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\title{Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation}
\date{2006}
\author{Jesse Cohn}
\subtitle{Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics}






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\chapter{Acknowledgments}


ONE OF THE SIMPLEST AND PROFOUNDEST TEACHINGS OF ANARCHISM IS THAT IT
is only with the help of many, many others that one finds oneself. I want to thank everyone who made this book possible: Darlene most of all, for the gift of time and space in which to work, and for her endless love, enthusiasm, and (by no means least) patience; my students, for allowing me to try out some of these half-baked notions on them first, and for constantly inspiring me to the effort of interpretation and writing again; Silvia Dapía, for her gracious mentorship and friendship, and Ronald Creagh for his; and a whole generation of researchers for doing the hard work of re-opening the questions I have tried to address here, including Allan Antliff, Mark Antliff, Max Blechman, Daniel Colson, Uri Eisenzweig, John Hutton, Andrew M. Koch, Howard G. Lay, Patricia Leighten, Todd May, Saul Newman, Richard Porton, Richard Sonn, Alexander Varias, David Weir, and the late David Kadlec and John Moore. Special appreciation goes to Gareth Gordon and Steve Robinson, two of my unpaid professors, and to Carol Vandeveer Hamilton, who suggested to me what eventually became the theme of this book with a single question eight years ago.


Quotations from Diego Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution (Louis
Frank, translator) are reprinted from After the Revolution: Economic Reconstruction in Spain Today, Pages No. 11-13, 18-19, 23, 48, 50, 58, 64, 80, 89-91, 93, and 97, Copyright 1937. My thanks to Reed Elsevier for extending permission to quote from the work. Attempts to locate the families of the authors were unsuccessful.


This book is dedicated to Rosa.

\chapter{Introduction: The General Form of the Crisis of Representation}



\begin{quote}


A single but complex issue defines the representational crisis. It involves the assumption that . . . there is a world out there (the real) that can be captured by a ‘‘knowing’’ author . . .


—Norman K. Denzin, Interpretive Ethnography



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


Consider just two of the social practices in which representation functions centrally: literature and democratic politics. Both have operated historically as practices of exclusion. If representation . . . always pre-supposes a distance, then . . . literary representations and representative democracy always seem to extend the distance under the illusion of narrowing it.


—Santiago Colás, ‘‘What’s Wrong With Representation?’’



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


The whole system of representative government is an immense fraud resting on this fiction: that the executive and legislative bodies elected by universal suffrage of the people must or even can possibly represent the will of the people.


—Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy



\end{quote}


IN OUR TIME, ACCORDING TO FREDERIC JAMESON, WESTERN THOUGHT HAS FALLEN
under the shadow of an all-encompassing ‘‘crisis of representation’’ that
calls into question the relationships between our concepts and the truths
they are meant to denote, our images and the realities they are supposed to
depict, our institutions and the interests they are supposed to serve.\footnote{Frederic Jameson, introduction to The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, by Jean-François lyotard, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), viii-xii.} The
broad scope and significance of the crisis are implicit in its central term.


Concerns about representation cross disciplinary boundaries, straddling
the realms of the symbolic and the practical, since ‘‘to represent’’ means
both to stand for, as a symbol stands for a thing symbolized, and to speak for,
as an elected official speaks for a constituency. It can be articulated as the
denial that representation is possible, or that it is what it purports to be: so
Richard Rorty’s ‘‘antirepresentationalism’’ denies, in theory, that discourse
can refer to something nondiscursive. Antirepresentationalism can also be
articulated, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, as a prescriptive opposition to practices of representing. While the first kind of claim is concerned with knowledge and the second with action, the two inevitably overlap: if you no longer
accept ‘‘the notion of knowledge as accurate representation,’’ then you will
oppose practices that appeal to the authority of such knowledge as erroneous
or malicious. Thus, the critique of representation appears simultaneously in
‘‘two registers’’—the ‘‘epistemic’’ and the ‘‘political.’’\footnote{Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 6; Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 97.}


It is not for nothing that Jonathan Arac has pointed to this issue as ‘‘one
of the most vexed areas in contemporary theory.’’ Postmodern critiques of
representation extend modernist suspicion of representational art and literature by questioning whether even high-modernist abstraction ever, in fact,
constituted a successful exit from representation.\footnote{Jonathan Arac, ed., Postmodernism and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xx, xxii.} At the same time, antirepresentationalists have turned modernist attacks on ‘‘mimesis’’ into an assault
on the representationalist underpinnings of interpretation.\footnote{Gregory Ulmer, ‘‘The Object of Post-Criticism,’’ in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post- modern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 83.} Not only has this
undermined the claims of social researchers to produce a scientific discourse
that accurately represents its object, it also places the representative status
of any political discourse in question.


To represent, it would appear, is to dominate; there is no escape from
representation; ergo, there is no end to domination. Here, the moral zeal
animating the postwar generation of French theorists converges, paradoxically, with the prevailing cynicism of the post-sixties era, for the critique of
representation produces cynical conclusions incompatible with its own ethical premises. As Nancy Fraser has argued, the position that sees representations as indistinguishable from ‘‘power plays’’ puts in question the very
possibility, let alone the content, of any kind of ethical engagement: ‘‘How,
after all, can one argue against the possibility of warranted claims while one-
self making such claims as that sexism exists and is unjust?’’ In this way,
the very ‘‘opposition between totalitarianism and democracy’’ has been
placed under the sign of radical doubt.\footnote{Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 181, 184.}


This reluctance to defend democracy and discourses of human rights as
universal norms has raised alarms. While antihumanist critiques of representation have usefully called attention to the possibility that even the most
seemingly transparent representational systems, in speaking for a multitude,
entail the silencing of its multiplicity, this has led to an ethical quandary. If
every representation is an act of domination, and if every statement, every
interpretation, and every staking-out of a position means making a representation of things, then every work of art, every reading, and every political
act, even those motivated by a wish to lend a voice to those who have been
silenced, involves a further silencing. How, then, can we consistently think
or practice in the absence of representation?


The fact is that we cannot and do not. The show goes on—but as Terry
Eagleton remarks, ‘‘the fact that ‘everything just goes on’ is the crisis.’’ Thus,
the sanguine tone assumed by anthropologists George Marcus and Michael
Fischer, who describe the ‘‘crisis of representation’’ as a climate of ‘‘uncertainty about adequate means of describing social reality’’ in which ‘‘older
dominant frameworks are not so much denied . . . as suspended,’’ masks a
dangerous recognition: since there is ‘‘nothing so grand to replace them,’’
ethnographers’ representational practices can and do go forward, but deprived of their justification.\footnote{Terry Eagleton, The Eagleton Reader, ed. Stephen Regan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 145; George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 8, 10.} Likewise, the literary scholar Elizabeth Ermarth
is forced to acknowledge that her own critique of representation ‘‘is written
in the language of representation’’—for what other language is there? To
speak at all, it seems, is to speak in ‘‘the language of representation’’ in
which ‘‘we are inescapably engaged.’’\footnote{Elizabeth Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and The Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 14, 37.}


This epistemological inconsistency dangerously weakens critical arguments, leaving practices that have as their goal the transformation of society—and in every corner of the human sciences, many, if not all, remain
committed to some vision of social transformation—ethically incoherent.


Thus, no less an exemplar of contemporary theory than Michel Foucault,
whom Gilles Deleuze credits with having issued the definitive denunciation
of ‘‘the indignity of speaking for others,’’ who declares that ‘‘there is always
something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it,’’
is also to be found suggesting that the intellectual ‘‘provide,’’ for those engaged in struggle, ‘‘a ramified, penetrative perception of the present . . . a
topological and geological survey of the battlefield,’’ i.e., to represent social
reality.\footnote{Deleuze, quoted in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 209; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 9; Foucault, Power\Slash{}Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1980), 62.} Without such representations, how can political battles be fought?


Many have insisted that radical politics need only to be rethought, that its
representationalist baggage can be jettisoned. However, the radicality of the
challenge to radical thought and practice cannot be overstated. The rejection
of representation, ultimately, is nothing less than the rejection of language
and signification, the stuff of the social itself. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s account of ‘‘the relation between signification and power,’’ which
largely collapses the difference between the two, is indicative of the depth
and breadth of the antirepresentationalist mistrust for and even hostility
toward signification in general. ‘‘Knowledge’’ and ‘‘critique’’ are equally
prone to antirepresentationalist attacks. ‘‘Where do you criticize from?’’ demands Jean-François Lyotard. ‘‘Don’t you see that criticizing is still knowing, knowing better? That the critical relation still falls within the sphere of
knowledge . . . and thus of the assumption of power?’’\footnote{Jean-François Lyotard, Driftworks, trans. Susan Hanson et al. (New York: Semio- text(e), 1984), 13.} How, then, can any-
one resist, denounce, or even identify domination—aesthetically, hermeneutically, politically—without simultaneously enacting it? If a poststructuralist
world is one in which domination and injustice always already inhabit the
very logoi that denounce them, where can justice or freedom find purchase?


Of course, radical critiques of representation are not new to the scene;
they have been with us from the days of ancient Eastern and Western
thought, and debates over the aesthetic propriety of representation predate
even the rise of avant-garde art (in, for example, the arguments over idolatry
in Judaism, Islam, and Byzantine Christianity). What I want to consider here
is the value of the earliest modern critique of political representation—that
posed by anarchism from the mid-nineteenth century onward. In light of the
problems created for political action by a critique of representation, we
might ask how, for a century and a half, men and women engaged in the most
profound contestation of representation managed nonetheless to organize
and struggle en masse. Could it be, in the words of Chamsy Ojeili, that a
study of anarchism reveals ‘‘a way beyond these sorts of blockages,’’ a road
back to practice?\footnote{Chamsy Ojeili, ‘‘The ‘Advance Without Authority’: Post-modernism, Libertarian Socialism, and Intellectuals,’’ Democracy and Nature 7, no. 3 (November 2001), \href{http://www.democracynature.org/dn/vol7/ojeili\_intellectuals.htm}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.democracynature.org\Slash{}dn\Slash{}vol7\Slash{}ojeili\_intellectuals.htm} (accessed 11 March 2005).}


A number of recent arguments—for instance, those of Todd May (The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 1994), Saul Newman (From
Bakunin to Lacan, 2001), and Daniel Colson (Petit lexique philosophique de
l’anarchisme de Proudhon à Deleuze, 2001)—have reached just this conclusion. For these writers, the dominant critical systems have been exhausted,
and the anarchist tradition supplies a new one. This tradition is particularly
congenial to the poststructuralism of Deleuze, Foucault, and Lyotard, for
whom the ‘‘rejection of representation’’ also serves as an ethical foundation.\footnote{Todd May, ‘‘Poststructuralist Anarchism: An Interview with Todd May.’’ Interview with Rebecca DeWitt. Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 4, no. 2 (Fall 2000), \href{http://perspectives.anarchist-studies.org/8may.htm}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}perspectives.anarchist-studies.org\Slash{}8may.htm} (11 March 2005); May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 47.}


I, too, contend that anarchism has something to contribute to projects that
seek a way out of contemporary impasses in hermeneutics, aesthetics, and
politics. However, when we look for this contribution, we will find that it is
something more and other than mere antirepresentationalism. In fact, a careful rereading of the tradition will take us beyond the sterile opposition between an unsupportable ‘‘representationalist’’ position and an incoherent
‘‘antirepresentationalist’’ one. It will require us to rethink the very premises
that have premised the crisis, including such key concepts as essentialism,
agency, construction, determination, and the subject.


It will also require us to dissolve some popular and academic misinterpretations of anarchism. Despite some rather unhistorical Marxist claims to the
contrary, anarchism is also a socialism. While the everyday rhetorical use of
the term refers merely to some vague embrace of chaos, anti-intellectualism,
or disorganized violence, the word in its older sense names a body of theory
generated by and uniting (in a somewhat loose but still coherent manner) a
branch of the workers’ movement originating in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. The historical anarchist movement presented a socialist program for
political transformation distinguished from reformist and Marxist varieties of
socialism by its primary commitment to ethics, expressed as


\begin{enumerate}[1.]
\item\relax 
a moral opposition to all forms of domination and hierarchy (particularly as embodied in the institutions of capitalism and the state, but
also as manifested in other institutions, e.g., the family, and in other
relationships, e.g., those of city and country or empire and colony) and



\item\relax 
a special concern with the coherence of means and ends.




\end{enumerate}

Thus, for instance, Bakunin declared that ‘‘we reject all legislation, all
authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal powers over us . . .


This is the sense in which we are all anarchists’’; thus, Emma Goldman repeatedly emphasized the importance of achieving an ‘‘identity of means used
and aims sought’’ in the acts intended to bring about and constitute a stateless socialist order.\footnote{Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works By the Activist-Founder of World Anarchism, ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 231; Emma Goldman, My Further Disillusionment in Russia, Anarchy Archives: An Online Research Center on the History and Theory of Anarchism, 1 March 2000, \href{http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}dwardmac.pitzer.edu\Slash{}Anarchist\_Archives\Slash{}goldman\Slash{}further\Slash{}mfdr\_12.html} (accessed 11 March 2005), 12.} These are typical and essential anarchist statements.


When I say typical, I am referring to anarchism as a material fact of history; when I say essential, I am referring to anarchism as an idea. The essence is an abstraction from the material fact, a generalization about what it
is that unites anarchists across different historical periods in an anarchist
tradition, about the ways in which individual self-identified anarchists have
identified themselves (diachronically) with the historical movement as well
as (synchronically) with their living cohort. Within this general consensus,
there is still considerable diversity, but also enough coherence for one to
distinguish between anarchism’s socialist mainstream and its more marginal
individualist tendencies. The distinction between mainstream and margins
most clearly emerges in historical perspective: the moments in which anarchism plays its largest role in public life—for instance, in the struggle over
the direction of the First International (1871-72), in the Makhnovist insurrection in the Ukraine (1917-21), in the formation and suppression of the
Industrial Workers of the World (1905-20), or, most famously, in the Spanish civil war (1936-39)—have nothing to do with individualism, not even in
the modest form individualism took in America (a handful of cooperative
colonies, a limited protest against monopoly and finance capitalism). Indeed,
the anarchist tradition is not defined so much by its loosely defined canon of
theory as it is by a repertoire of practices: direct action, the general strike,
direct democracy, collective ownership, cooperation, federation, etc. The individualist terrorism with which anarchism is still associated—peaking in
1893 with the assassination of President Sadi Carnot and Émile Henry’s
bombing of the Café Terminus—bears little relation to the socialist mainstream of anarchism. In the context of what is called ‘‘social anarchism’’ (to
distinguish it from the individualist variety), to speak of an organized anarchist movement is not only not contradictory, it is the only way to understand
anarchist history. As Voline wrote, after the crushing of the Makhnovist rebellion in the Ukraine, ‘‘it is not a matter of ‘organization’ or ‘nonorganization,’ but of two different principles of organization . . . Of course, say the
anarchists, society must be organized. However, the new organization . . .
must be established freely, socially, and, above all, from below.’’\footnote{Voline, qtd. in Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, trans. Mary Klopper (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 43.}


That it is necessary to go to this length to articulate what I mean by ‘‘anarchism’’ reflects the depth of the oblivion to which anarchism has been consigned in the academy.


It is perhaps too early to tell if this oblivion will be shaken by the recent
resurfacing of anarchism in the public sphere, particularly in the nations of
the old Soviet bloc (where anarchist federations, unions, and student groups
have enjoyed a small renaissance) and in Western protests against the globalization of capitalism (which have not only featured ‘‘black blocs’’ of anarchist protesters, but have been organized in the federative, bottom-up
anarchist style). At the junction of West and East, in mass demonstrations
against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings in
Prague, anarchists were so visible that even left-liberal commentators were
forced to account for their presence. Thus, in the Toronto Globe and Mail,
Naomi Klein remarks:



\begin{quote}


The experience of growing up disillusioned with both [communist and capitalist]
systems helps explain why so many of the activists behind this week’s protests
call themselves ‘‘anarchists’’. Anarchism is an ideology that defines itself by being
fiercely non-ideological. It rejects externally imposed rules . . . Most of us carry
a mess of negative biases about anarchists. But the truth is that most are less
interested in hurling projectiles than in finding ways to lead simple, autonomous
lives. They call it ‘‘freedom.’’\footnote{Naomi Klein, ‘‘Capitalism And Communism Look Equally Bad In Prague,’’ Montreal Serai 14, no. 1 (Winter 2000-2001), \href{http://www.montrealserai.com/2001\_volume\_14/14\_1/article\_2.htm}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.montrealserai.com\Slash{}2001\_Volume\_14\Slash{}14\_1\Slash{}Article\_2.htm} (accessed 22 March 2004).}



\end{quote}


The sympathy Klein evinces toward the anarchist protesters is in such
marked contrast to the sneering, dismissive tone taken by mainstream commentators that it is easy for a reader to miss the subtle note of condescension: apparently ignorant of any larger dimension to anarchists’ critique,
Klein reduces their ideas to a psychological reaction to the traumas of Stalinism and marketization, a weariness with ideologies, vague complaints about
‘‘externally imposed rules,’’ and equally vague longings for a vanished ‘‘simple’’ life. Like Lenin or E. J. Hobsbawm, Klein diagnoses anarchism as a
primitive or regressive form of leftism. Thus, in the name of ‘‘understanding,’’ anarchism is once again misunderstood, pushed to the margins of public discourse. This book is an attempt to redress that wrong.


The chapters that follow address critiques of representation in three different areas. Part 1, ‘‘Hermeneutics,’’ begins with an examination, in chapter
1, ‘‘False Solutions,’’ of some attempts on the part of a number of theorists
to formulate a nonrepresentational alternative to representationalist interpretations of texts. I want to show that all of these attempts fail to cohere on an
ethical or an epistemological level, and sometimes on both levels at once, for
a number of reasons; none is adequate, finally, because all are structurally
committed to one or another pole of a certain persistent problem that I am
calling the genetic\Slash{}quantum antinomy, an inability to articulate a balanced
understanding of the relations between subject and object, structure and
agency, mind and body, language and world. Through an analysis of these
problems in chapter 2, ‘‘The Necessity of a Critique of Representation,’’ I
move toward a clarified understanding of ethical and epistemological critiques of representation. Then, in chapter 3, ‘‘Anarchism as a Critique of
Representation,’’ I propose a different approach to representation, one suggested by the anarchist tradition. While recent poststructuralist treatments
of that tradition tend to see it as committed to an outdated rationalist philosophy, a ‘‘repressive hypothesis’’ about power, and a mythology of ‘‘human
nature,’’ a careful re-reading of the tradition reveals something much more
rich, complex, and nuanced—in fact, something more approximating the
‘‘critical realism’’ of Roy Bhaskar than the naïve realism contemporary theorists use as a foil.
Chapter 4, ‘‘Anarchism Beyond Representationalism and
Antirepresentationalism,’’ distinguishes a particular tradition within anarchism, that of ‘‘social anarchism,’’ as the source of this critical-realist critique of representation and locates the specificity of a social anarchist
account of meaning. This section concludes with chapter 5, ‘‘Anarchist Hermeneutics as Ethics and Ecology,’’ outlining a social anarchist interpretive
methodology founded on ethical commitments and bearing a certain ecological character.


Part 2, ‘‘Aesthetics,’’ also begins with a review of the difficulties created
by critiques of representation. In chapter 6, ‘‘The Fate of Representation,
the Fate of Critique,’’ I examine the failure of modernist critiques of representation, which empty the text of its content and refuse the demands of the
audience, as well as the failure of postmodernist critiques of representation,
which strip texts of their referential power and authors of their authority.


Both are informed by an individualist anarchism that merely perpetuates
rather than overcomes a historical rift between creative forces and their social context. Chapter 7, ‘‘Reconstructing Anarchist Aesthetics,’’ attempts to
retrieve a social anarchist discourse on art, beginning with Proudhon and
extending to the present, that goes beyond the sterile alternatives of representationalist classicism and the modern and postmodern varieties of anti-
representationalism. This social anarchist aesthetic, known in the nineteenth
century as l’art social, provides the starting point for a series of meditations
on the politics of literary style and the contexts in which literary signs are
produced, circulated, and consumed. Drawing on the same tradition, chapter
8, ‘‘Aesthetic Production,’’ attempts to reconceive relations between authors
and audiences, signifiers and signifieds, in terms of mutuality instead of
domination.


This economic turn leads to the subject of Part 3, ‘‘Politics.’’ Chapter 9,
‘‘The Critique of Democracy as Representation,’’ examines the relationship
between these two terms vis-à-vis direct democracy. Chapter 10, ‘‘The Critique of Economy as Representation,’’ considers problems of economic representation and value from an anarchist standpoint. Chapter 11, ‘‘The
Critique of History as Representation,’’ addresses the antirepresentationalist
critique of historical metanarratives, outlining an anarchist conception of
history that is neither formless nor rigidly teleological. The last chapter,
‘‘The Critique of Identity as Representation,’’ turns to questions of identity,
defending forms of universality that do not subsume or annihilate diversity.

\part{Part I: Hermeneutics}

\chapter{1. False solutions}



\begin{quote}


We have carried criticism to the last degree of scepticism, even to the point where it becomes sceptical of itself, and have yet no new synthesis.


—Herbert Read, Poetry and Experience



\end{quote}


WHILE ANARCHISM IS ASSOCIATED PRIMARILY WITH A REJECTION OF REPRESENTATIVE
democracy, Daniel Colson argues that its critique runs far deeper:
since, in each case, ‘‘men, signs or institutions claim to replace things or to
say what they are,’’ anarchism extends its opposition to ‘‘any form of representation.’’ Julia Kristeva concurs: an anarchism that fails to criticize symbolic as well as political representation fails to constitute itself as truly
antiauthoritarian.\footnote{Daniel Colson, Petit lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme de Proudhon à Deleuze (Paris: Librairie générale française, 2001), 281-82, translation and emphasis mine; Julia Kristeva, Desire In Language: A Semiotic Approach To Literature And Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 23; Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique: l’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle, Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1974), 426-27.} An anarchist hermeneutics, then, would seem to be a contradiction in terms—for what is interpretation if not the construction of representations of the text? Presumably, then, a consistent antiauthoritarianism
would imply resistance to the representational premises of the hermeneutic
enterprise, a refusal to interpret the text as signifying something beyond itself, hermeneutically substituting for the text an interpretation that says what
it is.\footnote{Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 76-77, 306.}


Thus, for poststructuralists such as Kristeva and Roland Barthes, interpretation appears as an exercise in representational reductivism, the imposition of a totalizing meaning on textual plurality and indeterminacy, and
thereby an assertion of the interpreter’s authority over it.\footnote{Ibid., 304-5; Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 192.} At the same time,
strangely, both appear to see the realist premises of the interpretive enterprise—the pretense of discovering a subtextual meaning that is already present, if latent, within the text—as a kind of fetishism of the textual object, a
cringing submission to its authority.\footnote{Kristeva, Kristeva Reader, 306; Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, ed. and trans. Katherine Pilcher Keuneman (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 36.} Finally, both see interpretation as an
error, the attribution of meaning-making powers to something that can have
no such powers, mistaking some point in the chain of signification as a definitive end, a ‘‘meaning,’’ rather than simply part of an interminable process
of signification; the interpreter, from this standpoint, is saddled with a delusory authority, an imaginary knowledge about the text.\footnote{Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 37; Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 158.}


The urgency of the conclusion this leads to—the call for a radical break
with the very notion of interpretation as representation—should not distract
us from what is curious about its premises. Linked to one another by the
themes of antiauthoritarianism are no less than three competing, seemingly
incompatible interpretations of the act of interpretation itself. In the first,
interpretation is the reduction of all the disparate moments and instances of
a text to representations of a central meaning; in the second, the interpreter
is dominated by a text whose supposed meaning his or her text is enjoined
to re-present, to repeat and confirm; in the third, the claim of an interpretation to be representative of its object is simply taken to be empty.


Antirepresentational critiques of interpretation, then, can be enunciated
in three ways. The first critique is an ethical injunction against interpreting
the text as a representation of anything else; on this account, interpretation
is a domination of the text by the reader. The second critique regards interpretation as the reader’s domination by the text; on this account, the interpreter’s supposed obligation to represent the text must be refused. The third
form of critique is an epistemic denial that an interpretation can represent a
text. The first two varieties of antirepresentationalism about hermeneutics
find something morally or politically unacceptable about ‘‘speaking for’’ the
textual other (political representation or Vertreten); the last of these finds
something logically dubious about standing-for (symbolic representation or
Darstellen, Vorstellen, etc.).


All three of these critiques of representation raise serious questions. First
of all, can we act and intervene in the world without, in so doing, mediating
between subjects, imposing meanings, translating, identifying—i.e., taking
on the privilege or the burden of ‘‘speaking for’’ others? Moreover, can we
observe and analyze the world without thereby appealing to concepts of
meaning, referentiality, correspondence, signification, communication—i.e.,
seeing something as standing for something else? Finally, how do these three
forms of antirepresentationalism—ethical, political, and epistemological—
stand in relation to one another? Can these seemingly disparate perspectives
be combined into a single coherent picture? Can these three divergent proposals be contained within a single coherent program? In short, can we go
from merely particular, partial critiques of representation to a general critique
of representation?


One approach to producing a general critique of representation has attempted to find a logical link between the epistemic and the ethical, to make
the one serve as a kind of grounds for the other. The argument runs as follows: if our interpretive model cannot possibly ‘‘stand for’’ the text in any
reliable way, then our claims to ‘‘speak for’’ it are a priori illegitimate. Thus,
Michael J. Shapiro reads Foucault as arguing that since there is nothing underlying historical appearances that is so stable and simple that it can be
interpreted or represented, any claim that an interpretation truly represents
history is both ungroundable and coercive.\footnote{Michael J. Shapiro, Reading the Postmodern Polity: Political Theory as Textual Practice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 1-2.} Kenneth J. Gergen extends this
argument into a critique of psychology as a discourse claiming interpretive
authority: because the psychologist’s claims to speak on behalf of the subjects of research or treatment cannot be founded on any ‘‘grounds’’ of epistemic certainty, these claims will always amount to a de facto imposition of
false universality on the multiple.\footnote{Kenneth J. Gergen, ‘‘Exploring the Postmodern: Perils or Potentials?’’ American Psychologist 49, no. 5 (May 1994): 413.} Conversely, for Heideggerian literary theorists like William Spanos, it is because of the epistemic priority of ‘‘difference’’ over ‘‘identity’’ that the critic, in claiming to discover a unified
meaning within the text, in fact surreptitiously ‘‘coerces’’ it into that shape
via the machinations of ‘‘method.’’\footnote{William V. Spanos, Repetitions: The Postmodern Occasion in Literature and Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 32, 38; ‘‘Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature: A Preface,’’ in The Question Of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism, ed. William Spanos, Paul Bové, and Daniel O’Hara, xi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).} The strategy shared by Spanos, Gergen,
and Foucault, then, is to deny interpretations ethical legitimacy by attacking
their epistemic foundations, redescribing the knowledge claims of interpreters—claims to discover meaning as a unity behind the text’s multiplicity—as the coercive imposition of unity on difference, sameness on
otherness. The ethical imperative that emerges from this articulation of the
general critique of representation—the imperative not to represent the
other—is, in this sense, deeply Kantian, in that it evokes a respect, even a
sublime awe, for the noumenal unknowability of the other, calling on us not
to reduce the other to an object of knowledge or utility, a means to an end,
something to be categorized and controlled.\footnote{Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 79.} This is a critique of instrumental rationality, a form of anti-instrumentalism.


While persuasive in many ways, this formulation of antirepresentationalism as anti-instrumentalism encounters a number of difficulties, since it depends on assumptions that beg their own epistemological questions. The
certainty that a text cannot manifest any intrinsic form or fundamental identity, that there is no ‘‘depth lying beneath the surface’’ waiting to be represented,\footnote{Shapiro, 159n1.} is underwritten by a rather detailed set of ideas about what is, in
fact, to be found below the text’s surface, what is intrinsic and fundamental
to it. In other words, claims that ‘‘Being is fundamentally disordered,’’ that
‘‘dissension’’ and ‘‘disparity’’ are intrinsic to it but not unity,\footnote{Ibid., 2; Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 142; Spanos, ‘‘Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and the Hermeneutic Circle: Towards a Postmodern Theory of Interpretation as Disclosure,’’ in Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature: Towards a Postmodern Literary Hermeneutics, ed. William V. Spanos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 122.} are by no
means ontologically or epistemically innocent; they constitute a set of a priori foundational assumptions that are taken to ground practice. Translated
into practical terms, they specify practices of ‘‘interpretive disclosure,’’ of
unmasking or penetrating surfaces, which determine in advance what will be
discovered there, ‘‘behind things’’: namely, ‘‘the secret that they have no
essence.’’\footnote{Spanos, ‘‘Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and the Hermeneutic Circle,’’ 121; Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 144, 149, 142.} This lack of an essence turns out itself to be a kind of essence,
a truth that always and everywhere remains the same. Thus, for Spanos, all
that is left for the reader to find in the text is the ‘‘essence of literature’’ as
the production of difference—indeed, the ‘‘existential nature of language’’
itself.\footnote{Spanos, ‘‘Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and the Hermeneutic Circle,’’ 138.} In other words, antirepresentationalist procedures radically predetermine their own destination: the meaning one aims to reveal within the text
is one that is known ahead of time. In spite of Spanos’s avowals to the contrary, the refusal of interpretive ‘‘method’’ as coercive ends in the reproduction of method as the imposition of a ready-made interpretive telos on the text.\footnote{Ibid., 116-17.}


The formulation of anti-representationalism in terms of an anti-instrumentalist ethic, then, seems incapable of producing a coherent practice, as witness Spanos’s unsuccessful attempts to articulate the very distinction
between his preferred practice of reading as ‘‘letting be’’\footnote{Spanos, Repetitions, 236.} and the kind of
authoritarian reading that coerces texts into a predetermined shape. Indeed,
as an ethics of interpretation, antirepresentationalism appears to open itself
to unethical potentials in more than one way. Either the encounter with the
text is theorized in terms of a tautological process that merely reaffirms certain readerly presuppositions, or it is conceived as a kind of abject surrender
of the reader to the text, the abandonment of critique. Thus, while Spanos’s
Bakhtinian notion of interpretation as a dialogue rather than a monologue in
which the interpreter speaks for the text is appealing (it certainly does
counter the sort of aggressive interpretive mastery that he justifiably abhors),
what sort of ‘‘dialogue’’ is it in which one of the participants simply lets the
other be, pretending to go silent? How would this foregoing of epistemological procedures or certainties differ from the Husserlian bracketing of all assumptions, which both Spanos and Heidegger hold to be impossible in
theory and a false pretense in practice? Noninterventionist passivism, placing the interpreter in the contemplative position of the spectator, is simply
the flip side of instrumentalist activism. The ethical injunction to avoid reducing the other to the same, the ideal of ‘‘releasement’’ (Gelassenheit) ends
up as a mirror image of the representationalist premise of ‘‘disinterested or
objective inquiry.’’\footnote{Ibid., 306.} The attempt to respect the otherness of the text, to avoid
instrumentalizing it, reproduces the same impossible premise of objectivist
neutrality that authorizes ‘‘method.’’


A third problem with the articulation of antirepresentationalism as anti-
instrumentalism is that its ethical stance implies, but cannot really be recon-
ciled with, certain political commitments. If being has a special character to
which we do violence when we impose meanings on it that are incompatible
with that character, then we are obligated to oppose not only violent interpretive practices but violent texts—for interpretive practices produce texts, and
texts are themselves interpretations of being. Spanos’s anti-instrumentalist
reading practice, with its primary injunction to let the text be, is also enjoined to do battle with texts that form part of the authoritarian apparatus of
Western civilization. And so it must: if it is not to abet the crimes of an
ecocidal and genocidal culture, it has to be capable of doing ‘‘hermeneutic
violence’’ to the violence of a representationalist hermeneutics,\footnote{Ibid., 306-7.} even if this
‘‘violence’’ seems incompatible with a stance of releasement or letting-be.


Here Spanos enters, despite himself, into the meta-ethical dilemma posed
more generally by an ethics of respect for difference: such ethics are not
necessarily more ethically satisfying than universalist ethics if they prevent
us from taking action on behalf of others who have already been silenced.


Ultimately, the injunction not to speak for the other ignores the fact of our
thrownness (Geworfenheit), our being-there (Dasein), and our being-with-
others (Mitsein), our perpetual involuntary intervention in the lives of others
and the life processes of the Earth itself—a problem Heidegger never adequately addressed.


If the anti-instrumentalist approach to articulating a general critique of
representation by bridging the epistemic and the ethical ends in failure
largely on political grounds, another approach would begin precisely at this
locus of failure. Rather than attempting to build a politics out of the refusal
of representation as a kind of instrumentalism, pragmatists such as Richard
Rorty and Stanley Fish propose an instrumentalist epistemology as a kind of
antirepresentationalist politics. In other words, for Rorty, the epistemological
error of representationalism—the mistaking of a meaning that the interpreter
has produced for something that has been induced, the misperception of
makings as findings—is largely responsible for the phenomena of political
oppression: tyrants inevitably rule not in the name of their own will to power
(which would be unacceptable), but in the name of a transcendent principle,
a God (even if this God is the vox populi as vox dei)\footnote{Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 86; Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 146.} Rorty’s instrumentalist
‘‘anti-authoritarianism,’’ then, appears as ‘‘a protest against the idea that
human beings must humble themselves before something non-human,
whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality.’’\footnote{Richard Rorty, ‘‘Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,’’ Revue Internationale de Philosophie 53, no. 207 (1999): 7.} Likewise, for
Stanley Fish and Roland Barthes, the interpreter who claims to be con-
strained by a preexisting meaning within the text is either submitting, in
fetishistic fashion, to an imaginary authority or is surreptitiously arrogating
authority for himself or herself—an authority disguising itself as submission
to the text.


In this way, Rorty, Fish, and Barthes offer an alternative account of interpretation that combines a refusal of the text’s political authority over us with
a denial that interpretations can have any epistemic authority. The epistemic
claim, here, underwrites the political claim. On the terms of this instrumentalist account of interpretation, texts have no fixed or preexisting identity,
i.e., no essence, hence no intrinsic meaning; interpretation is simply the interpreter’s ‘‘appropriation’’ and use of a text to produce meanings.\footnote{Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 150; Rorty, ‘‘The Pragmatist’s Progress,’’ in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 93.} The attribution of meaning-making power to the text is a classic example of
alienation: the subject’s agency is projected onto the products of the subject’s own acts. It is because there is no real meaning to be represented that
the text cannot claim any legitimate authority over us, and it is for the same
reason that any claim to represent the meaning of the text constitutes a covert exercise of power. In Fish’s words, it is because there is, in effect, no
object to refer to that no interpretation can justify itself through a referential
‘‘demonstration’’ of the truth of its claims; instead, there are only performative acts of ‘‘persuasion,’’ language games as pure power plays.\footnote{Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 365.} Thus, as
Barthes remarks, whenever an interpreter attributes the meaning he or she
claims to find in a text to ‘‘the Author’’ (or to an author-surrogate, e.g., ‘‘society,’’ ‘‘history,’’ ‘‘psyche,’’ etc.), this is also an arrogation of authority to the
interpreter.\footnote{Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 147.}


The prevalence of power over meaning in this instrumentalist account of
interpretation—or rather, the collapse of meaning into power (Foucault’s
power\Slash{}knowledge)—gives pause, however, to those who take seriously the
ethical critique of representation as a form of violence done to the text by its
interpreter. Indeed, the instrumentalist premise amounts to nothing more
than a hypostasization of ‘‘domination’’ of the text as both justifiable and
inevitable: if ‘‘all anybody ever does with anything is use it,’’ then the interpreter ‘‘simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose.’’\footnote{Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 150-51; Rorty, ‘‘The Pragmatist’s Progress,’’ 93, and Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 151.}


The only ethical demand that can be recognized from the
instrumentalist position, it would seem, is the injunction not to disguise
power as something else. However, even this principle seems dubious when
subjected to a purely pragmatic standard of judgment: if, as Foucault suggests, the games of power played out through the struggle over the meanings
of texts (the texts of law, medicine, science, history) are often won by the
clever disguising of subversive appropriation as obedient submission to textual authority, then why should interpreters put away their masks of obedience?\footnote{Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 139, 151, 154, 156, 158.} Indeed, how else could anyone be persuaded of an interpretation
than through the giving of reasons—i.e., through some demonstration of its
validity?


What seems to be required at this point in the argument is some sort of
coherence theory of truth and knowledge to replace the old correspondence
models. In other words, to make an antirepresentationalist theory of interpretation work, one would need some concept of interpretive legitimation without recourse to a referent. Instrumentalism calls on other resources in order
to construct this—in particular, the resources of community. Thus, Fish appeals to the structuring forces of ‘‘interpretive communities’’: since interpretation is not merely private, subjective belief, but is always a public exercise
in persuasion, in practice, I will always have to formulate my interpretation
in terms that will be both understandable and effective in my interpretive
community, using its shared codes, procedures, and conventions as to what
can count as evidence and how. While nothing objective underpins this interpretive community—the rules of its language-game are quite arbitrary,
and different communities will play different interpretive games—the fact of
community guarantees that there will be no interpretive free-for-all. Thus,
even though texts do not and cannot inform our interpretations of them, we
find in practice that our interpretations of a text will still tend to converge,
because we share an interpretive community. This convergence is not the
product of the text, but of an agreement between interpreters. Thus, while
the text per se can have no power over readers, the community always exercises its power to shape and constrain readers’ interpretations.


The difficulty comes when one asks about the nature of the community
that holds Fish’s system together. Just as structuralists have never been able
to explain how a structure of language in which every sign receives its meaning from every other sign, a system that supposedly can only operate as a
seamless whole, could ever have arisen,\footnote{Horst Ruthrof, The Body in Language (London: Cassell, 2000), 85.} so Fish has trouble explaining how
one joins an intepretive community. By assuming that an interpretation cannot be determined by a text but only by an interpretive community, Fish has
painted himself into a corner, for this community—its rules, its norms, its
conventions—can only be another text, a social text that must be read by its
participants in order for it to interpellate them at all. As Noam Chomsky has
observed, the plain fact that you are interpellated by a social system, even if
imperfectly, means that you have somehow acquired some relatively accurate mental representations of that system, even if these are largely inarticulate and never complete.\footnote{Noam Chomsky, quoted in M. C. Haley and R. F. Lunsford, Noam Chomsky (New York: Twayne, 1994), 183.}


Socialization, induction into a community, is the
never-finished process of constructing this representation—an immense series of interpretations of social experiences. To arrive at an understanding of
what is meant in such-and-such a context by the terms good and bad, for
instance, one must make all kinds of more or less accurate inferences from
the actual behavior of other people in connection with the use of these words,
such that one will not mistake praise for blame or vice versa. If all of these
inferences were utterly unconstrained by their referents (the set of experiences acquired in the process of socialization) and unconstrained by anything else (a natural structuring agency within the subject), then there could
be no coherence or convergence—nor, indeed, could there be a community.


Fish is left to insist that there is nothing—no experience, no natural structure—outside of the very community that, when one is still in the process of
socialization, one must be to some extent outside. The very experiences of
coherence, convergence, and community, then, quite apart from their content, tell against Fish’s theory, which purports to explain the first of these
facts by the last. In effect, Fish’s coherence theory founders on its exclusion
of any process of learning or induction—i.e., of correspondence, the sufficient adequation of the subject, even on a provisional and contingent basis,
to something outside itself, an object. Here it becomes apparent, as Shapiro
admits, that even ‘‘antihermeneutic’’ theories require ‘‘hermeneutic anchors’’ in order to function.\footnote{Shapiro, 42.} Once again, antirepresentationalism fails to
break free from representationalist foundations.


Nonetheless, the community model promulgated by Fish and others has
inspired at least one proposed answer to the ethical problems of antirepresentationalism: if any single interpretation is reductive of otherness, then
perhaps many coexisting interpretations, representing the text in as many
different ways, can preserve difference against the grain of representationalism itself, as long as we refuse to privilege any interpretations over any others. Norman K. Denzin cites several proposals for pluralistic models of
legitimation that promote a suspension of judgment, a prolongation and
deepening of ambiguity and doubt, avoiding the need to award victory to
any single interpretation.\footnote{Norman K. Denzin, Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publication, Inc., 1997), 13-14.} As Gergen writes, this response to the seeming
inescapability of representation precludes the hegemony of any one regime
of representation by treating all such regimes as ‘‘local, provisional, and political’’; all we need oppose, on this account, is the imperialistic extension
of any single discourse beyond the boundaries of its native discourse community. Even scientific and moral discourses, Gergen suggests, need not be
accorded any universal validity; they are merely to be seen as useful in the
practices of some specific communities.\footnote{Gergen, 414.}


Here Gergen assumes what he ought to question: are there any shared
standards for usefulness across communities, or might what is helpful to one
community be harmful to another? Indeed, a primary attraction of the pragmatist notion that truth is utility is that it allows us to understand the diversity of beliefs as a result of the diversity of interests: depending on the
particular agent’s needs and wants, not only what is useful but also the very
standards of utility may vary. Truth becomes a thoroughly contingent notion.


Problems with this pluralist pragmatism only become apparent when one
stops imagining a single agent (or a homogeneous community) operating in
solitary contentment and imagines instead multiple agents needing to coordinate action across two or more communities. If any two communities do
not share any assumptions, then by definition, a speaker located in one community cannot have any warrant for making an argument in the context of
the other community. How would this kind of epistemological and moral incommensurability be handled in practice, if there can be no argument accepted as rational across such a gap, and therefore no negotiation? An
appeal to some impossible practice of cultural nonintervention will not do:
in a globalized world, more than ever, the requirements of practice always
throw us among others, and in practice, decisions have to be made. Without
any universals to mediate between different communities, it would appear
that all cooperation is merely a coercive normalization of the different.\footnote{Andrew Sayer, Realism and Social Science (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000), 75.}


Moreover, the entities to which communitarian pluralists appeal are not
exactly self-evident. If interpretive communities are constituted by agreement, where is a perfect structure of agreements to be found? One might
equally ask Gergen exactly where one community ends and another begins,
since in practice, as Andrew Sayer notes, one never finds ‘‘separate, non-
communicating discourses or local knowledges.’’\footnote{Ibid., 75, 77-78; Sonia Kruks, ‘‘Identity Politics And Dialectical Reason: Beyond An Epistemology Of Provenance,’’ Hypatia 10, no. 2 (Spring 1995).} What, in fact, would it
mean for subjects to ‘‘speak and act on their own behalf,’’ when this ownness
is always composed of otherness?\footnote{Deleuze, quoted in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 211, emphasis mine; Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17; Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 142.} Indeed, if we take seriously the notion of
the subject as inherently decentered or plural (such that even my ascription
of identity to myself is always a kind of error, an interning of differences
within the false identity of a self-representation), then would such a pluralism permit me to speak for myself? It seems that, on the level of ethics,
interpretive pluralism requires an individual—an indivisible, autonomous,
atomic identity—to which it is ontologically constrained to deny existence.


Thus, one major problem with the pluralist project of protecting others
from one’s own regime of representation is that it is never clear where a safe
self, whether collective or individual, is to be found: it seems that every
identity can be ultimately found to consist of others. Nor is it clear that ethical pluralism can avoid contradicting itself by issuing universalizing prescriptions, as Gergen insists, since the failure to proscribe universalizing
discourses de jure—e.g., aggressive forms of racism or nationalism—would
comprise a de facto endorsement of them.\footnote{Gergen, 414; May, Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 129-30.} All the old ethical problems of
relativism come back to haunt the pluralist project. Thus, both internally
and externally, in theory and in practice, pluralist forms of antirepresentationalism fail to distinguish themselves from the representationalism that
they apprehend as reductively monist.


The return of monism within pluralism takes other, more disturbing forms
when we try to imagine, on its terms, acts of interpretation as a social practice, a dialogue or exchange. As we have seen, pragmatism does offer a
seemingly pluralist alternative to essentialism: texts only acquire identities
when they are instrumentalized—that is to say, through ‘‘interpretation’’ as
‘‘appropriation.’’\footnote{Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 151-52.} One text, then, should be susceptible of indefinitely or
even infinitely many uses, so that comparing our interpretations of it will no
longer be a matter of deciding which is the most accurate representation of
its meaning; rather, representationalist hermeneutics gives way to pluralist
aesthetics as interpreters show one another how many different meanings
they have constructed from the same text. However, reducing the interpretation of texts to the use of instruments or the creation of artworks gives rise
to problems when we try to explain just how this encounter of interpretations
with one another can take place.


First of all, there is the question of how any two interpretations of a text
can be said to diverge or differ if there is no way to establish that they are
representing the same text. For pluralists, since the text has no intrinsic
form, it can only be given its identity by readers: in Barthes’s words, ‘‘a
text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.’’\footnote{Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 148; Rorty, ‘‘The Pragmatist’s Progress,’’ 97.} If a text has no
identity but that given it by readers, however, then what lets us see Kafka’s
The Trial, as treated by Wilhelm Emrich, as the same book treated by Valerie Greenberg or Clayton Koelb? ‘‘However much we allow our interpretations of a work to differ,’’ as Richard Shusterman remarks, ‘‘we must allow
for the reidentification of the same work in order to talk about ‘the’ work
(and indeed ‘its’ different reception) at all.’’ Even Joseph Margolis admits,
despite his pragmatist critique of ‘‘invariant realism’’—the claim that discursive play must be anchored in a nondiscursive object world—it is obvious
that ‘‘nothing could be referentially fixed [i.e., made into an object of inter-
subjective discourse] that did not exhibit a certain stability of nature.’’\footnote{Margolis, quoted in Richard Shusterman, Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 194-95; Shusterman, Surface and Depth, 194-95.} The
pluralist gesture of privileging the instability of meaning ends in canceling
one of the constitutive properties of meaning and the sign in general—
namely, its iterability, its ability to remain relatively self-similar across time
and space.\footnote{Ellen Spolsky, ‘‘Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory as a Species of Post- Structuralism,’’ Poetics Today 23, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 50; Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 324-25.}


Indeed, it is not only the identity of the sign which pluralism tends to
dispense with, but the identity of the time and space in which discourse
unfolds, since instrumentalism not only reduces the text to the (infinite) sum
of its possible uses but also reduces the object world, the world as an ensemble of objects, to a text whose meaning is infinitely interpretable. On what
terrain, then, can two interpreters meet to share or compare interpretations?


For Foucault, the only possible answer is a seemingly improbable one: ‘‘the
adversaries do not belong to a common space’’; rather, the ‘‘place of confrontation’’ can only be quite literally a kind of nowhere or ‘‘non-place.’’\footnote{Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 150.} Gone
is the situatedness of discourse. With it, too, the earth itself—in the words
of Kate Soper, ‘‘a ‘nature’ which is not the cultural effect of productive interaction but the prior condition of any such interaction’’—vanishes.\footnote{Kate Soper, ‘‘Realism, Humanism and the Politics of Nature,’’ Theoria, December 2001, 58, italics mine.}


The crowning irony of a theory that aimed to dislodge the humanist anthropos from the center of the universe is that it seems to end not in an ecological materialism, a return of the supposedly autonomous subject to the
productive matrix of nature, but a kind of textualist idealism, a kind of paradoxical return to the disembedded and disembodied subject of Cartesian dualism, the master of a nature that is as nothing before the power of
instrumental logos.\footnote{Mark S. Lussier, ‘‘Blake’s Deep Ecology,’’ Studies in Romanticism 35, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 393-94; Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 139.} Nothing external to this decentered subject, this subject
that has been dissolved or disseminated into the sum of its practices of subjection and self-production, contains or constrains it; the body, too, is merely
another infinitely reinterpretable text, neither a limit nor a foundation.\footnote{Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 91-92; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 79, 85.}


Granted, claims that our bodies need to be interpreted in order to be experienced as meaningful are demonstrably grounded in historical experience (we
can observe some remarkable variations over time and place as to how various bodily shapes, gestures, pleasures, and pains are interpreted) and politically emancipatory (if the body does not predetermine its own interpretation,
then biology is not destiny, and practices of radical self-fashioning become
possible).\footnote{Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 34-35.} However, Crispin Sartwell complains that ‘‘the hegemony of language in recent philosophy . . . elides the physical’’ and ‘‘deemphasizes or
textualizes the body.’’ When taken to the textualist extreme, this notion of
embodiment as unconstrained interpretation, as Hilary Rose comments,
seems to have little in common with our actual experience of ‘‘the body I
inhabit, which bleeds, smells, hurts in an untidy intrusive way.’’\footnote{Crispin Sartwell, Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 13; Hilary Rose, quoted in Richard Cleminson, ‘‘Making Sense of the Body: Anarchism, Nudism and Subjective Experience,’’ Bulletin of Spanish Studies 81, no. 6 (September 2004): 697-98.}


This apparent elimination of the body has long been a matter of concern
for theorists engaged in the political critique of representation. Feminist theorists have often attempted to write the body back into the picture, but have
too frequently run up against the problem of essentialism.\footnote{Ruthrof, The Body In Language, 1-2.} Foucault, too,
attempts to re-materialize the body, but the corporeal being that emerges
from books such as Discipline \& Punish and The History of Sexuality is altogether too plastic, too much a tabula rasa, a thing that is ‘‘mark[ed]’’ by
power\Slash{}knowledge and made to produce ‘‘signs.’’\footnote{Foucault, Discipline \& Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 25-26.} Judith Butler attempts to
bridge the gap between the seeming limitlessness of the textualized body
and our experience of embodiment as concrete finitude via the concept of
‘‘performativity,’’ ‘‘that capacity of discourse to produce effects through reiteration’’: finitude and limitation appear, then, as ‘‘the effect of boundary,
fixity, and surface we call matter’’ produced by a ‘‘process of materialization
that stabilizes over time.’’ Rather than imagining social construction as a single act of production, we should see it as a continuous activity of reproduction that submits the actual plasticity of being to the appearance of control
and stability.\footnote{Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex’’ (London: Routledge, 1993), 20, 8-9.} This formulation is anticipated by Nietzsche’s remark that
‘‘Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was
hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history’’—a
kind of reification of signifying processes into seemingly solid structures,
analogous to Sartre’s ‘‘practico-inert.’’\footnote{Nietzsche, quoted in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 144; Sartre, The Critique of Dialectical Reason vol. 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan- Smith, ed. Jonathan Ree (London: Humanities Press, 1976), 337.} The resistance that discursive forces
may encounter from time to time, then, does not come from some extradiscursive bodily reality but from other discursive forces.


On the one hand, this reformulation of construction as materialization
seems to offer a satisfying reconciliation of transcendental possibility with
empirical limitation, all without resorting to any explanatory principle outside of discursive practice. If material nature seems to offer resistance to
discursive practice, this is merely the internal friction generated by discursive forces themselves. On the other hand, it is by no means clear that nature
and the material can be so subsumed. First of all, as Horst Ruthrof points
out, if the material limitations that seem intrinsic to bodies were really only
discursive effects, then they should be specific to just one discourse community or another, so that ‘‘significations concerning death, the need to eat and
drink certain things and not others, the inability to survive a fall from certain
heights, and so on’’ would vary dramatically from one discourse community
to the next. In practice, however, we find that this ‘‘in so many respects,
especially those having to do with the basic conditions of the body, cultures
produce very similar texts’’—from a Butlerian standpoint, a seemingly inexplicable outcome.\footnote{Ruthrof, ‘‘Deleuze and the Body: Eluding Kafka’s ‘Little Death Sentence,’ ’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 96, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 573.} Likewise, the physical development of bodies, while inevitably marked by and interpreted through discursive structures (so that,
for instance, the relatively fluid continuum of bodily states between childhood and pubescence is divided up by arbitrarily imposed social boundaries,
rites of passage, and so forth), this development is also remarkably universal,
determinate, and orderly, characterized by ineluctable processes of aging
and mortality.\footnote{Noam Chomsky, in Noam Chomsky and Kate Soper, ‘‘On Human Nature: Noam Chomsky interviewed by Kate Soper,’’ Red Pepper, August 1998, \href{http://www.redpepper.org.uk/cularch/xchomsky.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.redpepper.org.uk\Slash{}cularch\Slash{}XCHOMSKY.HTML} (10 March 2005); Bryan S. Turner, review of Bodies That Matter, by Judith Butler, in Contemporary Sociology 24, no. 3 (May 1995): 332.}


In light of these problems, as Butler remarks, some theorists have argued
that the image of nature or the body as ‘‘blank,’’ merely waiting to be inscribed, is to be rejected; instead, they have suggested reframing these as
active agencies that both prompt and resist our own projects. Such a conception, she notes, has led some to a reconsideration of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.\footnote{Butler, Bodies That Matter, 4.} Indeed, their insistence that ‘‘everything is body
and corporeal’’ has been a tonic to excessive textualism, and they have produced a powerful materialist critique of what they have called, following the
philosopher Gilbert Simondon, the ‘‘hylomorphic schema,’’ the conception
of matter as formless and featureless.\footnote{Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed. Con- stantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 136; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 409.} If the reduction of Being to a blank
slate, a representation without a prior presence, tends to reinstate the invidious distinction between acting subject and passive object, Deleuze and Guattari have proposed instead a thoroughgoing vitalism, a kind of naturalist
ontology that posits active striving everywhere. At the same time, this ‘‘becoming-realism’’ is made to carry the ontological weight of an epistemological pluralism: the world is neither my subjective construct nor something
that is capable of being reduced to a single objective account.\footnote{Joanne Martin, ‘‘Meta-theoretical Controversies in Studying Organizational Culture,’’ February 2002, \href{http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/martin/personal/meta-theoretical\_controversies\%0A\_in\_Studying\_Organizational\_Culture.pdf/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}faculty-gsb.stanford.edu\Slash{}martin\Slash{}personal\Slash{}Meta-theoretical\_Controversies \_in\_Studying\_Organizational\_Culture.pdf\Slash{}} (10 March 2005), 4-6.} The result
is a form of ‘‘pluralist interpretation’’ that avoids relativism, taking account
of the multiple while also asserting the ‘‘univocity of being.’’\footnote{Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1983), 5; Iain MacKenzie, ‘‘Deleuze \& Guattari’s Poststructuralist Philosophy,’’ Political Studies Association Conference Proceedings 1996, \href{http://www.psa.ac.uk/cps/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.psa.ac.uk\Slash{}cps\Slash{}} 1996\Slash{}mack.pdf (10 March 2005), 1240; Deleuze, Difference \& Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 37.}


One key to this balancing act appears to be the manner in which Deleuze
frames the relationship between what he calls ‘‘the virtual,’’ ‘‘the actual,’’
and ‘‘the real.’’ Actuality and virtuality are opposed to one another, but both
are moments of reality, and in that sense, they are complementary as well.


Thus, a ‘‘real object,’’ an object in a given, ‘‘actual’’ state of being, may also
be possessed of any number of ‘‘ ‘virtual’ or ‘embryonic’ elements’’—proper-
ties, powers, other states that may emerge through some process of becom-
ing. Plural world-potentials subsist and unfold within a single world.\footnote{Deleuze, Difference \& Repetition, 208-9; Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 148, 150-51.} In
this way, Deleuze is able to avoid the extremes of discursive idealism and of
a crude or naïve realism.


What does all this imply for the relation between interpretation and representation? Notwithstanding their critiques of the discursive constructivism
and relativism endemic to postmodern theory, Deleuze and Guattari are
equally committed to a critique of representation and the sign in general.


Their entire corpus can be read as an extended antirepresentationalist attack
on the kinds of totalizing interpretive systems beloved by psychoanalytic and
Marxist orthodoxy. ‘‘Psychoanalysis,’’ complains Guattari, ‘‘transforms and
deforms the unconscious by forcing it to pass through the grid of its system
of inscription and representation,’’ reducing its products to symptoms or expressions of a predetermined content. Likewise, a certain form of Marxist
critique reduces every text to an expression (either ‘‘scientific’’ or ‘‘ideological’’) of the supposed social totality. By definition, such a process of ‘‘interpretation’’ must entail
‘‘delegation of power’’ to the interpreter, the
representative. In place of representational psychoanalysis or ideology-
critique, then, Deleuze and Guattari propose schizoanalysis, a practice of the
performative construction of subjectivity (in Deleuze’s later use of the term, a
practice of liberatory ‘‘subjectivation’’ rather than normalizing ‘‘subjectification’’). The point is not to accurately represent a collection of mental
contents but to produce something useful: ‘‘Experiment, don’t signify and
interpret!’’\footnote{Félix Guattari, ‘‘A Liberation of Desire,’’ in Homosexualities and French Literature, ed. George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 59; Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Séan Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 103; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 54-55; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 139.}


In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari seem to rediscover a form of pragmatism that either subsumes the category of meanings to that of uses or replaces
interpretation with appropriation: it is always ‘‘the force which appropriates
the thing’’ that determines its meaning. Unlike Rorty, however, their practices of use and appropriation seem to have built into them an ethical as well
as a political dimension, ‘‘immanent criteria’’ to distinguish ‘‘legitimate
uses’’ from ‘‘illegitimate ones.’’\footnote{Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 3; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 109.} This ethics of use manifests itself in two
ways. First of all, instead of hypostasizing interpretation as an aggressive
domination of the text, the active subject’s imposition of form (morphe) on a
passive matter (hyle), Deleuze and Guattari suggest a more reciprocal sort of
interaction between the participants in a schizoanalytic process, conceived
as engaged in a mutual becoming. Secondly, schizoanalysis is a project of
evaluation as well as a process of production. Since the forces that appropriate an object can have affirmative or negative qualities, the question that
Deleuze substitutes for the classical interpretive What is it?—namely,
Which forces have got hold of it?—is also always to be phrased as an ethical
question, a question about the quality of the desire or will to power currently
invested in the object.\footnote{Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Literature (London: Routledge, 2003), 11; Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 76-77; May, Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 70.}


Presumably, then, we are enjoined to appropriate the object only in ethically appropriate ways. Freud’s psychoanalysis of the Wolf-Man is to be discredited largely on ethical grounds, as he reduces the patient’s dreams of
wolves to an Oedipal symptom, a disguised representation of a traumatic
memory, thereby imposing a unified identity on the multiple and interrupting
the patient’s becoming-wolf.\footnote{Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 28-29, 32.} In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari’s critique
of representation cuts against every hermeneutics of suspicion, every interpretive strategy that claims to know better: speaking for others is always to
be shunned. At the same time, schizoanalysis is still in many respects a classical interpretive project, a hermeneutic of suspicion; it is a ‘‘symptomatology,’’ an ‘‘art of piercing masks’’ to discover what forces really are in
possession of the object in question, what desiring-machines really compose
the subject in question.\footnote{Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 3, 5; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 338.} Pluralism is distinguished here from an arbitrary
relativism, since there can be wrong answers to the questions. Thus, Deleuze
attacks clinicians’ use of the term ‘‘sadomasochism’’ to interpret behavior,
not so much on ethical grounds, but because it fails to correspond to reality:
it is a sign without a referent, imposing a false unity on real differences.\footnote{Deleuze, Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: George Braziller, 1971), 115.}


This hermeneutic or realist aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory would
seem to be in tension with its pragmatist, anti-hermeneutic aspect. If we take
seriously Deleuze’s insistence, in Difference and Repetition, that ‘‘in every
respect, truth is a matter of production, not of adequation,’’ then how can we
hold simultaneously, with Deleuze, that some truths or meanings are hidden
behind false appearances, waiting to be discovered?\footnote{Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 154.} One answer may be
found in the relation between the virtual and the actual: if meanings can be
considered virtual, emergent properties of an actual text, then their discovery is a matter of producing them, in the root sense of the word (pro-ducere:
to draw forth). The line between Deleuze’s pragmatism and that of Fish and
Rorty would then be drawn at the text itself: for Fish and Rorty, there is no
actual text. In this sense, Deleuze is able to present, in his famous analogy,
his own practice of reading as ‘‘a sort of buggery . . . taking an author from
behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous.’’ The monstrosity of the idea produced, the interpretation, is perhaps
the strongest evidence of the interpreter’s creativity (the active quality of
the interpreter’s desires). At the same time, for Deleuze, it is crucial that the
‘‘child’’ really belong to the actual text as one of its virtual possibilities: ‘‘the
author had to actually say all I had him saying.’’\footnote{Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 6, emphasis mine.}


It would appear, then, that Deleuze and Guattari can accommodate a certain practice of interpretation and a certain concept of meaning such that
they are able to distinguish between valid interpretations, on the one hand,
and distorted forms of meaning or misinterpretation on the other. Indeed, it
is the perennial possibility of misinterpretation, the investment of desire in
formations that suppress desire, that animates this project. However, this
campaign against misinterpretation is phrased as a refusal of the very notion
of false consciousness or ideology: ‘‘there is no ideology and never has
been.’’\footnote{May, Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 70; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4.} That is to say, there is no consciousness or concept that is not itself
a part of the material world, part of what Marx called ‘‘sensuousness as practical activity’’; rather, ‘‘transcendence is always a product of immanence,’’
and what we might otherwise take to be ideological falsifications of reality
‘‘are in no way illusions, but real machinic effects.’’ Thus, the critique of
ideology reappears in the work of Deleuze and Guattari as a project of track-
ing down and destroying claims to transcendence, reconfirming their imma-
nence; Deleuze and Guattari suggest that we ‘‘revamp the theory of ideology
by saying that expressions and statements intervene directly in productivity,
in the form of a production of meaning or sign-value.’’\footnote{Marx, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1959), 245; Deleuze, ‘‘Immanence: A Life,’’ trans. Nick Millett, in An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, ed. Jean Khalfa (London: Continuum, 2003), 172; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 514, 89.}


On these terms, ideology-critique becomes less a matter of demonstrating
that certain representations fail to correspond to real states of affairs and
more a matter of resisting certain forces. Signs are not, in fact, representations that correspond or fail to correspond to reality; they are ‘‘order-words,’’
performatives that produce realities, ‘‘made not to be believed but to be
obeyed, and to compel obedience.’’ As forces that stratify and subjectify,
imposing rigid categories and rules equally on speakers, listeners, and the
world, language and communication are by nature forms of domination and
violence, not alternatives to them.\footnote{Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 76.} However, instead of advocating some
sort of impossible escape from language, Deleuze and Guattari seek to turn
language against itself in some manner, to use signs to destratify, to dislodge
subjects and objects from their representationally fixed positions. As part of
this project, they propose a ‘‘non-signifying semiotics’’ in which signs ‘‘do
not produce effects of meaning,’’ instead ‘‘entering into direct relations with
their referents.’’ Their own discourses are attempts to use language to overturn orders of representation, to intervene materially in the world.\footnote{Alan Taylor, ‘‘Incorporeal Transformation,’’ 1996, \href{http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/d\&g/ancorporeal\_transformation.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.uta.edu\Slash{}english\Slash{}apt\Slash{}d\&g\Slash{}ancorporeal\_transformation.html} (10 March 2005); Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Penguin, 1984), 290.}


This attempt to avoid the element of dualism or transcendence in conventional accounts of language by collapsing signification into the realm of immanence and material forces is persuasive in some ways, but it raises serious
questions. As Horst Ruthrof asks, ‘‘how . . . is it possible for order-words to
do their work?’’\footnote{Ruthrof, The Body in Language, 138} How do order-words acquire their material effectiveness in
the world? Surely not without the action of human beings as their necessary
mediation. To recognize this does not mean a return to a naïve conception of
the subject as an autonomous tool-user and language as a neutral instrument.


Even a conception of language that utterly eliminated the autonomy of the
subject, undoing or reversing the tool\Slash{}user binary, would have to acknowledge that words in themselves do not possess physical force; their causal
powers are of a different order. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, in order to
perform their ‘‘incorporeal transformations’’ of the corporeal order, order-
words require ‘‘assemblages’’—speakers, listeners, communities, institutions—to conceptualize or embody them, to enact their meanings and
respond to their call.\footnote{Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 80, 85.} What Ruthrof argues is that a thorough account of
this relationship between order-words and assemblages, or between signifying practices narrowly defined and ‘‘the much larger circle of general semiosis that is the horizon of our world,’’ would have to return to certain notions
of language as communication and representation. Unless language has constative, communicative, representational powers, it can have no performative
powers, and vice versa.\footnote{Ruthrof, ‘‘Deleuze and the Body,’’ 575; Jonathan Culler, ‘‘The Fortunes of the Performative in Literary and Cultural Theory,’’ Literature and Psychology 45, no. 1-2 (Spring- Summer 1999).} Deleuze and Guattari seem to know all this perfectly well. Nevertheless, their work is replete with the insistence that
language is either primarily or solely performative rather than representational—and, not coincidentally, with denunciations of the intrinsic ‘‘despotism’’ or ‘‘imperialism of the signifier,’’ the inherently dominatory nature of
all forms of representation.\footnote{Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 65-66.}


This ambitious attack on representation as domination—an attack waged
simultaneously on epistemic, ethical, and political grounds—of necessity relies on representation at every step. Deleuze and Guattari can only criticize
a given ‘‘picture of the operation of power’’ or ‘‘image of thought’’ by suggesting new ones, producing new generalizing representations. The very denunciation of language as
‘‘an abominable faculty consisting in emitting,
receiving, and transmitting order-words’’ takes place in language, through
the production of order-words, and constitutes a representation in itself—a
representation of representation.\footnote{May, Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 71; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 131; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 76.} Of course, this is all done with the aim of
subverting the processes of signification and representation, forcing them to
operate in very different ways. The strangeness and difficulty of Deleuze and
Guattari’s style of writing, with its nonlinearity and proliferation of idiosyncratic terms, bears witness to the intensity of this struggle. Yet it would seem
that there are only two possibilities: either language and representation can
be made to function in ways that do not dominate, in which case they are not
intrinsically dominatory, or cannot, in which case the only recourse can be
to a kind of hermetic silence. The attempt to have it both ways—as, for instance, in the injunction to produce ‘‘a-signifying signs’’ or a ‘‘nonsignifying
system without a General’’—can only end in confusion: not only is it ‘‘difficult to grasp’’ what Deleuze and Guattari could possibly mean by these contradictions in terms, as Ruthrof remarks, but it is not even clear whether
they are intended to mean or to be grasped, since this moment of understand-
ing would constitute a return to signification, communication, and represen-
tation.\footnote{Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 78; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21; Ruthrof, The Body in Language, 27. Alan Taylor, among others, emphasizes the two- sidedness of Deleuze and Guattari’s judgments about language: even if language, by its very nature, subjectifies and objectifies, it can be made into an agency of becoming, a possibility most visible in minoritarian discourse practices (‘‘Incorporeal Transformation’’). However, Deleuze himself seems to cast this possibility in doubt: ‘‘if societies of control and information will not give rise to forms of resistance . . . this will not be insofar as minorities will be able to acquire speech. Perhaps, speech and communication are rotten’’ (quoted in Žižek, Bodies Without Organs: Deleuze and Consequences [New York: Routledge, 2004], 190).}


Why, then, deny that language is, among other things, a medium of representation—or deny that this representational role is as indispensable to
one’s oppositional projects as it is to projects of domination? Why attempt to
collapse the category of signification into the category of force? Not only does
this maneuver seem at least as reductive as the kinds of strategy Deleuze
and Guattari criticize, it also opens the way back to some of the ethical problems raised by pragmatist alternatives to representationalism. First of all,
unlike Fish, Deleuze and Guattari do not accept the appeal to community;
indeed, in the context of their attacks on order-words, the very category of
the social is made to resonate with increasingly ominous overtones: in Ruthrof’s words, ‘‘the community appears as the prison guard of meanings.’’


This makes it more difficult to imagine freedom as a non-dominatory community, a shared life without either systemic or sporadic violence. Furthermore,
reducing texts or signs to force or action blurs the distinction between persuasion and violence, as interpretive method becomes ‘‘necessarily an instrument for combat.’’\footnote{Ruthrof, The Body in Language, 137; Deleuze, in Foucault, Language, Counter- Memory, Practice, 208, emphasis mine.} Stripped of its representational character, interpretation,
for Fish, is nothing but an aesthetic competition for authority and prestige;
for Deleuze and Guattari, it is even more thoroughly agonistic, a pure play
of force on force.


Even in one of its most sophisticated and flexible forms, then, we can see
a number of recurring problems in antirepresentationalist theories of interpretation, as this cursory overview demonstrates. Every antirepresentationalist alternative to representational hermeneutics is structurally prone to
falling into theoretical and practical incoherence. The hermeneutics of suspicion, the systematic mistrust of textual surface meanings, has been radicalized into what might be called a suspicion of hermeneutics, but this
systematic mistrust of any notion of subtext is itself premised on an appeal
to a division between appearances and reality. The thesis that the identities
we seem to discover are merely discursive constructs or performances pre-
supposes a preexisting, nondiscursive reality as its ground. In the name of
the material, the concrete, and the body’s sensuous particularity, antiessentialism produces something like a textualist idealism or inverted Platonism,
from which perspective even the most materialistic forms of realism can be
made to look like Platonic idealism. Attempts to explain the experience of
coherence without reference to real identities rely on objective structures
that constrain (and, indeed, produce) the apparent agency of subjects, but
these all-powerful structures are built of signs that are supposed to be powerless to point to anything, to be always already the unstable constructs of
readerly subjectivity. Meanwhile, the refusal to speak for the other entails
the usual paradoxes of ethical relativism: one is forced to choose between a
submissive liberationism (an ethics of difference that forbids its own universalization) or an imperialist pluralism (an ethic of relativity that particularizes itself as the sole exception to the rule of relativity that it upholds), an
unethical ethics (a sense of excessive responsibility, a reluctance to impose
an interpretation on the radical otherness of the autonomous other, results in
a real irresponsibility, one’s failure to speak for the other in the name of the
other’s autonomy) or an authoritarian antiauthoritarianism (the defense of
the reading subject’s autonomy from the domination of the object ends by
reducing the subject to a manipulated object in an administered world).


Both ethically and epistemologically, the antirepresentationalist project
issues in its own negation. Antirepresentationalism manifests itself first as a
defense of the object, in its unique otherness, against the instrumentalizing
machinations of the interpreting subject, but this generous impulse ends up
surreptitiously inflating the subject by liberating it from any responsibility
to represent the object; the irresponsible interpreter becomes not the object’s
representative, but its creator and dominator. This promotion of the subject
to the status of all-dominating creator, in turn, ends in an embrace of self-
domination: deprived of its other, the subject is locked in a solipsistic
prison—a real subjugation that is presented as the final form of liberation
from objectivist narratives. This is the kind of impasse to which every search
for a nonrepresentational form of interpretation has come.


At this point, I want to reframe the crisis by taking up Herman Rapaport’s
suggestion that what is at work is a seemingly unresolvable conflict between
just two ‘‘paradigms.’’ We experience a crisis of representation on the epistemological level because we find ourselves trapped in an antinomy between
utter determinism and utter indeterminacy.\footnote{Herman Rapaport, The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 116-17.} This antinomy prevents us from
deciding whether to see the individual subject as determined by the object
world (what we could call the genetic perspective) or to see the object world
as constructed by subjects (what we could call the quantum perspective). I
use the metaphor of genetics here to evoke the idea of determinism, our
being structured by something beyond our control. I use the metaphor of
quantum physics to evoke the idea that the external world is discursively
produced by subjects, just as in quantum physics, an observer is said to
create some aspect of the reality being observed.


If my use of this binary metaphor seems reductive—after all, there are
some real differences between the kinds questions I am lumping together in
each of these categories—I would suggest that it is useful to recognize a
certain sameness between them, because it allows us to see how a number of
solutions to one given problem succeed only by pushing the genetic\Slash{}quantum
problem into another domain. In contemporary theoretical discussions, this
genetic\Slash{}quantum antinomy takes on different forms, each of which implies
all the others, and all of which call up the question of representation. Thus,
when Fish avoids the messier consequences of hermeneutic antirealism by
an appeal to the structuring force of the interpretive community, this just
displaces one problem into the domain of another. In the domain of the first
problem, Fish banishes the textual object in favor of unlimited interpretive
subjectivity; then there is a return of the repressed objectivity as he tries to
show that this interpretive subject is really held in place by an objective
structure, begging all the questions that constitute the structure\Slash{}agency
problem. He tries to escape the genetic perspective via the quantum and
then to escape the quantum perspective via the genetic. Likewise, when K.
Anthony Appiah suggests, as a way out of the structure\Slash{}agency problem, that
explanations that appeal to structure and those that appeal to agency are not
mutually exclusive but depend on our purposes for their validity, he merely
displaces one form of the genetic\Slash{}quantum problem into another—the epistemic problem in terms of which we are unable to decide whether our discourses provide us with knowledge of a reality that stands apart from our
purposes or reality is performatively constituted by our discursive will-to-
knowledge.\footnote{K. Anthony Appiah, ‘‘Tolerable Falsehoods: Agency and the Interests of Theory,’’ in Consequences of Theory, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson, 74-75 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).} In a similar manner, Rorty tries to get away from this epistemic
problem via an appeal to conversational agreement as a replacement for cor-
respondence to an independently existing reality, which leaves him open to
the problem of hermeneutic suspicion: if we are effectively making up the
texts we read out of whole cloth, how can we listen for others’ meanings?\footnote{Shusterman, Surface and Depth, 205.}


Thus, the seeming panoply of theoretical differences obscures a monotonous sameness: every antirepresentationalism is condemned to the same theoretical bind, in which competing, incompatible premises mutually require
and presuppose one another. Nor, when theorists seek to escape the undecidable questions of theory by returning to the supposed certainties of political practice, leaving questions of reality and universality unresolved,
resorting instead to ‘‘strategic’’ essentialisms and universalisms, do they find
firmer ground: indeed, ethical contradictions are just as endemic to antirepresentationalism as epistemological or ontological problems. Theoretical
confusion over the relations between subject and object gives rise to practical uncertainties about autonomy and collectivity, activity and passivity.


Which way, then, to the exit from this hall of mirrors?

\chapter{2. The Necessity of a Critique of Representation}


BUT WE SHOULD BE WARY OF PREMATURE CONCLUSIONS. NONE OF THE OBJECTIONS
I have raised so far to the contemporary critique of representation—I
have called it an intellectual trap and a practical dead end—rescinds the
necessity of that critique. Jonathan Arac wishes to dispel the problems of
antirepresentationalism by declaring that it is simply an erroneous interpretation, an overstatement, or a one-sided expression of the poststructuralist
theory of representation: with Derrida, he disputes the notion that postmodernism can be distilled to the declaration that ‘‘representation is bad,’’ and
he insists that it ‘‘acknowledges—critically—our enmeshment in representation.’’\footnote{Arac, xx.} The problem, however, is that this acknowledgment coincides with
a critique of representation that more or less inevitably produces the consensus that, on the terms of this critique, representation is the enemy. That is
why there is a crisis of representation: if antirepresentationalism were simply
an unnecessary error, there would be no problem getting out of it. But it
is not so easy, since the critique of representation proceeds with some real
justification and owes its theoretical development to some genuine movements for justice. The animating concern behind it, the concern for violating
the otherness of the other, is a legitimate response to a civilization that had
for too long indiscriminately pursued and violently imposed sameness. If this
response requires rethinking, it must not be at the cost of forgetting its raison
d’être. On the contrary: we need to subject this critique to analysis, to see
whether it can be reformulated more gracefully.


‘‘We all now use the word representation,’’ Stuart Hall warns, ‘‘but, as
we know, it is an extremely slippery customer.’’ Slippery indeed: even Arac
hesitates to define the term, averring (without explanation) that ‘‘we know
well enough the different things we mean by it.’’\footnote{Stuart Hall, ‘‘New Ethnicities,’’ in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, 224 (London: Routledge, 2002); Arac, xxi.} But if we know well
enough, then why is there such confusion about it? Pauline Rosenau suggests that the word can be understood in no less than six ways: we can speak
of representation as ‘‘delegation’’ (of popular power to a ‘‘parliament’’), ‘‘resemblance’’ (as between a ‘‘painting’’ and its subject), ‘‘replication’’ (as a
‘‘photograph’’ replicates its subject), ‘‘repetition’’ (or the expression of a
mental content in a linguistic\Slash{}material form), and ‘‘duplication’’ (as a ‘‘photocopy’’ duplicates an original).\footnote{Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 92.} I don’t find that this clarifies the issue much:
for instance, is the difference between ‘‘resemblance’’ and ‘‘replication’’ a
difference of degree, or a difference in kind, as seems to be the case between
‘‘duplication’’ and ‘‘delegation’’? Are these six aspects of one thing, ‘‘representation,’’ or six different types of representation? How and where do these
notions acquire an ethical content, a critical force?


I have already proposed that there are roughly two closely related general
concepts of representation common to most contemporary formulations of a
critique of representation, namely, standing-for and speaking-for; these can
be shown to subsume Rosenau’s categories. I want to propose further that
the unified concept of representation is manifested in four basic kinds of
representational practice, which entail a set of related that comprise what can
be called ‘‘representationalism’’—four basic ontological assumptions about
the features of reality that make true representations possible and desirable.
These practices, which I will call labeling, patronizing, identifying, and focalizing representation, I will examine next.

\section{LABELING REPRESENTATION}


In November 1896, as Uri Eisenzweig recounts, the French intellectual
world first discovered the scandal that would be known as the Dreyfus Affair—the trial of a Jewish army officer, humiliated and imprisoned by an old-
boy network of anti-Semitic military men and judges. The first voice raised
in Dreyfus’s defense belonged to an anarchist: Bernard Lazare.\footnote{Eisenzweig, ‘‘Représentations Illégitimes: Dreyfus, ou la fin de l’anarchisme,’’ Romantisme 87 (1995): 80, translation mine.} If this seems
in retrospect ‘‘logical, perhaps even inevitable,’’ it is because of the central
place accorded by anarchism to a critique of representation: ‘‘it is precisely
because of his anarchism, his anarchist resistance to the legitimacy of
narrative power, that Bernard Lazare was destined to identify . . . modern
anti-Semitism as a major source of totalitarian narration.’’\footnote{Ibid., 85-86, translation mine.} In other words,
Eisenzweig suggests that Lazare’s opposition to the juridical narrative within
which ‘‘because he [Dreyfus] was a Jew they arrested him, because he was
a Jew they tried him, because he was a Jew they condemned him, [and]
because he was a Jew one could not make heard in his favour the voices of
justice and of truth’’\footnote{Lazare, Une Erreur Judiciaire: la vérité sur l’Affaire Dreyfus: Deuxième Memoire (Paris: P.-V. Stock, 1897), 9, translation mine.} was part of a systematic critique of representation in
what could be called, in the lexicon of the sociology of deviant behavior, its
labeling function.


We can define labeling representation as symbolic representation operating in two related modes, both of which bring social power to bear on the
object spoken of (even where this object is the speaker himself or herself).


To label is to attribute certain qualities to an object that encourage certain
behaviors toward it, or that encourage certain behaviors for it. In prescribing
behaviors both toward and for an object, labeling representations are the
instrument of normalization, the enactment of moral, ethical, political, or juridical forms of social and institutional power on individuals. As such, labeling is almost inseparable from language in the mode once thought typical of
all language, i.e., its descriptive mode, and from the mode once thought to
be derivative of it, i.e., the rhetorical function of language, its use for prescribing action.


Labeling representations, whether hostile, friendly, or ostensibly neutral,
exercise power over subjects, not only in organizing how the subject is
treated, but in encouraging it to conceive itself through the other’s discourse.


The labeled object may even respond by internalizing and enacting its label:
as Nietzsche remarks, ‘‘the passions become evil and insidious when they
are considered evil and insidious.’’\footnote{Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (Viking, 1967), 79.} Thus, Emma Goldman contends, ‘‘puritan’’ representational codes, which threaten sexually active unmarried
women with the labels ‘‘immoral or fallen,’’ produce not only ‘‘a great variety
of nervous complaints,’’ e.g., ‘‘diminished power of work,’’ ‘‘limited enjoyment of life,’’ and ‘‘sleeplessness,’’ but also, ironically, ‘‘preoccupation with
sexual desires and imaginings.’’\footnote{Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 171-72.}


While anarchists have long possessed a critique of labeling representation, it has taken a long time for other forms of critical thought to formulate
such a critique. Positivist philosophers from the nineteenth through the beginning of the twentieth centuries had hoped to tightly cordon off descriptive
language from prescriptive language. In the twentieth century, the seemingly
uncomplicated matter of making descriptive propositions appeared more and
more problematic under the gaze of structural linguistics, antiessentialist
philosophies, the sociology of deviance, and speech-act theory. From these
new perspectives, what had been thought of as the passive reflection of reality in representational statements was to be redescribed as the active construction of reality.\footnote{Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 4; Culler, ‘‘The Fortunes of the Performative in Literary and Cultural Theory.’’} All of these intellectual movements combined to produce
an antirepresentationalist (antirealist and morally relativist) model of ‘‘speaking about’’ that simultaneously collapses the difference between description and prescription and that between word and world. In the absence of any possible reference to an objective world or transcendent moral principles, all descriptive representation comes to be seen as an act of social power, the manipulation of some audience to some end.


It is striking, given the long intellectual development behind post-
structuralism’s analysis of representation’s labeling function, that anarchists
such as Lazare anticipated it in their politics. Thus, unlike other Dreyfusards
for whom Dreyfus had to ‘‘play . . . [the] role of victim’’ in a social ‘‘melodrama,’’ Lazare insisted that ‘‘Dreyfus did not have to represent anything,’’
attempting instead to show ‘‘that the person at the heart of the debate does
not correspond at all to the central person of the imposed [juridical] narrative’’: ‘‘Was he needy?’’ Lazare asks rhetorically. No, he was rich. Had he
passions and vices to satisfy? None. Was he greedy? No, he lived well and
had not augmented his fortune. Is he a sick man, an impulsive liable to act
without reason? No, he is a calm, a thoughtful man, a being of courage and
energy. What powerful motives had this happy man for risking all his happiness? None.’’\footnote{Eisenzweig, ‘‘Représentations Illégitimes,’’ 83-85; Lazare, quoted in Eisenzweig, ‘‘Représentations Illégitimes,’’ 85, translation mine.} This purely negative rhetoric, Eisenzweig argues, does not
appeal to the fullness of an identity (the captain as suffering victim); it only
gestures toward the absence of a referent corresponding to the signs used to
define and fix their object. The referent, Dreyfus, remains unknown, perhaps
unknowable: unrepresentable.

\section{PATRONIZING REPRESENTATION}


If, for anarchists like Lazare and Goldman, hostile representations can
never truly fix their objects in judgment, friendly representatives are equally
unable to name the subject they would defend. Thus, as Eisenzweig points
out, Proudhon links the questions of ‘‘suffrage’’ and ‘‘language’’: if ‘‘the People’’ is a ‘‘collective being,’’ he asks, ‘‘with what mouths, in what language’’
must this being speak? If it ‘‘does not speak at all in the material sense of
the word,’’ then ‘‘who has the right to say to others: it is through me that the
People speak.’’\footnote{Eisenzweig, Fictions de l’anarchisme (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2001), 113, translation mine; Proudhon, ‘‘An Anarchist’s View of Democracy,’’ trans. Robert Hoffman and S. Valerie Hoffman, in Anarchism, ed. Robert Hoffman, 52, 54 (New York: Atherton Press, 1970).} To claim to speak for a collectivity, Proudhon suggests, is
to postulate two fictitious identities where there is really difference. As Mike
Michael puts it, recasting Proudhon’s critique via the sociology of Michel
Callon and Bruno Latour, one becomes a representative, the ‘‘spokesperson
of others,’’ by persuading them not only, in the manner of labeling representation, that ‘‘rather than maintain a particular set of self-understandings . . .
they should really be conceptualizing themselves through the categories that
you provide,’’ but that they share an identity with this agent, and that, there-
fore, ‘‘it can represent them and their interests.’’\footnote{Mike Michael, ‘‘The Power-Persuasion-Identity Nexus: Anarchism and Actor Networks,’’ Anarchist Studies 2 (1994): 30-31.} That is, a representative
sets himself or herself up a patron, one who can speak for others on the basis
of true knowledge.


The term patronizing, then, might serve as a general term for practices
that appropriate the power to represent the other’s interests. Patronizing representations suppose that the representative has capacities the represented
lacks. When they are persuasive for the relevant institutional or popular audiences, they disempower the represented, at least for a time (e.g., until the
institution or community judges that the represented person is rehabilitated,
readmitted to the sphere of general competency, personhood, and citizenship).

\section{IDENTIFYING REPRESENTATION}


The capacity of representation to interpellate and stigmatize, to delegate
and appropriate, is intimately tied to its mechanics of sameness and difference, as anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin have long recognized. Thus,
when Kropotkin attempts to reconstruct the circumstances under which
‘‘primitive society’’ allowed its ruling classes, ‘‘the priest and the warrior,’’
to emerge, he suggests that this came about when they successfully
confounded in one code . . . maxims which represent principles of morality and
social union wrought out as a result of life in common, and the mandates which
are meant to ensure external existence to inequality. Customs, absolutely essential to the very being of society, are, in the code, cleverly intermingled with usages imposed by the ruling caste, and both claim equal respect from the crowd.


‘‘Do not kill,’’ says the code, and hastens to add, ‘‘And pay tithes to the priest.’’


‘‘Do not steal,’’ says the code, and immediately after, ‘‘He who refuses to pay
taxes, shall have his hand struck off.’’\footnote{Peter Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 203, 205.}


This operation of identification is paralleled, in the analyses of primitive society by contemporary anarchists Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl, by a
dissociative maneuver, a tendency toward spurious estrangement: ‘‘Human
beings who were outside the family and all its elaborations into bands, clans,
tribes, and the like, were regarded as ‘strangers’ who could alternatively be
welcomed hospitably or enslaved or put to death.’’\footnote{Murray Bookchin, ‘‘What Is Social Ecology?’’ Institute for Social Ecology, November 17, 2003 \href{http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031118113538865/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.social-ecology.org\Slash{}article.php?story=20031118113538865\Slash{}} (accessed 21 March 2004).} Unable to recognize
other communities as human, the primitive community that constitutes itself
as a homogeneous family with a unitary culture—the very conditions that
permit it to do without the State—tends to find itself at war with all the other
communities, and so develops a permanent warrior class, the kernel around
which hierarchy can grow.


