"Historicizing the Spontaneous Revolution:

Anarchism
and the Spatial Politics of Postmodernism"

Nicholas Spencer, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Wendell V. Harris, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Colin Falck,
Camille Paglia, Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton --
these are just some of the many writers who have
pronounced the demise of postmodern and/or
poststructuralist thought. It seems that the regime of
the sign and discourse analysis has given way to
materialist critique and cultural studies, and while
some people may not perceive any essential antinomy
between discourse and materialism, many others welcome
these developments as finally exposing the faddish and
pretentious nature of postmodernism. As the heady
self-referentialism of postmodern culture continues, a
cooling of academic interest may enable scholars to
examine the traditions and influences relevant to
postmodernism's career more clearly. The histories of
Tel Quel written by Patrick French and Danielle
Marx-Scouras, Peter Starr's recovery of the
post-revolutionary climate of French theory, and
Francois Dosse's recently translated two-volume
History of Structuralism are all excellent examples of
this project. I propose to make a small contribution
to this process of historicization by seeking to find
clues to the true politics of postmodernism within
leftist traditions of the past one hundred and fifty
years.

According to Brian McHale, postmodernism represents an
intensification of the epistemological dominant of
modernism into an ontological dominant. In other
words, modernism asked the question, "What can I know
about the world?" whereas postmodernism asks, "Which
world is this?" and "Which 'I' is asking?"
Postmodernism's radical problematization of the
ontological integrity of the world and the subject is
apparent in much literature and theory, and Linda
Hutcheon argues that effects such as the decentering
of the subject, reflexivity, and the destabilization
of referentiality and representation constitute the
politics of postmodernism. However, the metaphorical
application of these discursive tropes within the
political sphere is unconvincing, as Hutcheon herself
seems to conclude. While arguing that postmodernism
"is not a degeneration into hyperreality but a
questioning of what reality can mean and how we can
come to know it" (Hutcheon 34), Hutcheon also states
that postmodernism is both complicitous with the
systems of power it seeks to critique and devoid of
any "theory of positive action on a social level"
(Hutcheon 22). Even where postmodernism's undermining
of the master narratives of western culture is
affirmed, as in Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern
Condition, metaphorical application takes precedence
over political identification, as Lyotard makes the
provisional contracts of postmodern language games and
the science of chaos and catastrophe theory into
metaphors for one another. Of course it could be
argued that political identity, in the sense implied
by democratic representation, is precisely what
Lyotard objects to; yet this does not alter the fact
that Lyotard fails to acknowledge that his critique is
part of an ongoing tradition of political philosophy.
Not content to rest with weakly political or
apolitical readings, Richard J. Bernstein has probed
more deeply than most into the political "horizons" of
postmodernity. For example, Bernstein argues that the
writings of Jacques Derrida are fundamentally
ethical-political. However, Bernstein is bemused by
the fact that these texts "can be read . . . as being
nihilistic, obscurantist, self-indulgent logorrhea
and. . .passionate, political, subversive, committed
to opening the spaces for diffrance and respecting
what is irreducibly other"; Bernstein's frustrated
conclusion is that Derrida rejects political methods
or "positions," while simultaneously "point[ing] us
toward the promised land of a postmetaphysical ethics
and politics without adumbrating its geography"
(Bernstein 191).

One way to begin adumbrating the geography of the
politics of postmodernism is to characterize the most
prominent arguments of the critics of postmodernism,
i.e., those made by left-wing figures such as Terry
Eagleton, David Harvey, Jurgen Habermas, and
Christopher Norris. All these critics subscribe to
some version of the Marxist model of a rational or
scientific understanding of historical processes,
which culminate in a class-based revolution at the end
of dialectical time. Each has a particular emphasis in
their criticisms of postmodernism: Eagleton chides
postmodern vogues for turning potential radicals away
from leftist political activism; Harvey attacks the
postmodern notion that discourse is as primary a
social process as economics; Habermas perceives the
postmodern abandonment of the rational program of
modernization as "neoconservatism"; and Norris seeks
to preserve the sanctity of Derrida's philosophy from
the taint of meaningless postmodern posturing a la
Baudrillard, Foucault, et al. What unites these
critics is their belief that postmodernism, by
rejecting rationalism and history, has forfeited all
claims to a revolutionary political identity, and, in
so doing, has bolstered the power of corporate
multinational capitalism.

