Anarchist Studies

Volume 16, 2008 No.2

Editorial SAUL NEWMAN

Postanarchism is emerging as an important new current in anarchist thought, and it is the source of growing interest and debate amongst anarchist activists and scholars alike, as well as in broader academic circles. Given the number of internet sites, discussion groups, and new books and journal publications appearing on postanarchism, it is time that the challenges it poses to classical anarchist thought and practice are taken more seriously.

Postanarchism refers to a wide body of theory - encompassing political theory, philosophy, aesthetics, literature and film studies - which attempts to explore new directions in anarchist thought and politics. While it includes a number of different perspectives and trajectories, the central contention of postanarchism is that classical anarchist philosophy must take account of new theoretical directions and cultural phenomena, in particular, postmodernity and poststructuralism. While these theoretical categories have had a major impact on different areas of scholarship and thought, as well as politics, anarchism tends to have remained largely resistant to these developments and continues to work within an Enlightenment humanist epistemological framework1 which many see as being in need of updating. At the same time, anarchism - as a form of political theory and practice - is becoming increasingly important to radical struggles and global social movements today, to a large extent supplanting Marxism. Postanarchism seeks to revitalise anarchist theory in light of these new struggles and forms of resistance. However, rather than dismissing the tradition of classical anarchism, postanarchism on the contrary, seeks to explore its potential and radicalise its possibilities. It remains entirely consistent, I would suggest, with the libertarian and egalitarian horizon of anarchism; yet it seeks to broaden the terms of anti-authoritarian thought to include a critical analysis of language, discourse, culture and new modalities of power. In this sense, postanarchism does not understand post to mean being 'after' anarchism, but post in the sense of working at and extending the limits of anarchist thought by uncovering its heterogeneous and unpredictable possibilities.

This issue explores some of these new approaches to anarchist theory and practice. Benjamin Noys' essay is important in this respect because it seeks to highlight a series of problems and conceptual and practical limitations that these new anarchist approaches often encounter. His essay explores the proximity - as well as critical distance - of contemporary thinker, Alain Badiou to anarchism. While Badiou's political thought seems to reflect certain anarchist ideas about a radical politics that is autonomous from the Party and the State, he is also extremely critical of anarchism, and especially of what he sees as the libertarian element of the global anti-capitalist movement. For Badiou, these anti-globalisation 'movementists' - drawing on motifs of flux, flows of desire and deterritorialisation derived from poststructuralists such as Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Hardt and Negri - fetishise and, in a sense, mimic the movement of global capitalism itself, and are unable to gain any critical distance from it. Noys uses this critique to work through questions of strategy, organisation and coherence which are central to the anti-authoritarian radical politics today - for instance, is a contemporary anarchist politics practical and can it achieve anything without some form of organisation; and can the notion of organisation be rethought in ways that avoid the Party form and which do not conflict with anarchism's commitment to decentralised and non-hierarchical forms of activism?

Contrary to what certain anarchist activists and scholars have claimed, postanarchism is not confined to the world of theoretical abstractions; it is concerned with concrete forms of activist politics. In an essay by one of the major theoreticians of poststructuralist anarchism,2 Todd May provides a postanarchist interpretation of a political movement in Canada that fights for the rights of Algerian 'illegal' immigrants, the sans-statuts (those without legalised refugee status). The question of 'illegal' immigrants and the rights of those who, as Arendt would say, have not even the right to have rights, is emerging as one of the major points of antagonism in global capitalism - a site for the new biopolitical barbarism of state sovereignty, as well as a site for the emergence of new forms of activism and radical politics.3 May uses the thought of philosopher Jacques Rancière4 - which he sees as making a major contribution to anarchism and to radical political theory generally - to explore a political logic based on the presupposition of equality. For Rancière, politics starts with the fact of equality, rather than seeing it as a goal to be attained - and it is the assertion of this fact as part of a particular political campaign which has the potential to disrupt the existing political and social order based on relationships of hierarchy, inequality and authority (what Rancière calls the order of police). In the same way, as May shows, the Algerian sans-statuts in Canada - those absolutely excluded from the dominant order and at the bottom of the social hierarchy - were able to mobilise themselves as if they were absolutely equal to the rest of society and as if they had the same rights as everyone else. In my view, this is a genuine example of a 'postanarchist' politics: a concrete, localised, grass-roots struggle engaged in by those directly concerned, but which, importantly, is able at the same time to transcend its position of particularity by inscribing itself on the universal horizon of equality.