These capacities for identification and dissociation are intrinsic to language itself;\footnote{Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1966), 425.} what we could call identifying representation draws on these
resources to produce an order that is not only intelligible (enabling some
kinds of cognition and practical action in the world) but also controllable
(disabling other kinds). Power operates in both of these moments. Identification is representation as a standing-for that groups and divides objects so
as to promote or discourage certain relationships with or among them, forming classes and associations, oppositions and boundaries. Another anarchist,
Gustav Landauer, recognized as much, and he extended this insight via Fritz
Mauthner’s language philosophy: ‘‘In reality,’’ he remarks, ‘‘there is no
equivalence, only resemblance.’’\footnote{Gustav Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik: Versuche im Anschluss an Mauthners Sprachkritik (Köln am Rhein: Marcan-Block-Verlag, 1923), 6, translation mine.}

\section{FOCALIZING REPRESENTATION}


‘‘Our world,’’ Landauer concludes, ‘‘is a poorly-painted picture [Bild],
painted by our few senses.’’ This representation—and language itself, as a
representation of the representation—is poor in relation to its object: ‘‘The
world of nature, however, in its speechlessness [Sprachlosigkeit] and unspeakability [Unaussprechbarkeit], is immeasurably rich compared to our so-
called worldview [weltanschauung].’’\footnote{Ibid., 6, translation mine.} These conclusions, drawn as much
from the tradition of Bakunin and Proudhon as from Mauthner’s Sprachkritik
(critique of language), strongly prefigure another aspect of what Andrew M.
Koch calls poststructuralism’s ‘‘attack on representation’’: namely, its objection to substituting ‘‘closed,’’ finite representations for unrepresentable objects. Such a ‘‘closed system,’’ as Koch writes, ‘‘always omits an element
contained in the object that it seeks to describe.’’\footnote{Andrew M. Koch, ‘‘Poststructuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,’’ Philosophy of the Social Sciences 23, no. 3 (1993): 337.}


The ultimate totality, the universe, cannot be included in a finite representation. Moreover, as Howard Richards comments, any part of the universe, considered as a totality, is itself possessed of an ‘‘infinite concreteness’’ that is infinitely describable.\footnote{Richards, Letters From Quebec (Richmond, IN: Eartham College Bookstore, 1995), 2.50.3; 1.15.9.} In this way, as Burke points
out, all representation is synecdochic, substituting pars pro toto.\footnote{Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 25-26.} Since a
representation presents us with a part in lieu of an unpresentable totality,
representations inevitably impact our practices by what they include and
what they exclude. In order to produce any representation, as Koch observes, ‘‘one must continually limit the universe of one’s objects, closing the
system. One must draw a boundary around that which is relevant. But to do
so . . . [is to] create fiction.’’\footnote{Koch, ‘‘Poststructuralism,’’ 334.} Representation is fictive in the root sense of
fictio, ‘‘to make, to create, to do’’; it is inevitably not only reproductive or
constative but productive and performative, a matter of transformation as
much as description.\footnote{Richards, Letters From Quebec, 1.15.8; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 85.}


Because representation is transformative, it is an exercise in power.


‘‘What we know about the world,’’ writes Stuart Hall, ‘‘is how we see it represented’’; thus, representing means ‘‘circulating . . . a very limited range of
definitions of who people can be, what they can do, what are the possibilities
in life, what are the nature of the constraints on them.’’\footnote{Stuart Hall, quoted in Reba Chaisson, For Entertainment Purposes Only?: An Analysis of the Struggle to Control Filmic Representations (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000), 1.} By directing our
attention to A, B, and C, leading us to avert our eyes from X, Y, and Z,
focalizing representation manipulates our consciousness by controlling what
we see and therefore what we have occasion to think about.

\section{ONTOLOGICAL JUSTIFICATIONS FOR REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES}


In order to legitimate these sorts of representational practices, what must
be assumed about the nature of the realities to be represented? Critiques of
representation have pointed to the way in which representational ‘‘methodology,’’ to borrow Burke’s words, presupposes a representationalist ‘‘ontology.’’ This ontology is what we have come to call essentialism. Essentialism
comprises an interlocking set of assumptions that could be named naturalism, naïve realism, reductivism, and transcendentalism.

\subsection{Representationalism as Naturalism}


Representations are almost the only static things in a moving world: think
of Keats’s Grecian urn or Shakespeare’s promise to immortalize his beloved
in a sonnet. If the static can be made to stand in for the changing, it would
seem, the fluctuation we see around us must somehow be reducible to an
unseen fixity—an essence. An essentialist presumes, as Nick Haslam puts
it, that an essence is a set of ‘‘underlying intrinsic properties . . . causally
related to the accessible ones, giving rise to them in some fashion,’’ and that,
therefore, ‘‘knowing that something is an instance of such a kind allows
many things to be inferred about it and generalized from it.’’\footnote{Nick O. Haslam, ‘‘Natural Kinds, Human Kinds, and Essentialism,’’ Social Research 65, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 294.} Essentialism
therefore means the attribution of supposedly fixed characteristics to things.


In short, essentialism is naturalist theory, speculation predicated on the notion that things have natures that predestine or predict their behavior.

\subsection{Representationalism as Naïve Realism}


If a representation is to be meaningfully related to what it purports to represent, then presumably there must be a parallel between the structure of
signs and the structure of things signified—a system of ‘‘kinds or types’’
and a reality that ‘‘consists of things that fall into kinds or types.’’\footnote{Hubert L. Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, ‘‘Two Kinds of Antiessentialism and Their Consequences,’’ Critical Inquiry 22, no. 4 (Summer 1996): 738.} For an
essentialist, just as words are discrete units, so each thing is distinguished
from other things by its intrinsic essence, i.e., its haeccaeitas or quiddity,
the qualities that are ‘‘essential’’ to the thing rather than merely ‘‘accidental,’’ ‘‘the ones it needs to possess to be the thing it is.’’\footnote{Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1998), 417.} This is part of what
has been called naïve realism. Naïve realism allows us to think of the universe in terms of what Charles C. Fries calls an ‘‘item-centered’’ ontology,
an account of reality that says that the real consists of a collection of preexisting objects, as a set of ready-made objects waiting to be perceived by a
passive subject.\footnote{Charles Fries, quoted in Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 22.} Essentialists assume that the objects of which they speak
have distinct identities that preexist their articulation in language—that they
possess ‘‘inherent or intrinsic’’ properties, and that these comprise ‘‘a hidden structure underlying the superficial properties by which the kind is recognized.’’ Thus, an essence is taken to be a substance that underlies all
‘‘outward appearance,’’ a thing existing entirely outside of the language we
use to describe it, a self-contained presence prior to representation.\footnote{Haslam, ‘‘Natural Kinds,’’ 294; Ugo Volli, ‘‘Crisis of Representation, Crisis of Repre- sentational Semiotics?’’ Semiotica 143, no. 1 (2003): 27-28.}

\subsection{Representationalism as Reductivism}


To produce a believable representational description of reality requires
that we forget the indescribable plenitude of reality. As Michel Serres reminds us, every object is ‘‘infinitely discernible’’: in order to describe reality
with perfect accuracy, ‘‘there would have to be a different word for every
circle, for every symbol, for every tree, and for every pigeon; and a different
word for yesterday, today, and tomorrow; and a different word according to
whether he who perceives it is you or I, according to whether one of the two
of us is angry, is jaundiced, and so on ad infinitum.’’\footnote{Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. and trans. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 69.} The very fact that, as
Henri Bergson points out, signs are always generalizations means that a universe of unique and unrepeatable moments is altogether beyond the reach of
signification—or, as Serres would have it, that the imaginary element in
words is a necessary consequence of their finitude.\footnote{Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: The Modern Library, 1944), 167.} The infinitely varied
language that Serres asks us to imagine is oxymoronic: words, which obtain
their effects through their difference from one another, always mark an imaginary same masking real otherness, the likening of what is always irreducibly
unlike. A word is something that is meant to be repeated, to appear in one
mouth and another; it marks something recurring, expected, not the unique,
the once-only (therefore the monotheistic substitution of euphemisms for the
dread Name of God: the Name must not be treated as a word at all).\footnote{Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 324-25.}


Since language is inherently reductive, inevitably referring to classes and
categories rather than individuals, representation could never do justice to
the represented reality if reality did not present itself as something that can
be meaningfully treated in reductivist terms, through classes and categories.


Thus, closely related to the naturalist aspect of essentialism is a form of identitarian or reductionist thinking, in which the differences between members of a group may be ignored or forgotten in favor of their supposed sameness.


To assume that ‘‘discrete categories’’ objectively exist, and that they are separated by boundaries that are ‘‘defined crisply by the core of necessary properties’’ that constitute the being of the category, is yet another form of
essentialism. This central sameness is taken to be the ‘‘essence’’ of the
group, in light of which differences between members are held to be peripheral, unimportant, epiphenomenal, transitory, ‘‘inessential.’’ Essentialism in
this sense reifies necessarily provisional, incomplete generalizations about
changing phenomena into rigid categories that are taken as given, even as
absolute, so that all things are taken to fit into these categories, and so that
all members of the ‘‘kind’’ are taken to share in this ‘‘core of necessary properties . . . without which something cannot be an instance of the kind.’’\footnote{Haslam, ‘‘Natural Kinds,’’ 293-94.}

\subsection{Representationalism as Transcendentalism}


It is precisely because the totality of the real is infinite that enclosure, the
drawing of a frame around an object, is constitutive of representation. In
other words, there is no representation without the exclusion of something
from the scope of the representation—and representations necessarily exclude infinitely more than they include. At the same time, they depend for
their intelligibility on an illusion of closure: in order that the signs that make
up the representation be taken to stand for something definite, there must be
the sense that the context in which these signs will acquire this definite
meaning is present and ready to hand, whereas in fact this required context
is endless, spilling outside the finite bounds of the text, so that the meaning
of the signs can never be fixed. In order to be taken as an intelligible and
adequate token of the real, a representation must promise a ‘‘transcendental
signified’’—an ultimate meaning located ‘‘outside of the text,’’ where in fact
‘‘nothing is.’’\footnote{Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 163, 158.} In this sense, then, representationalism entails transcendentalism.


Transcendental thinking is closely tied up with the reductivist premises
of representationalism as well. In order for representations to operate legitimately under those premises, it is important not only that reality be intrinsically composed of neatly sorted, self-contained items; in addition, the
definition of each item must be stable, a ‘‘fixed list of unchanging features.’’\footnote{George Lakoff and Marc Johnson, Philosophy In the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 557.}


This, too, is a form of essentialist thinking: representationalism assumes the
existence of static essences—i.e., that ‘‘despite developmental transformations in the outward appearance of their members and historical changes in
human understandings of their nature, the essential sameness of the kind
remains.’’\footnote{Haslam, ‘‘Natural Kinds,’’ 294.} The essentialism entailed in representationalism attempts to
transcend the flux of shifting appearances for the security of absolutes, to
turn fluid phenomena into fixed nouns, to leave the world of becomings for a
world of static being. Many a philosophy of becoming, such as Aristotle’s, or
of history, such as Hegel’s, may conceal a teleology in which all becoming—
indeed, history itself—is representationally neutralized or overcome.\footnote{Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: Guilford Press, 1991), 83, 99.}

\section{ANTIESSENTIALIST CRITIQUES OF REPRESENTATIONALISM}


Since the premises of representationalism are essentialist, they are typically critiqued from an antiessentialist position: antiessentialists aim to demonstrate the epistemic error and ethical wrong of essentialism.


First of all, it has been argued that naturalist assumptions obscure the
reality of social construction, and therefore that they obscure creative possi-
bilities for social practices—the potential plenitude of viable alternative so-
cial arrangements. It goes without saying that essentialist predictions about
behavior as read off from a purportedly intrinsic, ‘‘natural’’ character—from
a feminist attribution of a good and generous nature to women to a white
supremacist attribution of a lazy and violent nature to black people—are
frequently translated into moral and political prescriptions, which are then
imposed on real subjects as a Procrustean bed (so that they can be punished
for bearing the stigma of a negative description or for failing to live up to the
‘‘ideal’’ descriptions—or both); to the extent that these imposed identities
are subsequently reproduced in the behavior of these subjects, this is taken
as confirmation of the naturalness of the representation. Andrew Feenberg
identifies this phenomenon as ‘‘what Bourdieu calls the ‘doxic’ relation to
reality . . . [i.e.,] that relation in which social determinations are simply
taken for granted as uncontestable realities’’; this relation, in turn, ‘‘is the
foundation of practices that reproduce precisely that relation, and with it the
corresponding reality.’’ In short, naturalist assumptions readily lead to exactly ‘‘such well known phenomena as ‘labeling,’ in which individuals
treated in function of the label they have been assigned learn to produce the
behavior that corresponds to their label, thereby justifying and reproducing
the initial definition under which they labor.’’\footnote{Andrew Feenberg, Lukacs, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), 197.} Naturalistic conceptions,
accordingly, are embraced by people who positively seek out such static,
preformed identities, as Sartre argues in his existential analysis of anti-Semitism: by imagining that Jews are animated by an evil essence, the anti-Semite avoids questions about ‘‘the Good,’’ and ultimately fantasizes himself as
well as Jews as objects rather than subjects, en-soi instead of pour-soi.\footnote{Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), 39, 44, 54.}


Ignoring the social construction of subjects is perhaps only slightly more
damaging, from an antiessentialist viewpoint, than ignoring the social construction of reality. Naïve realism means ignoring the creative role of subjects
in co-constituting an experiential world through logos, and therefore obscures the potential multiplicity and plenitude of the real. As such, naïve
realist preconceptions can be held partially responsible for the failure of socialist politics. As Burke admonished the Communist Party orthodoxy of his
day, ‘‘a reader of the New York Herald-Tribune finds that an entirely different
world occurred on a given date than if he had read the Daily Worker—which
suggests that there might as reasonably have been a dozen other ‘real’ worlds
for that same day’’; by ignoring this plurality (via a naïve faith in the self-
evidence of workers’ ‘‘real situation’’ and ‘‘true interests’’), socialists falsely
assume that their rhetorical appeals will reach the workers to whom they are
directed (since, on this account, they occupy the same ‘‘real world’’).\footnote{Burke, ‘‘Auscultation, Creation, and Revision,’’ in Extensions of the Burkeian System (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 64.} They
imagine that ‘‘worker’’ is a ready-made identity, a subject position that workers already occupy: that is, they take for granted the givenness of precisely
that which must be socially constructed.


Moreover, where socialism succeeds, its identitarian imagination, which
sees in so many different individuals the single identity, ‘‘workers,’’ reproduces what it assumes: reductivism imposes oppressive sameness on the
plural. Here, representationalism is central to what Adorno and Horkheimer
saw as the lethal dialectic of Enlightenment. The assumption, as David Harvey puts it, ‘‘that there existed a single correct mode of representation’’ undergirds technocratic ambitions:
‘‘the world could be controlled and
rationally ordered if we could only picture and represent it rightly.’’\footnote{David Harvey, The Condition Of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 27.} Controlling the creativity of readers and texts, ignoring the potential plenitude
of meanings and the situatedness of writing and reading, representationalism
is that ‘‘monologism’’ that, as Bakhtin warned us, ‘‘denies that there exists
outside of it another consciousness, with the same rights, and capable of
responding on an equal footing,’’ and so reifies everyone and everything:
‘‘Monologue pretends to be the last word.’’\footnote{Mikhail Bakhtin, quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 107.}


The wish to have the last word, to situate oneself at the end of, and therefore outside of, an ongoing process in which uncertainty and plurality preside, betrays a certain fear of change and temporality in general.


Representationalist essentialism, in this sense, is part and parcel of what
William Spanos calls the ‘‘metaphysical’’ project of the West, drawing on
the root meanings of the Greek words metá-tá-physiká (μετ τυ σικ); that is, essentialist thinking wishes and claims to occupy a vantage point
situated ‘‘after or beyond or above (μετ) the (τ) immediate processes of being (υσικ).’’\footnote{Spanos, Repetitions, 195.} This dualistic way of thinking, driven as much by a fear of death and a hatred of the body as it is by the will to control, stands accused of a whole host of philosophical, moral, and political crimes: the will
to forget differences and impose sameness at all costs has issued in genocide
and ecocide.\footnote{Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 139-40.}

\section{THE ETHICAL CONTENT OF ANTIREPRESENTATIONALISM}


Antirepresentationalists, with varying emphases and in different formulations, have objected to representational practices (labeling, patronizing,
identifying, and focalizing), and they have rejected the ontological premises
of representationalism (naturalism, naïve realism, reductivism, and transcendentalism).


Labeling practices, as documented by Erving Goffman, Howard S.
Becker, Michel Foucault, R.D. Laing, and others, are accused of producing
the dismal world of juridical, medical, and military ‘‘total institutions,’’ the
normalizing gulags in which deviants are interned. Of course, these could
not function without the patronizing representation that deputizes a representative to speak for the deviant, who is represented as incapable of or unwilling to speak for his or her own interests. The normalizing institution
depends even more fundamentally on the identifying practices that induce
the men and women who do the work of the institution to identify themselves
with the institution as a whole, to see its interests as sufficiently identical
with their own. They, in turn, have been recruited to the service of the institution through processes that combine all three modes of representational
practice: they have been persuaded that their interests are thus-and-such
(they have been labeled), that the institution is identical with their interests
(they have been identified), and that they will cede certain decision-making
prerogatives to the institution, which will make those decisions in the best
interests of the whole to which they now belong (they have been patronized).


What is true on the scale of the institution is true at every other scale. As
the ultimate total institution, the State—whether it is a feudal kingdom, built
on the premise that the king speaks for everyone through the authority of the
divine, whose agent he is, or a modern electoral democracy, whose representatives claim to do the business of their constituents—is a permanent practice of patronizing representation: it is the clinic from which the patients are
never discharged.\footnote{Thus, Nietzsche calls democracies ‘‘quarantine arrangements to combat that ancient pestilence, lust for tyranny’’ (Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 383).} Even more absolute and far-reaching in its representational power, to such an extent that it cannot be called an institution, is the
cultural community from which the power of the state ultimately derives; its
customs can and do dictate the special and permanent patronization of entire
sectors of society—women, for instance.


Every effort in history to transform State and society has merely reproduced the system of representation and power with superficial differences.


The same patronizing relationship present in the practice of an arrogant psychoanalyst toward a patient, expressed on the political level as the pretense
through which the king speaks for God or parliament for the citizens, is
translated into revolutionary vanguardism, the pretense of a revolutionary
party to possess a theory (a representation of the world) that justifies it in
speaking for (representing) a group (the people or the proletariat, conceived
as a homogenous unit) conceived as universal (representing humanity as a
whole). Inevitably, this arrangement, if successful, operates in the manner
of every other patronizing practice: it transfers power from the represented
to the representatives, creating a new ruling class, new normalizing institutions, and so on. Once more, banal narrative unity is imposed on the unpredictable course of events; once more, the creative power or Spinozan potentia
of the multitude is alienated and confined in the potestas or governing power
that it creates; once more, authority is reinvented and reinstated. Authority
itself, in the sense proposed by Alan Ritter—a cause for obedience to commands that is not in the content of the command but in the person or position
from which the command emanates\footnote{Alan Ritter, Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 66.} —is perhaps merely a result of these
processes, as are the phenomena of class and hierarchy in general.


If, in this light, all social and historical existence comes to seem permeated by a carceral character, despite the inevitable (but fruitless) phenomena of ‘‘resistance,’’ this is because the critique of representation, in making
power and its concentration coextensive with language and its rhetorical
function, establishes the total ubiquity of both. Nietzsche’s image of language as a ‘‘prison-house’’ returns with a vengeance. What Guy Debord
identified as the premise peculiar to the modern consumerist ‘‘society of the
spectacle’’—that ‘‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears’’—is revealed as the watchword of every society, as all establish the
same ‘‘monopoly of appearances,’’ the same primary narcissism.\footnote{Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Black \& Red (Detroit: Black \& Red, 1977), 1.12.} Only in
periods of breakdown can dominant representations be challenged or seen as
representations at all; otherwise, they are simply confirmed by the everyday
experience that they structure in advance.


To summarize:


1. Representational practices impose an appearance of sameness on the
infinity of differences, giving rise to


2. the processes whereby diffuse social power is consolidated into its
macroscopic institutional forms, producing


3. the phenomena of authority and hierarchy, which


4. blanket the visible universe with representations of sameness, which


5. underwrite the hypostasization of this representable sameness into the
nature of things in themselves, which


6. reinforces the representationalist assumptions which


7. justify the dominant representational practices.


This is the self-confirming cycle through which the social order is reproduced.

\section{MARXISM AND ANTIREPRESENTATIONALISM}


Contemporary post-structuralism thus comes to conclusions that look
rather similar on a practical level to those reached by the Frankfurt School,
which ultimately inverted the Hegelian dialectic in favor of nonidentity, extending a negation of the principle of exchange-value—‘‘the levelling principle of abstraction’’ for which ‘‘what was different is equalized’’—into a
nearly total abandonment of the universalism on which Marxism once depended, now seen as ‘‘totalitarian.’’\footnote{Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1997), 12, 11, 166.} At the same time, their history of the
triumph of exchange-value saw representations as coming to subsume and
dominate material presence (‘‘Real life is becoming indistinguishable from
the movies’’), paving the way for the postmodern assertion that ‘‘real life’’ is
itself a movie.\footnote{Ibid., 126; Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1.}


After a certain point, Marxism found itself with only two options left. It
could embrace its own dissolution in the Baudrillardian ‘‘liquidation of all
referentials,’’ the death of any notion of a material reality apart from ideology, and therefore also of the notion of a ‘‘false consciousness’’ that it could
edify;\footnote{Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 2.} otherwise, Marxism would have to somehow insist on its right to correct the false consciousness, re-erecting the old representationalist distinctions between true and false that now elicit incredulity. The first route, of
course, is the one taken by Jean Baudrillard, for whom depth simply is surface and the representationalist pretense of a Gramsci merely the same old
pedantry. Here, as Steven Best writes, the ‘‘inversion of illusion and reality’’
theorized by the classic concept of ideology is ‘‘radicalized, finalized,
pushed to its highest degree’’ as ‘‘simulation devours the real—the representational structure and the space it depends on—and, like a grinning Cheshire cat, leaves behind nothing but commutating signs, self-referring
simulacra which feign a relation to an obsolete real.’’\footnote{Steven Best, ‘‘The Commodification of Reality and the Reality of Commodification: Jean Baudrillard and Postmodernism,’’ in Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, ed. Douglas Kellner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 53.}


Taking the other fork in the road, Frederic Jameson attempts to get away
from the ‘‘representational narrative’’ of conventional historiography while
privileging his own preferred brand of historicism, for which ‘‘interpretation
. . . consists in rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive
master code’’ that demands to be recognized ‘‘as the absolute horizon of all
reading and all interpretation.’’ For all his exaggerated attempts at flexibility
and all-inclusiveness, incorporating and assimilating seemingly every methodological trend from archetypal criticism to deconstruction, and generously
acknowledging literature’s transformative ‘‘Utopian functions’’ as well as its
recuperative ‘‘ideological’’ content, Jameson nevertheless returns to what
Craig Owens refers to as ‘‘the Marxist master narrative’’—in Jameson’s
words, ‘‘the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of
Necessity’’—which Owens regards as ‘‘only one version among many of the
modern narrative of mastery,’’ culminating in ‘‘mankind’s progressive exploitation of the Earth.’’ For antirepresentationalists like Owens, Jameson’s
calls for a ‘‘reconquest of certain forms of representation’’ signify nothing less
than an attempt at ‘‘the rehabilitation of the entire social project of modernity itself,’’ a cowardly retreat from postmodern critique.\footnote{Jameson, Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 10-11, 17, 19, 299; Craig Owens, ‘‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,’’ in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 66.}


Even more boldly, Slavoj Žižek has sought to defend and renew the notion
of ‘‘ideology’’ as false consciousness, this time by reference to Lacan’s anti-
realist conception of ‘‘the Real’’ as ‘‘a hard kernel, a leftover which persists
and cannot be reduced to a universal play of illusory meaning’’: ‘‘The difference between Lacan and ‘naïve realism’ is that for Lacan, the only point at
which we approach this hard kernel of the Real is indeed the dream.’’\footnote{Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 47.} In
effect, Žižek tries to have it both ways: to be an antirepresentationalist (i.e.,
antirealist, antiessentialist) and a representationalist at the same time.


This does not seem a happy proposition. Excised from Žižek’s system is
any possibility of an appeal to ‘‘reality as it is’’ or the ‘‘objective’’ for an
alternative to ideological subjectivity: no objective experience can offer any
‘‘irreducible resistance to the ideological construction.’’ Instead, ‘‘the only
way to break the power of our ideological dream is to confront the Real of
our desire which announces itself in this dream.’’ The sort of ideology critique that Žižek prescribes for this confrontation may be useful and worth-
while, as it allows us to respond to anti-Semitism, for example, by saying
that ‘‘the anti-Semitic idea of Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system’’; at the same time, it seems to preclude the efficacy of any
reference to the way Jews really are, or the way the economy really is, or the
real state of the ecosystem.\footnote{Ibid., 48-49.}


Perhaps it is possible to say that the second Bush administration’s serene
will to increase arsenic levels in drinking water has nothing to do with the
effect of this chemical on human bodies, but is merely a way of making laissez-faire ideology secure; however, if there is no effective appeal to facts
(the ‘‘real’’ with a lower-case ‘‘r’’), then it is useless for me to point to objective studies of the toxic hazards posed by arsenic, or even to point to the
complicity of the administration with corporate polluters. Thus, Žižek castigates as naïve Noam Chomsky’s supposed belief ‘‘that all we need to know
are the facts’’: ‘‘I don’t think that merely ‘knowing the facts’ can really
change people’s perceptions.’’\footnote{Žižek, ‘‘I Am a Fighting Atheist: Inteview With Slavoj Žižek,’’ Bad Subjects, no. 59 (February 2002), \href{http://eserver.org/bs/59/zizek.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}eserver.org\Slash{}bs\Slash{}59\Slash{}zizek.html} (accessed 14 July 2003).} A scientific account of the effects of arsenic
on human bodies, for Žižek, could not constitute an effective counter to
Bush’s ideological narrative, for ideologies can incorporate any mere facts.


In so arguing, Žižek seems to privilege his own theoretically informed
analyses over ‘‘undertheorized’’ references to matters of fact. This leaves
Žižekian ideology-critique open to a question: how can we know when the
analyst has reached the kernel of the Real within the ideological dream? In
other words, how is it possible to differentiate clearly between the sort of
analysis that really does point to the ideological function of some discourse
and the kind that is yet another exercise in the representational appropriation of power? The repressed term (representation) simply returns again.


Along these lines, it is disturbing that Žižek urges radicals to lose their ‘‘fear
of state power,’’ their sense ‘‘that because it’s some form of control, it’s bad,’’
and calls for the revival of Lenin’s critique of freedoms of speech, thought,
and decision.\footnote{Ibid.; On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 114.} Surely there can be no neo-Leninist solution to the crisis of
representation, a crisis precipitated in part by the vanguardist pretensions
of Leninism.


The limits of those pretensions are most gravely challenged by one who
also makes their last best defense: Louis Althusser. In scrapping Marxism
as an ‘‘explanatory model’’ in favor of an antiessentialist concept of ‘‘overdetermination,’’ Althusser evacuates the category of ‘‘science’’ even as he
makes a last-ditch attempt to reerect the crumbling distinction between it
and the all-consuming category of ‘‘ideology’’; for him, as for the neo-pragmatists, interpretation is no longer tied to a correspondence theory of truth.\footnote{May, Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 35.}


Such a perspective, for which ‘‘all consciousness is false consciousness’’ and
even ‘‘history features . . . as an object of theory, not as a real object,’’ is also
an antirepresentationalism, albeit one that tries to retain the representational
privilege Lenin assigned to the bearers of scientific knowledge.\footnote{Eagleton, The Eagleton Reader, 242; Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 1979), 117.} Similarly,
Burke’s pragmatism acknowledges that there is, in social practice, no escape
from ideology: in its violence, the world can irrupt through our ‘‘terministic
screens’’—‘‘history,’’ as Jameson puts it, ‘‘is what hurts’’—but our responses to this world are inevitably mediated by ideology, that compound of
ready-made ‘‘beliefs and judgments’’ that is available for acts of persuasion,
the means by which an author is able to persuade a reader about something
particular by appealing to his or her feelings about things in general: ‘‘I
make this exhortation in the terms of what has already been accepted . . . I
shall argue only for my addition, and assume the rest. If people believe eight,
I can recommend nine; I can do so by the manipulation of their eightish
assumptions.’’ Small wonder, then, that Burke ends up in the slough of despond from which it appears that ‘‘hierarchy’’ and ‘‘bureaucracy’’ are the
fate of a species condemned infinitely to repeat the cycle of ‘‘purification’’
dictated by its authoritarian representations—the ultimate ‘‘repetition compulsion.’’\footnote{Burke, Language As Symbolic Action, 45; Jameson, Political Unconscious, 102; Burke, Counter-Statement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968) 146, 161; Philosophy of Literary Form, 388; Language As Symbolic Action, 15, 17.} In a pan-ideological world, there is no end to ideological power
struggle, for this struggle can never come to rest in a referent, an appeal to
something universally true outside of the particular interests of a party in the
struggle: thus Foucault remarks that ‘‘the notion of ideology’’ per se is no
longer meaningful, since ‘‘it always stands in virtual opposition to something
else which is supposed to stand as truth.’’\footnote{Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 60.}


Representation, in contemporary theory, constitutes the very perspective
from which it is refused. It is both epistemologically untenable and coextensive with our knowing, ethically repugnant and intrinsic to our doings. This
is the ethical and epistemological crisis of representation. On what grounds
can we sustain any objection to representation if we are always already deprived of any alternative?

\chapter{3. Anarchism as a Critique of Representation}


IS IT TRUE, HISTORICALLY SPEAKING, THAT ANARCHISM HAS ALWAYS REJECTED
representation in all its forms? Is it possible to conduct political action without the use of symbolic representations—for instance, engaging in rhetorical
persuasion, making factual claims about what is the case, assessing the opinions and consulting the wishes of the group, communicating intentions in
order to coordinate action—in a word, without language? Does such a
sweeping critique of representation leave room for anarchism, or for any radical project at all? Or is it possible for anarchists to distinguish between
legitimate and illegitimate representational practices? If not, how did anarchist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries succeed in waging serious and sometimes successful struggles against capital and the State?


Here, we might observe that the accounts of anarchist resistance to representation overstate the case. For instance, when Eisenzweig calls Lazare’s
intervention in the Dreyfus Affair unique, arguing that for the anarchist
alone, ‘‘Dreyfus did not have to represent anything,’’ this interpretation can
hardly account for the rhetoric of Lazare’s declaration that Dreyfus ‘‘incarnates, in himself . . . the centuries-old sufferings of the people of martyrs’’:


‘‘Through him, I see Jews languishing in Russian prisons . . . Rumanian
Jews refused the rights of man, Galician Jews starved by financial trusts and
ravaged by peasants made fanatics by their priests . . . Algerian Jews, beaten
and pillaged, unhappy immigrants dying of hunger in the ghettos of New
York and London, all of those whom desperation drives to seek some haven
in the far corners of the inhabited world where they will at last find that
justice which the best of them have claimed for all humanity.’’\footnote{Bernard Lazare, quoted in Michael R. Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: The French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 188.} There could
hardly be a stronger appeal to identification and identity than this (unless
one counts the personal letter to Dreyfus in which Lazare writes, ‘‘Never
shall I forget what I suffered in my Jewish skin the day of your military degradation, when you represented my martyred and insulted race’’\footnote{Lazare, quoted in Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 86.}). For Lazare, it seems, Dreyfus’s ‘‘representative’’ character is not only a trick or a
trap, but in some sense, a truth. Anarchist resistance to identification is balanced by a motif of reidentification: as Goldman wrote, ‘‘The problem that
confronts us . . . is how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others, to
feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic
qualities.’’\footnote{Goldman, Anarchism, 213-14.}


Perhaps, then, anarchists succeeded in organizing because their opposition to representation was incomplete and inconsistent. Indeed, post-
structuralist critics such as May, Newman, and Koch have found ‘‘classical’’
anarchist theory (save, in some instances, for the marginal works of Max
Stirner) to be shot through with residues of metaphysical, foundationalist
Western thought—a thoroughgoing essentialism. As Todd May writes in his
Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, ‘‘almost all anarchists
rely on a unitary concept of human essence’’ to argue for the abolition of the
State: ‘‘the human essence is good; therefore, there is no need for the exercise of power.’’ From an antirepresentationalist perspective, however, the
very notion of a human essence ‘‘leads to its own practices of oppression’’;
it is already a representationalism, a ‘‘globalizing discourse’’ whose effect is
‘‘tyranny.’’\footnote{May, Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 13; Koch, ‘‘Poststructuralism,’’ 340.} Accordingly, May, Newman, and Koch have sought to detach
anarchism from what they see as its investment in essentialism by wedding
it to post-structuralism; these adjustments to anarchist theory, they argue,
will make it into a more suitable and up-to-date instrument for political practice.


We have already called these pragmatic claims into question: post-
structuralism has by no means demonstrated that it is able to generate a
practice coherent with its own premises, nor even a set of premises consistent with themselves. The question is whether the anarchist tradition is liable
to the antiessentialist critique leveled at it by its would-be post-structuralist
rescuers, particularly since, as we have already noted, the radicality of the
anarchist negation of representation is wider in its implications than most
have recognized. What is an anarchist ontology like? Pursuing this question
ought to teach us some very important lessons about the current crisis of
representation, its origins, and its limits.

\section{ANARCHISM AS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORY}


It is perhaps easiest to dismiss the charge that classical anarchist theory
was a simpleminded naturalism. Bakunin’s appeal to ‘‘nature’’ is not a refusal to see the ways in which subjects are socially constructed. Individual
subjectivity is socially produced: ‘‘The real individual,’’ he writes, is over-
determined by ‘‘a confluence of geographic, climatic, ethnographic, hygenic,
and economic influences, which constitute the nature of his family, his class,
his nation, his race.’’ Here, one’s ‘‘nature’’ is less constitutive than constituted. ‘‘Every individual,’’ Bakunin continues, ‘‘inherits at birth, in different
degrees, not ideas and innate sentiments, as the idealists claim, but only the
capacity to feel, to will, to think, and to speak’’—a set of ‘‘rudimentary faculties without any content.’’ These empty ‘‘faculties’’ must be filled in with a
‘‘content’’ that comes from generations of cultural development, the creation
of a ‘‘common consciousness’’ that is ‘‘the intellectual and moral patrimony
of a nation, a class, and a society.’’ Since each real individual is always
‘‘the product of society,’’ all that is ‘‘natural’’—in other words, inevitable or
inescapable—is the ‘‘influence that society naturally exercises over him.’’


Thus, since they do not exist ready-made in the human soul, ‘‘mutual aid and
solidarity’’ must be ‘‘developed’’ through concrete experience in society.\footnote{Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, 89, 239-41, emphasis mine.} In
short, Bakunin is not a naturalist, founding his hopes on the assumption that
human behavior is driven by unvarying natural drives and instincts, but a
constructivist: for him, anarchy is not a ‘‘state of nature,’’ but something that
must be collectively willed, struggled for, built, achieved, produced—in a
word, constructed.


Bakunin’s anarchism does not rely on unsupportable assumptions about
the ‘‘underlying intrinsic properties’’ of the human subject, apart from the
manifest behavior of actual human beings in history. Neither is it necessarily
yoked to a mystified notion of the State as ‘‘essentially immoral and irrational,’’ as Newman charges, citing Bakunin’s declaration that ‘‘It would be
impossible to make the State change its nature\dots{}
All States are bad in the
sense that by their nature, that is, by the conditions and objectives of their
existence, they constitute the opposite of human justice, freedom, and equality.’’ This passage seems to support Newman’s interpretation, but on closer
inspection, it is not so clear that Bakunin is appealing to a theory of essences
here. Notice that the phrase ‘‘the conditions and objectives of their exis-
tence’’ is being offered as a substitute for the phrase ‘‘their nature.’’ This
implies that there is no ‘‘nature’’ of a thing apart from its ‘‘conditions’’ and
‘‘objectives’’—its functioning in a concrete historical situation (a context)
and its aims in that situation. The claim ‘‘all States are bad . . . by their
nature’’ is tautological, a matter of definition, rather than a characterization
of something completely extralinguistic: if a State ceased to operate more or
less as it does, i.e., if it did not enforce laws, then it would no longer be
recognizably a State. As Bakunin writes elsewhere: ‘‘Where all govern, no
one is governed, and the State as such does not exist.’’\footnote{Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 24; Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism, ed. G.P. Maximoff (Glencor, IL: Free Press, 1953), 224, 240.} This is, in fact, a
reasonable characterization of the goal of Bakunin’s political program.


Like Bakunin, Kropotkin works from an empiricist psychology—a concept of self that presupposes both conflict and development. This sensing
and learning self, while it is always subject to determination by experience
in a social context, is not the undifferentiated tabula rasa of Lockean liberalism, but something internally divided, even fractured or fragmented: in particular, it is riven by a conflict between ‘‘two sets of diametrically opposed
feelings’’—those that ‘‘induce man to subdue other men in order to utilize
them for his individual ends’’ and those that ‘‘induce human beings to unite
for attaining common ends by common effort.’’ The ethics that Kropotkin
sought to create are not simply a representation of an already present morality, but an attempt to mediate this internal ‘‘struggle’’ that marks subjectivity, to discover a social ‘‘synthesis’’ capable of resolving ‘‘this fundamental
contradiction.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development, trans. Louis S. Friedland and Joseph R. Piroshnikoff (Dorset: Prism Press, 1924), 22.} That is to say, rather than assuming as the basic unit of
ethical reasoning the ‘‘individual’’ who is ‘‘one and indivisible,’’ and who
therefore can be judged as ‘‘an entire being’’ to be ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad,’’ ‘‘intelligent’’ or ‘‘stupid,’’ and so on, Kropotkin’s psychological model
sees in man a multitude of separate faculties, autonomous tendencies, equal
among themselves, performing their functions independently, balancing, opposing one another continually. Taken as a whole, man is nothing but a resultant,
always changeable, of all his divers faculties, of all his autonomous tendencies,
of brain cells and nerve centers. All are related so closely to one another that
they each act on all the others, but they lead their own life without being subordinated to a central organ—the soul.\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 119-20.}


As in Nietzsche’s conception, the internal ‘‘multitude’’ of the human being,
as well as its ‘‘resultant’’ character, render it resistant to the kinds of totalizing judgments underwriting moral and juridical systems of guilt and punishment.


That Kropotkin holds our enduring nature to be our changeability is intimately tied to his concept of development—an evolutionary notion that
places him in the camp of the social constructivists rather than that of the
naturalists. Kropotkin’s ethics are thoroughly constructivist; if he links them
to his studies of ‘‘mutual aid,’’ it is because social construction appropriates
the materials deposited by the evolutionary process, not because there is a
ready-formed morality that is sufficient unto itself. A Kropotkinian genealogy
of morals might ultimately lead back to certain biologically evolved instincts
to preserve the genetic commons of the group, but this would constitute no
more than a ‘‘foundation’’ upon which a ‘‘higher sense of justice, or equity’’
must be ‘‘developed.’’ He underlines this point in a comment on Proudhon:


‘‘The tendency to protect the interests of others at the expense of our own
cannot be solely an inborn feeling . . . its rudiments were always present in
man, but these rudiments must be developed.’’ None of the ‘‘feelings and
practices’’ we admire in tribal peoples (e.g., ‘‘hospitality,’’ ‘‘respect for
human life,’’ ‘‘the sense of reciprocal obligation’’) are the result of any closeness to some authentic human nature, he insists; rather, all must be ‘‘developed,’’ for they are ‘‘the consequence of life in common’’ rather than its
cause.\footnote{Kropotkin, Ethics, 16-17, 271, emphasis mine; Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 203, emphasis mine.}


Thus, Kropotkin does not assume, as in May’s caricature, that ‘‘people are
naturally good,’’ and that this good essence is being repressed by the State;
this is why Kropotkin’s political program does not assume that the only con-
dition for a good life is that ‘‘the obstacles to that goodness are removed.’’\footnote{May, Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 63.}


Rather, he insists that
it is not enough to destroy. We must also know how to build . . . That is why
anarchism, when it works to destroy authority in all its aspects, when it demands
the abrogation of laws and the abolition of the mechanism that serves to impose
them, when it refuses all hierarchical organization and preaches free agreement,
at the same time strives to maintain and enlarge the precious kernel of social
customs without which no human or animal society can exist.


Communist customs and institutions are of absolute necessity for society, not
only to solve economic difficulties, but also to maintain and develop social customs that bring men in contact with one another. They must be looked to for
establishing such relations between men that the interest of each should be the
interest of all; and this alone can unite men instead of dividing them.\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 136-37.}


Once again, Kropotkin is delivering an imperative, not merely enunciating a
description, when he says that human beings must be united in solidarity,
that community must be constructed, that relationships of reciprocity must be
established. Solidarity, community, and ethical relationships are not already
there, components of a human essence merely awaiting expression. Nor are
they, by the same token, nonexistent, so that they must be created ex nihilo.


Rather, if they can be said to exist already at all, they already exist as possibilities implicit in the biological and social matrix of nature and humanity.


Nature alone is not the sufficient condition for their realization; culture (customs, institutions, relationships) is necessary.


Both Bakunin and Kropotkin, then, combine what Dave Morland calls
‘‘universal’’ and ‘‘contextual’’ accounts of ‘‘human nature’’ (i.e., elements
of both naturalism and constructivism), in assuming that ‘‘there are innate
components of human nature, the development of which is encouraged by
the environmental context within which individuals find themselves.’’ Both
ascribe a limited role to ‘‘human nature’’ in the codetermination of human
behavior—one in which our natural ‘‘potentialities’’ are said to ‘‘exist in . . .
a symbiotic relationship with the environment.’’\footnote{Dave Morland, ‘‘Anarchism, Human Nature and History: Lessons for the Future,’’ in Twenty-First Century Anarchism, ed. Jon Purkis and James Bowen (London: Cassell, 1997), 10, 14.} Once again, these potenti-
alities or faculties only acquire their content, hence their political meaning,
through this interaction with the historical environment. Thus, in the context
of the patriarchal, tradition-bound Spain of the early twentieth century, the
anarchist-feminist Mujeres Libres sang:



\begin{quote}


Affirming the promise of life


we defy tradition


we mold the warm clay


of a new world born of pain.\footnote{Martha Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), vii.}



\end{quote}


To affirm that human life has ‘‘promise,’’ potential, possibilities other than
those already expressed by history, is indeed to compare it to clay, which
can be remolded to assume a new form. The human is not, by this token,
intrinsically hylomorphic or formless, any more than clay is: where water
and air are incapable of being remolded by human hands, clay is possessed
of physical properties and causal powers that permit it to be shaped and
informed, to change and to accept the new.

\section{ANARCHISM BEYOND NAÏVE REALISM}


A number of anarchist theorists have recognized that, contrary to our
naïve realist intuitions of operating directly and unmediatedly in a world of
simple presences, our very ‘‘sense of ‘reality’ is surely one of those conventions that change from age to age and are determined by the total way of
life,’’ so that ‘‘there is no single way, even no normal way, of representing
the world we experience.’’\footnote{Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art: Collected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 21.} They have taken account of the mediating function of language: an anarchist analysis of institutional power concludes that,
in the words of Paul Goodman, ‘‘one of the most powerful institutions is the
conventional language itself. It is very close to the ideology, and it shapes
how people think, feel, and judge what is functional.’’\footnote{Paul Goodman, Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 26.} Read and Goodman
are writing in the wake of twentieth-century relativisms, to be sure; however,
they are also writing in the anarchist ontological tradition of Proudhon.


Proudhon conjectures that ‘‘All that exists is grouped; all that forms a
group is one, consequently is perceptible, consequently is.’’\footnote{Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Rivière, 1946), 12.63, translation mine.} This is a powerful transformation of Aristotle’s insight that to ‘‘be’’ is, in an important
sense, to have form and structure, to connect and cohere; it is directly informed by Kant’s recognition of the role of the subject in giving form to its
own experience; it also reflects the influence of Hegel’s monistic claim that
‘‘the real is rational and the rational real’’; it anticipates Heidegger’s description of the way in which perception of ‘‘things’’ is always a construction
of these ‘‘things’’ through the intrinsically associative, generalizing, and categorizing power of words, so that ‘‘thinging gathers,’’ and so that culture, as
the ensemble of linguistic constructs, enables us to inhabit a world that is
within but distinct from the earth.\footnote{Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel: The Essential Writings, ed. Frederick G. Weiss (New York: Harper \& Row, 1974), 14; Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper \& Row, 1971), 174, 215.} Moreover, like Heidegger and Kant—
and unlike Hegel and Aristotle—Proudhon does not thereby strip difference
of its value: ‘‘What I call ORDER,’’ he declares at the outset of De la création de l’ordre dans l’humanité, ‘‘necessarily presupposes division, distinction, difference. All things that are undivided, indistinct, undifferentiated,
cannot be conceived as ordered: these notions reciprocally exclude one another’’; ‘‘order is unity in multiplicity.’’\footnote{Proudhon, Oeuvres, 5.33, 5.33n, translation mine.}


When Proudhon defines ‘‘the object of metaphysics’’ not as the accurate
description of a preexisting order of things, but as ‘‘the production of order,’’
this resonates with Howard Richards’s claim that metaphysics is ‘‘the construction of unifying symbols’’ and symbol-systems that serve to help organize communities and societies.\footnote{Ibid., 5.42, translation mine; Richards, Letters from Quebec, 2.48.10.} Just as Bakunin conjectures that the
‘‘unity’’ we perceive in the infinite ‘‘diversity’’ of nature is something we
project onto it through our faculties of ‘‘representation,’’ Proudhon sees language not as the mirror of an unchanging reality, but as something which, as
the ‘‘spontaneous creation’’ of human ‘‘instinct,’’ both emerges from and reflects nature in so far as both linguistic and natural processes constantly
create and recreate ‘‘groups and divisions.’’ If language in general operates
this way, it is no less apparent that particular texts must operate ‘‘through
the power of divisions and groups,’’ likening and distinguishing, calling
things into articulacy from their inarticulate being.\footnote{Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 113; Proudhon, Oeuvres, 5.136, 5.217.}


Read and Goodman similarly recognize the ways in which human beings
actively and creatively construct a world through the agency of signs and
symbolically guided practices. Like Proudhon, however, they do not postulate an arbitrary creation-from-nothing but a dialectical creation-from-
something, a construction from materials. ‘‘Art,’’ writes Read, ‘‘is not an
invention in vacuo,’’ but a representational organization of the material of
experience—‘‘a selection from chaos, a definition from the amorphous, a
concretion within the ‘terrible fluidity’ of life.’’\footnote{Read, Poetry and Experience (London: Vision Press, 1967), 31.}


Rather than the pure
performativity imagined by an antirepresentationalist textualism, social anarchists share the sort of critical realist perspective that sees social construction and interpretation as the production of something new through
signification from something that precedes signification. As David Bordwell
admonishes, while we see ‘‘interpretation’’ as ‘‘the construction of meaning,’’
we should acknowledge the implications of this figure of speech: ‘‘Construction is not ex nihilo creation; there must be prior materials which undergo
transformation.’’ Even Derrida agrees that while the ‘‘artifactuality’’ of experience ‘‘is indeed made,’’ it is ‘‘made of’’ something. In a similar manner,
Bakunin remarks that ‘‘man, born in and produced by Nature, creates for
himself, under the conditions of that Nature, a second existence’’: nature is
the set of materials from which a cultural world is constructed.\footnote{David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cin-ema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3; Derrida, ‘‘The Deconstruction of Actuality: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,’’ Radical Philosophy 68 (1994): 28; Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 110.}


It is within the framework of this modified realist understanding, which
recognizes the ‘‘unavoidable subjective necessity to project grammar into the
world,’’ as Goodman puts it, that we must read Landauer’s apparent antirealism when he paraphrases Mauthner in declaring that ‘‘your world is the
grammar of your language.’’ The object world is not immediately present to
the subject, but is mediated through signs that are collectively constructed
by subjects: in this sense, ‘‘it is my own self-created world into which I look,
in which I work.’’\footnote{Goodman, Speaking and Language, 74; Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik, 8, translation in Eugene D. Lunn, Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 162.} A ‘‘worldview,’’ like a language, is therefore subject to
historical change: as Rudolf Rocker writes in his book-length riposte to fascist theories of Volk and Kultur, not only is ‘‘language . . . not the result of a
special folk-unity,’’ it is something that ‘‘readily yields to foreign influences’’; it is not the bearer of an eternal racial essence, a ‘‘mysterious ‘nature of the nation’ which allegedly is always the same at bottom,’’ but ‘‘a
structure in constant change in which the intellectual and social culture of
the various phases of our evolution is reflected . . . always in flux, protean in
its inexhaustible power to assume new forms.’’\footnote{Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, trans. Ray E. Chase (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1998), 288.} Weltanschauungen are plural, riddled with difference, and constantly changing: ‘‘Not only does the
concept of reality differ as between a mediaeval philosopher like St. Thomas
Aquinas and a modern philosopher like Bergson, but a similar difference
also exists on the average level of apprehension (the difference between animism and theism, between supernaturalism and materialism, and so on). The
‘reality’ of a citizen of the Soviet Union is certainly different from the ‘reality’
of a citizen of the United States.’’ In short, ‘‘we must recognize, with the
Marxists, the historic nature of human consciousness.’’\footnote{Read, Philosophy of Modern Art, 21-22.}


While they have thus been able to acknowledge the historicity and cultural specificity of particular forms of ‘‘consciousness,’’ anarchists have traditionally acknowledged that there is more to the world than the infinity of
perspectives on it. Goodman writes that ‘‘we live in a kind of doubled world,
a world of experiences with words attached and a world made of experienced
words.’’ This sense of doubleness, of ‘‘nature’’ as both inescapably connected
with and irreducibly other to ‘‘culture,’’ is ineliminable. To reduce the one
to the other is literally madness. To live completely within a Weltanschauung
would be not only a form of ontological impoverishment, but a kind of lunacy—what Goodman calls the ‘‘box of panlogism,’’ or ‘‘the pathology of
living too much in the world of speech,’’ in which the capacity for producing
words, words, words translates into an ‘‘excessive freedom.’’\footnote{Goodman, Speaking and Language, 70, 81-82.}


Here an antirealist like Rorty, who thinks of his antirealism as antiauthor-
itarian, might interject: in what, for an anarchist, could an ‘‘excessive free-
dom’’ consist? Despite Goodman’s individualist tendencies, he condemns as
false the kind of privatized, merely personal inner freedom celebrated by
subjectivist idealism, and affirms that the only sort of freedom that is really
worth having, or even really free, is a social freedom, freedom lived in com-
munity with others. The retreat into a linguistically custom-built private
world actually imprisons: ‘‘The formative power of speaking can be so un-
limited that the sense of reality is deranged. Ideas and sentences crowd out
experience. In paranoia, the system of meanings is so tight that countervail-
ing evidence counts for nothing.’’ The very ‘‘spontaneity and freedom’’ with
which we speak gives us ‘‘a kind of control, often a too easy control, of the
world’’ that renders us perilously prone to solipsistic ‘‘delusion.’’\footnote{Ibid., 81, 70-71.}


Here, Goodman’s theory echoes Kenneth Burke’s assertion that ‘‘the magical decree is implicit in all language’’: since ‘‘the mere act of naming an
object or situation decrees that it is to be singled out as such-and-such rather
than as something-other,’’ and since the world does not always immediately
gainsay or offer resistance to our ‘‘decrees,’’ we enjoy a delusion of godlike
power, as if we had only say ‘‘let there be . . .’’ to hear the world respond
‘‘and there was.’’ If power, for Bruno Latour, is ‘‘the illusion people get when
they are obeyed,’’ Goodman would say that we enjoy a fetishistic illusion of
power over what seems to obey us. At the extremes of delusion, he writes,



\begin{quote}


‘‘names are persons and formulas magically produce physical effects’’—as
if saying literally made it so.\footnote{Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 3-4; Latour, quoted in Michael, 31; Goodman, Speaking and Language, 81.} This is, in fact, a form of fetishism very much
like the fetish of money that Proudhon critiques: while wealth is really the
product of the collective force, ‘‘imagination attribut[es] to the metal that
which is the effect of the collective thought toward the metal,’’ mistaking the
representation for its object. As with commodity fetishism, the fetish of language promises the fetishist magical power over reality, but produces only a
solipsistic slavery-in-freedom: ‘‘When everything can be made up, finally
nothing is given, there are no facts.’’ This solipsism is no less enslaving
when it locks the self inside of a group self, in the form of a folie à deux or
madness of crowds: Goodman’s prime example is ‘‘religious superstition.’’\footnote{Proudhon, Proudhon’s Solution of the Social Problem, ed. Henry Cohen (New York: Vanguard Press, 1927), 59; Goodman, Speaking and Language, 81.}



\end{quote}


The way out of the box of panlogism, for Goodman, is not through the
replacement of a faulty vernacular with some positivist linguistic ‘‘prophylaxis,’’ such as Carnap’s, which would supposedly render us secure against
linguistically induced illusions.\footnote{Goodman, Speaking and Language, 108, 111.} Like Burke, he is an enlightened debunker
of the Enlightenment project of ‘‘debunking,’’ recognizing that language can
never completely be cleaned up, demystified, or rationalized: ‘‘an attempt
to eliminate magic,’’ Burke writes, ‘‘would involve us in the elimination of
vocabulary itself as a means of sizing up reality.’’ Instead, Burke seeks
magic that works—‘‘correct magic, magic whose decrees about the naming of
real situations is the closest possible approximation to the situation named,’’
or which at least helps us ‘‘cope’’ with the situation.\footnote{Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 4; Goodman, Speaking and Language, 172.} Goodman appeals to
an empirical reality outside of language, albeit one that can always be named
with many names, an infinitely redescribable reality: bodily ‘‘facts and failures’’ offer ‘‘correctives’’ or checks on the free play of magic signifiers,
grounding us in the concrete life of an ecology. Like Burke, Goodman would
submit formulas (ideas, concepts, phrases, structures) to the trials of experiment and experience: the best adaptations to a situation will be ‘‘supplied
by the ‘collective revelation’ of testing and discussion.’’\footnote{Goodman, Speaking and Language, 82; Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 4.}


In the tradition of Bakunin, then, Goodman regards nature and natural
laws as anchoring social being and freedom; the reality principle is still the
principle of sanity. But the lessons of linguistic relativism have been
learned, and must not be forgotten: representations always mediate between
ourselves and the world, perhaps most of all where we least suspect it.


Proudhon, like Vico, hypothesizes that ‘‘consciousness, at the first moment
of its activity, is absorbed and immobilized in nature, identifies with it, seeks
to penetrate it, to seize it in its essence, and . . . makes of the universe an
animated whole, divine, through which it explains the organism by comparisons and symbols.’’\footnote{Proudhon, Oeuvres, 5.130, translation mine.} Nor, in our supposedly advanced state, are we ‘‘civilized’’ people above this sort of ‘‘primitive,’’ mimetic, and anthropomorphic
thinking; thus, Proudhon observes that ‘‘In the moral and political sciences
generally . . . problems arise above all from the figurative manner in which
the mind originally presents their elements,’’ which converts the object into
‘‘a symbol, a mystery, an idol.’’\footnote{Proudhon, The Principle of Federation, trans. Richard Vernon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 57, emphasis mine.} The tendency of language to conjure imaginary beings out of abstract ideas is, in fact, at the root of our fetishistic relationship to the State: in primitive society, he hypothesizes, the social order
itself, as an invisible but effective agency, is thingified by a mythic imagination that ‘‘refused to believe that society, the State, and the power present in
it were simply abstractions,’’ so that primitives ‘‘intuitively . . . [attributed]
the origins of social power to the gods who fathered their dynasties.’’\footnote{Proudhon, Selected Writings, ed. Stewart Edwards, trans. Elizabeth Fraser (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969), 114.} In
this sense, Read regards statist ideologies as depending on a certain kind
of organicist metaphor. Indeed, despite his own frequent attraction to such
metaphors, Read observes their use by fascist philosophers, e.g., in the met-
aphor of ‘‘the circulation of élites,’’ the opposite of which would seem to be
‘‘stagnation’’:



\begin{quote}


A convincing rhetorical attitude can be struck if the circulation metaphor is
maintained. But it is merely a figure of speech, a myth. Why all this bubble bub-
ble, toil and trouble? Does not nature offer us alternative metaphors of balance
and symmetry, of poise and repose? The best fruit grows on the sheltered wall.
The deepest waters are still. To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.
How easy it is to find, or invent, convincing metaphors of exactly the opposite
tenor. Chinese philosophy is full of them. The universe is full of them.\footnote{Read, The Philosophy of Anarchism (London: Freedom Press, 1944), 13; To Hell With Culture, and Other Essays on Art and Society (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), 65-66.}



\end{quote}


Of course, a rhetoric of ‘‘balance,’’ ‘‘symmetry,’’ and ‘‘repose’’ is not necessarily politically innocent either; the main stream of the Chinese thought to
which Read alludes is merely complicit with a form of authoritarianism older
(and more genuinely conservative) than fascism—one which, if it rejects
metaphors of dynamic circulation does so only because it is oriented toward
a fastidiously cyclical preservation of traditional power arrangements. However, the point remains that for Read, the universe appears as something
other than a static and unitary essence, source of a single natural law to
which all social laws must conform; instead, it is a realm of interpretative
plenitude, overflowing with other metaphors implying a variety of possible
attitudes we might take up—a space of possibilities.


In short, Proudhon and Read suspect that the intrinsically metaphorical
nature of language tends to constitute thought as ‘‘a mythology’’ that both
enables and deranges our action in the world—and that only a certain vigilance can keep us from reifying everything into that mythological narrative.\footnote{Proudhon, Principle of Federation, 57.}

\section{ANARCHIST ANTI-REDUCTIVISM}


What Marx condemns as idealist is precisely the anarchists’ refusal to
reduce all questions to one ‘‘ultimately determining’’ question, a ‘‘last instance’’: in his notes on Statism and Anarchy, he complains that Bakunin


‘‘understands absolutely nothing about social revolution\dots{}
For him its
economic requisites do not exist. Since all hitherto existing economic formations, developed or undeveloped, have included the enslavement of the
working person (whether in the form of the wage worker, the peasant, etc.),
he thinks that a radical revolution is possible under all these formations
Will power and not economic conditions is the basis of his social revolution.’’\footnote{Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, trans. Martin Nico- laus, Saul K. Padover, International Publishers (New York: W. W. Norton \& Co., 1978), 640; Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 136; Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, 544.}


In fact, it is this feature of anarchism—its coming to itself in an
ethical rejection of all forms of hierarchy and domination—that renders it
not necessarily ahistorical but free from the limitations of what Marx called
historical materialism. Where Marxists seek to wedge each kind of historically and culturally specific injustice into a single, all-embracing economic
model—Do women form a ‘‘vertical class’’? Is the hegemony of the old over
the young ‘‘economic’’ in nature? Should bureaucratic totalitarianism be
considered ‘‘state capitalism’’?—anarchists can universalize their critique
without mutilating particular social phenomena to make them fit: whatever
the form, domination is dominatory, and hierarchy is hierarchical. To say
more than this is to reify theory—that is, to mistake one’s theoretical representations for the represented reality itself. Thus, in a retort to Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy, Proudhon insists ‘‘that principles are . . . [merely] the
intellectual representation, not the generating cause, of facts.’’\footnote{Proudhon, quoted in Robert L. Hoffman, Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P.-J. Proudhon (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 113.}


Anarchists from the nineteenth century on have been wary and often
sharply critical of such tendencies to reification and essentialization, the seductions of abstraction and systematicity. Thus Bakunin rejects Marxian historical schematizations:



\begin{quote}


The Marxist sociologists, men like Engels and Lasalle, in objecting to our views
contend that . . . both the miserable condition of the masses and the despotic
power of the State are . . . products of an inevitable stage in the economic evolution of society; a stage which, historically viewed, constitutes an immense step
forward to what they call the ‘‘Social Revolution.’’ To illustrate how far the obsession with this doctrine has already gone: the crushing of the formidable revolts
of the peasants in Germany in the sixteenth century . . . is hailed by Lasalle as a
victory for the coming Social Revolution! Why? Because, say the Marxists, the
peasants are the natural representatives of reaction.\footnote{Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, 309-10.}



\end{quote}


The subtext of Marxist sociology, as Bakunin reads it, is not only a variety
of Stoicism, in which even one’s own subjective role in struggle is to be
viewed from the objective standpoint of the final goal of history, but also a
form of essentialism. Why is a communist defeat to be celebrated as progress? Because ‘‘the peasants are the natural representatives of reaction’’: no
matter what they happen to do (contingently), they are reactionary (necessarily). Their ‘‘reactionary’’ quality is an essence underlying appearances.


Thus, Richard DeHaan, a contemporary anarchist, considers Marxism to be
fraught with ‘‘ontologism’’: ‘‘Marxists talk about ‘the nature of capitalism,’
‘the essence of October,’ ‘internal contradictions in the very heart of bourgeois democracy,’ etc. Thus, such well-intentioned people as the Trotskyists
(Socialist Workers’ Party variety) are forced into saying that Russia is in
essence a workers’ state, but that it has been distorted by bureaucratic Stalinism (i.e., it has had affixed to it attributes that do not accord with its nature). They become prisoners of their
‘objective reality.’’’\footnote{Richard DeHaan, ‘‘Kropotkin, Marx and Dewey,’’ Anarchy 55 (Sept. 1965): 282-83.}


Prisoners,
perhaps, but uniquely privileged ones all the same, since their theory pur-
ports to give them ‘‘objective’’ insight into the ‘‘essence’’ of States, classes,
and individuals. This is the colonial, ontological privilege Bakunin revoked
when he declared ‘‘the revolt of life against science.’’\footnote{Bakunin, God and the State (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1970), 59.}


Life, then, is something that resists any fixed, definitive, absolute schematization. ‘‘Reality,’’ writes Proudhon, ‘‘is inherently complex; the simple
never leaves the realm of the ideal, never arrives at the concrete.’’ ‘‘The
concept,’’ Bookchin adds, ‘‘can never fully grasp the concrete in its own
particular uniqueness and in the uniqueness of each ecosystem.’’\footnote{Proudhon, The Principle of Federation, 17; Bookchin, ‘‘Finding the Subject: Notes on Whitebook and ‘Habermas Ltd,’ ’’ Anarchy Archives: An Online Research Center on the History and Theory of Anarchism, 30 June 2002, \href{http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist\_archives/bookchin/finding.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}dwardmac.pitzer.edu\Slash{}Anarchist\_Archives\Slash{}bookchin\Slash{}finding.html} (accessed 10 March 2005).} A critical-realist fallibilism, for which errors and surprises are essential to knowledge, grounds anarchism: true ‘‘science,’’ writes Bakunin, ‘‘when it has
reached the limit of its knowledge . . . will say in all honesty: ‘I do not
know.’ ’’\footnote{Peter Wilkin, ‘‘Chomsky and Foucault on Human Nature and Politics: An Essential Difference?’’ Social Theory \& Practice 25, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 200; Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 56.} In the face of a universe whose ‘‘infinities’’ are ‘‘inexhaustible,’’
Proudhon asks us to attend to the ‘‘fecundity of the unexpected,’’ which
‘‘outstrips any foresight’’—the ‘‘fecundity of the creative power’’ of ‘‘Nature,’’ whose works are ‘‘always new and always unforeseen . . . a text which cannot be exhausted of conjectures.’’\footnote{Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 58; Proudhon, Selected Writings, 104; Oeuvres, 5.233.}

\section{ANARCHISM AND POWER}


Anarchism has borne the charge of transcendentalism for a long time. This
charge has recently been resuscitated by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
who, like many left Marxists, take positions that are rather close to anar-
chism—i.e., advocating bottom-up popular movements organizing outside of
parliamentary politics and antagonism to the State as such—while declaring,
‘‘we are not anarchists’’: ‘‘you are just a bunch of anarchists, the new Plato
on the block will finally yell at us. That is not true. We would be anarchists
if we were not to speak . . . from the standpoint of a materiality constituted
in the networks of productive cooperation


No, we are not anarchists but
communists who have seen how much repression and destruction of human-
ity have been wrought by liberal and socialist big governments.’’\footnote{Hardt and Negri, Empire, xv, 349-50.} The putative difference to which Hardt and Negri are obliquely appealing appears to
be between locating one’s critique within history, seeing one’s own perspective as the result of an economic process, and claiming some privileged perspective outside of history and beyond the material world. In other words,
from this perspective, the anarchist departure from Marxist historiography,
with its stages of development and necessitarian teleology, constitutes idealism, a postulation of an ideal of freedom that, since it is equally available to
all times and places, must somehow exist outside of history. Thus it is that
Negri, in naming what purportedly ‘‘radically distinguishes Marx’s positions
from those of the anarchists,’’ approvingly cites the ‘‘polemic against Bakunin’’ in which Marx declares it necessary that ‘‘the organisation of the
working class, an organisation which arises from its economic struggles,
should previously reach a certain level of development’’ before it can take
power.\footnote{Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 229.} Indeed, for Hardt and Negri no less than for Marx, the erection of a
global capitalist Empire is progress.


In another perennially popular interpretation, anarchism is centered
around the belief that human beings are naturally endowed with a social
instinct that is repressed by present-day society. It is this essentialism that
more knowing post-structuralist types find naïve: as Michael Walzer explains, if Michel Foucault seems at times to approach a kind of anarchism
in his politics, he ‘‘does not believe, as earlier anarchists did, that the free
human subject is . . . naturally good, warmly sociable, kind and loving’’;
rather, ‘‘men and women are always social creations, the products of codes
and disciplines.’’\footnote{Michael Walzer, ‘‘The Politics of Michel Foucault,’’ in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Hoy, 61 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).} Anarchism, so it would seem, entails belief in a transcendent human essence—as the notion that we are socially constructed supposedly does not.


Saul Newman, too, characterizes anarchism as transcendentalist. ‘‘For
Kropotkin,’’ Newman writes, ‘‘anarchism can think beyond the category of
the State . . . because it has a place, a ground from which to do so. Political
power has an outside from which it can be criticized and an alternative with
which it can be replaced.’’ In other words, anarchist theory falsely externalizes power in order that it may see itself as external to power, outside its
corrupting influence. In reality, Newman argues, power comes from human
subjects. If, as Foucault remarks, there is no escape from power, this is because it is not an object with a location. Classical anarchism, Newman contends, is crippled by its inability to recognize this, trapped in a mistaken
notion that society constitutes a standpoint that transcends power.\footnote{Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan, 17, 31.}


The classical anarchists did not, however, found their hopes on an transcendent ideal standing outside human history, on a human essence prior to
society, or on a metaphysical civil society that is beyond power. We have
already contested the interpretation of anarchism as a form of naturalism:
the classical anarchists knew nothing of a presocial or asocial human subject. Neither did they know of a way to get outside of history, to assume a
supra-material vantage point. For Bakunin, nothing could be more axiomatic
than the intuition that ‘‘everything in existence is born and perishes, or
rather is transformed,’’ and that nature, as ‘‘the sum of actual transformations of things that are and will be ceaselessly produced,’’ is an ‘‘infinity of
particular actions and reactions which all things having real existence constantly exercise upon one another’’ in ‘‘combination[s]’’ that can be ‘‘in no
way predetermined, preconceived, or foreknown.’’ The ‘‘abstract’’ thinker
who ‘‘disdains all that exists,’’ seeking to transcend this endless series of
transformations, ‘‘lifting himself in thought above himself, and above the
world around him’’—beyond all historical determination—only ‘‘reaches the
representation of perfect abstraction . . . this absolute nothingness is God.’’\footnote{Bakunin, Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, ed. Arthur Lehning, trans. Steven Cox and Olive Stevens (New York: Grove Press, 1974), 231; The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 53; Bakunin on Anarchy, 272.}


From the beginning, anarchism has set its face against theological nihilism,
affirming our existence in and through matter and time.


Neither does classical anarchism postulate a society that is exterior to
power, or a power that is exterior to society. ‘‘Power,’’ Proudhon insists, ‘‘is
immanent in society.’’ In fact, it is Bakunin who writes that ‘‘no minority
would have been powerful enough to impose all these horrible sacrifices
upon the masses if there had not been in the masses themselves a dizzy
spontaneous movement that pushed them on to continual self-sacrifice, now
to one, now to another of these devouring abstractions, the vampires of history’’; it is Kropotkin who points out that if, in spite of its patent injustice,
the State survives and grows, this is because ‘‘all of us are more or less,
voluntarily or involuntarily, abettors of this society’’—or, as Proudhon puts
it,
‘‘everyone is complicit with the prince.’’\footnote{Proudhon, Oeuvres, 8.2.261, translation mine; Bakunin, God and the State, 59; Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 104; Proudhon, Oeuvres, 8.2.269, translation mine.} Both State and marketplace,
Errico Malatesta reminds us, are called into being not only by the few who
persuade, coerce, and exploit, but—more fundamentally—by the fragmented community that needs someone to organize it.\footnote{Errico Malatesta, Life and Ideas, ed. and trans. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1993), 84, 86.}


In fact, for Proudhon and Bakunin, it is always society which produces its
own oppressors. Thus, ‘‘when the masses are deeply sunk in their sleep, patiently resigned to their degradation and slavery,’’ writes Bakunin, ‘‘the best
men in their midst, those who in a different environment might render great
services to humanity, necessarily become despots.’’ The oppressor does not
come from ‘‘outside’’; rather, ‘‘one may say justly that it is the masses themselves that produce those exploiters, oppressors, despots, and executioners
of humanity, of whom they are the victims.’’\footnote{Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 248-49.} In Proudhon’s historical narrative, as Stewart Edwards explains, ‘‘mankind had come to believe that the
State had a strength of its own, as seen in the armies and public officials.


But all its apparent power came from the alienation of the ‘collective force.’


Once men recovered the power they alone had created, then the State would
be seen as it really was, simply a façade.’’ It is when ‘‘individuals’’ are ‘‘vested with social power’’ that power seems to detach itself from the social matrix, to become a property or quality independent of the combined action of the collectivity.\footnote{Stewart Edwards, ‘‘Preface,’’ in Proudhon, The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Beverly Robinson (London: Pluto Press, 1989), 23-24; Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, 245.}


Such is the consensus of the classical anarchist theorists. It is Landauer,
however, who most memorably renovates this insight into a sophisticated social theory of power, combining it with Etienne de la Boétie’s concept of the
people’s ‘‘voluntary servitude’’ as the source of the apparent ‘‘power’’ of the
‘‘tyrant’’ and Mauthner’s linguistic skepticism, which noted the capacity of
words to hypostasize abstract ‘‘phantoms’’ and ‘‘illusions’’ into perceived realities and necessities. ‘‘The State,’’ as Eugene D. Lunn summarizes Landauer’s argument, ‘‘is not an external force that operates on man, but a mere
‘name for what man allows.’ ’’\footnote{Lunn, Prophet of Community, 225.} Just as Malatesta warned against the ‘‘meta-
physical tendency’’ of those who think of the State as a discrete, abstract
‘‘entity,’’ an essence existing apart from its instantiations in practices of coercion and domination, so Landauer warned in his 1907 Die Revolution against
conceptualizing ‘‘the state’’ as ‘‘a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in
order to destroy it’’; rather, ‘‘The state is a condition, a certain relationship
among human beings, a mode of behavior between men; we destroy it by
contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another
. . . We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have
created the institutions that form a real community and society of men.’’\footnote{Malatesta, Anarchy, trans. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 2001), 18; Landauer, quoted in Lunn, Prophet of Community, 226, my emphasis.}


Foucault’s concept of disseminated power could not be more forcefully anticipated. Nor is Landauer’s concept of power ahistorical, as Karl Mannheim
charges. Rather, Landauer traces an historical process whereby the ‘‘unifying spirit’’ of primitive communities is increasingly articulated through ‘‘external forms’’ such as ‘‘religious symbols and cults, ideas of faith, prayer
rituals or things of this sort,’’ a formalization that reduces ‘‘the warmth and
love of the unifying spirit’’ to ‘‘the stiff coldness of dogma,’’ which in turn
leads to the growth of religious institutions and other ‘‘organizations of external coercion’’—e.g., ‘‘serfdom, feudalism, the various departments and authorities, the state.’’\footnote{Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harcourt, Brace, \& World, 1963), 197-98; Landauer, For Socialism, trans. David J. Parent (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1978), 33.}


Bakunin’s speculations on the origins of the State also trace it to the religious illusion. He hypothesizes that the origin of primitive conceptions of
the world lies in ‘‘inadequate representations of natural and social phenomena, and the even less valid conclusions inferred from those phenomena,’’
errors reiterated and compounded through the agencies of language and cognition. For primitive peoples, reason itself—‘‘the capacity for generalization
and abstraction, thanks to which man is able to project himself in his
thought, examining and observing himself like a strange, external object’’—
gave rise to the reification of abstractions into fetishes that could be worshipped—the primordial alienation that gives the priestly caste, and with it
the class system, its first foothold in human community.\footnote{Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 237-38; Bakunin on Anarchy, 272.} In retrospect, these
fetishizing processes seem to have been ‘‘inevitable and necessary in the
historical development of the human mind, which through the ages, only
slowly arriving at a rational and critical awareness of itself and its own manifestations, has always started with absurdity in order to arrive at truth, and
with slavery in order to win freedom.’’ Religion and the State have arisen
within the human subject as the perhaps unavoidable by-products of its own
process of self-constitution; nevertheless, that same process and the linguistico-cognitive faculties that drive it also produce the possibility of critical
self-awareness and revolt.\footnote{Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 239, 106-7.}


Kropotkin, too, as we have seen, theorizes history in this dialectical fashion. In his account, the very feature of primitive communities that makes
them nearly models of functional anarchy—their ability to exist peaceably
without law and the State—is pregnant with the fatal flaw that will tear the
egalitarian social nexus apart. In oral cultures, Kropotkin writes, ‘‘human
relations were simply regulated by customs, habits and usages, made sacred
by constant repetition.’’ It is this susceptibility to repetitive action in daily
life—the ‘‘tendency to run in a groove, so highly developed in mankind’’—
that makes human subjects prone to regimes of exploitation, provided these
are introduced gradually enough. Thus, through ‘‘the indolence, the fears,
and the inertia of the crowd, and . . . the continual repetition of the same
acts,’’ priests and warriors manage to establish ‘‘customs which have become
a solid basis for their own domination.’’ Appealing to the logic of sameness,
these emergent ruling classes gain power by persuading others to identify the
communal ‘‘code’’ with theocratic and militaristic privilege. As these new
practices become customary, they are invested with ‘‘the spirit of routine,’’
and even the exploited are too timid to challenge their exploiters. The past
itself is fetishized. Hierarchy becomes an enduring presence in human life.\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 201, 203-5.}


Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Landauer all trace the emergence of domination
and hierarchy back to a process through which the very attributes that make
humanity potentially capable of living in a rational and equitable order pro-
duce irrational fetishes—and with them, social and political inequality. The
human subject is not distinct from the power that seems to confront it as ‘‘a
strange, external object’’; this apparent separation of power is the alienation
that produces an effectively separate power in the State. State power springs
from and depends on the community of human subjects.


For Bakunin, as for Newman, power is the natural product of society. Nor
does Bakunin wish to abolish power as such—an impossible project; rather,
like Newman, he wishes to abolish ‘‘domination.’’ Bakunin’s account of the
way that ‘‘social power’’ is produced and operates, however, is substantially
more concrete than that given by Newman. In Newman’s writing, as in Deleuze’s, abstract concepts are reified into quasi-tangible entities and treated
in pseudo-physical terms: ‘‘power relations’’ can ‘‘flow’’ or ‘‘become congealed’’ or ‘‘crystallized,’’ and so on.\footnote{Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan, 30-31, 32, 34.} To describe social relationships in
this way is to beg the question: is this not a way of falsely applying physical
language to an inappropriate domain—indeed, is this not a form of naturalist
mystification? Bakunin, more sensibly, explains ‘‘social power,’’ the mutual
play of influence between individuals in a society, as the product of individuals’ natural need for ‘‘the approval and esteem of at least some portion of
society’’: ‘‘The power of collective sentiment or public spirit is even now a
very serious matter. The men most ready to commit crimes rarely dare to
defy it, to openly affront it. They will seek to deceive it, but will take care
not to be rude with it unless they feel the support of a minority larger or
smaller.’’\footnote{Bakunin, God and the State, 42-43n.} Since, along with their most basic biological needs, all human
beings also have some need of the companionship and support of others,
human nature is to influence others and be influenced by others in turn: ‘‘To
wish to escape this influence in the name of some transcendental, divine
freedom . . . is to aim toward non-being.’’ Proudhon concurs: ‘‘The living
man is a group.’’\footnote{Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 168; Proudhon, Oeuvres, 12.128.}


Thus, from a classical anarchist perspective, social power is ineradicable—nor is there any call to abolish this power, for it alone can provide any
guarantee that, in the absence of the organized violence of the State, acts of
informal, antisocial violence will not erupt and form the basis for a new
State: ‘‘The only grand and omnipotent authority, at once natural and rational, the only one which we may respect, will be that of the collective and
public spirit of a society founded on equality and solidarity and the mutual
human respect of all its members . . . It will be a thousand times more powerful, be sure of it, than all your divine, theological, metaphysical, political,
and judicial authorities . . . your criminal codes, your jailers, and your executioners.’’\footnote{Bakunin, God and the State, 42n.} The persuasive and normative power woven into our social relationships is Bakunin’s alternative to the brute-force rule of State law.


There is, then, no question of Bakunin wishing to abolish power per se.


The question this does prompt is: if disseminated power is preferable to centralized State power, and if this disseminated power always already exists,
why are we not now living in a Stateless social order? We have already seen
that for Bakunin, social power is not an essentially good alternative to an
essentially evil State power. Nonetheless, if Bakunin thinks that the ordinary
processes of socialization and education at society’s disposal are powerful
enough to produce subjects who will not behave criminally toward, make war
on, or oppress one another, how does he account for criminality, warfare, and
oppression? Again, Bakunin anticipates the question:



\begin{quote}


But, if this social power exists, why has it not sufficed hitherto to moralize, to
humanize men? Simply because hitherto this power has not been humanized itself; it has not been humanized because the social life of which it is ever the
faithful expression is based, as we know, on the worship of divinity, not on respect
for humanity; on authority, not on liberty; on privilege, not on equality; on the
exploitation, not on the brotherhood of men; on iniquity and falsehood, not on
justice and truth. Consequently its real action . . . has constantly exercised a
disastrous and depraving influence. It does not repress vices and crimes; it creates them. Its authority is consequently a divine, anti-human authority; its influence is mischievous and baleful.\footnote{Ibid., 43n.}



\end{quote}


It is not that social power simply is good or bad; rather, its historical forms,
riddled with hierarchy and irrationality, have produced conflict, placed us
in relations of domination and submission to one another, and produced ideologies to justify these as natural and necessary. Thus social power spawned its official double, State power.


Social power has not yet found a form that is not oppressive and incoherent, a form that is fully social and therefore fully human; it has remained
self-contradictory. However, Bakunin claims, a coherent, consistently social
form of power does exist in potentia, as a virtual possibility to be realized in
history: ‘‘Do you wish to render its authority and influence beneficent and
human? Achieve the social revolution. Make all needs really solidary, and
cause the material and social interests of each to conform to the human duties of each. And to this end there is but one means: Destroy all the institutions of Inequality; establish the economic and social equality of all, and on
this basis will arise the liberty the morality, the solidary humanity of all.’’\footnote{Ibid., 43n.}


Once again, it is not the case that the words power and authority always
mean one thing to Bakunin, or that they are simply synonymous with evil;
they are not monovalent words, but as ambiguous as the social contradiction
itself. As Murray Bookchin forcefully restates the point:



\begin{quote}


Power itself is not something whose elimination is actually possible. Hierarchy,
domination, and classes can and should be eliminated, as should the use of power
to force people to act against their will. But the liberatory use of power, the empowerment of the disempowered, is indispensable.



\end{quote}


It seems inconceivable
that people could have a free society, both as social and personal beings, without
claiming power, institutionalizing it for common and rationally guided ends, and
intervening in the natural world to meet rational needs.\footnote{Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human Spirit Against Antihumanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism, and Primitivism (London: Cassell, 1995), 183.}


Anarchism in this sense has always been a theory of popular empowerment,
aiming at the return of the collective force to its origin in the collective itself.


Rather than assuming that power originates solely in the State, and that
society is a pure realm of freedom, Bakunin sees the social as marked by
contradictory tendencies toward freedom and oppression; moreover, since
he sees subjectivity as socially produced, these contradictions are played
out within each individual subject: ‘‘social tyranny . . . permeates every facet
of life, so that each individual is, often unknowingly, in a sort of conspiracy
against himself. It follows from this fact that to revolt against this influence
that society naturally exercises over him, he must at least to some extent
revolt against himself.’’ Bakunin specifically says that the influence of society on individuals can be either ‘‘injurious’’ or ‘‘beneficent’’—hardly located
on one pole of a ‘‘Manichean’’ opposition.\footnote{Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, 239, italics mine; Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan, 17.} This social power is not located
or localizable at all; it needs to be combated—more properly speaking,
transformed —not only in its concentrated, centralized, institutional manifestations, but in its dispersed, disseminated, everyday forms. Thus, Bakunin calls for the contradiction between the liberatory and dominatory
forms of social power to be played out within the subject as well as in the
streets—for the individual to ‘‘revolt against himself,’’ to overthrow not only
the ruling institutions without but the reigning ideologies within. Here, too,
Newman might have read his own conclusions vis-à-vis the need for a self-
transformation to accompany the abolition of oppressive political institutions—‘‘we must work on ourselves’’—in Bakunin’s text.\footnote{Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan, 36.}

\section{ANARCHIST IMMANENCE}


The notion that classical anarchist theory presupposes an ‘‘essentialist
foundation’’ outside of the flux of history is also open to challenge.\footnote{Ibid., 38, 30.} Rather,
in refusing dualisms of matter and thought, bodies and souls, nineteenth-
century anarchists locate their theory within a process of development that
is at once natural and historical. The visible universe does not ask for a
transcendental supplement, but is the source of its own autopoietic and self-
transformative creativity.


The universe described by nineteenth-century anarchist theory is characterized by ecological diversity and evolutionary fecundity. Elisée Reclus
took up Bakunin’s ontology of change and creativity, integrating it more fully
with Darwinian biology: ‘‘evolution,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is the infinite movement of
all that which exists, the incessant transformation of the universe and of all
its parts from the eternal origins and until the infinity of the ages.’’\footnote{Élisée Reclus, ‘‘L’évolution, la révolution et l’idéal anarchique,’’ Bibliothèque Libertaire, \href{http://kropot.free.fr/reclus-evorevo.htm}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}kropot.free.fr\Slash{}Reclus-evorevo.htm}, translation mine.} Accordingly, Reclus sought to historicize geography, to reveal the effects of time
and transformation within the very form of space, to produce an evolutionary
vocabulary in which life is synonymous with change, growth and development.\footnote{Reclus, ‘‘Evolution and Revolution,’’ Anarchy Archives: An Online Research Center on the History and Theory of Anarchism, 21 January 2002, \href{http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist\_archives/coldoffthepresses/evandrev.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}dwardmac.pitzer.edu\Slash{}anarchist\_archives\Slash{}coldoffthepresses\Slash{}evandrev.html}.} Peter Kropotkin likewise interpreted the data of contemporary science as providing a Weltbild in which there is no more metaphysical
‘‘center,’’ ‘‘origin,’’ or ‘‘law,’’ only the ceaseless self-transformation of the
inconceivable ecological whole:
the center, the origin of force . . . turns out to be scattered and disseminated. It
is everywhere and nowhere


The whole aspect of the universe changes with
this conception. The idea of force governing the world, pre-established law, pre-
conceived harmony, disappears to make room for the harmony that Fourier had
caught a glimpse of: the one which results from the disorderly and incoherent
movements of numberless hosts of matter, each of which goes its own way and all
of which hold each in equilibrium.\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 117-18.}


If this conception of the universe is deeply organicist, then its concept of the
organic also closely resembles what Richard Shusterman calls ‘‘the deconstructive idea . . . that there are no independent terms with positive or intrinsic essences’’; ultimately, such a resistance to representationalism must
represent each particular thing as ‘‘a product of its interrelations and differences with other things . . . [and] the world as an organic totality or system.’’\footnote{Shusterman, ‘‘Organic Unity: Analysis and Deconstruction,’’ in Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction and Literary Theory, ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock, 107-8 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).} It is just such a world picture that permits anarchism, no less than
post-structuralism, to dispense with any impulse to go beyond life for values.


The basic this-worldliness intrinsic to the tradition, its contempt for what
Kropotkin called ‘‘metaphysical conceptions,’’ e.g., ‘‘of a Universal Spirit,
or of a Creative Force in Nature, the Incarnation of the Idea, Nature’s Goal,
the Aim of Existence, the Unknowable, Mankind (conceived as having a separate spiritual existence), and so on,’’ is easily documented; what is less well
understood is the sense in which its accounts of ethical life are rooted in this
ontological decision. ‘‘The end of morals,’’ Kropotkin writes in his Ethics,
‘‘cannot be ‘transcendental,’ as the idealists desire it to be: it must be real.
We must find moral satisfaction in life and not in some form of extra-vital
condition.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 257; Ethics, 12.}


Instead of postulating a transcendent source of goodness
outside of nature, Kropotkin articulates ethics through embodiment, embeddedness, and development. Ultimately, it is phusis, the ‘‘immediate processes of being,’’ that creates not the inevitability of an ethical social order,
but the material preconditions for ethical life, and even, to the extent that
violence and injustice threaten human survival, the empirical necessity of a
viable ethics.\footnote{Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism, 139-40.} Nor is this ethics pronounced from the supposed ground of a
metaphysical no-place or a view-from-nowhere, the panoptical perspective
that surveys the temporal world from after, beyond, or above; one formulation
Kropotkin suggests to replace the falsely globalizing, generalizing, and universalizing ‘‘do unto others as you would have others do unto you’’ is the
more particularizing, contextualizing, and individuating (yet still universally
binding) ‘‘treat others as you would like them to treat you under similar circumstances.’’ Thereby, Kropotkin admits a degree of relativity, ambiguity,
and temporality into the ethical: ‘‘the conception of good and evil varies . . .


There is nothing unchangeable about it.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 97, 92, emphasis mine.} This is hardly evidence of meta-
physical, foundationalist thinking.


