Postanarchism in a Bombshell
By Jason Adams
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 Deleuzo-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 http://www.spooncollective.org
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)
