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Title: Postanarchism in a Nutshell
Author: Jason Adams
Date: 2003
Language: en
Topics: post-anarchism
Source: Retrieved on June 12th, 2009 from http://info.interactivist.net/node/2475

Jason Adams

Postanarchism in a Nutshell

In the past couple of years there has been a growing interest in what

some have begun calling “postanarchism” for short; because it is used to

describe a very diverse body of thought and because of its perhaps

unwarranted temporal implications, even for those within this milieu, it

is a term that is more often than not used with a great deal of

reticence. But as a term, it is also one which refers to a wave of

attempts to try to reinvent anarchism in light of major developments

within contemporary radical theory and within the world at large, much

of which ultimately began with the Events of May 1968 in Paris, France

and the intellectual milieu out of which the insurrection emerged.

Indeed, in the preface to Andrew Feenberg’s recent book on the events,

When Poetry Ruled the Streets, Douglas Kellner points out that

poststructuralist theory as it developed in France was not really a

rejection of that movement as is sometimes thought, but for the most

part was really a continuation of the new forms of thought, critique and

action that had erupted in the streets at the time. As he puts it, “the

passionate intensity and spirit of critique in many versions of French

postmodern theory is a continuation of the spirit of 1968 Baudrillard,

Lyotard, Virilio, Derrida, Castoriadis, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and

other French theorists associated with postmodern theory were all

participants in May 1968. They shared its revolutionary elan and radical

aspirations and they attempted to develop new modes of radical thought

that carried on in a different historical conjecture the radicalism of

the 1960s” (2001, p. xviii).

Thus, whether it is fully self-conscious of this fact or not, it is

ultimately against this background that “postanarchism” has recently

emerged as an attempt to create a hybrid theory and practice out of the

most compelling elements of early anarchist thought as well as more

recent critical theories that have emerged out of this and similar

milieus around the world, thus reinvigorating the possibility of a

politics whose primary slogan is “all power to the imagination” in our

own time. It should come as no surprise that this would eventually take

place since it is well-known that anarchism was a major element of the

events; this is evidenced not only in Raoul Vaneigem’s statement that

“from now on, no revolution will be worthy of the name if it does not

involve, at the very least, the radical elimination of all hierarchy”

(2001, p. 78) but also in a remarkably resonant statement by Michel

Foucault a decade later, in which he stated that “where Soviet socialist

power was in question, its opponents called it totalitarianism: power in

Western capitalism was denounced by Marxists as class domination; but

the mechanics of power in themselves were never analyzed. This task

could only begin after 1968, that is to say on the basis of daily

struggles at the grass roots level, among those whose fight was located

in the fine meshes of the web of power” (Gordon, 1980, p. 116).

These are just two of the most obvious examples of this legacy, but

countless others like this could easily be dug up to make the case

further — even if it might be countered that many of the participants

were also largely influenced by existentialism, phenomenology, the

Frankfurt School and Western Marxism in general, it is undeniable that a

strong anarchistic, anti-hierarchical ethic permeated the entire affair

just as it has the theorists who emerged out of it. Thus it can clearly

be seen how anarchism has, though perhaps indirectly, nevertheless been

a major influence on many of these thinkers, all of whom produced the

main body of their works in the aftermath of the events. Paul Virilio

for instance, has often directly expressed his affinity with anarchism,

citing his participation as one major reason for this. Despite

widespread delusions asserting the contrary, poststructuralists did not

simply “give up” on insurrectionary and other social movements after May

’68 either.

Virilio’s involvement, along with that of Foucault, Deleuze, and

Guattari in the Autonomia and free radio movements in Italy and France

in the late 1970s, Foucault’s engagement with queer liberation and

prison abolition movements in the 1980s, Luce Irigiray and Judith

Butler’s connection with third-wave feminism in the 1990s and Derrida

and Agamben’s work with the Sans Papiers/No Border movement as well as

Hardt and Negri’s extensive ties with the antiglobalization movement of

the past several years should alone be more than enough evidence to

destroy that myth. Further absurd critiques that are sometimes heard,

which seek to take a rather unique example such as cyberfeminist Donna

Haraway to argue that poststructuralists are universally uncritical of

technology or a neo-nihilist like Jean Baudrillard to prove that they

unwaveringly reject the possibility of resistance are also quite

ignorant since the flip side of such untrue and totalizing statements is

that a politics of “resistance” was a central element throughout the

entire corpus of Foucault’s work, just as the relentless critique of

“the art of technology” in all its forms ranging from military ordnance

to television has been crucial throughout Virilio’s work.