Indeed, for Kropotkin, the ecological embeddedness of morality is contiguous with a certain kind of groundlessness: he describes the most striking
instances of moral life not in terms of an instrumentally rational or utilitarian
‘‘calculation,’’ nor in terms of abstract rules and principles, but in terms
of ‘‘fertility,’’ ‘‘energy,’’ ‘‘expansion,’’ ‘‘overflowing,’’ the excessive and the
gratuitous.\footnote{Ibid., 107-9.} Here, Kropotkin does not draw a Manichean dichotomy between
power (in the sense of an ability to intervene in the world, to exert influence
on others) and morality, as Newman alleges—quite the contrary. ‘‘Power to
act is duty to act,’’ writes Kropotkin, whose attention to the gratuitous aspect
of altruistic behavior at times approaches Nietzsche’s. For Kropotkin’s ecological anarchist morality, in the words of J.-M. Guyau, whose Equisse d’un
morale sans obligation ni sanction inspired both Kropotkin and Nietzsche,
altruism ‘‘is nothing but a superabundance of life, which demands to be exercised, to give itself; at the same time, it is the consciousness of a power.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Ethics, 322-23 n3; Guyau, quoted in Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 108.}


Ethical action, for Kropotkin, cannot be said to emanate from any arché
or foundation outside of life itself (indeed, in the most profound instances,
outside of the act itself). If all of this simply amounts to replacing the divine
logos with
‘‘Nature’’ or
‘‘Life’’—a danger of which Kropotkin is well
aware\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 83-84.} —then none can do more than to add, as he does, that even if our
capacity for ethical behavior has evolved in time, an ethics is not in itself a
destiny or telos. ‘‘We certainly must abandon the idea of representing human
history as an uninterrupted chain of development from the prehistoric Stone
Age to the present time,’’ he warns. ‘‘The intellectual evolution of a given
society may take at times, under the influence of all sorts of circumstances,
a totally wrong turn.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Ethics, 17, 21.} Consequently, his historical studies, in contrast to
those of Marx and Engels, do not represent history as the unfolding of material necessity, but as a series of largely contingent events, possibilities
opened for a time but then closed again, roads not taken, and avoidable catastrophes. Even Bakunin, with his strict emphasis on material determinism,
regards the project of a totalizing ‘‘science of history’’ as impossible, denies
that any ‘‘process of economic facts’’ is ‘‘inevitable,’’ and rejects the Marxist
tendency to retrospectively justify the catastrophe of State and capital as a
particularly loathsome form of theodicy.\footnote{Bakunin, God and the State, 61; Bakunin on Anarchy, 311.}


These anarchists reject a ‘‘science of history’’ to the very extent that they
embrace their own historicity. The radical concept of ‘‘progress’’ that Proudhon philosophizes is not at all part of that nineteenth-century teleological
faith that led Hegel and Marx to speak of history as a linear process with an
end; rather, as Gareth Gordon argues, it anticipates ‘‘the radical alterity of
the Derridean undeconstructible, the future’’:\footnote{Gareth Gordon, ‘‘Horizons of Change: Deconstruction and the Evanescence of Authority,’’ 6 January 2003, \href{http://melior.univ-montp3.fr/ra\_forum/en/people/gordon\_gareth/theses\_\%20intr.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}melior.univ-montp3.fr\Slash{}ra\_forum\Slash{}en\Slash{}people\Slash{}gordon\_gareth\Slash{}theses\_ intr.html}.} ‘‘Progress, I repeat, is an affirmation of universal movement, and thus it is the denial of all forms and
formulae of immutability, all doctrines of eternity, irremovability and impeccability, etc., applied to any being whatsoever. It denies the permanence of
any order, including that of the universe itself, and the changelessness of any
subject or object, be it empirical or transcendental.’’ Its diametric opposite,
according to this definition, is not racial stagnation or regression but the very
notion of an ‘‘Absolute’’: ‘‘The Absolute or absolutism, on the contrary, affirms all that Progress denies, and denies all that Progress affirms. It is the
search, in nature, society, religion, politics, morality, etc., for the eternal,
the immutable, the perfect, the final, the unchangeable, the undivided. It is,
to borrow a term that has become famous in our parliamentary debates, in
all things and everywhere, the status quo.’’ ‘‘Absolutism,’’ on this definition,
is rather close to what is now meant by terms such as ‘‘foundationalism’’—
the quest for an unchanging ground, outside of history, for our values and
concepts, perhaps with an eye toward placing certain historically contingent
institutions beyond the reach of critique.


From these double and contradictory definitions of progress and the absolute, we
may first deduce as a corollary a proposition that seems rather strange to our
minds, which have been attuned for so long to absolutism. This is that the true,
real, positive and practicable in all things is what changes, or at least what is
capable of progression, reconciliation and transformation, while what is false,
fictitious, impossible and abstract appears as fixed, complete, whole, unchangeable, indefectible, not capable of modification, conversion, increase or decrease,
and is thus refractory to any greater combination or synthesis.\footnote{Proudhon, Oeuvres, 12.49-51; Ewen, translation in Proudhon, Selected Works, 247-48.}


This is most certainly ‘‘essentialist,’’ in that it is a statement about the way
things are. It is also a coherent affirmation of temporality: the way things
are is temporal. Indeed, for Proudhon, it would have been more accurate for
Descartes to declare: ‘‘I move, therefore I become.’’\footnote{Proudhon, Oeuvres, 12.50, translation mine.} It is in this spirit that
Landauer proposes a vision of ‘‘the world as time’’ and writes that ‘‘Time is
not merely perceptual, but the very form of our experience of self; therefore
it is real for us, for the conception of the world that we must form from out
of ourselves.’’\footnote{Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik, 22, translation mine; Skepsis und Mystik, 55, translation in Lunn, Prophet of Community, 164.} The human species, for Landauer, is a project that is always
underway, engaged in what Proudhon and Kropotkin called ‘‘reconstruction.’’\footnote{Landauer, Skepsis und Mystik, 16, translation in Lunn, 168; Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution, 207; Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 189.}


Such evolutionary and reconstructive perspectives are congenial to anarchism because they posit a subject who is both formed by community and
self-forming—in the words of Voltairine de Cleyre, a ‘‘conception of mind,
or character . . . [which is not] a powerless reflection of a momentary condition of stuff and form, but an active modifying agent, reacting on its environment and transforming circumstances.’’ The relation between the self and its
determinations is not static or unidirectional, but dialectical; moreover,
these determinations include both the material and the symbolic economies
that are the products of its own activity, so that the self is produced both by
physical, bodily discipline and by ‘‘dominant ideas.’’\footnote{Voltairine de Cleyre, Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, ed. Alexander Berkman (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1914), 83.} If there is a subject to
be represented in a text, it is not the eternal ‘‘human nature’’ that Arnoldian
humanists wished to find there, but something that alters and is altered,
something whose identity is other than itself.

\section{ANARCHISM BEYOND RELATIVISM}


At the same time that social anarchism affirms change and reconstruction,
it does not theorize these either in terms of a linear, teleologically predes-
tined progress toward an end or an aimless, open-ended fluctuation, a mere
‘‘precession of simulacra.’’\footnote{Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 1.} If Hegel’s teleological version of history merely
amends Parmenidean fixity with ‘‘false movement,’’ then a Nietzschean theo-
rization of history as random flux offers a notion of movement that is equally
false.\footnote{Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 8.} Essentializing either flux or fixity is a mistake, for the two concepts
are relative to one another, and to polarize and abstract them from one an-
other can only lead to confusion; there is no flux without something fixed to
measure it against, and no fixity without relation to flux. A concept more
potentially meaningful than either of these abstractions is that of development. This ecological concept needs to be defined against its economistic
counterfeits—the stereotypes of ‘‘economic development’’ and ‘‘underdevelopment’’ used to foreclose political possibilities in the name of capitalist
teleology. If adequately understood, however, it synthesizes flux (change, motion, transformation, dynamism) with fixity
(continuity, coherence, directionality, self-control) to yield a notion of change that is neither a unidirectional monologue, a metanarrative, nor a disjointed collection of micronarratives.


An anarchist account of development is also compatible with the idea of
‘‘reconstruction’’ that Shusterman appeals to, insofar as it assumes, as Bordwell argues, some prior materials that are to be reconstructed.
‘‘Self-
creation,’’ Shusterman agrees, ‘‘can never be self-creation ex nihilo,’’ because ‘‘the self you have to work with in self-creation is made of things you
didn’t create but were given or done to you.’’\footnote{Shusterman, ‘‘Self-Styling After the ‘End of Art,’ ’’ interview with Chantal Pontbriand and Olivier Asselin, Parachute no. 105 (2002), \href{http://www.parachute.ca/public/\%2B100/105.htm\%20self}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.parachute.ca\Slash{}public\Slash{}+100\Slash{}105.htm self} (accessed 10 March 2005).} In so saying, Shusterman and
Bordwell are close to Bakunin, who also sought to describe the human subject as somehow self-determining while remaining within the context of social determination: ‘‘the idea of human responsibility . . . cannot be applied
to man taken in isolation and considered as an individual in a state of nature,
detached from the collective development of society.’’ Instead, Bakunin proposes, it is where one becomes aware of oneself and one’s place within that
collective development that one ‘‘becomes to some extent [one’s] own creator’’ and therefore ‘‘to be held accountable’’ for decisions made about one’s
own self-development. Nevertheless, in the ‘‘moment’’ one recognizes the
obligation to develop oneself, one is ‘‘nothing else but the product of external
influences which led to this point.’’\footnote{Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 104.} What is wanted is the development of
a society that tends to produce individuals who are self-developing.


Bakunin’s developmental perspective has also been elaborated by Sylvia
Rolloff in her anarchist response to post-structuralist accounts of the subject
as ‘‘constructed.’’ Rejecting as one-sided the sorts of genetic perspective
that reduce the subject to something predetermined by its social construction, she also refuses the consolation of a quantum or transcendental perspective outside of any determinate subject position: ‘‘We need not be
completely separated from the forces of our construction (indeed, this is impossible) in order to make critical statements about the world.’’\footnote{Sylvia Rolloff, ‘‘An-archism: On The Political Philosophy (Or Lack Thereof) In Foucault’s Philosophy’’ (unpublished paper, 1998), 14.} Instead,
she describes ‘‘a socially constructed subject’’ whose very constructedness
implies that it can become something other than it is. Citing Butler’s work,
she finds that understanding the self as a product of social forces does not
necessarily doom it to reproduce these forces: ‘‘My position is mine to the
extent that ‘‘I’’ . . . replay and resignify the theoretical positions that have
constituted me, working the possibilities or their convergence, and trying to
take account of the possibilities they systematically exclude.’’ ‘‘Once a subject is created,’’ Rolloff interprets, ‘‘that is not the end of the process’’; instead, ‘‘to be a subject . . . is to be a permanent possibility.’’\footnote{Butler, quoted in Rolloff, ‘‘An-archism,’’ 18; Rolloff, ‘‘An-archism,’’ 19.} If the self is
something that is put together, built, made, then it can be remade, rebuilt,
put together differently in the same way that a representation or an artwork
can.\footnote{Susan Sontag, A Sontag Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 30.}


What Butler and Rolloff do is to make explicit the connection between
the could-have-been and the could-yet-be. Just as Rudolf Rocker insists that
‘‘the artist does not simply give back what he sees,’’ Rolloff suggests that the
subject does not simply give back its social encoding, but always and inevitably transforms it, makes the social over into the individual, makes the old
new: ‘‘Even if we are constituted in very strong ways by society, our action
and how we re-enact our inscriptions never have a predetermined outcome.’’\footnote{Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, 474; Rolloff, ‘‘An-archism,’’ 19.} Because the self and the work of art are both inscriptions or
constructions, products of a contingent historical process without a predetermined end, they are both capable of redetermination, even if this does not
take place in a void of quantum indeterminacy.


This is what Bookchin points to as a dialectics appropriate both to ecology
and anarchism, in the tradition of Reclus and Kropotkin: rather than conceptualizing the real as simple, self-identical, and essentially static, an ecological dialectic apprehends being in terms of becoming, development and
relationality.\footnote{Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 206; Bookchin, ‘‘A Philosophical Naturalism,’’ Institute for Social Ecology, 18 November 2003, \href{http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031118095030293/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.social-ecology.org\Slash{}article.php?story=20031118095030293\Slash{}}.} It does so, moreover, in a manner curiously consistent with
Deleuze’s ostensibly anti-dialectical ‘‘becoming-realism,’’ as an ontology of
movement. Just as Deleuze maintains that the real is not exhausted by the
infinitely detailed concreteness of the actual but comprises an even greater
order of emergent or virtual possibilities, so from Bookchin’s standpoint, reality includes not only the immediately, empirically present ‘‘actuality,’’ but
also a dimension of ‘‘potentiality’’: ‘‘Reality is always formative. It is not a
mere ‘here’ and ‘now’ that exists no further than what we can perceive with
our eyes and noses. Conceived as formative, reality is always a process of
actualization of potentialities. It is no less ‘real’ or ‘objective’ in terms of
what it could be as well as what it is at any given moment.’’\footnote{Bookchin, Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990), 203.} This dialectical
stance, which places anarchism outside of both positivisms (which deny reality to what-could-be in favor of what-is) and relativisms (which deny the
existence of a what-is for a pure play of what-could-bes), also places it beyond both representationalism and antirepresentationalism. From this perspective, there is clearly an object world to be represented, and our
representations can and should be informed by, sensitive to, anchored in
that world; at the same time, we assume that our representations will never
completely coincide with their object, for the object is not fixed or self-
identical. It follows that to be as adequate as possible, our representational
practices should evoke the creativity, plurality, and interconnectedness of
reality, so that actualities are seen by the light of potentialities, and potentialities in view of actualities.

\chapter{4. Anarchism Beyond Representationalism and Antirepresentationalism}

\section{BEYOND REPRESENTATIONALISM AND ANTIREPRESENTATIONALISM}


HOW COULD THE CLASSICAL ANARCHIST THEORISTS OF THE NINETEENTH
century have anticipated and transcended the most important findings of
twentieth-century theories of the human sciences, the findings that culminate in a crisis of representation? Were Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin
such profound savants that they were able to do what the trained philosophers of their age and ours were unable to do? I do not claim that they were
necessarily aware of all the philosophical implications of the positions they
staked out, nor even that they were concerned with such an awareness; they
did not think of themselves as philosophers any more than Marx and Engels
did. A more plausible interpretation would note that while they were working
on the same practical problems that occupied Marx and Engels, their solutions come from the kind of broadly ethical orientation that animates structuralism and post-structuralism rather than from the largely descriptive or
analytical orientation that Marx took over from philosophy. The problems,
crudely stated, concerned how to construct a movement for social transformation that would not be limited by the sorts of idealist illusions that had
constrained such movements in the past—the divine mandates, national
destinies, and racial essences that had been called on to legitimate and
ground all the revolutions of the past. Marx’s solution was to immanentize
the transformative power in history itself, conceived as a definite development, so that freedom would emerge from and of necessity. The anarchists
immanentized the transformative power, locating it within nature (after the
example of Spinoza, as Daniel Colson points out), proposing that nature
formed a matrix that made freedom possible and desirable but not necessary.\footnote{Colson, ‘‘Lectures anarchistes de Spinoza,’’ Réfractions, no. 2 (Été 1998), \href{http://refractions.plusloin.org/textes/refractions2/spinoza-colson.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}refractions.plusloin.org\Slash{}textes\Slash{}refractions2\Slash{}spinoza-colson.html} (accessed 26 March 2004).}


Like their Marxist counterparts, then, the classical anarchists operated
from a dialectical conception of reality, in which change, which traditional
metaphysics had done its best to deny, and relationship, which modern meta-
physics was progressively exorcising from reality, were accorded a primary
ontological status. Anarchists rejected what they saw as the overly schematic
representations of change and relation in Marxist theory, which seemed all
too clearly related to an authoritarian will to schematize and represent in
practice. Instead of representing change and relation in terms of rigid historical stages and monolithic class structures, they argued for a more open-
ended, non-necessitarian conception of historical development, in which all
sorts of classes were potentially capable of making change (even the peasants and lumpens that Marx wrote off as essentially reactionary). Insisting
on the ethical coordination of means and ends, rather than a centralized,
hierarchical revolutionary movement and a dictatorship of the proletariat,
they proposed decentralized, horizontal federations of self-managing units as
the most appropriate organizational form for both the transition and the future beyond it.


This is not only a theory of political practice; it is a theory of meaning.

\section{ANARCHIST THEORIES OF MEANING: MULTIPLICITY AND CREATIVITY}


Perhaps no anarchist has written a direct answer to the question, ‘‘what
is meaning?’’ However, certain concepts of meaning are implicit within the
anarchist tradition, particularly in its accounts of the real. An ontology of
change and relationship implies a theory of meaning and representation that
avoids both representationalist assumptions about the fixity and simplicity
of the representation-object or signifier-signified relationship and the anti-
representationalist dissolution of those relationships. Rather, anarchists
have generally presupposed a robust form of realism that does not ignore the
extent to which ‘‘speakers and hearers are active and shaping,’’ nor deny
that ‘‘they intervene in the world and are in the world in a special way as
speakers.’’\footnote{Goodman, Speaking and Language, 33.} The primary object of anarchist critique, whether it is called
‘‘authority,’’ ‘‘domination,’’ or ‘‘hierarchy,’’ is never a purely objective reality, an en-soi existing apart from the human beings who reciprocally form it
through their beliefs, discourses, and actions and are formed by it in return,
nor is it ever a purely subjective illusion, a figment of individual or collective
imagination that can be instantaneously doubted or willed out of existence.


Moral opposition to hierarchy, to domination, to authority as such has compelled anarchist theory to develop in a tension between the claims of objectivity and subjectivity, materialism and idealism, realism and textualism.


This is why Proudhon can at some moments sound every bit the idealist heir
of Hegel and at other times like a staunch materialist.


For Proudhon, there is no meaningless experience, for nothing is excluded
from the dimension of the ideal. It is not the case with Proudhon, as it was
with dualist philosophers like Hobbes, that ideas are merely ghostly representations of material facts; we could equally say that matter is a representation of ideas:
‘‘human facts are the incarnation of human ideas’’: ‘‘In
following in our exposition this method of the parallel development of the
reality and the idea, we find a double advantage: first, that of escaping the
reproach of materialism, so often applied to economists, to whom facts are
truth simply because they are facts, and material facts. To us, on the contrary, facts are not matter,—for we do not know what the word matter
means,—but visible manifestations of invisible ideas.’’\footnote{Proudhon, System of Economical Contradictions; or, The Philosophy of Misery, trans. Benjamin R. Tucker (Boston, MA: B.R. Tucker, 1888), 172-73.} Thus, for Proudhon
(as we shall see in more detail in part 2), it is possible to distinguish between
‘‘the real’’ and ‘‘the truth,’’ or between mere empirical fact and reality in a
broader sense; the first, strictly speaking, ‘‘has no meaning in itself,’’ while
the latter includes the dimension of the ideal, and therefore a dimension of
meaning.\footnote{Proudhon, Oeuvres, 12.188, translation in James Henry Rubin, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and Proudhon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 94.}


Here, Proudhon is close to anticipating postmodern insights into the cultural construction of reality. This is where Marx finds reason to write Proudhon off as an idealist Hegelian, of course. ‘‘Equality,’’ he sneers, ‘‘is M.
Proudhon’s ideal.’’\footnote{Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 119.} However, Proudhon anticipates this criticism:


It is as impossible to accuse us of spiritualism, idealism, or mysticism: for, admitting as a point of departure only the external manifestation of the idea,—the idea
which we do not know, which does not exist, as long as it is not reflected, like
light, which would be nothing if the sun existed by itself in an infinite void,—and
brushing aside all a priori reasoning upon theogony and cosmogony, all inquiry
into substance, cause, the me and the not-me, we confine ourselves to searching
for the laws of being and to following the order of their appearance as far as
reason can reach.\footnote{Proudhon, System of Economical Contradictions, 173.}


Proudhon would be an idealist, like Plato, if he postulated the dimension of
the ideal as a realm separate from and existing outside of matter. However,
for him, there is no ideal outside of its instantiation in the material. Just as
matter, stripped of its dimension of ideality, cannot be fully or truly real, so
ideas cannot exist outside of their material representations. Truly, in this
scheme, there is no presence prior to representation; yet Proudhon is also
realist enough. The ‘‘dialectical series’’ may be ‘‘the queen of thought,’’ but
thought does not reign over life: ‘‘the series is not at all a substantial or
causative thing: it is order, an ensemble of relations or of laws.’’\footnote{Proudhon, Oeuvres, 5.141, translation mine.}


Thus it is that Proudhon approaches economics as a human phenomenon,
and hence as a representational phenomenon. All our doings re-present or
incarnate ideas that are only made present through representation. Just as a
structuralist anthropologist might put it, all human activity generates meaning. Proudhon asserts that ‘‘metaphysics . . . [or] philosophy entire lies at
the bottom of every natural or industrial manifestation; that it is no respecter
of degrees or qualities; that, to rise to its sublimest conceptions, all proto-
types may be employed equally well; and, finally, that, all the postulates of
reason meeting in the most modest industry as well as in the most general
sciences, to make every artisan a philosopher,—that is, a generalizing and
highly synthetic mind,—it would be enough to teach him—what? his profes-
sion.’’\footnote{Proudhon, System of Economical Contradictions, 171.} As Antonio Gramsci was to write, ‘‘everyone is a philosopher,’’ for
everyone continually manifests as well as operates within a certain ‘‘conception of the world.’’ Everything, even the seemingly menial or trivial, is endowed with this quality and significance, the ideal, or rather everything
produces or emanates the ideal; everything has meaning.\footnote{Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geof- frey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 323.} In this sense,
Proudhon declares art to be ‘‘at once realist and idealist,’’ for ‘‘it is equally
impossible for a painter, a sculptor, a poet, to eliminate from his work either
the real or the ideal.’’ He sets out to demonstrate the ‘‘inseparability of the
two terms’’ via a thought experiment: ‘‘Take from your neighbor the butcher
a quarter of a slaughtered animal, beef, pork, or mutton; place it before a
lens, so as to receive the image from it reversed behind the lens, in an darkened chamber, on an iodized metal plate: this image traced by the light is
obviously, as an image and from the point of view of art, all that you can
imagine of the highest realism.’’\footnote{Proudhon, Oeuvres, 11.59-60, translation mine.} The experiment asks us to imagine eliminating, so far as is possible, every element of subjectivity from the process
of producing a representation of reality: ‘‘the image obtained,’’ we are reminded, ‘‘is the work of a natural agent which the photographer knew how
to set to work, but into the action of which he does not at all enter.’’ Is there
such a thing as a purely objective representation—absolute realism, a zero
degree of the aesthetic? Proudhon answers in the negative:



\begin{quote}


It is certain that this realism is not deprived of all idea, nor powerless to arouse
in us the least aesthetic spark: because, without counting the butcher and the
cook, who can easily tell when to say: Here is beautiful or nasty meat, and who
knows it; without counting the gastronomist, who is no more insensitive to the
thing, there is the plain fact of the photographic work, one of the most marvelous
phenomena in the universe that we are given to observe. Say, if you like, that the
aesthetic feeling aroused by this representation of a quarter of beef is the lowest
degree that we can observe of the ideal, that which is immediately above zero;
but do not say that the ideal has been absolutely lacking here: you would be
contradicted by the universal sentiment.


Instead of a side of beef, a leg of mutton, or a ham placed in the stall, put an
orange tree in its box, a spray of flowers in a porcelain vase, a child playing on a
settee: all these images, types of copies created by an artist without consciousness, absolutely insensitive to beauty and ugliness, but with a perfection of details which no living artist could approach, will be realistic images, if you wish,
in the sense that the author, namely the light, does not put anything of his own
into them and is not aware of you; still, however little you give him your attention,
these same images will not cause you any less of a sensation of pleasure; they
will even appear to you all the more pleasant, leaving less of the realistic, more
of the ideal, as the objects represented will move away from pure materiality, as
they will participate in your life, your soul, your intelligence.\footnote{Ibid., 11.60-61, translation mine.}



\end{quote}


Not even counting such aesthetically privileged viewers as the butcher, the
cook, or the gastronomer (who all know good from bad meat, and can imagine
how delicious or vile it will taste) there is still always in the viewer some
‘‘degree’’ of aesthetic response, an activity of ideation, and therefore an aspect of the subjective or the ‘‘ideal’’ added onto objective reality—an ineliminable dimension of
‘‘attitude’’
(in Kenneth Burke’s sense) or
‘‘interestedness’’ (in Martin Heidegger’s).\footnote{I am also reminded, here, of Herbert Read’s citation of Whitehead’s definition of ‘‘symbolism’’: ‘‘the human mind is functioning symbolically when some components of its experience elicit consciousness, beliefs, emotions, and usages, respecting other components of its experience’’ (Whitehead, quoted in Read The Philosophy of Modern Art, 24). However, where Read cites Whitehead’s notion of the ‘‘symbolic’’ in order to underscore the complementary notion of ‘‘presentational immediacy’’ or nonsymbolic experience, Proudhon is arguing—rightly, I believe—that there is no such thing as mere ‘‘immediacy,’’ that all presence is also representational in character, or to put it more simply, that all experience is ‘‘symbolic’’ or meaningful.}


It is in this sense that Goodman proposes that ‘‘signs . . . help us to cope
with their designates.’’ A text is not something that exists apart from the
world of deeds and consequences, but is itself an ‘‘act’’ performed ‘‘in a
concrete situation’’ with consequences of its own. ‘‘A style of speech,’’ he
argues, is something we devise to ‘‘cope with . . . experience’’; a way of
speaking is ‘‘a way of being.’’ Meaning is driven both by the intentions of
interpreters and the extra-intentional reality of the situation in which interpretations happen: the content of speech, the ‘‘what needs to be said,’’ is
‘‘not the thoughts or intentions of the speaker; it is the situation of the
speaker and hearer as a problem to be coped with\dots{}
It is the unifying
tendency in the on-going situation, the coping.’’ One consequence of this
position is that ‘‘meaning is not mental,’’ a matter of ghostly contents-in-the-
head transmitted through a material medium to another head; it cannot be
reduced to an original intention. Moreover, meaning is redefined as a natural
phenomenon, ‘‘characteristic of most overt animal behavior,’’ as well as a
social one; we look for ‘‘meaning’’ in texts just as we look for ‘‘meaning’’ in
any phenomenon.\footnote{Goodman, Speaking and Language, 85; Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 242; Speaking and Language, 97, 171-72.} An anarchist account of meaning thus can be seen to
answer the calls of ecocritics and recent proponents of a ‘‘corporeal turn’’ in
the philosophy of language such as George Lakoff (Metaphors We Live By),
Marc Johnson (The Body in the Mind), Ellen Spolsky (Gaps in Nature), and
Horst Ruthrof (The Body in Language) for a naturalized, embodied account
of meaning in opposition to the textualist tendency to inter all questions of
meaning within the seemingly self-contained web of signifiers pointing to
other signifiers, writing the body out of the picture.\footnote{Ruthrof, The Body In Language, 3, 7.} From Goodman’s perspective, meaning can be seen to emerge from ecological processes of adaptation—both on the ontogenetic level, in the life experience of individual
human beings, where it emerges in the activity of adapting oneself to what
Bookchin calls the ‘‘second nature’’ of one’s historical and cultural setting,
and, ultimately, on the phylogenetic, evolutionary level, where it emerges in
the slow adaptation of the species to that ‘‘first nature’’ within which we have
made our home.


Goodman’s account of meaning resonates strongly with the ecocritical dimensions of Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory, which regards speech as a
‘‘strategy’’ for responding to a ‘‘situation,’’ a means of forming ‘‘attitudes’’ in
the face of a hostile or friendly ‘‘history.’’\footnote{Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 1; Attitudes Toward History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 1.} By the same token, interpretation
is a response to a situation; it is also animal, natural, an adaptation to environment. Just as Bergson characterized the most basic animal responses to
the environment as incipiently linguistic, since recognition of a recurring
situation, such as the presence of food, is already an exercise in ‘‘the faculty
of generalizing,’’ and ‘‘a sign—even an instinctive sign—always to some degree represents a genus,’’ Burke sees animal behavior as organized by something like the interpretation of signs: for instance, ‘‘a trout, having snatched
at a hook but having had the good luck to escape with a rip in his jaw, may
even show his wiliness thereafter that he can revise his critical appraisals.’’


Ultimately, we could say that ‘‘all living organisms interpret many of the
signs about them.’’\footnote{Bergson, Creative Evolution, 167; Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 5.} From this perspective, interpretation does not look like
an assault on Being; rather, it is as natural a process as anything else.


Without collapsing the distance and the difference between the human
and the natural sciences, it seems to me that an anarchist hermeneutics
treats the social as parallel to the ecological, and insofar as our knowledge
of ecology is a knowledge of development—not reducible to a Newtonian
billiard-table model, but still in some sense a study of cause and effect, conditions and consequences, potentiations and actualizations—our knowledge
of the social will also be developmental in character. A naturalized conception of meaning would conceptualize it in terms of development from antecedents that are themselves developments from further antecedents, and so
on. On these terms, to ask what X means is to ask two related questions:
i. What is X a development from (i.e., what does X stem from or portend)?
ii. What can develop from X (i.e., what are the uses of X, and what might
it affect)?


Let us take the first instance, in which we are thinking about the ‘‘meaning’’ of a thing as a matter of what it has developed from. This means looking
for its meaning in its relation to an originating context or source—i.e., the
way in which smoke betokens or indicates the presence of fire. We are treating the meaning-bearing object here as more or less the kind of sign that
Peirce called an ‘‘index’’—something by which, when we know it, we also
know something else because the first thing is materially and causally related to the second thing. This is not necessarily an anti-intentionalist theory
of meaning. Rather, it places the thing to be interpreted somewhere on a
continuum between intended ‘‘message’’ and unintentional ‘‘symptom’’; the
range of possible meanings may encompass conscious expression and unconscious parapraxis. In the case of a text, asking what it ‘‘means’’ in sense
(i) is asking what produced it, i.e., what situation was it a response to—as
Kenneth Burke says, what ‘‘motivated’’ it; it is to construct what Paul Goodman called ‘‘final explanations’’ (in the sense that they refer to purposes,
goals, or ends), or equally to seek ‘‘genetic’’ explanations of the orgin of
the text (investigating ‘‘how and why did it come to be’’).\footnote{Goodman, The Structure of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 2-3; Utopian Essays, 246-47.} This mode of
interpretation, while basically oriented toward the past, also bears the trace
of an opposite orientation in time: to ask what produced this text, what it is
a ‘‘sign’’ or symptom of, is also to ask what it implies for the future. This is
an evolutionary approach to the text, and we could call the kind of meaning
that it seeks ‘‘genetic.’’


Working on this level, interpretation seeks to read a text en situation,
reading it for the traces of a consciousness in terms of the genesis of that
consciousness in social and natural history. Along these lines, Bookchin proposes that ecological thinking opposes ‘‘the claim of epistemology to adjudicate the validity of knowledge’’ in a historical vacuum, insisting on ‘‘the
claim of history to treat knowledge as a problem of genesis.’’ This rules out
the kinds of abstract, formalist, or textualist philosophy that overlook the fact
of embodiment: ‘‘From this historical standpoint, mental processes do not
live a life of their own. Their seemingly autonomous construction of the world
is actually inseparable from the way they are constructed by the world.’’\footnote{Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1991), 38.}


Where textualist idealism erases bodies and nature, Bookchin offers to re-
root interpretation in material life: ‘‘There is no facet of human life that is
not infiltrated by social phenomena and there is no imaginative experience
that does not float on the data of social reality.’’\footnote{Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (San Francisco: Ramparts Books, 1971), 284.} On one level, this retrieves
the ideology-critique of Marxist historical materialism, in which ‘‘societies
. . . foster ideologies that render their pathologies tolerable by mystifying the
problems they raise,’’ sponsoring ‘‘world views’’ that conveniently ‘‘uphold
the hegemony of those in power and . . . explain the crises that unsettled
those eras,’’ or that provide a safe outlet for popular frustration with the
status quo.\footnote{Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity, 175.} At the same time, it avoids the hubris of locating the critical
perspective itself outside of (in a superior position to) the ideological realm:
even these moments of analysis ‘‘float on the data of social reality.’’ Thus,
like Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, Bakunin traces Romanticism’s raison d’être to its material roots in the ascent of the bourgeoisie following the French Revolution and the subsequent schism between its
interests and the interests of ‘‘the proletariat’’—class interests whose trace
is effaced and disguised as disinterestedness and ethereality but tangibly
present as a motive force in the poetry of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Novalis,
and others.\footnote{Bakunin, God and the State, 81.}


Under sense (ii) of ‘‘meaning,’’ the instance in which we are asking not
so much what the meaningful object is determined by, but what it might
determine in its turn, we regard it as an actuality that, while possessing its
own determinate shape, features, and qualities (to this extent, again, anar-
chist theory is traditionally realist), at the same time potentiates an indeter-
minate number of functions, applications, effects. There is an actual
quantum of energy, we could say by way of analogy, but it can manifest as a
particle or as a wave. Thus, we could call this kind of meaning ‘‘quantum.’’


From the nineteenth century on, we can find anarchists making critiques
of philosophy and literature that rely on a certain logic of development, on
tracing lines away from the origin or ‘‘point of departure’’ of a discourse
toward a certain destination, oftentimes an unexpected destination; to some
degree, this is a function of the evolutionary character of language itself, in
which ‘‘quite gradually and unnoticeably the shadings and gradations of the
concepts which find their expression in words alter, so that it often happens
that a word means today exactly the opposite of what men originally expressed by it.’’\footnote{Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, 277. This interpretive practice of unmasking, revelation, surprise, is frequently tied to an awareness of the extent to which our encounter with texts is mediated or distorted by previous readings and received ideas: thus, ‘‘everybody knows’’ that Paradise Lost is a theodicy (until the Romantic rereading becomes popularized, after which ‘‘everybody knows’’ that it is a Promethean heroization of Satan). Thus, in his entries for the Encyclopédie Anarchiste, Edouard Rothen contends that ‘‘classicism had for its result the throwing of a veil of incomprehension over both ancient and contemporary life,’’ calls for ‘‘a Shakespeare stripped of academic cosmetics,’’ and claims that popular ‘‘infatuation’’ has obscured our reading of Mallarmé and Verlaine by ‘‘put[ting] them on a pedestal from which posterity will dislodge them’’ (Encyclopédie anarchiste, ed. Sébastien Faure [Paris: Librairie internationale, 1934], 1299, 2074, 2768).} Thus, in God and the State, Bakunin demonstrates how the
‘‘material’’ point of departure of the revolution unfolds itself dialectically
into a revolutionary practice of ‘‘real idealization,’’ while ‘‘per contra and for
the same reason,’’ the Romantics’ idealist point of departure produces a
crassly materialistic politics of compromise and reaction:



\begin{quote}


The literature created by this school was the very reign of ghosts and phantoms.
It could not stand the sunlight; the twilight alone permitted it to live. No more
could it stand the brutal contact of the masses. It was the literature of the tender,
delicate, distinguished souls, aspiring to heaven, and living on earth as if in spite
of themselves. It had a horror and contempt for the politics and questions of the
day; but when perchance it referred to them, it showed itself frankly reactionary,
took the side of the Church against the insolence of the freethinkers, of the kings
against the peoples, and of all the aristocrats against the vile rabble of the
streets.\footnote{Bakunin, God and the State, 48, 80.}



\end{quote}


Likewise, in one of his entries for Sébastien Faure’s 1934 Encyclopédie anarchiste, Edouard Rothen (also known as Charles Hotz) observes that ‘‘the
good apostles of l’art pour l’art,’’ in denying the ‘‘social function’’ of art,
declaring that ‘‘art must not be humanitarian, laical, revolutionary, leftist,’’
and proclaiming its superiority to mere ‘‘utilitarianism,’’ naturally make
their art useful for ‘‘militaristic, pro-clerical, patriotic, reactionary, rightist’’
purposes.\footnote{Rothen, in Encyclopédie anarchiste, 2458.} Once more, Proudhon is there first: as Colson observes, through
a ‘‘practice of paradox and contrariety, Proudhon claims to show . . . how
Descartes, in favor of free will, constructs a theory that leads to its negation
[and] how Spinoza, denier of the free will, proposes on the contrary a
theory that necessarily supposes it.’’\footnote{Colson, ‘‘Lectures anarchistes de Spinoza,’’ translation mine.} Where Descartes’s Meditations begins
with the absolute subject, free from all determination, and deductively
reaches the knowledge of God’s existence, Spinoza’s Ethics begins with the
‘‘absolute necessity’’ of God’s existence, working backward to the subject. If
‘‘Spinoza, the philosopher of the absolute, of necessity and raison d’État,
who, very logically, denies that free will has any meaning,’’ is nonetheless
‘‘at the same time the philosopher of freedom, a freedom inherent in his system,’’ this is because the trajectory of his thought leads to the very conclusions he wishes to exclude from the beginning: ‘‘How can Spinoza deny free
will, since, in the Ethics, he claims to show how man, degraded and miserable creation of the all-powerful divine, subjected to the darkness and the
illusions of passions, can despite everything ‘go against the flow of necessity’
that produced it, freeing itself from passions that block it and mislead it, to
reach a ‘freedom at the expense of the necessity that it subordinates’?’’\footnote{Ibid., translation mine.}


Proudhon’s primary purpose is ‘‘to destroy and rebuild’’ rationalist meta-
physics through logical analysis,\footnote{Proudhon, General Idea, 43.} but in the process, he is forced to go beyond a pure hermeneutics of recollection, reconstructing the author’s
original intention: ‘‘It must be seen to be believed; and how can the translators and critics of Spinoza not see it? The Ethics, which everyone knows as
a theory of necessity as God, is at the same time a theory of the free will of
man. This word is left unstated, and it is right to say that the author does not
believe in it at all; but since when does one exclusively judge a philosopher
on his words?’’\footnote{Proudhon, quoted in Colson, ‘‘Lectures anarchistes de Spinoza,’’ translation mine.} This line of interpretive speculation, then, turns our attention away from origins and beginnings and toward implications or results.


Ultimately, it tends not to a theorization of any destination or conclusion
conceived of as a single, simple, and rigidly determined teleology, but in-
stead toward an interpretive plurality: just as the roots of a tree spread in all
directions, so do its branches.


Here we can draw on the splendid legacy of ‘‘anarcho-spatialist’’ studies
of geography, architecture, and urbanism to think of a text not so much as a
container containing a message, but a space we might inhabit in a variety
(but not an infinite or wholly indeterminate variety) of ways. Bookchin’s
‘‘second nature’’ is a space made up of just such a network of texts and
textual relationships. To ask about meaning in this second sense is to ask,
as Paul Goodman asked of the interior spaces of buildings, how they could
facilitate some further ‘‘adjustment to the environment’’ by modifying an existing environment or creating a new environment within the old.\footnote{Goodman, Utopian Essays, 156.}


Inquiring this way about a thing’s meaning, we ask what situations it could
help us adapt to ecologically, and on what terms: i.e., what kinds of behavior
it could ‘‘motivate’’ in Burke’s sense, and (ethically speaking) with what results. This is not quite the same as a purely instrumentalist version of meaning-as-use, however, and not only because we acknowledge that the text has
intrinsic features that are not arbitrarily created by the reader. We cannot
speak of meaning—even in this context, where it is thoroughly saturated
with life-interest, project, and action—as simply equivalent to use, unless
we implausibly insist that the organisms inhabiting their niches in an eco-
system, living and acting and carrying out their projects, are ‘‘using’’ the
environment; the metaphors of manipulation and control are just inappropriate and misleading here. Just as we do not reduce readerly subjectivity to a
passively, helplessly overdetermined object—on the contrary, Chomsky and
Goodman do everything to remind us of the active and creative character of
every act of reading—so we do not necessarily assume that the reading subject is sovereignly self-possessed, always completely able to resist the effects
of the text. Anarchists can hear and understand Thomas Frank’s outraged
objection to the self-serving accolades of the right wing for readers’ ability
to appropriate the products of the culture industry, as if that potential were
simply the actual case in every case;\footnote{Thomas Frank, New Consensus For Old: Cultural Studies From Left to Right (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002), 19, 41-43.} at the same time, we don’t fail to
observe all the ways in which, as organisms struggling to survive in a cultural
environment, we also reorganize and alter that environment to our own ends.


Meanings (i) and (ii) are related but not coterminous; both are to some
extent indeterminate, and meanings in the second register will fluctuate de-
pending on who is asking (and in what situation), but neither is independent
of the material actuality of the thing being investigated. In short, we hold
that an actual text conditions its multiple potential meanings for different
readers in different times and places. This anarchist account of meaning has
the distinct advantage of avoiding the pitfalls of antirepresentationalist theo-
ries. In ethically balancing the claims of self and other, it avoids the ex-
tremes of an instrumentalism for which the other only exists as a use-value
and a passive stance of letting-be.


Voltairine de Cleyre reaches some insights about the form to be taken by
such a balancing act in an essay on ‘‘Literature the Mirror of Man,’’ in which
she exhorts us to ‘‘acquire the habit of reading twice, or at least with a double intent.’’ I am reminded here of two similar formulations: Bonnie Zimmerman’s advocacy of a critical ‘‘double vision,’’ and W. E. B. DuBois’s notion
of the ‘‘double consciousness.’’\footnote{Bonnie Zimmerman, ‘‘What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism,’’ in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter, 219 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); William E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon Books, 1969), 215.} Both see this sense of ‘‘twoness’’ as something with which minority or subaltern subjects are both blessed and cursed:
it is because ‘‘Negro’’ subjects are not permitted to be fully ‘‘American’’ that
they have a ‘‘sense of always looking at [themselves] . . . through the eyes of
others.’’ Likewise, Zimmerman sees minoritarian communities as having
‘‘had to adopt a double vision for survival.’’ Nevertheless, she argues, this
condition of doubleness is not to be understood as mere loss, privation, or
alienation: ‘‘one of the political transformations of recent decades has been
the realization that enfranchised groups—men, whites, heterosexuals, the
middle class—would do well to adopt that double vision for the survival of
us all.’’\footnote{DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 214-15; Zimmerman, ‘‘What Has Never Been,’’ 219.} While her identity as a feminist and the daughter of an immigrant
doubtless has some bearing on the genesis of the concept, de Cleyre’s ‘‘double reading’’ is not necessarily a subaltern strategy; it is, however, a process
that entails challenging one’s own identity and that of the textual other, and
that therefore seeks to reproduce, on another level, some of the insights
available to subaltern doubleness. It is, in effect, a version of what Peter
Elbow calls the ‘‘believing’’ and ‘‘doubting’’ games—a systematic attempt
both to experimentally occupy a subject position within the text and to engage in a struggle for ‘‘self-extrication’’ from the text.\footnote{Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 145, 148, 163-65.}


The first reading, according to de Cleyre, ought to be a listening, an at-
tempt ‘‘to feel and hear the music of language,’’ to be receptive to the ‘‘vanished passion, hope, desire, thought’’ within the work: ‘‘Train your ears to
hear the song of it; it helps to feel what the writer felt.’’\footnote{de Cleyre, Selected Works, 380.} This is the ‘‘recollective’’ mode Spanos opposes as representationalist; it is also that Keatsian
mode of ‘‘negative capability’’ that Spanos urges as a counter to the instrumentalist tendency to ‘‘enclose’’ the text; it is also that imaginative
identification with the other through the textual medium urged by the proto-
anarchist Shelley (who called it a ‘‘going out of our nature’’) and the Christian anarchist Tolstoy (who spoke of our ‘‘capacity to be infected by the feelings of other people’’). Indeed, it is good for us to open ourselves to the text’s
otherness, even, as Sontag suggests, practicing an ‘‘erotics’’ of the text—up
to a point.\footnote{Spanos, Repetitions, 220; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Critical Prose, ed. Bruce R. McEldberry Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 277; Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 38; Sontag, A Sontag Reader, 104.} Lest we forego our right of response, question, and critique, our
openness to the text, which allows it to overcome our limits, should itself be
limited and overcome.


Therefore, de Cleyre insists that after this initial receptive, sympathetic
reading, one should ‘‘read critically, with one eye on the page, so to speak,
and the other on the reflection in the mirror, looking for the mind behind the
work, the things which interested the author and those he wrote for.’’ While
de Cleyre emphasizes that this ‘‘re-reading’’ does not have to be destructive
(‘‘It means rather take notice of all generals and particulars, and question
them’’) there is something relatively harsh and hard about it, after the sentimentality and even the religious sensibility of a receptive reading; it approaches the text without respect for its sacredness.\footnote{de Cleyre, Selected Works, 366, 380.} While the first reading
aspires to a kind of disinterestedness (a suppression or bracketing of one’s
own assumptions and sense of self, the suppression of that flood of rationalizations and defensive responses remarked by Jeannette Winterson, the creation of a silent, internal space, so that one is open to the possible
experience of pain as well as pleasure\footnote{Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 7-9; Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Random House, 1983), 23.}), in the second phase of reading, we
are not only fully, even egoistically, ‘‘interested’’ in what we can get out of
the text, we are interested in ‘‘the things which interested the author and
those he wrote for.’’ Rather than simply identifying with the subject of enunciation, we are now ‘‘looking for the mind behind the work’’ and actively
questioning it. Along with any romantic reverence for the text goes the sense
of easy, anachronistic continuity between the reader and the ‘‘vanished passion’’ of the author; the reader remembers that he or she is ‘‘the child of
another age and thought,’’ and an abyss of historical relativity opens between
his or her particular ‘‘standpoint’’ and ‘‘values’’ and those of the text.\footnote{de Cleyre, Selected Works, 371-72, 379-80.} By
contrast with the romantic mode of the first reading, the second reading is in
the mode of Aufklärung: as Goodman writes, ‘‘this cutting of a text down to
true size is a typical act of the Enlightenment,’’ propelled not by empathy
but by ‘‘skepticism and sophistication.’’\footnote{Goodman, Utopian Essays, 243.}


De Cleyre demonstrates such a reading in her brief treatment of a frag-
ment from a medieval historian’s chronicle: ‘‘678. This year appeared the
comet star in August . . . Bishop Wilfred being driven from his bishopric by
King Everth, two bishops were consecrated in his stead.’’ ‘‘There are,’’ de
Cleyre comments, ‘‘no records of when shoemakers lost their jobs that I know
of, nor of how many shoemakers were put in their places; and I imagine it
would have been at least as interesting for us to know as the little matter of
Bishop Wilfred. But the chronicler did not think so.’’\footnote{de Cleyre, Selected Works, 371-72.} Here the focalizing
aspect of representation becomes of particular interest: no chronicle could
possibly contain everything that happens (the object represented, ‘‘history,’’
contains an indescribable infinity in all its parts), but the choice of what to
include and what not to include within the ‘‘frame’’ of the representational
‘‘mirror’’ is significant, is part of the meaning.\footnote{‘‘If any one fancies that this disposition has quite vanished,’’ de Cleyre adds, ‘‘let him pick up any ordinary history, and see how many pages, relatively, are devoted to the doings of persons intent on slaying, and those intent on peaceful occupation’’ (Selected Works, 372). Kropotkin turns this observation to his own critical purpose in Mutual Aid, when he writes that historians’ ‘‘predilection for the dramatic aspects of history’’ leads them ‘‘to exaggerate the part of human life give to struggles They hand down to posterity the most minute descriptions of every war, every battle and skirmish, every contest and act of violence, every kind of individual suffering; but they hardly bear any trace of the countless acts of mutual support and devotion which every one of us knows from his own experience’’ (Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution [Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989], 116). Here already is that critique of focalizing representation which a contemporary anarchist, Ursula K. LeGuin, places in a gendered context when she proposes departing from the infinite series of repetitions of ‘‘the tale of the Hero,’’ the ‘‘story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing,’’ phallocentric narrative as penetrating ‘‘weapon,’’ in favor of narrative as ‘‘container,’’ ‘‘womb,’’ ‘‘matrix,’’ ‘‘pouch,’’ ‘‘bag,’’ ‘‘medicine bundle’’ (‘‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,’’ in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 150-52 [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996]).} Where, in the receptive
mode, we imaginatively make present what has ‘‘vanished’’ from the world
outside the representation, in the critical mode, we inquire after what is
missing within it.


We can develop this interpretive narrative or ‘‘dialectic of propositions’’\footnote{Elbow, Writing Without Teachers, 149.}
in several different directions, depending on the text, the reader, and the
entire situation of reading. Our interpretation might take the form of a negation that annihilates the initial affirmation, a justified critical rejection of the
text; it could look something like a Hegelian dialectic, in which, after trying
out two opposed positions, we settle on a third; it could be a final embrace
or defense of the text after the rigors of questioning; it might even look like
Proudhon’s dialectic, with its maintenance of a productive, ironic tension
between positions that remain opposed. In any case, as Derrrida remarks of
the deconstructive aporia, ‘‘a decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of
the undecidable would not be a free decision.’’\footnote{Derrida, ‘‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority,’’ in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell et al., 24 (London: Routledge, 1992).} To negotiate representation
without either surrendering to it or subordinating it to oneself, one must first
experience the presence of the absent, then attend to what is absent from
this presence.


This taking an interest in what is absent or omitted is not without its own
representational perils. In an essay on ‘‘Some Problems of Interpretation:
Silence, and Speech as Action,’’ Goodman weighs carefully the New Critical
injunction not to ‘‘read between the lines’’—an ethical injunction against
interpretive appropriation of the text. To seek a subtext within the text, to
read between the lines, is always to take the risk of opening up a dominatory
moment. In interpreting, we may be asserting the privilege of transposing the
speaker into ‘‘our realm of discourse,’’ denying its semantic autonomy: ‘‘the
interpreter treats the text as if it were psychotic.’’\footnote{Goodman, Utopian Essays, 236, 244.} That is, there is a chance
that the skeptical interpreter may simply be doing what he implicitly accuses
the writer of doing—that is, pulling everything (appropriately or not) into
one’s own private realm of discourse, thereby screening out whatever experiences or facts might serve as ‘‘correctives’’ to the self-reinforcing delusion,
like the rapist who tells himself that a woman’s cries of resistance are either
perversely expressed enjoyment or evidence of ‘‘frigidity.’’\footnote{In that sense, as Sharon Marcus insists, rape is a kind of text (‘‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,’’ in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, 385-403 [New York: Routledge, 1992])—or rather, it is both a textual imposition of a script on another person and a textualizing reading of another’s responses as acts so as to justify one’s own acts as responses (George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], 412-15).} This is also
what Bookchin fears in his somewhat underinformed critique of deconstruction: he fears that by constituting itself as autonomous from the author’s intentions, ‘‘deconstruction removes the reader from the author of a work and
places him or her completely in the hands of the interpreter,’’ who becomes
a kind of ‘‘invisible puppeteer.’’ The puppeteer claims to speak in the name
of ‘‘hidden referents’’ or ‘‘implicit ‘others’’’ in the text but in fact only
speaks for himself or herself, exerting arbitrary authority over meaning: ‘‘we
are completely in the hands of the critic.’’\footnote{Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity, 196-98.} In short, the critic becomes a
privileged intermediary, a representative.


There is no way to simply avoid the risk of interpretation; no non-interpretive stance is available, there is no stance of irrelation. As Burke says, no
amount of rationalist disenchantment can make the problem of discursive
‘‘magic’’ go away. Yet Goodman does not deny the seriousness of this risk,
as does Rorty, for whom all we are ever doing is inserting speakers and their
speeches into our own realms of discourse, placing objects into contexts of
our choosing in order to give them a meaning.\footnote{Rorty, ‘‘Not All That Strange: A Response to Dreyfus and Spinosa,’’ Inquiry 42, no. 1 (March 1999): 127.} Goodman shares the New
Critical suspicion of the ‘‘genetic fallacy’’ whereby the text is overwritten
by its ‘‘origins and backgrounds,’’ read as ‘‘ideology,’’ ‘‘rationalization,’’ or
cultural epiphenomenon. Even an ethical loyalty to texts can lead one to
betray them: like Sontag, Goodman distrusts the religious tendency of humanist interpreters, under the spell of the text’s authority, to try ‘‘to save the
texts,’’ a practice that ‘‘often leads to pious fictions of allegorical interpretation, not unlike legal fictions.’’ Texts can be distorted by willfully instrumentalizing reading practices, and something of value can be lost in the
process—in particular, the reader’s chance to be ‘‘moved in ways I had not
expected.’’ What self-critical transcendence we are capable of is greatly
aided by engagement with otherness: a most important kind of corrective to
our primary narcissism, our tendency to a psychotic self-enclosure or panlogism in which every experience must ‘‘be reduced to our kind of experience,’’ is the recognition of some domain in which ‘‘perhaps our kind of
experience is inadequate’’; the relativistic, Boasian anthropology that takes
each culture as ‘‘a functioning whole’’ has ‘‘a salutary pedagogic effect for
ourselves, leading to a radical unsettling of our own presuppositions.’’ One
need not make a sacrament of the text, he suggests, to value the kind of true
‘‘encounter’’ in which one opens oneself to the other, ‘‘risking one’s own
logic in the interpretation.’’\footnote{Goodman, Utopian Essays, 236, 245-46, 246-48.}


Nonetheless, Goodman argues, the principle of rigorously deferring to the
logic of the text is one-sided: it ‘‘cannot stand as a general rule of interpretation, for it misunderstands the nature of language.’’ The thing it doesn’t understand is that the meaning of an utterance is tied to the situation in which
it is uttered, and that this situational context is ‘‘very often . . . not expressed
in speech and even less so in writing.’’ Here he refers to those circumstances
in which ‘‘one cannot or dare not speak,’’ or in which ‘‘one must speak indirectly,’’ or in which ‘‘the mere act of speaking is a lie’’: for instance, under
oppressive political regimes, social repression, or commercial conformism.


He also considers cases where texts are vehicles of ‘‘prejudice, cultural, or
class bias,’’ where they ‘‘mythologize or ideologize or rationalize, or they are
prelogical altogether, really dreams,’’ or where discourse is itself an evasion
of action. That is, reading between the lines is called for in situations in
which power importantly comes to bear on what is and can be represented—
the kinds of situations Tillie Olsen catalogues in Silences. At times, ‘‘it is
necessary, in order to interpret a text, to go beyond the text’’: one’s moral
obligation to listen to the other demands that one risk speaking for it, acting
as its representative.\footnote{Ibid., 236-37, 238, 238-39, 241-42, 243.}


In short, anarchist hermeneutic practices do not prohibit the interpreter
from speaking for the text’s otherness, so they avoid the antinomies of a submissive liberationism and an unethical ethics; at the same time, they don’t
deny the text its otherness, so they avoid the traps of an imperialist pluralism
and an authoritarian anti-authoritarianism. In this manner, they strike a balance between the claims of self and other that is more ethically coherent than any antirepresentationalist alternative.


How, then, do we proceed to interpret, to elicit potential meanings from
actual texts without ever violating the texts in their actuality, their otherness,
their determinacy, their limitations? It would seem that this task is made
more difficult, rather than easier, by Goodman’s exploration of the risks of
textual narcissism, on the one hand, and textual paternalism on the other. If
there is any answer to this dilemma, it comes from practicing critique as
dialogue rather than monologue, as negotiation rather than dictation. On one
level, this dialogue is among interpreters: interpretation is persuasion, and
the Burkean trials of ‘‘testing and discussion’’ are entailed in every interpretation as a public act of discourse. On another level, however, the dialogue is between interpreter and text.


In the sphere of political practice, anarchist dialogism, rather than imposing a rigidly schematized order on a generic ‘‘class’’ population (as per the
colonial or vanguardist model), always seeks a way to articulate the universality of the anarchist ideal with and even from within the particularity of the
locally ‘‘lived traditions’’ and specific ‘‘problems’’ of given communities—to
think, as Bakunin put it, ‘‘from the base to the summit’’ and ‘‘from the circumference to the center’’ rather than a unity imposed on ‘‘base’’ and ‘‘circumference’’ from ‘‘summit’’ and ‘‘center.’’ Voline, echoing Bakunin, writes
that ‘‘this is entirely false; it is not a matter of ‘organization’ or ‘nonorganization’ but of two different principles of organization, . . . Of course, say the
anarchists, society must be organized. However, the new organization . . .
must be established freely, socially, and above all, from below.’’\footnote{Bookchin, Remaking Society, 165; Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, 77; Voline, quoted in Guérin, Anarchism: from Theory to Practice, trans. Mary Klopper (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 43.}


What does it mean to organize from below? ‘‘The principle of organization,’’ wrote Voline, ‘‘must not issue from a center created in advance to capture the whole and impose itself upon it but, on the contrary, it must come
from all sides to create nodes of coordination.’’ Voline’s comments recall
Kenneth Burke’s essays on literary methodology, which seek to create an
alternative to the kinds of reductive approaches that seek to decode works
‘‘with a ‘symbolist dictionary’ already written in advance.’’\footnote{Voline, quoted in Guérin, Anarchism, 43, italics mine; Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 89, italics mine.} The will to preempt the text, to predetermine its symbolic vocabulary, hence its range of
possible meanings, is always dominatory. As Herbert Read writes, ‘‘The
danger is that the critical faculty, elaborating its laws too far from its immediate object, may construct categories or ideals that are in the nature of impassive moulds. The critic then returns to the plastic substance of art and in
a moment, in the name of science, he has presented us with a rigid shape
which he would persuade us is the living reality. But obviously it is dead; it
no longer pulses with that life and variability which we ascribe to emotional
experience.’’\footnote{Read, Poetry and Experience, 37.} An anarchist literary theory must oppose the tendency to reification that Read associates with a vulgar Marxist criticism by being reflexive and inductive, entering into a dialogue with the text whose end is not
foretold from the beginning. At the same time, to simply engage the object
in a spirit of naïve receptivity, hands supposedly empty of methodological
tools, is to risk domination by the text, or even more likely, by the unseen
context of cultural tradition and personal prejudice that mediates this encounter. The alternative to methodological domination is not an escape from
method. Rather, to restate Burke’s insight in Chomsky’s terms, where a fixed
vocabulary constrains, a certain kind of grammar might actually liberate,
producing in its simplicity the infinite complexity of living speech, with its
unlimited range of meanings. Instead of a symbolic dictionary, we need
something like what Burke called a grammar and a rhetoric of meaning, a
systematic understanding of how meanings are put together, how they can be
constructed and reconstructed.


It is my sense that this is where the anarchist legacy might most fruitfully
contribute to the work of literary criticism. Because we recognize a certain
continuity of practice between the activities of poiesis and interpretation,
because we see the sense in which a literary text is always an effort to interpret the world, to create a certain experience or coherence, and a literary
analysis is always an effort to create a new textual coherence from the old
one, we can construct our interpretive practices as something other than the
imposition of an all-powerful readerly subject’s design on a passive textual
object or the inscription of an all-powerful textual object on a submissively
receptive subject.

\section{ANARCHIST INTERPRETATION AS NON-VANGUARDIST PRACTICE}


As Goodman remarks, interpretation attains a transformative ‘‘humanistic
power’’ when it becomes ‘‘a two-way affair’’ in which ‘‘both sides risk their
unexpressed presuppositions’’—that is, in a ‘‘dialogue’’ where interpreter
and text ‘‘question’’ one another.\footnote{Goodman, Utopian Essays, 246.} Instead of launching a critique either
from a fixed array of categories or from nowhere, an anarchist reading of the
literary text would seek to enable the text to supply the materials for its own
critique—to manifest the content to be investigated and to specify the methods for reorganizing that content. This is not to say that such a reading would
simply reproduce the surface or self-representation of the text; that would be
anything but radical. Instead, it is to enter a complex struggle with the work,
both to emancipate the reader from his or her static subject position (to allow
the work to surprise the reader, to exceed and undermine his or her predetermined categories), and to liberate the truth of the work from its concealment
(to dislodge it from whatever ideological devices it may yet be held captive
by).


This process of mutual transformation is suggested by a recent polemic in
which Bookchin urges anarchists to reconceptualize anarchism ‘‘in terms of
the changing social contexts of our era.’’ In order to speak to the ‘‘living
problems’’ of particular people, anarchism must be translated into the cultural dialect of whoever needs it; ‘‘rather than . . . resurrect ideas, expressions, slogans and a weary vernacular that belong to eras past,’’ we should
make the effort ‘‘to solidarize with libertarian traditions and concepts that
are clearly relevant to dominated peoples.’’ Bookchin denies that anarchism
can or should be treated ‘‘as a fixed body of theory and practice’’; it ‘‘does
not have the proprietary character of Marxism with its body of definable
texts, commentators, and their offshoots,’’ but is a movement in which a core
ethic is rearticulated time and time again in the historical idioms of particular people in specific struggles—turn-of-the-century Argentinean factory
workers or migrant laborers in the logging camps of the American Northwest,
Spanish peasants in the thirties, militant Black Panthers and Parisian students in the sixties, New England antinuclear activists in in the seventies,
and so on.\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘Anarchism: Past and Present,’’ Institute for Social Ecology, 17 November 2003, \href{http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031117102316395/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.social-ecology.org\Slash{}article.php?story=20031117102316395}.} Along similar lines, David Graeber surmises that this very lack
of a theoretical canon is a prime reason why ‘‘anarchism . . . has made such
small inroads into the academy’’; while Marxism is the invention of an intellectual, ‘‘anarchism, on the other hand, was never really invented by anyone.’’ Proudhon styled his own ‘‘mutualist’’ economic theories after the
example of a Lyons workers’ association, the Mutualists: ‘‘I see, I observe, I
write.’’\footnote{David Graeber, ‘‘The Twilight of Vanguardism,’’ 18 May 2003, \href{http://www.dualpower.net/print.php?sid=61/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.dualpower.net\Slash{}print.php?sid=61} (accessed 2 June 2003); Proudhon, General Idea, 102.} Where anarchists group themselves by some ‘‘organizational principle or form of practice,’’ e.g., ‘‘Anarcho-Syndicalists and Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists and Platformists, Cooperativists, Individualists, and
so on,’’ Marxisms are named for leaders and intellectuals, e.g., ‘‘Leninists,
Maoists, Trotskyites, Gramscians, Althusserians’’ Accordingly, academic
discourse tends to be conducted in the proprietarian language of Marxism,
the language of sectarian vanguards. Speculating on what form anarchism
might take in an academic setting, as a ‘‘non-vanguardist revolutionary intellectual practice,’’ Graeber suggests, like Goodman, that anarchist intellectual practice could take contemporary anthropology as its methodological
model.\footnote{Graeber, ‘‘Twilight of Vanguardism.’’}


Just as the ethnographer’s role consists not in dictating truth to communities from outside them (telling the peasants whether they are a truly revolutionary class or not), but in ‘‘teasing out the hidden symbolic, moral, or
pragmatic logics that underlie certain types of social action, the way people’s
habits and actions makes sense in ways that they are not themselves completely aware of,’’ the anarchist interpreter would make some effort to think
in and through categories drawn from the relevant situation of the text at
hand. Here Graeber’s words recall Proudhon’s declaration that the worker is
also potentially a philosopher, that the radical intellectual’s role is to draw
out the intellectual content that is implicit within the worker’s practical experience: in practice, this would result in something like ‘‘a form of auto-
ethnography, combined, perhaps, with a certain utopian extrapolation’’ of
the potentials implicit within the actual.\footnote{Ibid.}


Such an ethnological approach to interpretation strikingly resembles the
‘‘inductive criticism’’ of which Madelyn Jablon writes in her introduction
to Black Metafiction. She detects an impatience among scholars of African-
American literature with ‘‘the shortcomings of imposing structuralist, post-
structuralist, psychoanalytic and feminist theories on black texts,’’ a process
with implicitly colonial overtones, and notes the emergence of ‘‘an inductive
method of investigation’’: ‘‘Instead of imposing theory on texts, critics begin
with an analysis of the works themselves and extrapolate theory from
them.’’\footnote{Madelyn Jablon, Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African-American Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 1-2.} Practices of theory-imposition, which Graeber would identify as an
essentially vanguardist approach, are by definition inappropriate to an anarchist literary theory. They are also perhaps redundant: for sufficiently attentive and creative readers, literary texts can be seen to already raise the same
issues that another reader would import to them with heavy citations and
terminology borrowed from Lacan or Althusser, Macherey or Bakhtin, Derrida or Foucault. A text does not simply deconstruct itself, much less interpret itself, but in a sense, it does anticipate its own critique, since it emerged
from a creative process of which interpretation and critique are a continuation. To preempt the text out of a fear of mystification, to read it against a
theory that rigidly determines its findings in advance, is to dominate it. It is
possible instead to extrapolate theory from the text itself: not to enter the
reading without theoretical tools, but to use these to discover another set of
tools within the structure of the text—perhaps even the master’s tools with
which one might disassemble the master’s house.


A valuable resource for a dialogical, ethnological, or inductive anarchist
criticism would be Paulo Freire’s philosophy of education, and the work of
Freirean social philosopher Howard Richards. These neo-phenomenological
theorists coherently combine a respect for difference and a certain critical
realism with concrete practices aimed at producing functional unities-
within-difference. Such practices do not take the form of a coercive methodology, as Spanos fears, but neither are they unmethodical. The dialogical
methods propounded by Freire and Richards—beginning, as Goodman recommends, with an investigation of both the context in which dialogue takes
place and the native context or ‘‘life-world’’ of the addressee, and going on
to discover significant ‘‘themes’’ within that context, producing ‘‘hinge
themes’’ to bridge contexts, and improvising a shareable code from those
themes—are readily applicable to literature; and while they align themselves with Marxism, as Alan Carter points out, their attitude is far more
consistent with the anarchist rejection of vanguardism.\footnote{Richards, Letters From Quebec, 2.40.15-16, 2.40.19; Alan Carter, Marx: A Radical Critique (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), 167.} A dialogical researcher, Graeber and Jablon suggest, will avoid the unnecessary and one-
sided imposition of
‘‘invader themes’’—the
‘‘official’’ or
‘‘scientific’’
language that Bakhtin called ‘‘authoritative discourse’’ and that Geertz,
following Heinz Kohut, calls ‘‘experience-distant’’ language.\footnote{Richards, Letters From Quebec, 2.40.18; Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 342-43; Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 57.} Through this
process, one delineates the specific shape of a ‘‘symbolic structure’’ and the
corresponding subject positions it subtends (a subjective reality as experienced by some subject or subjects), not in order to make the empty pluralist
gesture of passively affirming the equal truth-value of all such realities, nor
in order to normalize the errant subject by pointing to the supposedly un-
questionable truth of some objective reality without any reference to subjects, but to open an exchange in which multiple subjects can negotiate a
shared and more complex conception of reality as a common situation in
which they can collectively act.


The attempt to extrapolate critical tools from the text itself is a way of
moving between the passive-receptive and active-critical moments of de
Cleyre’s double reading. This sort of dialogical interchange is precisely the
third way that Bookchin seeks between the aggressive claims of technocracy
and the passivity of deep ecology: nature intervenes in us, and we intervene
in it, hopefully in a spirit of care and openness to the other. Ultimately,
sameness and difference do not contradict but mutually condition one another: ‘‘Diversity and unity do not contradict each other as logical antinomies. To the contrary, unity is the form of diversity, the pattern that gives it
intelligibility and meaning, and hence a unifying principle not only of ecology but of reason itself.’’\footnote{Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, 306-7.} Anarchist readers practice the process of reading
as an encounter with the text in which both text and reader have a potential
for challenge, contestation, and critique, as well as collaboration, cooperation, and change.


Thus, in response to the ethical and epistemological crisis of the human
sciences—a crisis occasioned by the antirepresentational turn within an endeavor that is intrinsically hermeneutical (hence intrinsically representational)—anarchist theory offers a hermeneutical epistemology that is neither
simply antirepresentational (in the contemporary sense) nor simply representational (in the traditional sense), but deeply ethical and ecological in its
outlook.

\chapter{5. Anarchist Hermeneutics as Ethics and Ecology}


PROUDHON REJECTED HEGEL’S NOTION OF SYNTHESIS OR THE AUFHEBEN (OVERCOMING)
of differences, seeing this as a mask for the domination of the other
by the self or of the self by the other, and proposed instead the antinomy or
dynamic balance of these opposing claims, a conversion of mere antagonism
(a competitive relationship) into a productive tension (a cooperative relationship). Anarchist theory thus demands a hermeneutics that avoids domination
of self or other.


In light of these ethical commitments, anarchist interpretive practices can
and should appropriate the techniques and insights of other schools, from
psychoanalysis and semiotics to dialogism and deconstruction. It can do so
without regard to propriety; it ought to do so without also borrowing their
restrictions, their constraints, their limitations. This means that we should
appropriate technique in a critical manner, avoiding a careless eclecticism.


If anarchists are to be theoretical magpies (as, ultimately, all theorists are),
then we must reinscribe what we borrow within a wider sense of purpose.
But what are the limitations of these methods, and what consequences do
they have for the interpretive enterprise?

\section{ONTOLOGY AND METHODOLOGY}


As Kenneth Burke proposes, a methodology (a recipe, however complex,
for ‘‘how, when, and where to look for’’ something) presupposes and entails
an ontology (a theory about ‘‘what to look for, and why’’—i.e., a theory as to
what kinds of things there are to be found).\footnote{Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 68.} Most of the interpretive methods
that have been developed by textual scholars are vitiated to some extent by
the limited concepts of the object that they presuppose. Insofar as interpretation apprehends a text as something produced by human activity, a creative
deed, a speech-act—in short, as an action—then we can produce a typology
of genres of interpretive method sorted by the different categories through
which these methods have apprehended the ontology of the text.


Burke’s famous ‘‘pentad of key terms,’’ as set forth in his Grammar of
Motives, offers a useful framework for just such a typology. ‘‘In a rounded
statement about motives,’’ i.e., a full answer to the question of ‘‘what people
are doing and why they are doing it,’’ which arises when we treat these doings as a readable text (i.e., when we regard them as ‘‘action,’’ the work of
rational creatures who form the field of rhetoric, rather than mere ‘‘motion,’’
the patterned but irrational ongoing happening of the universe, which is not
subject to rhetorical appeal), we are compelled to name the ‘‘act’’ itself in
terms of both the ‘‘agency’’ (the ‘‘means or instruments employed’’) and the
‘‘purpose’’ (the end aimed at), and in terms of both ‘‘the scene,’’ (‘‘the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred’’) and the ‘‘agent’’ (the
‘‘person or kind of person [who] performed the act’’).\footnote{Burke, A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1962), xvii; ‘‘Dramatism,’’ in Drama in Life: The Uses of Communication in Society, ed. James E. Combs and Michael W. Mansfield, 11 (New York: Hastings House, 1976); A Gram- mar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives, xvii.} Thus, we can see the
field of interpretive methodologies as divided into those centered on a notion
of the text as an action through an agency versus those focusing on the purpose served by the textual act (structural versus functional methodologies),
and between those foregrounding the importance of the scene in which the
textual act takes place versus those privileging the agent who acts through
the text (contextual versus rhetorical methodologies).


In my exposition, I have already hinted at the ways in which these four
categories arrange themselves into agonistic binaries, as theories of texts as
means (structural theories) versus theories of texts as fulfilling given ends
(functional theories), or theories of texts as constituted by the not-me (contextual theories) versus theories of texts as constituted by a me (rhetorical
theories). We could also organize them through the rubric of genetic theories
(structural and contextual theories, which emphasize underlying frameworks
and situational determinations behind the textual act) versus quantum theories (rhetorical and functional theories, which highlight the agency of the
subject in its moment of textual action). Opposition, of course, entails a relationship between the opposed parties, but it also means their mutual striving
to exclude one another. Each of these genres of methodology essentializes
certain aspects of the text-as-act (or act-as-text) rather than others.


The question to consider in reviewing these genres of theory is this: given
the ethical parameters of anarchist scholarship defined by theorists such as
Goodman, Bookchin, and Graeber, which of these approaches, if any, is most
appropriate for the anarchist intellectual, whose function is not to dictate to
the text but to tease out its own implicit logic in a utopian extrapolation of
the potential from the actual?

\section{RHETORICAL METHODOLOGIES}


We can treat the text as the act of an agent, the deed of a doer, practicing a
rhetorical method of analysis. Shucking the traditional dichotomy of rhetoric
versus literature, we read the text as an act of expression or communication.


Instead of assuming that literature is entirely unlike rhetoric, we can read a
literary text as if it were a work of rhetoric, presupposing an audience, crafted
for the purpose of persuasion. This is to interpret the text in terms of some
extratextual cognition or emotion, as the expression of some thought or wish
by the author (even if this author is collective).


To make a rhetorical interpretation of a literary text, we treat it as an instance of rhetoric—as if it were implicitly stating a claim about some topic
and presenting a kind of argument for that claim. In other words, we parse
the ‘‘symbolic act’’ of the text as a statement. ‘‘A very clear way to illustrate
the meaning of an act,’’ Burke writes, ‘‘is to say, ‘The actor, by this act, is
saying, in effect . . .’—then give a declarative sentence. Thus the practice
of shaking hands after a game says in effect: ‘There are no hard feelings.


The rivalry does not extend beyond the confines of the game’ ’’ (Burke, The
Philosophy of Literary Form 447).


In literature, implicit statements can be deduced at several different levels. Since, as Irving Howe writes, ‘‘when a writer works out a plot, he tacitly
assumes that there is a rational structure in human conduct, that this structure can be ascertained, and that doing so he is enabled to provide his work
with a sequence of order,’’ narrative has an intrinsically rhetorical, persuasive function; Charles Johnson goes so far as to assert that ‘‘each plot—how
events happen and why—is also an argument. To plot well is to say, ‘This is
how the world works,’ that if you place this person A in this situation B, the
result will be event C.’’\footnote{Iving Howe, quoted in Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xii; Charles Johnson, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 32.} Narrative provides what Stephen Toulmin calls a
‘‘warrant’’ for this implicit claim (specifying the features of the ‘‘data’’ that
relate it to the ‘‘conclusion’’), and what Charles Sanders Peirce calls a
‘‘ground’’ (specifying the ‘‘respect’’ in which a ‘‘sign stands for something,
its object’’).\footnote{Stephen Edelston Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 98; Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2.228.} In nonnarrative texts, the warrant or semiotic ground appears
in the relationships we are led to infer between the words juxtaposed on the
page, the reason we perceive them as going together.


To read rhetorically, then, is to read the text as an implicit argument—a
justification for the crime, perhaps—for certain claims (even if these are
tacit or ambiguous), using figures, affective appeals, and narrative logic as
the reasoning and evidence with which it makes its case. We do so by distinguishing ‘‘theme’’ and ‘‘thesis,’’ identifying a topic we could take it to be
about, then deducing what it seems to argue for regarding this topic.\footnote{Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, ‘‘What Is Theme And How Do We Get At It?’’ in Thematics: New Approaches, ed. Claude Bremond et al. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 10.} Moreover, we can ask for the warrant that advances this argument—i.e., what
feature of the data is being seized on to universalize it (within the text’s
fictive universe) so that it applies to the implicit claim—and ask to what
extent this universality is particularized, historicized, limited, tempered by
implicit ‘‘qualifiers.’’\footnote{Toulmin, The Uses of Argument, 101.}


This does not necessarily reduce to looking for the author’s intention, although intentional dimensions of meaning are included in its domain. However, looking for an argument in the text doesn’t require us to postulate a
conscious authorial intention; many of the arguments we make on a daily
basis are gestural, habitual, unconscious, and unintended. Nor are we necessarily supposing that the text will make a clear and univocal argument: it
could be that the text expresses more than one idea about a given topic—
perhaps even contradictory ideas. This method also opens onto another infinity: in theory, given the flexibility of ‘‘aboutness,’’ a new characterization
of the ‘‘topic’’ can be given for every context into which the text can be
placed, and the set of possible contexts is boundless.\footnote{Menachem Brinker, ‘‘Theme and Interpretation,’’ in Thematics, 37-38; Stephen David Ross, A Theory of Art: Inexhaustibility By Contrast (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 201.}

\section{STRUCTURAL METHODOLOGIES}


Tools are, of course, created by toolmakers for their own use, but it is also
true that they can suggest and even constrain certain kinds of uses; the
means employed to an end can supply and even supplant the intended ends
themselves. Language, as an ‘‘implement of action,’’ is not to be seen as a
transparent or passive medium; in some sense, it must always overtake, become, be its own message. Thus, since symbolic materials form the agency
through which the writer must express himself or herself, we need to investigate the forces arising from within the ‘‘writer’s medium,’’ the ways in which,
as the sociologist Hugh Duncan insists, rather than being motivated by
‘‘some kind of experience ‘beyond’ symbols,’’ they become ‘‘a motivational
dimension in [their] own right.’’ We come to see the invention as the mother
of necessities—indeed, as a creation that to some extent invents its own creator. Rather than seeing the agency as derivative from and subordinate to
purpose, we see it as primary, producing its own aims, shaping the agent in
its own image—perhaps to our peril; carried away by our own figures of
speech, believing in the flatness of our maps, we sail off, looking for the
edges of the earth. The power of a device such as metaphor to compel attitudes and action is profound: entire fields of thought and discourse, as Burke
remarks, in terms reminiscent of Borges and Derrida, ‘‘are hardly more than
the patient repetition . . . of a fertile metaphor.’’\footnote{Burke, Counter-Statement, 54-55; Permanence and Change, 176; Duncan, ‘‘Introduction’’ in Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Indianapolis: Babbs- Merrill), xxi; Burke, Language As Symbolic Action, 9, 15; A Grammar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives, 276, 317; Permanence and Change, 35.} By establishing relationships between the things it orders, a text, perhaps regardless of (or even
contrary to) the intentions of its author, embodies certain ideas about how
the universe is ordered; it performatively enacts, rather than constatively
conveys, certain ideas, certain meanings.


Linguistic devices structure the world for us, giving things shape and
form, enabling us to act and indeed compelling action. Despite the astounding diversity of these devices, the ‘‘two basic dialectic resources’’ any language affords are those of ‘‘merger and division’’—the structure of categories
that dictates ‘‘what goes with what’’ and ‘‘what is vs. what.’’ In effect,
through this activity of ‘‘pulling bits of reality apart and treating them like
wholes,’’ the agency of language constructs the very context within which we
operate: ‘‘The universe would appear to be something like a cheese; it can
be sliced in an infinite number of ways—and when one has chosen his own
pattern of slicing, he finds that other men’s cuts fall at the wrong places.’’\footnote{Burke, Permanence and Change 95; Language As Symbolic Action, 425; Philosophy of Literary Form, 20, 69; Permanence and Change, 103.}


This pattern or ‘‘equational structure’’ is to some extent inscribed in the
lexicon of each discursive community, but this community is not to be conceived as a crystal, an immobile unity predetermining the position of each
of its component molecules; rather, within it, different discourses can proliferate, each with its own particular usages (as Burke remarks, ‘‘there are
cultures within cultures’’), and within a particular discourse—say, literature—a particular text creates its own structure through its ‘‘internal organization,’’ its narrative or spatial arrangement of elements into patterns.\footnote{Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 89; Permanence and Change, 35; Counter- Statement, 161; Attitudes Toward History, 191, 195.}


While a text may always borrow its materials from a preexisting language
and a ready-made set of cultural codes, it may also tinker with these systems,
making new combinations and splitting up traditional groupings to give us a
different way of seeing the world; indeed, we never really use a word ‘‘in its
mere dictionary sense’’ because it will always acquire different ‘‘overtones’’
by being placed in the ‘‘company’’ of other words, what Bakhtin called the
‘‘dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words.’’\footnote{Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 35; Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 276.} That
is to say: a textual act doesn’t only use its native language, or duplicate the
particular system of symbols that makes up its native culture; by entering
into a meaning-altering context (and every passing moment provides, to
whatever small degree, just such a new context), it reconstructs the language, it ‘‘codifies reality’’ in ways that can differ from the dominant codifications of the parent culture. Thus we might see literature, as Richards sees
philosophy, as ‘‘a meaning-making activity,’’ a project that produces new
relationships between old signs. In this way, Goodman argues, ‘‘the power
to speak and hear continually modifies the code to say sentences that do
mean.’’\footnote{Richards, Letters From Quebec, 1.1.6; Goodman, Speaking and Language, 33.}


According to Burke, paying this kind of careful attention to the way that
words transfer or share their connotative charges is key to the enterprise
of interpretation. The first interpretive move is to ‘‘watch for the dramatic
alignment’’ of things, looking for the associations that an author builds be-
tween elements.\footnote{Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 20, 69.} This is, in fact, a key insight of structuralist literary theo-
rists like Roland Barthes: if a text is organized like a language, it can be
analyzed like one. We are examining the text as if it were a language tha
has its own way of grouping and splitting things, its own way of carving up
the universe. It is by tracing these webs of association that we can start to
reconstruct a specific text’s internal thesaurus, observing which terms are
being used as synonymous, or identical, and which appear to be antonyms,
or opposites.


For example, in Thomas Pynchon’s novel, The Crying of Lot 49, ‘‘inside’’
and ‘‘outside’’ are key terms, dramatically aligned against one another. They
figure in Oedipa Maas’s most significant moments of realization, e.g., when
she is trying to understand the implications of the enormous conspiracy she
has stumbled upon: ‘‘The act of metaphor then was both a thrust at truth and
a lie, depending on where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.’’\footnote{Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper \& Row, 1986), 129.} Normally, we use ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside’’ as slang for certain degrees of power
and knowledge (which are the two things that make for a conspiracy, a secret
organization that is powerful because it is unknown to the many): we say that
insiders are those who are powerful and\Slash{}or knowledgeable, and outsiders
those who are not in the know, who do not have access to power. However,
to read ‘‘inside, safe’’ as synonymous with knowledge or ‘‘outside, lost’’ as
synonymous with ignorance would be to misread Pynchon—for in the world
of The Crying of Lot 49, it appears that the most powerless outsiders (poor
people, despised minorities, social outcasts, misfits, screwups, and other
‘‘lost’’ types) are the ones who know the most about the conspiracy; it is in
her night-journeys through the ghettoes and the slums that white, middle-
class Oedipa reaches her most intense moments of revelation. For Pynchon,
it is one’s position as an outsider, the position of alienation or marginality,
that gives one access to a certain kind of truth; those who stay safe inside
middle-class suburban Kinneret-Among-The-Pines are systematically blind
to what is really going on. We can only understand this if we suspend our
presuppositions about the connotations of the words ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside’’
enough to notice how they actually function in the text at hand, whereupon
we observe that their culturally assigned relationship has been deliberately
and systematically inverted. It is in this manner that Burke insists we should
‘‘get our equations inductively, by tracing down the interrelationships as revealed by the concrete structure of the book itself’’—in other words, making
no firm assumptions about what a given element means until we have seen
how it functions in this particular instance: ‘‘Thus, if we want to say that one
principle equals ‘light,’ and the other equals ‘darkness,’ we must be able to
extract this interpretation by explicit quotation from the work itself.’’\footnote{Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 69, 70.}

\section{CONTEXTUAL METHODOLOGIES}


If the structural analyst is a bit like a sports announcer commenting on
the brilliance of each play in a particular game, this would seem to exclude
from view the rules and parameters of the game itself, the boundaries of the
field on which it is played. So Burke calls for a ‘‘statistical’’ assessment of
meaning that asks what words and texts represent by asking what norms they
are ‘‘representative’’ of, interpreting the text as an act taken in a situation (a
particular time and place, a set of circumstances, an occasion, a moment,
a setting), ultimately reading it as the effect of a given set of social relations,
a time and place.\footnote{Ibid., 18-19.}


The goal of contextual interpretation is not only to discover equational
structures in the text or describe how these patterns operate, but to trace
them back to structures and patterns outside the text—whether these are
inherited aesthetic forms (like literary archetypes), large-scale social structures (like sexism), or habitual patterns of thought and feeling in the psyche
of the author (like the Oedipal Complex)—attempting to sum up or capture
the nature of this resemblance, what Raymond Williams calls the ‘‘homology’’ between text and context.\footnote{Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 105.} The textual instance, the text as parole, is
taken to be a moment in a larger system, a social langue; it is a fragment of
some signifying whole, synecdochically reflecting the social totality. Contextual analysis sees the text not so much as the linguistic production of a world
as the culture’s reproduction of itself.


If a rhetorical analysis reads a literary text as an act of persuasion, fore-
grounding the aspect of persuasion rhetoricians call logos, identified most
closely with the ‘‘message’’ or content, contextual analysis foregrounds the
aspect of pathos or ‘‘audience’’—the collectively held ‘‘values and beliefs’’
that are the condition for any successful appeal.\footnote{John C. Bean and John D. Ramage, Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric With Readings (Needham Heights, MA: Allyn \& Bacon, 1998), 82.} From this perspective,
the speaker does not appear as an ‘‘agent’’ expressing a ‘‘meaning’’ formed
independently from the ‘‘audience’’ to which it is directed; rather, one is
dependent, for one’s very ability to speak, on the preexisting structure of
meanings within which one comes to speak, think, act, and be. ‘‘The so-
called ‘I,’ ’’ as Burke comments, is merely a function of ‘‘corporate we’s,’’
and indeed, ‘‘persuasion’’ must be reconceived in terms of the ‘‘identification’’ of self with others: ‘‘You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk
his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.’’\footnote{Burke, Attitudes Toward History 264; A Grammar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives, 579.} One is a priori embedded in a ‘‘scene’’ that
determines what one can say and mean, for it is only to the extent that others
already participate in an economy of shared beliefs and expressive conventions that one can effectively persuade them of anything; an ‘‘ideology’’ or a
‘‘culture’’ is nothing less than ‘‘the nodus of beliefs and judgements which
the artist can exploit for his effects.’’\footnote{Burke, Counter-Statement, 161.} In short, it is not possible to mean
something radically new; all meanings are contextual, bound to a particular
time, place, language, culture, situation.


If it is possible to transcend this structure, it is not through the introduction of ‘‘new principles’’ ab novo but through the ‘‘casuistic stretching’’ of
‘‘old principles,’’ the ‘‘stealing back and forth of symbols’’ between warring
social forces, the exploitation of the contradictions and ambiguities in a
given structure. Just as the agent, insofar as its very subjectivity is the product of social and historical processes, is not a coherent whole but a collection
of disparate and conflicting forces, any ideological and cultural structure capable of constituting it is inevitably a more or less unstable ‘‘aggregate of
beliefs,’’ many of which are ‘‘at odds with one another’’ at any given time,
rather than ‘‘a harmonious structure of beliefs or assumptions.’’ Contexts are
constantly changing, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes radically. Thus,
we are to seek not only the ‘‘internal consistency’’ of the relations between
clusters of signs, but to look for transformations of those relationships.\footnote{Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 229, 328; Counter-Statement, 146; Attitudes Toward History, 264; Counter-Statement, 147, 163; Terms For Order (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 172.}


For instance, in Tom Godwin’s classic 1954 science-fiction tale ‘‘The
Cold Equations,’’ which concerns the dilemma posed for a male spaceship
pilot who discovers that either the ‘‘girl’’ stowaway, who is innocent of ill
intention, must be thrown overboard, or both he and she and the colonists to
whom he is delivering a vaccine must die, the rhetorical force of the story is
clear enough: this is the expression of a stoic creed, the sad wisdom that
recognizes the universe as a ‘‘cold’’ system of natural laws that do not recognize our moral purposes. From the perspective of a structural analysis, however, we can note the almost obsessively symmetrical clustering of binary
oppositions around masculine and feminine ‘‘principles’’ (male rationality is
‘‘cold,’’ female emotionality is ‘‘warm’’; space is masculine territory, Earth is
feminine, domestic space; and so on).\footnote{Tom Godwin, ‘‘The Cold Equations,’’ in In Dreams Awake: A Historical-Critical Anthology of Science Fiction, ed. Leslie Fiedler, 123, 125, 134 (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1975).} In this sense, contextually speaking,
Godwin’s vision of the future is really a reflection of its own present, a distorted representation of Eisenhower-era gender codes that projects these
onto the universe itself, rewriting social conventions as natural law. However, this is not yet a complete account of the ways in which ‘‘The Cold
Equations’’ reproduces its context, for if we look closer, we can see that its
very attempt to eternalize a contingent set of social relations is undone by
historical forces. At a key moment, all the carefully constructed symmetry
chiasmatically demolishes itself: the stowaway’s transgression against gender boundaries is rectified by her expulsion from the ship’s ‘‘warm’’ interior
into ‘‘cold’’ space, and the pilot’s ‘‘cold’’ rationality is feminized by his
‘‘warm’’ internal experience, his emotions of guilt and regret.\footnote{Ibid., 145-46, 138.} The text’s
law is upheld by its own violation; the equational structure follows its own
logic to the demonstration of its absurdity, collapsing inward upon itself.


