsky’s (2004, 113) observation that “a

Marxist-anarchist perspective is justified quite apart from anything

that may happen in linguistics.” Although he regards any connection

between his linguistic (scientific) and anarchist (political) views as

tenuous at best, Chomsky does notice that they both are imbued with a

spirit of creativity and freedom. Rocker (1978), too, pointed to this

creative aspect when he asserted that language “is a structure in

constant change in which the intellectual and social culture of the

various phases of our evolution is reflected. It is always in flux,

protean in its inexhaustible power to assume new forms.”

Still, the search for a satisfactory account of language that could

support anarchist inquiry and practice has not yet concluded. The

hesitations and concerns about the philosophical and political adequacy

of poststructuralism expressed by May remain to be addressed. In his own

postanarchist classic, May (1994, 94) quotes from Anti-Oedipus, in which

Deleuze and Guattari urge us to “stop asking the question ‘What does it

signify?’ and ask instead ‘What does it produce? What can it be used

for?’” The latter questions are certainly in the spirit of anarchism’s

focus on concrete practice rather than abstract theory, on doing rather

than being. They are very pragmatic questions about how we get on with

things, about how we use language to carry on with the tasks of

life—political, social, and otherwise. In other words, they are

questions that point to an as yet unexplored source for an anarchist

account of language that I believe meets the criteria set forth above.

As noted, an adequate account must not only regard language as natural,

hegemonic, and contingently open-ended; in addition, it must also have

some satisfactory implications for anarchist practice.

For all the attractions of poststructuralist thought, I propose that an

adequate account of language could be drawn from Ludwig Wittgenstein.

His approach shares with anarchism a pragmatic orientation that

emphasizes practice over theory—even in the course of theorizing. His

focus is not on developing an abstract ontology of the subject, but

rather on what language could do (and not do) for people: “Think of the

tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-drive, a

rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails, and screws.—The functions of words are as

diverse as the functions of these objects” (Wittgenstein 1958, §11). In

reading a good bit of poststructuralist writing, one often gets the

sinking feeling that language has gone on holiday(Wittgenstein 1958,

§38). Wittgenstein provides an important corrective because, for him, it

is more useful to focus on describing our everyday practices. This

position he shares with Alejandro de Acosta (2010, 119), who noted that

anarchism’s “commonplaces (direct action, mutual aid, solidarity,

affinity groups, etc.) are not concepts but forms of social practice. As

such, they continually, virally, infect every even remotely

extraparliamentary or grassroots form of political action. And, beyond

politics, they compose a kind of interminable reserve of social

intelligence.”

Wittgenstein’s approach urges us to think pragmatically. In doing so, we

should return to our criteria for an adequate theory of language. First,

it must accept that language is natural, that it represents some great

existing fact. Wittgenstein’s approach most definitely begins with just

such a perspective. For him, language is an integral element of a

community’s practices; indeed, “the term „language-game’ is meant to

bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of a language is part

of an activity, or of a form of life” (Wittgenstein 1958, §23, original

emphasis). Members of a given community do not have to deliberately

impose rules from the outside; they do not have to force creativity and

expressiveness out of an individual. What happens instead is that the

rules inherent in our practices are taught in the context of various

“language games” involving interactions between speakers. The language

games help set the boundaries of appropriate use of words. In so doing,

it establishes individuals as members of the community and gives them

the capacity to act. A Wittgensteinian perspective, without any need for

linguistic science or extra-historical ruminations, allows us to view

language as a natural phenomenon.