Indeed, far from the images some would give of it, poststructuralism

emerged out of a much larger anti-authoritarian milieu which began by

taking what up to that point had existed as radical, but still abstract

theories and put them into practice in the streets of Paris; for all its

limitations over the years, because its origins are to be found here, it

nevertheless contains many strong anarchistic elements that are not

found elsewhere; therefore, it would seem obvious that amongst these

thinkers there would likely be a great deal of radical theory that would

be of use to anarchists today who wish to keep their theory relevant to

the contours of a structure of domination that does not exist outside of

space and time but which is constantly in a state of flux and

transformation.

As mentioned, the term “postanarchism” has emerged recently as a term

that could be used to describe the phenomenon whereby this radically

anti-authoritarian poststructuralist theory has developed and mutated

and split off into dozens of hybrid critical theories over the past

three decades, finally coming back to inform and extend the theory and

practice of one of its primary roots.

Anarchism seems to perpetually forget the lessons of recent events that

have shaped the lived present we inhabit daily, all to the unhappy ends

of a fetishization of on the one hand the “proud tradition” of the past

and on the other the “glorious promise” of the future. As we have seen

in the example of the anarchistic events of May ’68, it is not simply

poststructuralism that is informing anarchism today, but in fact the

reverse is and has certainly been the case as well, despite this having

been largely ignored by almost everyone — until recently. In order to

understand what the emerging phenomena of postanarchism “is” in the

contemporary moment, first of all one should consider what it is not; it

is not an “ism” like any other — it is not another set of ideologies,

doctrines and beliefs that can be laid out positively as a bounded

totality to which one might conform and then agitate amongst the

“masses” to get others to rally around and conform to as well, like some

odd ideological flag. Instead, this profoundly negationary term refers

to a broad and heterogeneous array of anarchist theories and practices

that have been rendered “homeless” by the rhetoric and practice of most

of the more closed and ideological anarchisms such as

anarchist-syndicalism, anarchist-communism, and anarchist-platformism as

well as their contemporary descendants, all of which tend to reproduce

some form of class-reductionism, state-reductionism or liberal democracy

in a slightly more “anarchistic” form, thus ignoring the many lessons

brought to us in the wake of the recent past.

Postanarchism is today found not only in abstract radical theory but

also in the living practice of such groups as the No Border movements,

People’s Global Action, the Zapatistas, the Autonomen and other such

groups that while clearly “antiauthoritarian” in orientation, do not

explicitly identify with anarchism as an ideological tradition so much

as they identify with its general spirit in their own unique and varying

contexts, which are typically informed by a wide array of both

contemporary and classical radical thinkers.

Interestingly enough, all of this is to a surprising degree quite in

line with the very origin of the term in Hakim Bey’s 1987 essay

“Post-Anarchism Anarchy”. In this essay, he argues that the thing that

is keeping anarchism from becoming relevant to the truly excluded of

society, which is also the thing driving so many truly

anti-authoritarian people away from anarchism, is that it has become so

caught up in its own tightly bordered ideologies and sects that it has

ultimately mistaken the various doctrines and “traditions” of anarchism

for the lived experience of anarchy itself. Between the dichotomous

prison of a tragic past and impossible future, he says that anarchism

has become an ideological doctrine to be adhered to rather than as a

living theory with which to gum up the decentered works of the

postindustrial society of control, all of this resulting in the

universal foregoing of any real politics of the present, a point also

made by Raoul Vaneigem in May ’68, but in regards to society in general.

Bey goes on to emphasize the various ideological anarchisms’ lack of

attention to real desires and needs as being as reprehensible as their

reticence in the face of more recent radical theory, those challenging

thoughts and ideas that might appear to be “risky” or uncomfortable at

first glance, especially to an anarchism increasingly comfortable in its

form, not unlike the post-industrial temp worker, who at the end of the

day plops down into the Lay-Z-Boy and stays there out of sheer

exhaustion; if we were to resist this temptation and open anarchism up

to an engagement of this sort, he argues, “we could pick up the struggle

where it was dropped by Situationism in ’68 & Autonomia in the seventies

& carry it to the next stage” (1991, p. 62) far beyond where the

grassroots radicals, anarchists, existentialists, heterodox Marxists and

poststructuralists have ever taken it in the past.