Statement and structure alike are overcome by the instability of the determining context, the general text within which we all are caught.

\section{FUNCTIONAL METHODOLOGIES}


But pragmatists will insist that a culture is simply the set of particular
ways that people in a given time and place have found of getting on with the
business of living together, getting done what needs to be done. It is the
‘‘what needs to be done’’ that becomes the focus of functional methodologies.


To treat the text as an action taken to realize some purpose, a tool crafted for
some use, is to analyze it in the way that an engineer might analyze an unfamiliar tool or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, a machine: ‘‘Given a certain
effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?’’\footnote{Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 3.} Asking these utilitarian and pragmatic
questions about a text, we look for how it has been or can be placed in the
service of some individual or social group or set of values or interests, how
it can be used to achieve some goals or aims, reading the text not as a sign
with a referent but as an instrument with powers. This is to see a text as a
machine or a tool with multiple applications—purposes for which it serves,
whether according to an author’s designs or not, as an instrument. Texts in
this sense are ‘‘equipments’’ for acting in and on the world.\footnote{Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 304.}


Machines, tools, only receive their meaning from their uses: as Rorty com-
ments, screwdrivers can be used ‘‘to drive screws,’’ but they can just as well
be used in other ways—‘‘to pry open cardboard boxes,’’ for instance. In the
functional register, making a statement about what a text ‘‘means’’ is analo-
gous to saying that the amount of money in my wallet ‘‘means’’ that I can
afford to buy one china doll, or three tacos, or five packages of batteries, etc.


Money, too, lacks meaning apart from its enactment in purchases; in this
sense, James spoke of the utility of a representation as its ‘‘cash-value.’’ Just
as instrumentalism and functionalism call for what Spanos calls ‘‘problem-
solution’’ thinking, an functionalist analysis of a text will ask what problems
it offers to solve: the range of possible answers is the range of possible mean-
ings.\footnote{Rorty, ‘‘The Pragmatist’s Progress,’’ 103; William James, Writings, 1902-1910 (New York: Viking, 1987), 573; Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 85.}

\section{METHODOLOGICAL LIMITATIONS}


Each of these roles, as a performative translation of presuppositions into
practices, is marked by the same old pernicious genetic\Slash{}quantum binary—
the opposition that sets the perspective of being (in which subjects are only
passive epiphenomena of an object world) against that of doing (in which
the object world is only the pliable fantasy of subjects). Since both of these
perspectives are dominatory, as Spanos would say, they give rise to a ‘‘blindness’’ proportional to the ‘‘insight’’ each makes possible.

\section{TOWARD ECOLOGICAL READING}


In the face of durable antinomies, I appeal to the wisdom of poetry.


In ‘‘Blanco,’’ Octavio Paz writes: ‘‘The spirit \Slash{} is an invention of the body \Slash{}
The body \Slash{} is an invention of the world \Slash{} The world \Slash{} is an invention of the
spirit.’’\footnote{Octavio Paz, Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987, ed. Eliot Weinberger, trans. Eliot Weinberger et al. (New York: New Directions, 1987), 328, 329.}


If the contradiction we are confronting is a contest between the
limited truth of the statement that the spirit is an invention of the world, on
the one hand, and the limited truth of the statement that the world is an
invention of the spirit on the other, then Paz is right to make of the static
contradiction a flowing cycle by postulating the body as the crucial overlap
between the mutually opposed categories of spirit and world, the zone in
which they coexist. As Martin Buber writes, ‘‘the world dwells in me as a
notion’’—Walter Kaufmann notes that Buber here uses the word Vorstellung,
also translatable as representation—‘‘just as I dwell in it as a thing. But that
does not mean that it is in me, just as I am not in it. The world and I include
each other reciprocally.’’\footnote{Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 141, 141n9.} If we are to transform a fruitless contest between
subject and object into a complementary relationship, it is crucial that we
fully acknowledge this mutual inclusion: our embodiment, our embed-
dedness, our interdependence with others and with the world as other. This
is where an anarchist ethic meets the ethic of ecology.


Thus, a truly anarchist hermeneutics cannot be content to treat the text as
statement or structure, reflection or instrument; the fullest anarchist analysis
of a text would have to place the interpreter in the role of ecologist. Much as
Ernst Haeckel defined ‘‘ecology’’ as the sum total of the sciences, I would
argue that ecological methodology should be seen as not merely another ago-
nistic category in a catalogue of methodologies, but as their dynamic synthe-
sis.\footnote{Howard Richards, ‘‘Comments on Martin Heidegger’s ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,’ ’’ \href{http://www.howardri.org/heidegger.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.howardri.org\Slash{}Heidegger.html} (accessed 21 March 2004).}


Burke implies as much when he extends his pentadic model into a
‘‘hexad’’ including a sixth term, ‘‘attitude’’: ‘‘With regard to the Dramatistic
pentad (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose), I have found one modification
useful for certain kinds of analysis
[Namely,] I have sometimes added
the term ‘attitude’ to the above list of five major terms.’’\footnote{Burke, A Grammar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives, 443.} This shift seems
to have come as Burke became uneasy about his pentadic reorganization of
older, more complex rhetorical schemes: ‘‘Recall the scholastic hexameter
listing the questions to be answered in the treatment of a topic: Who, what,
where, by what means, why, how, when: quis, quid, quibus auxiliis, cur, quo
modo, quando. The ‘who’ is obviously covered by agent. Scene covers the
‘where’ and the ‘when.’ The ‘why’ is purpose. ‘How’ and ‘by what means’ fall
under agency. All that is left to take care of is act in our terms and ‘what’ in
the scholastic formula.’’\footnote{Ibid., 228.} But does ‘‘quo modo’’ really reduce to another aspect of ‘‘agency’’? Burke decides that it does not: ‘‘ ‘attitude’ would designate the manner (quo modo). To build something with a hammer would
involve an instrument, or ‘agency’; to build with diligence would involve an
attitude, a ‘how.’ ’’ The distinction is crucial. Attitudes may be something
one ‘‘shapes,’’ the ‘‘policies’’ that one ‘‘adopts’’ in view of a universe that
includes ‘‘anguish, injustice, disease, and death’’; however, as Burke’s invocation of such overwhelming forces as ‘‘anguish’’ and ‘‘death’’ indicates, attitudes are not necessarily tools manipulated by an autonomous subject who
stands apart from, over, and against a world of objects.\footnote{Ibid., 443; Attitudes Toward History, 3.} The concept of attitude implies not only operating but being operated on. At the same time, we
do ‘‘adopt’’ and ‘‘shape’’ attitudes—in an alternating blend of the voluntaristic and the involuntary, the conscious and the unconscious, that no other
term in the hexad seems to encompass.


Interestingly, Goodman also identifies a close relation between aesthetic
‘‘manner’’ and ethical ‘‘attitude’’ (or, significantly, ‘‘attitudinal meaning’’)
and sees literary styles as the embodiment of ‘‘powerful world-outlooks’’ that
allow authors and readers to ‘‘find meaning’’ in the world they look out on:
from this perspective, ‘‘a literary method . . . is a moral hypothesis,’’ presented as if ‘‘it has the reality of necessity.’’ Just as dreams are the unconscious mind’s way of responding to the problems we face in our waking lives,
Goodman suggests, a work of literature is an author’s (and perhaps also a
reader’s) way of coping with a ‘‘situation’’—in Ernest Hemingway’s case,
the trauma of surviving World War I. Goodman implies that Hemingway’s
‘‘passive’’ style of writing, using short declarative sentences that make it
seem as if the characters merely experience events rather than actively participate in them, enacts a strategy for dealing with an overwhelming world
by becoming ‘‘stoic,’’ hardened, inert.\footnote{Goodman, Creator Spirit Come!: The Literary Essays of Paul Goodman, ed. Taylor Stoehr (New York: Free Life Editions, 1977), 22-28, 31, italics mine; Speaking and Lan- guage, 181.}


The profoundest level on which a text proposes a ‘‘solution’’ is in its representation of some feature of life in a context as a ‘‘problem’’ in a manner that
implicitly endorses a particular ‘‘attitude’’ that we should take in response.
Burke suggests that as we locate ourselves in a situation—a ‘‘universe’’ and
a moment of ‘‘history’’—that includes ‘‘anguish, injustice, disease, and
death,’’ we create works of art that shape our responses to the situation:
‘‘One constructs his [or her] notion of the universe or history, and shapes
attitudes in keeping.’’\footnote{Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 3.} For Hemingway and his contemporaries, ‘‘the problem’’—if we can call it a problem—is that the twentieth-century industrialized world seems more complicated and dangerous than it used to be; it
produces war, crime, and corruption, and it lacks the social solidarity and
religious certainty that traditional societies enjoyed. One solution is a kind
of nostalgia for the lost tradition—the sort of rejection of modern life that
Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, and Pound exemplify in their poetry and novels. This
attitude of horrified rejection is, at times, so intense that it identifies the
forward movement of time with death itself: ‘‘Consume my heart away,’’
writes Yeats; ‘‘sick with desire \Slash{} And fastened to a dying animal \Slash{} It knows
not what it is; and gather me \Slash{} Into the artifice of eternity.’’\footnote{William Butler Yeats, ‘‘Sailing to Byzantium,’’ in The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 21-24.} Another
solution—Hemingway’s—is to accept modern life stoically, to endure it. As
Scholes notes, this stoic attitude can extend to ‘‘the aestheticizing of death
itself’’: Hemingway’s descriptions of bullfights and warfare seem to invite us
to glory in depictions of slaughter.\footnote{Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 72-73.} Psychoanalytically, we could say that
this style of writing plays out a fantasy in which one saves oneself from pain
by pretending to be an inanimate object, a thing—in effect, by playing
dead.\footnote{Goodman, Speaking and Language, 181.}


To see literature as ‘‘a meaning-making activity,’’ in this sense, is to see
it as an attitude-forming activity, a way of negotiating the manner in which
and degree to which one accepts or rejects the situation one finds oneself in.


It is not, by this token, to call it a mere game and thereby to dismiss it as
unimportant; rather, for a theorist like Goodman, ‘‘speech is a presence, a
force, an act’’ in itself, and art is ‘‘the evoking and displacing and projecting
of dormant desires by means of some representation.’’ The ‘‘force’’ of art, its
power to motivate ‘‘desires,’’ is visible in the very ubiquity of art in the age
of mass media: our seemingly unaesthetic society is in fact awash in ‘‘floods
of printed matter, merchandising pictures, cartoons,’’ etc., most of which
function in one way or another to mediate social conflicts, reinforce social
mores, and perpetuate ‘‘audience passivity.’’ The prominent role of art in
securing power arrangements is evidence enough of its representational
power.\footnote{Goodman, Creator Spirit Come, 80-81, 137.}


In an important essay, de Cleyre, too, chides the vulgar materialists of her
day for representing representations as ‘‘shifting, unreal reflections, having
naught to do in the determination of Man’s life, but so many mirror appearances of certain material relations, wholly powerless to act upon the course
of material things’’—a metaphysics for which ‘‘ideas are but attendant phenomena, impotent to determine the actions or relations of life, as the image
of the glass which should say to the body it reflects: ‘I shall shape thee.’ ’’


However, much as in Lacan’s account of the mirror stage, the mirror does
instruct the body it reflects, and the essay goes on to explore the causal powers of ‘‘Dominant Ideas’’ to dominate (or facilitate) the material world.\footnote{de Cleyre, Selected Works, 82-84.} As
de Cleyre suggests, we shouldn’t allow the word symbolic to occlude the word
action in the phrase symbolic action, or the say that a symbolic solution to a
problem is merely imaginary; it would be a mistake to assume that since
literature is all about manipulating symbols, it simply amounts to finding
imaginary solutions to real problems—a naïve realist prejudice in favor of
unmediated presence that perhaps underlies much antirepresentationalism.


What literature does, in offering us another way to cope with reality, is what
culture itself does—and if, as the anthropologists argue, we can’t live in this
world without the mediation of culture, we shouldn’t regard literature as a
dispensable mediation either. Furthermore, we can easily see that many of
our real problems are rooted in faulty symbolization: flawed concepts and
beliefs promote social practices that give rise to conflict, violence, and misery, where more adequate ones might enable the negotiation of conflicts, the
avoidance of violence, and the attainment of justice in our relations. The
seemingly abstract business of symbol-manipulation is closely related to action in the material world. As Burke writes, ‘‘it is an act for you to attempt
changing your attitudes, or the attitudes of others. Our philosophers, poets,
and scientists act in the code of names by which they simplify or interpret
reality. These names shape our relationships with our fellows.’’\footnote{Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 4.} No less
than science or philosophy, literature is a response to problems posed by the
material and social conditions, an adaptation.


In place of the autonomous subject and the heteronomous object, then, we
have an organism, a node of self-organization in a self-organizing ecosystem.


As Timothy Crusius writes, ‘‘Burke ‘saves’ the individual’’ as a self-
constituting entity even while recognizing that this subject, seen from another angle, is an object; ‘‘in our thrownness, in our being caught up in trans-
personal forces beyond our control and mostly preconscious, unconscious,
or nonconscious, we still do act. Burke’s individual is an agent. Constructed,
s\Slash{}he also constructs.’’\footnote{Timothy W. Crusius, Kenneth Burke and the Conversation After Philosophy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 41.}


One works with a hammer; one works with diligence. The preposition with
is the same and not the same, altered by the company it keeps as it slides
from one noun to the other: one works on materials through the instrumental-
ity of a hammer; one works in a spirit of diligence. The difference is under-
scored by Bookchin’s summary of Dorothy Lee’s analysis of concepts of
equality and freedom implicit in the Wintu language: ‘‘She notes that terms
commonly expressive of coercion in modern languages are arranged, in
Wintu syntax, to denote cooperative behavior instead. A Wintu mother, for
example, does not ‘take’ a baby into the shade; she goes with it. A chief does
not ‘rule’ his people; he stands with them.’’ The Wintu way of relating agent
and scene, agency and purpose, evokes a mutualistic, reciproal relationship
between spirit and world.\footnote{Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, 44-45, italics on ‘‘with’’ mine.} Just as the body, for Paz, links the subjectivity it
produces and the objectivity that produces it, so attitude stands as the
threshold between the two perspectives that have come to dominate interpre-
tive thought, the mutually alienated domains of being and doing. This
threshold, this excluded middle, is the ground from which an ecological interpretation might begin.


Treating a text ecologically entails an awareness of intentionality, purposiveness, and freedom (the organism’s adaptation of the environment to itself)
together with an awareness of determinacy, reactivity, and communal being
(the organism’s adaptation of itself to its environment). It means thinking of
the text both as an organism cohabitating the environment in which one lives
and as a potentially habitable space to inhabit—something one lives with
and within. To read as an ecologist is to examine the text as a sign whose
potential meanings are the entire range of functions that it has fulfilled and
might yet fulfill for the entire range of subjects engaged with it. This is to
investigate the text as a formative nexus of relationships (attitudes, ideologies, worldviews, Weltanschauungen, paradigms, moods, mindsets, etc.). It
is, in Goodman’s sense, to investigate the text as a mode of situational
coping.


An ecological interpretation, instead of simply naming particular patterns
of identification and division in the text, tries to generalize about the text’s
‘‘representation of life.’’ That is, it recognizes the fact that ‘‘we live more or
less in stories,’’ and that the stories we tell shape the life we live: even if, as
Goodman argues, ‘‘the thesis of Benjamin Whorf, that the language determines the metaphysics of the tribe and what people can think . . . was too
sweeping,’’ since ‘‘language is checked by non-verbal experience,’’ there is
truth in the observation that as we use language, we ‘‘focus [our] experience
and define and limit [our] thoughts’’ through its signifying agency. Thus,
every text, through its very ‘‘style of speech,’’ proposes an implicit ‘‘hypothesis about how the world is’’—one that offers to help us to deal with the very
‘‘experience’’ that we call ‘‘non-verbal.’’\footnote{Peter Lamborn Wilson, ‘‘Amoral Responsibility.’’ Science Fiction EYE 8 (Winter 1991): 57; Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1988), 14-15; Goodman, Speaking and Language, 171-72.}


To look for the ‘‘way of seeing’’ the text ‘‘embodies,’’ or for its ‘‘world
vision,’’ as Lucien Goldmann calls it, means to try to spell out not just the
ways in which the text is related to some significant context, but to articulate,
as far as possible, the ‘‘whole complex of ideas, aspirations, and feelings’’
through which the text offers to relate us to the world. The important thing
to remember, in spite of the fact that theorists like Goldmann and Berger
tend to name it through metaphors of vision, is that this mode of investigation
is never merely spectatorial; what we are interested in is the range of poten-
tial attitudes suggested and enabled by the text, a way of seeing as it could
inform a ‘‘way of being.’’\footnote{John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 10; Lucien Goldmann, quoted in Roger Webster, Studying Literary Theory (UK: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 71; Good- man, Speaking and Language, 172.} What we try to do through our ecological and
ethical engagement is to spell out what kinds of relationship a text encour-
ages us to build between ourselves and the world that it ‘‘frames’’ for us. We
seek simultaneously for genetic and quantum meanings, casting back into
the history from which the text emerged, projecting into the text’s possible
future development.


Anarchist hermeneutics as ecological interpretation is an ethical interpretive practice, balancing the claims of self and other. It avoids a one-sided,
reductive featuring of textuality (the written and the act of reading) as either
purely active, an instrument for aggressively acting on the world outside of
any determination, or purely passive, a reaction, reflection, response, symptom, or outcome, the result of supra-purposive forces—since texts clearly
can be and are both. Ecological reading affirms embeddedness and embodiment (the unconscious, involuntary, and supra-individual) as well as intervention and transformation (consciousness, choice, and individual agency).

\section{CONCLUSION: FROM ANARCHIST READING TO ANARCHIST WRITING}


All of this has implications for questions of representation in aesthetics.


If representation is not merely an illusion, a play of signifiers with no relation
to concrete life and practice, but is the inescapable medium of human life
and action, then we must reconsider aesthetic programs that have been
premised on the rejection of representation as illusionism. If a work of art
proposes not only a game of form, an implicit statement about a topic, a
significant cultural pattern, and a set of use-values, but an entire ecological
and ethical way of being in the form of a representation of life, then our
aesthetics must be critically informed by the way we desire to be, the form
of life we want to live. But if the antirepresentationalist problematic has cast
a long shadow over questions of reading, they have equally cast doubt on the
enterprise of writing and aesthetic creation as a whole. Once again, we will
have to retrace and rethink the historical processes that brought us to this
point.

\part{Part II: Aesthetics}

\chapter{6. The Fate of Representation, the Fate of Critique}



\begin{quote}


Our culture is altogether on the guide-book model; Shakespeare has four
stars, Milton three, Donne and Blake one. We do not stop to ask on what
system, and by whom, the stars were awarded.


—Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art



\end{quote}


THE ANSWERS WE GIVE TO THE QUESTION OF INTERPRETATION WILL CONDITION
how we think about the possibilities of the aesthetic. If the text is, epistemologically speaking, a nothing, as neo-pragmatists suggest, then there is almost nothing to say about what texts should be or do, since we have decided
a priori that they cannot be or do anything. Here the question of whether
‘‘the subaltern’’ can ‘‘speak’’ acquires a certain keenness, as when Santiago
Colás considers the implications of antirepresentationalism for the aesthetics
of ‘‘testimonio,’’ the first-person literature of witness written by a nonliterary
person in ‘‘a native voice’’; if representations are inevitably self-referential,
then of what value can a testimonio be? Must a testimonio such as that of
Rigoberta Menchú either make a false promise to represent a pure, unadulterated, authentic history, or else ground itself in some transcendent position
‘‘beyond representation,’’ as George Yúdice argues? Could there be an
authoritarian subtext in Menchú’s claim to speak for or represent the experience of her Guatemalan Indian community—a claim perhaps epistemologically undermined by the very fact that Menchú is writing, a fact that already
makes her ‘‘unrepresentative’’ of this community?\footnote{Santiago Colás, ‘‘What’s Wrong With Representation?: Testimonio and Democratic Culture,’’ in The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 161, 170, 161, 170, 162.}


More generally, Colás raises the question: must a radical aesthetic either
‘‘reject representation altogether,’’ or else simply ‘‘return to representation’’
like the rest of the demoralized and defeated Latin American left wing? Is
there yet, as Colás suggests, the possibility of ‘‘a contestatory, oppositional
discourse that seeks to reoccupy and redefine—not escape or flee—the terrain of representation’’?\footnote{Ibid., 169, 171.} This question, unfortunately, is posed in the absence of a certain historical context—the memory of an anarchist critique of
aesthetic representation.


One precursor of testimonio is the tradition of littérature proletarienne, of
which the anarchist Henry Poulaille was one of the first exponents. Writing
in the time of Eugène Jolas’s Modernist ‘‘Revolution of the Word’’ and Henri
Barbusse’s marxist conception of ‘‘proletarian’’ literature, Poulaille rejected
the former as ‘‘bourgeois’’ and the latter as mere ‘‘littérature à thèse.’’\footnote{Karl-Anders Arvidsson, Henry Poulaille et la littérature prolétarienne française des années 1930 (Göteborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gotoburgensis, 1988), 11; Rosemary Chapman, Henry Poulaille and Proletarian Literature, 1920-1939 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 165.} An
anarchist literature of testimony or ‘‘témoignage,’’ as Poulaille imagined it,
could be neither antirepresentationalist, an exercise in aestheticism discon-
nected from social life, nor a mere ‘‘vehicle for ideas,’’ representing a fixed
ideology anchored outside the social experience it bore witness to. Its ‘‘revo-
lutionary character’’ would be neither-nor, different, other.\footnote{Poulaille, quoted in Chapman, 164, translation mine.}


Neither Poulaille’s name, nor the names of his primary theoretical
sources, Lazare and Proudhon, appear in contemporary discussions of aesthetic representation. They form a tradition outside the modern and postmodern aesthetics to which I now turn.

\section{REFUSALS OF AESTHETIC REPRESENTATION}


Since both modern and postmodern artworks engage in a critique of repre-
sentation, it is notoriously difficult to make rigorous historical distinctions
between modernism and postmodernism in terms of techniques or effects.


For David Harvey, the aesthetic roots of the postmodern go back to the ‘‘crisis of representation’’ produced by the financial and political upheavals of
1847-48, while Lyotard calls Montaigne’s essays ‘‘postmodern.’’ According
to Michael Berubé, ‘‘every attempt to define postmodern fiction in stylistic
terms . . . winds up being a definition of modernist fiction as well.’’ In the
end, it seems, postmodern antirepresentationalism looks an awful lot like the
modern variety.\footnote{Harvey, The Condition Of Postmodernity,260-63; Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 81; Michael Berubé, ‘‘Teaching Postmodern Fiction Without Being Sure That the Genre Exists,’’ The Chronicle of Higher Education 46, no. 37 (19 May 2000), \href{http://chronicle.com/free/v46/i37/37b00401.htm}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}chronicle.com\Slash{}free\Slash{}v46\Slash{}i37\Slash{}37b00401.htm} (accessed 10 March 2005).}


If neither the specific devices employed by postmodern writers nor their
immediate effects are sufficient to distinguish postmodernism as a literary
movement or tendency belonging to a specific historical period, then what is
more distinctive to the period is the way in which writers and readers alike
conceptualize the purpose of these devices and their effects. While both modernism and postmodernism propose a certain critique of representation,
then, Craig Owens suggests that the form of this antirepresentationalism
changes, so that modernist techniques and effects are turned to different
ends in postmodern art. Modernism, Owens argues, ‘‘proclaimed the autonomy of the signifier, its liberation from the ‘tyranny of the signified,’ ’’ while
postmodernism opposes ‘‘the tyranny of the signifier, the violence of its
law.’’\footnote{Craig Owens, ‘‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,’’ in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 58-59.}


This scheme is too simple, since it only addresses two of the four moments
of W. J. T. Mitchell’s quadrilateral diagram of representation. Representation, Mitchell writes, entails a relationship between four key elements: a
something (signifier) through which someone (sender) communicates something else (signified) to someone else (receiver): Cutting from the left-hand
to the right-hand quadrant is the ‘‘axis of communication’’ or speaking-to;
connecting the upper to the lower quadrant is what Mitchell calls the ‘‘axis
of representation’’ proper,\footnote{W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘‘Representation,’’ in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 12 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).} which I would call the axis of reference or standing-for (‘‘representation’’ rather involves at least the leftmost three quad-
rants, and ultimately the entire quadrilateral). We could call the ensemble
of the top and left quadrants of the quadrilateral, comprising the artist in
relation to the art object, the ‘‘aesthetic level,’’ with the other side, comprising the audience’s relation to meaning, forming a ‘‘social level.’’


Accordingly, we can distinguish in modernist and postmodernist departures from norms of communication and referentiality in art a number of critiques of representation, revolts not only against the respective tyrannies of
signifier and signified but also against those of the artist (sender) and the
audience (receiver):


Using this second table to classify the welter of modern and postmodern
aesthetics, we find that programs aiming at the emancipation of the audience
from the burden of being represented or spoken for by artists and their works
occupy the upper left-hand corner; metafiction, parody, ironic self-deflation
(particularly romantic irony), and self-referentiality or reflexivity in general,
aiming at the emancipation of temporal Being from the arrogance of a static
discourse that claims to stand for or reveal its truth, occupies the upper
right-hand corner; a wide variety of formalist, abstractionist, minimalist, absurdist, and aestheticist programs for the emancipation of art from the burden of standing for a meaning or representing a world occupy the lower left-
hand corner; even more hermetic or hedonistic aestheticist, aleatory, and
expressivist programs, meant to emancipate artists from the audience’s demands to speak for or be representative of it, occupy the lower right-hand corner.


What unites modernism and postmodernism, let us say, is their identity
as avant-garde movements with conscious, articulate programs—this despite
the objections of scholars like Mike Featherstone to lumping postmodernism
in with other avant-gardes.\footnote{Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1991), 37.} Granted, many postmodern artworks blur the
line between high culture and popular culture, but so did any number of
modernist works: the Futurists and Dadas appropriated the typographical
style of poster art, Joyce and Dos Passos made use of the newspaper format,
the Surrealists tinkered with the commercial cinematic imagery of the Fantômas movies, film noir returned the favor by translating the alienated, nihilistic impulses of German Expressionism into narrative film, and so on.


Conversely, even if the history of postmodernism fails to constitute itself as
a long series of isms (Orphism, Vorticism, Cosmism, Abstract Expressionism, etc.), it does present us with groups and group identities—e.g., the
Black Mountain Poets, the Apocalyptics, the Beats, Pop Art, the Factory,
and so on.


Besides, I am thinking in a more general way of the history of avant-
gardes, particularly in terms of Graeber’s discussion of the emergence of the
concept, which he links to a utopian desire for ‘‘a society . . . premised on
less alienated forms of creativity,’’ importantly expressed not only through
radical works of art, but through a bohemian experiment in the possibility of
‘‘new and less alienated modes of life.’’ So it is that Derrida, exemplar of the
postmodern, writes of Artaud, paragon of modernism, that he ‘‘attempted to
destroy a history, the history of the dualist metaphysics . . . of the body and
the soul which supports, secretly of course, the duality of speech and existence, of the text and the body’’—and, we might add, of art and life.\footnote{Graeber, ‘‘Twilight of Vanguardism’’; Derrida, Writing and Difference, 175.} Both
modern and postmodern forms of antirepresentationalism are attempts to collapse the duality between the two halves of the quadrilateral of representation, to reabsorb the aesthetic into the social or the social into the aesthetic.


Here, modernists and postmodernists find some important common
ground with anarchists old and new. In particular, a recent strain in anarchist theory associated with contemporary writers such as John Zerzan,
Fredy Perlman, David Watson, Hakim Bey, and John Moore has taken aesthetic antirepresentationalism onboard as an important form of critique. One
can hear an anticipation of their arguments in the 1969 manifesto that Michael Lucas published in Anarchos, wherein it is asserted that the very existence of a realm of practice separate from everyday life, art as an institution,
is in itself a symptom of alienation: ‘‘The generative condition of art is the
dichotomy of man with himself and with reality\dots{}
In its negativity art is
because man is not.’’ Thus, Moore finds anarchists articulating a critique of
aesthetic representation through a rhetoric of ‘‘abolition,’’ the route taken by
Lucas and Zerzan, or one of ‘‘transformation,’’ the favored idiom of theorists
like David Watson, Hakim Bey, and Kingsley Widmer: ‘‘in either case art
as it is currently constituted would disappear one way or another,’’ whether
through its ‘‘suppression’’ or through its ‘‘subsumption in the broader practice of culture as creative play.’’\footnote{Michael Lucas, ‘‘Guerrilla Theater, the Esthetic, and Technology,’’ Anarchos 3 (Spring 1969): 34; John Moore, ‘‘Composition and Decomposition: Contemporary Anarchist Aesthetics,’’ Anarchist Studies 6 (1998): 118.}


Perhaps we could say, then, that postmodern aesthetics continue the modern pursuit of the end of art, but in a different manner.\footnote{O. B. Hardison Jr. calls this project ‘‘the disappearance of art.’’ See O. B. Hardison Jr., Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century (New York: Viking Press, 1989).} While it is still
impossible to draw rigid boundaries between modern and postmodern aesthetics, we can generally observe that modernisms usually negate the social
side of the quadrilateral in favor of the aesthetic level, while postmodernisms
tend to negate the aesthetic in favor of the social. Both propose a radical
interruption of the axes of communication and reference and identify the
rejection of aesthetic representation with the rejection of political representation.

\section{ANARCHISM AMONG THE MODERNISTS}


This historic conjunction of aesthetic with political antirepresentationalism is one of the great discoveries—or rediscoveries—of the last decade and
a half of research in modernist studies. Historians of art and literature like
Mark and Allan Antliff, Joan Halperin, Carol Hamilton, John Hutton, David
Kadlec, Patricia Leighten, Robyn Roszlak, Richard Sonn, and David Weir
have shown how a series of modernist avant-gardes, from Symbolism, Expressionism, Dada, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Surrealism on
the Continent to the Anglophone modernisms of Man Ray, James Joyce, and
Ezra Pound, not only drew inspiration from anarchism but, in effect, constituted an anarchist aesthetic—an ‘‘anarchist modernism,’’ as Allan Antliff
terms it.\footnote{Alan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).}


Studying modernism in the context of anarchism (particularly Max Stirner’s individualist variety) has provided scholars with nothing less than a new
narrative about modernism. The collective oblivion following anarchism’s
eclipse—that is, its apparent world-historical defeat after the First World
War in America, the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion in Russia, and the
Falangist victory in Europe—obscured its history to such an extent that
Leighten could write, in the significant year of 1989, that ‘‘socialism is now
popularly conceived as the only revolutionary movement to have risen in the
nineteenth century.’’\footnote{Patricia Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897-1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), xv.}


Subsequently, as Kadlec explains, left-wing responses to a dominant history of modern art—e.g. the Greenbergian narrative that describes as ‘‘progress’’ modernism’s development towards pure
form without a content—identify this telos with a reactionary ‘‘bourgeois ‘individualism,’ ’’ privileging art with ‘‘progressive’’ communist commitments
instead. The new narrative reinstates a third option that had been effectively
ignored by previous historians: namely, ‘‘left radical anarchism.’’ As Weir
writes, the dichotomy ‘‘between politically engaged realist art . . . and apolitical purist art’’ is challenged by the recognition that ‘‘much of modernist art
is consistent with’’—indeed, directly informed by—‘‘the politics of anarchism.’’\footnote{David Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 2-3; David Weir, Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 160.}


Building on a well-documented history of association between anarchists
and modernists (e.g., in the exchanges between anarchist circles and those
of the avant-garde poets and painters of Paris in the 1880s through the
1890s, or the intensely anarchist milieu inhabited by American artists like
Man Ray in the years before the First World War), the new narrative posits
a thematic as well as a historical link between anarchism and modernism.


The primary theme linking modernism and anarchism, in this new narrative,
is the translation of an anarchist revolution against every form of domination
into the Revolution of the Word fomented by Joyce and Jolas—that is, the
translation of an anarchist refusal of political representation into a general-
ized ‘‘resistance to representation,’’ as Kadlec puts it,\footnote{Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism, 2.} and particularly into
a refusal of symbolic representation. A corollary theme is that of ‘‘the frag-
ment,’’ which traces the shattered style of modernism back to Max Stirner’s
egoism via figures such as Oscar Wilde and Dora Marsden.\footnote{Weir, 168, 185, 188.} The connection
between the first and the second theme is to be found in Stirner’s elaboration
of an individualist politics that postulates the ego as an irreducible fragment
that belongs to no group and therefore cannot be represented.


Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and His Own, or
more literally, The Unique One and Its Property), which has been called indi-
vidualist, nihilist, egoist, and even poststructuralist, seems to inform almost
every direction taken by anarchist modernism. Stirner, Marx’s fellow Young
Hegelian, makes his own radical inversion of Hegel: the Spirit whose cunning made toys of individual wills becomes the will of the bodily individual,
the ego or Einzige. This sovereign self may choose to have ‘‘commerce’’ or
‘‘intercourse’’ with other individuals or not, depending on the values it assigns its varying interests, desires and whims. Prior to every thought and
sign, declaring that ‘‘no concept expresses me, nothing that is designated as
my essence exhausts me; they are only names,’’ it wages unconditional war
on the categories, universals, and ideals threatening its uniqueness (‘‘God,’’
‘‘truth,’’ ‘‘freedom,’’ ‘‘humanity,’’ ‘‘justice,’’ ‘‘people,’’ ‘‘fatherland,’’ etc.),
unmasking them all as mere ‘‘spooks’’ and ‘‘fixed ideas.’’\footnote{Stirner, The Ego and His Own, trans. Stephen Byington (New York: Benjamin R. Tucker, 1907), 3, 11, 55, 177, 337, 490.} Ultimately, for
Eisenzweig, this critique is ‘‘more radical . . . than the texts of Proudhon,
Bakunin, and their successors’’ in its insistence on ‘‘refusing all representative systems and questioning the denotative nature of language.’’ Koch, Newman, and Colson agree that The Ego and His Own is uncannily proleptic of poststructuralist critiques of representation.\footnote{Eisenzweig, Fictions, 120, translation mine; Colson, Petit lexique, 11, 16n2; Koch, ‘‘Poststructuralism,’’ 332; Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan, 68.}


Stirner’s subordination of social relations to individual expediency—‘‘we
have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use,’’ he
writes; ‘‘for me, you are nothing but—my food, even as I too am fed upon
and turned to use by you’’—disgusted Marx, who, with Engels, spent much
of The German Ideology attacking ‘‘Saint Max.’’ It likewise repelled most
anarchists, whom Stirner himself never bothered to address, apart from di-
recting a little scorn at Proudhon’s maxim that ‘‘property is theft,’’ for similar
reasons, since theirs was primarily a socialist movement, associated with the
trade unions, centered on notions of a common identity and shared values.\footnote{Stirner, Ego, 100, 394.}


Nonetheless, Stirner’s work found its way into a sort of anarchist theoretical
canon when it was rediscovered near the turn of the century, partly due to
the devotion of a small but vocal group of individualist anarchists such as
John Henry Mackay and Benjamin Tucker. It entered the milieux of the liter-
ary and artistic avant-gardes via intellectuals such as Felix le Dantec and
Zo d’Axa, who interpreted Stirner for the readers of journals like Entretiens
Politiques et Littéraires and L’Endehors, and Dora Marsden, whose journal
The Egoist published her own Stirnerite analyses of politics and culture
alongside the writings of Pound and Eliot.\footnote{John G. Hutton, Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground: Art, Science, and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siecle France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 54, 244; Richard Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France (University of Nebraska, 1989), 16-17.} In making of ‘‘nominalism’’ a
weapon against the humanist who, in Stirner’s words, ‘‘takes little heed of
what you are privatim’’ but ‘‘sees only what you are generatim,’’ Marsden
constructed an egoist aesthetic that ‘‘would encourage a numbering of the
streaks of the tulip, details stripped of the discursive apparatus that facilitates generalization.’’\footnote{Stirner, quoted in Robert von Hallberg, ‘‘Libertarian imagism,’’ Modernism\Slash{}Modernity, 2, no. 2 (1995): 65; von Hallberg, 65.} Marsden articulates the philosophical roots of the
modernist campaign against disembodied ‘‘ideas’’ (William Carlos Williams) and ‘‘abstractions’’ (Ezra Pound) in poetry:


They are made up of misty thought-waste, confusions too entangled to be disentangled; bound together and made to look tidy by attaching an appellation-label,
i.e., a sign. It is the tidiness of the sign which misleads. It is like a marmalade
label attached to an empty jar. Remove the label, and confusion vanishes: we see
the empty jar, the bit of printed paper, and know there is no marmalade. And so
with abstract terms and ideas . . . An idea is a privileged assertion. It is seated
high on a pedestal above question and offering no explanation. The only concern
is to learn the most fitting form of rendering such idols allegiance—justice, law,
right, liberty, equality, and the rest; each matched with a spouse, its negative. It
is part of our work to shatter the pedestals.\footnote{Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism, 225, 4; Dora Marsden, ‘‘Views and Comments,’’ The New Freewoman 1, no. 11 (1913), 204.}


The anarchist project of stripping the would-be representatives of humanity
of their political authority is here translated into a program stripping symbolic representations (thoughts, abstractions, ideas, signs, binary oppositions) of their metaphysical authority, reducing them to their lowly,
fragmentary, material origins. If ‘‘Culture is Thought,’’ Marsden argues, we
must instead engage in ‘‘Thinking’’—that is, the ‘‘destruction of Thought.’’\footnote{Marsden, ‘‘Culture,’’ The Egoist 1, no. 17 (1914), 322. If this formulation reminds us of Deleuze’s admonition that ‘‘thought thinks its own history . . . in order to free itself from what it thinks’’ (Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, translated by Séan Hard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) 119, it is nonetheless quite directly attributable to Stirner: ‘‘a fixed idea arises by a thought—to wit, by the vanishing of the energy of the thought (the thinking itself, this restless taking back all thoughts that make themselves fast) from the thought’’ (Ego, 407).}


In so arguing, Marsden rephrases arguments made over seventy years ear-
lier by Stirner himself in an essay for the Rheinische Zeitung. Here, he ar-
gues that the only liberatory role for art to play is that of the negative
‘‘comedy’’ that destroys accumulated thought: ‘‘Comedy, as befitting its es-
sence, probes into every holy area, even into Holy Matrimony, for this itself
is no longer—in the actual marriage—Holy. It is rather an emptied form, to
which man should no longer hold.’’ However, where comic art plays a useful
role ‘‘in openly displaying the emptiness, or better, the deflation of the . . .
old belief,’’ it tends to do so merely in order to clear the way for a new fetish;
the nihilistic moment in comedy is merely idealism showing its disappointed
face before it recovers its spirits.\footnote{Stirner, ‘‘Art and Religion,’’ trans. Lawrence Stepelevich, Egoist Archive (rest of text in bibliography?)} Thus, as Paul Goodman observes, Shakespeare’s Henry plays subject the feudal ideal of ‘‘honor,’’ with its antique
ideal of ‘‘personal allegiance to the chief,’’ to a throughgoing comic deflation: ‘‘What is honour?’’ Falstaff asks rhetorically. ‘‘A word . . . What is that
word honour? air.’’ Nonetheless, the impetus of comic art is to ‘‘form again’’
or re-form the discarded ideal:



\begin{quote}


By the end of the sixteenth century, when Henry IV was written—and Cervantes
was writing Don Quixote—the old feudalism was dead and gone\dots{}
And honor\dots{}
has become air.


Yet in the same Histories, Shakespere tried to give the word ‘‘honour’’ a new
lease on life, as national patriotism, for instance in Henry V’s speech on Crispin’s
Day at Agincourt. Honor was now securely fastened to the ideology of dying for
England and being a household word in every English mouth. It is likely that
Shakespere himself believed in the renewed word—at least he consigns Falstaff
to disgrace—and patriotic honor certainly proved to have vitality and reality for
the nation-states for a couple of centuries.\footnote{Goodman, Speaking and Language, 84-85.}



\end{quote}


Ordinarily, then, art plays the recuperative role of cultural guardian, providing the world’s Matthew Arnolds with a surrogate for waning faith: ‘‘even
comedy, as all the arts, precedes religion, for it only makes room for the new
religion, to that which art will form again.’’ Stirner’s pragmatism in dictating
that all anything and anyone can be is ‘‘an object in which I take an interest
or else do not, an interesting or uninteresting object,’’ dictates that art, like
everything else of the world of ideas, can only be an instrument, one that
must be thrown away after its has worn out its usefulness, lest it become a
new spook or idée fixe dominating the subject.\footnote{Stirner, ‘‘Art and Religion’’; Ego, 211, 407, 414-15.}


For art can and will act as a force for domination. ‘‘Art creates disunion,
in that it sets the Ideal over and against man,’’ Stirner writes; ‘‘this disunion
is called by another name—religion.’’\footnote{Stirner, ‘‘Art and Religion.’’} Men and women possessed by a religious attitude project ideal selves ‘‘over and against’’ their real selves, then
strive to match these ideals, to fit themselves to the Procrustean bed of an
abstraction: as Marsden remarks, ‘‘the Symbol . . . is not even an approximation to anything in life, but is the tracery of an arrangement among dead
things which accidentally Life, in its passage through, has left. Is Life restive
inside the Symbol? Then Life must learn Duty.’’\footnote{Marsden, ‘‘Intellect and Culture,’’ The New Freewoman, 1, no. 2 (July 1, 1913), 22.} In ostensibly post-theological discourses like Marx’s, this striving after the unattainable ideal reappears as ‘‘alienation,’’ the separation of one’s false, fragmented, merely
apparent being from one’s potential, whole, true self. This is precisely what
Stirner’s account of the Einzige is designed to counter: ‘‘The true man does
not lie in the future, an object of longing, but lies, existent and real, in the
present . . . I am it, I am the true man.’’ For Stirner, as for Baudrillard, the
notion of alienation, in postulating subjects as incomplete fragments of an
emergent whole, is itself alienating: ‘‘What an absurdity it is to pretend that
men are ‘other,’ to try to convince them that their deepest desire is to become
‘themselves’ again! Each man is totally there at each instant.’’ The Einzige
only manifests itself, however, as an unrepresentable ‘‘creative nothing’’ that
subsumes everything: ‘‘all things are nothing to me.’’\footnote{Stirner, Ego, 436-37; Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975), 166; Stirner, Ego, 490.}


For Marsden and Stirner, this emptiness or lack of essence in the subject
renders every representation of it a lie, every ‘‘effort to mirror life’’ a crippling form of ‘‘submission.’’ When the empty subject looks in the ‘‘mirror’’
of its own ‘‘Intellect,’’ becoming ‘‘self-conscious,’’ it makes a drastic error:
Intellect, like fire, is a good servant but a bad master . . . in place of being directed it becomes director: in place of its performances being judged by Soul . . .
it begins to judge the Soul—to prove that the Soul is not there in short, and establishes itself in its place


In pressing its mirror back upon the inner life and
failing to find the spatial qualities with which alone it has experience, Intellect
has adopted one of three courses: either it has maintained that it could detect
nothing there distinct from itself, or that the something which existed was identical with itself, or finding nothing but being conscious of a vague uneasiness, it
has faked up false images and declared that these are what it found.\footnote{Marsden, ‘‘Intellect and Culture,’’ 22.}
Here Marsden, like many other individualist anarchists at the turn of the
century, blends Stirner’s declaration that ‘‘thinking and its thoughts are not
sacred to me’’ with Bergson’s rejection of the Kantian belief that all ‘‘experience’’ is ‘‘infra-intellectual’’ to project an aesthetic for which, as the anarchist painter Signac declared, ‘‘the subject is nothing, or at least is . . . not
more important than all the other elements, colour, drawing, composition.’’


Thus, as Kristeva points out, from the nineteenth century through the early
twentieth, ‘‘It seems thus that certain anarchist tendencies, far from stopping
at the contestation of social and official structures, assert a major transformation of the concept of the speaking subject itself,’’ both in the political and
aesthetic fields.\footnote{Stirner, Ego, 197-98; Bergson, Creative Evolution, 380; Signac quoted in Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts: Western Europe: A Cultural History from the French Revolution to 1968 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 249; Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique: l’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle, Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974), 426-27, translation mine.} It is in keeping with the logic of this antirepresentational
aesthetic that the work of radically questioning ‘‘the speaking subject’’ is
assigned to ‘‘one who . . . will struggle with all of his individuality, with a
personal effort, against bourgeois and official conventions’’: what often appears to be a suggestion that the artist owes the world an act of ‘‘self-effacement’’ is actually a strategy whereby ‘‘the artist exercises individualism by
negating it, or rather, by appearing to negate it,’’ since the work of art is
taken to ‘‘embody the political ideal of egoism merely by its existence, so
that individualist politics is enacted through aesthetic practice.’’ It is significant that even T. S. Eliot, a conservative for whom ‘‘anarchy’’ is merely
synonymous with ‘‘futility,’’ should publish his call for the poet to pursue ‘‘a
continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’’ in the pages
of Marsden’s The Egoist.\footnote{Signac, quoted in Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts, 249; Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 181; T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 40, 177. None, to my knowledge, have placed Eliot in the context of anarchism—probably for good reason, given his ‘‘extraordinary sense of ‘the reality of Sin,’ ’’ which seems to have led him to ‘‘Hulme, Maurras, and Action Française’’ rather than Spain. However, his disgust with ‘‘wasteland’’ modernity, his resistance to representational language, and even his rejection of democracy are not too different from the beliefs that once sent Symbolist writers careening between anarchist, royalist, communist, and proto- fascist positions—nor, as George Franklin points out, from those that propelled Percy Bysshe Shelley toward William Godwin’s philosophical anarchism. Indeed, Eliot owes an unacknowledged debt to Shelley (George Franklin, ‘‘Instances of Meeting: Shelley and Eliot: A Study in Affinity,’’ English Library History 61, no. 4 [Winter 1994]: 956, 960, 979-80).}


It is in just these terms (at least initially) that the anarchist Max Baginski
attacks traditional Western drama in a 1906 issue of Emma Goldman’s journal Mother Earth, impeaching its claim to represent the human subject. In
the drama’s representational pretense, he finds a disciplinary institution:



\begin{quote}


The inscription over the Drama in olden times used to be, ‘‘Man, look into this
mirror of life; your soul will be gripped in its innermost depths, anguish and
dread will take possession of you in the face of this rage of human desire and
passion. Go ye, atone and make good.’’


Even Schiller entertained this view when he called the Stage a moral institu-
tion. It was also from this standpoint that the Drama was expected to show the
terrible consequences of uncontrolled human passion, and that these conse-
quences should teach man to overcome himself. ‘‘To conquer oneself is man’s
greatest triumph.’’



\end{quote}


This ascetic tendency, incidentally part of chastisement and acquired resignation, one can trace in every investigation of the value and meaning of the Drama,
though in different forms.\footnote{Max Baginski, ‘‘The Old and the New Drama,’’ Mother Earth 1 (April 1906): 36.}


The very claim of the drama to hold up a truth-telling mirror to the spectator
is, on this account, a deception, and moreover a religious one, calculated to
evoke a guilty fear of ‘‘uncontrolled human passion,’’ and thus to justify
forms of control and rule: once again, ‘‘Life must learn Duty,’’ only this time,
not from the projection of an ideal self beyond the real self, but from the very
reverse—the projection of a bad self that one is simultaneously to identify
with and reject (producing another kind of disunion). What one sees in the
representational medium of the dramatic mirror is not a neutral description
of life, but an aggressively moralistic prescription: This is how you should
not live. A robust, self-affirming individual, however, ought to see through
these representational scare tactics: knowing himself or herself to be unique,
and affirming rather than fearing his or her own desire, an Einzige should
laugh at these false reflections in the tragic mirror.


In this way, Baginski formulates one version of the antirepresentational
stance in relation to art: the very stance that the Dadas, led by Hugo Ball
(an assiduous reader of Bakunin and Kropotkin, familiar as well with Gustav
Landauer and Otto Gross) were to take up a decade later. As Robert Variscz
notes, Dada was not merely anarchic in the frequently noted sense of being
chaotic and ‘‘anti-sensical,’’ but in the way that it programmatically ‘‘turned
its face away from recognizable representation.’’\footnote{Robert A. Varisco, ‘‘Anarchy and Resistance in Tristan Tzara’s ‘The Gas Heart,’ ’’ Modern Drama 40, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 139.} In Tristan Tzara’s Le
Coeur au Gaz, the sort of conventional drama in which ‘‘clearly delineated
identities permitted the action to proceed in an orderly fashion’’ became a
target. Whereas the protagonist of the traditional drama impeached by Bag-
inski is a richly rounded ‘‘character,’’ Tzara sees any such unified, specular
identity as a lie and a trap. Instead of characters, we are presented with
‘‘general, undisguised body parts as names for the play’s characters: Eye,
Mouth, Nose, Ear, Neck, and Eyebrow; Tzara thus deconstitutes customary
dramaturgical organization and re-constitutes a spontaneous, revolution\Slash{}riot-
type (mob formation) anonymity . . . They jockey for position above their
squirming audience, anesthetizing the hall with ravings and gibbering.’’


Rather than presenting an organically unified subject, Tzara gives us organs
at odds with one another—a riotous ‘‘mob’’ or ‘‘anarchist swarm.’’\footnote{Varisco, ‘‘Anarchy and Resistance in Tristan Tzara’s ‘The Gas Heart,’ ’’ 141-42.} Where
traditional drama encourages us to recapitulate our méconaissance of our-
selves in the coherent whole of a self-representation, Dada antirepresenta-
tionalism gives us something remarkably like the state of fragmentation we
occupy prior to the mirror stage—a dis-organ-ized body: that which Deleuze
and Guattari name, following Antonin Artaud, the ‘‘organless body.’’\footnote{Guattari, Molecular Revolution, 290.}


Just as ‘‘Dadaists believed that language, like other representational art
forms . . . had become a tool bankrupt of artistic probity, one which effectively buoyed ideological power structures,’’ so Symbolist aesthetes such as
Mallarmé, seeking a ‘‘purified poetry,’’ took on board an anarchist critique
of representation. In fin-de-siècle Paris, indeed, the Symbolist poets were so
closely involved with the anarchists that Sonn speaks of them as ‘‘dual libertarian avant-gardes.’’ In this milieu, as Kristeva remarks, ‘‘writers engaged
in an investigation into the liberation of the subject in language encounter
the preoccupations of anarchists, the combat against social structures,’’ engaging in a bilateral exchange of ideas.\footnote{Varisco, ‘‘Anarchy and Resistance in Tristan Tzara’s ‘The Gas Heart,’ ’’ 140; Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 131; Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 49-50; Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics, 38; Kristeva, Révolution, 427, translation mine.}


Among other things, individualist anarchists and Symbolist aesthetes
agreed on the need to protect what Alfred Jarry called the ‘‘sacred disorder
of my spirit’’ from the menace of an administered world and its rationalist
representational systems. Together, they came to see language as having
been corrupted by commercialization and propaganda; for Mallarmé, ‘‘the
attitude of a poet in an epoch like this one, in which he is on strike against
society, is to put aside all the corrupt means that may offer themselves to
him.’’\footnote{Jarry, quoted in Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics, 77; Read, Poetry and Experi- ence, 120; Mallarmé, quoted in Joan U. Halperin, Félix Fénéon, Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 50, translation mine} Since, for Symbolist aesthetes like Maurice Devaldès, ‘‘communication’’ had in some sense become impossible, it became ‘‘irrelevant’’ as well:
silence, whether figurative (in the sense of withdrawing from a shared, publicly accessible language) or literal (in the case of Rimbaud, whose desertion
of poetry some have taken to be the prototypically modernist act), became
an aesthetic protest against the banalization and mediocrity of modern existence—ultimately, the means by which the poet could escape from the constraints of the social symbolic order. The modern word, as defined by
Mallarmé, is precisely that which refuses complicity with the ‘‘system of representation’’ to which writer and readers are subjected.\footnote{Alexander Varias, Paris and the Anarchists: Aesthetes and Subversives During the Fin de Siècle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 146; Sontag, A Sontag Reader, 183-84; Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics, 222; Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 183.}


Here, once again, we can see how a certain critique of the unified subject—that figure whose commanding eye projects the visual space of the theater of representation, whose retrospective gaze brings all the fragmentary
moments of action into the end-shaped unity of a plot\footnote{Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 69-70; Spanos, Repetitions, 20.} —is paradoxically
compatible with an egoist politics, since this subject is seen as a false image
or a reified structure imposing itself on the unnamable. If the self is actually
a creative nothingness, ‘‘a fluctuating element,’’ as Herbert Read writes,
then it cannot be fixed through mimetic ‘‘mirror knowledge’’ or ‘‘representation,’’ and ‘‘we . . . cannot know a self; we can only betray our self\dots{}
All
art is in this sense an unconscious self-betrayal.’’ Accordingly, for Read, the
lesson of Stirner’s Ego and His Own was its warning against ‘‘surrendering
one’s self to an abstraction, to an illusion of any kind,’’ including the illusion
of an ideal, unified self: ‘‘the Self (with a capital S) is not an essence to
which the self (with a small s) must pay homage.’’\footnote{Read, Icon and Idea: The Function of Art in the Development of Human Consciousness ( name city: Harvard University Press, 1955), 110-11; The Forms of Things Unknown: Essays Towards an Aesthetic Philosophy (New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 173-74.} For Hugo Ball, one could
‘‘discard the Ego like a coat full of holes’’ precisely because ‘‘man has many
Egos, just as the onion has many skins. It is not a matter of one Ego more or
less. The center is still made of skins.’’ Likewise, in poetry, the unrepresentable uniqueness of the ego could not express itself in a language of communication, whose function, as Nietzsche says, is to ‘‘make the uncommon
common.’’ Thus, for the Dadaists, the fluctuating self could be recognized in
‘‘a fluctuating style,’’ an anarchist aesthetic in which ‘‘the separate parts of
the sentence, even the individual vocables and sounds, regain their autonomy.’’ Seen in this light, the decadent art that has most frequently been depicted as a mere aesthetic reflection or symptom of modern urban anomie
can be reinterpreted as a deliberate ‘‘expression of anarchist politics’’ in the
form of ‘‘aesthetic individualism.’’\footnote{Hugo Ball, Flight Out Of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (New York: Viking, 1974), 29; Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 428; Ball, Flight Out of Time, 22; Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 186.}


For Kristeva, as Moore explains, poetry manifests radical force only in a
‘‘refusal of meaning,’’ the embrace of ‘‘incoherence.’’ Ordinary discourse, in
presenting itself as a transparent conduit of meaning, subjects us to a repres-
sive, socially governed structure of signification. Poetry, conversely, instead
of concealing its artifice, produces a ‘‘crisis, explosion, or shattering’’ that
makes this artifice visible. The overthrow of the speaking subject through
poetic fragmentation reveals the fragmentary, disunified nature of the pre-
linguistic self, liberating it from its semantic prison.\footnote{Moore, ‘‘Public Secret: Fredy Perlman and the Literature of Subversion,’’ in Twenty- First Century Anarchism, ed. Jon Purkis and James Bowen (London: Cassell, 1997), 128; Kristeva, quoted in Moore, ‘‘Public Secret,’’ 127-28.} Thus, while chiding
Mallarmé for his reticence about politics, which amounted to a ‘‘refusal to
consider the possibility of a political activity that would be simultaneous to
textual activity,’’ she agrees with him that politically committed art is self-
canceling, nonrevolutionary. ‘‘One cannot ask that ‘art’ . . . emit a message
which would be considered ‘positive,’ ’’ she declares; since art is only ‘‘ethical’’ in destroying the language within which this ‘‘message’’ could be carried, the language that situates self in relation to society, ‘‘the univocal
enunciation of such a message would itself represent a suppression of the
ethical function as we understand it.’’ As an attack on representation, art’s
social mission consists in its violation of the social; it has a ‘‘social-anti-
social function.’’\footnote{Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 189, 195, 232.} The negation of an illusory selfhood is the liberation of
ego as ‘‘creative nothing’’; the refusal of ethico-political commitment in favor
of autonomous aesthetics is itself an ethics and politics of autonomy in an
aesthetic form.


Thus, as Sonn observes, the ‘‘politicization of aesthetes’’ in fin-de-siècle
France was matched by an ‘‘aestheticization of politics.’’ While poets elaborated this critique of representation into a style of hermetic ‘‘incommunicabilité,’’ some anarchists turned toward a similarly solitary and antisocial
practice. After the 1876 Berne conference, anarchists turned to a practice of
‘‘propaganda by the deed’’ which is held to be revolutionary precisely by
virtue of being pure of all representation, all signification—one for which
communication is no longer relevant.\footnote{Laurence M. Porter, The Crisis of French Symbolism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 11; Guérin, Anarchism, 74-75.} If bombings such as the ones rending
the Restaurant Foyot and the Café Terminus in 1894 ‘‘seemed to defy logic,’’
writes Howard G. Lay, this could be taken to demonstrate how ‘‘in the absence of authorial identity and interpretive legibility . . . [an] explosive ‘!’
was liable to stretch language to its limits, to reveal both its ideological constitution and its deficiencies as a system of representation, to contest both
its powers of containment and its capacity to establish the parameters of cognition.’’\footnote{Howard G. Lay, ‘‘Beau Geste!: On the Readability of Terrorism,’’ Yale French Studies 101 (Spring 2002): 91.} This attempt ‘‘to navigate around the referential trap of language,
to pass beyond the cognitive borders that governments and language both
patrol’’ drew approval from Symbolists like Mallarmé, who compared poems
to anarchists’ bombs, and Laurent Tailhade, who after Vaillant’s bombing of
the Chamber of Deputies commented, ‘‘What do the victims matter if the
gesture is beautiful? What does the death of some unidentified persons matter if, by it, the individual is affirmed?’’\footnote{Ibid., 95; Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics, 255; Tailhade, quoted in Sonn, 234.} Spontaneous, individual violence,
as the epitome of ‘‘the nonutilitarian act,’’ functioned as an embodiment
rather than a representation of the individual’s desires. Thus, art critic Félix
Fénéon undertook his own bombing, while the poet Pierre Quillard redescribed Symbolist poetry as ‘‘an eminent form of propaganda by the deed,’’
praising its ‘‘destructive power.’’\footnote{Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics, 3, 234; Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 373n1; Pierre Quillard, L’Anarchie par la littérature (Paris: Editions du Fourneau, 1993), 14, trans- lation mine.}


This valuation of ‘‘dynamic embodiment’’—action, force, and motion—
over the ‘‘static,’’ abstract intellectuality of representation was embraced by
another explicitly anarchist avant-garde, the Action d’Art group founded by
Gérard Lacaze-Duthiers, André Colomer, and Geraldo Murillo, whose
aesthetic philosophy combined Wilde’s endorsement of l’art pour l’art, Bergsonian and Nietzschean irrationalism, and Stirnerite egoism.\footnote{Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism, 2; Mark Antliff, ‘‘Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism: The ‘Aestheticism’ of the Action d’art Group, 1906-1920,’’ Oxford Art Journal 21 (1998): 102.} Echoing
Bergson’s argument that ‘‘representation’’ is merely the reflex of blocked,
delayed, or frustrated ‘‘action,’’ Lacaze-Duthiers declared ‘‘action’’ to be
more ‘‘concrete,’’ more ‘‘sensory,’’ hence more ‘‘real’’ than ‘‘the word and
writing,’’ the resorts of mere ‘‘chatterers’’ and ‘‘soapbox speechmakers.’’ It
is in this spirit that Herbert Read would later write admiringly of the Action
painters that their works ‘‘are not the result of any process of reflection’’—in
the sense both of introspection and mimesis: ‘‘there did not first exist an
object, or even an internal feeling, for which the artist then found an equivalent symbol.’’ Rather, they present ‘‘a Gestalt that has not yet been organized
for formal communication—that is still free.’’\footnote{Bergson, Creative Evolution, 151-52; Lacaze-Duthiers, ‘‘Action,’’ in Encyclopédie anarchiste, 18-19, translation mine; Read, quoted in Herbert Peter Hogue, The Anarchic Mystique of Five American Fictions (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1971), 34.}


The Bergsonian valorization of le Geste, action, and intuition over ‘‘reflection,’’ ideation, and intellect, as Georges Sorel advocates in his Reflections
on Violence (translated into English by T. E. Hulme in 1912\footnote{Kadlec, ‘‘Pound, Blast, and Syndicalism,’’ English Literary History 60, no. 4 (Winter 1993), 1027.}), links anarcho-modernist resistance to representation with a revolt against the domination of the ego by reason, which after all is a matter of following rules,
signifying, and making sense. In place of Dadaist negation and Symbolist
silence, therefore, the Surrealists proposed nonsense—bending rather than
breaking the representational mirror. Despite this limited use of mimetic illusionism, Surrealists maintained a critique of any commonsense notion of
referentiality. Magritte declared that his famous painting The Human Condition, in which he ‘‘placed in front of a window, seen from inside a room, a
painting representing exactly that part of the landscape which was hidden
from view by the painting,’’ was an analogy for ‘‘how we see the world: we
see it as being outside ourselves even though it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves.’’\footnote{Magritte, quoted in Suzi Gablik, Magritte (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 185-86.} The limited embrace of a
representational practice becomes a means to question the epistemology of
representationalism.


Set diametrically against the claims of bourgeois and socialist realism
alike, this anarchist modernism claims the broadest possible privileges for
the ‘‘peculiar consciousness of the artist,’’ defined in terms hostile to all
forms of sociality, whether those produced by capitalist conformism or socialist collectivism.\footnote{Murillo, quoted in Mark Antliff, ‘‘Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism,’’ 110; Mark Antliff, ‘‘Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism,’’ 114.} Just as Pound declares in The Egoist that the Vorticist
artist is ‘‘born to rule,’’ while Marsden declares that ‘‘what I want is my state
. . . the world should be moulded to my desire if I could so mould it’’ and
Artaud imagines the figure of ‘‘the crowned anarchist,’’ members of Action
d’Art paradoxically crown themselves ‘‘Artistocrats’’ to express their Nietzschean master morality.\footnote{Pound, quoted in Allan Antliff, ‘‘Man Ray’s Path to Dada,’’ Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed 18, no. 2 (Fall 2000-Winter 2001): 52; Marsden, quoted in Weir 180; Artaud, Heliogabalus: Or, The Anarchist Crowned; translated by Alexis Lykiard (London: Creation Books, 2003); Antliff, ‘‘Man Ray’s Path to Dada,’’ 53.} Consequently, the only appropriate relationship
between Artistocrats is what Colomer calls ‘‘La Bande,’’ a collective project
that ‘‘can only exist through the conscious will of the individuals who form
it.’’\footnote{Colomer, quoted in Mark Antliff, ‘‘Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism,’’ 114.}


The inspiration for this conception would appear to be Stirner’s proposal for a limited form of social cooperation, a Union of Egoists, which is
never allowed to become anything more than the ‘‘instrument’’ of the individuals who engage in it. Like Stirner, Colomer also defines ‘‘society’’ as
an alienated instrument that instrumentalizes its creators, a contract whose
‘‘conditions’’ are unconditionally imposed on each by all; the Artistocrat refuses to be a party to these conventions, as to any ‘‘which he was not the author of.’’\footnote{Stirner, Ego, 234, 417; Colomer, quoted in Mark Antliff, ‘‘Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism,’’ 114.}


Rather than participate in society as its subject, an Artistocrat aspired to
be self-authoring, both authorized and created by his or her own ineffable
selfhood, in something like the manner of Foucault’s askesis or aesthetico-
ethical ‘‘care of the self.’’ Just as Ball had proposed that artists ‘‘adopt symmetries and rhythms instead of principles’’ and Erich Mühsam had proclaimed the artist’s ‘‘thoroughly unethical character’’ in opposition to every
regime of control, the philosophy of Artistocratie substituted aesthetic values
for ethical values: one was to ‘‘make of his existence a work of art.’’\footnote{Ball, quoted in Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 232; Erich Mühsam, ‘‘The Artist in the Future State,’’ trans. Christopher Winks, in Revolutionary Romanticism, ed. Max Blechman, 188-89 (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1999); Lacaze-Duthiers, ‘‘Artistocratie,’’ in Encyclopédie anarchiste, 145-47.} Conversely, the artwork itself was to enact the individual’s freedom from constraints: ‘‘Artistocratic art was beautiful by virtue of its utter individuality
and complete separation from anything construed as ‘social.’ ’’ The artist,
in short, in joining an aesthetico-social body without organs, is enjoined to
represent nothing and no one, fulfilling Ball’s prophecy that one could
‘‘reach an incomprehensible, unconquerable sphere’’ by abjuring the
‘‘dreary, lame, empty language of men in society.’’\footnote{Mark Antliff, ‘‘Cubism, Futurism, Anarchism,’’ 110; Ball, Flight Out of Time, 77.}


The connection between individualist anarchism and aesthetic abstrac-
tion, however paradoxical—Stirner, after all, condemns ‘‘abstraction’’ as
‘‘lifeless’’ and propounds an instrumentalism seemingly incompatible with
the aesthetics of disinterestedness entailed in l’art pour l’art —makes sense
when framed as the artist’s refusal to subject himself or herself to the signifying regime of a social audience by representing a subject: thus, as Tzara
asserts, ‘‘DADA is the mark of abstraction.’’ ‘‘Abstraction in art,’’ reasoned
the Stirnerite anarchist John Weichsel in an influential manifesto in Alfred
Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work, is ‘‘the index . . . of the artist’s anarchistic
freedom from socially-imposed aesthetic demands through the affirmation of
his own expressive individualism.’’\footnote{Stirner, Ego, 112; Tzara, quoted in Varisco, ‘‘Anarchy and Resistance in Tristan Tzara’s ‘The Gas Heart,’ ’’ 139; Alan Antliff, ‘‘Man Ray’s Path to Dada,’’ 51-52.} Formalism, condemned as apolitical by
Marxists, is understood by its originators as a means of revolt against authority far more far-reaching than ‘‘bourgeois and Marxist aesthetics,’’ which
‘‘subordinate [art] to an ideal,’’ could ever be. Where politically committed
art reduces its rebellion to finite, identifiable ‘‘theses,’’ Moore argues, ‘‘the
coherence of its discourse indicates its lawfulness’’; the truly subversive
text, however devoid of a thesis it may be, achieves a more thoroughgoing
rebellion by disrupting the very laws of discourse, destroying coherence itself. That is to say, works of anarchist modernism distinguish themselves not
by what they say, since saying emanates from a self who is subject to a structure, but by what they do: even when taking place in the medium of words,
what transpires is a gesture, an action. ‘‘In the beginning,’’ writes Lacaze-
Duthiers, quoting Goethe’s revision of Genesis, ‘‘was the deed.’’\footnote{Max Blechman, ‘‘Toward an Anarchist Aesthetic,’’ in Drunken Boat: Art, Rebellion, Anarchy (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1994), 15; Moore, ‘‘Public Secret’’ 128, 131n23; Lacaze- Duthiers, ‘‘Action,’’ in Encyclopedie anarchiste, 18.}
It is this deed, this performative gesture, which may be most characteristic
of anarchist modernism in its many forms. The seeming diversity of modern-
ist styles, Harry Redner argues, from Mallarmé to Malevich, from Kafka to
Cocteau, conceals a programmatic, a pragmatic unity: all enactments of ‘‘an
anti-representationalist aesthetic’’ whose ‘‘political import . . . is stated by
Theda Shapiro: ‘modern art is the ultimate act of anarchism.’ ’’\footnote{Harry Redner, A New Science of Representation: Towards an Integrated Theory of Representation in Science, Politics and Art (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 288.}

\section{THE IMPASSE OF ANARCHIST MODERNISM}


The violent implications of a modernist flight away from representation
ought to be enough to give us pause; if terrorist propagande par le fait was
the practical corollary of the formalist embrace of incommunicabilité, history
records the dismal practical results of this anti-intellectual fetish of action
among anarchists. First of all, while earning applause from ‘‘literati and artists,’’ terrorism may have actually contributed to the well-being of a political
elite that was otherwise in serious trouble, conveniently drawing public attention away from the scandals of power. Indeed, some investigators have
pointed to evidence that the enthusiasm of a few anarchists for violent revenge on the State was supplemented by the State itself via agents provocateurs and even ‘‘phoney attentats.’’ Furthermore, as Lay observes, the
supposedly sublime unreadability of the terrorist’s bomb ‘‘was immediately
delimited by the discourses to which it was accordingly conjoined’’: the juridical discourse that pinned the act to an agent (the ‘‘perpetrator’’ as author
or final referent), and the medical discourse that redefined the act as ‘‘a
symptom (of a sociopathic personality) rather than a statement (of revolutionary intransigence),’’ as well as the novelistic discourse of writers such as
Henry James (The Princess Cassamassima), Joseph Conrad (The Secret
Agent), and G. K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday), which helped
to cement the public perception of anarchists as pathologically violent miscreants.\footnote{Alexandre Skirda, Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization From Proudhon to May 1968, trans. Paul Sharkey (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2002), 57, 55-58; Lay, ‘‘Beau Geste!’’ 91, 82; Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 52-53.}


Indelibly associated with lunacy and criminal violence, turned into fodder
for thrilling novels, the anarchist movement was in danger of becoming permanently estranged from the working classes whose cause it championed. In
the end, the unreadable act only gave way to ‘‘readerly gratification’’ and a
return to ‘‘the congenial placidity of false consciousness.’’\footnote{Guérin, Anarchism, 74-75; Lay, ‘‘Beau Geste!,’’ 95.} Meanwhile, in
Sorel’s hands, the ideology that valorized violent action over communication and cognition became part of the intellectual armory of a new European
movement, one that, like anarchism, held the representational pretenses of
bourgeois democracy in contempt—namely, fascism.


The anarchist movement only managed to return to health when the infatuation with immediate revenge gave way to a renewed commitment to organized struggle. For these purposes, a reading of anarchist theory that set the
gesture (action without legitimation, pure deed, pure violence) against representation (theorization, propaganda work, entry into public discourse) was
not only incompatible with the ethical premises of anarchism, but no longer
even ideologically useful or tenable; ultimately, the policy of propaganda by
the deed, as the operation of ‘‘a tiny band of the ‘elect’ substituting itself
and making the choices for everybody,’’ proved inconsistent, not only with
the basic populist thrust of the movement, but with its own antirepresentationalist premises:\footnote{Skirda, Facing the Enemy, 54.} even as the lone terrorist functioned as a scapegoat for
State crimes, he became the icon of a quasi-religious cult of martyrdom. As
terror increasingly became the pretext for an emergent police state (complete
with domestic spying, repressive legislation, and public executions), the appeal of individual violence faded, even for the minority who had embraced
it at first; instead, theories emphasizing social relationships
(anarcho-communism) and the formation of shared identities (anarcho-syndicalism)
came to the fore of the movement.\footnote{Lay, ‘‘Beau Geste!,’’ 87, 96.}


Apart from the historical failure of antirepresentationalism as a political
practice, there is another major problem with the history that reduces anarchism to the aesthetics of modernism: its flat historical redundancy. ‘‘For
better or worse,’’ as Weir remarks, ‘‘in today’s postmodern, postrevolutionary
society, anarchy itself is a sign of culture.’’ In our time, according to Andrei
Codrescu, the culture of individualism has already won; in the endless
stream of fragmentary, libidinal, often surreal images circulating through our
media, anarchist modernism seems to carry the day.\footnote{Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 267; Andrei Codrescu, The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990), 131-56.} Decadence is positively respectable, and the rebellion of the unique ego against the masses
is a mass-marketed product. If commercial culture has learned to market
individuality, then the rediscovery of an individualist aesthetic is politically
belated indeed. What was once an experiment and a political act is now
so nearly an official style, a ‘‘new ‘cultural dominant.’ ’’ Indeed, as Graeber
acknowledges, it is possible that ‘‘insofar as bohemians actually were an
avant garde, they were really the vanguard of the market itself, or more precisely, of consumerism’’—the hip white kids who settle in the rough, scary
neighborhoods of outlaw desires only to help developers commodify them
into loft apartments, boutiques, and upscale restaurants, the cutting edge of
gentrification.\footnote{Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 259, 264; Graeber, ‘‘Twilight of Vanguardism.’’} The multiplicity of desires unleashed by capitalism are, at
least in the ruling economies, readily satisfied by capital itself. Individualist
anarchy is indeed a sign of capitalist culture, only it hasn’t gotten us anywhere: to the extent that we are socially fragmented, we are no more free.


It was partially in response to the growing sense that earlier waves of modernist anarchy were being recuperated by the system that the last great push
for a ‘‘rejection of representation’’ as the refusal of audience and signification came in the form of Action Painting or Abstract Expressionism. As Zerzan recounts, artists such as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Adolph Gottlieb,
and Barnett Newman, most of whom in fact had explicit commitments to anarchist politics, castigated surrealism for what they deemed its ‘‘conservative
representationalism’’ in incorporating elements of recognizable empirical reality. ‘‘Action paintings,’’ by contrast, ‘‘do not ‘stand for’ anything outside
themselves, and in the autonomy of the artistic act imply an autonomy in the
world.’’\footnote{Zerzan, ‘‘Abstract Expressionism: Painting as Vision and Critique,’’ Anarchy: A journal of Desire Armed 17, no. 1 (Spring\Slash{}Summer 1999), 37, 39, 41-42, 39.} Specifically, they claimed an absolute autonomy from the demands
of the public for ‘‘the social art, the intelligible art, the good art’’—producing
instead ‘‘something that fills utterly the sight and can’t be used to make life
only bearable.’’\footnote{Baziotes, quoted in Zerzan, 43; Francis, quoted in Zerzan, 39.}


The very negativity, the almost purely destructive character of anarchist
modernism defined it as unsustainable. ‘‘Anarchist texts,’’ Moore suggests,
‘‘are in a sense suicide notes, but notes left by suicides who expect to survive
the leap into the unknown, anticipating the miraculous existence of utopia
on the other side of the abyss.’’ Here he recalls Sontag’s cautionary note that
the pursuit of an ever more perfect silence is not a sustainable program.


Indeed, Moore recognizes that ‘‘anarchist artists risk falling into incomprehensibility.’’\footnote{Moore, ‘‘Composition and Decomposition,’’ 120; Sontag, A Sontag Reader, 204; Moore, ‘‘Composition and Decomposition,’’ 121.} This is the edge over which the Abstract Expressionists leapt,
one by one—many via a literal as well as a metaphorical act of suicide.


Moreover, the drive to create an art unrecuperable by capitalism—
‘‘something that would ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever ate
in that room,’’ as Rothko said of his plan for the Seagram Building murals—
was, in the end, fruitless. Ultimately, Zerzan admits, even the works of Pollock and Newman succumbed to commodification: ‘‘It becomes hard to resist
concluding, let me concede, that the heroic AE enterprise was destined to be
a dead end, inspiring to some, but unrealizable.’’ Zerzan quotes the Abstract
Expressionist painter Clyfford Still, who reflected after the fact that, in the
face of the ‘‘cool, universal Buchenwald’’ constructed with the active collusion of authoritarian Bauhaus and Proletkult modernisms, anarchist modernisms had proved useless: ‘‘All the devices were at hand, and all the devices had failed to emancipate.’’\footnote{Rothko, quoted in Zerzan, ‘‘Abstract Expressionism,’’ 41; Zerzan, ‘‘Abstract Expressionism,’’ 38, 40; Still, quoted in Zerzan, ‘‘Abstract Expressionism,’’ 42.}


Was this not, then, the limit-case of anarchist modernism? George Marcus
and Michael Fischer trace the emergence of ‘‘postmodern aesthetics’’ in part
to the ‘‘crisis of representation’’ created by the waning of the ‘‘shock value’’
once possessed by modernist rejections of realist representation.\footnote{Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, 7.} Most commentators trace the modernist moment, in turn, to the challenge posed to
the arts by the rise of nineteenth-century positivist science (including, with
particular relevance to the narrative arts, the science of sociology) and its
technological applications (including, with special relevance for the visual
arts, photography). By the end of the nineteenth century, the proliferation of
modernist avant-gardes was fully underway, as Naturalist social novels and
Neo-Impressionist paintings vie with Symbolist poetry either to rival the
achievements of scientific and technological representation or to spurn them
as unworthy. A few decades later, this contest seemed exhausted.


Magritte had already hinted, in works such as Evening Falls (Le soir qui
tombe, 1964)—in which, as Gablik describes it, we look out at a landscape
through a ‘‘window [that] has shattered . . . but fragments of the landscape
reappear on the broken bits of glass as they fall inside the room’’—that attempts to destroy representation and meaning still left representation somehow intact. Indeed, representation had survived in the form of the
‘‘visionary’’ artist who ‘‘expresses’’ himself or herself in the work of art—as
Graeber observes, a thoroughly representationalist conception in the political sense as well. From the moment that Saint-Simon coined the term
‘‘avant-garde’’ or ‘‘vanguard,’’ the concept linked the ‘‘priestly function’’ of
artists to that of party leadership, so that ultimately avant-gardes began to
imitate political vanguardists, ‘‘publishing their own manifestos [and] communiqués, purging one another, and otherwise making themselves (sometimes quite intentional) parodies of revolutionary sects.’’ This visionary
authority had already been proclaimed by the Romantics, who seemed to
want poetry to subsume the functions of both spiritual and political leadership: Blake says that poets are prophets, and Shelley calls poetry unacknowledged legislation—leading Paul Goodman to ask the inevitable
question: does poetry then want the acknowledgment of Church or State?


Similarly, Kenneth Burke, commenting on Read’s anarcho-modernist mani-
festo, Poetry and Anarchism, suggests that art, rather than being ‘‘the oppo-
site of authority,’’ inevitably ‘‘derives its strength as much from the structure
of authority as from . . . resistance’’; while ‘‘the artist will tug at the limits of
authority . . . authority provides the gravitational pull necessary to a work’s
firm location.’’\footnote{Gablik, Magritte, 97; Graeber, ‘‘Twilight of Vanguardism’’; Goodman, Speaking and Language, 230; Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 225, 232.}


In its critique of the signifier and the subject, then, postmodernism becomes a meditation on the complicity of modernist antirepresentationalism
with representational systems, an inquiry into the source of art’s authority.


According to Lyotard,



\begin{quote}


Painting obtained its letters of nobility, was placed among the fine arts, was given
almost princely rights, during the Quattrocento. Since then and for centuries, it
made its contribution to the fulfillment of the metaphysical and political programme for the organization of the visual and the social. Optical geometry, the
ordering of values and colours in line with a Neoplatonically inspired hierarchism, the rules for fixing the high points of religious or historical legend, helped
to encourage the identification of new political communities: the city, the State,
the nation, by giving them the destiny of seeing everything and of making the
world transparent (clear and distinct) to monocular vision.\footnote{Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 119.}



\end{quote}


This vast representational project—‘‘the intellectual counterpart of political
tyranny,’’ as Read calls it\footnote{Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art, 112-13.}—was taken up, between the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, by literature, particularly by realist fiction. As Elizabeth Ermarth points out, the realist novel, as ‘‘representational fiction’’ par
excellence, is presided over by the unifying figure of the narrator, who operates as its vanishing point, a panoptical eye whose recollective gaze, located
after and often altogether outside the action—a metaphysical view-from-nowhere—‘‘enables the many to speak as one’’ via an ‘‘arbitrary hindsight
which unifies the field.’’ The ‘‘consensus’’ thus generated by this narration
has absolute ontologizing power. The agreement between present and past, or
present and re-present, is a purely formal agreement that literally objectifies the
world. Ordinarily, we may assume, we agree among ourselves about things (to the
extent that we do agree) because we all live in the same world. But a close look
at the conventions of realism gives rise to a disconcerting reversal: not ‘‘it exists,
therefore we agree,’’ but the reverse, ‘‘we agree, therefore it exists.’’ What is objective in realism is only so because all available viewpoints agree and to the
extent that they so agree . . . the very act of reading [a realistic novel] thus entails
acceptance of the view that the world is a common world, a ‘‘human’’ world, a
world that is the ‘‘same’’ for everyone.\footnote{Elizabeth Ermarth, ‘‘Fictional Consensus and Female Casualties,’’ in The Representation of Women in Fiction, ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet, 4-5 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).}


The oppressive enforcement of sameness on the different elicits submission.
The ‘‘world picture’’ produced by this aesthetic act of ‘‘enframing,’’ as Heidegger would put it, is of an essentially ‘‘invariant world’’; while each subject’s experience is particular, conditioned by culture and circumstances,
the ‘‘representational convention’’ of the all-seeing narrator assures us that
‘‘if each individual could see all the world . . . all would see the same
world.’’\footnote{Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper \& Row, 1977), 20, 128; Ermarth, Sequel to History 30.} Once again, essentialism and representationalism ride together.


Since this task of turning the world into a picture by rendering it in its
objectivity could now be taken over by technology and science, modernist
art could only justify itself by either reconstituting itself as a quasi-scientific
activity of controlled observation (particularly in terms of the still heavily
verbal and narrative study of social relations), as in Zola’s Naturalism, or, in
a manner pioneered by the Romantics, by claiming to produce representations of something more sublime or ineffable than the object world—for instance, the object world as it appears in the act of seeing (Impressionism
and Neo-Impressionism), or in the act of seeing over time (Cubism), or filtered through moods (Expressionism), or refracted through the unconscious
(Surrealism). In any case, classical representationalism was no longer an option.


A further problem with classicism, apart from its technological obsolescence, is its wedding of community to hierarchy. The anarchist modernism
charted by Weir, Allan and Mark Antliff, and Kadlec, as a subjectivist and
individualistic reaction against tradition, never resolves its relationship to
community. Pound, for example, began his career under the communitarian
influence of Ruskin and Morris, but came to find its neo-medieval traditionalism abhorrent and its reliance on reference unsupportable; when Pound
arrived in London, modernist critics like Ford Madox Ford were already
turning against Morris, and ‘‘by 1913 Pound was cursing the ‘slush’ of PreRaphaelite verse.’’\footnote{Kadlec, ‘‘Pound, Blast, and Syndicalism,’’ 1015-16, 1023.} Modernist hostility toward community vitiates attempts
‘‘to efface the boundary between art and everyday life,’’ rendering them incomplete and internally incoherent. Thus, Symbolism, whose goal is to liberate art from the world, inaugurates an aestheticism (a program of abstraction
or drawing away from the social), separating art from community; Dadaism,
whose goal is to liberate the world from art, inaugurates a negation of the
aesthetic (a program summed up in Francis Picabia’s declaration that ‘‘art
must be unaesthetic in the extreme’’), separating community from art—
which ironically places it in apposition to aestheticism, for which art must
be ‘‘useless and impossible to justify.’’ The final expressions of aestheticism
empty art of all content, anything recognizable from everyday life: art has
gotten as far away from everyday life as it can possibly get. At the same
time, they strip art of any aesthetic sensuality or erotic appeal, producing
‘‘unaesthetic’’ art as nausea, as if to exemplify the dour Frankfurt School
slogan: ‘‘To be pleased means to say Yes.’’\footnote{Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 66; Picabia, quoted in Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 228; Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 144.}


Robbed of any connection to ‘‘art’’ as a wholly separate, private institution, the community goes elsewhere for its pleasure: to art as commoditized,
mass-produced ‘‘entertainment.’’ This so-called popular culture offers only
a sham populism: images, gestures, and impulses originating outside of (and
even in opposition to) the marketplace are recuperated by it and commoditized, while the overwhelming spectacle of cultural production intimidates
the public into playing a passive, spectatorial role, leaving the production of
art to specialists in the pay of commercial elites. Similarly, in the Proletkult
designed for ‘‘the undifferentiated mass of the collectivist state,’’ as Read
writes in his 1936 manifesto, Poetry and Anarchism, ‘‘the artist must have
one aim and only one aim—to supply the public with what it wants.’’ Under
authoritarian socialism and capitalism alike, ‘‘what this public wants is what
it has wanted throughout history—sentimental tunes, doggerel verse, pretty
ladies on chocolate-box lids: all that which the Germans call by the forceful
word Kitsch.’’\footnote{Read, Poetry and Anarchism (London: Freedom Press, 1941), 27.} The ‘‘aesthetic ideal’’ of this cliché-ridden ‘‘kitsch’’ art and
literature, as Milan Kundera writes, is a representation of the world ‘‘in
which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist . . . kitsch
excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in
human existence.’’ This ‘‘categorical agreement with being,’’ this will to believe that nothing is essentially wrong with the world, that all is well (or at
least that all the problems we see are exceptions to the rule, transitory, temporary, destined for Aufhebung), expresses a rejection of whatever is unacceptable about the world—including the ultimate unacceptable fact, to
which all the others refer: Kundera calls kitsch ‘‘a folding screen set up to
curtain off death.’’\footnote{Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper \& Row, 1991), 248, 253.} Thus, kitsch encodes a ‘‘world-hatred,’’ a compulsive,
repetitive ‘‘expression of [dominant] ‘values,’ ’’ ultimately ‘‘the enactment of
the assertion that what is ought not to be,’’ in the words of Crispin Sartwell;
rather than evoking a utopian desire for world transformation, it transforms
the existing world into the utopia of one’s desires. In short, commercial culture provides both the sort of generalized endorsement of existence that Marx
calls an opiate with the sort of generalized hatred of existence that Nietzsche
calls nihilism.\footnote{Sartwell, Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality, 12, 5; Robert C. Solomon, Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 207.} To be pleased, here, means saying No to one’s own concrete
experience of everyday life (which certainly includes shit) and Yes to an
illusion.


Here is the impasse, then, as summarized by Andreas Huyssen: ‘‘While
low art . . . floods the consumer with positive models which are as abstract
as they are unrealistic, the function of high art is to legitimate bourgeois
domination in the cultural realm by intimidating the non-specialist, i.e., the
majority of a given population.’’\footnote{Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 150.} The only two options on offer seem to be
the elitist populism of consumer culture (art produced for popular consumption against elite culture but in exclusive elite interests) or the populist elitism of avant-garde modernism (art produced against elite interests by an
elite for its own exclusive consumption).


Yet the modernism that once declared war on kitsch\footnote{Ibid., 35.} is no longer an option: now, having exhausted its populist and anarchist energies, it appears
merely as elitism. The refusal to communicate, to send a message in a common code, only renders artworks more recuperable: one can make them
mean whatever one likes. This resignification takes place via the agency of
the universal economic subject, whose absolute individuality is signaled by
a resistance to all signification, whose calculating practices spring from incalculable desires, who makes of everything a property, annihilating it and
taking it into its interior nothingness.


