"Postanarchism in a Nutshell"

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 Postanarchism

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)