post anarchism & radical politics today

Post-Anarchism and Radical Politics Today (retrieved 2018) by saul newman via 22 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/saul-newman-post-anarchist-and-radical-politics-today]

[whole article is also in post anarchism: a reader p 46-66]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Newman: Saul Newman (born 22 March 1972) is a British political theorist who writes on post-anarchism. He is professor of political theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London.. Newman took up the term “post-anarchism” as a general term for political philosophies filtering 19th century anarchism through a post-structuralist lens, and later popularized it through his 2001 book From Bakunin to Lacan. Thus he rejects a number of concepts traditionally associated with anarchism, including essentialism, a “positive” human nature, and the concept of revolution. . the subject of a number of debates amongst anarchist theorists and activists as well as academics

notes/quotes:

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There is an *urgent need today for a new conceptualization of radical politics, for the invention of a new kind of radical political horizon ..t– especially as the existing political terrain is rapidly becoming **consumed with various reactionary forces such as religious fundamentalism, neoconservatism/neoliberalism and ethnic communitarianism. ***But what kind of politics can be imagined here in response to these challenges, defined by what goals and by what forms of subjectivity? ..relationship between the political and the economic is now conceived in a different way: ‘global capitalism’ now operates as the signifier through which ****diverse issues – autonomy, working conditions, indigenous identity, human rights, the environment, etc. – are given a certain meaning (cf. Newman, 2007a).

*the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

**any form of re ness as cancerous distraction

***not really imagining if responding/goals.. just same song perpetuating same song

****not really diverse issues.. all too steeped in whalespeak

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Moreover, social movements today eschew the model of the revolutionary vanguard party with its authoritarian, hierarchical and centralized command structures; rather, the emphasis is on horizontal and ‘networked’ modes of organization, in which alliances and affinities are formed between different groups and identities without any sort of formalized leadership. Decision making is usually decentralized and radically democratic.. t

rather.. decision making is unmooring us.. need to try a nother way

endnote 4: The ‘anarchist’ forms of organization and decision-making procedures which characterize many activist groups today are discussed in David Graeber’s article, ‘The New Anarchists’ (2002).

new anarchists.. david graeber

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*In Hobbes’ state of nature, the conditions of perfect equality and perfect liberty – the defining principles of anarchism – led inevitably to the ‘war of everyman against everyman’,..t thus justifying the sovereign state (Hobbes, 1968: ch.13). .Rather than suppressing or restricting perfect liberty and equality – which most forms of political theory do, including liberalism – anarchism seeks to combine them to the greatest possible extent. Indeed, one cannot do without the other. Étienne Balibar has formulated the notion of ‘equal-liberty’ (egaliberté) to express this idea of the inextricability and indeed, irreducibility, of equality and liberty – the idea that one cannot be realized without the other:

*then still conditions of sea world.. and so still perpetuating myth of tragedy and lord

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For anarchists, then, the state was not only the major source of oppression in society, but the major obstacle to human emancipation – which was *why the state could not be used as a tool of revolution; rather, it had to be dismantled as the first revolutionary act. We might term this theoretical insight – in which the state is conceived as a largely autonomous dimension of power – the ‘autonomy of the political’. 

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In other words, according to anarchists, the revolutionary vanguard party – with its organized and hierarchical command structures and bureaucratic apparatuses – was already a microcosm of the state, a future state in waiting (see Bookchin, 1971). For anarchists, the revolution must be libertarian in form as well as ends – indeed, the former would be the condition for the latter; and so rather than a vanguard party seizing power, a revolution would involve the masses acting and organizing themselves spontaneously and without leadership. This does not mean that there would be no political organization or coordinated action; rather that this would involve decentralized and democratic decision-making structures.

oi to against ness and re ness and decision making ness.. et al.. all the red flags that really mean ‘already a microcosm of state’/whatever..

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CONTEMPORARY DEBATES

The themes I have discussed are often reflected in debates in radical political theory today, particularly amongst key continental thinkers – such as Badiou, Rancière, Laclau, and Hardt and Negri. Amongst these contemporary theorists there is *the recognition of the need to develop new approaches to radical politics in the face of the global hegemony of neoliberal capitalism and the increasing authoritarianism and militarism of ‘democratic’ states. Indeed, as I shall show, many of these thinkers seem to come quite close to anarchism in their approaches to radical politics, or draw upon anarchist themes – while at the same time remaining silent about the anarchist tradition…There is a general and somewhat perplexing silence about anarchism – and yet, **I would suggest that anarchism is the ‘missing link’ in a certain trajectory of radical political thought, one that is becoming increasingly relevant today. ***Here I will attempt to show the ways in which anarchism can inform some of these key debates in contemporary radical politics.