Postmodern artists have taken a more skeptical attitude toward the very
‘‘oppositional pretensions’’ of modernism, forgoing the ‘‘austere indecipherability’’ of autonomous art to operate from the belly of the beast, and
abandoning the abstractionist dream of making a clean break from representation: the postmodern, Mitchell notes, appears as the reversal of minimalist
abstraction and the quest for purity into the proliferation of copies and simulations, a period of ‘‘hyper-representation.’’\footnote{Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 108; Mitchell, ‘‘Representation,’’ 16.} The question is: does postmodern art thereby renounce its critical function, becoming a dutiful duplicate
of commodity culture? Does postmodernism dispose not only of modernism
but of anarchism?

\section{POSTMODERN ANARCHY}


To the extent that anarchism is a utopian politics,\footnote{Which is by no means an incontestable claim: Daniel Guérin, for one, insists that ‘‘anarchist theory emphatically rejects the charge of utopianism’’ (41). However, anarchists have typically been more willing to elaborate a vision of the good society than have their orthodox Marxist counterparts.} it might seem unlikely
that postmodern aesthetics could have any affinity to anarchism. The concept
of ‘‘the loyal opposition’’ in postmodern theory militates against revolutionary
political commitments per se, and postmodern aesthetics embrace complicity rather than seeking purity. As Linda Hutcheon writes, ‘‘postmodernism
questions centralized, totalized, hierarchized, closed systems: questions, but
does not destroy’’; thus, ‘‘postmodern art self-consciously acknowledges
that, like mass culture, it is ideologically loaded because of its representational (and often narrative) nature.’’\footnote{Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (Cambridge, UK: Routledge, 1988), 41, 230.}


Moreover, to a postmodern eye, utopias appear under the sign of Apollonian idealism, as attempts to realize ideals like freedom, happiness, equality,
and justice—static, closed representations from which, inevitably, something must be excluded, but on which the representation surreptitiously relies. Not incidentally, that which utopias appear to exclude is that which is
celebrated by postmodern theory: the Dionysian multiplicity, diversity, and
flux of unruly and unpredictable desires. Where the classic utopians, from
Plato and More all the way through to the communal experimenters of the
nineteenth century, assumed that ‘‘truth is one, and only error is multiple,’’
in Judith Shklar’s words, postmodernists tend to assume the reverse.\footnote{Judith Shklar, ‘‘What Is The Use Of Utopia?’’ in Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic, ed. Tobin Siebers, 42 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Richards, Letters From Quebec, 1.2.8.} Some
postmodernists have even suggested, à la Baudrillard, that the cynicism and
passivity generally displayed by the postmodern masses with regard to politics is itself the only credible politics remaining, a form of mass ‘‘resistance’’
to utopian ideologies of both the Left and the Right.\footnote{Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities: Or, the End of the Social, and Other Essays, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 9.} For a Marxist such as
Eagleton, conversely, much postmodern art seems to present a cruel parody
of the modernist aspiration to merge art with life: ‘‘Mayakovsky’s poetry
readings in the factory yard’’ return as ‘‘Warhol’s shoes and soup-cans.’’\footnote{Eagleton, ‘‘Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism,’’ in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge, 385-86 (New York: Longman, 1988).}


Nevertheless, Tobin Siebers argues that postmodernism, in evoking the
desire for some absolute liberation of difference, is itself ‘‘a utopian philosophy.’’ This utopia of difference or ‘‘heterotopia’’ is conceived as the place
‘‘where community is based on the inclusion of differences, where different
forms of talk are allowed to exist simultaneously, and where heterogeneity
does not inspire conflict.’’\footnote{Siebers, Heterotopia, 2, 20.} Opening space for this coexistence of differences means not so much leaving representations behind as placing them all
under suspicion, bracketing their claims to be connected to anything extra-
representational. Accordingly, Marike Finlay locates two moments in the
postmodern destruction of ‘‘representational’’ art that present a return of the
utopian mode. First of all, this destruction stands for ‘‘the negation of what
is not utopian,’’ the unmasking of official representations of the status quo
as free, happy, just, and good. At the same time, it stands for some radically
different form of relation in which the state of being a fragment would not be
experienced as a wound or a deviation from any norm (such as coherence,
self-similarity, or wholeness), reconceiving utopia as ‘‘a dispersion, a dissemination, a free, unconstrained production and practice of discourse.’’\footnote{Marike Finlay, The Romantic Irony of Semiotics: Friedrich Schlegel and the Crisis of Representation (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988), 169-70.} While
Finlay takes Adorno and Schlegel for her primary points of reference, we
can see here the return of that nexus of agreements about fragmentation and
representation that constituted the common politics of anarchism and modernism. Indeed, in Ihab Hassan’s famous chart of ‘‘differences between modernism and postmodernism,’’ reproduced in Harvey’s Condition of
Postmodernity, ‘‘hierarchy’’ is classified as modern, while ‘‘anarchy’’ is classified as postmodern. If Yeats’s anxiously conservative modernism worried,
as had Matthew Arnold, that ‘‘mere anarchy’’ had been ‘‘loosed upon the
world,’’ Cage’s postmodernism declared, ‘‘We must make the world safe for
poverty \Slash{} Without dependence on government’’—or, with Ferlinghetti, that
it was ‘‘waiting \Slash{} for the war to be fought \Slash{} which will make the world safe \Slash{}
for anarchy.’’\footnote{Yeats, ‘‘The Second Coming,’’ in William Butler Yeats: The Poems, 4; John Cage, ‘‘Anarchist Poem,’’ The Anarchist Library, \href{http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/john\_cage.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}flag.blackened.net\Slash{}daver\Slash{}anarchism\Slash{}john\_cage.html} (accessed 3 April 2004), 25-26; Lawrence Ferlinghetti, ‘‘I Am Waiting,’’ in A Coney Island of the Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958), 17-20.}


Thus, while a popular reading of postmodernism frames it as the collapse
of modernist opposition to representation, Owens argues that it is primarily
‘‘a critique of representation, an attempt to use representation against itself
to challenge its authority, its claim to possess some truth or epistemological
value,’’ and therefore a continuation of that anarchist project.\footnote{Charles Jencks, quoted in Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 36; Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 88.} Postmodernism responds to the impasse posed by an obsolete classical tradition, a corrupt commercial culture, and an exhausted anarchist modernism by
attempting to cobble together what it needs, in a mode of bricolage, from
each of these sources—using elements of the commercial and the classical
as a means to a kind of populism, and using a blend of classical and modernist techniques, particularly techniques of reflexivity and irony, to neutralize
the conservative content of realism without a step back into abstraction.
Along these lines, Eco describes postmodernism as a step away from the
kind of modernist program that ‘‘destroys’’ or ‘‘defaces the past’’ in an attempt to be free of it: ‘‘the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because
its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited; but with irony, not innocently.’’\footnote{Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 67.} That is, instead of seeking to eradicate everything that is impure
in the received codes and traditional forms, a project which ends in self-
annihilation, the postmodern ironist distances himself or herself from these
materials by citing them, appropriating them while holding them at one remove. In doing so, the ironist restores communicative understanding. This
ironic restoration, this ‘‘replenishment’’ of what has been ‘‘exhausted,’’ as
John Barth has it,\footnote{John Barth, ‘‘The Literature of Replenishment,’’ in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (New York: Putnam, 1984), 193-206.} seems like an odd outcome for what is still a critique
of representation in all its forms: is not communication synonymous with
representation, since one communicates through representational signs, and
what represents must, by definition, communicate something to someone?


This paradox makes more sense if, as Mitchell suggests, one sees the axis of
representation connecting signifier to signified as interrupting or obstructing
the axis of communication connecting speaker to hearer.
Since the concern with purity is gone, postmodernism celebrates the Bakhtinian mixture of genres: all the conventions and standard tropes of the
universe of low-art genres (romance, western, science fiction, mystery)
spawned within the matrix of mass culture from traditional realist fiction and
cinema (as if in imitation of the classical genre taxonomy of lyric, epic, dramatic, etc.) become part of the common store of imagery and styles. Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow references both Rilke and Plastic-Man comix,
while Auster’s City of Glass blends Dashiell Hammett with Wittgenstein.


Where classical realism entailed an insistence that our senses are adequate
to represent an ultimately sensible world, the heteroglossic mixture of genres
deployed by postmodernism suggests that ‘‘nothing we know makes ‘a lot of
sense’ and perhaps even that nothing ever could.’’\footnote{Bruce Sterling, ‘‘Slipstream,’’ Science Fiction EYE 1, no. 5 (July 1989): 78.}


A shift in materials and tactics is accompanied by a shift in strategy.
Where anarchist modernism typically emphasized the liberation of artists
and their works from a restrictive social framework—both from the bigotry
of bourgeois moral codes, with their strictures as to what is and is not a
proper subject for representation, and from the combined pressure of the
commercial marketplace and philistine popular tastes for artists to produce
representational art—anarchist postmodernism tends to take these freedoms
for granted as having been won by modernism.\footnote{David Graeber approvingly notes Bourdieu’s argument that modernist formalism, despite its political aloofness, achieved a political victory in securing ‘‘the autonomy of one particular field of human endeavor from the logic of the market’’ (‘‘The Twilight of Vanguardism’’).} Instead of defending the
autonomy of the artist and the artwork, an anarchist postmodernism deflates
the artist’s pretensions to authority, contesting the power of art to reveal a
natural realm outside of its own artifice or a transcendent truth beyond its
own historical materiality. Authors and narrators are fragmented, as are the
wholeness of narrative and symbol.


In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera sketches a brief history of the
novel as the story of a series of attempts to represent the self. At first, the
self is revealed through action, the picaresque experience of adventure on
the open road; as the world becomes increasingly colonized, however, this
sphere of free action diminishes, and the self resorts to revealing itself
through words (the epistolary novel) and ultimately through thoughts (the
stream-of-consciousness novel). Finally, with the modernism of Kafka and
Beckett, the self is utterly flattened and negated by a totalitarian environment that makes personality irrelevant. Beyond this modernist ne plus ultra,
Juliana Spahr traces how postmodern ‘‘antirepresentational impulses’’ are
realized instead through the representation of the self as a ‘‘multiple subjectivity’’—hermetic, unknowable, irreducibly fragmentary. As Sartwell writes,
lived experience resists representation: ‘‘Every attempt I make to narrativize
my life is radically impoverished . . . my life is no novel and cannot even be
described.’’ In Paul Auster’s stories, the indescribability of the self, its absolute otherness to itself, is powerfully affirmed, and when his protagonists
succumb to the temptation of accepting identities imposed on them as a way
to ‘‘pull all these things together and make sense of them,’’ they take a step
toward oblivion. Thus, Auster says that his The Invention of Solitude poses
‘‘the question of . . . whether it’s in fact possible for a person to talk to another person.’’\footnote{Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Lisa Asher (: Harper \& Row, 1988), 23-26; Juliana Spahr, ‘‘Resignifying Autobiography: Lyn Hejinian’s My Life,’’ American Literature 68, no. 1 (March 1996): 146; Sartwell, Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality, 15; Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (: Penguin, 1986), 9; Auster, The Art of Hunger (: Penguin, 1993), 300.} A kind of Stirnerian self, resistant to identity, reappears.


This singular-plural self presupposes plural-singular realities. In place of
a realist representation that claims veracity for itself—a mimetic matching
of its own unified system of categories to a unified system of nature, so that
each natural kind fits its cultural category and vice versa—postmodern fiction presents us with multiple worlds.\footnote{Harvey, 301.} If, as Hubert Dreyfus and Charles
Spinosa argue, representationalism entails the essentialist assumption of an
‘‘all-embracing set of types’’—in Borges’s famous analogies, a perfect Map
that would cover the Empire point for point, or a perfect language whose
noun structure would exactly fit the structure of really existing things—then
an antirepresentationalist approach would dispense with this unified picture
of things, acknowledging the creativity of language and embracing the coexistence of many realities.\footnote{Hubert L. Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, ‘‘Coping with Things-in-Themselves: A Practice-Based Phenomenological Argument for Realism,’’ Inquiry 42, no. 1 (March 1999): 752; Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, Extraordinary Tales, ed. and trans. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 123; Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 101-5; Dreyfus and Spinosa, ‘‘Two Kinds of Antiessentialism and Their Consequences,’’ 747.} Gianni Vattimo defines postmodern beauty in
terms of this ontological fecundity, the proliferation of ‘‘possible life worlds,’’
rather than the reduction of the manifold to unity, à la Percy Bysshe Shelley.\footnote{Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 72.} As Bruce Sterling observes, this antirepresentationalist pluralism underlies many of the techniques of postmodern fiction: in a manner notably
dramatized by Burroughs’s reappropriation of the Dadas’ cut-up technique,
all manner of texts, from pulp fiction and publicity to political propaganda,
the factual alike with the fictional, are reduced to ‘‘raw material for collage
work.’’\footnote{Sterling, ‘‘Slipstream,’’ 80.} Thus, in Steve Erickson’s Arc d’X, more or less factual historic
episodes (Thomas Jefferson’s embassy to Paris, his rape of his slave Sally
Hemings) are combined with the counterfactual (in a sublime act of revenge,
Hemings stabs Jefferson in his bed) and the marvelous (in the moment after
the murder, ‘‘she picked herself up from the floor to see fly out of his body
a hundred black moths which filled the room’’).\footnote{Erickson, Arc d’X (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993), 38.} Such juxtapositions, in
suggesting that these ‘‘fantastic elements . . . are not clearcut ‘departures
from known reality’ but ontologically part of the whole mess,’’ challenge the
reality principle, inviting the subversive question: ‘‘‘real’ compared to
what?’’ This disrespect for intellectual property and ontological propriety, as
well as the presentation of ‘‘worlds in the plural,’’ is what Brian McHale
calls the ‘‘anarchic’’ in postmodern literature.\footnote{Sterling, ‘‘Slipstream,’’ 80; McHale, quoted in Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 301.}


An anarchic plurality of worlds, as Dreyfus and Spinosa acknowledge,
means a certain ‘‘incommensurability’’ between them; even in a Habermasian ‘‘ideal speech situation,’’ according to Andrew M. Koch, the irreducibility of one world to the terms of any other implies relativism, ‘‘skewed
languages speaking at one another—neither truth nor consensus.’’\footnote{Dreyfus and Spinosa, ‘‘Two Kinds of Antiessentialism,’’ 759; Koch, ‘‘Poststructuralism,’’ 338.} This,
in turn, spells out a further ramification of postmodern antirepresentationalism—the ethical responsibility of the artist not to represent or ‘‘speak for’’
others. For Craig Owens, Martha Rosler’s 1974-75 photographic series The
Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems is exemplary in its renunciation of representational ‘‘mastery.’’ A number of oblique, vacant photographs—for example, the façade of a ‘‘First National City Bank’’ with two
empty bottles of liquor resting on its granite stoop—are juxtaposed with a
scattered series of words for drunkenness (‘‘plastered,’’ ‘‘stuccoed,’’ ‘‘rosined,’’ ‘‘shellacked,’’ ‘‘vulcanized,’’ ‘‘inebriated,’’ ‘‘polluted’’). In this stark
‘‘juxtaposition of two representational systems, visual and verbal,’’ Rosler
not only denies us the satisfaction of a direct statement, an explanation, a
single meaning; she has also
refused to photograph the inhabitants of Skid Row, to speak on their behalf, to
illuminate them from a safe distance (photography as social work in the tradition
of Jacob Riis). For ‘‘concerned’’ or ‘‘victim’’ photography overlooks the constitutive role of its own activity, which is held to be merely representative (the ‘‘myth’’
of photographic transparency and objectivity). Despite his or her benevolence in
representing those who have been denied access to the means of representation,
the photographer inevitably functions as an agent of the system of power that
silenced those people in the first place. Thus, they are twice victimized: first by
society, and then by the photographer who presumes the right to speak on their
behalf.\footnote{Owens, ‘‘The Discourse of Others,’’ 68-69.}


We are thus presented only with floating signifiers that stubbornly refuse our
wish to master them, to subdue them into revealing a final meaning. The only
statement Rosler offers is one about ‘‘the impoverishment of representational
strategies’’: All these images and words, she writes, ‘‘are powerless.’’\footnote{Rosler, quoted in Owens, ‘‘The Discourse of Others,’’ 70.}


Anarchist postmodernism thus aims at the displacement or decentering of
the artist as privileged representative. Here, once again, the postmodern
both cancels and preserves the results of modernist experimentation. On the
one hand, what modernists conceived of as the artist’s liberatory struggle for
autonomy is redescribed as the attempt to retain for the artist, in the face of
the challenge posed by science, some degree of his former ‘‘authority,’’ a
‘‘claim to represent some authentic vision of the world.’’ At the same time,
as Featherstone writes, ‘‘This attack on autonomous, institutionalized art was
itself not new,’’ but had already been anticipated by modernism.\footnote{Owens, ‘‘The Discourse of Others,’’ 58; Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Post- modernism, 38.} The earlier generation of the Symbolists, like their Romantic forebears, had already
been fascinated with the unconscious forces outside the artist’s control;
Dada put the idea of abdicating conscious control into practice with Tzara’s
cut-up poetry method, and the Surrealists extended this experiment with the
aleatory and the unconscious in practices of automatic writing (écriture automatique) and the Exquisite Corpse poetry game. By replacing authorial will
with Mallarmé’s ineradicable hasard, these anarchist moderns aimed to radically de-privilege the poet as individual genius. Anti-art strikes at the spirit
of aesthetic hierarchy,\footnote{It strikes at the spirit of hierarchy, but does not kill it: instead, it calls into being new élites (of literati who ‘‘understand’’ anti-art as a continuation of aesthetics, wealthy patrons who own ‘‘valuable’’ aesthetic objects, and arts bureaucrats who commission control aestheticized ‘‘public’’ spaces), and at the same stroke, destroys the spirit of aesthetic community (ex-cluding the public from art as plebian ‘‘philistines,’’ rather than impressing it through art, as did the old aristocracies via ostentatious art-display). Even in 1865, Proudhon was concerned that ‘‘art’s ‘true significance’ is falsified’’ by its ‘‘commodification’’ through ‘‘awards, galleries, government sponsorships, etc.’’ (Max Raphael, Proudhon, Marx, Picasso: Three Studies in the Sociology of Art, trans. Inge Marcuse, ed. John Tagg [Atlantic Highlands, NJ]: Humanities Press, 1980), 4); by 1936, Herbert Read was lamenting the state of affairs in which the most radical modernisms could be cheerfully ignored by an oblivious public while government patronage meant dependence on bureaucrats (Poetry and Anarchism), and by 1949, Paul Goodman bemoaned ‘‘the disappearance of a popular audience for good work’’ and the self-isolation of artists, the familiar dilemma in which art and the public mutually excluded one another (Creator Spirit Come!, 77-79).} not only by painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa
or placing a urinal on a pedestal, but also in more modest uses of vernacular
(from Wordsworth’s timid attempt to introduce everyday language in poetry
to Picasso’s incorporation of the day’s newspaper headlines in cubist collages) and attempts to popularize art by siting it in everyday life (e.g., Man
Ray’s abstract chess set or the Muralists’s public art). Arguably, then, this
aspect of postmodernism begins with those modernists ‘‘who effectively
practised postmodernism avant la lettre.’’\footnote{Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 38.}


Once again, as they struggle to articulate the antirepresentationalist project in aesthetics in terms of a radical deflation of the authority of art, post-
modernists find themselves referring to modern experiments. According to
Harvey, Picasso’s collage and Eisenstein’s montage come to be redefined as
the postmodern techniques par excellence, in part because the fragmentary
style they produce undermines our sense of stability and univocity, but also
because ‘‘minimizing the authority of the cultural producer creates the opportunity for popular participation and democratic determinations of cultural
values.’’\footnote{Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 51.} Rather than creating art ex nihilo like a god, the postmodern bricoleur produces the new through recombinations of the old, as collage and
montage; since we are all now equipped with a store of recombinable materials, all of us are the potential creators of Duchamp’s ready-mades. This de-
deification of the artist expresses itself in a camp aesthetic of travesty and
parody: what Spanos considers ‘‘the essential characteristic of postmodern
literature,’’ i.e., its ‘‘mockery of the canonical literary forms of ‘official’ culture,’’ finds ample precedent in modernist parodies of official art, from the
ridicule Pirandello heaps on the ‘‘well-made play’’ to Eliot’s mock-melodrama, Sweeney Agonistes.\footnote{Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 196; Spanos, Repetitions, 20.}


This anti-aesthetic reduction of the distance between artist and audience,
between art and everyday life, means that the didacticism of traditional
drama must give way to something nonmimetic. Once again, postmodernism
looks to a modernist precedent. If, according to Derrida, traditional drama is
tied to humanism by its commitment to ‘‘a representation of life,’’ then anarchist antirepresentationalism dictates Artaud’s antihumanist Theater of Cruelty, which ‘‘is not a representation’’ but ‘‘life itself.’’ Rather than a drama of
realism and the word, Artaud’s is one of action. Refusing the transcendental
pretense of the signifier, Artaud produces what Perez terms a ‘‘theater of the
flesh,’’ a ‘‘theater of passion and desiring-production, where expression is
not linguistic but hieroglyphic and a-signifying in nature,’’ so that ‘‘flows of
the body replace the flows of words’’ and ‘‘linguistic expression is replaced
by the emotive a-signification of ‘affective athleticism.’ ’’ Thus, instead of
enacting a predefined text, actors in the Theater of Cruelty engage in ‘‘gestures, dances, and shouts,’’ for ‘‘the gesture is always spontaneous, non-
coded and non-inscribed; and it disappears like a musical note the moment
it is performed. But most importantly, unlike the despotic and imperial Signifier it does not refer back to anything.’’ In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms,
this theater is one of ‘‘production’’ rather than ‘‘expression’’: if psychoanalytic representation inappropriately imposes an expressivist or dramaturgical
model on the unconscious, Artaud’s theater presents instead ‘‘a factory, a
workshop.’’ Within this workshop, Derrida notes, everyone and everything is
productive: rather distancing a contemplative audience from the action on
stage, cruelty involves them, enters into their bodies. Anarchist theater proposes to abolish ‘‘the distance between the spectator and the actor’’—
displacing the performer’s agency and the author’s authority in favor of the
active audience. Thus, in Artaud’s words, ‘‘the true theater, like poetry . . .
is born out of a kind of organized anarchy.’’\footnote{Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 234, 237; Rolando Perez, On (An)archy and Schizoanalysis (Brooklyn: Auto- nomedia, 1990), 38-39; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 55; Artaud, quoted in Derrida, Writing and Difference, 249.}


A postmodern emphasis on the active audience valorizes what Umberto
Eco calls the ‘‘open work’’—the text that forces the reader to produce, rather
than passively consume, its narrative form.\footnote{Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Concogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3-4.} Already, in modernism, we
find hints of de Certeau’s notion of the text as a kind of space that readers
inhabit differently: Sonn cites the Symbolist writer Léon Deschamps as one
who believed that a poem ‘‘only provided the palace which the reader was
free to furnish,’’ so that a poem’s ambiguity should allow ‘‘freedom of interpretation.’’ Indeed, for the Bloomsbury modernist critic Roger Fry, ‘‘the accusation of revolutionary anarchism’’ leveled at formalism by conservatives
was due to its elimination of elitist requirements on its interpretation, the
abolition of an aristocratic genre vocabulary.\footnote{Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics, 223; Roger Fry, Vision and Design (New York: Brentano’s, 1924), 291; Jack Kerouac, Tristessa (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 96.} The spirit of this open work
is democratic and leveling, typified by Kerouac’s cavalier invitation at the
end of Tristessa: ‘‘This part is my part of the movie, let’s hear yours.’’ Juliana
Spahr describes this kind of text as ‘‘giving the reading act as much authority
as the authoring act,’’ arguing that it ‘‘cultivates readerly agency by opening
an anarchic space for reader response.’’\footnote{Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001), 47; ‘‘Resignifying Autobiography,’’ 148.}


Presumably, this ‘‘anarchic space’’ is offered as an answer to Marxist concerns about ideology and repressive structures. Instead of confronting a
nearly all-powerful ‘‘culture industry’’ that reifies subjects into objects at
every turn, we find active agents subverting the system by creatively, autonomously appropriating its products. Thus Virginia Postrel rereads a 1950s ad
for Dove soap as high camp: ‘‘Read with today’s eyes, the ad is quite insulting, but it is also hilarious. It is so unabashedly over-the-top that only the
most irony-deprived could find it truly offensive. The 1990s reaction is to
puncture it, to make jokes at its expense. In the age of Monica, the story
cries out for reinterpretation as soft-core phone sex (‘Well, darling, I’m all
over cream. Just imagine, cream tip to toe. Arms. Legs. All of me!’ says the
ad) or a desperate cry for attention.’’ Our knowing, ironic responses to this
priceless bit of kitsch, Postrel argues, are the cumulative result of advertisers’ attempts to craft ever-more-effective pitches, ‘‘a media dynamic that
made consumers increasingly immune to the ad men’s favorite tech-
niques.’’\footnote{Virginia Postrel, ‘‘The Pleasures of Persuasion,’’ Reason, 2 August 1999, \href{http://reason.com/opeds/vp080299.shtml}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}reason.com\Slash{}opeds\Slash{}vp080299.shtml} (accessed 22 March 2004).} The ability of such images to elicit credulous and affective responses has steadily declined, while a postmodern culture of resistance has
arisen, in which advertising imagery and narrative style are subject to the
continual ‘‘parodies and satirical allusions,’’ which have become a ubiquitous part of pop culture. As Carl Matheson explains, postmodern comedies
like The Simpsons ‘‘tend to be highly quotational: many of today’s comedies
essentially depend on the device of referring to or quoting other works of
popular culture. Second, they are hyper-ironic: the flavor of humor offered
by today’s comedies is colder, based less on a shared sense of humanity than
on a sense of world-weary cleverer-than-thou-ness.’’ These quotational and
hyper-ironic strategies both reflect and participate in what Matheson calls
‘‘a pervasive crisis of authority, be it artistic, scientific or philosophical, religious or moral’’: no one, in any of these fields, now has an unchallenged
right to speak for others, or can claim uncontested legitimacy for his or her
representations of the world.\footnote{Carl Matheson, ‘‘The Simpsons, Hyper-Irony, and the Meaning of Life,’’ in The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer, ed. William Irwin et al., 109, 117 (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2001). Note the conspicuous absence of political authority from Matheson’s list of the kinds that are in crisis.} As Sterling remarks, when one can no longer
either faithfully represent a world (as classicism aspired to) or create one ab
novo (as modernists aspired to), one instead quotes worlds, cutting them up
and turning them to new uses. The culture of ironic appropriation, on this
account, is an antiauthoritarian ‘‘politics of subversive quotation,’’ an attack
on elite culture.\footnote{Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 178; Postrel, ‘‘The Pleasures of Persuasion.’’}


It is left to a few Marxist types, such as Thomas Frank, to question these
notions of agency, resistance, and elitism: such ‘‘active-audience theorizing,’’ he argues, is little more than an ideological fig leaf for neoliberal capitalism. For Postrel, however, Frank’s ideology-critique is still another
version of elitist vanguardism, claiming a higher epistemological ground
from which to speak for others—a representational authority—at the expense of the autonomous agency of those for whom he would speak, who
are represented as dumb victims. By contrast, Postrel’s active audience is
positively empowered, and she includes herself in its ranks.\footnote{Frank, quoted in Postrel, ‘‘The Pleasures of Persuasion’’; Postrel, ‘‘The Pleasures of Persuasion.’’} The consumerist self recreates itself, in magpie fashion, by adopting and rewriting the
texts of others, making them part of its own fictional project.


This notion of performative self-construction, and ultimately of ‘‘liberation
through fiction-making,’’ Hutcheon argues, is what makes postmodern fiction
at least potentially something more than a form of textualist escapism; in-
deed, ‘‘if self-reflecting texts can actually lure the reader into participating
in the creation of a novelistic universe, perhaps he can also be seduced into
action—even direct political action.’’\footnote{Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (London: Methuen, 1980), 155.} Rather than presenting an apolitical
textualism à la Borges or Nabokov, works of self-referential art may indeed,
as Takayuki Tatsumi and Larry McCaffery argue, ‘‘[have] very direct and
relevant implications for our daily lives.’’ In particular, metafictions politicize their own antirepresentationalism when they prompt us to reflect on our
own status as scripted characters in a mediated, artifactual, virtual world:
‘‘Metafiction made us aware that what fiction can tell us is not reality itself
but a narrative version of reality . . . our contemporary lives are all ideological versions of reality, with us characters within narratives. It isn’t so much
that metafiction is now out-of-date, but that it’s no longer an avant-garde
literary device. It’s part of the popular life we are leading now.’’\footnote{Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi, ‘‘Toward the Theoretical Frontiers of ‘Fiction’: From Metafiction and Cyberpunk Through Avant-Pop,’’ Science Fiction EYE 12 (Summer 1993): 45, 43-44.} McCaffery
and Tatsumi argue that despite the ebbing shock value of metafictional devices now incorporated into pop culture—the very pop culture that to some
degree constitutes our ‘‘ideological versions of reality’’—there is still room
for a radical aesthetic intervention. This intervention would be neither quite
avant-gardist nor pop-cultural but a hybrid ‘‘avant-pop’’— ‘‘emphasizing the
‘avant’ part of the term,’’ as McCaffery insists,
to foreground the connection between A-P and the avant-garde movement which
hoped to use its radical aesthetic orientation to confuse, confound, bewilder, piss
off, and generally blow the fuses of ordinary citizens exposed to it. The idea being
that it’s now useless to try to create change via political institutions (useless because they are so infused with corruption, stagnation, and blind adherence to the
tautologies that create and protect their existence), so artists need to try and work
on peoples’ consciousnesses directly. Radical formal devices are one means of
trying to swerve peoples’ consciousnesses off the daily ‘‘grooves’’ of normalcy—
the kind of ‘‘tracks’’ of response, desire, intuition, beliefs, etc. that have been
laid down for us by our governments, advertisers, and schools (they’re interlocking systems, at this point, don’t you agree?), and to steer people away from the
predictable places . . . to maybe discover ‘‘tracks’’ that are more interesting and
maybe even more appropriate for our own tastes and desires (if we could only
discover for ourselves what these actually are, for a change).\footnote{Ibid., 48-49.}


The call for a return to an avant-garde strategy of épater les bourgeoises might
seem datedly modernist, but what seems to make avant-pop postmodern is
the ‘‘pop’’ component. Rather than trying to create art outside of and against
the mass-marketed art produced by capitalism (presumably no longer an option), McCaffery promotes ‘‘active resistance’’ in the form of a ‘‘subversive,
guerilla-art’’ produced from within the belly of the beast, using the images,
texts, and sounds thrown up by the marketplace as the very materials
through which it will enact aesthetic rebellion. Postmodern avant-pop thus
continues that modernist strategy pioneered by the Dadas and Cubists—
what Read called, in a 1930 review of Max Ernst’s collage-novel La Femme
100 Têtes, that ‘‘function of art’’ that is ‘‘to snatch things from the security
of their normal existence.’’ This new brand of subversive appropriation, according to McCaffery and Tatsumi, will be about ‘‘seizing control’’ of the
collective cultural product, remixing and ‘‘re-narratiz[ing]’’ boring, racist,
sexist, capitalist pop-culture narratives, subverting and appropriating them:
‘‘In other words, you storm the reality studio. And retake the universe.’’\footnote{Read, quoted in Andrew Causey, ‘‘Herbert Read and Contemporary Art,’’ in Herbert Read Reassessed, ed. David Goodway, 128 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998); Mc- Caffery and Tatsumi, ‘‘Toward the Theoretical Frontiers of ‘Fiction,’ ’’ 49.}

\section{PROBLEMS WITH THE POSTMODERN PROJECT}


As ambitious and inventive as this project is, here are some flaws in the
assumptions animating it that will seem a little familiar. First of all, there is
a heavy dose of essentialism here that belies the constructivism of McCaffery
and Tatsumi’s postmodern premises: they presume the reality of a preexist-
ing actual or true self that is outside capitalism, but simultaneously argue
that the seemingly true self that we discover on introspection is likely to be
just another ideological construct: just as the childhood experiences that the
replicant Rachel ‘‘remembers’’ in Blade Runner are merely an implanted
‘‘fake memory,’’ so, in the time of late capitalism, ‘‘our past . . . becomes [a]
commodifiable object that we can sample, cut and mix, colorize, and other-
wise re-experience.’’\footnote{McCaffery and Tatsumi, ‘‘Toward the Theoretical Frontiers of ‘Fiction,’ ’’ 46-47.} McCaffery and Tatsumi want to be strategic realists
in facing up to the absolutely dominant power of capitalist structures, but
at the same time, they seem to imagine that the subjects of this dominant
structure—who appear, in this column, as colonized, constructed, programmed, and completely passive—are capable of using the media of their
own domination for the purpose of resistance. The late-capitalist world, supposedly utterly impervious to political intervention, is at the same time supposed to be open to forms of aesthetic rebellion that still have as their goal
the production of an avant-garde-style shock effect, the very possibility of
which has already largely been lost to the advance of capitalist pop culture.


Avant-pop is conceptualized partly from a quantum perspective, from which
it appears that nothing now is real and everything is possible for us, and
partly from a genetic perspective, from which it appears that the very reality
we now have to face is that nothing is possible.


Indeed, metafictions may have the paradoxical effect not of empowering
us to rewrite our own scripts, but of making us feel all the more paranoiacally
powerless (since, like Thomas Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas, we are trapped inside a narrative prison-house, a conspiracy of sublime proportions) and all
the less concerned to change anything (since we are convinced, like David
Foster Wallace’s Lenore Stonecipher, that none of this is real anyway\footnote{Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (New York: Avon Books, 1997).}).


From the subject positions offered by metafiction—remarkably similar to
those occupied by the protagonists of the virtual-reality paranoia films of the
late 1990s—we find, as Slavoj Žižek writes apropos of the latter, that we are
looking at ‘‘the ultimate American paranoiac fantasy,’’ with all the contradictions that entails. The scenario is terrifying in that the protagonist ‘‘suddenly
starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to
convince him that he lives in a real world, while all people around him are
effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show’’; it is nonetheless the obverse side of a ‘‘fantasy,’’ in that the ‘‘real social life’’ of ‘‘late capitalist
consumerist society’’ promotes itself as a ‘‘paradise’’ that is somehow ‘‘unreal, substanceless, deprived of material inertia.’’ In such a disembodied
world, no one can really suffer, nor need any such suffering take place, for
the bounty of consumer pleasures and pleasant appearances is not produced
through exploited labor; everything is produced mysteriously, as if by wishing, from the flow of ephemeral images, information, desires, and ‘‘financial
speculations disconnected from the sphere of material production.’’\footnote{Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (New York: Verso, 2002), 12-13, 14.} Paranoia, as Pynchon recognizes, is the twin of narcissism: for the ‘‘paranoid,’’
he writes, ‘‘all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central
pulse of himself.’’ If, in conspiracy narratives, the numinous forces organizing appearances are ‘‘basically omniscient,’’ hence omnipotent, we can only
respond with (im)passivity.\footnote{Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 129; Sterling, ‘‘Sneaking for Jesus 2001,’’ December 1992, \href{http://www.eff.org/misc/publications/bruce\_sterling/catscan\_columns/catscan.11/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.eff.org\Slash{}Misc\Slash{}Publications\Slash{}Bruce\_Sterling\Slash{}Catscan\_columns\Slash{}catscan.11} (accessed 10 July 2003).} Better yet, as Sartwell speculates, the conviction that all appearances have been arranged for our benefit, that we are
blanketed in a solipsistic ‘‘representation,’’ provides a consolation, for at
least ‘‘images are safe’’: ‘‘In my fantasy, in the world of images, I can commit
horrific crimes and remain innocent. I can plunge off cliffs and awaken before I hit bottom. No one has ever been blown to bits by a picture of an
explosion. So if the world as I experience it were an image, I would be perfectly safe.’’\footnote{Sartwell, Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality, 10-11.} In the root sense of the word, then, postmodern paranoia is
fascinating: it invites passive speculation and spectatorship rather than action. The paranoid’s universe, like the detective novels favored by Auster’s
protagonist Daniel Quinn, is infinitely readable:


What he liked about these books was their sense of plenitude and economy. In
the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so—which
amounts to the same thing. The world of the book comes to life, seething with
possibilities


Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial
thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be over-
looked. Everything becomes essence; the center of the book shifts with each
event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumfer-
ence can be drawn until the book has come to its end.\footnote{Auster, The New York Trilogy, 9.}


Like Borges’s Library of Babel, Quinn’s world is a kind of utopia of interpretative plenitude. If it appears meaningless, this is because it is overflowing
with meanings: everything represents something else, and yet nothing represents anything, for unlike a book, the system of language (in which signifiers
merely point to other signifiers) has no end. At the extremes, antirepresentationalism and hyper-representationalism meet.


If postmodern utopia consists in this kind of overflow or superabundance
of signification, one might ask whether it is also a material paradise, abundant in the means of life—food, water, shelter, clothing. Here, postmodern
fictions fall curiously silent. Auster is certainly aware of the material world;
throughout The New York Trilogy, his characters confront the dilemma posed
by their dwindling resources, as they are drawn into the rapture of their respective mysteries; after a certain point, the plots of the stories are like a
countdown toward the exhaustion of the protagonist’s savings, the zero-point
of survival. Still, they do leave behind the normal world of money, work,
property, and the relationships bound up in these. Thus, near the end of City
of Glass, Quinn is mysteriously relieved of the need to work or take care of
himself so that he can spend all of his time writing in his red notebook.
Similarly, the inhabitants of Borges’s library-universe are mysteriously supplied with light, warmth, and even, it must be assumed, food and drink.


However, these last considerations are not even mentioned, though the narrator does write that each hexagonal gallery contains a ‘‘closet’’ in which one
can ‘‘satisfy one’s fecal necessities’’; this seems to leave us with a world in
which people read and defecate but do not eat. This image of the universe
tends to confirm Jane Flax’s warning that postmodernism, when it takes the
deconstructive aphorism that ‘‘nothing exists outside a text’’ too literally,
essentializes its own preoccupations into a human vocation, ‘‘as if the modal
human activity is literary criticism.’’ Flax further worries that ‘‘this lack of
attention to concrete social relations (including the distribution of power)
results . . . in the obscuring of relations of domination.’’\footnote{Flax, quoted in Margery Wolf, A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Reponsibility (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 118-19.}


The degree to which the utopian moments in postmodern fiction as well
as postmodern theory are invested in images of reading, writing, textuality,
and interpretation raises certain concerns. How is such an investment com-
patible with action in and on a real world (however socially constructed) that
is not merely what any particular individual wants it to be, a world in which
saying doesn’t simply or immediately make it so? If postmodern utopia is
conceived in such a way as to have no meaningful relation to the world of
bodily, material experience and action, then how can it lay claim to reality?
I’m not sure that any sufficient answers can be made to these questions.
Tobin Siebers seems to answer these in the negative in his introduction to
Heterotopia: ‘‘What distinguishes postmodernism ultimately is the extremity
of its belief that neither utopia nor desire can exist in the here and now . . .
[it] is concerned with what lies beyond the present moment, perhaps beyond
any present moment.’’\footnote{Siebers, Heterotopia, 3.}


One line of argument would defend Siebers’s statement while denying its
implied reinstatement of the transcendental beyond. Heterotopia, in the orig-
inal sense of the word proposed by Foucault, is both ‘‘here and now’’ and
not-here, not-now: it lies in the ‘‘juxtaposition’’ of normalized spaces with
certain ‘‘elsewhere’’ spaces—railway cars, cemeteries, motels, cinemas—
that host transitory episodes of the abnormal, the liminal, the transgressive.


In this sense, ‘‘there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails
to constitute heterotopias.’’ Similarly, Michel de Certeau proposes that the
most seemingly obedient subject can be seen to be ‘‘poaching in countless
ways on the property of others,’’ subversively appropriating the spaces that
it occupies.\footnote{Foucault, ‘‘Of Other Spaces,’’ Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986), 22, 24-25; de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xii, xxi.} In this spirit, postmodern anarchist Hakim Bey (a.k.a. Peter
Lamborn Wilson) argues that the seeming omnipresence of ‘‘the State’’ conceals innumerable ‘‘cracks and vacancies’’ in which spontaneous life can
flourish. While the repressive apparatus is more than capable of destroying
or co-opting any revolutionary program, it cannot prevent the eruption of the
‘‘Temporary Autonomous Zone,’’ ‘‘an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of
time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere\Slash{}
elsewhen, before the State can crush it. As soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind it an empty
husk, only to spring up again somewhere else.’’\footnote{Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, and Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991), 99.} This antirepresentationalist tactic, however, is only successful to the degree that it is temporary, an
evanescent and to some extent private experience of the non-ordinary, leaving the spatial hegemony of the ordinary unchallenged. As Murray Bookchin
argues, the TAZ is an aesthetic substitute for politics, irrelevant because it
fails to engage with historical actuality.\footnote{Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (: AK Press, 1995), 20-26.} Revolution, like the final signifier,
is infinitely deferred, its possibility relocated to an elsewhere or virtuality
outside of every actual. Condemned to a deterritorialized exile, one consoles
oneself by valorizing the nomadic.


Postmodern fiction, like postmodern theory, seems to locate itself in a spurious ou-topos or no-place, taking as its perspective the very view from nowhere (the imaginary position-that-is-not-a-position) that it attacks as a
transcendental fiction. After relativizing all values, it issues the Nietzschean
call to create new values, without realizing or admitting that this very invitation is itself a value, and without confronting the contradiction this poses for
relativism and the limiting principle it implies. In annihilating the meta-
physical ground of both knowledge and ethics, it promises that we can live
in a noncoercive relation with our world and each other, but leaves no ground
for that promise to take root in, so that these new relations are relegated
precisely to the no-ground, the no-place. It is a way of thinking about human
possibility that, in Kafka’s terms, leaves plenty of room for hope, but not for
us.


Utopia, in postmodern culture, appears as its own disappearance—or reappears as an empty simulation of freedom. Just as the participants in a TAZ
pretend that a propertyless world is here now, that the streets are theirs,
commercial culture openly invites us to appropriate its symbols: ‘‘Make 7UP
Yours,’’ as the slogan goes (openly calling attention to its naughty counter-
reading: up yours!). Many, perhaps most of the songs played on the radio
and music-video TV are open works or reader-centered texts, offering fragmentary lyrics, loose semantic bundles, maximally open to interpretation.


Take, for example, a classic hit by that epitome of postmodern self-creation,
Madonna: ‘‘Papa Don’t Preach.’’ While entirely straightforward and narrative in contrast to the more avant-garde stylings of contemporaries New
Order, The Cure, or R.E.M., the subject of the video, according to Renate
Müller, was interpreted by young white audiences as ‘‘teenage pregnancy’’
and as
‘‘[a] father-daughter relationship’’ by young black audiences;
Planned Parenthood staffers saw it as a ‘‘commercial for teenage pregnancy,’’ and antiabortion activists saw it as ‘‘a positive prolife video.’’ Müller
proposes that the ability of such commodities to elicit ‘‘multiple and contradictory meanings’’ makes them ‘‘open to cultural struggle over meaning,’’
but I see no evidence of such a struggle. Consumerist pluralism, in its superficial displays of tolerance and more fundamental anomie, allows these interpretations to float past one another without connecting, avoiding conflict. We
can see anything we want in the mirror of the commodity, which is magically
all things to everyone.\footnote{I am reminded of Bookchin’s remark that fortune-tellers typically ‘‘hedge their state- ments lest a prophecy fail to materialize in reality’’ by using ‘‘vague phrases’’ with ‘‘multiple meanings’’ (Re-enchanting Humanity, 216).} Polysemy, promising everything and nothing, saves
one the risk of getting caught taking a position—a surefire marketing technique.


As long as audiences take what they want and tune out the rest without
resistance from the text, the text does not challenge its self-understanding,
as Eco hopes, or promote its sense of autonomy and creative empowerment,
as Spahr hopes. Listeners who encounter the ‘‘social codes’’ in the songs as
if they were autonomous ‘‘users,’’ in de Certeau’s formulation, who can make
them into narratives and symbols of themselves, ironically fulfill Adorno and
Horkheimer’s prediction that the culture industry would extend its reign of
uniformity precisely by ensuring that ‘‘something is provided for all so that
none may escape.’’\footnote{de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xx-xxi; Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 123.} In this way, like Siebers, Eagleton sees postmodernism
as desiring a utopian world of ‘‘plurality, free play, plasticity, [and] open-
endedness,’’ but argues that it ‘‘prematurely’’ identifies this utopia with the
present, creating a ‘‘false utopianism . . . for which freedom exists in reading
the world differently.’’\footnote{Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 64-65.} The freedom thus afforded is false because it is
essentially private. It is entirely possible for members of this supposedly ac-
tive audience—who are never forced to depart from their essentially passive
stance as consumers of music made for them, who never engage in a true
gift-exchange by giving back their own representation of reality—to be ap-
propriated by the industry at the same time that they appropriate its prod-
ucts. Instead of a modernist abolition of meaning, postmodernism pursues a
privatization of meaning, just as neoliberal capitalism proceeds to privatize
all experience.

\section{THE IMPASSE OF ANARCHIST POSTMODERNISM}


Some might argue that all discussions about prescriptive aesthetics or poetics have been mooted by the pragmatist argument that, as Rita Felski suggests in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, the radical or conservative effects of
texts can be traced not to anything inherent in the texts themselves but to
their reception by audiences.\footnote{Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 157.} If radical readers are capable of discovering
radical potentials within any text (and conservative readers likewise capable
of reading any text as an affirmation of traditional values), then why bother
asking writers to write one way or another? But this attempt to circumvent
aesthetic debate falls prey to the same logical problems as the pragmatist
subjectivisms of Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, for it cannot be the case
that just any text can have just any effect, or that readers are all-determining—otherwise, lacking any texts to inform and shape consciousness, there
would be no radical or conservative readers to do the reading. We are thrust
back into the old debate willy-nilly.


However, the desire to leave this long-contested terrain was understand-
able. The conversation over aesthetics has gotten stuck in a groove, with
generations of theorists doing little more than oscillating between the twin
poles of the same old binaries. If readers’ power does not provide us with a
way out of the impasse, does this not return us to the old choice ‘‘between
an autonomous art which protests against society but remains elitist and ineffective,’’ on the one hand, ‘‘and the products of the mass media, which
encourage identification and blur the distinction between art and life but
with the loss of any critical dimension’’ on the other\footnote{Ibid., 181.}—or, even less promisingly, between an irredeemably compromised traditional aesthetic and the
dead end of all avant-garde aesthetics, whether modernist or postmodern?

\chapter{7. Reconstructing Anarchist Aesthetics}

\section{ANARCHY VERSUS DECADENCE}


‘‘UNLIKE THE MARXIST G. PLEKHANOV,’’ WRITES SONN, ‘‘THE ANARCHISTS NEVER
elaborated a theory of decadence, at least not in the 1890s. The term in fact
found no place in their rhetoric.’’ On the contrary, ‘‘writers who identified
themselves as decadents also gave a positive valuation to anarchy.’’ After
all, all that decadence connotes—fragmentation, amoralism, self-indulgence,
the anomie that Émile Durkheim observed in young men at that time—is
compatible, as Matei Calinescu notes, with ‘‘the unrestricted manifestation
of aesthetic individualism, a style that has done away with traditional authoritarian requirements such as unity, hierarchy, [and] objectivity.’’ Anarchists,
by this logic, could not have had a critique of decadence because anarchy
simply is decadence, nihilism, chaos, dissolution—‘‘a rising of individuals
. . . without regard to the arrangements that spring from it.’’\footnote{Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics, 297, 294; Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 171; Stirner, Ego, 421.}


Or so the story goes. Is the legacy of anarchist discourse on the aesthetic
merely assimilable to the basically individualist, decadent discourse of the
avant-gardes? Was anarchism entirely identifiable with the practitioners of
épater les bourgeois, and not at all with the philistines of both Right and
Left who objected to l’art pour l’art? In fact, the anarchist engagement with
modernism is more complex than this. Weir concludes Anarchy and Culture
with an expression of surprise at finding that a leading contemporary anarchist, Murray Bookchin, apprehends the present moment in culture as a time
of ‘‘cultural decadence’’ whose signs include ‘‘disillusionment,’’ ‘‘fragmentation,’’ ‘‘anomie,’’ and ‘‘loss of belief in progress,’’ culminating in a ‘‘post-
modernist nihilism.’’ Bookchin inveighs against ‘‘the self-indulgent aesthetic
vagaries’’ of countercultural ‘‘lifestyle anarchism,’’ which seek ‘‘emancipation . . . outside of history, in the realm of the subjective,’’ perhaps even to
such a degree that any objective reality is erased in favor of the subject and
its private whims.\footnote{Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity, 172-73, 180; Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, 51, 53.} Likewise, the contemporary anarchist feminist Regina
Cochrane criticizes ‘‘the highly aestheticized individualism’’ of current
anticapitalist protests, an individualism ‘‘embraced by both camp- and neo-
pagan-oriented anarchafeminist activists’’: ‘‘Focusing on emotion, aesthet-
ics, ‘non-ordinary’ consciousness, and even ‘aristocratic sensibilities,’ it
rejects the struggle for democracy, picket line demonstrations, and revolution. Instead, it favours self-liberation—especially ‘the right to party’—and
temporary but frequent ‘festive’ uprisings. Life in the TAZ . . . is a continual
‘rising up’ that carries individuals from one protest to the next in search of
‘peak experiences.’ ’’ By drawing primarily ‘‘middle-class individuals’’ together in a transitory search for pleasure, to the exclusion of a more concentrated and sustained attempt at organizing around the needs and interests of
less privileged people, postmodern anarchism creates a ‘‘decadent, elitist,
and ultimately depoliticized aesthetics.’’\footnote{Regina Cochrane, ‘‘(Eco)Feminism as a ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’?’’ Women \& Environments International Magazine, no. 56\Slash{}57 (Fall 2002): 25-26.}


Such a critique of individualist aesthetics as decadent is not at all a recent
development in anarchism, but springs from traditions more than a century
old. Where much of the recent scholarship on anarchist modernism tends to
reduce all anarchist discourse about aesthetics to an outgrowth of Stirner’s
egoism, this omits a considerable degree of dissensus and political difference. Allan Antliff argues that anarchist history presents us with ‘‘a contested discursive field’’ rather than a simple political identity; within this
field, as Leighten notes, we can observe ‘‘a constant stream of argumentative
theorizing in the anarchist press and little reviews,’’ in which modernist defenders of ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ clash with the advocates of ‘‘ ‘social’ art.’’ Even
Sonn, contrary to his own argument, notes that ‘‘the charge of decadence was
leveled at the Symbolists from the left by proponents of l’art social’’—for
instance, Bernard Lazare, himself an anarchist and former member of Mallarmé’s Symbolist circle.\footnote{Alan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism, 10; Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe, 50; Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics, 296.} It is eye-opening to find Lazare using the word
‘‘decadent’’ again and again in his pamphlet, L’Écrivain et l’Art Social (The
Writer and Social Art), decrying the ‘‘swamp’’ of ‘‘mystico-decadent’’ ideas
in which Symbolism had issued no less than the ‘‘inferior forms of life’’ catalogued by the naturalists, the ‘‘libertine or obscene art of a decrepit society’’
no less than the new social novel’s focus on ‘‘the scum of the earth.’’\footnote{Bernard Lazare, L’Écrivain et l’art social (Béarn, France: Bibliotheque de l’art social, 1896), 28, 29, 16, 28, translation mine.}
Lazare’s contemporaries Paul Flaustier and Fernand Pelloutier inveigh
against the ‘‘syphilitic canker’’ of Symbolist aesthetics and the ‘‘debauchery’’ of the aesthetes’ delight in mystical subjectivism. Even Elisée Reclus,
who elsewhere defends Zola’s naturalism against the charge of decadence
and makes friendly overtures to the Symbolists, attacks the immorality of
forms of art that represent ‘‘scenes of vice, and a thousand filthy things that
it would have been simpler to leave in the dirt,’’ citing Ruskin’s notion that
‘‘the beginning of art . . . consists in making the people beautiful.’’\footnote{Flaustier, quoted in Hutton, Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground, 113; Fernand Pelloutier, ‘‘L’Art et la Révolte,’’ in Fernand Pelloutier et les origines du syndicali- sme d’action directe, ed. Jacques Julliard, 509 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971), translation mine; Reclus, letter to Amy Putnam-Jacoby, 2 May 1889, Anarchy Archives: An Online Research Center on the History and Theory of Anarchism, \href{http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist\_archives/bright/reclus/ishill/ishill259-324.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}dwardmac.pitzer.edu\Slash{}Anarchist\_Archives\Slash{}bright\Slash{}reclus\Slash{}ishill\Slash{}ishill259-324.html} (accessed); Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics, 191; Reclus, ‘‘Art and the People,’’ Anarchy Archives: An Online Research Center on the History and Theory of Anarchism, 5 May 1998, \href{http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist\_archives/bright/reclus/ishill/ishill325-330.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}dwardmac.pitzer.edu\Slash{}Anarchist\_Archives\Slash{}bright\Slash{}reclus\Slash{}ishill\Slash{}ishill325-330.html} (accessed).} We can
find Kropotkin, too, inveighing against ‘‘the art of our time’’ for its supposed
‘‘realism’’ in treating such subjects as ‘‘the suffocating filth of a sewer, the
boudoir of a whore of high degree’’—what he elsewhere calls ‘‘the lowest
aspects of life,’’ a spectacle of ‘‘degeneracy.’’ Reviewing Dostoevsky’s The
Brothers Karamazov, he exclaims, ‘‘there is certainly not in any literature
such a collection of the most repulsive types of mankind—lunatics, half-
lunatics, criminals in germ and in reality, in all possible gradations—as one
finds in this novel’’; he brands it a specimen of ‘‘morbid literature,’’ ‘‘unnatural’’ in its obsession with ‘‘psychical disease’’ and ‘‘moral perversion.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 272-73; Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1916), 86, 168.}


Likewise, Voltairine de Cleyre, for all her fascination with the Gothic, writes
with amused condescension of the ‘‘vogue’’ for ‘‘fever-bred stories and
sketches which deal with the abnormalities of men’’: ‘‘madmen explaining
their own madness, perverted men analyzing their own perversions, anything, everything but sane and normal men\dots{}
[We see] the curious paradox
of the people of the most highly evolved scientific and mechanical age taking
especial delight in psychic abnormalities and morbidities,—whereby the
most utterly unreasonable fictive creation becomes the greatest center of curiosity and attraction to the children of Reason.’’\footnote{de Cleyre, Selected Works, 378, 380.} This psychoanalysis of
literary and artistic decadence is carried over into Edouard Rothen’s entry
on ‘‘Littérature’’ in Sebastien Faure’s 1934 Encyclopédie anarchiste, in
which he complains of the ‘‘complete deterioration of style [deliquescence]’’
resulting from Symbolism and ‘‘the decadent schools,’’ a discursive decay
that only serves to prevent the formation of ‘‘collective, popular, and human
thought.’’ Rothen sees the ‘‘aristocratic and bourgeois literature’’ of the post-
1848 period as an ideological justification of the ‘‘feelings’’ and ‘‘view of
life’’ shared by the ‘‘privileged,’’ reflecting a certain ‘‘restlessness’’ felt by
the members of this class ‘‘in view of the uncertainty of a happiness illegitimately founded on the unhappiness of others.’’ This class anxiety, Rothen
explains, produces a ‘‘tendency . . . to that hyper-analysis that is, as Barbusse has said, ‘one of the present signs of artistic decadence.’ ’’ Like Kropotkin and de Cleyre, Rothen sees decadent literature as a\dots{}
‘‘morbid
product’’ of ‘‘sick aesthetes,’’ and ultimately of the moral corruption of the
wealthy.\footnote{Edouard Rothen, ‘‘Littérature,’’ in Encyclopédie anarchiste, 1300, 1302, translation mine.} Even Herbert Read, chief promoter of Surrealism in England, can
be heard to complain of the ‘‘warped psychology’’ of ‘‘modern man,’’ whose
aesthetics display his ‘‘worst disease,’’ ‘‘the one he creates out of his own
isolation: uncriticized phantasies, personal symbols, private fetishes.’’\footnote{Read, Poetry and Anarchism, 19.}


This defensive impulse to psychoanalyze new literary styles, to diagnose
them as forms of quasi-physiological ‘‘morbidity,’’ stunted or diverted mani-
festations of an ‘‘energy’’ that should properly express itself in revolutionary
action, is not confined to anarchist literary discourse of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. It carries over into George Woodcock’s The
Writer and Politics, in which he regards the dystopian works of Franz Kafka
with a mixture of disapproval, admiration, and disappointment, seeing them
as a token of the ‘‘malady’’ besetting ‘‘many of our contemporary intellectu-
als’’: an obsession with depictions of ‘‘tragedy and evil’’ to the exclusion of
any ‘‘living quality,’’ an ‘‘insufficient faith in man.’’\footnote{Rothen, ‘‘Littérature,’’ 1302; Woodcock, The Writer and Politics (London: Porcupine Press, 1948), 183-84.}


We can draw a straight line from this to the 1991 essay titled ‘‘Amoral
Responsibility’’ in which Peter Lamborn Wilson, usually associated (under
his nom de plume, Hakim Bey) with the antirepresentationalist aesthetic of
individualist anarchism, nevertheless expresses a social anarchist vision of
art. Wilson insists that every text, no matter how fictional, inevitably offers
a ‘‘representation of life,’’ and that its politics are to be found here. It is
important to note that this concept of representation is very different from
Zola’s: where Zola wished to pretend to neutrally record what happens, Wilson insists on the fictive nature of fiction. The power of the writer to shape
and condition even the most referential reportage of reality is considerable,
and confers on the writer a corresponding ‘‘responsibility’’ for how the text
represents life and its possibilities. On this basis, Wilson offers a critique of
commercial ‘‘horror’’ fiction from Victorian times to the present that mirrors,
in many ways, Lazare’s critique of Naturalist fiction. He denounces it as ‘‘a
literature of morbid cultures,’’ ‘‘flowering in decadence,’’ ‘‘denying all moral
and social codes’’ (and ultimately all meaning), a literature that represents
life solely in terms of ‘‘fear and disgust,’’ ‘‘reduces human beings to sacs of
blood and filth,’’ and ultimately ‘‘leaves the reader . . . holding the bag. The
bag of slime, the bag of sexual secretions.’’ The ironic use of such an iconography of degradation by postmodern filmmakers like David Lynch, Wilson
argues, only deepens the bad-faith cynicism of horror.\footnote{Wilson, ‘‘Amoral Responsibility,’’ 54, 55-56, 57.} Again, contemporary
culture is lambasted for its perceived combination of pessimism and immorality, which is attributed to a kind of psychic disease, a pathology of aes-
thetic will.


So frequent and vehement are such statements that one is compelled to
ask: why are these anarchists—whom one would think ready to champion
almost any sort of radical innovation or change, in art or anywhere else—so
outraged, vexed, shocked, and scandalized by all manner of aesthetic and
poetic innovators, from Dostoyevsky to Lynch? Is their outrage symptomatic
of a rationalist refusal to see empirical reality, a will to substitute kitsch
representations (idealized, sentimental, politically correct) for real perceptions? This interpretation would nicely complement the dominant interpretation of anarchism—recently revived in Tom Stoppard’s drama, The Coast of
Utopia—that views it not as a social practice but as an impractical theory: a
utopian doctrine founded on a naïve essentialism, the assumption that people are more ‘‘rational,’’ ‘‘compassionate,’’ and ‘‘gregarious’’ than they really
are.\footnote{Koch, ‘‘Poststructuralism,’’ 328.} This version of anarchism is merely the idealistic inverse of the nihilism Wilson attacks; on the terms of Stoppard’s psychoanalysis, it stems from
an unwillingness to accept the disappointments of life in an imperfect world,
or in the language of Lynch’s film Blue Velvet, from the wish to deny the
existence of ‘‘people like Frank’’—the irrational, violent, and cruel.


As we have already noted, this is a diagnosis that social anarchists have
consistently refused. Rather than seeing themselves as perfectionists or ide-
alists, they have insisted, in the words of one editorialist in an 1888 article
for the London anarchist journal Freedom, that their premise is precisely the
‘‘imperfections of human nature’’:


When we hear men saying that the Anarchists imagine men much better than they
really are, we merely wonder how intelligent people can repeat that nonsense. Do
we not say continually that the only means of rendering men less rapacious and
egotistic, less ambitious and less slavish at the same time, is to eliminate those
conditions which favour the growth of egotism and rapacity, of slavishness and
ambition? The only difference between us and those who make the above objection is this: We do not, like them, exaggerate the inferior instincts of the masses,
and do not complacently shut our eyes to the same bad instincts in the upper
classes. We maintain that both rulers and ruled are spoiled by authority; both
exploiters and exploited are spoiled by exploitation; while our opponents seem to
admit that there is a kind of salt of the earth—the rulers, the employers, the
leaders—who, happily enough, prevent those bad men—the ruled, the exploited,
the led—from becoming still worse than they are.


There is the difference, and a very important one. We admit the imperfections
of human nature, but we make no exception for the rulers. They make it, although
sometimes unconsciously, and because we make no such exception, they say that
we are dreamers, ‘‘unpractical men.’’


We can make two observations about this retort. First of all, it is important
to note the anarchist representation of ‘‘the masses’’ that appears here: it is
characterized by ‘‘egotism,’’ ‘‘rapacity,’’ ‘‘slavishness,’’ etc.—the very litany
of human degradation that Lazare and other social anarchists seem to reject
in its literary manifestations. The speaker here does not deny the ‘‘realism’’
of this ugly representation of the human, and even proposes to deepen and
widen it. This is difficult to accommodate within the rubric of the explanation
that social anarchism is an aesthetics of good-human-naturism; at the very
least, a more complex explanation is required.


A second social anarchist response to the diagnosis of idealism is a
counter-diagnosis. It is ideologically convenient for those who wish to maintain the status quo to assume that anyone proposing to radically transform
society must be out of tune with ‘‘reality’’; in fact, such an assumption
merely unconsciously hypostasizes whatever conditions happen to be prevailing at the time—mere historical contingency—into ‘‘reality’’ per se, and
therefore into natural necessity. The ruling ideologies that prevail in any
dominatory social order—or, in Voltairine de Cleyre’s terms, the ‘‘Dominant
Ideas’’\footnote{de Cleyre, Selected Works, 79.} —surreptitiously substitute a ‘‘must be’’ for every ‘‘is,’’ and turn
every ‘‘must be’’ into an ‘‘ought to be.’’ It is precisely this ideological slide
from description to prescription that anarchist critics from Proudhon to Wilson have always called attention to, and it is in terms of this opposition that
they have encountered works of radical ugliness as manifestations of a conservative aesthetic.


This is the animating idea behind Wilson’s attack on horror fiction.


‘‘Every fiction,’’ Wilson asserts, ‘‘prescribes as well as (or more than) it describes.’’ How so? Anarchism, like Marxism, takes some of its inspiration
from the Hegelian and Spinozan rejections of the fact\Slash{}value binary, and unlike Marxism, also refuses the form\Slash{}matter binary. Thus, as Peter Marshall
explains, anarchists posit ‘‘no unbridgeable gap’’ between representations of
the actual, the possible, and the desired, ‘‘since the former contain the moral
and practical potential of the latter.’’ What must be avoided is collapsing the
productive tension of this dialectic between is, could, and should into the
error of ‘‘maintaining that because something is, it follows that it ought to
be.’’\footnote{Peter Marshall, ‘‘Human Nature and Anarchism,’’ in For Anarchism : History, Theory, and Practice ed. David Goodway (New York: Routledge, 1989), 138, 144.} Wilson sees a strong tendency in fictional representation to reduce
values to facts, or as Kropotkin put it, to reify contingent ‘‘facts’’ into eternal
‘‘laws.’’ Because a fiction presents itself as a microcosm, ‘‘a kind of world,’’
it posits at least an implicit claim to represent the macrocosm, i.e., the world.


As LeGuin puts it, ‘‘an artist’’ not only ‘‘makes the world her world,’’ appropriating it representationally, but reciprocally ‘‘makes her world the world,’’
a representation of the whole: ‘‘the work of art seems to contain the whole,
and to imply eternity.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 179; Wilson, ‘‘Amoral Responsibility,’’ 54; Ursula K. LeGuin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 47.} Fiction invites generalization: the fictional text typically presents us with particulars (the story of a person in a place at a time)
but at the same time invites us to think of these particulars as tokens of
something larger. That is to say, a fiction embodies ‘‘a worldview,’’ a ‘‘view
of what life ‘really’ is—or should be.’’ The radical ugliness of horror fiction,
its tendency to represent ‘‘life’’ in terms of an abbreviated vocabulary of
suffering and nausea, evokes a worldview for which ‘‘sensuality connects
only to disgust.’’ Instead of projecting a critique of the negativity present in
life as it is constituted here and now, it expresses a universal loathing for
life in general: ‘‘Life, love, pleasure—all is death, all is shit and disease.’’


Wilson suggests, in other words, that the typical horror text is a secular revi-
sion of Gnosticism, with its postulation of the material creation as the work
of an evil Demiurge, or in terms of Nietzsche’s psychology, a form of nihilism. In short, ‘‘by its very nature,’’ this sort of writing is ‘‘politically reactionary.’’\footnote{Wilson, ‘‘Amoral Responsibility,’’ 54-55, 56.}


Thus, for Woodcock, even the ‘‘honest horror’’ of novels like Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, which documents the barbarity of the Stalinist
purges with ‘‘remarkably destructive clarity,’’ nonetheless reproduce the
‘‘state of mind’’—with an implicit pun on the word state—‘‘which produces
the evils they regard with such honest horror.’’ Paul Goodman, too, asserts
that ‘‘where the imagination is bound to the actuality, the world is a prison
even without bars’’: the utopianism of the pleasure principle is chained to a
repressive reality principle.\footnote{Woodcock, The Writer and Politics, 183-84; Goodman, Utopian Essays, 126.}


But to attribute to the imagination a certain degree of autonomy from actuality is not to repudiate reality. When Proudhon and Kropotkin advocated a
mimetic practice of ‘‘realistic description’’ in the service of an ‘‘idealistic
aim’’ they did not merely ask artists to pretend that historical reality is already a utopian ideality.\footnote{Kropotkin, Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature, 86.} Their respect for historical reality, in all its concrete particularity and material detail, is evident. Indeed, Bakunin’s polemic
against the pretensions of Marxian ‘‘science’’ in God and the State reproaches it precisely for its will to forget the concrete particulars of historical
reality, ‘‘the living and suffering materials of this history,’’ in favor of lifeless
‘‘abstractions’’; conversely, Bakunin valorizes the potential of ‘‘art’’ to ‘‘excite in our imagination the memory and sentiment of life’’: for while it is
peculiarly concerned also with general types and general situations . . . art
in a certain sense individualizes the types and situations which it conceives;
by means of the individualities without flesh and bone, and consequently
permanent and immortal, which it has the power to create, it recalls to our
minds the living, real individualities which appear and disappear under our
eyes. Art, then, is as it were the return of abstraction to life.’’\footnote{Bakunin, God and the State, 56-57, 61.} Proudhon,
who wrote Du Principe de l’Art largely as a defense of the work of his friend
Gustave Courbet, urged other artists to join Courbet in depicting human beings ‘‘in the truth of their nature . . . without artificial poses’’; Kropotkin,
too, had called on ‘‘poets, painters, sculptors, musicians’’ to ‘‘show the people how hideous is their actual life’’—an ‘‘actual life’’ that includes ‘‘people
dying of hunger . . . corpses piled up in these mines . . . [and] mutilated
bodies lying in heaps on the barricades.’’\footnote{Proudhon, quoted in Paul B. Crapo, ‘‘The Anarchist as Critic: P.-J. Proudhon’s Criticism of Literature and Art,’’ The Michigan Academician 13, no. 4 (Spring 1981): 464, translation mine; Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 273, 278.}


Neither do social anarchists necessarily assume that aesthetic mimesis
elicits a simple mimetic response from the reader. Although Wilson questions the distinction between description and prescription in representation,
he does not presume that everything that a fiction presents is automatically
represented as good or desirable and subsequently re-presented by the receptive reader via action in the world; nothing is that simple. However, it
cannot be denied that fictional representations have a ‘‘real effect in the real
world’’: they can and do ‘‘change peoples’ perception’’ of things.\footnote{Wilson, ‘‘Amoral Responsibility,’’ 55.}


This leaves open the question, however, of exactly how art can represent
life in its actual condition—which is, in no small part, a violent condition—
without at the same time representing this violence as intrinsic to ‘‘the
human condition.’’ As Read puts it, ‘‘If we are to measure the dominion of
force [in Simone Weil’s phrase], must we not in the very process depict it?


. . . Any avoidance of acts of violence would be arbitrary, and falsify the
truthful relation of art to life. The problem is to determine the relationship
that should subsist between art and action, or, to make the problem more
precise, between art and violence.’’\footnote{Read, The Forms of Things Unknown, 186.} The answer to this question about
‘‘the relationship that should subsist between art and action,’’ for Wilson,
is not to assume that every depiction of violence or grotesquery in ‘‘art’’
automatically prescribes aggression or mutilation as ‘‘action’’: rather than
concluding that writers should ‘‘give up dealing with violence and hatred
as fictional subjects and write only scripts for Disney films,’’ he outlines
‘‘another possibility.’’\footnote{Wilson, ‘‘Amoral Responsibility,’’ 56.}

\section{ANARCHIST ONTOLOGY, ANARCHIST AESTHETICS}


The social anarchists do not ask art to simply map the ideal onto the real,
or to take the ideal for the real; rather, they propose that the ideal be discovered within the real, as a moment of reality. This goes beyond merely asking
art to preach a social gospel, beyond ‘‘dull moralisation,’’ as Kropotkin
called it; it asks for a complex, dialectical interplay between the imperatives
of realistic reflection and idealistic persuasion. This is the sense in which
Woodcock regards Arthur Koestler as a ‘‘brilliant journalist of fiction’’ in
speaking truth about the corruption and debasement of the actual world, but
contrasts him critically with ‘‘the constructive artist,’’ for in a work of ‘‘constructive’’ art, ‘‘some living quality can be apprehended growing out of the
ruins of tragedy and evil.’’ This ‘‘living quality,’’ the ‘‘seed beneath the
snow,’’ as Colin Ward puts it, is what this type of anarchist reader looks for
in the text no less than in life.\footnote{Kropotkin, Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature, 86; Woodcock, The Writer and Politics, 183, italics mine; Ward, Anarchy In Action (London: Allen \& Unwin, 1973), 22.} Thus, as Eugene D. Lunn paraphrases Gustav Landauer, while art ‘‘cannot be viewed as an autonomous activity,’’ detached from all social reality, ‘‘the purpose of art should not be the mere
representation of reality.’’ For an idealist like Landauer, a naturalist work
like Hauptmann’s Die Weber, dedicated to the accurate representation of the
actual world, can only confirm the actual to which it refers, not challenge or
transcend it.\footnote{Lunn, Prophet of Community, 44-45, emphasis mine.} Rather than naturalism, what Proudhon and Kropotkin propose is an aesthetic premised on the reciprocal, dialectical relationship between actuality, potentiality, and reality. To mistake the actual for the real
is to mistake a part for the whole, and therefore to be mistaken indeed; it
is quite literally to reify the status quo. The error of which anarchists are
accused—that of taking the potential for the actual—is equally an error from
the standpoint of the dialectic; as Bookchin puts it elsewhere, ‘‘even in the
seemingly most subjective projections of speculative reason . . . the ‘what-
should-be,’ is anchored in a continuum that emerges from an objective
potentiality, or ‘what-is.’ ’’\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘Philosophical Naturalism.’’} Mere potentiality, unanchored to the actual, divorced from the material matrix of possibilities produced by historical development, is unreal in its ephemerality—only an ‘‘abstract universal,’’ in
Hegel’s terminology, rather than a ‘‘concrete universal’’—and images representing such phantom potentials will produce only escapism (moreover, an
escapism that, as Bakunin noted in the case of the French romantic poets,
complements and even justifies the most ruthlessly pragmatic and materialistic forms of brutality).\footnote{Bakunin, God and the State, 80-81.}


This balancing of the potential and the actual, the subjective and the objective, is paramount for social anarchist aesthetics. Goodman warns not
only against binding imagination to actuality, but against severing the one
from the other, against ‘‘the pathology of living too much in the world of
speech.’’ The seeming freedom of pure subjective idealism, the refusal of
any truth other than internal truth, is in fact only a solipsistic slavery-in-
freedom, for like Bakunin, Goodman regards freedom as a social condition,
to be found only in community with others. This community can only be
rooted in a shared experience of the shared ecological reality in which it is
embedded; solipsistic dreaming, even in the form of a rêve à deux or ‘‘shared
psychosis,’’ is not enough. Both Bakunin and Goodman thus regard the social as situated in, though never identical to, the natural, the material universe and its concreteness, which is not the same as our representations: the
world of first nature still grounds us, interrupting our monologues, giving us
the reality principle in the form of error, ‘‘facts and failures.’’ When we shelter ourselves too thoroughly from the world, we trap ourselves in ‘‘the box of
panlogism,’’ the state in which ‘‘everything can be made up, [and] finally
nothing is given,’’ so that there are no errors, no gaps or differences between
signs and things—and no freedom either.\footnote{Goodman, Speaking and Language, 81-82. I am reminded here of Ellen Spolsky’s suggestion that the ‘‘gaps in nature,’’ the slippages or misfits between words and things, are what allow and indeed ultimately force us to be creative, not ‘‘merely adapting to culture’’ but actively reshaping it (Gaps In Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind [Albany: SUNY Press, 1993], 205-6).} So far does Bookchin go in
countering Bey’s subjective idealism that one might think his social anarchism entirely wedded to a materialist ontology. However, as Kingsley
Widmer might caution, this would be to mistake countering, a maneuver, for
a dogma, a fixed position. The point is not to deny that ideas and signs are
part of the real; even Bakunin, in his bold declaration at the outset of God
and the State that ‘‘undoubtedly the idealists are wrong and the materialists
right,’’ modulates this to say that the idealists are wrong in descending from
the ‘‘ideal’’ to the ‘‘material’’ rather than the other way around, and he insists that ‘‘the negation’’ of the existing material injustices that should occupy revolutionary thought, the overturning of material conditions that is the
destination of revolutionary action, ‘‘must be . . . ideal.’’\footnote{Bakunin, God and the State, 9, 48.} The only accurate
or even adequate accounts of reality, from an anarchist standpoint, are those
that apprehend it as perpetually moving, changing, developing and transforming itself from within, actualizing some potentialities, leaving others unactualized. A way of seeing that ‘‘imagines what might be, taking account of
what is,’’ would provide a way toward the radical transformation of society.\footnote{Goodman, Speaking and Language, 241.}


It is to the potentialities dormant inside the real that an anarchist aesthetics
directs us.


Conservative ideology, on the contrary, would consist, from a dialectical
standpoint, in perceiving reality as simply self-identical. The mind-set that
declares that things are what they are and that what you see is what you get
insists that appearance and essence, actuality and reality, are one and the
same. This is the mind-set that, as George Trow so aptly puts it, excludes all
meaningful context. Where a formative conception of reality places the actual in the context of the larger scope of potentiality (including the potentials
that could have been but were not historically actualized, for good or ill), the
conservative conception removes the actual from all real context, freezing
and isolating it, so that a particular moment in history is seen as the end of
all history. Particular acts and agents within this reified scene likewise
appear through the distorting lens of reification: deeds are seen as the individual doings of individual doers, so that larger processes—social and ecological systems, as well as the forms of systematic violence being done to
them—become effectively invisible, as if unreal. Thus, Bookchin tells an
anecdote about a certain ‘‘environmental presentation’’ at the Museum of
Natural History in New York, ‘‘in which the public was exposed to a long
series of exhibits, each depicting examples of pollution and ecological disruption’’:


The exhibit which closed the presentation carried a startling sign, ‘‘The Most
Dangerous Animal on Earth,’’ and it consisted simply of a huge mirror which
reflected back the human viewer who stood before it. I clearly recall a black child
standing before the mirror while a white school teacher tried to explain the message which this arrogant exhibit tried to convey. There were no exhibits of corporate boards or directors planning to deforest a mountainside or government
officials acting in collusion with them. The exhibit primarily conveyed one, basically misanthropic, message: people as such, not a rapacious society and its
wealthy beneficiaries, are responsible for environmental dislocations—the poor
no less than the personally wealthy, people of colour no less than privileged
whites, women no less than men, the oppressed no less than the oppressor.\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘Society and Ecology,’’ Institute for Social Ecology, 18 November 2003, \href{http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031118102234687/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.social-ecology.org\Slash{}article.php?story=20031118102234687\Slash{}} (accessed).}


The exhibit, in Bookchin’s interpretation, suggests a meaning both by what
is excluded from the mimetic frame and by what is unified by inclusion
within it. The mirror makes certain things invisible by what it makes visible;
even though the image it gives back is a true image, a literal reflection of
whoever stands before it, it lies. The lie is not enunciated only in the falsifying caption, supplied to make sure we interpret the mirror image in the terms
that have been preselected for us (Man, look into this mirror of life, it seems
to say; Go ye, atone and make good); it is also manifest in the way that the
mirror frames its subjects. To ‘‘mirror privileged and underprivileged people
in the same frame’’ is to disguise real differences as fundamental sameness,
politics as biology, the social as the natural. As an ideologically inflected
‘‘message,’’ it operates, Bookchin finds, by a logic of replacement: in the
unified image, ‘‘A mythical human ‘species’ had replaced classes; individuals had replaced hierarchies; personal tastes (many of which are shaped by
a predatory media) had replaced social relationships; and the disempowered
who live meagre, isolated lives had replaced giant corporations, self-serving
bureaucracies, and the violent paraphernalia of the State.’’\footnote{Ibid.} The mirror lies
by presenting individuals rather than social systems, political institutions,
economic forces, and, more fundamentally, the power with which they are
invested: ‘‘There were no exhibits of corporate boards or directors planning
to deforest a mountainside or government officials acting in collusion with
them.’’ Adding these images would not be sufficient to politicize the exhibit,
however, for it is not only the planners that the viewers need to see, but their
activity of planning; not only officials, but officials colluding with the very
businesses they are meant to regulate. Actions, processes, are not visible in
the mirror, which dumbly reflects back the spectator’s inertia: we can wave
our hands and shift from side to side, but the mirror only reflects a moment,
however extended, of our standing in front of the mirror, and cannot encompass what we did before we arrived nor after we leave. Our own capacities
for action are placed outside the frame.\footnote{Ibid.}


The final layer of falsification, then, is in the way that the mirror replaces
an unfolding process of change and development over time with a spatially
fixed image. The mirror lies by presenting a static object—the observer, arrested by the exhibit—instead of ongoing historical and natural processes:


‘‘Nature . . . is not a scenic view we admire through a picture window—a
view that is frozen into a landscape or a static panorama. Such ‘landscape’
images of nature may be spiritually elevating but they are ecologically deceptive. Fixed in time and place, this imagery makes it easy for us to forget
that nature is not a static vision of the natural world but the long, indeed
cumulative, history of natural development.’’\footnote{Ibid.} What is ‘‘ecologically deceptive’’ when applied to nature is politically deceptive when applied to social
relationships. If landscape or panorama representations of nature disguise
evolutionary development a changeless state (to be ‘‘conserved,’’ no doubt,
in keeping with the ‘‘natural resources’’ perspective of mainstream liberal
environmentalism), surely it similarly disguises the dialectical development
of human societies as an unchanging (bad, destructive, guilty) essence. By
creatively omitting the facts of elite power and economic motives, in effect
naturalizing the destruction of the earth, the exhibit both delivers a sternsounding moral lecture to the visitor and lets its corporate sponsors off the hook.\footnote{Ibid.}


While life itself is inherently ‘‘relational’’ and ‘‘contextual,’’ representa-
tions can encourage us to forget relationships and contexts.\footnote{Bookchin, The Murray Bookchin Reader, ed. Janet Biehl (London: Cassell, 1997), 41.} In ecocidal
representations, the scene appearing before us disappears as a scene: in the
absence of any notion that things have been or could be otherwise, the way
that things are cannot be questioned. The logic that destroys nature thereby
naturalizes its own destructiveness. An anarchist critique of art would be a
fortiori a critique of this suicidal logic.

\section{‘‘CRITICAL IDEALISM’’ AS SOCIAL ANARCHIST AESTHETIC}


The emphasis placed by art historians on the contribution of individualist
varieties of anarchist theory to modernist avant-garde aesthetics has largely
obscured the contribution of another stream of anarchist thought—in fact,
its main stream: social anarchism. As Bookchin writes in the opening lines of
his 1995 manifesto, ‘‘anarchism—a very ecumenical body of anti-authoritarian
ideas—developed in the tension between two basically contradictory tendencies: a personalistic commitment to individual autonomy and a collectivist
commitment to social freedom.’’ The first tendency was always a minority
current in the movement as a whole; as Bookchin notes, ‘‘anarcho-individualism
was largely marginalized by mass socialistic workers’ movements, of which
most anarchists considered themselves the left wing.’’\footnote{Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, 4, 7.} The most vigorous
and historically significant tendencies in anarchism were always collectivist
and socialist, articulated in the form of anarcho-syndicalism (the anarchist
trade union movement) and anarcho-communism (the tradition of which
Bookchin is an inheritor). In practice, anarchist history is largely the history
of social anarchism; however, Bookchin argues, some individualist tendencies have persisted in anarchist theory: ‘‘Anarchism’s failure to resolve this
tension, to articulate the relationship of the individual to the collective, and
to enunciate the historical circumstances that would make possible a stateless anarchic society produced problems in anarchist thought that remain
unresolved to this day.’’ It is altogether natural that Bookchin should illustrate this problematic with a discussion of Proudhon:


Pierre Joseph Proudhon, more than many anarchists of his day, attempted to formulate a fairly concrete image of a libertarian society. Based on contracts, essentially between small producers, cooperatives, and communes, Proudhon’s vision
was redolent of the provincial craft world into which he was born. But his attempt
to meld a patroniste, often patriarchal notion of liberty with contractual social
arrangements was lacking in depth. The craftsman, cooperative, and commune,
relating to one another on bourgeois contractual terms of equity or justice rather
than on the communist terms of ability and needs, reflected the artisan’s bias for
personal autonomy, leaving any moral commitment to a collective undefined beyond the good intentions of its members.


Indeed, Proudhon’s famous declaration that ‘‘whoever puts his hand on me to
govern me is an usurper and a tyrant; I declare him my enemy’’ strongly tilts
toward a personalistic, negative freedom that overshadows his opposition to oppressive social institutions and the vision of an anarchist society that he projected.\footnote{Ibid., 4-5.}


Bookchin’s invocation here is apt. To read Proudhon is to read the whole
history of this unresolved antinomy in miniature. More than Bookchin’s sum-
mary would indicate, Proudhon is founding for the socialist character of an-
archist theory and practice: he is the man whose political career begins with
the famous proclamation, ‘‘Property is theft!’’ and ends with the publication
of his De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières (On the Political Capacity
of the Working Classes). For his opposition to all fixed and inflexible abstract
systems, his embrace of motion, change, and flux, and his recognition that
‘‘man is a group,’’ Daniel Colson has hailed Proudhon as a poststructuralist
avant la lettre;\footnote{Colson, ‘‘Lectures anarchistes de Spinoza,’’ translation mine.} in his combination of an attack on the bureaucratic State
and an individualistic defense of the small proprietor with elements of anti-
Semitism and patriarchal moralism, he has also been read as a prophet of
the New Right. His extreme philosophical mobility, which allows him to
shuttle back and forth between the most innovative and the most backward
positions, makes all of these readings partially true. Proudhon is almost a
microcosm of the entire continuum of anarchist theory.


Even the most enthusiastic of Proudhon’s anarchist readers today must
look back at much of his work with profound disappointment. Even if one
overlooks his sometimes ludicrous pretensions (his ambition to build an encyclopedic theory encompassing chemistry, history, mathematics, aesthetics,
linguistics, and political economy) and his misguided eclecticism (his attempts to blend Kant’s notion of antinomy with Hegel’s dialectic and Fourier’s ‘‘series’’), Proudhon ultimately fails to produce a form of socialism
completely free from authoritarianism or a form of anarchism completely free
from capitalist ideology. The very element of moral commitment that transcends Proudhon’s individualism, the zeal for ‘‘Justice’’ that makes Proudhon a socialist, is tightly bound up with ‘‘provincial’’ and ‘‘patriarchal’’
elements—indeed, the prejudices of a Franche-Comtois peasant (e.g.,
against Jews, and particularly against women). The libertarian element in
Proudhon’s thought, meanwhile, is permeated with a capitalist mythology (of
the sanctity of the free contract, the dignity of the independent small proprietor, etc.).


Thus, much of Proudhon’s writing on art is inflected with his prejudices:
his prudery (‘‘If modesty and love were to be taken away from youth, and
lust put in their place, young people would very soon lose all sense of morality’’), his mistrust of modernity (‘‘as everyone knows, it is true that we are
living in an age of decadence, in which civic courage has been annihilated,
personal virtue cast aside, the race trodden down, all sentiments falsified
and depraved’’), and particularly his mixture of patronizing contempt for and
fear of women (in his reply to the feminist challenge issued by Jenny d’Hericourt, he asserts that her refusal to accept his arguments amounted to an
inability to ‘‘comprehend’’ them—an inability that, he gently explains, ‘‘results precisely, as I have told you, from your sexual infirmity’’\footnote{Proudhon, Selected Writings, 255, 215; Jenny d’Hericourt, A Woman’s Philosophy of Woman; or Woman Affranchised: an Answer to Michelet, Proudhon, Girardin, Legouve, Comte, and Other Modern Innovators, Sunshine for Women, \href{http://www.pinn.net/\%7Esunshine/book-sum/hericour.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.pinn.net\Slash{}\textasciitilde{}sunshine\Slash{}book-sum\Slash{}hericour.html} (accessed).}).