Second, an adequate theory of language should acknowledge that language

is not merely natural, but also hegemonic. Though language is “woven

into all human activities and behavior, and accordingly our many

different uses of it are given content and significance by our practical

affairs, our work, our dealings with one another and with the world we

inhabit” (Grayling 1996, 79); it should be seen as neither autonomous

nor essentialist. In learning a language—that is, in participating in a

form of life—we naturally come to accept certain things as valid and

true. “The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e., it learns to

act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what

is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably [sic] fast

and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not

because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held

fast by what lies around it” (Wittgenstein 1969, §144). Doubt never

enters the picture, at least initially; we first have to accept: “The

child learns by believing the adult. Doubt comes after belief’

(Wittgenstein 1969, §160, original emphasis). As certain habits of

thought and action become established, they become constituted as common

sense, as second nature. As Wittgenstein (1980, 64e, original emphasis)

remarked of religion, “although it’s belief, it’s really a way of

living, or a way of assessing life. It’s passionately seizing hold of

this interpretation.” We always learn to interpret our lives through the

prism of the language-games whose lessons we have absorbed. Even so,

Wittgenstein embraces no foundational or essentialist assumptions about

the subject positions available to us, no grand narrative on the order

of either class struggle or hegemonic contest.

Finally, our account of language should acknowledge its contingent and

open-ended character. For Wittgenstein (1969, §559), a language-game

simply exists: “It is there—like our life.” Nevertheless, it is not a

permanently fixed feature. Not only does a language-game change with

time (Wittgenstein 1969, §256), but it is clear that “language has no

single essence” and is instead “a vast collection of different practices

each with its own logic” (Grayling 1996, 79). Although we “make

ourselves in the practices that make us” (de Acosta 2009, 31), those

same practices emerge and dissipate in a seemingly perpetual evolution.

At one point in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein (1958,

§309) asked himself, “What is your aim in philosophy?” His answer: “To

shew the fly the way out of the fly- bottle.” The emancipatory project

in which anarchists are engaged has much the same orientation. It

involves developing a political space for action, “the creation of an

interstitial distance within the state, the continual questioning from

below of any attempt to establish order from above” (Critchley 2007,

122-123). That creative activity depends upon using imagination: “If we

imagine the facts otherwise than as they are, certain language-games

lose some of their importance, while others become more important. And

in this way there is an alteration—a gradual one—in the use of the

vocabulary of a language” (Wittgenstein 1969, §63). Any sustained

alteration in the language-games we play suggests a corresponding

alteration in the practices we perform, in the forms of life we inhabit.

In short, we have arrived in a highly pragmatic fashion at the

“contingent determinacy” favored by May, without resort to any elaborate

ontological architecture.

Though a Wittgensteinian account of language has much to recommend it,

its utility for the anarchist project may still remain in

doubt—particularly because Wittgenstein has been viewed as both a

philosophical and political conservative (Robinson 2006). To show the

fly the way out of the bottle, to show that Wittgenstein might have

something meaningful to say to anarchists, let us return to the issue of

how to construct an alternative, oppositional identity. For Simon

Critchley (2007, 112, original emphasis), “the labour of politics is the

construction of new political subjectivities, new political aggregations

in specific localities, a new dissensual habitus rooted in common sense

and the consent of those who dissent.” Similarly, the labor of political

theory becomes one of describing how it is possible for all that to

happen. All too often, though, theorists ponder matters at such an

abstract level that they ignore Wittgenstein’s (1958, §66) telling

admonition to look, rather than think, when we contemplate matters such

as the concept of a game or the nature of language. If we take this

admonition seriously, then we need to explore matters such as identity

formation from a more grounded standpoint.

The central question is how might a change in any dominant grammar of

identity be possible? How can we rearrange or articulate that grammar’s

elements in novel ways. When a grammar has become sedimented or

naturalized, subjects come to take things for granted or to see them in

the same way—a phenomenon that David Owen (2003) has called “aspectival

captivity.” Aspectival captivity develops when a given picture of the

world becomes an implicit background or horizon (‘natural forgetting’),

when it is taken for a universal (‘philosophical repression’), when it

becomes entrancing and captivating (Owen 2003, 87-88). When our

perspective comes into question through genealogical description and

critical reflection, or when things begin to appear in a new light,

genuine transformation is possible. “Aspect dawning or change occurs

when one realizes that a new kind of characterization of an object or

situation may be given, and we see it in those terms” (Norval 2006,

235).