*yes.. nothing legit diff to date.. again.. the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

**rather .. cancerous distraction if it is how you’ve described it thus far.. legit missing pieces.. we need to org around those legit needs

***ie of cancerous distraction.. oi

This was precisely the same problem that was posed by the anarchists well over a century before – *the tendency and danger of revolutionary movements (including Marxism) to reproduce, through the mechanism of the political party, the state power they claimed to be opposing.. t

*that will happen if any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

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what is more problematic – as well as paradoxical – about Badiou, is his highly idealized and abstract conception of politics, one that sees the political ‘event’ as such a rarefied experience that it almost never happens. The impression one gets from Badiou is that all genuine radical politics ended with the Cultural Revolution. Major political events, such as the ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 1999 and the emergence of the anti-globalization movement, are consigned to irrelevance in Badiou’s eyes. The problem with Badiou is his haughty disregard for *concrete, everyday forms of emancipatory politics: genuine egalitarian experiments in resistance, autonomy and radical democracy are going on all the time, in indigenous rights movements, in food cooperatives, in squatters’ collectives, in independent media centres and social centres, in innovative forms of direct action, in courageous acts of civil disobedience, in mass demonstrations and so on; Badiou seems either oblivious to all of these or grandly contemptuous of them. As Critchley (2000) has observed, Badiou gestures towards a ‘great politics’ and an ethics of heroism, one that risks, as I would argue, a nostalgia for the struggles of the past. There is a kind of philosophical absolutism in Badiou’s thinking, from which any form of politics is judged from the impossible standard of the ‘event’, akin to the Pauline miracle. **I agree that what we need today is a genuine politics defined by new practices of emancipation which break with existing forms, with the structures of the party and the state, and which invent new and innovative political relationships and ways of being. But the problem is that Badiou sets such an impossibly high and abstract standard for radical politics that almost nothing in his eyes lives up to the dignity of the event. For all his insistence that politics must be situated around the event, there is virtually no recognition of real, situated political struggles.

*you can be very concrete in sea world.. doesn’t mean you’ll get out.. hari rat park law et al.. the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]

**sounds like me.. warning ness et al.. but not thinking am better.. just wanting something that actually gets to root of problem

What is really behind this contempt for the politics of the everyday, I would argue, is a kind of elitism, which can be found in Badiou’s fetishization of the militant. For Badiou (2001), the figure of emancipatory politics is not the people or the masses, but the isolated militant engaged in a heroic struggle against overwhelming odds, fighting his or her own impulse to give up, to capitulate. *There is little emphasis here on building mass movements, on working to develop links between different groups, on the spontaneous self-organization of people, on grassroots direct action, on democratic decision making, on decentralized social organization, etc.

*yeah to some (spontan org.. links.. ).. no to some (direct action.. demo dm)

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 the notion that the empty universality of the political space can be filled temporarily with certain signifiers, like ‘global democracy’ or ‘the environment’ – or even the claims of a particular group – around which other struggles and identities are discursively constructed, is, in my view, a necessary and inevitable aspect of any kind of radical politics which hopes to transcend the position of pure particularism.

and to me.. not legit radical.. signifiers we need: itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us

Perhaps it is with a view of developing a new model of politics that is no longer reliant on notions of leadership, representation, sovereignty and the seizure of state power, that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have proposed the concept of the multitude..

multitude.. michael hardt.. antonio negri

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There are a number of interesting themes here, themes which have a clear resonance with anarchism, as well as applying to the emerging reality of anti-globalization struggles. The notion of the multitude bears strong similarities to Bakunin’s idea of the revolutionary mass, an entity defined by multiple identities and possibilities rather than by class unity and strict political organization. Furthermore, *there is the idea of acting in common, spontaneously and without centralized leadership – an idea which derives from anarchism, and which, as many commentators have noted, is a characteristic of contemporary anti-capitalist movements, activist networks and affinity groups. ..Hardt and Negri talk about the ‘exodus’ of the multitude, a simple turning away from, or refusal to recognize, sovereignty, upon which, as in Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic, the sovereign would simply no longer exist