Many of these criticisms have frequently been used by
leftist officials and organizers to destroy the
political credibility of the anti-authoritarian
revolutionary philosophy of anarchism. Conversely,
those of an anarchist persuasion have often criticized
the Marxist emphasis on rational history as a
counter-revolutionary justification for the authority
of the state and political party leaders. Both
anarchists and Marxists consider themselves the
spokespersons for the authentic political revolution;
by detailing a number of confrontations between these
two revolutionary viewpoints, we can establish a
context within which the politics of postmodernism
might be understood.

The inaugural struggle between Marx and the anarchists
took place during the era of the First International
Working Men's Association, founded in September 1864.
The first four years of the International were
characterized by the conflict between, on the one
hand, Marx's attempt to form the International into a
centralized political party that would gradually
achieve victories on behalf of the working class, and,
on the other hand, the views of anarchist
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who rejected mass political
struggle in favor of a network of spontaneously-formed
mutual aid societies organized along federalist lines.
The demise of the Proudhonist Paris Commune of 1871
reinforced Marx's power in the International, and at
the Hague Congress of 1872 Marx achieved his
definitive victory over anarchist thought by defeating
Mikhail Bakunin and his adherents. Bakunin refuted
Marx's claim to represent the proletariat and argued
that the authoritarianparty could only promote its own
power and not that of the proletariat. In turn Marx
characterized Bakunin as a bourgeois apologist,
arguing that Bakunin's opposition to a unified and
bureaucratic political party and his anti-state (as
opposed to pro-proletarian) motivation were indicative
of the complete absence of revolutionary and political
elements in anarchism.

Such is the power of Marx's rhetorical strategy that
anarchism has continued to be synonymous with
unrealistic and mystical aspirations and a wildly
romantic understanding of human nature. Anarchist
political philosophy is by definition difficult to
identify precisely, since "anarchism" is an umbrella
term for various concepts and practices rather than
being a codified doctrine; the legacy of Marx's attack
has been to exacerbate the invisibility of anarchist
political philosophy, so that even the most
widely-accepted anarchist notions have been eliminated
from the almost universal understanding of politics in
terms of party authority and representation. One such
notion is the theory of spontaneous revolution, which
was a major feature of nineteenth-century anarchist
thought, and which is most closely associated with the
name of Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg was not an avowed
anarchist, but her theoretical criticisms of the
Bolshevik revolution in Russia and her practical
involvement in the spontaneous Spartacist uprising in
Germany in 1919 indicate an anarchist disposition. For
example, Luxemburg was a fierce advocate of direct
action democracy and spurned both Leninist
dictatorship and the bourgeois democracy proposed by
Karl Kautsky. While Luxemburg supported the need for
party leaders and organization to guide revolutions
according to the historical science of dialectical
materialism, she also posited that the revolutionary
moment cannot be predicted and instead can only occur
spontaneously as an expression of the people's will.
From Lenin's associate Grigori Zinoviev onwards,
Luxemburg's views on spontaneous revolution have been
castigated as counter-revolutionary nonsense, and the
contrast between the success of the Soviet revolution
and the failure of the Spartacist uprising has been
cited by Marxists to destroy the legitimacy of
anarchist tendencies within radical groups. What is
ironic about this interpretation, according to some
historians, is that the groundswell of revolutionary
feeling, which the Spartacist uprising exemplified,
was thwarted not by its own incoherence but by the
blunting of political will resulting from the attempts
of groups such as the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and
the Berlin Congress of the Workers' and Soldiers'
Councils to commandeer power and impose organization.