But for Bey, a postanarchist politics would really only become possible

if anarchists could somehow find the will to abandon a whole host of

leftover fetishisms which have kept anarchism in its own private little

network of self-imposed ideological ghettoes, including all types of

ideological purity, conceptions of power as simply blatant and overt,

fetishisms of labor and work, biases against cultural forms of

resistance, secular cults of scientism, anti-erotic dogmas which keep

sexualities of all forms in the closet, glorifications of formal

organization to the detriment of spontaneous action and territorialist

traditions that link space and politics, thus ignoring the possibility

of nomadic praxis. Fourteen years later, after some important

foundational work by radical theorists such as Andrew Koch, and Todd

May, this schematic formulation of ‘postanarchism’ reappeared under the

same sign but in a rather different and more fleshed-out concept

developed by the Australian political theorist Saul Newman in his book

“From Bakunin to Lacan: Antiauthoritarianism and the Dislocation of

Power”.

Here the term refers to a theoretical move beyond classical anarchism,

into a hybrid theory consisting of an synthesis with particular concepts

and ideas from poststructuralist theory such as post-humanism and

anti-essentialism; Newman explains that “by using the poststructuralist

critique one can theorize the possibility of political resistance

without essentialist guarantees: a politics of postanarchism...by

incorporating the moral principles of anarchism with the postructuralist

critique of essentialism, it may be possible to arrive at an ethically

workable, politically valid, and genuinely democratic notion of

resistance to domination...Foucault’s rejection of the ‘essential’

difference between madness and reason; Deleuze and Guattari’s attack on

Oedipal representation and State-centered thought; Derrida’s questioning

of philosophy’s assumption about the importance of speech over writing,

are all examples of this fundamental critique of authority” (2001, p.

158).

As is implied in Hakim Bey’s conception of postanarchism, here too it is

obvious how the antiauthoritarianism which Newman sees running

throughout poststructuralist theory would have emerged originally in the

world-historic social movements at the end of the 1960s; in the process,

the radically anti-authoritarian spirit of anarchism, as one of the

primary elements of these milieu, mutated into a thousand different

miniviruses, infecting all of these critical theories in many different

ways that are only now really being rediscovered. Yet, although he is

critical of the essentialism which he sees as endemic within the thought

of canonic anarchists like Kropotkin and Bakunin, Newman’s conception of

postanarchism does not reject all early anarchist thought; his embrace

of Stirner’s egoism as the most important precursor to a politics of

this sort illustrates this quite clearly. Finally, it should be noted

that it is precisely in this sense that Newman’s conception is actually

quite similar to the “postmarxism” of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,

in that while it is postanarchist it is also postanarchist (2001, p. 4)

in that it is by no means a total rejection of early anarchisms but

rather a step beyond the limits defined for them by the Enlightenment

thought which had not yet really been subjected to a great deal of

critique, while simultaneously embracing the best elements produced by

that same revolution in human consciousness including such obvious

aspects as the ability of people to govern themselves directly without a

sovereign lording over them; the viral strains of a mutant

poststructuralism suddenly reappearing in a new form after a long and

nomadic exile.

Since the publication of Newman’s book in 2001, there have been several

attempts to articulate a conception of postanarchism that would bring on

board many of his specific ideas regarding the anarchistic elements of

radical poststructuralist thought yet which would also bring it back out

of the halls of academia and into broader, more diverse, and more

flammable environments, much as Bey had originally described his

conception of the term in 1987. Earlier this year, I started a listserv

and website by the name of postanarchism which was intended to do just

that; I advertised its existence on Indymedia websites all over the

world, on Infoshop’s bulletin board and on multiple radical activist and

anarchist listservs all of which drew hundreds of anarchists, activists

and intellectuals, most commonly attracting those who somehow find a way

to be all three simultaneously. Since that time there has emerged an

increasingly dynamic discussion which has ranged from the activist topic

of social movements like the No Borders movement which has taken on

board the ideas of critical theorists like Giorgio Agamben, Michael

Hardt, Antonio Negri and Jacques Derrida, to the more strictly

intellectual question of the extent to which early anarchist thinkers

such as Bakunin and Kropotkin were essentialist in their conceptions of

the human subject to the more explicitly anarchist discussion of what

tendencies in contemporary anarchism, such as insurrectionary anarchism,

social ecology or anarchist-feminism might be the most relevant in the

contemporary world order.