*today we can go deeper.. ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)

the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]

there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it

ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition

**

Our world is not a ‘smooth space’ as Hardt and Negri maintain, but a dislocated, uneven space – a world beset by major divisions and inequalities, exclusions and violent antagonisms. Indeed, rather than creating a borderless world of smooth flows and transactions, economic globalization is producing new borders everywhere – symbolized by the Israeli ‘security’ wall, or the fence being constructed along the US–Mexico border.

because not sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

siddiqi border law et al

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What is missing from Hardt and Negri’s notion of the multitude is any account of how this can be constructed, how to build transnational alliances between people in the global North and South.. What is lacking in this understanding of the multitude is any notion of political articulation – in other words, any explanation of how this multitude comes together and why it revolts

ie: a nother way

a sabbatical ish transition

Jacques Rancière, on the other hand, proposes a very *different notion of radical politics to that of the multitude – for him, politics emerges out of a fractured rather than smooth space, something that ruptures existing social relations from the outside rather than being immanent within them...his whole political project has been to disturb existing hierarchies and forms of authority, to unseat the position of mastery from which the masses are led, excluded, dominated, spoken for and despised. Any form of vanguard politics is, for Rancière, simply another expression of elitism and contempt for ordinary people. Indeed, **these ‘ordinary’ people are actually extraordinary, being capable of emancipating themselves without the intervention of revolutionary parties.

*needs to be outside sea world.. but already inside each heart

**yes to the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. but so too.. imagine a turtle ness.. something beyond our comprehension.. graeber unpredictability/surprise law

We can see this idea particularly in Rancière’s study of the French nineteenth-century schoolteacher Joseph Jacotot, who developed what was essentially an *anarchist model of education where he was able to teach students in a language that he did not speak himself, and where students were able to use this method to teach themselves and others. The discovery that one did not need to be an expert in a subject – or even have any real knowledge of it – in order to teach it, undermined the posture of mastery and intellectual authority, a posture that all institutionalized forms of politics are based on (the authority of professional politicians, experts, technocrats, economists, those who claim to have a technical knowledge that the people do not).**All forms of political and social domination rest upon a presupposed inequality of intelligence, through which hierarchy is naturalized and the position of subordination comes to be accepted..t And so if, as Jacotot’s experiment showed, there is actually an equality of intelligence – the idea that no one is naturally more or less intelligent than anyone else, that everyone is equally capable of learning and teaching themselves – this fundamentally jeopardizes the inegalitarian principle that the social order is founded upon. This form of intellectual emancipation suggests a profoundly egalitarian politics – a politics that not only seeks equality, but, more importantly, is founded on the absolute fact of equality. In other words, politics, for Rancière, starts with the fact of equality: ‘Equality was not an end to attain, but a point of departure, a supposition to maintain in every circumstance’ (1991: 138). Furthermore, emancipation was not something that could be achieved for the people – it had to be achieved by the people, as a part of a process of self-emancipation in which there was a recognition by the individual of the equality of others: ‘[T]here is only one way to emancipate. And no party or government, no army, school, or institution, will ever emancipate a single person’ (ibid.: 102).

*but if think you are/need-to-be teaching .. already thinking levels.. already not trust the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

**intellectness as cancerous distraction.. any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do..

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Central here would be a certain realignment of anarchism, no longer around an opposition between society and the state, but between ‘politics’ and ‘the police’. In other words, the central antagonism is not so much between two entities, but between two different modes of relating to the world. ‘Police’ refers to the rationality of ‘counting’ that founds the existing social order – a logic that partitions and regulates the social space, assigning different identities to their place within the social hierarchy. In this sense, police would include the usual coercive and repressive functions of the state, but it also refers to a much broader notion of the organization and regulation of society – the distribution of places and roles. In other words, domination and hierarchy cannot be confined to the state, but are in fact located in all sorts of social relationships – indeed, domination is a particular logic of social organization, in which people are consigned to certain roles such as ‘worker’, or ‘delinquent’, or ‘illegal immigrant’, or ‘woman’, to which are attributed particular identities.