According to anarchist philosophy, belief in history
is the guarantor of political authority, since change
over time implies the need for a centralized body to
guide the processes of change. The anarchist appeal to
spontaneous revolution is one symptom of the rejection
of history; another is the spatial or geographical
emphasis which is apparent throughout anarchist
literature. Such an emphasis is evident in the
activities of the Situationist International, a
political and artistic grouping that was heavily
involved in the mobilization of students and workers
in Paris, May 1968. In their expose of the
commodification of human psychology and behavior and
their identification of capitalist society as "the
spectacle" of universal non-participation, the
situationists broke with dialectical leftists who
sought to justify control over revolutionary events by
prioritizing history and economics. As in the Berlin
of January 1919, the revolution of May 1968 was,
according to Christopher Gray and other pro-situ
historians, undermined because groups such as the
Council for the Maintenance of Occupations were
marginalized by the action committees of more powerful
leftist groups, who demanded short-term reform of the
universities and police power rather than total
revolution.

A fundamental aspect of the situationists' critique of
the authority of dialectical history was their belief
that social power relations are best understood
spatially. Situationist theorists such as Guy Debord,
Raoul Vaneigem, Ivan Chtcheglov, and Asger Jorn wrote
on issues such as housing, urbanism, traffic
regulations, and other geographical structures to
argue that revolutionary activity is primarily a
matter of the spontaneous rearrangement of local
spatial configurations. Considering history and
political representation to be simulations, the
situationists turned to spatial revolutionary tactics
such as the following: the drive was a drifting walk
through the urban environment which attempted to
inscribe authentic desire into social space;
psychogeographical analysis involved the examination
of social space in terms of its potential
transformation into the site of situations (where,
again, authentic desire could be liberated); and
dtournement was the means by which situationists
tried to undermine the power of advertisements and
other ideological formations of capitalist society,
not by opposing them dialectically, but by subtly
altering them, so that the ideological power of the
original could be hijacked for revolutionary ends.
While dtournement may seem less spatial a procedure
than the drive or psychogeography, it is based on the
assumption that the space of dialectical opposition is
non-existent. Dtournement is, therefore, a
reinscription of pre-existing social space rather than
a move in the game of deferred historical revolution.

Geographical or spatial concerns form a powerful link
between situationist thought and both anarchist
traditions and postmodernism. The geographical
emphasis of anarchism is easily demonstrated. The
professional expertise of geographer Peter Kropotkin,
one of the major anarchist theorists of the nineteenth
century, informed his political philosophy, which was
concerned with models of the decentralized
distribution of locally-owned farms and factories, as
exemplified by the Russian mir or village commune,
rather than the concentration of power in the state.
The influence of Kropotkin and the French writer
Elise Reclus upon anarchist geographers such as
Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, Paul Goodman, and
Lewis Mumford is incalculable, and all these writers
posit that the implementation of social justice
requires a spatial, more so than a historical,
redistribution of power; moreover, some urban
historians such as Peter Hall have argued that the
modern discipline of regional planning was the product
of anarchist thought. Like many of the aforementioned
geographers, the situationists did not identify
themselves as anarchists for reasons which feature
heavily in anarchist history, i.e., for those of an
anarchist persuasion, issues of group identification
and representation are deeply problematic.
Nevertheless, their spatial politics of spontaneous
revolution place them in the tradition of anarchist
thought, and these politics continue to inform
postmodernism.