This deep misogyny is particularly noticeable and lamentable, and it
frequently mars his philosophy of art. Proudhon seems to think of art, metaphorically, as a female presence, and he conceives of women (when decoupled from their rightful and necessary ties to men) as deceptive, irrational,
foolish, and sexually depraved: d’Hericourt quotes his claims that the feminine subject is composed of ‘‘disconnected ideas, contradictory reasonings,
chimeras taken for realities, unreal analogies erected into principles, a tendency of mind inclining inevitably towards annihilation,’’ that ‘‘by her nature she is in a state of constant demoralization,’’ that ‘‘without a man, who
is to her prophet and word, she would not emerge from the bestial conditions,’’ that ‘‘he who wishes to preserve entire the strength of his mind and
body will fell her,’’ and that ‘‘her emancipation is the same thing as her
prostitution.’’\footnote{Proudhon, quoted in d’Hericourt, A Woman’s Philosophy of Woman.} Bad art has the same faults as bad women; good art is like
the good woman, who is pure and virtuous—‘‘bathed clean, with nails and
hair trimmed.’’ Presumably, cleansed of its impurities, with its animal nature
and libidinal impulses trimmed away, art will make a good helpmeet for the
more properly masculine sphere of labor and material production: ‘‘The role
(of art) is one of an auxiliary; it is a faculty more feminine than virile, pre-
destined to obedience, and whose development must in the last analysis be
determined by the legal and scientific development of the species.’’\footnote{Proudhon, quoted in Crapo, ‘‘The Anarchist as Critic,’’ 462-63, 464; translation mine.} When
art, like woman, does not remain chaste and in her proper place, it assumes
the role of a harlot, drawing on the base impulses of the audience and calling
us to do wrong: just as Proudhon declares, in La Pornocratie, that woman’s
‘‘power [puissance]’’ is that of ‘‘fascination’’ (rather than the male ‘‘puissance
d’action’’), he also expresses a fear that art ‘‘has power over us in the same
way that the magnetiser has power over the magnetised.’’ Untamed art, like
untamed sexuality, is dominating (‘‘pornocratic’’), destructive, deadly.\footnote{Proudhon, Oeuvres Complètes, 11.354; Proudhon, quoted in André Reszler, ‘‘Peter Kropotkin and His Vision of Anarchist Aesthetics,’’ Diogenes, no. 78 (Summer 1972).}


When sex is decoupled from its proper marital function, when it appears
outside the sphere of its proper goal (reproduction), then it assumes the form
of masturbation, which Proudhon, like Rousseau, fears and despises as ‘‘unnatural’’; likewise, art decoupled from its proper goal and function as the
reproductive supplement to production—‘‘art for art’s sake’’—is an aesthetic ‘‘vice’’: ‘‘love for love’s sake leads to unnatural vice, onanism, and
prostitution; art for art’s sake ends in Chinese knickknacks, caricature, the
worship of the ugly.’’ In short, Proudhon’s disdain for ‘‘the principle of art
for art’s sake’’ or the ‘‘autonomy of judgment’’ is closely coupled to his fear
of sexuality, particularly his fear of women’s sexuality, and to his desire to
control and discipline a threatening female presence.\footnote{Proudhon, System of Economical Contradictions, 227; Proudhon, quoted in Raphael, Proudhon, Marx, Picasso, 4-5.}


This attitude toward art is not altogether distinct from that of the Soviet
theorists of socialist realism and Proletkult. Indeed, in the embattled revolu-
tionary Spain of the late 1930s, anarchist aesthetics became almost indistin-
guishable from those of the authoritarian Left: ‘‘even as anarchosyndicalists
and Communists killed each other on the streets of Barcelona in May 1937,’’
Michael Seidman notes ironically, they manifested an ‘‘aesthetic unity . . .
accepting similar representations of their supposed constituencies.’’ These
‘‘humorless and sometimes menacing’’ focalizing representations of bodies
as machines in motion, designed to glorify the workers, ‘‘never depicted the
workers and soldiers of the posters as tired, hungry, or ill.’’ Anarcho-syndicalist poster art, functioning as ‘‘persuasive and coercive images that were
designed to convince them to work harder,’’ was meant to instill a productivist ethos in the sometimes reluctant Spanish proletariat; in short, it constituted an entirely utilitarian art. Not surprisingly, this aesthetic tended to
represent human beings in terms of their utilitarian dimension, their ‘‘productive capacities,’’ to the exclusion of any other dimension, using ‘‘the arm
and particularly the hand’’ as synecdoche for the whole body to indicate that
the entire person is defined by the activity of labor; the posters leveled bodies, truncating or omitting gender and facial features, since ‘‘what was important was neither the qualities nor the character of the individual
portrayed but his or her function as soldier or worker.’’ Here, behind the
apparent egalitarianism of the androgynous female figure, we can see the
return of Proudhon’s ideal representation of the clean, chaste woman. The
idealized kitsch universe of these images, envisaging a ‘‘future society’’ that
‘‘would not revolve around religion, sex, art, or play’’ but around the dignity
and glory of work itself, corresponds rather closely to Proudhon’s ‘‘workplace
utopianism.’’\footnote{Michael Seidman, Workers Against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona during the Popular Fronts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), \href{http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/\%0A13030/ft5h4nb34h/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}ark.cdlib.org\Slash{}ark:\Slash{}13030\Slash{}ft5h4nb34h\Slash{}} (accessed), 4, 14.}


Although Proudhon certainly had an influence on the Spanish anarchists,
it is a stretch to blame him for their aesthetic failures, which can be more
directly traced to the brutalizing influences of war and economic rationing.


However, it is certainly true that to the extent that Proudhon’s aesthetics are
strictly mimetic and utilitarian, obeying his own misogynist and authoritarian impulses, he subordinates the pleasure principle to the reality principle,
dictating that art should not self-indulgently play with form at the expense
of content, but that it should serve its proper social function by reproducing
reality. However, as Paul Crapo notes, Proudhon also develops a rather different thesis about art (if not, unfortunately, about women). Indeed, this second, contrary thesis develops to the point that it reveals something far more
fertile and significant than the sum of his ideological limitations: the prototype of a program for art that is consistently anarchist and socialist, the two
poles of his thought held together in a moment of synthesis.


While Proudhon spends much energy denying any ‘‘autonomy’’ to the aesthetic sphere, Paul Crapo argues, he also ‘‘attempts to recognize, far more
than is apparent, the independent status of the arts and their inherent
value.’’\footnote{Crapo, ‘‘The Anarchist as Critic,’’ 466.} Indeed, at times he even reverses the priority of terms, declaring
that art, like ‘‘morality’’ itself, is ‘‘above the realm of the useful,’’ greater
than the mere production of necessities—undoing his hierarchy of utility
over beauty: ‘‘If utilitarianism, which fights here for the principle of the reality of the spirit, of poetry, of science and of art . . . had been able to triumph,
all would have been lost.’’ For this Proudhon, art ‘‘should be totally and
completely free and reject any kind of control’’; indeed, ‘‘art is liberty itself,
recreating under its guise, and for its own glorification, the phenomenality of
things, executing . . . variations on the concrete theme of nature.’’\footnote{Proudhon, Selected Writings, 185; Proudhon, quoted in Crapo, ‘‘The Anarchist as Critic,’’ 467, translation mine; Rubin, Realism and Social Vision, 136; Proudhon, quoted in Rubin, Realism and Social Vision, 66.} This
more properly libertarian vision of art and the aesthetic retains the notion of
mimesis, but without the connotations of servile imitation, showing its autonomy in introducing ‘‘variations’’ on the given. Proudhon here steps far outside the narrow conception of anarchism as essentialism, declaring that
man does nothing according to nature: he is, I daresay, an animal who likes to
make improvements [un animal façonnier]. He likes nothing on which he has not
left his mark\dots{}


For the pleasure of his eyes, he invented painting, architecture,
the plastic arts, . . . none of the utility of which he can explain, except that they
satisfy the needs of his imagination, and they please him. For his ears, he polishes his language, counts syllables, and measures rhythm. Then he invents melodies and chords, assembles orchestras . . .\footnote{Proudhon, quoted in Rubin, Realism and Social Vision, 148n10.}


Since art, on this account, is precisely that which enables human beings to
develop a realm of freedom within the realm of natural necessity, it is no
hyperbole to identify it with ‘‘liberty’’ per se. In this mood, Proudhon affirms
a certain material sensuality, elevating an aesthetic pleasure principle above
and beyond the utilitarian or naturalist reality principle. Thus, in his System
of Economic Contradictions, Proudhon declares that ‘‘art consists in rendering things, not as nature made them, but as it should have made them.’’ In
this last comment, we can begin to see how two mutually incoherent, contradictory moments in Proudhon’s aesthetic thought—a moment that affirms the
sensuality of form and a moment that negates it in the interest of moral duty
and the utility of content—converge in a surprising moment of coherence.


This is the locus of an aesthetics that Proudhon names ‘‘critical idealism.’’\footnote{Proudhon, System of Economical Contradictions, 434; Rubin, Realism and Social Vision, 94.}


For Proudhon, art can and should represent nature as it is, performing its
mimetic function of rendering things, but at the same time present an image
of things as they should be—a potential that exists in a dialectical relation
to the actual within which it is always embedded. Art that cleaves to one
pole or the other of this dialectic is a failure: since, as Proudhon remarks in
Du principe de l’art, ‘‘the real is not the same as the truth,’’ it is possible to
transcend reality by telling the truth, what Theodor Adorno called the truth
of ‘‘the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it.’’ The reverse
is also true: to merely reproduce the real (as in Zola’s Naturalism) would be
to fail to tell the truth, i.e., to lie. ‘‘If [art] is limited to simple imitation,
copies or counterfeits of nature,’’ Proudhon warns, it will end up ‘‘dishonor-
ing the same objects that it would have imitated.’’\footnote{Proudhon, System of Economical Contradictions, 434; Proudhon, quoted in Rubin, Realism and Social Vision, 94; Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 135; Proudhon, quoted in Crapo, ‘‘The Anarchist as Critic,’’ 461, translation mine.} If art can represent the
actual, performing its mimetic function, but at the same time unfold some
part of the manifold potential dormant within actuality, then in the moment
that it frees itself from mere imitation, it can fulfill its deepest moral commitment, realizing the principle of justice in revealing the ‘‘should be’’ within
the ‘‘is.’’ The ‘‘social destination’’ of art, in the end, is not only to reproduce
what exists, but also to criticize what exists by reference to what can and
should exist—the realm of possibility that is implied but concealed by the
actual. This is what Peter Kropotkin seems to have in mind when he calls
for an aesthetic of realist description to serve an idealist goal.


Bookchin’s definition of reality as comprising potentials as well as the
actual is kin to Kropotkin’s assertion that ‘‘realistic description’’ should be
‘‘subservient to an idealistic aim,’’ particularly when this is read in context.


Kropotkin is discussing the shortcomings of a particular kind of realism—
that of French writers, particularly Émile Zola, for whom realism means ‘‘a
description only of the lowest aspects of life’’—the bestial misery of coal
miners, alcoholics, streetwalkers. First of all, Kropotkin argues that Zola’s
Naturalism, which purports to render a panoptical ‘‘anatomy of society,’’ offers only a myopic view of that society: ‘‘the artist who limits his observations
to the lowest and most degenerate aspects [of society] only . . . explores only
one small corner of life. Such an artist does not conceive life as it is: he
knows but one aspect of it, and this is not the most interesting one.’’ Moreover, Zola’s focus on the ‘‘degeneracy’’ of life under capitalism is merely the
mirror image of ‘‘the . . . romanticism which he combated.’’ The idealism of
the Romantic poets led them to avert their gaze from the ugly present, fleeing
into a mystical beyond; however, the Naturalists seem no more than their
Romantic counterparts to recognize that the ‘‘highest’’ manifestations of
‘‘life’’ are to be found ‘‘beside and within its lowest manifestations.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 86.}
Kropotkin judges Zola’s Naturalism to be ‘‘a step backwards from the realism of Balzac’’ because it so rigorously adheres to the actual that it appears
to exclude any sense of the possible.\footnote{Ibid.} The social anatomy that Zola renders
in Germinal is one in which everything is driven by fatal necessity: rebellion
appears futile. Zola’s anatomy of capitalist exploitation may indict the cruelty of the system, but it inadvertently defends that system by making it
appear unchangable—even natural. It evokes pathos, but not revolt. Ultimately, an ultra-materialist representation that freezes living men and
women into immobile objects produces the same lousy results as an ultra-
idealist representation that turns away from the material world. Where Romanticism mystifies reality, Naturalism reifies it.


For Kropotkin, as for Bookchin, it is the dialectical relationship between
material and ideal that is indispensable to any genuine realism in art or politics. Kropotkin is arguing for an aesthetic that is neither Romantic nor Naturalist, neither idealist nor (in the corollary sense) realist—an aesthetic that
Proudhon, while carefully positioning himself against both ‘‘idealist’’ and
‘‘materialist’’ metaphysics, was willing to call ‘‘critical idealism.’’ This is
Kropotkin’s ‘‘realistic description’’ in the service of an ‘‘idealistic aim.’’\footnote{Rubin, Realism and Social Vision, 94; Proudhon, System of Economical Contradictions, 16-17; Oeuvres, 11.59; Kropotkin, Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature, 86.}


In fin-de-siècle Paris, we find another group of social anarchists working
along very similar lines: the art social group of Paris, with Bernard Lazare
as one of its brightest lights. Against the Symbolist aesthetes, partisans of
‘‘social art’’ maintained, with Proudhon, that art has a ‘‘social mission,’’ but
like Kropotkin, they rejected Naturalism as an ‘‘incomplete’’ program. In his
1896 manifesto, Lazare declared that ‘‘the reproach which had to be made
to naturalism lay in its incompleteness, its . . . considering only bodily functions and not mental functions to be real; also its disfiguration [enlaidir] of
pleasure with ugliness [laid], instead of showing real things under their aspect of perfection.’’\footnote{Lazare, L’Écrivain et l’art social, 5, 27-28.} Naturalist representation, by privileging the material
over the ideal, renders a picture of life in which there are objects, but no
subjectivity; insofar as Zola’s coal miners seem to live a merely ‘‘animal
life,’’ Germinal endorses that bourgeois ideology that depicts the working
classes as mindless brutes, incapable of rational self-governance.\footnote{Ibid., 29.} Moreover, by subordinating pleasure to ugliness, Naturalist writing encourages us
to turn away from life in disgust at least as much as it encourages us to revolt
against social conditions.


If this sort of realism is a dead end for Lazare, so is Mallarmé’s Symbolism, which is an ‘‘idealist reaction against Zola and naturalism’’: the Symbolist ‘‘error,’’ he asserts, ‘‘was to turn one’s back on life, it was to return to
the old romantic theory, whose basis [fond] is christian: life is abject, one
must go beyond life [il faut aller hors la vie]. Starting from this point, one
cannot but end up in the mystico-decadent swamp [au marais mystico-
décadent].’’\footnote{Ibid., 28-29.} The same revulsion with life that is evoked by objectivist representation is the starting point for an antirealist, subjectivist aesthetic—a
flight away from representation. In place of Naturalist reification of reality,
all Symbolism can offer is mystification. Neither aesthetic offers enough to
revolution.


The alternative to Naturalism and Symbolism, for Lazare, is a ‘‘social art,’’
‘‘neither realist nor idealo-mystical,’’ whose starting point is an affirmation
‘‘that life is good and that its manifestations are beautiful,’’ while ‘‘uglinesses are the product of the state of society,’’ and which ‘‘represent[s] not
stable beings, fixed in a chosen pose, but beings in evolution’’; this art, in
accordance with Proudhon’s critical idealism, ‘‘must not content itself with
photographing the social milieux . . . it must release from them the ideas
which they contain.’’\footnote{Ibid., 29-30.} In short, social art is a representational aesthetic, a
modified realism that embraces both of those aspects of reality that are polarized and isolated by Naturalism and Symbolism: where Naturalism excludes
the dimension of potentiality and Symbolism excludes the dimension of actuality, social art insists on including both, activating the dialectic between
them. In so doing, it provides a stimulus to revolt, engaging both writer and
reader in a historical process of change, thereby overcoming the ‘‘artistic
egotism’’ that results from the alienation of artists from their community context.\footnote{Ibid., 19.}


In its affirmation, art social continues, in its own way, the realist pursuit
of a critique of existing conditions. It does not do this by excluding or denying the ‘‘essentially unacceptable in human existence,’’ which would evidence a rejection of the world, a dualistic perception that ‘‘one must go
beyond life,’’ more than any monistic ‘‘agreement with being.’’ ‘‘The earth
is infinitely beautiful,’’ writes Elisee Reclus, but in order for there to be
‘‘born between earth and man a harmony kind to the eye and comforting to
the spirit,’’ contrary to the primitivist intuition of a pre-symbolic unity between humanity and its ecological context, we have always needed to constructively ‘‘associate ourselves’’ with it through art.\footnote{Reclus, ‘‘Art and the People.’’} A revolutionary art
can only do this by willingly undertaking the testimonial task of representing
what is humiliating and painful both in nature and in history, while refusing
to reify these experiences into the supposedly eternal facts of human nature
or the human condition.

\section{EFFECTS: EMPATHY, DISBELIEF, LAUGHTER}


It is not the case, then, that representation per se is oppressive and that
liberation consists in the nonrepresentation of silence. Power inheres just as
much in the dominant set of agreements about what cannot be represented—in the negativity of what I have called focalizing representation—as
in the positivity of the work of art. Silence, just as well as speech, bears the
mark of power; Reclus points out that the monarchs’ aura of authority consisted not only in ostentatious representations of themselves, in plenitude,
but in the restriction of representations, in silence and absence: ‘‘Their palaces were seen from afar; their statues were erected everywhere; their edicts
were read; but they never showed themselves.’’\footnote{Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 76; Clayton Koelb, Kafka’s Rhetoric: The Passion of Reading (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 94; Reclus, ‘‘Evolution and Revolution.’’}


Much of the measurable progress achieved by radical experimentation in
the arts has been in usefully broadening what can acceptably be included
within the representational frame. Thus, Baginski’s ‘‘The Old and the New
Drama’’ is partially a critique of traditional dramatic modes of representation, but it is also a celebration of the ‘‘modern drama’’ of Hauptmann and
Ibsen, which in his opinion ‘‘represents the World’’ more accurately, reflecting rather than deflecting certain crucial moments of this world experience.


Baginski hails these works as great achievements of naturalism, steps toward
the progressive ‘‘reproduction of nature in all its phases.’’ In them, a mirror
is held up to life that does not exclude what was previously excluded, and
so does not distort and deform the image of life in the name of a narrow,
class-prejudiced moralism:


The old conception of the drama paid little or no attention to the importance of
the influences of social conditions. It was the individual alone who had to carry
the weight of all responsibility . . .


The growth of the scope of the drama has increased the number of the participants therein. Formerly it was assumed that the fate of the ordinary man, the man
of the masses, was altogether too obscure, too indifferent to serve as material for
anything tragic


Because of that assumption, the low and humble never gained
the center of the stage; they were only utilized to represent mobs.\footnote{Baginski, ‘‘The Old and the New Drama,’’ 38-39.}


By including the social context within the frame, the new representations
avoid attributing misery or failure to the merit or worthlessness of an individual’s mysterious and unchangeable essence, nor to the working of a mysterious and unchangeable fate; now they can indict the society itself. By
including ‘‘ordinary’’ people, they widen the number of possible ‘‘actors’’ in
more than one sense; now, Baginski argues, other kinds of individual can
take the center stage, and we can identify with them without thereby subscribing to a Stoic falsehood.


There is something to this argument. It goes some way toward explaining
how and why I find myself struck by the way that Geoff Ryman’s novels,
even while conventionally centered on a protagonist whose mental world we
are allowed to explore in depth, also tend to feature numerous little incidental encounters with people drawn from the register of the ordinary, the kinds
of everyday encounters that are normally reduced to the single dimension of
utility—in The Child Garden, for instance, we watch Milena receiving mail
from the postal carrier, paying the fare to a driver, asking for directions from
a desk clerk—that are invested with an unusual depth of attention: the person who would ordinarily appear to us as a more or less useful object, a
function, an It, manifests instead the sort of qualitative dimensions and independent subjectivity of a You, before vanishing back into the textual background. The glimpsed fragment of another life prompts us to imagine the
unimaginable plurality of lives unread, of worlds unseen by us. Ryman carries this attempt to what is perhaps a kind of limit in his hypertext novel
253: Or Tube Theatre, whose title refers to the total number of passengers
on a London Underground train (plus, significantly, the driver), which narrates an ordinary journey from the point of view of every single person on
the train, each of whom is also described as an object (from the point of view
of others on the train), both in the present moment and in terms of ‘‘inside
information’’ about their personal history, frequently with important reference to social and political history (‘‘sadly,’’ Ryman remarks, ‘‘people are
not always what they seem’’). Moreover, while reading about any one passenger, we are likely to find that some part of their description, internal or external, past or present, is highlighted, a hypertextual link to some trivial or
crucial fact of another character’s life: a woman’s passing fantasies about a
photograph of Saddam Hussein in The Independent leads us to the next car,
where the thoughts of a man reading today’s Independent turn to a fantasy
about the man he saw ducking into a massage parlor, which leads us to the
sordid recollections of an actual masseuse sitting a few rows behind the
driver; a Turkish travel agent who works in Kennington Road is linked to a
Punjabi man (sitting behind the woman dreaming of Saddam), whose dry-
cleaning shop happens to be located there, which in turn connects to the life
of a young Armenian immigrant who has just taken a job in a new dry cleaner’s . . . and so on, indefinitely.\footnote{Geoff Ryman, 253: Or Tube Theatre: A Novel for the Internet About London Under- ground In Seven Cars and a Crash, \href{http://www.ryman-novel.com/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.ryman-novel.com} (accessed 26 July 2003), 169, 49, 17, 136, 168, 202.}


There is something about this kind of writing that is deeply anarchic, embodying on a number of different levels the worldview described by Kropotkin, in which ‘‘the center’’ is ‘‘scattered and disseminated,’’ and the life of
each intricately bound up with those of the others.\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 117-19, 150.} I am also reminded,
here, of Richard Linklater’s film Slackers, John Sayles’s film City of Hope,
and Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen, all of which employ a kind of
horizontal or paratactic narrative move that associates seemingly unrelated
characters by juxtaposing them in space and time—via the tracking shot in
Slackers that takes us from one character to another with whom the first
crosses paths (whom we then follow instead), via the ensemble casting and
intertwining plotlines of City of Hope, and in Watchmen, via transitions from
subject to subject—metaphysically and ethically promoting each and every
subject to the status of ‘‘a whole universe in himself,’’ worthy of narrative
curiosity, attention, and respect.\footnote{Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993), 74; Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 119.}


And yet, by employing decentered, polyphonic, or rhizomatic narrative,
substituting a collage of juxtaposed multiple voices for the single controlling
perspective of a narrator, protagonist, or first-person point of view, this kind
of strategy may risk reproducing a relativism for which objectivity disap-
pears into an infinity of self-enclosed subjective worlds—the opposite of the
sort of intersubjectivity and interdependence that Ryman, Linklater, Sayles,
and Moore seem to be striving to capture. Moreover, it will not always be
enough to represent ordinary subjects with whom a proletarian audience can
identify, as Baginski suggests; the political consequences of identifying representations can be difficult to foresee or control.


Goodman is sensitive to just such ambiguities in his cinematic writing.
‘‘Bad audiences,’’ he notes, ‘‘will select . . . what suits their own repressions,
and interpret according to their own prejudices’’; thus, ‘‘the lovely is taken
as dirty, the horrible as sadistically thrilling.’’\footnote{Goodman, Utopian Essays, 72.} It seems that the act of
poaching on the text, inserting one’s own messages into it, is not always auto-
matically liberatory, as de Certeau would hope; it can just as easily be the
way that the audience defends itself from whatever would threaten its com-
placency, its sense of self-containment. Where Shelley and Tolstoy hoped
that identification (empathy, Einfühlung) would be the means by which that
closure could be breached, Goodman, like Brecht, argues that certain kinds
of selective identification can serve to maintain it. When the bad audience
of traditional theater identifies with the struggles of the characters onstage,
Brecht complained, this results in the intuition that what is represented is
‘‘only natural’’ and ‘‘will always be so.’’\footnote{Bertolt Brecht, ‘‘Theatre for Learning,’’ in European Theories of the Drama, ed. Barrett Clark, 309 (New York: Crown Publishers, 1965).} Thus, faced with a narrative that
indicts war as an abomination against humanity, a sufficiently corrupt audi-
ence will ‘‘identify with the actors of the story and take sides,’’ or one attack-
ing the death penalty as cruelty, instead of evoking ‘‘revulsion,’’ encourages
the audience to ‘‘identify with the victim, get involved in the suspense, thrill
to the horror, and weep with pity.’’ In this event, the ultimate ‘‘effect’’ is
merely ‘‘entertainment,’’ delight without instruction. ‘‘To be entertained by
such a theme is itself damaging,’’ Goodman warns, since such films may act
as ‘‘excitants’’ that have a ‘‘pornographic’’ or ‘‘titillating effect,’’ aestheticiz-
ing or eroticizing ‘‘images of violence, horror, and waste,’’ inciting the audi-
ence to mimetic ‘‘repetitions.’’\footnote{Goodman, Utopian Essays, 70, 72-73.}


One thinks here, on the one hand, of the limitations of certain well-
intentioned Spielberg films such as Saving Private Ryan and The Green Mile,
which tend to sentimentalize their subjects rather than provoke critical
thinking, and, on the other hand, of thrillers like Dirty Harry or 15 Minutes,
which eroticize scenes of rape or the murder of prostitutes and then allow
viewers to ritually purify themselves of the guilt of voyeuristic complicity by
enjoying the extermination of the rapist-murderer as righteous retribution:
‘‘the ‘message,’ ’’ writes Goodman, ‘‘is then employed as rationalization,’’ as
an alibi.\footnote{Ibid., 71.} ‘‘In Horror fiction,’’ as Wilson observes,


The author frequently derives vicarious kicks galore, letting the Id run rampant,
creating a truly scary monster or villain who kills exactly the sort of people the
author’s Id would like to kill, in its most vindictive and slavering moments. But,
says the SuperEgo (who’s usually in control of the typewriter, or at least the final
draft), all this is EVIL. And for a grand finale, here in my world, GOOD will
triumph, the monster will be destroyed (in one last welter of gore), and I will be
seen as a decent fellow and a grand entertainer.\footnote{Wilson, ‘‘Amoral Responsibility,’’ 55.}


One need not speculate about authorial motives to recognize that what Wilson imagines here is readily applicable to the functions that such narratives
might fill for the audience, which very well might be seeking safe thrills and
a certain imaginary license to break social rules, combined with the security
and sense of self-righteousness that comes with the reaffirmation of conventional morality.


We could also extend these observations by noting the way that sympathetic narrative treatments of cultural or racial others aimed at an ethnically
homogeneous audience tend to represent otherness in terms of the familiar,
assuring the privileged audience that differences are merely superficial, that
underneath it all, they are just like us—a reductive representation that, in
the guise of respect, surreptitiously appropriates and colonizes the other. As
Bakhtin asks rhetorically, ‘‘In what way will the event be enriched if I succeed in fusing with the other?’’ Rather than seeking to ‘‘love one’s neighbor
as one loves oneself’’ through an art of empathy, it is better that one should
come to respect one’s neighbor as one’s neighbor, as ‘‘another consciousness,
with the same rights, and capable of responding.’’\footnote{Bakhtin, quoted in Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin, 108, 97, 107.}


Accordingly, like Brecht, Goodman proposes a distancing (estrangement,
Verfremdung) of the audience from the action to ‘‘neutralize’’ violent images
via a kind of ‘‘factual and analytic handling’’ that counters the ‘‘pornographic effect’’ of the ‘‘cinematic conditions of bright screen and dark theater’’ themselves, a non-ordinary context that affords viewers safe anonymity
and a kind of dream-like passivity: since, in this setting, ‘‘images of horror
easily detach themselves from the kind of intellectual and ethical framework
in which they are usually presented,’’ a radical film has to speak in the intellectual and ethical registers, to engage the ‘‘ethical and social self.’’\footnote{Goodman, Utopian Essays, 70-71, 79.} If, as
Wilson argues, ‘‘images of horror’’ tend to give play to das Es (in sadistic
fantasies of violence) and das Über-Ich (in masochistic fantasies of punish-
ment), a sounder aesthetic would speak to the rational agency of das Ich, the
responsible adult among other adults in the world, who is free to choose how
to act.


Paradoxically, however, this enlistment of the cognitive and moral subject
by means of a distancing effect also has to overcome the distance between
the space-time of representation and that of everyday life. The problem is
that ‘‘the conditions of fantasy and the habits of the audience are so discontinuous with behavior in the waking public world that the shock of strong
images is sentimentalized: the rationalizing sorrow and regret is used to insulate the experience from any possible action.’’ A sentimental-fantasy
framework neutralizes its contents, turning what would otherwise be powerful, motive affects of ‘‘revulsion,’’ ‘‘compassion,’’ or ‘‘political indignation’’
into merely passive ‘‘pity’’—much in the manner, Goodman notes, of
‘‘Christians who exhaust their neighbor-love in the sentimentality of the
Cross. The next step is for the sentimentalized horror to be taken as matter-
of-course in the public world, just as for those Christians the poor must always be with us, so Christians can be charitable.’’\footnote{Ibid., 71-72.} It is not only the case
that the viewers who thrill to the dramatic illusion naturalize its contents,
falsely exporting its narrative structure to the world outside the theater, but
that they fail to export important contents to that outside world—in particular, the moral feelings represented in the drama, and those aroused in the
course of their involved, compassionate response to it. An avant-garde approach that merely alienates the audience, confusing and repelling it, does
not solve this problem if it leads the audience to reject the whole experience,
closing it out. If the experience is not internalized, it cannot be radical for
anyone (except perhaps the filmmakers). Some kind of empathetic response
is wanted after all.


Along these lines, Wilson also arraigns the ‘‘pornographic effect’’ of fiction in the horror genre, from Bram Stoker to Stephen King, which encourages us to identify not only with repressive ‘‘heroes’’ (e.g., the ‘‘priests and
cops’’ whose function it is to police the boundaries of the ‘‘normal’’ world)
but also with equally repressive monsters (e.g., ‘‘rippers, slashers, toothed
vaginas . . . those who cannot caress without a razor, who cannot desire without desiring someone else’s misery’’), thereby combining a certain expression of ‘‘sexuality,’’ even a sublimated ‘‘masturbation-fantasy,’’ with self-
punishing ‘‘body-hatred’’ and ‘‘sexual disgust.’’ ‘‘In the Nietzschean sense,’’
finally,
‘‘Horror is anti-life,’’ a product of ressentiment. Instead, Wilson
urges, text should function as ‘‘propaganda’’ for ‘‘life.’’ Where Horace saw
fiction as instruction, Wilson writes,



\begin{quote}


I prefer now to look on fiction as seduction. Literally my ideal text would draw to
me someone to embrace. I also want to seduce readers into meditations on the
nature of freedom and influence them to imagine the possibility of their own free-
dom; I enjoy the game, and I also hope to create a world closer (by some perhaps
infinitesimal but real degree) to my desires. The best seductions are very stylish
and of course never boring. They’re tricky and multi-layered. They result in plea-
sure for both seducer and seduced, otherwise the true artist would consider them
flops. Orgasm for both partners as it were.\footnote{Wilson, ‘‘Amoral Responsibility,’’ 56-57.}



\end{quote}


By rethinking romantic identification in terms of the metaphor of ‘‘seduc-
tion,’’ Wilson emphasizes the eroticism of otherness, the playful and sensual
faculties of the imagination; what one wants is not only the capacity to feel
another’s pain, but the ability to anticipate, and so to desire, the other per-
son’s pleasure. The seductive text is nonetheless ‘‘didactic,’’ purposive: it
instructs by delighting.\footnote{Ibid., 57.} As such, it draws on what is on the other side of
alienation—the infinite fascination of a world that has lost its banal familiar-
ity. It is in terms of this sensation of ‘‘profound interest’’ and ‘‘excitement’’
that Read attempts to define his appeal to sensuous ‘‘play’’ and imaginative
‘‘subjectivity’’ in opposition to Marxist objectivism and productivism:



\begin{quote}


standing . . . on the edge of the abyss . . . [one] surveys the scene, the little speck
of protoplasm which is man, the universe, finite or infinite, on which he finds
himself, and, if he thinks of the universe as finite, the dreaded gulf of nothingness
beyond\dots{}
He sees Fire and Air, Earth and Water, elementary qualities giving
birth to all sorts of contrarieties—hot-cold, dry-moist, heavy-light, hard-soft,
viscous-brittle, rough-smooth, coarse-fine—sees these combining and inter-
acting and producing worlds and life upon these worlds, and is lost in wonder.\footnote{Read, ‘‘Existentialism, Marxism and Anarchism,’’ in The Essential Works of Anarchism, ed. Marshall Shatz, 530-31 (New York: Bantam Books, 1971).}



\end{quote}


This sense of wonder, this ecstasy or boggling of the imagination, is the kind
of feeling evoked by Magritte’s apple, which visually seduces us with its
trompe-l’oeil waxy surface, bewitching our eyes with its dappled red-and-
green skin, its volume, its palpable weight, only to disenchant our eyes at a
second turn, to reveal that its apparent actuality, even its seeming necessity,
is in fact an impossibility: it is an apple that has replaced a man’s head, or
fills an entire room, or that bears the caption, ‘‘Ceci n’est pas un pomme.’’


We are not assaulted by a closed, nonrepresentational formal exercise that
refuses us entrance, nor are we soothed by a conventional representation that
affirms what we already know; instead, we are seduced into a meditation
on the actual, the necessary, the impossible, and—the missing term in this
series—the possible. Through se-duction, Magritte achieves surprise, pulling us away (-ducto) from our supposed hold (-prehensum) on things: he
draws us in before blowing our minds.


This effect of surprise, wonder, astonishment, can also be performed in
the mode of trauma: it can be, as Ben Marcus writes, not only an ‘‘art of
making life less believable’’—that is to say, the particular form of life that
we passively receive from our society—but also ‘‘the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of.’’\footnote{Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String (Narmal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), 78.} That is, it can
get around our habitual defenses, that ‘‘accustomed’’ or mimetically dulled
consciousness, built from a repetitive ‘‘stereotyped use of language,’’ which
is ‘‘so fearful of any feeling that might work a change that it freezes against
giving in to unsafeguarded experience.’’ Against these centripetal forces, a
radical art seeks not simply to épater les bourgeoises, to ‘‘to confuse, confound, bewilder, piss off, and generally blow the fuses of ordinary citizens,’’
as McCaffery has it, but ‘‘to find at just what point the freezing occurs and
to sensitize that point.’’\footnote{Goodman, Creator Spirit Come!, 85.} It finds this point, as a surgeon might, not via a
crude assault, but through a subtler exploration.


I have seen this kind of effect demonstrated by Tim O’Brien’s The Things
They Carried, which almost unfailingly uses the appeal of verisimilitude and
immediacy—the ‘‘true war story,’’ the testimonial writing whose right to
speak is so identified with the suffering body that to question it would seem
like a repetition of the act of violence it bears witness—in order to pull the
rug out from under them, to call their attention to the inescapable mediation
of textuality, the limits of representation. O’Brien offers his postwar American audience what seems to be a straightforwardly realistic narrative of the
Vietnam War, with all the emotional authority that a veteran’s firsthand account commands for that audience, in order to induce a receptive state of
listening, an openness to experience, before it systematically undoes all of
its major premises: ‘‘I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now,
and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier.


. . . Almost everything else is invented.’’ The reader is seduced into identification with the suffering narrator, only to find this identity shaken and called
into question: the booby-trapped or self-destroying story ‘‘embarasses’’ us
into a more difficult act of imagination by catching us in our most self-deceptive moment, in our wish to appropriate the disorder and terror of a body in
pain to our project of making a tidy sense of order, selfhood, and historical
meaning. However, once having been pulled in, we find ourselves unable to
detach ourselves from the narrative so easily: ‘‘you can tell a true war story,’’
as O’Brien writes, ‘‘by the way it never seems to end.’’\footnote{Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 203, 77, 83.} Instead, we are left
with a knowledge of our own complicity in the effort to forget the unaccept-
able or unpresentable in history, an effort disguised as the Stoic remem-
brance of honorable sacrifice. Rather than writing off the unpresentable as
unrepresentable and therefore inaccessible, however, the novel charges us
with a responsibility for striving to imagine the unimaginable.


Or so it would seem. In fact, O’Brien’s use of traumatic authority is at
times abusive, or at least self-defeating. As Lorrie N. Smith points out, the
novel’s repeated gesture of destroying its own closure, gesturing toward endlessness or limitlessness, obscures the degree to which it reinscribes firm
boundaries and limits, even rather traditional ones: women and the Vietnamese are both constantly figured as uncomprehending or incomprehensible,
pushed outside of the circle of solidarity created by the soldiers’ ritual of
storytelling, marginalized and omitted from the frame.\footnote{Lorrie N. Smith, ‘‘ ‘The Things Men Do’: The Gendered Subtext in Tim O’Brien’s Es- quire Stories,’’ Critique 36, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 16-17.} To the extent that
this takes effect for readers—which I have also witnessed among students
discussing the novel—The Things They Carried develops into another version of the dominant American postwar narrative of Vietnam, which Pat
Aufderheide dubs the ‘‘noble grunt’’ genre, in which the war is not something American military power did to the Vietnamese people, but something
that happened to the American soldiers whose individual stories we are to
listen to. The telling of war stories becomes therapeutic, recuperative.\footnote{Pat Aufderheide, ‘‘Vietnam: Good Soldiers’’ in Seeing Through Movies, ed. Mark Crispin Miller (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 82, 111. Recently, in the wake of the reelection of George W. Bush, O’Brien himself has confessed to feeling ‘‘as if, despite the efforts of writers like Larry Heinemann, Michael Herr, and myself, we’ve lost the battle . . . the lessons [of Vietnam] have not stuck’’ (‘‘Vietnam and Iraq,’’ presentation at Valparaiso University, February 16, 2005). Perhaps the very effort to remember has been recuperated in the service of forgetting.}


Still, O’Brien’s use of a reflexive realism to entice readers into a more
epistemically and politically challenging critique of representation demon-
strates some of the possibilities, and it illustrates the kind of connection I
would like to articulate between an anarchist aesthetic, on the one hand, and
an anarchist hermeneutic, on the other. The aesthetic process of seduction
and surprise should trigger the hermeneutic process that de Cleyre describes
as ‘‘double reading,’’ in which an initial state of openness, receptivity, and
identification is followed by cognitive, analytical, critical consciousness.


If anarchist aesthetics require a certain dialectic of identification and dis-
identification, it is important to consider how existing aesthetic genres approach these questions. The tragic drama that Baginski critiques emphasizes
identification, as Eco points out: classical aesthetics specifies that tragedy
must be the story of ‘‘the downfall of a person of noble condition, neither too
wicked nor too good, for whom we can in any case feel sympathy, and at his
violation of the moral or religious code . . . feel pity for his fate and terror at
the suffering that will strike him.’’ In the case of classical comedy, however,
we are witness to ‘‘the violation of a rule committed by a person of lower
degree . . . toward whom we feel a sense of superiority, so that we do not
identify ourselves with his downfall.’’\footnote{Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 270.} In the modern period, this comic protagonist mutates: no longer restricted to the class-coded ‘‘person of lower
degree,’’ populist comedy attacks the high and brings them low. ‘‘The man
who kills a sovereign,’’ observes Reclus, is thereby ‘‘doing him the honour
to take him as the representative of a whole society’’; the true ‘‘regicide’’ is
the playwright who has us ‘‘laughing at the Grand Duchess or General
Boum,’’ demonstrating concretely that the ‘‘political power’’ on which their
real-life counterparts depend ‘‘is a worm eaten institution,’’ that ‘‘the universal respect which gave it worth has disappeared’’ so that what is left is ‘‘nothing but an external scaffolding, the edifice itself has ceased to exist.’’\footnote{Reclus, ‘‘Evolution and Revolution.’’}


Perhaps the ultimate extension of this regicidal comedy is Jarry’s anarchic
monarch, King Ubu. Nevertheless, comedy entails mockery of someone with
whom one disidentifies, so that ‘‘in the violation of a rule by a character so
different from us we can not only feel the security of our impunity but also
. . . allow ourselves the vicarious pleasure of a transgression that offends a
rule we have secretly wanted to violate, but without risk.’’\footnote{Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, 270-71.}
Drawing on these genre definitions, Eco reflects on the limitations of Bakhtin’s privileged aesthetic category, the basically comical ‘‘carnivalesque’’:


‘‘The comic seems to belong to the people, liberating, subversive, because
it gives license to violate the rule. But it gives such license precisely to those
who have so absorbed the rule that they also presume it is inviolable. The
rule violated by the comic is so acknowledged that there is no need to reaffirm it. That is why carnival can take place only once a year\dots{}
Carnival comic, the moment of transgression, can exist only if a background of unquestioned observance exists.’’\footnote{Ibid., 275.} Both tragedy and comedy, Eco argues, are
fundamentally conservative genres, exploring breaches of the social ‘‘rule,’’
whether via terror or laughter, only in order to reaffirm the naturalness, the
rationality, the rightness of the rules. This would be in keeping with the
speculations of scholars such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Kenneth Burke, and
James Redfield, for whom the central ‘‘social function of art’’ is to smooth
over the ‘‘contradiction’’ implicit within the rules that constitute a given
society—hence the central role of ‘‘conflict’’ in narrative: it is not that narrative per se requires a crisis as the occasion for drama, but that social crises
require dramatic resolution (e.g., the Burkean ‘‘ritual’’ cycle of guilt, scapegoating, and purification). Hence, Redfield argues, ‘‘the poet investigates the
norm in situations and in relation to characters where the norm implies dysfunction—situations in which and characters to whom the norm fails to prescribe the proper end or to furnish the necessary means.’’\footnote{James Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 82, 166.} In this general
description, we can see the primordial precursor of the circular kitsch narrative that always returns things to a status quo ante framed as natural and
unquestionable.


Here we seem to have come back to Stirner’s critique of comedy (and, by
extension, of all art) as the defense of the religious ideal by other means. If
all representation were necessarily comic or tragic, then perhaps representation would be intrinsically conservative in this way. However, representation
can take other forms, fulfilling other functions. Eco describes a third kind of
narrative —more an antigenre or an intergenre than a genre of its own—that
is both comic and tragic at once, while presenting something that is neither
comedy nor tragedy. This both-and\Slash{}neither-nor entity, which he provisionally labels ‘‘humor,’’ and which others might call ‘‘tragicomic,’’ is defined
via Pirandello’s comparison of Cervantes’ protagonist, Quixote, to Ariosto’s
Astolfo: ‘‘Astolfo arriving on the moon riding a fabled hippogriff and, at
nightfall, seeking a hotel as if he were a commercial traveler, is comic,’’ Eco
explains, ‘‘but not Don Quixote, because we realize that his battle with the
windmills reproduces the illusion of Cervantes, who fought and lost a limb
and suffered imprisonment for his illusions of glory.’’\footnote{Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, 276.} Cervantes does not
allow us to completely distance ourselves from Quixote, pulling us into tragic
identification with him, but at the same time undercuts this identification
with absurdity. Quixote provokes laughter, but there is a painful edge to this
laughter, in part because he is not merely breaking rules, but seeking to
uphold feudal rules that have ceased to have any purchase on the post-feudal
world, inflexibly interpreting everything by a law that does not change. In
this sense, the conservative who reads well cannot disown him without injury
or identify with him without shame. Such a narrative does indeed call things
into question, as Kundera suggests,\footnote{Kundera, The Art of the Novel, 18.} but it can do more than sustain mod-
ernist ambiguity or deconstructive hesitation: it can set cognitive dissonance
to work in the service of a critical dialectic that leads back to the world of
ethics, the world of practice.


For it is back to the world of practice that radical art can and should call
us. This is not to say, as does Lucas, that art is either a mimetic ‘‘illusory
form’’ that is ‘‘ineffective in reality,’’ or at best merely ‘‘a prop’’ defined by
its ‘‘purpose,’’ which is ‘‘to map the path back to sensuous awareness and
practice’’ away from its own ‘‘dream’’ existence; rather, as Burke reminds
us, art is an effective material practice insofar as it has effects on us: ‘‘poetry
contributes to the formation of attitudes, and thus to the determining of conduct.’’\footnote{Lucas, ‘‘Guerilla Theater,’’ 36, 30; Burke, Counter-Statement, 163.} Art as ‘‘a call to action,’’ for Landauer, is mimetic, in the manner
suggested by his reading of Goethe’s Campagne in Frankreich: ‘‘the beautiful is when we see the principles of life in their greatest activity and perfection, whereby we, incited to reproduction, feel ourselves equally alive and
thrust into a state of most powerful activity.’’ In imitating art, we recreate
ourselves.\footnote{Charles B. Maurer, Call to Revolution: The Mystical Anarchism of Gustav Landauer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971), 145; Goethe, quoted in Maurer, Call to Revo- lution, 145. I find interesting, along these lines, the recent argument made by Elaine Scarry, who despite her insistence that a certain kind of experience, for instance, of pain, ‘‘resists representation,’’ finds a strong connection between mimetic ‘‘beauty’’ and social ‘‘justice’’ (Scarry, Resisting Representation [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994], 3; On Beauty and Being Just [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999]).} Perhaps in this sense a certain metafictionality would be appropriate to anarchist works of art, in that we can be made to recognize and feel
our own activity as readers, our engagement in a world-building project—
even a utopian project.


It is not simply true that ‘‘every fiction is a utopian fiction,’’ as Wilson
writes, since not all fiction so fuses prescription with description, the actual
and the good.\footnote{Wilson, ‘‘Amoral Responsibility,’’ 55.} However, what Wilson gestures toward here is perhaps a
certain implicitly utopian dimension within all fictions: namely, their inevitable value-ladenness, and the degree to which they help us to sensuously
imagine (or hinder us from imagining) a world constituted by those values,
and the kinds of acts and facts that would tend to constitute it. Such a utopian dimension can only be made fully manifest in works that do not simply
collapse the possible into the actual, and that do not exclude pain and evil.


An anarchist utopia cannot be statically perfect, for this constitutes it as ou-
topia, a ‘‘no place,’’ ontologically removed from the domain of all possible
experience; such ou-topias deny from the outset the very possibility that they
seek to assert. Instead, what is wanted is eu-topias,
‘‘good places’’—
heterogeneous processes. They must be shot through with impurities in order
that they may invite us to inhabit them: impurity signals that a better world
is capable of admitting even such corrupt and miserable creatures as ourselves. In such worlds, suffering and sadness must at least exist as memory
(as, indeed, they do for the freed slaves of Toni Morrison’s Beloved)—or else
we sad and suffering subjects can feel no relation to them. Only a utopia that
recalls pain—specifically, the pain of injustice—can have a beginning; only
a utopia that has a beginning, a root in the historical world, is something
other than a timeless heaven.


Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, to its credit, attempts to meet this
challenge, giving us access to ‘‘an ambiguous utopia’’ (in the words of its
subtitle) that is nonetheless keenly tangible, and at times painfully sweet. It
is the presence of anguish amid sweetness that distinguishes an authentic
utopianism from what Castoriadis calls the ‘‘chimera of wanting to eliminate
the tragic side of human existence.’’ In this sense, perhaps the inhabitants
of LeGuin’s anarchist world, Annares, have more personality than we do, for
in their freedom and equality, they love and hate, they are frustrated or
lonely at times, they experience sickness or hunger or jealousy as we do—
only none of these is simply an irremediable outcome of the social structure.
The tragic still exists, as does the possibility of a general slide back into
authoritarianism (a key moment of ambiguity); rather, what is eliminated is



\begin{quote}


the melodramatic aspect, the false tragedy—the one in which catastrophe arrives
without necessity, in which everything could have been otherwise if only the
characters had done this or had done that. That people should die of hunger in
India, while in America or Europe governments penalize farmers who ‘‘over’’-
produce—this is a macabre farce, this is Grand Guignol in which the cadavres
and the suffering are real, but this is not tragedy, there is nothing ineluctable
here\dots{}
When a neurotic repeats for the 14th time the same behaviour-pattern of
failure, reproducing for himself and for those nearby the same kind of misfortune,
helping this person get out of such a situation is to rid his or her life of grotesque
farce, not tragedy; it is to allow the person finally to see the real problems of life
and the tragic element they may contain—which the neurosis served in part to
express but especially to mask.\footnote{Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 94.}



\end{quote}


To apprehend dominated life not as a tragic, but as melodramatic, grotesque,
farcical—this is to see the world through what Burke calls the ‘‘comic
frame,’’ to represent historical evil as unnecessary ‘‘error,’’ as a ludicrous
failure, rather than as the tragic enactment of necessity.\footnote{Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 172.} An anarchist aesthetic sees human beings, under these contingent conditions, not as the self-
possessed masters of their own fate, willfully pursuing their own and others’
ruin, but as ‘‘confused’’ and ‘‘trapped,’’ displaying ‘‘bafflement’’ and ‘‘spectacular folly’’; from this perspective, one is moved to exclaim, not ‘‘Es muss
sein’’ (‘‘It must be!’’), but ‘‘What stupid fuck-ups men are!’’ Only this cannot
be flattened into a depiction of humanity as afflicted by ‘‘incurable stupidity,’’ as the brothers Goodman remind us—else one arrives again at the
‘‘tragic frame,’’ Baginski’s disciplinary mirror.\footnote{Goodman and Goodman, 6; Kundera, Unbearable Lightness, 32; Goodman, People or Personnel: Decentralizing and the Mixed Systems and Like a Conquered Province: The Moral Ambiguity of America (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 421; Paul Goodman and Percival Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 6, emphasis mine.}

\section{THE LIMITS OF THE POLITICS OF STYLE}


Aesthetic styles have political consequences; a style of representation is
a kind of effective action-in-the-world, even when its effects are unforseen,
unintended, or unwanted. Differences in the manner of representing things
are practically, materially real in ways that belie the leveling claims of a
supposedly reader-centered poetics and hermeneutics for which the text is
simply an effect of the reader’s interpretation. However, while stopping short
of endorsing such facile dismissals of the politics of the text and its reality,
we should give serious consideration to Felski’s argument that those politics
are at least partly the product of their interpretation by audiences. It is to
this problem of audience reception, the social context of art, that we must
turn next.

\chapter{8. Aesthetic Production}

\section{THE PROBLEM OF ALIENATION}


IN ROTHEN’S ESSAY ON ‘‘LITTÉRATURE’’ IN FAURE’S ENCYCLOPÉDIE ANARCHISTE,
we find five centuries’ worth of literary history described as follows: after
some ‘‘fifteen centuries’’ of a poetics whose ‘‘source and formation’’ was
‘‘both popular and collective,’’
the Renaissance was to change things. For the popular thought resulting from the
upheavals one hundred centuries of migrations from which Europe was born, it
would substitute an erudite formation born of the stabilization [stabilisation] of
Hindu, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Arab civilizations. In place of collective
social life that integrated individualities into a single whole of thought and activity shaped by corporative spirit and solidarity, it established the individualist
spirit and competitiveness that would divide men. Printed literature succeeded
oral literature. Collective production, transmitted by wandering poets, would be
exhausted, deprived of voice and renewal. Nothing would remain for the people,
who were illiterate and cut off from the intellectual communion of men, but some
inferior troubadours who could not elevate their souls, who could only abase
through their vulgarity. Those who were somewhat talented would write books for
the rich who could afford to buy them, if not read them. Much more so than in
the Middle Ages, night would fall among the people, the night of the spirit into
which it would be systematically plunged in order to fall to the level of that
human beast that it would be on the eve of 1789 . . .\footnote{Rothen, ‘‘Littérature,’’ 1295, translation mine.}


It is hard not to be struck by how sharply this representation inverts the
traditional narrative of art history, preserved in the very nomenclature Rothen is forced to use, in which the glories of Greece and Rome are succeeded
by a ‘‘night of the spirit’’ or Dark Age, a mere interregnum or ‘‘Middle
Ages,’’ followed at last by a rebirth or ‘‘Renaissance’’ of classical learning
and a glorious Enlightenment. For an anarchist, the triumph of an ‘‘erudite’’
neoclassical culture means the gradual loss of a ‘‘popular and collective’’
folk culture and a growing estrangement between ‘‘the people’’ conceived of
as nonartists (if not totally illiterate, then to some degree intellectually isolated) and a separate institution called ‘‘art.’’ Even the medieval mystery
plays, Rothen argues, ‘‘despite their religious character and ecclesiastical
censorship . . . are essentially the product of popular inspiration,’’ a populist
influence visible in their heterogeneous combination of elements of the ‘‘miracle plays’’ and ‘‘comic theater.’’ This ‘‘mélange des genres,’’ which proved
‘‘necessary’’ to keep the audiences interested, resulted in the blending of
the high material of Christian doctrine with ‘‘farce pushed just to the edge of
obscenity’’—a subversive mingling of discourses that finally met with State
repression in 1548.\footnote{Rothen, ‘‘Théâtre,’’ in Encyclopédie anarchiste, 2761, translation mine.}


Practitioners of cultural studies would be quick to note the contradiction
between Rothen’s affirmation, here, of admixture and hybridity, his vision of
multiple forces, both authoritarian and popular, converging to shape art, and
his unilateral denunciation, elsewhere, of contemporary mass culture as an
authoritarian trap:



\begin{quote}


For a long time, to satisfy their need for art, the workers . . . have had no more
than the degradation [abrutissement] of the cabaret, pompously called ‘‘the salon
of the poor’’ by the demagogues, the shit of café-concerts, the unliterary nonsense
of paperback novels\dots{}
They were supplied with cinema, rendered as stupid as
possible, then boxing matches and bullfights. The people of the twentieth century,
who are called ‘‘sovereign,’’ rediscover in their diseased hovels, where social diseases devour those whom war has spared, and in the circuses, the existence and
the pleasures that were those of the Roman plebians: Panem et circenses!\footnote{Rothen, ‘‘Art,’’ in Encyclopédie anarchiste, 143, translation mine.}



\end{quote}


For Rothen, the appearance of popular ‘‘sovereignty’’ in the sphere of popular culture is mere illusion: mass-produced kitsch is nothing more than a
strategy of pacification. In a series of essays on cinema for La Revue Anarchiste written around the same time, Léo Claude offers a more balanced view of
mass culture as a product of the interaction between audience desires and
expectations, authorial agendas, and a spectrum of commercial imperatives.\footnote{Léo Claude, ‘‘Pour Prendre Langue,’’ La Revue Anarchiste 1 (December 1929): 48. Rothen was joined in his suspicion of cinema by several of his anarchist contemporaries, such as Franz Pfemfert, who regarded it as ‘‘soulless’’ and ‘‘fantasy-killing’’ (‘‘Das Kino als Erzieher,’’ in Kino-Debatte: Literatur und Film, 1909-1929, ed. Anton Kaes, 61 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1978), translation mine), and Victor Roudine, who saw it as ‘‘poisonous’’ (‘‘Le Cinéma calomniateur,’’ Pelloutier.net: Histoire du syndicalisme revolutionnaire et de l’anarcho-syndicalisme, 17 November 2004, \href{http://www.pelloutier.net/dossiers/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.pelloutier.net\Slash{}dossiers} [accessed], translation mine); however, apart from the anarcho-modernist examples of Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel, there were many attempts to adapt film to social anarchist projects, particularly in revolutionary Spain—a subject for another book, not at all exhausted by Richard Porton’s otherwise valuable Film and the Anarchist Imagination (New York: Verso, 1999).}


Certainly, in the play of forces between capital, whose project is certainly
one of recuperating popular desires into capitalist values, and the popular
audiences, who may selectively, if unconsciously, reward those productions
that speak to their own unacknowledged wishes and frustrations, there is
room for subversive representation, the saying of what is forbidden. Yet the
basic context in which this play of forces transpires, in which the desires of
the many are left to be represented or misrepresented by institutions run for
the benefit of an elite few, is insupportable, an index of the basic problem
that motivates modern and postmodern critiques of representation in the first
place: the separation between art and society.


It is this separation that creates the intolerable situation Goodman de-
scribes in his essays of the late 1940s: without a working relationship of
‘‘mutual aid’’ or gift exchange between themselves and their communities,
poets are forced to create works that are ‘‘combative and private,’’ and the
community is deprived of art’s ‘‘public functions.’’ Worse yet, the gap once
bridged by that ‘‘Occasional Poetry’’ or ‘‘use-music’’ that unites individual
creativity with collective celebration (‘‘weddings, mourning, rites and feasts,
anniversaries’’) is filled instead by commercialism:



\begin{quote}


I am not a friend of advertising, but as a friend of art I must say that there is more
inventive showmanship, in layout, calligraphy, musical setting, and almost in diction and syntax, dedicated to these stupid commodities, than poets dare to muster
for the truths of the heart. These ads are our occasional poems, as the purchase
and sale is our public occasion. It was interesting to see that even the last war
. . . could not evoke anything so neat and shiny as the singing-commercial for
Cresta Blanca Wine.\footnote{Goodman, Creator Spirit Come, 77, 76-78.}



\end{quote}


The loss of the artist’s community role is commensurate with (and intimately
related to) the loss of community itself, an index of which is that commerce,
i.e., private ‘‘purchase and sale,’’ is the only remaining ‘‘public occasion.’’


The fragmented society created by the reign of ‘‘stupid commodities’’ more
than ever needs to be drawn into a functional community of values and
shared purpose, but art is no longer available for this purpose: in ‘‘the kind
of vicious circle that is familiar to radicals,’’ it appears that ‘‘an occasional
poet can strengthen the sense of community if the sense of community is
strong.’’\footnote{Ibid., 77.}


The problem of alienation, then, is larger than any particular artist or work
of art: it is, properly speaking, a social problem, a dysfunctional cultural
structure. On the one hand, Kropotkin complains, an elite or ‘‘erudite’’ art
dependent on the ruling class for sponsorship, ‘‘being chiefly for the rich . . .
has too much specialised its ways of expression, so as to be understood by
the few only’’; on the other hand, as Goodman points out, popular art has
decayed into the ‘‘melancholy specialties’’ of ‘‘advertising and ballyhoo’’ because of ‘‘the disappearance of a popular audience for good work.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature, 299; Goodman, Creator Spirit Come, 78-79.} Commercial culture is not only vitiated by its commercial function, but is inevitably
conservative in its effects as well, for an audience that is subjected to a
dreary, unaesthetic work regime and a social environment largely deprived
of what Ivan Illich called ‘‘conviviality’’ craves consolation. Accordingly, so-
called popular culture is largely an exercise in ‘‘format,’’ rote repetition of a
formula:\footnote{Goodman, Speaking and Language, 200-1.}



\begin{quote}


Works of popular art have the following form: they present an important emotional
situation, of love, danger, adventure, in a framework where everything else is as
usual. The detailed routine of life, the posture and speech-habits of the actor (and
of the audience), the norms of morality, the time-table of work, these things are
not deranged by the plot; they are not newly assessed, criticized, X-rayed, devas-
tated by the passional situation. Therefore the aesthetic experience remains su-
perficial; the passional story releases a surface tenseness, but there is no change
in character, habit, or action.\footnote{Goodman, Creator Spirit Come, 81-82.}



\end{quote}


In short, we are sold the kind of kitsch representationalist aesthetic that,
shorn of any critical function, justifies the status quo arrangements (the ‘‘as
usual,’’ the ‘‘routine,’’ the ‘‘habit,’’ the ‘‘norms’’) to which the stereotyped
plot invariably returns us; this indeed ‘‘releases a surface tenseness,’’ allow-
ing us to ‘‘cope’’ with our miserable ‘‘situation.’’


Here, in a darkly Heideggerian fashion, the technique to which art is subjected retrieves one of the worst possibilities implicit in our nature as ‘‘mimetic’’ creatures, our ‘‘tendency to run in a groove,’’ to adapt ourselves to
our surroundings, to imitate.\footnote{Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), xv; Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 204.} While making the festival culture that once
sprang from community obsolete, modern ‘‘popular culture’’ thus resurrects
one of its least attractive features: its pervasive conformism, that ‘‘splendid
fixity’’ exemplified by such typical devices of folk aesthetics as the ‘‘unvarying formula’’ and the ‘‘refrain.’’ Just as ancient Egyptian art reflects and
justifies the static composition of the ancient Egyptian class system, modern
art reflects and justifies ‘‘the passivity of people in contemporary society.’’


But while commercial art is still harnessed for its ‘‘power to find meaning
and make sense’’ of the world, it has been stripped of its power to help us to
change the world, to do anything: instead, it relies on and reproduces that
‘‘audience passivity’’ that guarantees that ‘‘they do not strongly or overtly
react, nor do they artistically participate themselves . . . they dance to music
but do not make it.’’\footnote{Goodman, Speaking and Language, 174, 181, 218, italics mine; Creator Spirit Come 80-81.} Thus, the ‘‘specialization’’ of art has produced its own
tautological self-justification in an aesthetic practice that, as Marcus puts it,
‘‘naturally produced not actors but spectators: modern men and women, the
citizens of the most advanced societies on earth, who were thrilled to watch
whatever it was they were given to watch.’’ The Argentine anarcho-syndicalist Diego Abad de Santillan anticipates the Frankfurt School’s concept of the
culture industry when he remarks that, under the reign of State and capital,
‘‘the public schools, the university, the cinema, the theatre, sports, etc., are
all used as means towards providing a legal, moral and material foundation
for the privileges of a few and the slavery of the vast majority.’’\footnote{Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 99; Diego Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution: Economic Reconstruction in Spain Today, trans. Louis Frank (New York: Greenberg Publisher, Inc., 1937), 90.}


At the same time, as Goodman recognizes, the predominant modern ‘‘response’’ to the problem of stereotyped or formatted communication has been
just the kind of ‘‘avant garde’’ art that ‘‘devotes itself . . . to flouting the
standard style, to offending the audience,’’ an approach that terminates in
the noncommunication of the ‘‘incomprehensible’’ work: ‘‘the audience just
gets lost—and bored.’’ Moreover, attempts to transcend this divide in a
‘‘committed,’’ revolutionary art have not been very successful: ‘‘in practice,’’
Goodman writes, art as propaganda tends to amount to ‘‘a condescending
populism’’ relying on ‘‘half-truths’’ and ‘‘slogans’’ that are rendered immune
from criticism—ultimately, a form of leftist kitsch that is ‘‘ideological
through and through’’: ‘‘By a ‘revolutionary’ route we come right back to
format.’’\footnote{Goodman, Speaking and Language, 215-16, 218.}


This situation is a ‘‘vicious circle’’ indeed, returning every line of flight to
its point of origin. We seem drawn to Reclus’s rueful conclusion that ‘‘the
‘beautiful’ and the useful cannot become reconciled whilst men are not
united among themselves,’’ that alienated conditions trump every aesthetic
revolt: ‘‘Society being divided into enemy classes, art has become, of necessity, false, since it participates in the hostile interests and passions.’’ Even
Bookchin is enough of a historicist to write that ‘‘no movement for freedom
can even communicate its goals . . . unless historic forces are at work to alter
unconscious hierarchical values and sensibilities,’’ and that, therefore, ‘‘no
individual, newspaper, or book can undo a character structure shaped by the
prevailing society until the society itself is beleaguered by crises’’; ultimately, ‘‘ideas reach only people who are ready to hear them.’’ ‘‘I am myself,
as a poet, looking for a way out,’’ writes Goodman.\footnote{Reclus, ‘‘Art and the People’’; Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, 346; Goodman, Creator Spirit Come, 80.} But if the aesthetics of
the individual work are insufficient to provide such an exit, what ‘‘way out’’
can there be?

\section{THE REORGANIZATION OF CULTURE}


‘‘The fact is,’’ writes Kropotkin, lamenting the rise of specialization, ‘‘that
a new Art is indeed required . . . truly great Art, which, notwithstanding its
depth and its lofty flight, will penetrate into every peasant’s hut and inspire
everyone with higher conceptions of thought and life—such an Art is really
wanted.’’ He takes Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? as a helpful indicator of the direction from which this genuinely popular art might
come: Tolstoy ‘‘defines still more correctly the domain of Art when he says
that the artist always aims at communicating to others the same feelings
which he experiences . . . to infect the others with his own feelings.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature, 297. Tolstoy never identified himself as an ‘‘anarchist’’ per se, since the overwhelming majority of anarchists in his time, while fiercely antimilitarist, also believed violence in a revolutionary situation to be legiti- mate and even necessary. Nonetheless, he aligned himself with their defining anticapitalist and antistatist positions, and on the same (ethical) grounds, in works such as The Kingdom of God is Within You, which subsequently became the principal texts of a pacifist ‘‘Christian anarchism’’ with offshoots ranging from the Catholic Worker movement of Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and Ammon Hennacy to the writings of Jacques Ellul.}


Neil Birrell revives this metaphor of ‘‘infection’’ in a recent issue of the
British anarchist journal The Raven dedicated to questions of ‘‘Culture and
Ideology.’’ Adapting for his own purposes the theory of ‘‘memetics,’’ which
posits the unit of information as a kind of virus or ‘‘meme’’ (from the French
même, ‘‘same’’) that reproduces itself by spreading itself from one human
mind to another through communication and imitation, Birrell suggests that
‘‘the very stuff of culture’’ consists of memes such as ‘‘tunes, ideas, catch-
phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches’’ that
can be transmitted from person to person.\footnote{Neil Birrell, ‘‘Notes on Culture and Ideology,’’ The Raven 10, no. 39 (Summer 1999): 194, 198.} Where Tolstoy proposed that it
is ‘‘thanks to man’s capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by
means of art’’ that ‘‘every man may . . . become a sharer in their activity,’’


Birrell too sees the memetic function of culture, grounded in our nature as
mimetic creatures, as founding for the possibility of the ‘‘gift’’ economy that
Lewis Hyde calls ‘‘anarchist property.’’\footnote{Tolstoy, What Is Art?, 38; Lewis Hyde, The Gift, 84.} Where commodity economics are
based on the assumption of ‘‘scarcity,’’ the gift economy of memes is characterized by plenitude: ‘‘if someone has ten coppers and spends five,’’ as Malatesta points out, ‘‘he is left with exactly five,’’ but ‘‘if one has an idea it
can be communicated to a million people without losing anything, and the
more the idea is propagated the more it gains in strength and effectiveness.’’
Merging Hyde’s analysis of ‘‘gift exchange’’ with Illich’s notion of ‘‘conviviality,’’ Birrell argues that cultural memes ‘‘are, in essence, ‘convivial tools’
which may be freely exchanged as gifts.’’\footnote{Hyde, The Gift, 22-23; Malatesta, Life and Ideas, 42-43; Birrell, ‘‘Notes on Culture and Ideology,’’ 194.}


Early on in the development of a society, culture may already be a medium for the circulation of ‘‘ideology,’’ i.e., ‘‘that body of ideas and values
which presents the world from the point of view of one particular section of
society and supports their interests,’’ as shamans and warriors propagate the
myths and misrepresentations that favor their own ascendancy within the
tribal community. However, the imperial ‘‘imposition of one cultural set of
values’’ over an indefinitely broad territory that constitutes ‘‘ideological control’’ is not yet possible, for none is yet capable of broadcasting memes very
far. Birrell cites Illich’s claim that as late as the beginning of the twentieth
century, ‘‘most of the words heard by an American,’’ outside of the public
spaces of ‘‘the classroom or church,’’ ‘‘a rally or a circus’’—‘‘were personally spoken to him as an individual, or to someone standing nearby.’’\footnote{Birrell, ‘‘Notes on Culture and Ideology,’’ 194, emphasis mine; Illich, quoted in Birrell, ‘‘Notes on Culture and Ideology,’’ 194.}


As long as this is the case, Birrell argues, ‘‘we all own the convivial tools’’
necessary for ‘‘reinforcing the cultural code’’ or ‘‘mutating or subverting it.’’


As Goodman comments, ‘‘from time immemorial an essential characteristic
of the great art-media . . . is to be cheap: paper, mud, rock, tinkling, humming, talk, agitating the limbs.’’ Indeed, it would seem that ‘‘there is little
room . . . for one group or individual to hijack the process and force culture
down a given path unless, of course, they have access to tools which are less
than convivial, tools which can only be exchanged as expensive commodities, such as TV and radio broadcast equipment, and which therefore do not
circulate horizontally but broadcast information vertically.’’ Media, instead
of constituting a ‘‘means’’ or commons in which strangers can meet, appear
as interfering mediation or ‘‘obstacles’’ to ‘‘communication’’: as Goodman
writes, ‘‘between the artist and the public stand those who control the mass-
media, the publishers, impresarios, etc.’’ The representational power of
these middlemen, their privileged domination of speaking-for, is largely due
to the ‘‘less than convivial’’ tools they control: ‘‘because of our peculiar social arrangements, a feature of the mass-media is expense; and expense is
controlled by, let us say, ‘social policy.’ . . . Thus, if I want to move a million
people, I must also persuade the editor of The Saturday Evening Post to let
me.’’ Media ownership is concentrated in fewer hands, giving the owners
‘‘the ability to control the flow of memes,’’ Birrell argues—the sort of ‘‘vertical and elitist control’’ that properly can be called ‘‘ideological control.’’\footnote{Birrell, ‘‘Notes on Culture and Ideology,’’ 194; Goodman, Creator Spirit Come, 85; Birrell, ‘‘Notes on Culture and Ideology,’’ 193-94; Goodman, Creator Spirit Come, 85-86; Birrell, ‘‘Notes on Culture and Ideology,’’ 198.}


The anarchist critique of aesthetic representation, therefore, cannot only
criticize the manner in which signs relate to signifieds; it must also be a
critique of the re- in representation, the manner in which signs bridge the
time and place in which they receive their form and the times and places of
the audiences who interpret them. We must not only examine what I will call
the durational and spatial politics of the sign at its point of production (poetics) nor only at its point of consumption (hermeneutics); we must also attend
to the processes of distribution and circulation. As an anarchist, Birrell of
course favors ‘‘the circulation of cultural signs in a horizontal mode which
befits them.’’\footnote{Birrell, ‘‘Notes on Culture and Ideology,’’ 198.} The question, then, is how to achieve this horizontal organization of culture.


It would be disingenuous for anyone to pretend that the kinds of entrenched contradiction we have been discussing can be simply magicked
away in some post-revolutionary state, let alone in a period of revolutionary
transition. Signac hoped for a future in which conditions would be so
changed that formalism would no longer be opposed to populism: ‘‘When the
eye is educated, the people will see something other than the subject in pictures. When the society we dream of exists, the worker, freed from the exploiters who brutalize him, will have time to think and to learn. He will
appreciate all the different qualities of the work of art.’’\footnote{Signac, quoted in Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts, 249.} A redistributive
durational politics might have the effect of allowing more eyes to be ‘‘educated,’’ thereby widening the audience for challenging art beyond the relatively privileged fraction of the middle class that sponsors it now.


So some anarchists assume. ‘‘As soon as actors no longer played for
money, and the public were not attracted to amusements by the schemes
of advertisers,’’ predicts Émile Pataud in Syndicalism and the Co-operative
Commonwealth, ‘‘their taste, until then artificially misled, was purified.’’\footnote{Émile Pataud, Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth: How We Shall Bring About the Revolution, trans. Charlotte and Frederic Charles (Oxford: The New International Publishing Co., 1913), 210.}


Or perhaps not. What happens when sponsorship for aesthetic production is
no longer divided into two categories, as it is now—with one regime of production (‘‘popular culture’’) drawing sponsorship from mass audiences of average means, and another regime (‘‘high art’’) drawing sponsorship from
small, elite audiences of above-average means? Granted, the choices made
by mass audiences about the kind of aesthetic production they want are
made passively from a menu rigged by a shrinking handful of corporate decision-makers, with a corresponding distortion of desires, but recognizing this
is not cause for an optimistic faith that post-revolutionary mass audiences
will fail to manifest the same conservative desires. Will the tastes of the
mass audiences change, or will ‘‘high art’’ shrink to the size of its existing
sponsor pool? Would the disappearance or near-disappearance of what we
now think of as ‘‘high art’’ be a loss? What if what predominated was the
stultifying ‘‘kitsch’’ which Read fears is ‘‘what this public . . . has wanted
throughout history’’? What if what disappeared was precisely the kind of art
social that Proudhon and Lazare hoped for? Unless we agree with the pragmatists that the good in art, as in everything, is whatever people happen to
freely choose over time, so that, tautologically, this choice can never be in
error, we have to pause to consider the problem of aesthetic ‘‘freedom.’’


This problem fundamentally derives from the aesthetic’s resistance to
quantification. Thus, when Pataud, a leading theoretician of the French anarcho-syndicalist movement at the height of its historical strength, describes
how ‘‘luxuries’’ such as the arts would be organized after the revolution, his
argument becomes less convincing than when it addresses the production
of necessities. His primary instinct is to take the Arts-and-Crafts direction
endorsed by anarchist theorists like Charles Albert, who writes that ‘‘all that
which is well made is in a sense a work of art,’’ and Kropotkin, who insists
that ‘‘everything that surrounds man, in the street . . . must be of a pure
artistic form,’’ arguing that art, rather than ‘‘restrict[ing] itself to painting
large canvasses, to sculpturing marble, to moulding bronze,’’ could henceforth ‘‘enter into all production,’’ so that ‘‘there would be art . . . in the small-
est everyday things.’’\footnote{Charles Albert, L’Art et la Société (Béarn, France: Bibliotheque de l’Art Social, 1896), 5, translation mine; Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, ed. Paul Avrich (New York: New York University Press, 1972), 135, 226.} Have we not returned, here, via the route taken by
Morris and Ruskin, to a vision of art’s ‘‘disappearance’’ into the social text,
its ‘‘subsumption in the broader practice of culture as creative play’’?


However, since it would be hard to argue that the desire for great novels
could be fulfilled in such a manner, Pataud finds himself forced to address
not only the aestheticization of production but aesthetic production per se,
and he does so in keeping with his overall program: the free reorganization
of production at the point of production by the producers themselves, balanced by a collective reorganization of consumption by consumers. He assumes that the same ‘‘mechanism of an organization, which measured out
the using of things according to the possibilities of the moment,’’ so that
‘‘by means of rationing . . . a balance in the enjoyment of luxury’’ would be
‘‘established,’’ could simply be ‘‘applied . . . to the working of the theatres,’’
as well as ‘‘novels, poetry, scientific and historic works.’’ In a very similar
fashion, Abad de Santillan proposes that the syndicalist structure include a
‘‘Council of Publishing and Cultural Activities,’’ comprising a ‘‘syndicate of
graphic arts,’’ a ‘‘syndicate of writers,’’ and so on; thus, ‘‘theatres . . . cinemas, sports, etc., will all be integrated in the culture council and for the first
time fulfil their real purpose . . . art, today a privilege of select and rich
minorities, will be available to all and ennoble and beautify the lives of
everybody capable of appreciating it.’’\footnote{Pataud, Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth, 210, 214; Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution, 89, 91.}


Here is where things get particularly sticky. The system of ‘‘social
cheques’’ Pataud proposes as the new arbiter of ‘‘relations between producer
and consumer’’ is geared to account for labor time and use-value, but both
of these categories map very poorly onto aesthetic production. How to measure the time required to produce a work of art, let alone its utility? The very
features of aesthetic work that, as Hyde observes, tend to set it in permanent
opposition to the system of commodity exchange with which it coexists—that
is, its
‘‘gift’’ character, the degree to which it requires an ‘‘inspiration’’
whose arrival cannot be predicted or calculated—also make it difficult to
accommodate within a system designed to guarantee ‘‘a balance in the enjoyment of luxury,’’ the equality of work and leisure by quantification.\footnote{Pataud, Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth, 209-10.}


As if in recognition of this difficulty, Pataud proposes a tertiary sphere for
the production of art (and of knowledge—a related, but distinct matter, to
which we shall return): that of an expanded leisure time, ‘‘a consequence of
the reduction in the hours of work’’ as calculated by Kropotkin, whose 1885
Conquest of Bread calculated that rationally and fairly organized production,
requiring of each worker only ‘‘four or five hours a day till the age of forty-
five or fifty’’ to produce ‘‘all that is necessary to guarantee comfort to society,’’ would leave ‘‘five or seven hours a day which each will have at his
disposal, after having consecrated several hours to the production of necessities.’’\footnote{Ibid., 211; Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, 126, 136.} ‘‘With this duration,’’ Pataud writes, ‘‘each one had leisure, and employed it according to his tastes, his aspirations, and his abilities.’’ Thus, in
addition to professional ‘‘Theatrical Companies’’ organized on the syndicalist model, he projects a proliferation of ‘‘what previously were called Amateur Theatres,’’ provided with like theater space and materials, these having
become public property; ‘‘little by little,’’ he predicts, ‘‘these became general, and perhaps they will end by replacing the professional theatre.’’ Only
unquantified time, communist time, can guarantee the diversity that anar-
chist space requires. Here is the beginning of the very argument against Bakunin’s ‘‘collectivism,’’ with its retention of the wage system, that Kropotkin
articulates: ‘‘The collectivists say, ‘To each according to his deeds,’ ’’ as if
the relative value of labor could be represented with precision, but this
‘‘yearning for justice . . . is only the perpetuation of injustice,’’ for the value
of labor, in its irreducible collectivity, is what cannot be represented.\footnote{Pataud, Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth, 211-12; Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, 183-85.} Kropotkin has no such difficulty in imagining the economics of postrevolutionary
art: ‘‘A painter or sculptor who has produced a work of personal feeling will
offer it to the woman he loves, or to a friend. Executed for love’s sake—will
his work, inspired by love, be inferior to the art that today satisfies the vanity
of the philistine, because it has cost much money?’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, 136.} Only an art created
‘‘from mere inclination, not for mercantile purposes,’’ Kropotkin suggests,
leaves the realm of instrumentality behind.\footnote{Kropotkin, Fields, Factories, and Workshops (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 408.} Such an art realizes fully its
nature as ‘‘gift’’ and goes farthest toward releasing artists from the situation
in which they are frustrated gift-givers, locked in a hopeless antagonism with
a distant and recalcitrant audience.


Thus, Kropotkin suggests a workable solution to the sterile dilemma propounded by Read, for whom the freedom of the artist means that ‘‘he must
be left alone’’ by society. This demand is accompanied by the recognition
that ‘‘a person is not left alone if he has a cupboard full of cares’’ (as Virginia
Woolf well understood, ‘‘one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one
has not dined well’’). Thus, the artist ‘‘must be left alone with sufficient food
and shelter to safeguard his health, and he must be left alone with sufficient
material to work with’’—but this now presupposes a considerable debt to
society. To leave the debt unpaid would be to suppose what is contrary to
the hypothesis, that the artist’s freedom is bought at the expense of others’
freedom. Here Kropotkin gently intrudes the promise of an entente, the hypothesis of social reciprocity: ‘‘If everyone took his share of production, and
if production were socialised . . . then more than one half of the working day
would remain to everyone for the pursuit of art, science, or any hobby he or
she might prefer.’’ Moreover, he suggests, ‘‘work in those fields would be the
more profitable’’ if one ‘‘spent the other half of the day in productive work’’
for the common store. In releasing art from commercial, institutional, and
even popular pressures, so that ‘‘free pursuit in new branches of art and
knowledge, free creation, and free development thus might be fully guaranteed,’’ communist economics at the same time encourages the reintegration
of art and community.\footnote{Read, To Hell With Culture, 23; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (New York: Harcourt Brace \& Co., 1981), 4, 18; Read, To Hell With Culture, 23; Kropotkin, Fields, Factories, and Workshops, 408.}

\section{ALTERNATIVE CULTURE}


Goodman, as is his wont, insists that this reintegration can begin here and
now: ‘‘a circle is not vicious if it is big enough, because then there is plenty
of room to maneuver and live on a little.’’ Instead of surrendering to the
elitist populism of mass culture or resigning oneself to the populist elitism
of a private art, he proposes ‘‘direct action’’ to bypass the elite cultural ‘‘intermediaries’’:



\begin{quote}


Let actors get themselves a cellar and act and forget about the critical notices;
let writers scrape together a few dollars and print off a big broadside and give it
away to all likely comers on 8th Street; forget about Hollywood movies—they
don’t exist—and how surprising it is to find one can make a movie for a couple
of hundred dollars and show it off in a loft . . .
‘‘What’s this? he speaks of popular culture, mass-media, the state of society,
and he ends up pleading for a little night-club where he and his friends and their
hangers-on can display themselves!’’ Listen, here is my concern: I want to be
happy . . . and I am fighting for happiness in the ways an artist can. If you, audi-
ence or artist, take care of yourselves, the intermediary somethings will get less
take at their box-offices, and we’ll have a popular culture.\footnote{Goodman, Creator Spirit Come, 77, 87.}



\end{quote}


This is, in effect, a proposal for the creation of what we would now call ‘‘alternative media’’; it would include ’zines, Web sites, poetry slams, public-
access cable TV shows, community radio stations, artists’ co-ops, housing
co-ops, book groups, and indie filmmakers. It is not a panacea, and it does
serve the immediate purpose of satisfying the expressive needs of small
groups of artists (bound by what the Spanish anarchists called afinidad),
leaving outsiders to their own devices. However, it does have the effect of
removing a certain amount of aesthetic production from the domain of the
marketplace, whether from the luxury marketplace constituted by institutions such as galleries, concert halls, museums, private architects’ firms, and
collectors’ auctions, or from the mass marketplace constituted by broadcast
media franchises, movie studios, and real-estate developers, and thereby liberates it from the domination of exchange-value. The trick is then to progressively widen the constituency for alternative media projects—not only the
audience, but the pool of creative labor, more and more, until what is by
itself merely an inward-looking bohemian community becomes another form
of what Harry Cleaver calls ‘‘the self-activity of labor.’’\footnote{Harry Cleaver, ‘‘Kropotkin, Self-Valorization and the Crisis of Marxism,’’ \href{http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/cleaver/kropotkin.html}{www.eco.utexas.edu\Slash{}facstaff\Slash{}Cleaver\Slash{}kropotkin.html} (accessed March 21, 2004).}

\section{VERNACULARIZATION}


There is also something to the notion of infusing art into all production
and into everyday life itself, Camille Pissarro’s utopian dream of a society in
which ‘‘everyone will be an artist,’’ which bears further exploration.\footnote{Pissarro, quoted in Hutton, Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground, 7.} Proudhon imagined it in Du principe de l’art, lamenting that ‘‘today we no longer
sing,’’ that industrialization has de-aestheticized life. ‘‘We cannot live in this
barbarity,’’ he declares; ‘‘we must relieve it\dots{}
There are other means to
employ, other forms to create, other arrangements to imagine. The earth must
become, through culture, like an immense garden, and work, through its organization, a vast concert.’’ Nor is Proudhon’s speculation here merely utopian: it is based on recollections of the peasant culture he knew in
childhood—‘‘once one sang at the harvest, at the hay-making, at the grape-
gathering, in the sowing-time, in the school, in the workshop’’—and, less
distantly, of the resistance culture he participated in as a prison inmate:



\begin{quote}


During my captivity at Sainte-Pélagie, in 1849, there were around eighty political
prisoners, at a minimal estimate, if one thinks of the thousands of deportees of
that sad period. Every evening, half an hour before the closing of the cells, the
detainees gathered in the courtyard and sang the prière; it was a hymn to Liberty
attributed to Armand Marrast. One sole voice spoke the strophe, and the eighty
prisoners gave back the refrain, which then was taken up by the five hundred
unfortunates detained in the other section of the prison. Later the songs were
forbidden, and this made the pain of the prisoners worse. That was a real music,
realistic, applied, situated art [art en situation], like the songs of the church, the
fanfares of the parade, and no music pleases me more.\footnote{Proudhon, Oeuvres, 12.334-335, 12.332, translation mine.}



\end{quote}


Here, surely, the metaphysics of art—its powers of making groupings and
divisions through a ‘‘meaning’’ that is not purely ‘‘mental’’ or private, but
that, in some important respects, ‘‘is the unifying tendency in the on-going
situation, the coping’’\footnote{Goodman, Speaking and Language, 97.}—are made supremely visible: music can create
unities among people, ‘‘concert’’ in the double sense of social agreement and
aesthetic harmony. ‘‘Realism’’ of such a sort does not consist in mere copy-
ing of a landscape from which one stands back, as the artist, or which one
stands back to admire on the wall, as a viewer; the prisoners’ hymn is ‘‘real’’
art because it is ‘‘art en situation,’’ because one is ‘‘situated’’ within it, and
because it changes one’s relationship to one’s ‘‘situation,’’ even when that
situation is in all other respects inescapable and unchangeable. It is not only
that the ‘‘meaning’’ of the song is specified by the ‘‘situation’’ in which it is
sung; the song also changes ‘‘the on-going situation’’ for the prisoner whom
it helps to cope, to survive. ‘‘Like the songs of the church, the fanfares of the
parade,’’ art en situation is an occasional poetry that serves to evoke community, to give community strength, to turn even captivity, for a moment, into concert.


The other crucial ingredient of an art en situation is that it is created by
those whom it is for; in this case, the hymn is ‘‘attributed to Armand Marrast,’’ but it is sung by the prisoners who are its hearers. This participatory
aspect, the durational and spatial overlapping of the categories of ‘‘artist’’
and ‘‘audience,’’ is an important part of what makes this kind of art liberatory, not because it overcomes representation by simple self-presence, but
because of its re-presentational character. As Goodman says, as active
poiesis or ‘‘making,’’ art ‘‘repeats the meaning and revives the spirit of past
makings, so they are not a dead weight, by using them again in a making
that is occurring now.’’ To create art, then, is to experience an important part
of the truth of one’s being human, since the human being is not only ‘‘the
one who is made by his culture’’ but ‘‘the animal who makes himself’’; it is
to recall one’s agency, one’s capacity for self-making and self-organization.\footnote{Goodman, Creator Spirit Come, 268.}


It is important, then, that in an anarchist society, not only should everyone
be immersed in an aesthetically rich, sensuous environment, but that everyone should in some way participate in the making and remaking of that environment, selecting means, creating forms, imagining arrangements that suit
their own tastes and inclinations, in concert with others. One need not imagine that specific practices of artistic creativity, such as the writing of novels,
will disappear in order to imagine a certain dissemination of that creative
quality—say, a novelistic quality, in the sense Bakhtin gave to that word—
into what is now the excessively quantitative experience of everyday life.