The question of universality is important to postanarchism, and it is this question that is considered by Benjamin Franks in relation to the ethics. Franks explores the ethical dimension of anarchist and postanarchist theory, and tries to develop an understanding of ethics which avoids, on the one hand, the universalising Kantian categorical imperative, and on the other, a ethical subjectivism that Franks attributes to Max Stirner and (somewhat unfairly I think) to myself.5 For Franks, both these positions are incompatible with anarchist political practice. As an alternative, he proposes a notion of ethics internal to particular practices and identities, negotiable over time and open to critical dialogue. Franks is correct to show that anarchism is deeply concerned with ethical questions, and his essay makes an important contribution to thinking out a distinctly anarchist form of ethics which, while grounded in particular practices and concrete situations, still offers certain norms and standards that foster non-hierarchical relationships and solidarity with others. I entirely agree with this approach to ethics, and would simply add that it is entirely compatible with postanarchism. Despite what many critics allege - and this is an allegation which is more or less made in Franks' essay - postanarchism does not amount to moral nihilism or ethical subjectivism. Not even Stirner's philosophy of egoism - as I have tried to show elsewhere - precludes ethics, and indeed allows for certain forms of social solidarity, which is implicit in his notion of the 'union of egoists'. Whatever the case, Franks makes an important intervention in exploring the politico-ethical contours of contemporary anti-authoritarian thought.

Along with ethics, one of the other major concerns of postanarchism is the role of images, symbols and language in the construction of political identities and meanings. Unlike the classical anarchists who saw a rational coherence in social relations and a human essence at the base of social identities, a postanarchist analysis privileges the function of language and the symbolic order in creating social and political meaning. However, rather than meanings and identities being fixed within a stable structure, they are inherently unstable and open to different and contingent articulations. It is precisely this point which is emphasised by Lewis Call, who has developed a distinctly postmodern approach to anti-authoritarian practices and discourses through an analysis of popular culture, in particular literature and film.6 In his essay, he explores the graphic novel (1981), and later the film version (2006), V for Vendetta, seeing this as a kind of postanarchist political narrative. Central here is the notion of the 'floating signifier' - derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis - in which a particular word or symbol is not fixed to a particular content, but is mobile and can produce different meanings. The examples Call gives are those of the historical figure Guy Fawkes, and also the character 'V' who directly invokes Fawkes as a symbol of resistance against State authority. 'V' in particular, because he remains masked and thus anonymous, operates as a kind of empty presence through which political authority is destabilised and through which a collective resistance is mobilised. The important lesson to be drawn from Call's analysis is that political domination relies on a certain control and manipulation of symbols, images and discourses - and therefore, any effective resistance must aim at a destabilisation and a resignification of these forms. Struggles against authority take place at the level of symbolic and even visual - indeed there is no separation here between symbolic and 'actual' politics. One only need look at the innovative and politically creative use of symbols and images at anti-global capitalist demonstrations to see examples of this.

One thinker who acknowledges the importance of the visual and aesthetic in radical politics is Jacques Rancière, to whom I have referred above. In some of his recent work, Rancière has reflected on the link between art and politics and has emphasised the political significance of the aesthetic, particularly in the idea that politics disturbs existing 'regimes' of visibility.7 Politics is, in other words, about conflicts over what is visible and what is invisible, and art can therefore contribute to a reconfiguration of space and perception through which new political meanings may emerge. In an interview conducted with Noys, May and myself, Rancière reflects on the position of the artist, as well as the 'anarchist' implications of his own political thinking, and on more general questions about the state of radical politics today. As the reader might have guessed by now, I see Rancière as a thinker whose work has major implications for anarchism: while he departs from classical anarchism in important ways - particularly in his rejection of the conceptual opposition between the 'artificial' State and the 'natural' Society - he also offers new ways of thinking about emancipation, equality, democracy and anti-authoritarian politics.

As this issue shows, postanarchism is not a unified doctrine or political practice, and it raises as many questions and problems as it answers. It is best to see it as on ongoing field of enquiry which seeks to explore, unearth, interrogate, rethink and revitalise many aspects of anarchist theory. One thing is for certain though: the contemporary situation demands that anarchism be thought and practiced once again.

Notes
1. This was described by Isaiah Berlin to involve a commitment to three principles: that all genuine questions can be answered; that all answers are knowable and that all the answers must also be compatible. See Roots of Romanticism (1999, pp. 21-2) - RK.
2. See Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, University Park PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
3. See for example the direct action network No Borders.
4. May has written extensively on Rancière, and has published a new book entitled The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: creating equality, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
5. Franks defines these terms in his essay - RK.
6. See Lewis Call, Postmodern Anarchism, Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2003.
7. See Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics: the distribution of the sensible, trans., Gabriel Rockhill, New York: Continuum, 2004.