Wittgensteinian reflections about aspect dawning lead one to the view

that identification is largely a retrospective, even retroactive,

process. It emerges not merely through rational persuasion, but also

through a subject’s active participation in a practice: “The subject

becomes a democratic subject, not simply because she is rationally

convinced it is the better option, though that may be part of the story,

but rather because she participates in democratic practices, which

retroactively allow her to identify as democratic subject” (Norval 2006,

241). In other words, because of this redescription of herself—because

of this aspect change—the subject sees herself and things in general

quite differently now. Processes of redescription are central not only

to identity formation but also to the battles over representation, the

“semiotic street fights” (Thompson 2010, 31), that occur after nearly

every major protest. With Black Bloc activists often pegged as

terrorists, with anarchists generally coded in stereotypical ways,

redescription is necessary if the prevailing frames are to be

undermined: “By speaking about what the mask enables and not what it

means; by not seeking to simply refute possible negative readings ...,

the Black Bloc statement [posted on infoshop.org] effectively

reformulates the relationship between activists and objects” (Thompson

2010, 57, original emphasis).

In contexts related to identity, ideology, and language, the prospects

for change seem to be ever problematic. If revolution were easy, it

would be an everyday occurrence; but it is not. Breaking free of old

habits and conventional practices is not for everyone, nor can an

abstract ethics of the demand be particularly motivating for most

people. A more pragmatic orientation to the emancipatory project is

required. Critchley (2007, 147-148) observes that, no matter one’s

preferred “ontological theodicy, politics is the activity of the forming

of a common front, the horizontal aggregation of a collective will from

diverse groups with disparate demands.” Such a conception of politics

can be seen within Laclau’s logics of equivalence and difference. Such a

conception of politics requires confronting a dilemma of

congruence—replacing one ideological perspective with another can happen

only if the new perspective is somehow congruent with the old. Agents of

social and political change cannot persuade folks to embrace a new world

view “unless people see the point of it—that is, unless they can

acknowledge its links to former habits of thought and unless it somehow

speaks to their condition” (Williams 1997, 141). The pressure for

congruence, I believe, translates relatively seamlessly into common

anarchist demands for prefiguration—for being the change we wish to

bring.

In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein (1980, 20e) observes that sometimes

one’s philosophy appears to be simply “a matter of temperament, and

there is something in this. A preference for certain similes could be

called a matter of temperament and it underlies far more disagreements

than you might think.” Temperament may indeed account for the various

strains of anarchist and radical thought explored above, as well as for

my preference for a pragmatic, Wittgensteinian account of language.

Still, such an account reminds us that language and ideology—as well as

the forms of domination that they create and support—are all part of the

life we currently experience. We cannot rest content with that reminder,

though, because the aim of our theoretical and activist practices is to

put us on a path toward liberation.

In this context, it is worth noting Christopher Robinson’s (2006, par.

31) suggestion that “Wittgenstein’s theorizing is not conservative; his

descriptivism entails and even demands a life devoted to non-conformity;

and the conventions he exposes at the base of all human languages is the

source of political and critical freedom.” The free, creative aspect of

his theorizing emerges in the multiplicity of language-games and the

diversity of forms of life that we encounter. As Wittgenstein (1958,

§18) observes: “Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of

little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with

additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of

new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.” In

wandering through that city—squatting here, creating a TAZ there;

organizing here, performing direct action there—we are noticing

different language-games, observing the range of practices that are

possible, developing resources for both criticism and insurrection. In

short, we are not merely traveling as nomads from one milieu to another,

we are experiencing a life in which the “dogmatism and slogans that

formerly proclaimed a new era, the signposts for utopia, are everywhere

coming to an end. Everywhere, concepts have turned into reality,

becoming unpredictable, shifting, unstable. There is clarity only in the

land of appearances and words; where life begins, systems end” (Landauer

2010a, 90-91).

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