From Proudhon on, anarchism looks forward to what could be called a vernacularization of art, its diffusion into everyday practice. In Read’s words,
‘‘the arts must return to a popular basis and from that basis, by a process of
education, be raised to a new universal level such as the world has never
known.’’\footnote{Read, Poetry and Anarchism, 27-28.}


One favored model for such a vernacular art, of course, is the medieval
model favored by Morris and Ruskin. In looking forward to ‘‘the works of
future artists,’’ which ‘‘will not be destined for sale’’ but ‘‘will be part of a
living whole that would not be complete without them, any more than they
would be complete without it,’’ Kropotkin also looks backward to that ‘‘mediaeval art’’ that, ‘‘like Greek art, did not know those curiosity-shops we call
a National Gallery or a Museum. A picture was painted, a statue was carved,
a bronze decoration was cast to stand in its proper place in a monument of
communal art. It lived there, it was part of a whole, and it contributed to give
unity to the impression produced by the whole.’’ However, it was not only
public access to art in the Middle Ages that made it closer to the social: as
Kropotkin points out, paraphrasing ‘‘Ruskin and his school,’’ ‘‘Greek and
mediaeval art were daughters of handicraft’’—just as the discoveries of Enlightenment science were the product of glass-grinders like Newton, gardeners like Linnaeus, and instrument-makers like Watt. The project of reuniting
art and society, for Kropotkin, is part and parcel of a larger project, the undoing of the division of labor in the reunification of manual and intellectual
work.\footnote{Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread, 135; Mutual Aid, 213n1; Fields, Factories, and Workshops 405, 363-64.}

\section{CONCLUSION: THE ONTOLOGY OF AESTHETIC REPRESENTATION}


Neither the tradition nor the future of anarchist aesthetic theory is exhausted by modernism and postmodernism. A reintegration of the social and
the aesthetic is possible—but not through a simple negation of one or the
other half of the representational relationship. Negations of representational
authority have their own authoritarian implications: a modernist elevation of
irrational intuition, spontaneous action, and muscular force over intellectuality, reflection, and communication is incipiently fascist, and a postmodern
dissolution of bodily materiality into the depthless play of self-reflecting images and floating signifiers neatly averts our eyes from the ongoing technocratic takeover of everyday life and subjectivity itself. Both strategies are
founded on a misbegotten metaphysics, a dualism to rival Descartes’, in
which signifier and signified or soul and body can never touch one another.


From this perspective, it is almost a foregone conclusion that art cannot be
of any help in social transformation, since it is merely a mirror, helpless to
do anything but reflect what is before it; either it must be smashed to reveal
what is behind it, or it must be played before, as one plays with one’s own
infinite reflections in a hall of mirrors. For de Cleyre, as we have seen, it is
possible for the mirror image to talk back to the body it reflects; signs and
spectacles are forces that structure life. Since it contributes, for better or
worse, to the formation of subjects, the aesthetic looking glass is not merely
a materially ineffective illusion.


Projects of aesthetic antirepresentationalism could only be meaningful if
it were in fact possible to ‘‘refuse’’ representation, as Kasimir Malevich’s
painting of a black square on a white background promises to do. It is not
so. When Arthur C. Danto writes that Black Square ‘‘represents’’ a ‘‘great
breakthrough,’’ this is not merely an accident, an embarrassment due to the
common use of the verb ‘‘to represent’’ as a synonym for ‘‘to be,’’ as his
own theory of the ‘‘artworld’’ should help to make clear. This artworld, the
institution of ‘‘art’’ as a set of coordinated practices of creating, viewing,
remembering, and judging is the context, the ‘‘ongoing situation,’’ as Goodman has it, in which any work of art, no matter how antirepresentational,
represents something, acquiring a significance, accreting language—in particular, as a ‘‘rejection of representation,’’ a reaction against other works in
the tradition. Other situations emerge and disappear as well. In its original
exhibition in 1915, Black Square was ‘‘mounted in an upper corner of the
gallery, diagonally connecting two walls’’ in the manner of a Russian Orthodox ikon, aligning it with the tradition of Byzantine antirepresentationalism.


Even Malevich’s last gesture, having a black square decorate his tomb, is
representational, as the persona of the artist fills the blank space: ‘‘He
clearly identified himself with the black square.’’\footnote{Arthur C. Danto, ‘‘Paint It Black.’’ The Nation 277, no. 5 (August 18-25, 2003): 48-49.} As Stephen David Ross
notes, every work of art, every text, ‘‘whatever can be discriminated,’’ is always to be found in ‘‘an order,’’ a set that it reciprocally modifies and makes
to mean something different—or, as Proudhon would say, a ‘‘series’’ (‘‘What
I call ORDER,’’ he writes, is anything that is ‘‘seriated,’’ and conversely,
‘‘the series’’ is an ‘‘order,’’ an ‘‘ensemble of relations’’). It does not matter
that the ambition of Black Square is to present a painting that is not ‘‘a picture,’’ that is, a representation of any ‘‘external reality’’; its very durational
and sensual being, its relationality, makes it representational.\footnote{Ross, A Theory of Art, 62; Proudhon, Oeuvres, 5.33, 5.141; Danto, ‘‘Paint It Black,’’ 48-49.} The wish to
escape from representation is a wish for an escape from all relationships,
which is to say, an escape from life, a self-annihilating wish. This is the
deeper sense of Moore’s observation that antirepresentationalist artworks are
‘‘suicide notes.’’


There remain better things to do than to commit aesthetic suicide, or to
continue the aesthetic game in bad faith. The trajectory of the last three
chapters, tracing a line from the consideration of the aesthetic in itself to a
broader view of art in the context of social transformation, leads us to the
difficult questions of representation in its fully political dimensions, which
the next section will explore.

\part{Part III: Politics}

\chapter{9. The Critique of Democracy as Representation}



\begin{quote}


Even more radical and ‘‘anarchist’’ anti-plans such as Bookchin’s proposals . . . suffer from the same basic vice: anticipating and planning a future for ‘‘others.’’


—Midnight Notes Collective, ‘‘Strange Victories: The Anti-Nuclear Movement in the U.S. and Europe’’



\end{quote}



\begin{quote}


The trouble with this good instinct—not to be regimented in one’s inti-
mate affairs by architects, engineers, and international public-relations
experts—is that ‘‘no plan’’ always means in fact some inherited and fre-
quently bad plan.


The best defense against planning—and people do need a defense
against planners—is to become informed about the plan that is indeed
existent and operating in our lives; and to learn to take the initiative in
proposing or supporting reasoned changes.


—Paul and Percival Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life



\end{quote}


READING AND WRITING ARE POLITICAL; AT THIS POINT IN THE ARGUMENT, HOW-
ever, it seems necessary to address the political per se. Many contemporary
theorists seem to flee the crisis of representation by means of a retreat to
the political realm, which is seen as the safe place where a certain kind of
epistemological objectivity, ethical universality, and cognitive rationality are
restored, imposed on one by necessity, without the need for any philosophically risky embrace of objectivism, universalism, or rationalism on one’s own
part; after one takes the step into politics, its seems, one is relieved of having
to decide about such things. For Diana Fuss, ‘‘politics operates as the privileged, self-evident category’’ in which questions of ontology (do ‘‘women’’
form a real ‘‘class’’?) disappear in the pragmatic questions of coalition building; for Colin MacCabe, one simply finds that ‘‘particular identities, whatever their provisionality, impose themselves in specific practices.’’\footnote{Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 36; Colin MacCabe, ‘‘Foreword,’’ in Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge), xvii, emphasis mine.} These
expressions of relief at being relieved of decisions imply a wish to avoid
questions, to retrieve some innocent, intuitive grounding in everyday life.


Instead of seeing politics as an exit from theoretical questions of representation, we ought to demand theories capable of articulating concepts of objectivity, universality, and rationality robust enough to actually provide a
political compass—a liberatory ethics.


Marx’s rejection of German idealism forced him to push his historical materialism in the direction of science, a move that effectively meant substituting rational appeals to knowledge (based in the measurable world of objects)
for emotional appeals to justice (based in the felt experience of subjects).


For all that this strategy has revealed, its price was a fundamental concealment of the matter of ethics. As a theory of how the system does operate and
(to a certain extent) how it must transform itself, Marxism has never been
able to adequately explain why those who suffer from the system should act
within their situation to transform it. This reading of Marxism has by no
means been universally accepted; Guy Debord, for one, insists that Marx
makes no distinction between descriptive and prescriptive modes.\footnote{Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 95.} Numerous radicals, from Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci to Cornel West,
have tried to address or compensate for this structural lacuna in Marxist
thought. Such efforts have been frustrated by the degree to which Marx’s
inability to address the ethical has permitted cynical readings for which justice is merely ideological—and so has become a valuable weapon for instrumentalists from Lenin and Stalin to Mao.


Poststructuralism, meanwhile, shares the same difficulty in a different
fashion. Instead of centering itself on an analysis of history, post-structuralist theory is animated by an ethical imperative demanding respect for the
other (for difference, plurality, heterogeneity) in the face of forces that reduce otherness to sameness (uniformity, the common, the universal). This
releases critique from the Marxist attachment to a fixed set of analytical categories and makes it more readily capable of addressing a wide variety of
other forms or sites of domination. However, while stepping away from a
monological or scientific model of knowledge, poststructuralist theory, too,
describes the world in terms of perpetual warfare. It is because there can be
nothing more substantial behind one story people happen to tell about the
world (about what is true, necessary, right, good, just, etc.) than there is
behind any other story, because the choice between them is always arbitrary,
that stories are inevitably weapons, instruments of coercive power. Resistance to coercive power means calling into question claims to authority allegedly based on universal truths. This implies that since any ethics comes
with a claim to universal validity, no ethics can claim legitimacy, for each
will be only another exercise in coercive power, an imposition of sameness
on otherness. However, as May points out, a resistance to ethical universality, unless heavily saddled with qualifications and caveats—e.g., ‘‘as much
as possible,’’ ‘‘all things being equal’’—is self-contradictory, for the demand
to respect the other universalizes. While May resists drawing this conclusion, it would seem that even on his account, poststructuralism encounters
serious difficulties in clarifying its relation to the ethical—difficulties that
are not merely contingent but structural, insofar as its very ‘‘avoidance’’ of
ethics is ‘‘ethically motivated.’’\footnote{May, Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 130, 130-31, 33. Notably, May also premises his Moral Theory of Poststructuralism on a distinction between ‘‘moral’’ and ‘‘semantic’’ forms of antirepresentationalism, and ultimately on a distinction between performative and constative, which other poststructuralists are often inclined to reject in the strongest terms (21-22, 48).}


Anarchist theory, as we have already seen, distinguishes itself from other
political theories by its special relation to the ethical. Anarchist politics has
always centered on an ethical opposition to domination in all its forms,
whether emanating from capital, state, church, family, or other institutions,
social conventions, or features of everyday life.\footnote{Colson, Petit lexique, 108; Hyde, The Gift, 90. The consistency with which this per- haps never-present ‘‘all’’ has been critiqued has improved particularly following the feminist, ecologist, and antiracist interventions that determined the reconstruction of theory in the sixties and seventies. These interventions affected all varieties of radical theory, but as Murray Bookchin points out, anarchism has been more structurally flexible, hence more readily able to respond to and incorporate the theoretical demands of the ‘‘new social movements.’’} This is exactly what Marx
found so obnoxious about Bakunin as a theorist: ‘‘He understands absolutely
nothing about social revolution\dots{}


For him its economic requisites do not\dots{}
exist. Since all hitherto existing economic formations, developed or undeveloped, have included the enslavement of the working person (whether in the
form of the wage worker, the peasant, etc.), he thinks that a radical revolution is possible under all these formations\dots{}
Will power and not economic
conditions is the basis of his social revolution.’’\footnote{Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, 544.} Although Marx exaggerates
the element of voluntarism in Bakunin’s thought, his comments reflect what
George Woodcock calls ‘‘a fundamental split between moral and material
views of history and society.’’ If oppression is wrong everywhere, both undesirable and unnecessary, then any group of oppressed subjects that becomes
conscious of its own oppression can revolt against it, including the peasants
and members of the lumpenproletariat, for whom Marx had little or no use.\footnote{Woodcock, The Writer and Politics, 47; Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, 294.}


They do not require representatives; they are capable, or potentially capable,
of articulating their own experiences, the materials of which they are constructed, into a critical response to their own circumstances—of representing themselves. So Proudhon asks: ‘‘What need have I of proxies, any more
than of representatives, [to] specify what I want . . . can I not explain it
without the aid of anybody?’’ It is in this sense that anarchists have regarded
political representation as inherently dominatory.\footnote{Proudhon, General Idea, 140; Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan, 102.}


This rejection of representation has particularly entailed repudiating the
vanguardism that some Marxists have authorized with selective quotations
from the master, such as Marx’s famous comment on the peasantry: ‘‘They
cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.’’ Where such Marxists pronounce the proletariat a universal class (representative of humanity,
by virtue of its relation to the means of production) and themselves a universal party of the proletariat (representative of the representative, as Lenin
declared, by virtue of its possession of an accurate theoretical representation
of history), anarchists insist on a nonhierarchical society as an end and non-
hierarchical organization as the only appropriate means to that end. In
reaching the same conclusions, post-structuralist ethics imply a new anarchist politics.\footnote{Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, 608; May, Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 21, 46-47, 155.}


The problem is that a post-structuralist critique of representation makes
it difficult, if not impossible, to answer the pragmatic questions of politics:
if the political, as Simon Critchley says, is ‘‘the realm of the decision,’’ then
how should decisions be made, if not through representational means? There
can no longer be any question—in theory, let alone in practice—of achieving political representation in terms of the Enlightenment model summed up
by John Adams’s declaration that the Congress should present ‘‘in miniature
an exact portrait of the people at large’’; there is no ‘‘people’’ to sit for such
a portrait.\footnote{Simon Critchley, ‘‘Is There a Normative Deficit in the Theory of Hegemony?’’ Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, \href{http://www.essex.ac.uk/centres/TheoStud/Laclauessay.doc}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.essex.ac.uk\Slash{}centres\Slash{}TheoStud\Slash{}Laclauessay.doc}, 2; Brian Seitz, The Trace of Political Representation (Al- bany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 2; John Adams, quoted in Seitz, The Trace of Political Representation, 2.} Seitz denies that the subjects of political representation preexist
the representational system that claims to reflect their wishes; instead, they
can be seen as its product. If this subject-producing representation is portraiture, it is less like Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage and more like
Magritte’s The Human Condition.\footnote{Seitz, The Trace of Political Representation, 25, 5.}


At its extremes, warns Pauline Rosenau, ‘‘post-modern anti-representationalism’’ not only deflates progressive ambitions, it effectively ‘‘erases any
normative preference for representative democracy.’’\footnote{Rosenau, Post-Modernism, 107.} If this is true, it is
most untimely, for representative democracy as it has been practiced is now
under serious strain. The pervasive cynicism with which many Americans
viewed the 2000 presidential election is understandable. Indeed, as Win
McCormack argues, nothing seems to describe the postelection wrangling so
accurately as Foucault’s conception of representation as a field of struggle.


While McCormack overstates his case that, in effect, the Republican post-
election strategy used Foucauldian arguments against conventional concepts
of truth and objectivity to discredit the recount—after all, James Baker’s
suggestion that ‘‘the more often ballots are recounted, especially by hand,
the more likely it is that human errors, like lost ballots and other risks, will
be introduced’’ appeals to notions of correctness and recollected presence
versus error and loss—what allowed this strategy to work was the public’s
acceptance of the disconnection between the electoral system and the popular will.\footnote{Win McCormack, ‘‘Deconstructing the Election,’’ The Nation, 8 March 2001, \href{http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010326\&s=mccormack\&c=1/}{www.thenation.com\Slash{}doc.mhtml?i=20010326\&s=mccormack\&c=1} (accessed 7 Aug. 2003); James Baker, quoted in McCormack, ‘‘Deconstructing the Election.’’} One did not have to read Baudrillard to conclude that ‘‘it is as if
everyone voted by chance, or monkeys voted,’’ that ‘‘the parties in power . . .
represent nothing.’’\footnote{Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 132.} In the face of such cynicism, where are the theoretical
resources to mount a defense of democratic representation?


One response has been to give up on democratic representation. If truth
is conceived as correspondence between a signifying representative and a
signified constituency, then there can be no question of truth in political
representation, there is no truth, only power—no right, only might. The
arena of democratic politics, in Foucault’s famous inversion of Clausewitz,
is only a sublimated version of the battlefield. Where democracy promises
to transform an ‘‘unworkable (dangerous, anarchic) multiplicity . . . into
workable plurality through representation,’’ Seitz proposes, it can never do
so; what is presented as peaceful persuasion and public deliberation is actually warfare, in which the object is not to persuade one’s equals but to anni-
hilate the enemy.\footnote{Seitz, The Trace of Political Representation, 25, 13; Alan Wolfe, ‘‘A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics,’’ The Chronicle of Higher Education 50, no. 30 (April 2, 2004): B16.} Post-structuralism conceives the true character of a
democratic society, as of any other society, in terms of a ‘‘war model . . .
characterized by constant antagonism, rift, and dislocation.’’ In this sense,
Koch writes approvingly, ‘‘the potential to reach consensus without decep-
tion or force becomes impossible.’’\footnote{Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan, 50; Koch, ‘‘Poststructuralism,’’ 343.}


While Newman cautions that the description of society and the political
as warfare is to be understood figuratively rather than literally, the selection
of violence as a metaphor invites the kind of objection recently voiced by
May in a review of Newman’s work: if theory is a tool, this tool seems designed less to help people build a cooperative society on egalitarian relationships than to disrupt and prevent any form of cooperation. Anarchism
requires something more solidary to guide its practice.\footnote{May, ‘‘Lacanian Anarchism and the Left,’’ review of From Bukunin to Lacan: Anti- Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, by Saul Newman, Theory and Event 6, no. 1 (2003): 11.} Koch and Newman
nonetheless claim that their war model is an anarchist conception of political
life, no more, no less; when we call all representation into question, stripping
the polis of its essentialist trappings, we are left with a power struggle that
will go on irrespective of whatever social order is in place—liberal, theocratic, social-democratic, monarchical, fascist, anarchist, communist, etc.


One can choose to wear blinders or not, that is all.


Is the war model, as Newman and Koch contend, an anarchist alternative
to a representational model of politics? The tradition seems to offer some
support for this interpretation: Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin all de-
nounce representative democracy as a mask for domination.\footnote{Proudhon, System of Economical Contradictions, 50-51; Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, 220-21; Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 188.} But we have
also seen that the social anarchist critique of representation takes subtler
forms than blanket acceptance or blanket rejection, both of which end in
practical and theoretical incoherence. In confronting every form of hierarchy
and domination, social anarchists from the nineteenth century on had to develop more ethically consistent and epistemologically sophisticated critiques
of representation, specifying which kinds of representational practices are to
be tolerated, endorsed, adopted. In hermeneutics, interpretive practices that
either submit blindly to the text or impose a reifying schema onto it are
equally to be shunned in favor of a dialectical encounter, a dialogue in which
both parties can be challenged. In art, this translates into representational
practices that seek to open up this dialectic of engagement and contestation.
In both fields, a politics of ecological relatedness and evolutionary development holds sway. What about the political field proper?


The anarchist tradition offers something a good deal more complex than a
simple refusal of or skepticism about political representation. True, Proudhon declares that government by representatives is simply incompatible with
freedom, but in his General Idea of the Revolution he modifies this judgment,
allowing that electoral democracy is at least better than more autocratic systems, such as constitutional monarchy.\footnote{Proudhon, quoted in Woodcock, Writer and Politics 52; General Idea, 135.} Nevertheless, the representational
system of the Second Republic, like our own, is at best merely ‘‘quasi-
democratic,’’ offering the general population only brief moments of self-
governance, ‘‘forty-eight hours at the most for each election,’’ after which the
normal order of domination and submission resumes: ‘‘the President and the
Representatives . . . are the masters; all the rest obey.’’\footnote{Proudhon, General Idea, 158-59.}


Such are the considerations that lead Bookchin to propose a stricter definition of democracy: only the direct crafting of policy by assemblies of the
people, rather than by elected representatives, can be called truly democratic. Bookchin therefore favors the replacement of representative democracy with participatory forms of direct democracy in which, instead of
electing representatives empowered to legislate independently from their
constituents, people would gather in small popular assemblies to craft their
own legislation, sending recallable delegates with imperative mandates to
represent their decisions to larger bodies.\footnote{Bookchin, Remaking Society, 174-75.} For Proudhon, however, this approach is dangerous. Direct democracy on the Greek model would be better
than an electoral system, but where representative democracy is all but
closed to citizen initiative, the direct form is so wide open that it might
equally function as a means by which despots like Bonaparte can be restored
to power by popular vote on the strength of charisma. Even if direct government fails to vote itself out of existence, it remains ‘‘a recipe by which . . .
the abstract collectivity of the people can still be used for maintaining the
parasitism of the minority and the oppression of the greater number’’—
another mask for domination.\footnote{Proudhon, General Idea, 110, 119, 135.}


Even the ideal democracy, in which universal suffrage is not turned to
advantage by a dominant class, is majoritarian, which for Proudhon constitutes the worst form of oppression, since it conceals its oppressive nature
behind the perfect ideological screen, ‘‘the name of the people.’’\footnote{Proudhon, Solution du problème social (Paris: Éditions Lacroix, 1868), 56, translation mine.} Between
popular majority opinion and truth is a gap through which the irrational can
enter into the rational, quantified world of democratic politics: if indeed ‘‘the
People’’ can be treated as a collective subject with its own cognitive capacities, then just like any other subject, its cognitive capacities can fail it. Quite
apart from the question of how authentically this collective cognition is expressed by any individual representative, then, Proudhon questions the content of the cognition itself, which may well be compromised by
‘‘the
domination of prejudices,’’ ‘‘the contradiction between ideas and interests,’’
‘‘the variability of opinion,’’ and ‘‘the drives of the multitude’’: ‘‘Who will
make triage of the ideas and fantasies of the People? To whom can we appeal
from this possibly erroneous, and consequently despotic will?’’\footnote{Ibid., 42-46, translation mine.} If, for
Proudhon, humanity is equipped with a faculty of reasoning, it by no means
excludes the possibility of a populist fascism; people free from political constraints but not from moral error can manifest a despotism, recreating the
State in terrifying new forms.


The possible domination of minorities by majorities is also of primary concern for Malatesta and Goldman. Goldman, conscious of the conservative
and conformist forces at work in society as well as the majoritarian claims of
the working class, criticizes what she calls, in the words of Ibsen’s individualistic protagonist, Dr. Stockman, the ‘‘compact majority,’’ the privileged
collective subject-object of an instrumentalist politics in which only numbers matter, in which the performative value of electoral ‘‘success’’ overrides
serious consideration of all other values.\footnote{Goldman, Anarchism, 69-70.} The rule of quantity is not neces-
sarily operative, Malatesta argues, even in modern liberal societies, where
majority rule is more often ideological appearance than effective reality.


Still, even in the ideal case, authentic majority rule would only present an
order ‘‘in which a part of the members, albeit the majority, has the right to
impose its own will on the others.’’ Although majoritarianism is at least preferable to the rule of an elite minority, he writes, ‘‘we do not recognise the
right of the majority to impose the law on the minority, even if the will of the
majority in somewhat complicated issues could really be ascertained’’—for
this will is not simply and purely present, not even to itself, not even in some
imaginable ideal speech situation.\footnote{Malatesta, The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924-1931, ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 74; Life and Ideas, 72-73.}


But if collective wills cannot be ascertained, be they minority or majority,
how can they be coordinated for consensual action on a large scale? One
proposition recurring in anarchist theory is to avoid the necessity of coordinating action, relying instead on the small, tightly knit group in which consensus is most readily available. As Colin Ward summarizes, ‘‘organization
should be voluntary, functional, temporary and small.’’\footnote{Colin Ward, quoted in April Carter, The Political Theory of Anarchism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 109.} One recent anarchist polemic, adopting the language of Deleuze and Guattari, adds another
item to this list of desiderata: where the ‘‘constituted or transcendent power’’
of State and capital ‘‘cuts us off or separates us from our active power’’ by
instituting a mediating distance between ‘‘the moment of decision’’ and ‘‘the
act of its realization,’’ anarchism ‘‘calls for decisions to remain immanent to
the situation at hand.’’ Retrieving the Spanish anarchist tradition of grupos
de afinidad—small, ideologically unified bands of friends who can act as
one to accomplish a goal—the current proliferation of ‘‘affinity groups’’ in
the global anticapitalist movement privileges immediacy over the slower deliberative processes of organizations.\footnote{‘‘The Anarchist Ethic in the Anti-Globalization Movement,’’ (CUSTOMER: copy from bib. into note form).}


For Proudhon, it is true that organization should be voluntary, functional,
and temporary. However, organization by ‘‘mental affinities,’’ as he describes Charles Fourier’s utopian system, falls prey to the fallacy of ‘‘the
principle of association,’’ in which ‘‘a secret intention of robbery and despotism’’ is couched; association, ‘‘a bond which is naturally opposed to liberty,’’ inevitably ‘‘places fetters on the liberty of the laborer’’ by substituting
fraternity for utility, confusing function with affection. Affections are specific
and localized, not generalizable or iterable like the principle of contract; you
can make contracts between three people or three hundred, but not bonds of
love. Love reduced to utility, iterable love, is perverse promiscuity or ‘‘prostitution,’’ while labor that is organized on a non-iterable basis, without utility
for those involved, is an irrational exchange of something for nothing: ‘‘association formed without any outside economic consideration, or any leading
interest, association for its own sake, as an act of devotion, a family tie, as it
were, is an act of pure religion, a supernatural bond, without real value, a
myth.’’\footnote{Proudhon, General Idea, 78-79, 83-84, 87, 88, 131.} In Fourier’s union of labor with love, then, Proudhon finds a return
of the sacred and sacrifice—irrationality, mystification, mental bondage.
Colin Mercer illuminates this distrust of Fourier’s ‘‘ ‘sexualisation’ of the social sphere’’ and ‘‘ ‘aestheticization’ of politics’’ when he describes certain
‘‘operatic events’’ staged by Mussolini in which ‘‘women swapped their gold
wedding rings (in the interests of the production of armaments) for iron
bands symbolizing their marriage to Il Duce.’’\footnote{Michèle Barrett, The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 59.}


The more rational solution to the problem of majorities and minorities,
Proudhon argues, is to conclude voluntary, temporary, functional agreements
between individuals and groups of individuals: ‘‘representation,’’ no less
than the State itself, ‘‘must be renounced’’ in order ‘‘that I may govern myself . . . everything in the government of society which rests on the divine
must be suppressed, and the whole rebuilt upon the human idea of CONTRACT.’’ Every contract is to be a free agreement between consenting parties, limited to mutual advantage: ‘‘I am ready to bargain, but I want no
laws.’’ He is convinced that this model can be universalized: ‘‘If the social
contract can be solved between two producers . . . it can as well be solved
among millions, as it relates always to a similar engagement.’’\footnote{Proudhon, General Idea, 131, 133, 205.}


Nevertheless, there is some real resistance among anarchists to this contractual model of social relations. It is not only, as Bakunin insisted, that
‘‘any contract with another individual on any footing but the utmost equality
and reciprocity’’ would be just another form of exploitation;\footnote{Bakunin, Mikhail Bakunin: Selected Works, 68-69.} this is no more
than a restatement of Proudhon’s own criteria. Proudhon’s willingness to dispense with the passional energies of solidarity as the complement to the
more cognitive values of freedom and equality seems rather coldly rationalistic and masculinist—and implausible as well, in light of the feminist observation that ‘‘the emotional substrate of caring is prerequisite for a rights-
based ethic to function at all—an invisible ‘feminine’ underbelly, whose social labour makes possible the public world of fraternal relations.’’\footnote{Ariel Salleh, ‘‘Social Ecology and ‘The Man Question,’ ’’ Versions of Freedom: An Anthology of Anarchism, Visions of Freedom Collective, 1996, \href{http://}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}}} The
more this substrate is eroded, the more the game of contract and exchange
encourages cheaters. Moreover, there are real problems in generalizing the
contractual model to all social relations—particularly when it comes to the
noneconomic, traditionally
‘‘feminine’’ sphere of family life. Certainly
among the things that ought not to be quantified or arbitrated is the nurturance of people who are not ideally independent, productive, rational agents:
the very young, the sick, the drastically disabled, the very old.


The deeper critique of contract theory comes from a recognition that a
society in which individuals are constantly forced to be on their guard
against the possibility of any exploitation, nervously policing their transactions, is both fundamentally impoverished and intrinsically fragile. In Proudhon’s system, Bookchin argues, ‘‘the craftsman, cooperative, and commune,
relating to one another on bourgeois contractual terms of equity or justice
rather than on the communist terms of ability and needs’’ preserve their individual freedom at the expense of community and solidarity, ‘‘leaving any
moral commitment to a collective undefined beyond the good intentions of
its members.’’\footnote{Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, 4-5.} Ultimately, he argues, Proudhon’s contractualism ‘‘can
scarcely be distinguished from bourgeois conceptions of ‘right,’ ’’ based on a
narrow, ledger-book morality of equal exchange.\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘Deep Ecology, Anarcho-Syndicalism and the Future of Anarchist Thought,’’ Institute for Social Ecology, 17 November 2003, \href{http://www.social-ecology.org/\%0Aarticle.php?story=20031117103758945}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.social-ecology.org\Slash{}article.php?story=20031117103758945\Slash{}}.} A contractual representation of social relations is too antagonistic and individualistic to be sustainable.


In the absence of a State, ‘‘aside from mere individual contracts,’’ Bookchin asks, ‘‘how . . . would society make dynamic collective decisions about
public affairs’’? One frequently proferred method, as Bookchin notes, ‘‘is the
practice of consensus.’’\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘What Is Communalism?: The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism,’’ Institute for Social Ecology, 18 November 2003, \href{http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=200311181130165/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.social-ecology.org\Slash{}article.php?story=200311181130165\Slash{}}.} For Graeber, the anarchist model of deliberation
simply is ‘‘consensus decision-making,’’ which encourages mutual respect:


‘‘Where voting encourages one to reduce one’s opponents positions to a hostile caricature, or whatever it takes to defeat them, a consensus process is
built on a principle of compromise and creativity where one is constantly
changing proposals around until one can come up with something everyone
can at least live with; therefore, the incentive is always to put the best possible construction on other’s arguments.’’\footnote{Graeber, ‘‘The Twilight of Vanguardism.’’} Certainly, consensus eliminates
the problem of a purely quantitative domination of majorities by minorities.


However, it may leave the door open to some kinds of informal domination,
as is perhaps demonstrated by the experience of the Clamshell Alliance,
which was formed to oppose the construction of a nuclear reactor in New
Hampshire in the late 1970s. There, Bookchin claims to have witnessed a
‘‘small, tightly knit faction’’ manipulating the process, which was open and
amorphous enough that a well-organized group of participants ‘‘unified by
its own hidden agendas’’ could ram its decisions through de facto, while the
de jure egalitarianism of the process made their power effectively invisible.


In this case, the faction made particularly effective use of the practice of
‘‘standing aside’’: ‘‘minority dissenters were often subtly urged or psychologically coerced to decline to vote on a troubling issue, inasmuch as their dissent would essentially amount to a one-person veto.’’ The very climate of
solidarity and friendship that made consensus possible served to reinforce
this psychological coercion, since the dissenting parties were made to feel
that they were being disruptive or selfish for holding out against the majority
opinion, and therefore ‘‘nullified themselves as participants in the process’’
for the greater good. As a result, egalitarian power relations became more a
matter of appearance than reality.\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘What Is Communalism?’’; Midnight Notes Collective, ‘‘Strange Victories,’’ 14-15.}


The notion that specific practices of consensus decision making are rooted
in an anarchist tradition seems simply ahistorical. As a writer for the activist
journal Clamor notes, the Clamshell Alliance was one of the first attempts to
use consensus in mass organizing on the radical Left; before this, it was
confined to liberal and religiously based movements. Anarchist groups, conversely, have had a long record of using majoritarian voting to make decisions. For example, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, Spain’s
anarcho-syndicalist union, put its policies to the vote, as it did in 1919, ‘‘the
year that it unanimously endorsed ‘libertarian communist principles.’’’

\section{ANARCHISM AND THE CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION}


Granted, this was not necessarily without contestation: at the International
Anarchist Congress of 1907, a significant gathering attended by such declared enemies of majoritarian tyranny as Emma Goldman and Errico Malatesta, one delegate argued against taking votes on ethical grounds.


Nonetheless, other delegates, including Malatesta himself, argued with
Pierre Monatte that there was nothing ethically inconsistent about voting
within a voluntary organization of this kind; besides, ‘‘voting was a regular
practice inside the unions.’’ Thereafter, motions were voted on by the congress.\footnote{Skirda, Facing the Enemy, 83; M. Treloar, ‘‘The Tyranny of Consensus,’’ Clamor 20 (May-June 2003): 39.} ‘‘For an anarchist organization,’’ Malatesta explains,
congresses, in spite of all the disadvantages from which they suffer as representative bodies, are free from authoritarianism in any shape or form because they do
not legislate and do not impose their deliberations on others. They serve to maintain and increase personal contacts among the most active comrades, to summarize and encourage programmatic studies on the ways and means for action; to
acquaint everybody with the situation in the regions and the kind of action most
urgently needed; to summarize the various currents of anarchist opinions at the
time and to prepare some kind of statistics therefrom. And their decisions are not
binding, but simply suggestions, advice and proposals to submit to all concerned,
and they do not become binding and executive except for those who accept them
and for as long as they accept them.\footnote{Malatesta, Life and Ideas, 87.}


The anarchist congress is a representative body in that it involves many people sending a few delegates to meet in their place, to speak in their place at
a meeting and report back to them afterward. What does this entail? It means
that the delegates, as instructed representatives, make representations of
‘‘the situation in the regions’’ for the benefit of those who have not been there
to witness it at first hand, as well as making generalizing representations of
‘‘the various currents of anarchist opinions’’ and exchanging ‘‘suggestions,
advice and proposals.’’ All of this means the creation of symbolic representations in order to avoid political representation, in order to coordinate action
and negotiate agreements without resorting to the kind of representation in
which the decisions of a few do become ‘‘binding and executive’’ for others
who have had no authentic opportunity to democratically participate in making those decisions.


Such is traditional anarchist practice, for which the revolution itself is
nothing less than ‘‘the forming and disbanding of thousands of representative, district, communal, regional, national bodies which, without having any
legislative power, serve to make known and to coordinate the desires and
interests of people near and far and which act through information, advice
and example.’’\footnote{Ibid., 153.} It is motivated by the assumption that the ‘‘desires and interests’’ of people separated by space will be diverse and manifold, in need
of ‘‘coordination’’ rather than unification. This pluralistic outlook is centered
on a traditional anarchist value elided by consensus practice: that which
Bookchin calls ‘‘dissensus.’’\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘What Is Communalism?’’} More than a century before Bookchin’s experiences in the Clamshell Alliance, Proudhon wrote that ‘‘when the group is
called upon to vote, it should not vote as one man as a result of one individual feeling having become generally accepted. This can only lead to large-scale fraud . . . [and] is contrary to reason.


Instead let us lay down this principle: the impersonality of the public rea-
son presupposes as principle, the greatest possible contradiction; as means,
the greatest possible multiplicity.’’\footnote{Proudhon, Selected Writings, 121-22.} Similarly, while Bookchin grants the
appropriateness of consensus among the band of friends, joined by affinity,
he insists that in the larger, more diverse collectivity presupposed by the
very concept of a polis, consensus can ‘‘stifle the dialectic of ideas that
thrives on opposition, confrontation and, yes, decisions with which everyone
need not agree and should not agree, lest society become an ideological cemetery.’’ While such a stalled dialectic does not necessarily end in the creeping domination of a minority, it may nonetheless produce a deadening
conformism, in which the agonism of ‘‘passionate dialogue’’ is subdued by
‘‘dull monologues’’ and an essentially conservative political process that
tends to favor ‘‘the least controversial or even the most mediocre decision.’’


Rather than the pluralism Proudhon hoped for, we evoke ‘‘the metaphysical
‘one’ of the ‘consensus’ group.’’ Ultimately, the consensus process, proposed
as an antidote to crude majoritarianism, ‘‘honors no minorities, but mutes
them.’’\footnote{Proudhon, Problème social, 51; Bookchin, ‘‘What Is Communalism?’’}


Moreover, consensus process in groups of even moderate size can raise
the problem of mediation and immanence again, since it can be slow and
unresponsive, particularly in emergencies, when quick decisions are called
for. Even among the activists who have so enthusiastically embraced consensus process since the Seattle protest of 1999, there have been ‘‘numerous
cases when facilitators and meetings threw out consensus process in order
to accomplish what was necessary.’’ For instance,
on the evening of Wednesday, December 2, 1999 at the convergence space in
Seattle . . . hundreds of people representing the remnants of many of the affinity
groups that had seized the downtown a day earlier, along with the Peoples’ Assembly and Seattle youth, were attempting to figure out what to do next. The
mayor of Seattle had declared a state of emergency and any marches downtown
would risk mass arrest.


While the facilitators skillfully attempted to keep hundreds of people on topic,
people choking from the tear gas outside came into the meeting with what proved
to be false reports that the police were coming to attack the space. Calls of
‘‘We’ve got to take the whole meeting to the streets’’ arose.


Presumably, this course of action would have been not only unnecessary
(since the information turned out to be erroneous) but dangerous, since the
streets outside were the scene of a police riot, and even taking the time to
consider this proposal would have distracted those meeting from their more
urgent purposes. According to consensus protocol, those urging the meeting
to take to the street should have been ‘‘considered to be blocking any proposals then on the floor and urging a counter-proposal’’; fortunately, however,
the facilitators at this gathering were not overly scrupulous about their observance of the rules and simply disregarded the proposal.\footnote{Treloar, 38-39.} In the event, the
process worked only by violating its own procedural principles; a more rigorous and coherent application of those rules would certainly guarantee that
in some situations, unacceptable delays would safeguard ‘‘the unconditional
right of a minority,’’ even ‘‘a ‘minority of one,’ ’’ at the expense of the active
power of the whole group.\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘What Is Communalism?’’}


Majoritarian voting, by contrast, can be accomplished more quickly when
need be. Importantly, participants can also take the length of time necessary
for real deliberation, persuasion, canvassing, and opinion forming over matters of long-term and broad-scope policy, as is demonstrated by the recent
experience of the ‘‘consultas’’ in the federation of autonomous muncipalities
created by the Mexican EZLN rebels. Reserved for ‘‘major decisions, such
as peace or war,’’ these entail ‘‘intense discussions in each community’’ that
‘‘take months and have been a great source of annoyance to the Mexican
government, which always wants an answer to its proposals on the spot or
within days.’’\footnote{‘‘The Zapatistas, Anarchism, and ‘Direct Democracy.’ ’’} Such a process, it can be argued, sustains a pluralistic dissensus more effectively than consensual processes can: even in defeat, dissenting minorities remain\dots{}
‘‘free to openly and persistently articulate
reasoned and potentially persuasive disagreements’’ and can continue to op-
pose policies through ‘‘unimpaired discussion and advocacy.’’\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘What is Communalism?’’}


The objections to direct democracy raised by Proudhon, Malatesta, and
Goldman, however, remain to be addressed. Here, as Proudhon himself came
to argue in his shift from contractualism to federalism, the anarchist practice
of decentralization becomes terrifically important. What had most concerned
Proudhon about direct democracy, what makes it most open to demagogic
manipulation by well-organized minorities (even in a society where other
sorts of inequality, e.g., unequal access to media and the means of information, have been eliminated) is the durational and spatial problematic of centralization: in Proudhon’s Principle of Federation, it is the federative division
of communities that reduces the danger of demagogy.\footnote{Proudhon, Principle of Federation, 62.} When decisions are
to be made quickly, and the decision-making body is of a size and scale that
does not permit face-to-face discussion among its members, then indeed the
process can be most easily hijacked by successful minorities, which then
gain power at the expense of other minorities who can be effectively ignored
and marginalized. To be genuinely rational, rather than merely populist or
bureaucratic, the decision-making process must involve the actual, participatory, public exercise of reason in the form of information, proposition, discussion, and deliberation—not only voting. Moreover, this must take place
not only in impersonal, anonymous electronic forums, where vertical and
monological communication often supercedes horizontal dialogue, but in the
sort of face-to-face community setting in which individuals can feel empowered to speak to others who are similarly empowered, and in which it is genuinely possible for one person to have an effect on the decisions made by the
whole voting body. As Bookchin writes, ‘‘libertarian institutions are peopled
institutions . . . structured around direct, face-to-face, protoplasmic relationships, not around representative, anonymous, mechanical relationships.


They are based on participation, involvement, and a sense of citizenship that
stresses activity, not on the delegation of power and spectatorial politics.’’\footnote{Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, 336.}


The challenge is to make direct participation and involvement practically
feasible.


The best solutions to this problem come from decentralized systems in
which decision making is kept as close to the base as possible, and as close
as possible to those directly concerned. In order to be functional, this decentralization cannot only be political, embodied in federated structures of decision making; it must also entail a material decentralization of infrastructure,
so that smaller territorial areas, such as regions, municipalities, and even
neighborhoods, can enjoy considerable functional independence as a material guarantee of their considerable political autonomy. This means undoing
the ‘‘subordination’’ of producer and consumer alike, under globalized capitalism, ‘‘to a vast economic machine which can become deranged in different
parts and leave him without elementary necessities’’ by bringing production
and consumption together.\footnote{Goodman and Goodman, Communitas, 155, 181.} When producers and consumers are in close
contact with one another, they can reach mutually satisfactory agreements
more quickly and less formally, and where conflicts arise, rather than disappearing into a bureaucratic administrative maze, they can be more easily
and rationally resolved;\footnote{Goodman, People or Personnel, 197.} as Fourier recognized, to the extent that ‘‘the conditions and process of work’’ are under the worker’s direct control, and the
satisfactions to be derived from productive labor are made immanent to the
productive act itself, ‘‘work becomes play’’ and ceases to require formal discipline or extrinsic incentives. Ultimately, the entire mentality of exchange
and instrumentality is undermined, since one is no longer ‘‘producing commodities primarily to be exchanged for something else.’’\footnote{Howard J. Ehrlich, ‘‘Anarchism and Formal Organization,’’ in Reinventing Anarchy: What Are Anarchists Thinking These Days? ed. Howard J. Ehrlich, Carol Ehrlich, et al. (Bos- ton: Routledge \& Kegan Paul, 1979), 111.} The more decisions can be effectively reserved to the same specific groups of people who
are to carry them out and experience their results, the more individual freedom—‘‘not an abstract right,’’ Malatesta insists, ‘‘but the possibility of acting’’—is realized in everyday life.


Functional and political decentralization thereby helps to address the
problem of mediation and immanence: as Rocker notes, where States favor
centralization as conducive to the systematization of command and obedience, anarchist organization locates the ‘‘power of decision’’ as close to the
‘‘immediate action’’ as possible.\footnote{Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 92.} In this sense, May misunderstands the significance of the ‘‘strain in anarchist thought that views decentralization as
an alternative to the current social structure of centralization,’’ which he sees
as founded on a hopelessly ‘‘strategic’’ conception of power that traces it to
a spurious ‘‘source’’; while it is true that power relations are always immanent to society, present everywhere, it is not the case that this power is
everywhere and always recognized, felt, and actualized.\footnote{May, Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 13, 52.} Instead, quite frequently, the power to decide is abdicated to the Invisible Hand of the economy (and its supposed Laws), or it is ceded to social and political superiors,
who in turn are subordinate to other superiors, and so on, until the final
justification for decisions is traced to some founding principle (Law, God,
Fate, Nature, etc.) that is beyond negotiation, a ‘‘center elsewhere.’’\footnote{Derrida, Writing and Difference, 279.} This
displacement is not just a psychological quirk, nor even some linguistic illusion; we incarnate it in our behavior, embody it in our social relationships,
and reproduce it in our everyday lives, so we cannot simply dispel it through
analysis. Where it prevails, power is not only apparently but effectively ‘‘invisible.’’\footnote{Critchley, ‘‘Is There a Normative Deficit in the Theory of Hegemony?’’ 3.}


Goodman describes this crucial operation of representational power as a ‘‘pattern of [organizational] behavior’’:



\begin{quote}


In short, the pattern is as follows: 1. The organization reduces its agents to personnel who carry out the organizational goals and policy. 2. If something goes
wrong and an agent is publicly exposed in an outrageous act, he suddenly becomes an individual again and is so penalized. 3. The organization takes no responsibility whatever, saves face, makes no public apology, makes no amends,
does not look retroactively into similar past outrages that it has committed. 4.
Nevertheless, the organization blandly comes before the public as a morally responsible agent, with a right to regulate itself.\footnote{Goodman, People or Personnel and Like a Conquered Province, 192.}



\end{quote}


First, an individual officer of the rational organization—Goodman’s exam-
ples are the New York Police Department and CBS—is endowed with the
authority of the organization itself via the magic of identifying representation, and then this identification is undone through the magic of focalizing
representation, which excludes the institutional and historical context of the
act from view. In this way, the bureaucracy’s power is made effectively invisible, and responsibility is infinitely deferred.


Clearly, as Kropotkin writes, postrevolutionary political life will ‘‘have to
be more popular, more decentralized, and nearer to the folk-mote self-
government than representative government can ever be.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 184.} However, this
does not simply amount to a simple embrace of antirepresentationalism.


What we oppose are practices in which representational power is made to
appear only on special occasions, in which the represented are prevented
from speaking for themselves or intervening in decision making outside of a
tightly controlled ‘‘electoral’’ format. Such a bureaucratic form of representation truly does preserve the outward form of democracy while concentrating
power in the hands of representatives; it is intrinsically hierarchical. What
we endorse is a decentralized, directly democratic process in which power
is always visible and contestable, in which the signified can always object
to, revise, or replace its signifier. In this way, Proudhon writes, the functions
of governance will be reduced to ‘‘a delegation, a convention, a federation,
in a word, a free and spontaneous assent by all the individuals which comprise the people, each one stipulating and canvassing for the guarantee of
his interests. So that the government, if government there be, instead of
BEING the AUTHORITY, as before, will represent the relation of all the interests . . . and consequently will itself have only a representative value, as
paper money has value only by that which it represents.’’ Here, Proudhon
imagines anarchy as the end of a series in which electoral democracy is not
the end, but a phase: an anarchist polis must be more ‘‘democratic and representative’’ than the kinds of government we currently call democratic and
representative. For Proudhon, this is made possible by the transparency of
the contract, a representation of mutual obligations in which all parties recognize their own wills and interests; for Bookchin, it happens through direct
democracy, in which all parties can recognize their active role in shaping
policy (in the words of Laclau and Mouffe, ‘‘a representative,’’ under conditions of direct democracy, ‘‘can be subjected to such conditions of control
that what becomes a fiction is the very fictitiousness of representation’’).\footnote{Proudhon, Oeuvres 9.289; Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985), 119.}


This supercession of representation that takes place through the realization
of representation is truly the disenchantment of political life, the rational
destruction of the magical thinking by which the power that really belongs
to everyone everywhere seems to come from somewhere else, so that
little by little, the government, instead of being regarded as the representation or
personification of the social relationship, which is only a materialist and idolatrous conception, is conceived as being this RELATIONSHIP itself . . . the government, no longer distinguishing itself from interests and freedoms in so far as
they place themselves in relation with one another, ceases to exist\dots{}
A relationship is a pure idea . . . which has no other reality than that of the objects which
are in relationship.\footnote{Proudhon, Oeuvres 9.289, italics mine.}


That is to say, order is reconceived as the relationship formed by human
beings in a free society, as immanent, rather than something that emanates
from a transcendent beyond. At the same time, in Goodman’s words, decentralization is about ‘‘increasing the number of centers of decision-making
and the number of initiators of policy,’’ producing forms of power that are
not disseminated into invisibility but exercised in situations of ‘‘face-to-face
association’’ with full consciousness of their workings on the part of those
involved.\footnote{Goodman, Drawing the Line: The Politcal Essays of Paul Goodman, ed. Taylor Stoehr (New York: Free Life Editions, 1977), 185.} For popular power to appear as what it is, the State, a body separate from and set over against society indeed must disappear into the net-
work of social relationships from which it emerged so long ago. As Proudhon
writes, ‘‘The negation of government emerges thus from its definition: whoever says representative government, says relationship between interests;
whoever says relationship between interests, says absence of government.’’


This negation, for Proudhon, is the product of a dialectic of undoing, in
which the first term in a series logically yields its own opposite. In radical
democracy, the center elsewhere becomes a center everywhere.\footnote{Proudhon, Oeuvres, 9.288-90, translation mine; Proudhon, General Idea, 282.}


However, Goodman acknowledges, populist decentralism has historically
shown two faces: emerging in reaction to the unprecedented concentration
of power into closed and rigid structures—‘‘the alliance of government and
monopolists, the manipulation of credit, the growth of the trusts, the squeezing of the farmers by railroads, packers, and manufacturers, the centralization and alienation of the political parties’’—the Populists met these not only
with practical ingenuity and prophetic fervor, but also with ‘‘a paranoiac and
know-nothing suspicion of all strangers, who belong to the diabolic enclosing
forces: the absentee owners are Jews, the poor immigrants are allied with
them. At first the Negroes are equally oppressed brothers; but then they are
diabolically strange. The East consists of Cities of Sin.’’\footnote{Goodman, Drawing the Line, 181.} Ultimately, the
racism of ‘‘States’ Rights’’ transforms American populism into a tool of the
same interests it once opposed: the right adopts populist rhetoric as a
weapon against universalizing federal regulatory regimes. As Biehl warns,
merely formal decentralization without a democratic content can ‘‘become
regressive\dots{}
Homophobia, anti-Semitism, and racism as well as sexism,
may be part of a parochial ‘communitarian ethos.’ ’’\footnote{Goodman, People or Personnel and Like a Conquered Province, 13, 48; Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 134.}


In short, as Goodman acknowledges, ‘‘decentralizing has its risks,’’ and
populist calls for local control are not always liberatory or just. For instance,
he invites us to ‘‘suppose that the school system of a Northern city were
radically decentralized, given over to the control of the parents and teachers
of each school. Without doubt some of the schools would be Birchite and
some would be badly neglected.’’ One answer to this problem is simply to
deny that it is a problem, at least as long as individuals have freedom of
movement between communities: ‘‘If each locality indeed had its option, the
counties where Negroes are in the majority would have very different rules!
And they would provide a meaningful choice for other Negroes to move to.’’\footnote{Goodman, People or Personnel and Like a Conquered Province, 12-13.}


However, those who are not relatively free to choose between communities—
particularly children, who are not only much more dependent on the immediate community for nurturance but that much more open to its influence,
receptive to its values—would still be subject to the tyranny of the local
regime. A small but quite vicious statism could easily reemerge.


Some structural safeguards are therefore desirable and necessary. Any
free federation of communities should include an articulate constitutional
agreement as to the minimal requirements for membership (as the charter of
the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, a network of intentional communities, does today) and, in effect, a political pact that specifies conditions
under which the cooperating communities can or even must intervene in the
affairs of a particular community within or even outside the federation in
order to defend the equality, the freedom, and\Slash{}or the lives of individuals
there. However, any truly egalitarian politics must finally depend on an egalitarian culture that fosters mutuality; the abstract system of rights and responsibilities must ultimately be grounded in emotional ties of solidarity,
concern, and care.\footnote{Salleh, ‘‘Social Ecology and ‘The Man Question.’ ’’} Democracy in the political sphere depends on a climate
of tolerance and respect that can only be the product of the social sphere,
without which it remains an empty form without content.


Two forces could converge to produce such a culture of solidarity-with-
diversity. The first is the result of a more anarchic circulation of information,
images, ideas, and people between communities, which tends to make cultural homogeneity more and more a thing of the past and to foster new hy-
bridities and diversities of identification. The second is what Biehl and
Bookchin, again drawing on the Greek tradition, call paideia—the cultural
role of education in producing a citizenry ready to act democratically in the
political sphere. Presumably the paideia that would train children to work in
groups, articulate ideas, and take initiative would also equip them with a
multicultural understanding of the world and the values that sustain a diverse society.


In any case, it is certain that there is no certainty, no safeguard against
injustice, elsewhere than in the willingness of human beings, as drawn into
relationships by some set of social and political structures, to treat one another fairly. Thus Goodman argues that ‘‘we must avoid concentration of power precisely because we are fallible\dots{}


The moral question is not whether men [and women] are ‘good enough’ for a type of social organization, but whether the type of organization is useful to develop the potentialities of
intelligence, grace, and freedom in [women and] men.’’\footnote{Goodman, People or Personnel and Like a Conquered Province, 19.} We have become
used to living in a situation where rights are guaranteed by law and upheld
by force, but in which it is foolish to trust others to respect these rights as a
matter of custom, compassion, and conscience. The governmental Leviathan
by no means puts an end to Hobbes’s bellum omnia contra omnes: we are
more or less always in a state of war against anyone outside our little spheres
of kinship and friendship, largely because we have no place to meet to settle
our differences openly, no experience dealing with strangers outside of
the media of exchange and command. As Adorno and Horkheimer show, the
prevalent forms of modern rationality, for all their universalism, allow the
most irrational, atavistic forms of particularism to survive and even thrive.


To trust one or another bureaucratic, authoritarian structure to promote and
maintain justice is perhaps more foolish, in the long run, than taking the
risks of decentralization and radical democracy.

\chapter{10. The Critique of Economy as Representation}


ANARCHISM BEGINS WITH A REJECTION OF ECONOMICS AS A ‘‘SCIENCE’’ THAT
observes events and represents their relationships as ‘‘laws.’’\footnote{Takis Fotopoulos claims otherwise, arguing that for Proudhon, too, economics is a ‘‘science.’’ However, as he acknowledges, ‘‘Proudhon goes on to assert that he does not regard as a science the ‘political economy’ of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, and J. B. Say . . . which he sees as an ‘incoherent ensemble of theories’ and aptly characterises as ‘the organization of robbery and poverty’ ’’ . Takis Fotopoulos, ‘‘Beyond Marx and Proudhon,’’ Democracy \& Na- ture 6, No. 1 (March 2000) \href{http://www.democracynature.org/dn/vol6/takis\_proudhon.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.democracynature.org\Slash{}dn\Slash{}vol6\Slash{}takis\_proudhon.html} In other words, for Proudhon, official economics is just an ideological mask for class interests, not the objective study that it claims to be.} The lawful-
ness of the economy, Kropotkin argues, is mere appearance; even in nature,
‘‘law’’ is always of ‘‘a conditional character,’’ so that when the conditions
subtending a given set of laws change, the laws change as well. For example,
as Richards writes, ‘‘the problem is not that when the minimum wage goes
up it is harder to find work . . . [it] is that the structure of the system is such
that when the minimum wage goes up it is harder to find work.’’\footnote{Richards, Letters From Quebec, 1.8.11.} Canonical
‘‘academic political economy’’ omits these structural conditions from its fo-
calizing representations, thus disguising them as nature: ‘‘having described
the facts which arise in our society under these conditions, they represent
to us these facts as rigid, inevitable economic laws.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 179.} Birrell, too, attacks
economists’ use of the theoretical fiction of ‘‘all things being equal’’: ‘‘The
world of economics is a world of theories . . . where European military supe-
riority is not a factor in any equation, a world where the CIA does not install
puppet régimes, a world where imprisoned labour is not used in the produc-
tion process, a world where carpet bombings of defenceless civilian popula-
tions do not occur, a world free of apartheid, concentration camps and
special economic zones . . .’’ Such are the dirty realities hidden by the clean
abstractions of economics. Economists’ ‘‘Platonic underworld of mathemati-
cal certainty’’ is ‘‘an ahistorical supposition lacking reference to reality,’’ a
mere pretense.\footnote{Birrell, ‘‘Some Notes For an Anarchist Theory of Trade.’’ The Raven 8, no. 31 (Autumn 1995), \href{http://www.spunk.org/library/pubs/freedom/raven/sp001755.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.spunk.org\Slash{}library\Slash{}pubs\Slash{}freedom\Slash{}raven\Slash{}sp001755.html} (accessed 11 March 2005).}


Since the market is not the gloriously self-regulating mechanism advertised by the focalizing representations of official economics, critical anarchist
economics must not only attend to the excluded political context—military
and police intervention in labor disputes, State management of economic crises, social welfare as a defensive response to workers’ movements, colonial
exploitation of peripheral nations by metropolitan powers, and direct and
indirect manipulation of the electoral system by the wealthiest actors, e.g.,
by means of campaign financing and the threat of the ‘‘capital strike’’—but
also, as Colin Ward reminds us, to the informal economies that subsist alongside the official one: the largely feminized household economy of unpaid
labor on which the male-dominated capitalist economy is parasitic; the un-
registered economies of barter and unlicensed enterprise; the black-market
and criminal economies that are capital’s shadowy twin; the mutual aid networks that still proliferate among the poor as a practice of survival, ‘‘the
very ancient art of ‘making do’ ’’; the resistance economies of squatting and
scavenging; and all the other ‘‘half-anarchistic’’ practices of ‘‘use and wont’’
in everyday life that, in Thorstein Veblen’s words, ‘‘live somehow in the
shadow of the large-scale coercive rule that killed [them].’’\footnote{Ibid. Ward, Social Policy: An Anarchist Response (London: Freedom Press, 2000), 83; de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 30; Veblen, quoted in Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 169.}


A critical economics, however, is merely descriptive, and anarchism’s primary modality is the prescriptive. Kropotkin suggests that the task for anarchists is not only to critique formal economics for disguising the existing
order as the natural order, but to reconstruct economics as ethics—which it
already was for Proudhon—and as technique, a method of analyzing needs,
capabilities, and resources that aims at ‘‘the discovery of means for the satisfaction of these needs with the smallest possible waste of labor and with the
greatest benefit to mankind in general.’’ That is to say, ‘‘in political economy
attention must be directed first of all to so-called ‘consumption’ . . . the first
concern of the revolution must be to reorganize that so as to provide food,
clothing and shelter for all,’’ and then to reorganize production accordingly.


The questions for such an economics are no longer spectatorial, but practical: ‘‘What are the means to satisfy the needs of all with the least loss of
power? How can a society guarantee to each, and consequently to all, the
greatest sum of satisfaction?’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 122, 180. For Kropotkin, as for Goodman, ‘‘technology, the use of instruments,’’ should be considered ‘‘a branch of moral philosophy,’’ involving more criteria than pure efficiency or utility (Goodman, Drawing the Line, 55), including ‘‘transparency of operation’’ and ‘‘repairability by the average well- educated person’’ (Goodman and Goodman, Communitas, 171).}


This is, in large part, a question about the relationship between individual
agency and social structure. In Marx: A Radical Critique, Alan Carter opens
up this question in subjecting the famous passage in the German Ideology
about the postrevolutionary life to a close reading. ‘‘In communist society,’’


Marx writes, ‘‘where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each
can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the
general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today
and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear
cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without
ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.’’\footnote{Marx, quoted in Alan Carter, Marx: A Radical Critique, 11.}


Carter notes that the phrase ‘‘just as I have a mind’’ seems to indicate
individual choice about what to do, which seems to contradict the claim that
‘‘society regulates the general production.’’ The utopian vision founders on
‘‘the apparent irreconcilability between individual freedom and social planning’’—unless, that is, one is to infer a far more participatory style of decision making than the command system we might otherwise assume. Thus,
Carter proposes, one could envision a system in which ‘‘individuals could
‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon,’ etc. ultimately as each chose,
but within the framework of a general plan that stated which activities were
necessary, and that had been arrived at through a process whereby the commune eventually reached a consensus. As long as such communes were on
a small scale so as to facilitate such a procedure, then the individual’s control over his or her own labour would be maximized without any loss with
regard to planning.’’ Such a system, of course, is not Marx’s, but Proudhon’s:
it is the structure of ‘‘workers’ control’’ in which relatively autonomous communes coordinate decisions through a ‘‘federal system.’’\footnote{Carter, Marx: A Radical Critique, 11-13.}


It is true that decisions about production must be coordinated to some
degree, and this means that people must come to some agreement about what
is needed and desired. It is this affirmation of a federalist planning-from-
below that, as James Guillaume deduced, distinguishes Proudhon’s mutualist system from mere individualism: insofar as production must be ‘‘planned
in advance and proportioned to needs,’’ it is necessarily made ‘‘social.’’\footnote{James Guillaume, quoted in Francis Feeley, The French Anarchist Labor Movement and ‘‘La Vie Ouvrière,’’ 1909-1914 (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 85.} As
Malatesta remarks, ‘‘production and distribution must be controlled, that is,
one must ascertain which commodities are needed and in what quantities;
where they are needed and what means are available to produce them and
distribute them.’’ Since this requires ‘‘that each should know not only what
he can produce and what he requires, but be aware of the needs and capabilities of others as well,’’ we are faced with the question of how to ‘‘distinguish
better from worse interpretations of people’s needs’’—a question that seems
unsolvable from an antirepresentationalist standpoint.\footnote{Malatesta, Life and Ideas, 96; Fraser, Unruly Practices, 181.} Even the practice of
‘‘classifying policies . . . as ‘good’, ‘better’, or ‘best,’ ’’ Rosenau argues, is
open to question from a standpoint that ‘‘questions . . . the possibility that
data can arbitrate between policy positions or allow us to conclude that one
policy is superior to another’’; inevitably, these judgments ‘‘claim legitimacy
by reference to external, universally truthful propositions that are really self-
referential.’’ If representations can refer to nothing but themselves, they cannot help us to manage our affairs as the pragmatists would like: even such
unquestioned concepts of mainstream economics as measurement, control,
and predictability are to be suspended or bracketed. Lacking justification,
‘‘policy suggestions’’ are reduced to ‘‘policy imposition’’ by the few at the
expense of the many.\footnote{Rosenau, ‘‘Anticipating a Post-Modern Policy Current?’’ Policy Currents 3, no. 2 (May 1993), \href{http://www.fsu.edu/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.fsu.edu\Slash{}} spap\Slash{}orgs\Slash{}apsa\Slash{}vol3\_no2\Slash{}rosenau.html (accessed 6 August 2003).}


As radically au courant as these notions sound, they have been anticipated by neoliberal economists, particularly the laissez-faire ‘‘Austrian
School’’ of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, which set out in the
period between the World Wars to challenge the legitimacy of socialist economic planning. On the terms of von Mises’s ‘‘calculation argument,’’ the
most efficient allocation of resources simply is whatever the marketplace encourages; the self-interested practice of a multitude of rational actors produces the best outcomes for everyone.\footnote{Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation In The Socialist Commonwealth, trans. Alder (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1990), 9.} For Hayek, it is not only the case
that marketplace competition makes socialized planning redundant, but that
such planning ‘‘deprives competition of its power of bringing about an effective co-ordination of individual efforts, because price changes then cease to
register all the relevant changes in circumstances and no longer provide a
reliable guide for the individual’s actions.’’ The attempt to replace exchange-value with use-value therefore ends in the minimization of utility and
the creation of a useless bureaucracy; worse, it calls into being a political
hierarchy that produces its own self-justifying ideology: ‘‘to make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be
forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come
to regard them as their own ends.’’\footnote{Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 37, 33, 153.}


It requires some effort for us to see this argument for what it is: a critique
of representation. Economic planning, no matter how democratically arranged,
inevitably entails identifying representation, directing the socioeconomic totality toward a ‘‘unitary end,’’ a ‘‘common good’’ or ‘‘general interest’’ that
is inevitably a reduction of the ‘‘infinite variety’’ of goods and interests conceived by the people whose welfare is to be planned for; it is a focalizing
representation that presents an inevitably partial and incomplete ‘‘scale of
values’’ as if it were or could represent the totality, when in fact ‘‘it is impossible for any man to survey more than a limited field, to be aware of the
urgency of more than a limited number of needs.’’ To fail to recognize this
limitation by allowing individuals ‘‘to follow their own values and preferences rather than somebody else’s’’ is to arrogate to someone else the power
to adjudicate needs, ends, values—to practice patronizing representation,
speaking for others. Ultimately, where ideological propaganda fails to convince the represented that the economic plan has properly represented their
interests and goals, compliance with the plan must still be mandatory—by
‘‘open or concealed force.’’ The argument fundamentally turns on the tropes
of antirepresentationalism: incalculability, unknowability, the uncloseable
gap between the finite part and an infinite, unavailable, never-present totality, ‘‘intellectual humility’’ versus ‘‘intellectual hubris.’’\footnote{Ibid., 37, 56-59, 166.} Once again, economic policy is a violent imposition on the many by the few, its claims to
legitimacy nothing more than deception or delusion.


Against these antirepresentationalist claims, Fraser argues that ‘‘we can
distinguish better from worse interpretations of people’s needs’’ and proposes a theory of ‘‘interpretive justification’’ that balances ‘‘procedural considerations concerning the social processes by which various competing
need interpretations are generated’’ with ‘‘considerations of consequences’’;
the best representations would be generated through an ongoing process that
unites formal (‘‘procedural’’) equality with substantive (‘‘consequential’’)
equality.\footnote{Fraser, Unruly Practices, 181-82.} The antirepresentationalist bogeyman of reductivism—the fear,
shared by poststructuralists and laissez-faire economists, that equality
means the leveling of differences, the imposition of uniformity—is by no
means a necessary outcome of such a project. As long as the dialogism of
Fraser’s interpretive method is put into practice, Chomsky writes, satisfying
‘‘the necessary requirements of every member of society’’ need not amount
to imposing an ‘‘equality of condition’’ irrespective of differences:



\begin{quote}


Individuals will differ in their aspirations, their abilities, and their personal goals.
For some person, the opportunity to play the piano ten hours a day may be an
overwhelming personal need; for another, not. As material circumstances permit,
these differential needs should be satisfied in a decent society, as in a healthy
family life. In functioning socialist societies such as the Israeli kibbutzim, questions of this sort constantly arise. I cannot imagine that it is possible to formulate
very strong general principles to resolve conflicts and measure individual opportunity against social demands. Honest people will differ in their assessments and
will try to reach agreement through discussion and sympathetic consideration of
the needs of others. The problems are not exotic ones; they arise constantly in
functioning social groups, such as the family.\footnote{Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, ed. James Peck (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 192.}



\end{quote}


Wilkin concurs: ‘‘although needs-based accounts of social justice such as
Chomsky’s are grounded in a universalistic claim, they do not lead (as strong
anti-essentialists fear) to homogeneity and the suppression of difference.


Logically, need satisfaction should produce the opposite.’’ In Bookchin’s
words, it is when the most universal, biologically based needs are satisfied,
abolishing the domination of ‘‘scarcity,’’ that more nuanced, varied, individualized ‘‘desires’’ come fully into play.\footnote{Wilkin, ‘‘Chomsky and Foucault on Human Nature and Politics,’’ 198; Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 274.} The question is how to put Fraser’s
egalitarian representation of needs and use-values into practice outside of
the family sphere.


Proudhon, at first glance, seems rather hostile to this project, given his
antagonism toward Louis Blanc’s communist distributive ethic, ‘‘From each
according to his capacity; To each according to his needs’’: ‘‘Who then,’’ he
asks, ‘‘shall determine his capacity? who shall be the judge of his needs?’’


What we should anticipate is not a spontaneous accord about capacities and
needs, but a series of disputes: ‘‘You say that my capacity is 100: I maintain
that it is only 90. You add that my needs are 90: I affirm that they are 100.


There is a difference between us of twenty upon needs and capacity. It is, in
other words, the well-known debate between demand and supply. Who shall
judge between the society and me?’’\footnote{Proudhon, General Idea, 96. George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (New York: New American Library, 1962).} Without any ‘‘guaranty . . . that the
member will work according to his capacity’’ or ‘‘that the association will
reward him according to his needs,’’ we are forced to find a way to allow
‘‘demand and supply’’ to play out their dialectic and find their equilibrium
in each case. Hence the role of the marketplace in Proudhon’s economic
system, which he called, after the name of a worker’s association in Lyon,
‘‘mutualism.’’\footnote{Ibid., 97; Woodcock, Anarchism, 108.}


It is ‘‘precisely because Value is in the highest degree difficult to formulate,’’ for Proudhon, that ‘‘it is eminently transactional.’’ So far, his theory of
value sounds much like standard capitalist economics. However, he argues,
the justice to be achieved between buyers and sellers cannot be merely decided by the outcome of the exchange, whatever its parties agree on; he regards ‘‘the producer’’ as standing under a moral ‘‘obligation . . . toward the
consumer to deliver his products at cost price.’’ The ‘‘just price for all kinds
of service or merchandise,’’ Proudhon argues, ‘‘is that which represents with
exactitude . . . the total cost of production, according to the average experience of free producers . . . [and] the wages of the merchant, or indemnity for
the advantage of which the seller deprives himself in parting with the thing
sold.’’ In a fluctuating capitalist marketplace, greedy individuals could
transgress against this obligation by seeking whatever profits the market
would bear, over and above this fair price, as could workers’ associations
motivated by ‘‘petty union interests.’’ For Proudhon, the solution lay in making relations between merchant and customer a matter of durable contracts
rather than sporadic exchanges; such a contract was exemplified by the appearance of the first producer-consumer cooperatives, in which, as described
by an article explaining the operation of a tailors’ cooperative, ‘‘direct communication between producers and consumers’’ allowed fair prices to be fixed
and fair wages assured in long-term agreements.\footnote{Proudhon, General Idea, 91-92, 92-93, 98, 220.} Here, then, is the sort of
negotiation that Fraser calls for under the terms of ‘‘procedural’’ equality.


What about ‘‘consequential’’ or substantive equality, however? Does not
Proudhon’s market system leave open the possibility that some individuals,
or even some cooperatives, will so profit by their de jure free and equal exchanges with others that they will become, de facto, the owners of the means
of production and therefore of the necessities of life, able to dictate to the
others the terms of their existence? In such a case, as Chomsky argues, the
representation of these outcomes as compatible with freedom and equality,
via a Hayek- or Mises-style ‘‘entitlement theory of justice’’ that focalizes
attention on the apparent fairness of the procedure from which injustice results, ‘‘has all the merits of a proof that 2+2=5.’’\footnote{Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, 187.}


However, Proudhon is not a mere proponent of laissez-faire, nor is he
careless of substantive equality. In What Is Property? he argues that if a
purchase, in registering ‘‘demand’’ for some commodity in the market system, is analogous to a vote in the electoral system, then ‘‘under the régime
of property . . . one may have several hundred votes, while another has only
one.’’\footnote{Proudhon, What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government, trans. Benjamin R. Tucker (New York: Dover, 1970), 207.} Here, his critique of ‘‘property’’ becomes salient. Proudhon distinguishes between ‘‘property’’ and ‘‘possession’’: where the institution of
‘‘property’’ gives a proprietor the right to own, and therefore to buy and sell,
more than he or she can use, decoupling exchange-value from use-value, one
can only ‘‘possess’’ what one can actually use. It is only the right to own as
property more than one can possess that makes it possible for an owner to
reap aubaine—a French term which Stewart Edwards explains as referring
to what in English is variously called ‘‘rent,’’ ‘‘profit,’’ or ‘‘interest.’’ This
‘‘droit d’aubaine,’’ which Tucker translates as ‘‘the right of Increase’’ or ‘‘the
right of escheat,’’ is a unitary phenomenon that ‘‘receives different names
according to the thing by which it is yielded: if by land, farm-rent; if by
houses and furniture, rent; if by life-investments, revenue; if by money, interest; if by exchange, advantage gain, profit.’’\footnote{Proudhon, Selected Writings, 125; Oeuvres, 4.182; What Is Property?, xviii, 75, 154.} This ‘‘increment or excess’’ is,
in short, the ‘‘surplus-value’’ that, snipped from the worker’s wages, sets
Marx’s ‘‘General Formula for Capital’’ going. As ‘‘the right of increase,’’
property confers on the proprietor the mysterious ability ‘‘to produce without
labor,’’ or ‘‘to make something from nothing,’’ as when Bill Gates claims to
have created wealth simply by permitting thousands of workers to perform
labor. The essential operation of finance is then a modernized, rationalized
version of ‘‘royal prerogative’’ or ‘‘homage’’ given by a borrower, a tenant, or
an employee to the proprietor for ‘‘permission’’ to use some capital upon
which the owner’s ‘‘seal is set’’; the very ‘‘source of profit’’ is ‘‘extortion’’
backed by State muscle.\footnote{Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, 329-32; Proudhon, What Is Property?, 155.}


Where property is a ‘‘right’’ that must be protected by laws and police,
possession is ‘‘a matter of fact, not of right.’’ Respect for this ‘‘fact’’ amounts
to a ‘‘principle’’ that founds a new ‘‘right’’: ‘‘By this principle, the man who
takes possession of a field, and says, ‘This field is mine,’ will not be unjust
so long as every one else has an equal right of possession; nor will he be
unjust, if, wishing to change his location, he exchanges this field for an
equivalent. But if, putting another in his place, he says to him, ‘Work for
me while I rest,’ he then becomes unjust, unassociated, unequal. He is a
proprietor.’’\footnote{Duranton, quoted in Proudhon, What is Property?, 43; Proudhon, What Is Property?, 285, 234.} Possessive land tenure is not abstract ownership, permitting
an absentee owner to command rent from a tenant farmer via his ‘‘nominal
and metaphysical occupancy,’’ separating labor from its product, but ‘‘the
right of occupation.’’\footnote{Proudhon, What Is Property?, 154, 54.}


The distinction between possession and property, then, in favoring concrete particularity over abstract equivalence, aims at preventing what Ruthrof
would call the ‘‘intersemiotic’’ inflation of monetary signs. Linguistic signs
cut off from any physical reference become self-referential; just so, as Landauer suggested, ‘‘money under the capitalist system’’ becomes a floating
signifier whose exchange-value, which ought to be subordinate or ‘‘relative’’
to use-value, becomes an end in itself, taking the form of ‘‘interest-bearing
capital . . . which gains products of labor and services without having done
any labor itself.’’ ‘‘Absolute money’’ ceases to represent labor and its product and seems to become an autonomous representation.\footnote{Lunn, Prophet of Community, 215-16; Landauer, quoted in Lunn, Prophet of Community, 215-16.} However, just as
Bakunin sees God, free from every concrete determination, as the ultimate
empty signifier, referring to nothing, so for Proudhon, this autonomy of economic representation is a lie, for ‘‘property is not self-existent,’’ a fact, but
a social convention: ‘‘An extraneous cause—either force or fraud—is neces-
sary to its life and action. In other words, property is not equal to property:
it is a negation—a delusion—NOTHING.’’\footnote{Proudhon, What Is Property?, 223.}


For Proudhon, what conditions the coexistence of formal equality with
substantive inequality is the possibility that the means of production can be
owned by a few, that they can become ‘‘property,’’ and so reduce the propertyless many to servitude; hence his famous formula, ‘‘property is robbery.’’\footnote{Ibid., 12.}


What has to be prevented is the concentration of wealth through the accumulation of aubaine.


Several economic institutions have been derived from these fundamental
mutualist postulates. Proudhon himself promoted the concept of free
credit—the socially provided loan ‘‘with a nominal interest rate to cover the
cost of administration’’—as an instrument with which to destroy the regime
of property; his ‘‘People’s Bank,’’ opened in 1849 (‘‘it quickly gathered
27,000 members’’) and closed down by police repression, was also to facilitate ‘‘the exchange of products among workers, based on labor cheques.’’\footnote{Woodcock, Anarchism, 120.}


In allowing workers to trade labor for labor and products for products, the
Bank would realize the principle of equality, in view of which ‘‘utility equals
utility,’’
‘‘function equals function,’’ ‘‘service pays for service,’’ and ‘‘one
day’s work equals another day’s work’’:\footnote{Proudhon, Selected Writings, 64.}



\begin{quote}


What must we do to make possible direct exchange, not only among three, four,
six, ten or one hundred traders, but among one hundred thousand, between all
producers and all consumers?
Simply this: centralize all the operations of commerce by means of a bank in
which all the bills of exchange, drafts and sight-bills representing the bills and
the invoices of the merchants, will be received. Then generalize or convert these
obligations into paper of equivalent value, which . . . will itself be a pledge of the
products or real values that these obligations represent.\footnote{Proudhon, Solution of the Social Problem, 67.}



\end{quote}


This creates a new instrument of exchange, a new form of monetary represen-
tation firmly tied to use-value through a mediation that is constitutionally
prevented from assuming the exploitative privilege of a middleman: as Lan-
dauer put it, ‘‘the exchange bank’’ would allow you to ‘‘sell your products
among all the mutually cooperating workers, without the intrusion of an ex-
ploiting intermediate.’’\footnote{Landauer, quoted in Lunn, Prophet of Community, 216.}


Some extensions of the ‘‘labor cheque’’ idea are visible in various attempts to create currencies that represent labor-time, such as Edgar S.


Cahn’s ‘‘Time Dollar’’ (which can be earned by providing a service to other
community participants and spent in exchange for a similar service, allowing
even unemployed and propertyless people to create and circulate wealth)
and Ithaca, New York’s ‘‘Ithaca HOUR’’ currency (each of which represents
ten U.S. dollars or one hour of labor at that wage). Michael Linton’s ‘‘Local
Exchange Trading System’’ (LETS) demonetarizes the exchange of labor altogether, creating a community-controlled database of services performed.


An even more inventive introduction of duration and materiality into monetary representation is that of the early twentieth-century Proudhonian economist Silvio Gesell, whose proposed ‘‘stamp scrip’’ currency (via a system of
monthly stamps, each of which represents one percent of the bill’s value)
loses value over time, builds in the systematic incentive of ‘‘negative interest’’ to motivate individual consumers to spend their notes quickly, keeping
wealth circulating, and punishing rather than rewarding those who hoard
wealth in order to accumulate it.\footnote{Hyde, The Gift, 259-60.}


The many and various attempts, in the mutualist tradition, to ‘‘ensure that
money truly represents the useful work performed by its possessors,’’ as Ma-
latesta observes, stem from the recognition that while ‘‘money is a powerful
means of exploitation and oppression . . . it is also the only means (apart from
the most tyrannical dictatorship or the most idyllic accord) so far devised by
human intelligence to regulate production and distribution automatically.’’\footnote{Malatesta, Life and Ideas, 101.}


The key term is ‘‘so far.’’ The collectivist economics developing from the
tradition of Bakunin continues Proudhon’s trajectory away from the essentially small-scale organizational form of the contract and toward that of federation, which permits much larger combinations of individual and group
effort, as well as a greater systematization and coordination of decision mak-
ing, while preserving individual freedoms and local initiative. The anarcho-
syndicalist program sketched by Abad de Santillan aims at creating a more
coherent economic system, taking advantage of the economic transparency
that can be achieved by excluding the arbitrary factors of aubaine. Under
capitalism, the real factors of production—‘‘Nature’’ (i.e., ‘‘raw material’’
and ‘‘natural forces’’), ‘‘Human Labor, manual and intellectual,’’ and ‘‘Machinery’’—were coupled with a host of unnecessary mediations: thus, agricultural production could only be accomplished via ‘‘rent,’’ ‘‘interest on
the capital,’’ ‘‘wages,’’ ‘‘profits,’’ and ‘‘government defence of private property’’ to keep the product from passing, unpaid-for, into the hands of those
the system had effectively pauperized.\footnote{Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution,11-13, 48.}


Such must have seemed particularly clear from the point of view of Spain
in the 1930s—a perpetually poor cousin of the family of Europe, in which
sheer lack of capital had created the intolerable paradox of tremendous potential economic capacity and actual stagnation: ‘‘Today, half of the people
of Spain dress raggedly and depend for food on a piece of black bread; for
half of Spain, fruit, in this land of fruit, is a luxury; half of the inhabitants of
cities live in slums, and on the land, in caves and hovels\dots{}
Half of Spain
is dressed in rags and textile workers cannot find anyone to employ their
skill and competence, while factories close and machinery rusts.’’\footnote{Ibid., 18-19.} Such
poverty is obviously artificial, the product of a deranged economy rather than
of any natural scarcity. The ‘‘supplies’’ concretely existed; the ‘‘demands’’
also clearly existed; yet the exchange economy could not manage to connect
the one with the other, since not enough investment could be found to develop the national resources, and the peoples’ needs and wants could not be
voiced in the vocabulary of money. Here, for Abad de Santillan, the distinction between nature and culture, reality and representation, must be vigorously reaffirmed: ‘‘No one would say that wheat would not grow in fields well
cultivated without land titles and police.’’\footnote{Ibid., 13.} The juridical and police function
is a waste of money, labor, and time: ‘‘If all the armed forces and government
employees alone were set to work on reforestation, construction of canals and
waterworks,’’ he estimates, ‘‘the present arid territories of Spain would become a potent source of agricultural wealth,’’ but instead, they are engaged
in nothing more useful than the protection of private property; indeed, there
is no other work for them. Hence, as Proudhon had argued, money is in no
real sense ‘‘a productive factor.’’\footnote{Ibid., 13, 23.} In the case of Spain, a system of ownership and profit had proved a massive barrier to production, ‘‘an obstacle to
progress and even to the very maintenance of life.’’ Hence, the lesson to be
drawn:



\begin{quote}


Under capitalism there is nothing unusual in this state of affairs because capital
is incapable of utilising all the resources of nature, science and human labor\dots{}
In a socialised economy, this spectacle would be impossible because production
would not follow the needs of a market, independent of the real needs of the
people, but would be in line with these needs; and so long as a single Spaniard
did not have sufficient clothing, there would be no reason to close a single textile
factory, or to make idle a single worker.



\end{quote}


Thus, the collectivist approach takes the challenge of determining ‘‘needs’’
and coordinating plans seriously, while rigorously requiring plans to be
made in a bottom-up, participatory manner, via a decentralized federation of
‘‘representative organisms.’’\footnote{Ibid., 19, 50.}


Proudhon’s Bank of the People reappears in this scheme as a ‘‘Council of
Credit and Exchange’’ that issues and regulates the monetary ‘‘symbol of
exchange’’ and provides ‘‘credit . . . based on the economic possibilities of
society and not on interests or profit,’’ and through which ‘‘products are bartered for machines, tools, clothing, food, etc., in accordance with the requirements and needs of producers and consumers,’’ as well as ‘‘Councils of
Economy’’ that tabulate ‘‘the necessities of the various guilds and of the consumers’’ in order to ‘‘increase and reduce and even suppress production in
accordance with needs.’’ However, in Abad de Santillan’s scheme, this considerable enterprise of economic information gathering, analysis, and planning would not only be the work of the specialized Councils, but would be
constantly initiated and intervened in by all the other ‘‘representative organisms’’ at work in society, including collectives of consumers as well as of
producers: for instance, he envisions ‘‘neighbourhood committees, which in
representing the residents, would propose improvements, reforms and other
necessities. This would give the population in general due expression of their
needs and would afford them the opportunity of solving their own problems.’’


Everywhere, in this society, in every part of everyday life, individuals are
engaged in small, face-to-face groupings, assessing what needs to be done
and what can be done, making and discussing proposals, casting votes and
giving instructions: ‘‘there, where everybody knows everybody, the practice
of democracy is possible.’’\footnote{Ibid., 50, 58, 64, 80, 87-88.} Taken in toto, this system seems to capture Fraser’s notion of a democratic procedure for negotiating the articulation of
human needs admirably.


Anarcho-communists, however, note that collectivist economics retains a
wage system, and therefore the possibility of distributive injustice. As Proud-
hon had warned, even wages that are subject to majority vote may be a reward of ‘‘90’’ units to someone’s ‘‘100’’ units of effort. Thus, Berkman warns
that ‘‘there is no way by which value can be measured,’’ since ‘‘worth’’ is
relative to all parties in a situation:



\begin{quote}


Suppose the carpenter worked three hours to make a kitchen chair, while the
surgeon took only half an hour to perform an operation that saved your life. If the
amount of labor used determines value, then the chair is worth more than your
life. Obvious nonsense, of course. Even if you should count in the years of study
and practice the surgeon needed to make him capable of performing the operation, how are you going to decide what ‘‘an hour of operating’’ is worth? The
carpenter and mason also had to be trained before they could do their work properly.
Even Proudhon’s banking system, with its exchange of products for products
and labor for labor, is vulnerable to this criticism: ‘‘Since the value of a
commodity cannot be adequately determined, no barter is equitable.’’\footnote{Berkman, Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism (New York: Vanguard Press, 1929), 196, 212.}



\end{quote}


This would be an abstract point if it were not a serious handicap for at
least some moments of anarcho-syndicalist practice. As Ackelsberg notes,
the lingering workerist biases of the CNT in Spain, through its ‘‘emphasis on
economic structures as the root of social organisation,’’ generated a focalizing representation of the political field that, ‘‘particularly in a society charac-
terised by a sharp sexual division of labour, raised serious questions for
women’’: namely, ‘‘How would women be involved?’’ By taking the workplace as the basic ‘‘organism of representation,’’ the syndicalist analysis left
‘‘domestic work,’’ including ‘‘arrangements for childcare or child-rearing,’’
out of the picture.\footnote{Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain, 8-9.} In this respect, it suffers a serious disadvantage even in
comparison to the reductivist representational practices of Marxist tendencies such as Autonomism that have attempted to ‘‘economize’’ housework,
situating women’s activity within the context of a ‘‘social factory.’’\footnote{May, Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 36.} The very
strengths of anarcho-syndicalism as a strategy for transformation—its ability
to simultaneously engage with and challenge existing capitalist structures
outside the State—prove a liability when it comes to non-monetarized forms
of practice, activities whose value has not already been quantified by those
structures. Thus, even the best-intentioned cenetistas were left with nothing
more to contribute than the repeated claim that men and women would be
equalized through coeducation and the entry of women into the sphere of
men’s work.


Even that sphere, in the Spanish experience, was no idyll. During the tempestuous time of the revolution, the CNT’s syndical structure was occasionally the scene of real disputes over wages. James Joll notes that ‘‘there were
quarrels in Valencia over the arrangements for marketing the orange crop,
when one orange-growing village revolted . . . because they claimed they
were not getting a fair price from the syndicalist committee which sold their
crops.’’\footnote{James Joll, The Anarchists (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 269.} Seidman argues that the Spanish working classes whom the CNT
‘‘claimed to represent’’ were ‘‘often more interested in pleasure than in labor
. . . [which] meant that workers’ desires sometimes conflicted with those of
the organizations that claimed to represent them.’’ The very ‘‘productivist’’
bias of CNT analyses, in which relations of production were made to represent the totality of social relations, were all too easily converted into a
‘‘supervisory’’ and ‘‘disciplinary’’ practice of speaking-for, one that provoked its own ‘‘workers’ resistance to work,’’ manifested in ‘‘indifference,
slow-downs, indiscipline, lateness, absenteeism, theft, and even sabotage
and outright violence.’’ Finding itself in charge of a large part of the Spanish
economy (a function thrust on it in part by its pragmatic decision to enter
the Popular Front government, a move denounced by many anarchists then
and since), the CNT became the new agent of labor discipline, using representations of value—wages and prices—to promote productivity, so that in
the end, ‘‘the anarchosyndicalists . . . were forced to jettison their theories
of workers’ democracy and participation to make the rank and file work
harder and produce more.’’\footnote{Seidman, Workers Against Work, introduction, 13.}


If, as Seidman indicates, the very logic of productivist representation, focalizing on the productive deed and a labor theory of value, is the source of
anarcho-syndicalism’s unfortunate destiny, perhaps the anarcho-communist
attention to needs and consumption is an antidote. For Berkman, use-value,
situationally defined by the needs of the user, is paramount. The unrepresentability of labor-value is one of the considerations that indicates, for
Berkman, the superiority of ‘‘social ownership and use; that is, to Communism, as the most practicable and just economic system.’’ The other is the
unrepresentability of rights. The ‘‘right of every one to the product of his
toil,’’ Berkman points out, assumes that ‘‘there is such a thing as an individual product’’—a naïve realist ontology undergirding certain practices of labeling representation that Kropotkin sums up as the ‘‘institutions of mine
and thine.’’\footnote{Berkman, Now and After, 212; Kropotkin, The Wage System (Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, n.d.), 12.} In the opening pages of The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin insists that ‘‘There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common
property, born of the past and the present . . . thousands of philosophers, of
poets, of scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of past centuries . . . upheld and nourished through life, both physically
and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all sorts.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, 45.} This interdependence and continuity are masked by a capitalist system that displaces
the politics of time into a politics of space, which it divides into private and
public, self and other, homeland and colony, interior and exterior, domestic
life and work life. As Ruth Chandler remarks, the ‘‘virtuous’’ of capitalist
class society are made to ‘‘feel so good’’ about their supposedly independent,
individual accomplishments that ‘‘they fail to see the durational politics, the
multitudes so to speak, running right thorough their ‘domestic interior.’ ’’\footnote{Ruth Chandler, e-mail to postanarchism listserv, March 2, 2003.}


Kropotkin is clear on this point: these accomplishments ‘‘have drawn their
motive force from the environment.’’ The upshot of his argument: ‘‘By what
right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense
whole and say—This is mine, not yours?’’ In the end, it is because ‘‘it is not
possible to evaluate every one’s part in the production of the world’s wealth’’
that the only truly just economy is communist: ‘‘All belongs to all.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, 45-46, 49.}


So anarcho-communists such as Kropotkin and Berkman, perhaps more
profoundly than Stirner, launch a critique of representation: they insist that
no system of labeling representation can adequately capture the essentially
collective productive activity of subjects. Seen from the standpoint of the
‘‘environment’’—an ecological way of naming community, that ‘‘impossible’’
object, that ungraspable totality—the individual subject disappears into a
multitude, an ‘‘all’’ that refuses to be represented.