In the postmodern era we are likely to give more
credibility to terms such as cultural politics,
appropriation, commodification, recuperation, playful
disruption, and reification than the language of
dialectical materialism, and while there are many
currents that have created this situation (and many
things to mourn about the dominance of cultural, as
opposed to political, politics), the situationist
current emanating from Georg Lukcs' writings on the
commodity and reification and dada and surrealist art
is one of the most significant. For example, the
influence of dtournement is strong, as is evidenced
by the postmodern art of Cindy Sherman, Kathy Acker,
and many others; also, the most prominent French
theorists of the postmodern or post-Marxist phase,
such as Baudrillard, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari,
etc., acknowledge the situationists' influence. The
criticisms made of Lyotard by Habermas are to a
considerable extent a restatement of the criticisms
made of Bakunin, Proudhon, Luxemburg, and the
situationists by dialectical leftists. Lyotard was
involved in political groups such as Socialisme ou
Barbarie and Mouvement du Mars, which had strong ties
with the situationists, and Sadie Plant argues that
Lyotard's thought "is a theoretical translation of the
situationist drive" (Plant 164). Also, Lyotard's
appeal to chaos theory marks him as a spontaneous
revolutionist, since the unmediated transition from
linear order to non-linear "chaos" in, say,
meteorological systems is clearly a metaphor for
non-dialectical revolution; yet, as we have seen,
Lyotard's discourse does not move beyond metaphorical
terms of reference. One of the most important
continuations of situationist thought subsists in the
writings of Edward Soja, who, like Baudrillard and Guy
Debord, takes Henri Lefebvre as one of his major
theoretical reference points.

Like the situationists and other upholders of
anarchist perspectives, Soja welcomes the spatial
emphasis, which he regards as being reasserted in
contemporary social theory. Through his concept of
postmodern geography, Soja argues that the primary
characteristic of postmodernism is its replacement of
historical with spatial concepts. Soja's formulation
shows how historians have promoted their own
discipline as analytical while demeaning geography as
"mere description," explains why it is hard for us to
perceive political geography as anything more than
stating the obvious, and makes a case for geography as
a sophisticated analytical discipline. Sojas interest
in the "urban imaginary" and discursivity of
postmodern geography leads him to criticize the
hegemony of rational historical models of social
processes, such as those put forward by leftist
geographer David Harvey. In so doing, Soja reenacts
the conflict between spatial anarchists and historical
Marxists, reaffirms that this conflict is still alive
in the supposedly post-ideological age, and returns it
to the domain of geography. Nowhere does Soja identify
either himself or his objects of study as anarchists
(although he does refer to Foucault as
"neo-anarchistic" [Soja 42]), nor does he speak of
spontaneous revolution; nevertheless, Soja's work
helps us to view the will-to-power of dialectical
history in the widespread assumption that the writings
of Baudrillard, Foucault, and others, since they lack
any representationalist political methodology, cannot
be regarded as legitimate political studies of
society. If we understand the current interest in
spatial conceptions of society in terms of the
suspicion of history endemic to both anarchism and
postmodernism, this may enable us to realize that
postmodernism does not lack a political identity,
neither is that political identity simply
metaphorical. Postmodernism's spatial understanding of
spontaneous change may be bad politics or naive
politics but it remains a politics of revolution. It
is important to state this because there are many
people interested in postmodernism who believe those
who say they are devoid of a political identity. At a
time when liberationist, decentralizationist, and
anti-governmental views are becoming increasingly
prominent, postmodernists must become aware of their
own political traditions. Without such an awakening of
awareness, our political future may well be reduced to
a choice between the paranoid individualism of the
right and the simulatory practices of "democratic
representation."

Works Cited and Consulted

Bernstein, Richard, J. The New Constellation: The
Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Frolich, Paul. Rosa Luxemburg. New York: Pluto Press,
1972.

Hall, Peter. Cities of Tomorrow. Oxford: Blackwell,
1988.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990.

Home, Stewart (Editor). What Is Situationism? A
Reader. San Francisco: AK Press, 1996.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism.
London: Routledge, 1989.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge. Translation from the French by
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword by
Frederic Jameson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984.

Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible: A History
of Anarchism. London: Fontana, 1992.

Marx, Karl. The First International & After. Edited
and Introduced by David Fernbach. New York: Vintage,
1974.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York:
Methuen, 1987.

Plant, Sadie. "The Situationist International: A Case
of Spectacular Neglect." 153-72 in Home.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion
of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso,
1989.