Anarchist Studies |
ABSTRACT: Orthodox anarchism - with its scientific discourse, its humanism and its rationalist semiotics - relies too heavily upon categories that are politically and epistemologically suspect. Postmodern anarchism (as articulated by Debord, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Deleuze and Foucault) solves this problem by moving beyond the traditional anarchist critique of capital and the state to challenge Cartesian concepts of rationality, subjectivity and space. Cyberpunk science fiction brings this postmodern anarchism to a wider audience. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling use the virtual world of the computer network to articulate a new, non-Cartesian concept of space. They simultaneously develop a cybernetic model of human subjectivity which is profoundly at odds with the conventional Cartesian model. Cyberpunk also develops postmodern strategies of gestural, micro-political resistance. Gibson and Sterling describe, in short, a theory and a practice of postmodern anarchism, and they do so in a language far more accessible to the ordinary reader than that of Deleuze or Lyotard.
ABSTRACT: How can revolutionary opposition avoid becoming a mirror image of the system it opposes? This has long been a central question for anarchism. Pat Murphy's novel, in which a stateless community wages a non-violent war of resistance against invaders, promises to make an answer to our question visible. Paradoxically, The City, Not Long After surrepetitiously closes the very question it attempts to open, sacrificing its own radical potential in the process. My counter-questions, then, are: 1) What compels this novel to take back with one hand what it gives with the other? 2) If this attempt at imaginative transcendence ends in a self-cancelling gesture, what does its fate imply for anarchist theory? Additionally: how can we raise issues of 'realism' in fiction and political speculation without falling into the bad logic of vulgar realism - the very logic which makes every alternative to the system appear unreal?
ABSTRACT:Despite similar origins and shared commitments, anarchist environmentalism (known as social ecology) and ecofeminism have grown increasingly distant from, and sometimes even hostile to, one another. Some social ecologists decry the self-absorbed, essentialist New Age romanticism of the 'ecomystics', while ecofeminists give their attention to elaborate critiques of the rationalist/humanist ideals of social ecology. Both parties persist in misunderstanding and undervaluing one another, and in so doing reinforce a schism between science and culture which helps to sustain both environmental degradation and human oppression. In this essay I will offer a reading of Joan Slonczewski's 1986 science fiction novel, A Door Into Ocean, which makes use of both social ecology and ecofeminism as interpretive strategies in order to create an accommodation between these two stances, and return them to fruitful cooperation. I begin with a plot synopsis. A more theoretical dialogue follows with a two-part summary of Murray Bookchin's social ecology, which, while not comprehensive in scope, focuses on both those elements of his anarchist environmentalism which are underutilised by ecofeminists, and those which are misinterpreted. It also highlights ecofeminist and anarchafeminist views which have the most in common with Bookchin's ideals. The utility of the novel in broaching a compromise between the two perspectives is woven throughout this discussion, and the use of fiction for social ecology and ecofeminism is addressed more directly in part four. Finally, I focus on ecofeminism's response to Bookchin, and what ecofeminists still have to offer social ecology that Bookchin's analysis lacks.
ABSTRACT:Eric Frank Russell was one of the best loved British science fiction writers of the post-war period. Although he is best known for his humorous stories, his fiction contains a strong streak of political radicalism which was unusual in the science fiction of the time. This article looks at Russell's published fiction and at the Russell Archive recently deposited at the University of Liverpool in order to assess Russell's own political views. It analyses in particular the novella '...And Then There Were None' (1951) and The Great Explosion (1962), the novel which grew from it, and argues that they constitute a fictional discussion about different varieties of anarchism. The article concludes by looking at some of Russell's other short fiction and the letters in the Archive, suggesting that Russell was motivated by a strong distrust of authority of all kinds, and that his own political philosophy was close to anarchism.
Paul-F. Tremlett
ABSTRACT: In this paper I develop a 'reading' of the film, Star Trek: First Contact (1997). I begin by elaborating a critical anarchist hermeneutic that understands interpretation as praxis and meaning(s) as mutable and unstable. I suggest that the film can be understood as an effort to mediate a crisis in human relations with technology (a potential 'other'). I argue that the principal element or relation through which this crisis is posed and then resolved is that between Picard, Data and the Borg 'queen'. The stability of a postulated father-son relationship enjoyed by Picard and Data is threatened by the intervention of the Borg queen, who attempts Data's seduction. Picard must 'save' Data and destroy the Borg, and, in so doing, preserve the stable and discrete identities of human and machine to prevent a descent into disorder signified by the hybridity of the Borg. Disorder, as the absence of any organising principle of knowledge or experience, is further linked to the post-structuralist critique of 'foundationalism' and the anarchist critique of government.
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