Or rather, this totality refuses to be represented as a series of isolated
‘‘individuals.’’ For Kropotkin is not an antirepresentationalist. Indeed, the
point of The Conquest of Bread is that the community can adequately know
and name its own collective needs, desires, and capacities—in all the richness of its own diversity: ‘‘We know, indeed, that the producers . . . even
now produce such quantities of goods that a certain degree of comfort could
be brought to every hearth.’’\footnote{Ibid., 51.} The Conquest of Bread upends the logic of the
laissez-faire economists who piously condemn all ‘‘planning,’’ no matter how
decentralized, democratic, open, and participatory, as ‘‘authoritarian’’ and
‘‘irrational’’: where Hayek would insist that the community cannot represent
itself as a social whole, delegating this task of naming and knowing to ‘‘individual’’ acts of sale and purchase, Kropotkin shows that this fragmentation
of a functional ‘‘all’’ into so many atomized ‘‘individuals,’’ of the durational
‘‘environment’’ into so many private spaces or ‘‘domestic interiors,’’ is the
real falsehood. My part-time freedom as a consumer is bought at the expense
of someone else’s part-time slavery as a producer (as well as, ultimately, my
own). Here, then, an anarcho-communist representational strategy echoes
that of Proudhon’s mutualism in encouraging the identification of consumption and production, bringing these two moments of identity and action as
durationally and spatially close to one another as possible.


Ultimately, many anarchists have refused to make any one of the three
anarchist economic systems into an absolute, pragmatically preferring to envision a variety of anarchist mixed economies. ‘‘In each locality,’’ predicted
Abad de Santillan, ‘‘the degree of communism, collectivism or mutualism
will depend on the conditions prevailing. Why dictate rules? We who make
freedom our banner, cannot deny it in economy.’’\footnote{Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution, 97.} Even earlier, in 1892,
the Italian anarchist Saverio Merlino had suggested that ‘‘Pacts of association can differ much from each other’’: ‘‘In one association the workers will
pledge themselves to give a certain number of hours of work, in another to
carry out a given task in a definite time. The workers in one association will
prefer to put the products of their labour in common; others to take a part
proportionate to their work.’’ What is essential, as Malatesta emphasized, ‘‘is
that all should possess the means of production’’ so that none may ‘‘control
the natural wealth and the instruments of production and . . . thus oblige
others to work for them.’’\footnote{Merlino, quoted in Joll, The Anarchists, 163; Malatesta, Life and Ideas, 102-3.} According to Guérin, the CNT put this principle
into practice in the collectivization of farmland: in Catalonia, where ‘‘slightly
better off’’ peasants chose ‘‘individualism,’’ this choice was respected,
whereas in Aragón, ‘‘more than three-quarters of the land was socialized’’
with such popular enthusiasm that even a forced decollectivization imposed
by Stalinist ministers was partially undone by rebellious peasants who destroyed the deeds of ownership.\footnote{Guérin, Anarchism, 131, 133, 140-41.} The economic ‘‘all,’’ then, was appropriated both by and for the popular ‘‘all,’’ and the horizon of a communismo
libertario was not so terribly distant at all.

\chapter{11. The Critique of History as Representation}


AS CHAMSY OJEILI EXPLAINS, CLASSICAL MARXISM PROPOSED, ON ALTERNATE
occasions, two possible accounts of how historical materialist theory relates
to the history it attempts to understand. One account dictates an essentiall
contemplative position, for which theory, as a prisoner of the social context
in which it is born, is ‘‘always arriving too late,’’ understanding events fully
only in retrospect, rather than looking ahead to direct the movement; in this
case, since ‘‘communism is not an ideal,’’ but an outcome of the historical
process, so that ‘‘revolutions cannot be made,’’ all that theory can prescribe
is ‘‘attentisme’’ or ‘‘revolutionary waiting’’—the deterministic official dogma
of the Second International, but also a key element in the left-wing spontaneist heresies of Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, the early
Lukács, and others. The other account specifies an active ‘‘leading role’’ for
theory as ‘‘head of a coming emancipation’’:\footnote{Ojeili, ‘‘The ‘Advance Without Authority.’ ’’} since, in this essentially Leninist conception, the intellectual vanguard ‘‘[has] over the great mass of the
proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement,’’ the
possessors of scientific theory, as Marx says, ‘‘have raised themselves to the
level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole,’’
and so are entitled to a position of leadership.\footnote{Marx, quoted in Ojeili, ‘‘The ‘Advance Without Authority.’ ’’} In either case, correct, scientific theory is taken to be an accurate representation of the objective structure of history—its stages of development, its central conflicts, its
protagonists, and its ultimate conclusion—such that the possessors of this
theory are in at least some sense entitled to represent the class whose victory
history assures. Leninists, of course, assumed the privilege of speaking for
the proletariat, but Kautsky’s Second International also asserted its duty to
teach workers ‘‘their historical function’’ and ‘‘goals,’’ and even its own
spontaneist opposition engaged in agitation toward the revolution that they
regarded as inevitable.\footnote{Ojeili, ‘‘The ‘Advance Without Authority.’ ’’}


Accordingly, Ojeili sees the greatest ‘‘post-modernist challenge to socialist theory and practice’’ as ‘‘its sharp critique of representation,’’ which is
not only an ‘‘attack on the metaphor of the mind as a mirror of nature’’ but
also ‘‘on the aspiration for totalising theories of social order and history.’’


For Foucault, the very notion of a totalizing ‘‘revolution,’’ as opposed to local
and tactical ‘‘revolts,’’ appears in retrospect to have been part of a bid ‘‘to
domesticate revolts within a rational and controllable history.’’\footnote{Ibid.; Foucault, Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 2000), 450.} In its incredulity toward grand historical narratives, on this account, ‘‘postmodernism
is not delivering another narrative about history, just denying that history is
in any sense story-shaped’’; as Hayden White puts it, ‘‘a historian . . . who
tries to represent reality as if it had the kind of coherence that the well-
found, rounded story does, is really lapsing into some kind of fictivism, fictionalism.’’\footnote{Eagleton, Illusions of Postmodernism, 31; Hayden White, ‘‘The Ironic Poetics of Late Modernity: An Interview With Hayden White,’’ Historein: A Review of the Past and Other Stories, no. 2 (2000), \href{http://www.historein.gr/vol2\_interview.htm}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.historein.gr\Slash{}vol2\_interview.htm} (accessed 11 March 2005).}


If revolutionary metanarratives, no less than others, are now placed under
the sign of incredulity, then the suggested alternative is performativity.


Rather than a theory that constatively represents historical situations, one
constitutes theory as a practice, a brick to be hurled at the forces of authority, ‘‘an instrument for combat,’’ as Deleuze has it. This pragmatist alternative is not far from an older irrationalist theory of revolution as a ‘‘myth’’
through which one organizes subjects for action. Perhaps with an uncomfortable awareness of the history of that term, Rorty prefers the term ‘‘image’’ to
‘‘myth’’ or ‘‘ideology,’’ insisting that ‘‘calling a story ‘mythical’ or ‘ideological’ would be meaningful only if such stories could be contrasted with an
‘objective’ story’’; since there is no ‘‘nonmythological, nonideological way of
telling a country’s story,’’ such pejorative language has no bearing. Indeed,
objectivity is beside the point: ‘‘Nobody knows what it would be like to try
to be objective when attempting to decide what one’s country really is, what
its history really means, any more than when answering the question of who
one really is oneself, what one’s individual past really adds up to.’’ Instead,
what is important is ‘‘deciding what we will do next, what we will try to become.’’ From this perspective, Rorty condemns objections among the neo-
Marxian intellectuals of ‘‘the academic Left’’ to idealistic representations of
American identity as a useless distraction from meaningful political work.


Rather than contrasting a merely ‘‘ideological’’ conception of America as the
bearer of a democratic dream with its ‘‘real’’ history of colonial depredations
and cruel inequalities, he argues, we should reinforce that American mythos
in the service of its own realization: ‘‘there is no point in asking whether
Lincoln or Whitman or Dewey got America right. Stories about what a nation
has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation,
but rather attempts to forge a moral identity.’’\footnote{Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 11, 13, 15.} Instead of guiding political
practice via an ‘‘accurate representation’’ of history, one tells prophetic ‘‘stories’’ about history that one ‘‘fulfills’’ in action: ‘‘fulfillment,’’ as White explains, ‘‘has to do with someone in the present choosing something in the
past and fulfilling it by that choice in the present.’’\footnote{White, ‘‘The Ironic Poetics of Late Modernity.’’} In this way, political
progress will be spurred by the positive construction of what might be called
Narratives of National Greatness.


This pragmatist deployment of performativity does not sit well with everyone, however. Nancy Fraser worries about a certain ‘‘Romantic impulse’’
that makes itself felt in Rorty’s political writing, despite his personal preference for social democracy. Indeed, his ‘‘deification of the strong poet’’ and
‘‘fetishization of creation ex nihilo’’ carry strongly ‘‘individualist, elitist, and
aestheticist’’ connotations: ‘‘It takes only the squint of an eye to see here the
vision of a Georges Sorel: a ‘sociology’ that classifies humanity into ‘leaders’
and ‘masses,’ a ‘theory of action’ whereby the former mold the latter by
means of a sheer ‘triumph of the will,’ a ‘philosophy of history’ as an empty
canvas awaiting the unfettered designs of the poet-leader.’’\footnote{Fraser, Unruly Practices, 96.} It is, in fact, the
notion of history as ‘‘empty canvas’’ that licenses the manipulation of ‘‘the
masses’’ via what Sorel called revolutionary ‘‘myth.’’ If this antirepresentationalist politics is, as Rorty avers, a form of antiauthoritarianism, then it is
perilously close to Sorel’s incipiently fascist variety.


Apart from ethical qualms we might have about these Narratives of National Greatness, Rorty’s substitution of utility for truth begs an epistemological question: if these narratives represent nothing ‘‘true,’’ if they have no
relation to an objective history, then how can they possibly be ‘‘useful?’’


Even Rorty, after all, in his recourse to ‘‘causal pressures’’ that mysteriously
occasion practice, recognizes that ‘‘objectivity is a useful goal when one is
trying to calculate means to ends by predicting the consequences of action,’’
but prediction is a matter of relating what has happened in the past to what
is likely to happen in the future—and this what-has-happened has already
been evacuated from Rorty’s system.\footnote{Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 11.} No belief that tax cuts for the suburban
middle class empower the urban poor, no matter how fervently embraced
and put into action, is likely to help empower urban poor people, because
such a belief is unrelated to historical actuality.


Moreover, it is not clear how the sort of Narrative of National Greatness
that Rorty’s ‘‘strong poet’’ would construct could have the salutary effects
Rorty anticipates, given his pragmatist beliefs about the nature of interpretation. If it is simply true that all we ever do with texts is use them, so that
texts never determine their interpretations, then the poet could not possible
exercise any control over how readers of this Narrative would use it. Perhaps
they would read it in precisely the same fashion as the existing Narratives of
National Greatness (the reigning ideologies of American exceptionalism, the
classless society, individual freedom and opportunity, etc.)—that is, as a
pretext and justification for continued inequalities, imperial adventures, and
so on.


Even if the poet could somehow ‘‘predict’’ what kind of ‘‘causal pressures’’ his or her Narrative would exercise over people, it could only have
an effect on them to the extent that they took it for an accurate representation
of the sort Rorty takes to be impossible and unreal. No one will be willing to
act on the basis of beliefs that he or she believes to be completely without
relation to reality; therefore, if people were aware of the artificiality of this
Narrative, they would reject it as false. In fact, a Narrative of National Greatness functions in almost exactly the same manner as what Žižek calls ‘‘the
unconscious’’: it can only function by means of a not-knowing, a deception.


To propagate such a narrative would be to take Baudrillard’s nihilist option,
refusing ‘‘representation’’ in favor of ‘‘simulation’’—admitting ‘‘that the real
is no longer real’’; it would mean little more than a twist on the existing
society of simulation or spectacles.\footnote{Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 13.} Since means tend to determine ends in
political practice, the selection of such manipulative tools would seem to
foredoom Rorty’s politics to the reproduction of a technocratic form of life in
which people are instrumentalized, treated as tools.


An instrumentalist conception of history as tabula rasa hardly seems preferable to a teleological conception of history as progress toward a goal. However, if historical narratives cannot be founded on any objective reality, and
if there is no way for us to meaningfully compare them to other narratives in
terms of truth or utility, one wonders if any narrative is preferable to no
narrative at all. The problem is that contemporary theory of almost every
variety points to the inescapable narrativity of life: ‘‘we all live a great proportion of our lives in a surrender to stories about our lives, and about other
possible lives,’’ as Wayne Booth summarizes; ‘‘we live more or less in stories.’’\footnote{Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep, 14-15.} The gloomy conclusion to be drawn would appear to be that we are
left to ‘‘surrender’’ to any story whatsoever; as White ominously remarks,
even ‘‘nationaIist discourse,’’ while ‘‘in one sense . . . fictitious,’’ is ‘‘real’’
to the degree that it is ‘‘fulfilled’’ in collective practice.\footnote{White, ‘‘The Ironic Poetics of Late Modernity.’’}


While ‘‘suspicious’’ of scientism and vanguardism, however, ‘‘most anarchists have not rejected the aspirations of classical social theory,’’ as Ojeili
writes: ‘‘A rational, even scientific, social theory has therefore remained an
important goal for numerous anarchists.’’ In opposition to an ultimately less-
than-critical critique of historical representation, social anarchists have proposed not an ahistorical idealism, but an ecological conception in which history is represented neither as formless (taking place in a void of ‘‘quantum’’
indeterminacy) nor as rigidly teleological (‘‘genetically’’ deterministic). Evolutionary ‘‘development,’’ in this conception, is neither the unfolding of a
biological ‘‘essence’’ nor mere quantum ‘‘fluctuation’’: in a development,
every new moment is conditioned—not rigidly determined or foretold, but
dialectically potentiated—by what came before. As Bookchin writes, ‘‘It is
fatuous to challenge dialectical reason with promiscuous ‘what-ifs’ that have
no roots in a dialectical continuum. Every intelligible ‘if’ must itself be a
potentiality that can be accounted for as the product of a development. A
hypothetical ‘if’ that floats in isolation, lacking roots in a developmental continuum, is nonsensical.\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘A Philosophical Naturalism.’’} Accordingly, Bookchin criticizes the sort of ‘‘quantum’’ view of history as something formless that passively awaits but is
equivocal toward all our ‘‘narratives’’ as unacceptably ‘‘relativistic,’’ ‘‘a
skepticism that denies any meaning, rationality, coherence, and continuity
in History.’’ The dissolution of ‘‘History’’ by these analyses ‘‘into eclectically assembled ‘histories’ made up of a multiplicity of disjointed episodes,’’
into ‘‘a series of ‘accidents’ ’’ without either causality or significance—‘‘or
even worse, into myths that belong to ‘different’ gender, ethnic, and national
groups,’’ a collection of mere ‘‘imaginaries,’’ all of which are held to be
‘‘ideologically equatable’’ and
‘‘essentially discontinuous from one another’’—is merely a form of ‘‘ideological prophylaxis’’ devised by disillusioned leftists ‘‘to protect themselves from the still-unexorcised demons of a
tragically failed past.’’ Instead, Bookchin advises, intellectuals should face
the necessity of investigating the ‘‘dialectical continuum’’ within which we
are situated, seeking the ‘‘objective potentiality’’ for further developments
within the actuality of that historical and ecological matrix.\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘History, Civilization, and Progress; Outline for a Criticism of Modern Relativism,’’ Anarchy Archives: An Online Research Center on the History and Theory of Anarchism, 15 Feb. 1994, \href{http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist\_archives/bookchin/hiscivpro.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}dwardmac.pitzer.edu\Slash{}Anarchist\_Archives\Slash{}bookchin\Slash{}hiscivpro.html} (11 March 2005).}


This revalorization of the radical intellectual has drawn sharp challenges
from others in the anarchist community, wary of a return to any vanguardist
notion of ‘‘the intellectual or party as ruler-legislator, as privileged interpreter of the direction of history.’’\footnote{Ojeili, ‘‘The ‘Advance Without Authority.’ ’’} Regina Cochrane sees Bookchin as surreptitiously reinstating the ‘‘scientific authority’’ of the classical Marxist
theorist, who claimed a panoptical knowledge of history or nature as the
basis for leadership: ‘‘By precluding the questioning of central political
‘truths’ and imposing closure on consideration of alternate possibilities, such
‘objectivity’ acts in direct opposition to the democratic process . . . contributing, even if inadvertently, to the rise of new forms of political hierarchy.


Those with insight into the liberatory ‘truth’ become the new elite on the
basis of their expert understanding of natural tendencies.’’\footnote{Cochrane, ‘‘Left-Libertarian Ecopolitics and the Contradictions of Naturalistic Ethics: The Teleology Issue in Social Ecology,’’ Democracy \& Nature 6, no. 2 (July 2000): 163-64.} Indeed, Book-
chin avers, ‘‘I believe in a ‘vanguard,’ ’’ since ‘‘a minority social project that
advances views in opposition to the conventional wisdom of a time is usually
an avant-garde, or a vanguard.’’\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘Reply to Moore,’’ Social Anarchism, no. 20 (1995), \href{http://www.socialanarchism.org/sa20/20bookchin.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.socialanarchism.org\Slash{}sa20\Slash{}20bookchin.html} (accessed 11 March 2005).}


However, Bookchin’s acceptance of vanguardism is not unqualified. To
begin with, he balks at anything that looks too much like ‘‘a Leninist ‘general
staff’ that functions politically like a military organization.’’ Secondly, his
embrace of a certain version of Adorno’s ‘‘non-identity’’ limits intellectual
pretensions to absolute ‘‘truth’’ or ‘‘objectivity.’’ In addition, he insists that
the historical and ecological ‘‘totality’’ opened for investigation ‘‘is no teleological referent, whose evolving components are merely parts of a predetermined ‘Absolute.’’’ Instead, he defines ‘‘an objective potentiality’’ as a
something within a given actuality which ‘‘may or may not be actualized,
depending upon the conditions in which it emerges.’’\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘Reply to Moore’’; ‘‘History, Civilization, and Progress.’’} Thus, in numerous
works, Bookchin makes a bid ‘‘to examine those turning points in history
which could have led people to either achieve a rational, ecological society,
or an irrational, anti-ecological one’’: for instance,
in the era that immediately preceded the formation of the nation-state, Europe
stood poised at a fork in the historic road. Depending upon the fortunes of the
Comuneros and the sans culottes who packed the Parisian sections of 1793, the
future of the nation-state hung very much in the balance. Had the continent
moved in the direction of urban confederations, its future would have taken a
socially more benign course, perhaps even a more revolutionary, democratic, and
cooperative form than it was to acquire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
By the same token, it is quite unclear that an industrial capitalist development
of the kind that exists today was preordained by history . . . capitalism, like the
nation-state, was neither an unavoidable ‘‘necessity,’’ nor was it a ‘‘precondition’’
for the establishment of a cooperative or socialist democracy.\footnote{Bookchin, Remaking Society, 76, 89.}


In so denying representations of history and nature a ‘‘teleological referent,’’
Bookchin opens himself to the traditional Marxist accusation of a relapse
into idealism, as if rejecting an historical telos meant placing the fulcrum of
historical change outside of history altogether. On the contrary: for Book-
chin, as for the classical anarchists, no force comes from outside of the uni-
verse or even outside of humanity to impose a specific social order on us.


‘‘Government is the species,’’ Proudhon says, but ‘‘ORDER is the genus . . .
there are many ways of conceiving order.’’\footnote{Proudhon, General Idea, 129.} Human order is invented, not
discovered, but it is invented within historically given situations from the
material deposited there by history, and this history unfolds within parame-
ters controlled to some extent by nature. Where this diverges from the tradi-
tional sense given to Marx’s declaration that ‘‘men make their own history
. . . under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the
past’’ is in the perception that these ‘‘circumstances’’ almost always permit
a wider range of choices than is readily apparent from certain perspectives.\footnote{Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, 595.}


The claim that anarchism is ‘‘impractical,’’ argued Goldman, is tautologically derived from the reformist definition of ‘‘a practical scheme’’ as ‘‘a
scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions,’’ when ‘‘it is
exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could
accept these conditions is wrong and foolish’’; a revolutionary path understands anarchist practice as ‘‘a living force . . . constantly creating new conditions.’’\footnote{Goldman, Anarchism, 49, 63} The genetic perspective that views ‘‘existing conditions’’ as a
structure that makes agency impossible is no truer than a quantum perspective from which the revolution is always already happening, if only in your head.


In The Principle of Federation, for example, as Proudhon outlines the historical precedents for his project of the free federation of communes, he discovers a
‘‘Federalist Gaul’’ that posed at one time an alternative to
‘‘Monarchical France’’: ‘‘After the fall of the Western Empire, Gaul, conquered by the Franks, recovered under Germanic influence something like
a federal form which, being rapidly corrupted, became the feudal system.


The growth of towns could have revived the federal spirit, especially if they
had drawn their inspiration from the Flemish commune rather than the
Roman municipality: but they were absorbed by the monarchy.’’\footnote{Proudhon, Principle of Federation, 77.} Note the
use of phrases such as could have . . . rather than and if they had . . . but
they were: these indicate a far different manner of thinking about history
than that evidenced by, say, Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,
which mocks Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Owens for their ostensible assumption that


If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the
case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was
the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth.


That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an
inevitable event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development,
but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering.\footnote{Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, 685.}


Proudhon opposes to this necessitarian logic not a repudiation of all determinism or of any notion of historical circumstances as conditioning action
for the people operating within them, but a sense that the same set of circumstances could have conditioned other outcomes, because a plurality of forces
are always at play. Peter Kropotkin evokes just such a perspective in his
history of the medieval cities, which emphasizes the astounding conquest of
freedom achieved by municipal and guild structures before their eventual
corruption and subjugation.\footnote{Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, chs. 5 and 6.} Murray Bookchin takes up this chronicle in
his account of certain crucial ‘‘turning points in history.’’ On the terms of
Bookchin’s history, the extent to which ‘‘Europe genuinely vacillated for a
time’’ between the developmental possibilities offered by the civic and cooperative models on the one hand and the national and marketplace models on
the other simply illuminates the sense in which there have been ‘‘choices
between rational and irrational alternatives in history’’: ‘‘it is quite unclear
that an industrial capitalist development of the kind that exists today was
preordained by history . . . capitalism, like the nation-state, was neither an
unavoidable ‘necessity,’ nor was it a ‘precondition’ for the establishment of
a cooperative or socialist democracy.’’\footnote{Bookchin, Remaking Society, 76, 88, 119, 89.}


Just so, where Marxists see socialism as the product of capitalist development—Marx declares that ‘‘the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal
lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist’’—for anarchists
like Abad de Santillan, ‘‘the negation of the principle of authority of man
over man is not bound up with the realisation of a predetermined economic
level.’’ While anarchism requires ‘‘a certain level of culture, consciousness
of power and capacity for self-government,’’ these desiderata are not positively tied to technological forces of production: ‘‘anarchism can exist in
penury or in abundance.’’ More forcefully, Landauer insists that: ‘‘Socialism
\dots{}is possible at all times and with any kind of technology\dots{} no socialism
at all must come . . . [but] socialism can come and should come—if we want
it, if we create it.’’\footnote{Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution, 93; Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 109; Landauer, For Socialism, 74-75.}


In the absence of an historical ‘‘must,’’ social anarchists from Proudhon
to Bookchin have had to theorize the utopian hope of what can come by specifying practices through which what we want may be elicited. If the collective subjects and desires that make history happen are not produced in
clockwork fashion by a linear developmental process, then it follows that
they can be formed by human action. Just as the kind of practice that articulates and activates the desires of groups is direct democracy, the kind of
practice that creates groupings and instills desires is symbolic action (persuasion, identification, propaganda in the broadest sense). Accordingly, anarchist discourse tends to manifest itself as a series of propositions of the
form: Let us . . . where Marxist discourse tends to take on the form of declarations beginning: It is\dots{}
Where vanguardist theory ‘‘offers a comprehen-
sive analysis of the world situation,’’ as David Graeber writes, ‘‘anarchism
has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice.’’\footnote{Graeber, ‘‘Twilight of Vanguardism.’’}


But what of the last line of the Communist Manifesto, ‘‘WORKING MEN
OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE’’? Surely this is a constructive project of subject-formation, as well as an act of persuasion with prescriptive overtones?\footnote{Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, 500.}
It is true that Marx and Engels sometimes understand what they are doing
in writing as a form of material social practice, performative ‘‘interventions’’
in history;\footnote{Paul-F. Tremlett, ‘‘Borg: A Critical Encounter,’’ Anarchist Studies 7, no. 2 (October 1999): 172.} however, their tendency is to regard any instance of ethical talk
as another lapse into the idealist ‘‘social reformer’’ mind set, a failure to
think in terms of the ‘‘inevitable event’’ rather than what ‘‘might’’ be. This
is part of why Marx frequently and forcefully declined to sketch out a model
for the communist future, a reticence that Kropotkin impugned as foolish:
‘‘To tell people, ‘First let us abolish autocracy or capitalism, and then we
will discuss what to put in its place,’ means simply to deceive oneself and
others.’’\footnote{Frank E. Manuel, A Requiem for Karl Marx (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 158; Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlet, 156.}


When there is no question about a ‘‘choice’’ in history, then there is no
sense in imagining or planning a future—and particularly no sense in exploring the question of what kinds of political institutions might be suitable
to such a life, since politics are epiphenomenal to material development anyway.\footnote{This is one of the loopholes exploited by the creators of the twentieth century’s ‘‘actu-ally existing socialisms,’’ who found it convenient to simply redescribe whatever they were doing as building the communist future.} Even a brilliant later Marxist such as Gramsci, whose Marxism emphasized the priority of practice, could only imagine a Marxist ethics in
terms of ‘‘a search for the conditions necessary for the freedom of the will in
a certain sense, aimed at a certain end, and the demonstration that these
conditions exist.’’ Until these conditions pertain, the primary question is
what means will most efficiently produce the required ends—a technical
question, not an ethical one.\footnote{Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 409-10.}


Lewis Hyde is not entirely wrong when he describes anarchism as rooted
in ethics rather than in politics as such: anarchist politics have always been
centered simply in an opposition to domination in all its forms (whether emanating from capital, state, church, family, or from other institutions, social
conventions, or features of everyday life).\footnote{Hyde, The Gift, 90. The consistency with which this perhaps never-present ‘‘all’’ has been critiqued has improved particularly following the feminist, ecologist, and antiracist interventions that determined the reconstruction of theory in the sixties and seventies. These interventions affected all varieties of radical theory, but as Murray Bookchin points out, anarchism has been more structurally flexible, hence more readily able to respond to and incorporate the theoretical demands of the ‘‘new social movements.’’} Various analyses of the specific
forms of domination have followed from this principle, but it is the principle
itself that is determining in the development of the thought of the movement.


Anarchist theory distinguishes itself from other political theories by its distinct relation to the ethical.\footnote{By the same token, paradoxically, it has a particularly close relation to some varieties of feminism that have never been comfortably situated within Marxist or postmodern theoretical frameworks, and that also center on a negation of hierarchy or domination per se as opposed to any particular instantiation of them (capitalist or precapitalist, Western or non-Western, and so on). See, for instance, Carol Ehrlich’s essay in Women and Revolution: A Discussion of ther Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1981) and essays in Reinventing Anarchy, Again.} In general, where the relative emphasis in
Marxist discourse is on a description of the actual and an appeal to necessity,
we can find in anarchist discourse an emphasis not only on a denunciation
of the actual, but on an evocation of the possible that pushes the discourse
into a prescriptive mode.


Does anarchist historical narrative succeed in articulating a relationship
between description and prescription that avoids the extremes of Kautskyan
descriptivism and Sorelian prescriptivism? Philip Winn sees a return of
Kautskyism in Bookchin’s appeal to evolution, which he sees as a discourse
with its own hierarchical implications. By situating culture within nature,
attributing dialectical patterns of development simultaneously to both, Bookchin seems to lend support to his own version of a teleological (and inevitably ethnocentric) historical narrative, complete with stages of development and a final goal.\footnote{Philip Winn, ‘‘Social Ecology—Some Concerns,’’ The Anarchist, no. 1 (October 1994), \href{http://www.spunk.org/texts/pubs/theanarc/1/sp000740.txt/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.spunk.org\Slash{}texts\Slash{}pubs\Slash{}theanarc\Slash{}1\Slash{}sp000740.txt} (accessed 11 August 2003).}


However, things are not quite this simple. From Bookchin’s perspective,
‘‘primitive’’ societies, despite their constitutive weaknesses (namely, their
attachment to the ethnic particularism of ‘‘the blood-tie’’), have a lot to teach
‘‘advanced’’ industrial societies about social solidarity and ecological economy: in fact, since monocultural industrialism has produced a destructive
‘‘homogenization of the social environment and the so-called individuals
who people it,’’ the very notion ‘‘that our society is more complex than earlier cultures’’ is laughable. Nor is any Marxian return of ‘‘primitive’’ communism at a ‘‘higher’’ stage inevitable; the final product of capitalism and
statism may be ecocide.\footnote{Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, 42-43, 46-48, 53, 138, 366.} However, without quite endorsing a rigid teleology, Bookchin argues that ‘‘there is some kind of directionality toward ever-
greater differentiation or wholeness insofar as potentiality is realized in its
full actuality.’’ When this development assumes a morally intelligible
shape—when what emerges is not only causally explicable, but ethically justified—we can retrospectively call this development ‘‘rational.’’\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘A Philosophical Naturalism.’’}


Human history, from this point of view, is not simply a catalogue of events,
nor even a structure of cause-and-effect explanations, but the rational content and continuity of events . . . that are grounded in humanity’s potentialities for freedom, self-consciousness, and cooperation, in the self-formative
development of increasingly libertarian forms of consociation. It is the rational ‘infrastructure,’ so to speak, that coheres human actions and institutions
over the past and the present in the direction of an emancipatory society and
emancipated individual.’’\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘History, Civilization, and Progress.’’} In other words, events may produce evil outcomes, but to the extent that this is the case, they are, on Bookchin’s terms,
irrational, an ‘‘incomplete, aborted, irrational ‘what-is’ ’’ in place of a ‘‘complete, fully developed, rational ‘what-should-be’ ’’—and thus, by definition,
ahistorical. Thus, while Bookchin eliminates the metaphysical concept of an
end of history, let alone a final synthesis in which all merely particular differences are abolished, he appeals to ‘‘the vision of an ever-increasing wholeness, fullness, and richness of differentiation and subjectivity.’’\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘A Philosophical Naturalism.’’}


This revision of Hegelian dialectics has prompted some confusion and
attracted criticism. Joff Bradley reads Bookchin’s appeal to notions of
‘‘wholeness’’ as evidence of an unconscious complicity with ‘‘Hegel’s grand
narrative of the unfolding and omnivorous ‘Spirit.’ ’’\footnote{Joff Bradley, ‘‘The Possibility of an Antihumanist EcoAnarchism,’’ Research on Anarchism Forum, 14 September 2004, \href{http://raforum.apinc.org/article.php3?id\_article=1765/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}raforum.apinc.org\Slash{}article.php3?id\_article=1765\Slash{}} (accessed 10 March 2005), 5.} Likewise, Cochrane
points out that Bookchin sometimes uses an insidiously teleological language in which ‘‘what he refers to as ‘real’ human ‘potentialities’ ’’ are distinguished from ‘‘ ‘monstrous’ and ‘episodic’ human ‘capacities’ ’’; within this
scheme of definitions, it is tautologically true that ‘‘humans have a capacity
but no potential to deliberately inflict harm on others.’’ While Bookchin does
not postulate any guarantee that our capacities for self-destruction won’t
overwhelm our potentials for self-rule, he nonetheless disqualifies the former
as part of ‘‘history’’ per se; the story of their unfolding is merely a record of
meaningless ‘‘events,’’ ‘‘accidental or eccentric’’ contingencies, social ‘‘failures,’’ political ‘‘setbacks,’’ ‘‘aberrations,’’ or ‘‘horrors,’’ an endless list of
‘‘aborted or distorted’’ developments.\footnote{Cochrane, ‘‘Left-Libertarian Ecopolitics,’’ 168-69; Bookchin, quoted in Cochrane, ‘‘Left-Libertarian Ecopolitics,’’ 168.}


Granted, at his weakest moments, Bookchin seems to imagine that ‘‘nature
itself’’ could somehow ‘‘ ‘write’ natural philosophy and ethics.’’\footnote{Bookchin, quoted in Cochrane, ‘‘Left-Libertarian Ecopolitics,’’ 169.} However,
anarchists need not make any profound ontological distinction, as Bookchin
chooses to do, between a good potentiality and a bad capacity, nor need we
think of either potentiality or capacity in the singular. The more traditional
anarchist assumption, shared by Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, is that
we have many potentials and capacities, some good, some bad. We can still
agree with Bookchin that nothing is ‘‘predetermined’’ and that any dialectics
that issues in an end of history is really a form of Platonic idealism that is
incompatible with ecology.\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘History, Civilization, and Progress’’; ‘‘A Philosophical Naturalism.’’} We can also agree that while much of human
history is ‘‘merely a series of revolting crimes,’’\footnote{Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, 134.} it still manifests a certain
developmental logic in which what should be is conditioned by what can be,
which in turn is causally conditioned by what is and what has been. Even
more importantly, we can accept Bookchin’s critical observation that historical narratives that give events a retrospective appearance of necessity frequently mask any number of alternative potentials—and moreover, that
among these counterfactual could-have-beens are any number of should-
have-beens whose recovery and remembrance alone serves as a rebuke to
the inadequacies of the status quo that came to be in their place. Bookchin’s
overall historiographical project—to make ‘‘the historic unconscious’’ conscious by distinguishing a posteriori between the ‘‘legacy of domination’’ and
the ‘‘legacy of freedom,’’ legacies that have become so densely ‘‘intertwined’’ that ‘‘the language of freedom becomes interchangeable with that of
domination’’—is still sound. It is not far from Kropotkin’s proposal for something like a genuinely social ‘‘history of the origin and development of past
revolutions,’’ which would liberate these histories from the conservative
ideological representations that mediate between them and ourselves, and in
which ordinary working people would occupy the foreground rather than
merely serving as a backdrop to great men.\footnote{Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, 41; Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 186.}


It would be misleading to attribute Bookchin’s views to the entire social
anarchist tradition, which is certainly theoretically diverse enough. Proudhon’s engagement with Hegel was complex and ambiguous, to say the least,
and Kropotkin rejected Hegel’s ‘‘dialectic method’’ altogether as a form of
metaphysics.\footnote{Kropotkin, Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 151-52.} Still, for all his quarrels with Hegel, Proudhon could still
write that ‘‘the dialectical series is the queen of thought,’’\footnote{Proudhon, Oeuvres, 5.193, translation mine.} and Kropotkin’s
own conception of a human species constituted, both in its needs and capacities, by an evolutionary process (which thereby conditions but does not predestine what we can become) is for the most part contiguous with Bookchin’s
use of dialectics. Neither Proudhon, Bakunin, nor Kropotkin would resist the
general thrust of Bookchin’s argument toward an affirmation—colored by an
understanding of ecology and evolutionary biology unavailable to Hegel—
that ‘‘Being is not an agglomeration of fixed entities and phenomena but is
always in flux, in a state of Becoming,’’ and that any transformative politics
must elaborate its project in terms of a logical development from a potential
subsisting in the objectively existing present.\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘A Philosophical Naturalism.’’}


There certainly is a strain within anarchism, particularly in times when a
dramatic upheaval seems imminent, that sees all history as culminating in
the Revolution conceived as a single event, a total break with the past—the
Grand Soir, as it was called in the nineteenth century. However, most anar-
chist theory, eschewing such a monological and linear history, articulates
a far more open-ended and unpredictable notion of progress and change.


Malatesta, among others, scoffed at the idea that we must ‘‘remain passive
spectators, awaiting the right moment to present itself’’;\footnote{Malatesta, The Anarchist Revolution, 80.} in fact, the development of anarcho-syndicalism was an effort to dispense with such revolutionary waiting—the revolutionary trade union, refusing to play by the rules
set by the State, would win such concrete victories as it could here and now,
while building up an independent workers’ power in preparation for general
strikes and general political contestation.\footnote{Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, 86-89.} April Carter offers a useful summary of anarchist political strategy when she observes that the apparent reformism of engaging in labor struggles is really one of two general anarchist
strategies: just as important as a campaign of resistance ‘‘to erode the power
of those at the top—a power in reality springing from the co-operative action
of the social group as a whole—by withdrawing co-operation and refusing to
obey orders’’ is the constructive effort ‘‘to build up independent communities and organizations within the existing State, and so create a new society
in embryo’’—that is, ‘‘forming the new society within the shell of the old,’’
in the words of the IWW Preamble.\footnote{Carter, Political Theory of Anarchism, 107; IWW Preamble, quoted in Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1967), 1.} An anarchist ‘‘process of revolution,’’
as described by Staughton Lynd, would not be reducible to a single event,
an Opening of the Bastille or a Storming of the Winter Palace; it starts when
by demonstrations or strikes or electoral victories in the context of supplementary
direct action, the way a society makes its decisions is forced to change. This is
something very real even when the beginnings are small. It means, not just that
a given decision is different in substance, but that the process of decision-making
becomes more responsive to the ordinarily inarticulate. New faces appear in the
group that makes the decision, alternatives are discussed in advance, more bodies have to be consulted. As the revolutionary situation deepens, the broadening
of the decision-making process becomes institutionalized. Alongside the customary structure of authority, parallel bodies—organs of ‘‘dual power,’’ as Trotsky
called them—arise. All that had been closed and mysterious in the procedure of
the parent institution becomes open and visible in the workings of its counterpart
. . . a new structure of representation develops out of direct democracy and controlled by it.\footnote{Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, 171-72.}


This reconstructive project was elaborated through theories of historical
change that dissolved the absolute opposition between sudden political ‘‘revolution’’ and gradual social ‘‘evolution’’: these were, Reclus argued, really
only the same phenomenon taking place at different speeds.\footnote{Reclus, ‘‘Evolution and Revolution.’’} ‘‘When a dam
bursts,’’ as Malatesta put it, ‘‘it is either because the pressure of the water
has become too great for the dam to hold any longer or because of the gradual
disintegration of the molecules of which the matter of the dam is made. In
the same way revolutions break out under growing pressure of those forces
which seek social change and the point is reached when the existing government can be overthrown and when, by processes of internal pressure, the
forces of conservatism are progressively weakened.’’\footnote{Malatesta, Anarchist Revolution, 81.} Thus, far in advance
of May’s suggestion that when power is no longer seen as emanating from a
single source, we dispense with the reformist\Slash{}revolutionary binary, Malatesta
declares that ‘‘anarchism has and always will be reformist’’ and that, as anarchists, ‘‘we are revolutionaries.’’\footnote{May, Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 55; Malatesta, Anarchist Revolution, 80.}


As Arendt points out, it was Proudhon, not Trotsky, who coined the term
‘‘révolution en permanence.’’\footnote{Proudhon, quoted in Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 51.} By speaking of the revolution as a permanent
state of affairs, he put a distance between the Jacobin notion of a final and
definitive overturning of social relations and a far less foreseeable evolution-
ary\Slash{}revolutionary process, a never-complete progrès toward a future that is
always other.\footnote{Gareth Gordon, ‘‘Horizons of Charge: Deconstruction . . .’’ 55-56.}

\chapter{12. The Critique of Identity as Representation}


AS JAMESON INDICATES IN HIS INTRODUCTION TO LYOTARD’S POSTMODERN
Condition, a major component of the crisis of representation in politics is the
demise of collective subjects. Without an all-encompassing ‘‘human nature’’
or ‘‘class interest’’ to produce unity among people (in the form of a ‘‘human’’
or ‘‘proletarian’’ subject), it would seem that the New Social Movements fill
this gap with group identities organized by constellations of affinity (gender,
ethnicity, race, sexuality, ability, age, etc). In place of an opposition between
‘‘the ruling class’’ and ‘‘the working class,’’ we can distinguish regions along
a continuum of identities, from those occupying a cultural ‘‘center’’ to those
relegated to the social ‘‘margins.’’ However, since these identities are not
essential but contextual, the center\Slash{}margins scheme is ambiguous at best:
one may be privileged in terms of some identity (say, gender or race) while
marginalized in other respects (e.g., sexuality). Thus, ‘‘identity politics’’
fractures almost from the beginning, as each group—Women’s Liberation,
Gay Liberation, Black Power, etc.—finds its own apparent homogeneity
crisscrossed by all the others, inaugurating the ‘‘differences among women’’
period in feminism. The resulting reshuffling of categories translates ‘‘identity politics’’ into ‘‘coalition work.’’\footnote{Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: Case Study of an Emerging Movement and its Relation to the Policy Process (New York: David McKay Co., Inc., 1975), 57, 99; Bernice Johnson Reagon, ‘‘Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,’’ in Changing Our Power: An Introduction to Women Studies, ed. Jo Whitehorse Cochran et al. (Dubuque, IA: Kendall\Slash{} Hunt Publishing Co., 1991), 312.}


While in important respects this process was a necessary, perhaps even a
‘‘dialectical’’ reconstitution of unity through difference, it has too often produced this unity in the form of unstable alliances and single-issue reformist
activism. The promise of empowerment through diversity has yet to be realized. In this sense, what some more traditional leftists dismiss as identity
politics is the product of a general collapse of concepts of identity,\footnote{Barbara Foley, review of Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, by Paula L. M. Moya and Michael Hames-Garcia, eds., in Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice 4, no. 2 (Spring 2001), \href{http://eserver.org/clogic/4-2/foley.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}eserver.org\Slash{}clogic\Slash{}4-2\Slash{}foley.html} (accessed 11 March 2005).} and it
cannot be transcended by any amount of wishing for the good old days when
we all supposedly knew that ‘‘in the last analysis,’’ class counted for the
most. As long as large, stable collective identities can be rejected as false,
reductivist representations of the Many as the One, no amount of pining for
a lost ‘‘hierarchy’’ of absolute political priorities, à la Eagleton, will convince
others to return to them.\footnote{Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, 113.} How, then, can universals be formulated without
subsuming diversity into sameness, without annihilating difference for the
sake of collective action?


One response is to deny that any such need for universality exists. In this
case, universals as such appear to be a form of domination, perhaps the form
of domination, against which one must struggle; that is, we could embrace a
politics of difference, a positive multiculturalism. If universalizing claims
always place one in the position of speaking for others, then, as May writes,
‘‘the first ethical principle to which poststructuralism is committed is that
practices of representing others to themselves—either in who they are or in
what they want—ought, as much as possible, to be avoided.’’ Of course, May
amends this sweeping maxim when he denies that ‘‘the problems of telling
people who they are’’ should prohibit us from ‘‘telling people what—at least
in some cases—they ought to do.’’ However, this distinction between
‘‘ought-claims’’ and ‘‘is-claims’’ is as fragile as the entire distinction between fact and value, since what one is and can be bears on what one can
and ought to do. Moreover, since there is no hard and fast distinction between claims about what is the case and claims about who one is (e.g., if the
Holocaust is a real historical event, then one who denies it is a liar), it is not
clear that the seemingly modest injunction against ‘‘telling people who they
are’’ is modest enough to avoid sliding into an epistemological relativism
that prohibits one from telling people what is the case. Thus, while May
wishes to stop short of a ‘‘full-blown relativism . . . that would recommend
withholding all ethical judgment on those who do not share our discourse,’’
which he regards as an ‘‘unpersuasive’’ stance, he does find ‘‘a certain kind
of cultural relativism . . . compelling.’’\footnote{May, Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, 132, 133, 151.}


Some, of course, have gone much further, arguing that discarding the category of the
‘‘human’’ entails scrapping the universalizing concepts of
‘‘human rights’’—and about time, too, since what was dressed as universality was really just another historically local, culturally particular set of notions, appropriate to modern Western societies, but inappropriately forced
on non-Western people, who if left to themselves would apply their own canons of judgment. This line of argument, of course, falls into the familiar traps
of cultural relativism: to say that ‘‘nothing must impair difference’’ is to contradict oneself immediately, for the totalizing concept of ‘‘difference’’ is at
war with the ‘‘nothing’’ that makes it total, so that one must either betray the
principle by imposing it on others in practice or by failing to put it into practice at all. In this sense, Reiner Schürmann would argue, May’s antirepresentational ‘‘principle’’ is a contradiction in terms, not only because such a
principle would compel one to respect, for instance, the self-serving relativism of a dictator like Daniel Arap Moi (who claims that democracy is a Western value, culturally inappropriate for African tribal societies), but also since
antirepresentational ‘‘an-archism’’ is directed against the very notion of first
principles or ‘‘arché’’ from which all else is to be derived as from an origin
or foundation.\footnote{Ibid., 133; Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Reiner Schürmann and Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 49.}


Another response, apparently more ethically robust, is to see universals
not as a bad political practice, but simply as the form in which political
practice has to take place. Just as, for Foucault, the play of power cannot be
eliminated but is coextensive with life, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau
regard the struggle of universalizing discourses to capture the discursive
field as inescapable—indeed, as inherent in the very definitions of discourse
and universality: ‘‘Any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate
the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre.’’ Every universal, they argue, is an instrument of power, a means of creating unity among people—for better or for worse. As Hayden White
remarks, a nationalist ideology can be an effective unifying force just as easily as can, say, a proletarian internationalism or a culturalist regionalism.\footnote{Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 112; White, ‘‘The Ironic Poetics of Late Modernity.’’}


Likewise, Best and Kellner note, apropos of Deleuze and Guattari’s libidinal
politics, that desires can produce their own repression when it is incorporated into fascist assemblages instead of those representing its real ‘‘interests’’—a strange criterion to apply, since on their own terms, desire cannot
be accurately represented. Since desire doesn’t seem equipped with any immanent preference for one form of investment over another, it is difficult for
Deleuze and Guattari to explain why radical investments of desire are better
than conservative or reactionary ones; from a purely ‘‘machinic’’ point of
view, a functional unity is a functional unity, regardless of what that function
happens to be.\footnote{Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, 94, 108.}


Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony unmasks all these forms of unity
as false and incomplete: the postulated ‘‘centre’’ of social relations is always
imaginary, and a ‘‘final’’ stitching-up or ‘‘suture’’ of differences into unity is
impossible. Every idea of the social as a completed whole is a fantasy. Ultimately, the ‘‘impossibility of closure’’ means ‘‘the impossibility of ‘society.’ ’’


The ‘‘representation’’ of unity is based on nothing, but this fictitious unity is
‘‘at the same time . . . a principle organizing actual social relations.’’ Therefore, the radical task is to produce a new organizing principle, to suture a
disparate collection of forces into a functional unity, an ‘‘articulation,’’ for
the purposes of socialist transformation.\footnote{Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 86, 105, 119, 122, 136.}


This is a clever end-run around the problems accruing to class theories;
rather than searching for a solid ontological basis for political action, Laclau
and Mouffe take political action as what organizes an ontological field that
is formless in itself. As Fuss puts it, this constitutes a reformulation of coalition work as normative for politics, rather than an available but impaired
mode of political action in the absence of a unified class subject—in short,
‘‘an anti-essentialist reading of ‘class’ as a product of coalition.’’ Even if the
class called women is without ontological purchase, a representation of no
preexisting subject, it can take on reality by calling a subject into existence:


‘‘Fictions of identity . . . are no less powerful for being fictions.’’\footnote{Fuss, Essentially Speaking, 36, 104.} Instead of
seeing politics as the epiphenomenal appearance of a material struggle centered on the economic category of class, we can see it as a properly political
struggle over representation. Moreover, as Althusser wished, Mouffe and
Laclau avoid the embarrassments of Hegelian idealism, with its inherent essentialism. For Hegel, as Geras explains, ‘‘the apparent complexity of the
social whole was merely apparent since its multiple aspects were always
traceable and therefore reducible in the end to an original common essence,
itself a moment or stage in the development of the world spirit. The diverse
and manifold appearances of the Hegelian totality were expressions of this
unique spiritual essence, which was present and more or less legible in them
all. The outwardly complex thus gave way to the essentially simple.’’\footnote{Norman Geras, Discourses of Extremity: Radical Ethics and Post-Marxist Extravagances (London: Verso, 1990), 68.} The
theory of hegemony, by contrast, affirms ‘‘the openness of the social as the
constitutive ground or ‘negative essence’ of the existing.’’\footnote{Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 95.} Contrary to orthodox political theories, the social does not require a totalizing representation, an essence, in order for political action to go forward.


Or does it? Is a negative essence not still an essence? Geras denies that
Laclau and Mouffe have actually transcended totalization. Instead, like Althusser, they produce their own reductivism: every politics is guilty of essentialism. The differences among political positions are leveled, erased. In
short, Althusser, Mouffe, and Laclau each reduce all politics to ‘‘reductionist
error,’’ the reiteration in different forms of ‘‘the reductionist assumption of
an original essence.’’ Within their theory, ‘‘a quite enormous variety of
ideas, idioms, philosophical and cultural lineages, may be seen to derive
from, for having been all but reduced to, a single common essence, that species of error that Laclau and Mouffe today freely call ‘essentialism.’ ’’\footnote{Geras, Discourses of Extremity, 70.}


Apart from the logical problems of this position—an antiessentialist politics that essentializes politics—Laclau and Mouffe also face an ethical problem. If all politics is the invention of identity ex nihilo through discourse,
why form this kind of hegemonic identity instead of another? Why suture A
to B and not to C, D, or E? It is telling that the theory of suture comes to
them from Lacan by way of film theory: it is an aesthetic concept, not an
ethical one. They risk the same Sorelian trap that Rorty falls into, in which
the decision that forms a social constellation seems to be everything, so that
it matters not whether one decides, as the anarchists did, to constellate workers’ power and struggle against the state with racial equality, or to constellate, as Sorel did, workers’ power and the struggle against the state with anti-
Semitism. The choice of organizing myths seems arbitrary, relative. As if
aware of this, Laclau now seems to be seeking an ethos within the theory of
hegemony: what is ethical and democratic, he contends, is not to hide the
instrumentality of hegemonic articulation, so that what is really a political
decision appears as a decision rather than as a natural given: as Critchley
explains, while ‘‘a naturalizing or essentializing politics’’ is ‘‘tacitly hegemonic,’’ constantly engaged in rendering ‘‘invisible’’ its own discursive ‘‘operations of power and force,’’ a truly ‘‘democratic’’ political practice would
be ‘‘explicitly hegemonic.’’\footnote{Critchley, ‘‘Is There a Normative Deficit in the Theory of Hegemony?’’ 3-5.}


This would seem to make sense. If, as Richards puts it, the deconstruction
of identities seems to imply that ‘‘the game is over,’’ a more optimistic way
of reading these findings would be to conclude that deconstruction simply
teaches us ‘‘how they were put together’’: ‘‘Now we can put symbolic structures together, as humans have been doing for centuries . . . using all the
resources and techniques humans have ever used.’’\footnote{Richards, Letters From Quebec, 2.50.13.} But to construct a symbolic structure in the clear light of the awareness that one is constructing it
does not guarantee that this structure will be democratic or ethical; perhaps
one is behaving in a Machiavellian fashion, without illusions, in one’s own
naked self-interest, so that one may stand at the center of the structure while
relegating others to its margins. But such a decision cannot be made noble
by the cynical admission that one is pursuing power for its own sake: Sorel’s
suturing of syndicalism to anti-Semitism, exploiting the revolutionary myth
of the Jew as capitalist, is no less an egregious case of scapegoating for being
committed in the awareness of its mythical function. The problem remains
that Laclau and Mouffe have lamely positioned themselves as simultaneously insisting that there are no real universally shared interests, only effectively persuasive political identities—and that we should construct a
universally shared political identity from this nothing. Hence the ‘‘normative
deficit’’ that Critchley perceives in their theory.\footnote{Critchley, ‘‘Is There a Normative Deficit in the Theory of Hegemony?’’ 20.}


Genuinely radical movements require a firmer ethical grounding than this.


The decision to suture workers’ power to antistatism cannot be persuasively
justified by a shrug and the admission that one has simply chosen to because
one has chosen to. If political identities are only effective insofar as they are
taken to be real, natural, given, rather than merely made-up, then we have
no reason to expect that such a fiat would be any more effective than Rorty’s
openly artificial Narratives of National Greatness; as fantasies of unity, they
take place within the unconscious, which is what has to hide itself in order
to take effect. Politics is the operation of power, and power is constantly
trying to pass itself off as something else, to make itself invisible.


The ethical problems entailed in Laclau and Mouffe’s antirepresentation-
alism have an epistemological corollary as well. If, as Geras argues, ‘‘an ‘essence’ will always be discoverable’’ in any ‘‘principle or principles of
explanation,’’ then every ‘‘explanatory project’’ will always be vitiated by
essentialism, a priori. Indeed, this is implicit in the very antirepresentationalist thrust of their program, since an ‘‘explanation’’ is a ‘‘representation’’ of
how things are; an unrepresentable ‘‘society’’ is, by the same token, unknowable, and its operations of power are inexplicable. This claim goes considerably beyond a mere revision of Marxist categories, a principled objection to
the economic reductivism of claims to the effect that ‘‘class position is the
primary historical determinant of social and political identities’’ or that ‘‘relations of production’’ have ‘‘explanatory primacy’’; it is tantamount to denying ‘‘that society can be rendered intelligible’’ at all. Ultimately, Geras
argues, Laclau and Mouffe seem unable to distinguish between a specific
argument that discourse helps to shape the political field and a generalized
claim that ‘‘there is no pre-discursive objectivity or reality, that objects not
spoken, written, or thought about do not exist.’’\footnote{Geras, Discourses of Extremity, 66, 71, 97.} This, in turn, leads to more
ethical problems. First of all, it is questionable whether such an extreme
antirealism is compatible with any kind of political action at all, since it
seems to preclude any reference to nondiscursive, nonarbitrary, nonvoluntary conditions, thereby threatening to collapse into a linguistic solipsism
that calls the very need for political action into question.\footnote{If nothing is outside of representation—or, more precisely, if nothing is anything apart from how it is described—why not avoid the work of emancipation and simply redescribe oneself as ‘‘free’’? This calls to mind the Wittgensteinian solution to the crisis of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, in which those under the Mikado’s death sentence convince him that (a) he is all-powerful, so that (b) what he says is as good as done, in which case, (c) why not just pretend that what he’s said is done, and let that be an end to it?} Secondly, if the
theory of hegemony itself constitutes a set of totalizing ‘‘explanatory categories,’’ its denial of any efficacy to such totalization is doomed to the self-
refuting ‘‘ ‘this is how it is’ with which the relativist tells you why you cannot
say ‘this is how it is.’ ’’\footnote{Geras, Discourses of Extremity, 66, 163.} Finally, since society is, on this account, finally
unintelligible, power relations seem so intrinsically opaque that no conceivable set of power relations could meet Laclau’s ethical standard of transparency. An antirepresentationalist canon of ethics and politics seems neither available nor realizable.


Laclau and Mouffe’s theorization of hegemony closely resembles Latour
and Callon’s postmodern sociology of knowledge or ‘‘Actor Network Theory,’’ which Mike Michael recommends as a useful supplement to anarchist
political theory. In a recent issue of Anarchist Studies, Michael suggests that
where anarchist theories of ‘‘power’’ have tended to ‘‘take it for granted that
the functioning of the state entails an admixture of coercion and ideological
indoctrination, the bottom line being the former,’’ Actor Network Theory offers a more accurate and sophisticated picture of how power operates. Instead of viewing power as hierarchical organization backed by violence, he
writes, anarchists ought to regard it in Foucauldian fashion as an all-pervasive ‘‘network,’’ an ensemble of forces ‘‘seeping through the multiplicity of
relations amongst people.’’ Rather than a ‘‘violent’’ theory of power, in fact,
they ought to embrace a ‘‘consensual’’ conception: power is the organization
of consent, and even the State’s ‘‘coercive forces’’ are themselves called into
being in the first place by consensus-creating processes of ‘‘persuasion.’’


These persuasive processes, in which certain agents seek to persuade other
agents to participate in their ‘‘network’’ of agreement, are fundamentally representational. Latour identifies three phases in the construction of this representative-represented relationship, which he calls interressement, enrolment,
and translation. In interressement, ‘‘one aims to convince actors that, rather
than maintain a particular set of self-understandings that are derived from
their relationships with other actors . . . they should really be conceptualizing themselves through the categories that you provide.’’ Translating follows
when ‘‘the ‘enrolling actor’ sets itself up as the spokesperson of others,’’ acquiring the power of representation. Finally, in the phase of enrolment, the
target of persuasion takes on the ‘‘identities and practices’’ that the persuader wants. In sum, the ‘‘actors’’ in this drama offer their audience something like a logical syllogism—or, more accurately, a teleological narrative:



\begin{quote}


This is what you want to be. (Interressement)


We are the ones who can help you become that. (Translation)


Grant your obedience by your own consent. (Enrolment)\footnote{Michael, ‘‘The Power-Persuasion-Identity Nexus,’’ 27-28, 30-31, 32.}



\end{quote}


What the actor (falsely) promises is that she or he can faithfully represent
the audience: ‘‘The ‘translator’ attempts to persuade others that it can repre-
sent them and their interests. To do this, it must convince others that its
and their identities and interests coincide’’\footnote{Ibid., 31.} —something that, it is tacitly
assumed, could never happen in reality.


Here, once again, ethical and epistemological antirepresentationalisms
converge. Like Baginski, Michael takes a position against the implicit mimetic claim of dramatic narrative, the pretense that the world of the drama
holds up a mirror to the audience in which it can see its own true nature,
which appears to be yet another form of the generalized social con game in
which unrepresentable individuals are seduced into adopting identities that
assure their participation in representational networks of command and obedience. Resistance and rebellion happen when these ‘‘roles and identities
assigned by one entity to another’’ are ‘‘challenged, undermined or betrayed’’—e.g., when the claim of one individual or group to represent others
is rejected or deconstructed.\footnote{Ibid., 32.} Unlike Baginski, however, Michael assumes
that there is no potential for narrative to tell a truer story about subjects, no
legitimate form of representation. On the terms of Actor Network Theory,
every identification is a priori false, the assertion of sameness where there
can only be limitless difference. The individual is unrepresentable because
it is essentially mysterious, unique, original. Couched in the assumptions of
this discourse, in other words, is an appeal to origins. What is at the origin
is difference, not sameness. The first of these is real and substantial; the
other is an illusion added on to the real, falsely imposed on it. We can have
nothing in common but a false pretense of having something in common.
Individuality is prior and superior to community; freedom would consist in
difference without unity.


Michael belatedly acknowledges that this conception of freedom precludes its own realization in practice, since individuals are incapable of waging a revolutionary struggle in isolation from one another. For actors to
effectively ‘‘betray their spokespersons and reject their designated roles,’’ he
writes, ‘‘it is not simply the case that associations need to be broken. Rather
new associations need to be forged and, in consequence, new identities need
to be generated.’’ At the same time, he has made it impossible for himself to
differentiate between those forms of identity and representation that revolutionary actors might find instrumental in achieving their ends and those that
entail the actors themselves being instrumentalized. In fact, Michael collapses Hannah Arendt’s distinction between ‘‘power’’ and ‘‘violence,’’ insofar as violence, in her classic definition, is ‘‘distinguished by its instrumental
character,’’ while power is ‘‘the human ability . . . to act in concert’’;\footnote{Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace \& Co., 1970), 46, 44.} as for
Stirner, instrumentality is the sole remaining category. ‘‘Even at the heart of
the anarchist group,’’ Michael warns, ‘‘we can see these processes of persuasion at work’’; indeed, what seem to be ‘‘ ‘spontaneous’ collectives’’ are inevitably ‘‘the product of just those processes . . . [involved in] the operation of the coercive state.’’\footnote{Michael, ‘‘The Power-Persuasion-Identity Nexus,’’ 40, 39.}


Which processes of persuasion are so entailed, we might ask. Are these
necessarily monological, closed processes, staged in a climate of fear and
intolerance, in which social pressure is the never-articulated but always-
present guarantor of stasis? Or might they also be processes that involve
open dialogue, that presume communities of diversity, that allow for democratic dissent as well as consensus, change as well as stability? Michael can
only speak of all forms of persuasion en bloc. Thus, as he coyly hints, even
his own persuasive rhetoric is not to be trusted: there can, on the terms of
his own theory, be no difference between his offer to ‘‘provide the reader
with a possible critical tool’’ and an attempt ‘‘to enrol you into my network.’’\footnote{Ibid., 40.} Birrell’s memetics returns, not as a circulation of convivial tools as
gifts, but as germ warfare.


If much contemporary political theory sees a slippery slope between notions of ‘‘totality’’ and ‘‘totalitarianism,’’ anarchists have been less certain of
this. On the one hand, anarcho-primitivists like Moore regard the will to
‘‘represent’’ others as inherently authoritarian. For Moore, the problem of
domination is largely ‘‘the problem of representation’’: ‘‘because ideology
claims to represent the interests of many,’’ he explains, ‘‘it does not truly
represent any single individual,’’ even ‘‘when it is able to persuade individuals of its representative legitimacy.’’ Representation is a means of repressively policing the infinite multiplicity of desires into unity.\footnote{Moore, ‘‘Prophets of the New World: Noam Chomsky, Murray Bookchin, and Fredy Perlman,’’ Social Anarchism 20 (1995), \href{http://www.nothingness.org/sociala/sa20/20moore.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.nothingness.org\Slash{}sociala\Slash{}sa20\Slash{}20moore.html} (accessed 1 July 2002).} On the other
hand, social anarchists like Bookchin have insisted that we have a positive
duty to ‘‘try to speak for dominated people as a whole.’’ Collective action,
Bookchin argues, must come neither from the self-interests of isolated individuals, nor from the sectional interests that constitute us as ‘‘class beings,’’
but from our species interest as ‘‘human beings’’ in an ecological matrix;
only a revolutionary project that appeals to a ‘‘general human interest’’ can
succeed.\footnote{Bookchin, The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986), 155; To Remember Spain, 31; Remaking Society, 184.}


However, as Goldman put it, anarchism cannot ‘‘comprise an iron-clad
program to be carried out under all circumstances’’; rather, it ‘‘must grow
out of the economic needs of each place and clime.’’ For Bookchin, likewise,
universality must always be rearticulated in and through the diversity of the
‘‘lived traditions’’ and ‘‘problems’’ faced by specific communities at particular historical moments. In fact, the anarchist practice of hermeneutics as
dialogue is part of this political practice. It is a process of negotiation
through which one not only modifies and revises one’s concept of the universal through particulars but also comes to articulate the universality implicit
within each particular tradition, developing warrants or grounds in terms of
which one culture can make ethical sense to the other.\footnote{Goldman, Anarchism, 63; Bookchin, Remaking Society, 165; Colson, Trois Essais Trois Essais de philosophie anarchiste (Paris: Éditiors Léo Scheer, 2004), 26.}


Thus, describing the community development efforts that made the
Loisaida neighborhood the center of New York’s community gardening movement between the end of the 1960s and the ascendancy of Mayor Giuliani—a process sponsored and inspired by a Puerto Rican community group
called Charas, which was influenced by Paul Goodman—Daniel Chodorkoff
contrasts their grassroots approach with that of ‘‘the War on Poverty model,’’
in which communities are represented as ‘‘battlefields’’ to be targeted for the
deployment of ‘‘strategic resources.’’ Rather than focusing on ‘‘the delivery
of services to a needy population by professionals,’’ a strategy that inevitably
‘‘degenerates into a form of social control,’’ anarchist intervention seeks to
develop what is already present within the community: its own capacities for
making value from itself. Rather than create new functioning social structures from scratch, Charas attempted to make use of whatever ‘‘traditions of
mutualism and cooperation’’ were already at hand, whenever possible: for
instance, a number of ‘‘youth gangs’’ were engaged in the process, becoming
part of the constructive forces. Vacant lots were transformed into a children’s
playground, a cultural space for locally produced poetry, music, and theater,
and, most imaginatively, an experimental food garden, which not only led to
the establishment of a new local enterprise producing ‘‘commercial rooftop
greenhouses,’’ but created ‘‘gardening groups’’ that ‘‘drew on the traditions
of the Jivaro, the Puerto Rican peasantry from which many of the Loisaida’s
residents hail.’’ Implicit in the knowledge base and survival practices of the
neighborhood were most of the building blocks of a functioning self-managed
society. Anarchism did not have to be imported or imposed from the outside,
but evoked from within.\footnote{Daniel Chodorkoff, ‘‘Social Ecology and Community Development,’’ Institute for Social Ecology, 25 November 2003, \href{http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=1125144547551/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.social-ecology.org\Slash{}article.php?story=1125144547551} (accessed 30 March 2004).}


It was in a similar manner that anarchism spread through Spain between
the mid-nineteenth century, when Pi y Margall translated Proudhon into
Spanish, and the present moment (in which it still survives with some vigor,
despite decades of fascist repression).\footnote{Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism, trans. Ida Pilat Isca, ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996), 50.} Even ‘‘the puritanical traditions of
the country’’ served as material for the faístas (members of the Federación
Anarquista Iberica, the political wing of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT union),
who wrote in 1936: ‘‘We want to reconstruct Spain materially and morally.


Our revolution will be both economic and ethical.’’\footnote{Bookchin, To Remember Spain, 13; FAI, quoted in Paul Berman, comp., Quotations From the Anarchists (New York: Praeger, 1972), 102.} At times this reconstruction was incomplete, to say the least: in the period of the revolution,
‘‘hot-headed young fanatics belonging to the Libertarian Youth organization’’
made a practice of assassinating ‘‘pimps and male prostitutes’’ as well as the
politically complicit clergy, and a 1936 CNT congress ‘‘proposed popular
assemblies to discipline those who ‘do not fulfill their duties either in the
moral order or in their functions as producers.’ ’’\footnote{Woodcock, Anarchism, 367; Seidman, Workers Against Work, 56.} At its best, however, anarchist cultural ‘‘reconstruction’’ managed to substantially convert what was a
terrifically patriarchal Catholic culture into a culture of resistance in which
‘‘working men and women’’ alike, as ‘‘obreras conscientes’’ or militant workers, could mutually accord one another respect, independence, and dignity.


Out of this resistance culture, in which ‘‘self-imposed mores’’ combined abstention from tobacco, alcohol, prostitution, bullfighting, ‘‘ ‘foul’ language,’’
and use of ‘‘the word ‘god’ ’’ in conversation (in the streets of anarchist Barcelona, ‘‘nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted,’ ’’ Orwell observed;
‘‘everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’ and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos días’ ’’) with the abolition of marriage in favor of ‘‘lifelong
‘free unions’ ’’ came a ‘‘historically unprecedented’’ expression of revolutionary feminism: Spanish women were not only ‘‘liberated from all the constraints of a highly traditional Catholic country, be it the prohibition of
abortion and divorce or a degraded status in the economy’’ and active members of the anarchist militias but created their own independent organization, the Mujeres Libres, rather than simply entering male-dominated radical
institutions.\footnote{Bookchin, To Remember Spain, 14; Orwell, Homage to Catalonia(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), 5; Bookchin, To Remember Spain, 44. Ironically, Proudhon’s ‘‘contractual’’ morality could also lend itself to forces for sexual liberation in the Spanish anarchist community. Thus, his distinction between free ‘‘possession’’ and dominatory ‘‘property’’ (which he somewhat flippantly explains by the analogy: ‘‘a lover is a possessor, a husband is a proprietor’’ [What Is Property?, 43]) is neatly echoed in the ‘‘critiques of both chastity and monogamous marriage’’ that were made by some Spanish anarchists in the 1920s and 1930s, which argued ‘‘that monogamy itself was a product of the desire for possessiveness, rooted in private property and in the subordination of women, and that it would disappear in a future anarchist society’’ (Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain, 29); thus, in 1934, Amparo Poch y Gascón, a founder of the Mujeres Libres, proposed to replace the institution of marriage, which would force a woman to remain with her husband ‘‘whether she was still in love or not,’’ with a monogamous sexual contract that ‘‘does not mean ‘forever,’ but as long as . . . the will and feelings of the lovers last’’ (quoted in Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain, 29).}


Ultimately, Spanish anarchism did not simply reproduce or reinforce existing social structures, but ‘‘tried to sift the more positive features of the
pueblo from its reactionary social characteristics’’ and ‘‘to create libertarian
organizational forms that could synthesize as the precapitalist collectivist
traditions of the village with an industrial economy and a highly urbanized
society,’’ combining the industrial ‘‘solidarity’’ of urban workers with a certain retrieval of ‘‘the mutualism of village life.’’\footnote{Bookchin, To Remember Spain, 11; Spanish Anarchists, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868-1936 (New York: Free Life Editions, 1977), 36.} Here, Chodorkoff’s typically anarchist insistence that ‘‘human development and cultural evolution
are not linear processes’’ can be importantly contrasted with what Laclau
and Mouffe disparage as the ‘‘stagist paradigm’’ of Marxism.\footnote{Chodorkoff, ‘‘Social Ecology and Community Development’’; Laclau and Mouffe, He- gemony and Socialist Strategy, 100.} As in the case
of Loisaida, where cultural ‘‘nonsynchrony’’ juxtaposes modern, postmodern,
and premodern realities, the Spanish CNT-FAI took advantage of ‘‘the fact
that many Spanish workers were either former villagers or were only a generation or so removed from the countryside.’’\footnote{Emily Hicks, ‘‘Cultural Marxism: Nonsynchrony and Feminist Practice,’’ in Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent, 221 (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Bookchin, To Remember Spain, 14} Thus, even before Mao’s culturalist revision of Marxism allowed Chinese communists to redescribe the
peasants as a revolutionary ‘‘proletarian’’ class, Bakunin’s appreciation of
their revolutionary potential was embraced by Chinese anarchists such as
Liu Shipei, who ‘‘called for the entire people—men, women, peasants, [and]
workers—to revolt.’’ Likewise, Sam Mbah and I. E. Igariwey propose an
‘‘African anarchism’’ that is both ‘‘forward-looking,’’ a ‘‘way out’’ of the impasse of ‘‘arrested development and stagnation,’’ and a radical ‘‘return to the
‘anarchic elements’ ’’ that are ‘‘indigenous to Africa,’’ where tribal societies
successfully resisted the internal threat of emergent hierarchy as well as the
external impositions of empires and states for thousands of years.\footnote{Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy, 208-9; Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 106; Sam Mbah and I. E. Igariwey, African Anarchism: The History of a Movement, Anarchist People of Color Website, \href{http://www.illegalvoices.org/apoc/books/aa/toc.html}{www.illegalvoices.org\Slash{}apoc\Slash{}books\Slash{}aa\Slash{}toc.html} (accessed).}


In its intensely ‘‘localist’’ articulations and embrace of historical nonlinearity and nonsynchrony, anarchist universality avoids becoming a rigid
schema to be imposed on situations from above and beyond them, a purely
abstract representation apart from every concrete historical particular. At the
same time, it does not render itself temporally and spatially immobile, ethnocentrically limited to any one ‘‘location,’’ nor does it hesitate to seek every
opportunity to draw specific forces into functional and lasting unities based
on shared needs, desires, interests, and affinities. This dialectic of universalism and pluralism inflects its very ethics; for Kropotkin, ethics evolve. Nevertheless, this process of transformation is not merely a meaningless
fluctuation, ‘‘mere accident’’; it poses a metaethical, ecological problem, an
evolutionary conflict between individual and species survival tropisms,
which will either be solved by the development of cultures that dissolve the
conflict or will ‘‘lead man to ruin’’—the misery of perpetual war and social
brutalization, made all the more painful and destructive, as indicated all too
clearly by the ‘‘acts’’ Kropotkin witnessed during WWI (e.g., ‘‘poisonous
gases, submarines, Zeppelins attacking sleeping cities, complete destruction
of abandoned territories by the conquerors’’) by our increasing technological
sophistication.\footnote{Kropotkin, Ethics, 336-37.} For Bookchin and other anarchists of the late twentieth century, theorizing in the shadow of genocide, ecocide, and the Bomb, this
shared threat is one important source of the necessity that drives us into the
identity of ‘‘human beings.’’ Only the predominance of sufficiently egalitarian, solidary, and free societies will answer what Richards calls the ‘‘ecological imperative’’ by establishing sufficiently stable relationships among
ourselves and our planet.\footnote{Richards, Letters From Quebec, 1.25.8.}


Such societies must also constitute their social and political life in terms
that synthesize universality with multiplicity. If, as Read argues, ‘‘the mistakes of every political thinker from Aristotle to Rousseau have been due to
their use of the abstract conception man’’—an assumption of ‘‘substantial
uniformity’’ underlying the manifold that, in practice, licenses priest and
prince to ‘‘enforce uniformity’’ on it—then an anarchist social order cannot
impose such a spurious unity, but must embrace cultural, aesthetic, even
religious and political diversity: ‘‘The political unitarian or authoritarian
conceives society as one body compelled to uniformity. The anarchist conceives society as a balance or harmony of groups, and most of us belong to
one or more such groups. The only difficulty is their harmonious interrelation.’’\footnote{Anarchy and Order, Herbert Read, Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 132-33, emphasis mine.} Thus, Kropotkin describes an anarchist society as constituted by
‘‘free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as
also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a
civilized being . . . harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-
changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and influences.’’\footnote{Kropotkin, KRP, 284, emphasis mine.} Here is a pluralist vision—a heterotopian
society indeed. However, how is this harmonious interrelation, this heterotopian equilibrium, to be attained?


Different schools of anarchist theory have promoted different solutions to
this problem. The Proudhonian mutualists envisaged an exchange-based
economy in which associations of workers and consumers would negotiate
contractual agreements to exchange goods and services. Abad de Santillan
proposes to organize workers in a federation of collectives with the workplace as its fundamental unit, not unlike the system of ‘‘workers’ councils’’
created by Russian, German, and Italian workers between 1917 and 1922.


To ensure the best possible coordination of production, this federation would
take the form of two parallel syndicates, one organized by locality, cutting
across trades, and the other by trade, cutting across localities.\footnote{Darrow Schecter, Radical Theories: Paths Beyond Marxism and Social Democracy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 50; Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, 148-50; Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution, 48-51.} Bookchin
argues that an exclusively economic organization ‘‘takes a part of society—
its economic component—and reifies it into the totality of society’’; this totality, however, must include the entire continuum of convivial relationships
that are brought into being by our geographical arrangement in space, by the
fact of community. Accordingly, a society without the state should constitute
itself communally as a network of municipalities constituted by neighborhood assemblies, rather than by workers’ councils. On this ‘‘libertarian municipalist’’ model, production must be regulated by policies that are
implemented by self-managing producers’ cooperatives but crafted by the
entire community.\footnote{Bookchin, To Remember Spain, 31. According to Andrew Flood, ‘‘The Zapatistas, Anarchism, and ‘Direct Democracy.’ ’’ The libertarian muncipalist system is not much different from that implemented in the rebel ‘‘autonomous muncipalities’’ of Mexico, in which ‘‘collectives that carry out particular tasks within the community . . . are set up by and answerable to the assembly but are otherwise autonomous.’’ \href{http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/andrew/zapasr.html./}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}flag.blackened.net\Slash{}revolt\Slash{}andrew\Slash{}zapasr.html.}} Municipal organization is designed both to prevent the
emergence of new sectional interests that can divide the community and re-
concentrate power and to institutionalize a distinction between the ‘‘social
sphere’’ in which informal relationships of kinship, workplace solidarity,
love, sexuality, and friendship are rooted and the ‘‘political sphere’’ that
emerges only where strangers who do not share passional or cultural affinities need to come together to make decisions.\footnote{Bookchin, ‘‘Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview,’’ Institute for Social Ecology, 17 November 2003, \href{http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031117110637888/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.social-ecology.org\Slash{}article.php?story=20031117110637888\Slash{}} (accessed 4 April 2004); Bookchin, ‘‘A Politics for the Twenty-First Century,’’ Institute for Social Ecology, 18 November 2003, \href{http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031118095526728/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}www.social-ecology.org\Slash{}article.php?story=20031118095526728\Slash{}} (accessed 4 April 2004). Even Diego Abad de Santillan confessed, some years after the defeat of the revolution, that he ‘‘was uneasy about the widespread tendency to take the line that ownership of the instruments of labor and the land would devolve upon the workers and peasants Land, factories, and the means of transportation belong to the community and must perform social functions. If, in our hands, they fail to perform these functions, the new form of ownership would be as unacceptable as its predecessor’’ (‘‘Two Views of ‘Libertarian Communism’: Utopia or Economic Integration,’’ in No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism, vol. 2, ed. Daniel Guérin, trans. Paul Sharkey [Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1998], 102).}


We can recognize in Bookchin’s division between the political and social
realms a return of the old dichotomy between public and private life, but
with a difference: the social realm bridges what we think of as personal or
private experiences, such as family life, with what we think of as the public
spaces of the workplace and the street. However, separating political decision making from personal life and informal interactions seems wise in view
of the tendency of genuinely totalitarian politics to monopolize every sector
of life. The problem is that the division of powers between a policy-making
council and policy-executing cooperatives seems to place nearly all initiative in the hands of the council, leaving little or none to the workers at the
point of production. This is, once again, a problem of representation, a question of how collective interests are to be represented. It might be argued
against libertarian municipalism that the imposition of ‘‘community’’ as a
single representational system cannot be much of an improvement on the
divide-and-conquer strategy of capitalism, which declares with Margaret
Thatcher that only individuals exist.


The broadest agreement among anarchists seems to favor balancing plurality with universality by means of a multiplicity of representational systems, relatively autonomous but mutually interanimating, none enjoying a
complete hegemony or representational monopoly. One has a ‘‘territorial’’
being as ‘‘citizen’’ of a community that must be represented through such
spatially defined bodies as the neighborhood assembly, municipal council,
and regional and global federations, and one has a ‘‘professional’’ being that
must be represented through bodies such as the workers’ council and the
syndicate; one also has a being as ‘‘consumer’’ whose needs and desires
can be articulated through federations of cooperatives and collectively run
distribution systems. In addition, anarchists postulate an endless series of
organizations based on less natural and more genuinely social kinds of ‘‘affinity,’’ expressing the desire to celebrate an identity or perpetuate a cultural
tradition, to innovate art and ideas, to disseminate knowledge, to share pleasures and desires, to entertain, and so on. Only experimentation can determine what works best, but perhaps a key to preventing the development of
entrenched sectional interests and intractable conflicts is to constitute these
systems of representation, and the identities dependent on them, not as separate or as unified but as overlapping. Thus, Kirkpatrick Sale suggests that
worker and community organizations might create a special ‘‘representative
arrangement’’ for one another, so that a certain number of worker delegates
would have votes in a community council and a certain number of community delegates would have votes at the workers’ council.\footnote{Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1980), 382-84. I have seen this solution implemented, with what seems to be some success, in one instance. At the State University of New York in Binghamton, a democratically run school bus collective was locked in conflict with the administration over the issue of late-night service on the weekends, which the drivers had decided to curtail after some incidents of passengers’ drunken misbehavior. The administration (perhaps illegally) seized the buses and attempted to run them with scab labor until outraged drivers and student riders managed to force negotiations. What eventually resulted was a compromise that reinstated the drivers’ collective, but that also set aside a few seats on the board for representatives of the undergraduate and graduate student unions as well as disabled riders.} The governing assumption must be that everyone will have many overlapping group
memberships and that one’s ‘‘full individualization’’ is possible in part
through the uniqueness of the intersection one occupies between these
groups: as Kenneth Burke writes, ‘‘the so-called ‘I’ is merely a unique combination of partially conflicting ‘corporate we’s.’ ’’\footnote{Kropotkin, Kroptkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, 285; Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 264.} One is not only a worker
but also a Jew, not only a Jewish worker but also a woman, not only a Jewish
working woman but one who enjoys dancing, lives in New York, and so on.


From this perspective, no collective identity should enjoy uncontested
‘‘hegemony’’—not even that of
‘‘humanity.’’ Thus Landauer protested
against the excesses of a ‘‘humanism’’ that had, at least since the French
Revolution, proposed the solution of ‘‘the Jewish problem’’ by what Marx
called ‘‘the social emancipation of the Jew’’ in ‘‘the emancipation of society
from Judaism’’—the essentially ‘‘liberal’’ project that seeks ‘‘to separate the
Jew from his religion, from his family, from his ethnic community, in order
to plunge him into the democratic crucible whence he will emerge naked
and alone, an individual and solitary particle like all the other particles’’—in short, the position that declares that ‘‘there are no Jews.’’\footnote{Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, 52; Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 57.}


‘‘Why,’’ Landauer asked, ‘‘should one . . . preach the ending of all bonds
and therefore of all differences in the world?’’ Instead of the representational
monopoly of humanism, one could embrace ‘‘every imponderable and ineffable thing that brings about exclusive bonds, unities, and also differentiations
within humanity’’ without confounding peaceful ‘‘differentiation’’ with aggressive ‘‘opposition.’’\footnote{Landauer, quoted in Lunn, Prophet of Community, 263. I cannot resist also quoting from Bernard Lazare’s magnificent riposte to the old Jacobin cry, ‘‘no state within the state!’’: ‘‘I find that there are not enough states within the state, that is to say, to make myself clearer, that there are not within modern states enough free groups bound to each other. The human ideal does not seem to me to be political and intellectual unification. Only one unification seems to me necessary: moral unification’’ (Job’s Dungheap, ed. Hannah Arendt [New York, 1948], 60-61).}


It is on this basis, as elaborated by Jewish anarchists such as Landauer


and Lazare, that Jews for some time envisaged and practiced a secular, non-
chauvanist form of Zionism, one that might have led to genuinely peaceful
coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Israel\Slash{}Palestine (where young members of the Hashomer Hatzair movement circulated Hebrew translations of
pamphlets by Kropotkin and Landauer) and that was a serious competitor
for the loyalties of Jewish settlers in the territory through the mid-1920s. In
the midst of a fresh wave of anti-Semitic persecutions, Landauer described
this project of cultural reconstruction:



\begin{quote}


The movement going through the world of Jewry, generally under the name Zionism, should have, whatever its external forms and fluctuations, the following purpose: that Jews, under the leadership of spiritual and strong individuals, mold
purely and creatively that particular nature which they, like every Nation, have
developed over thousands of years; that in the battle for that which is holy they
save their souls from the chaos of misunderstanding and superficially mechanical
custom; that they fill their souls with urgent life and present themselves and their
nature to developing mankind, which can as little stand to do without the Jews as
it can any other level or gradation of humanity. Humanity does not mean identity;
humanity is the union of the manifold.\footnote{Landauer, quoted in Maurer, Call to Revolution, 82.}



\end{quote}


Such is the concept of culture and of plurality given to anarchism not only by
the generalizing minds of theorists like Proudhon and Bakunin—who were
themselves limited by the prevailing bigotry of their time and place—but by
the living experiences of countless ordinary men and women, among whom a
good many, in the decades following the pogroms of 1880, were Jews, people
familiar with the position of being the particular in a world of vicious universalities.

\section{CONCLUSION: THE ONTOLOGY OF POLITICAL REPRESENTATION}


What is real, Proudhon writes, is the ceaseless self-transformation of nature, and nothing else. Anarchist political visions, despite their variety, all
share this recognition. It is not only the case that so-called representative
democracy has been justified by the cult of expertise and contempt for the
demos;\footnote{Bookchin, Ecology of Freedom, 132.} it has also been built on the assumption that punctuated elections
or referenda are adequate means for public expression, that these representational practices are joined to a representable world by relations of reference and justice. If the groupings that constitute the people and their will are
constantly developing, however, then systems of representation that impose
inflexible formats on the formation and articulation of this will must misrepresent it, producing a set of floating signifiers unanchored to any referent—
the separate power of the state. By substituting recallable delegates for
elected legislators, consensus and direct democracy not only make it possible for members of the base assemblies to create policy themselves in conditions of face-to-face encounter, but perpetually keep open the possibility of
their intervening in their own representation, allowing them to quickly withdraw the authority of an errant signifier and replace it with a better one. In this sense, as Bookchin remarks, anarchist practices constitute an antibureaucratic institutionalization of ‘‘direct action,’’ the ‘‘unmediated intervention of people’’ in the decisions that affect their lives.\footnote{Ibid., 132n.}


In opposition to the politics of representationalism, then, anarchism ultimately proposes not a simple rejection of representation, but a representational politics of duration and difference, motion and multiplicity. Anarchist
politics recognize the reality of duration and motion by creating institutions
that can be developed and modified as necessary, making structures of representation mobile and responsive (particularly via provisions that allow
base assemblies to craft policy directly, coordinating with other assemblies
via recallable delegates, instructed by mandates), and by using temporary,
task-based organization when possible. They recognize the reality of difference and multiplicity by promoting deliberation and sustained dissensus,
using decentralized structures to keep decision making as close as possible
to the immediate occasion and those immediately affected, and by constituting identity through a plurality of overlapping representational systems (via
consumption as well as production, spatial community as well as all the varieties of affinity) so that one is free to manifest and develop one’s self in all
of its all-sidedness.


It is to this legacy that I would call the attention, not only of academics
concerned by the ongoing crisis of representation in the humanities, but also
of sincerely committed women and men of the contemporary anarchist movements.

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Jesse Cohn

Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation

Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics

2006


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