There is now even talk of a postanarchism anthology which would collect

the dozens of essays that have been circulating around the internet and

bring them all together in one place; so far the anthology will likely

include such interesting proposals as one by former Black Panther member

Ashanti Alston on the outlines of what he conceives as a

poststructuralist African anarchism, combining the thought of Wole

Soyinka, Sam Mbah, Todd May and Saul Newman as well as another by Jesse

Cohn and Shawn Wilbur which would critique Newman’s conception of

postanarchism, arguing that even Bakunin and Kropotkin were far less

essentialist and more far critical of scientism than he generally

allows. As can easily be discerned by examining this trajectory, the

result of this listserv, website and ensuing anthology is that not only

has the discussion and the definition of postanarchism now become a

hybrid of Bey’s and Newman’s conceptions of the term, but it has also

become that of dozens of others who have been writing about the

intersections between anarchism, poststructuralism and other critical

theories since at least the early 1990s, with a pace and dynamism that

has been steadily increasing on into its crescendo in the present

moment. In this often unknowingly simultaneous endeavor, anarchists from

all kinds of backgrounds with all kinds of ideas have sought to make

contemporary anarchisms relevant to them in their own unique situations,

often going beyond poststructuralism itself, borrowing liberally from

the best of contemporary radical theory including phenomenology,

critical theory, Situationism, postcolonialism, autonomism,

postmodernism, existentialism, postfeminism, and Zapatismo amongst

others. Andrew Koch for instance argues that postfeminists such as

Helene Cixous, Luce Irigiray and Julia Kristeva all have a great deal to

teach contemporary anarchists about the authoritarian elements of

patriarchal foundationalism; Ricardo Dominguez uncovers poetic

revelations in the links between Zapatista strategies of decentered

netwar and eleuzo-Guattarian rhizomatic forms of resistance to the State

form, neither of which he reminds us, need be “plugged in” to be

effective.

Thus, it should be clear from all of this that the other than opposition

to all forms of domination, the only thing all of these theorists share

is an extreme lack of consensus over what it means to combine anarchism

with these extremely divergent philosophies; in fact, while some have

used it as an excuse to whole-heartedly write off earlier tendencies

such as anarchist-syndicalism, ironically some of the main theorists

touted as exemplary by such postanarchists, including Paul Virilio,

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have all flirted with versions of that

exact tradition in various parts of their works, even using terms like

“general strike”, (Virilio, 1997, p. 41) “anarcho-syndicalist”

(Armitage, 2001, p. 19) and “One Big Union” all in the positive (Hardt

and Negri, 2000, p. 206).

What this means then, is that radical theory, just like the world in

which it has emerged, is always in a perpetual state of flux, a nomadism

that never settles down, never completely hardens into one particular

shape and in which the “past” eternally returns in new and unexpected

ways in the present; many poststructuralist intellectuals, for instance,

after having been denounced as increasingly apolitical and obscurantist

have paid heed to these calls by using much clearer language and

actively trying to engage their theories with the practice of actually

existing social movements.

This recent tendency, exemplified most clearly in certain works of Paul

Virilio, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Michael Hardt and Antonio

Negri, can thus be seen as a return to the roots of poststructuralism in

the Events of May ’68 when intellectuals revolted against their roles as

the organizers of the cybernetic society and together with millions of

workers, immigrants, women and others, turned this world upside down, if

only for a few brief, blissful moments. It is in this way that the

appearance of postanarchism in recent years can also be seen as an

aspect of this return of the recently forgotten past, at least partially

as a result of the return of a world-historical social movement that has

been challenging all forms of technocratic domination, carrying the

struggle of May ’68 and the Italian Autonomia to the next stage as Bey

had hoped; a phenomena perhaps best summed up, at least for the moment,

by the proclamation, “neither the normalization of classical anarchism

nor the depoliticization of poststructuralism!”

To visit the postanarchism clearinghouse website or to join the

postanarchism listserv, which now has several hundred members from all

over the world engaging in discussions like this, please visit the

“postanarchism” link at

www.spooncollective.org

References

Armitage, John 2001. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. London: Sage

Publications.

Bey, Hakim, 1991. TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological

Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.

Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman, 2001. When Poetry Ruled the Streets:

The French May Events of 1968. Albany: SUNY Press.

Gordon, Colin, ed., 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and

Other Writings 1972–1977, Michel Foucault. New York: Pantheon Books.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, 2001. Hegemony and Socialist

Strategy. London: Verso.

May, Todd, 1994. The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist

Anarchism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Newman, Saul, 2001. From Bakunin to Lacan: Antiauthoritarianism and

the Dislocation of Power. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Vaneigem, Raoul, 2001. The Revolution of Everyday Life. London:

Aldgate Press.

Virilio, Paul, 1997. Pure War. New York: Semiotext(e)