police ness

Politics, on the other hand, is the process which disrupts this logic of social ordering – which ruptures the social space through the demand by the excluded for inclusion. For Rancière, politics emerges from a fundamental dispute or ‘disagreement’ (mesentente) between a particular group which is excluded and the existing social order: *this excluded social group not only demands that its voice be heard, that it be included in the social order, but, more precisely, it claims in doing so to represent the whole of society. What is central to politics, then, according to Rancière, is that an excluded part not only demands to be counted as part of the social whole, but that it claims to actually embody this whole. Rancière shows the way that in ancient Greece the demos – or ‘the people’, the poor – which had no fixed place in the social order, demanded to be included, demanded that its voice be heard by the aristocratic order and, in doing so, claimed to represent the universal interests of the whole of society. In other words, there is a kind of metonymical substitution of the part for the whole – the part represents its struggle in terms of a universality: its particular interests are represented as being identical to those of the community as a whole. **In this way, the ‘simple’ demand to be included causes a rupture or dislocation in the existing social order: this part could not be included without disturbing the very logic of a social order based on this exclusion. To give a contemporary example: the struggles of ‘illegal’ immigrants – perhaps the most excluded group today – to be given a place within society, to have their status legitimized, would create a kind of contradiction in the social order which refuses to include or even recognize them, which promises equal and democratic rights to everyone, and yet denies them to this particular group. In this way, the demand of the ‘illegals’ to be counted as ‘citizens’ highlights the inconsistency of the situation in which universal democratic rights are promised to all, but in practice are granted to only some; it shows that any fulfilment of the democratic promise of universal rights is at the very least conditional on their recognition also as citizens with equal rights.

*cancerous distraction.. just conforming to and perpetuating sea world/same song

**but not really a rupture/dislocation.. because demand is to be a part of sea world.. we need a nother way.. hari rat park law et al

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While it might seem that the demand for inclusion into the existing social, legal and political order is not an anarchist strategy, the point is that this demand for inclusion, because it is framed in terms of a universality, of a part which, in its very exclusion, claims to be the whole, *causes a dislocation of this order. In this sense, radical politics today might take the form of **mass movements which construct themselves around particularly marginalized and excluded groups, such as the poor, or ‘illegal’ immigrants.

*again.. not actually

**won’t get to root of problem.. has to be around all of us for the dance to dance

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Rancière’s view of political subjectification would be somewhat different from this. There is no natural or social tendency towards revolution; instead, what is important is the unpredictability and contingency of politics. Furthermore, the political subject is not founded on essentialist conceptions of human nature; rather, the subject emerges in an unpredictable fashion through a rupturing of fixed social roles and identities. This last point is important. For Rancière, political subjectification is not the affirmation or expression of an innate sociality, but rather a break with the social. It is a kind of de-subjectification or ‘dis-identification’ – a ‘removal from the naturalness of place’ – in which one distances oneself from one’s normal social role:

Rather than political subjectivity emerging as immanent within society, it is something that, in a sense, comes from ‘outside’ it – not in terms of some metaphysical exteriority, but in terms of a process of disengagement from established subject positions and social identities.

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POST-ANARCHISM

the point is that these cannot be understood as being founded on a certain conception of human nature, or as emerging inevitably from social processes. Rather, they are always to be constructed, and they often have unpredictable and contingent effects. There is no inevitability in this process, as there was for classical anarchists.

graeber unpredictability/surprise law et al

It is this idea of unpredictability, invention and contingency that I see as central to a new way of thinking about anarchism – one that avoids the sort of humanist essentialism and positivism that characterized much of classical anarchism. ..this would mean a partial abandonment – or at least a revising – of the Enlightenment humanist discourse that anarchism has been indebted to: an abandonment of essentialist ideas about human nature, of social positivism, of ideas about an immanent social rationality that drives revolutionary change. Instead, anarchist theory would have to acknowledge that social reality is discursively constructed, and that the subject is situated, and even constituted, within external relations of language and power, as well as unconscious forces, desires and drives which often exceed his rational control.[21] However, this does not mean – as many have wrongly suggested in reference to thinkers like Foucault – that the subject is determined by social structures or caught in ‘disciplinary cages’. On the contrary, post-structuralist approaches seek openings, interstices, indeterminacies, aporias and cracks within structures – points where they become displaced and unstable, and where new possibilities for political subjectification can emerge. Indeed, this view of the relationship between the subject and social structures, I would suggest, actually allows for a greater degree of autonomy and spontaneity than that posited by classical anarchists. That is to say, the ‘post-structuralist’ approach breaks the link between subjectivity and social essence, allowing a certain discursive space in which subjectivity can be reconfigured. The aim, from a post-structuralist point of view, would be for the subject to gain a certain distance from the discursive fields in which his/her identity is constituted – and it is precisely this distance, this gap, which is the space of politics because it allows the subject to develop new forms and practices of freedom and equality.

The prefix ‘post-’ does not mean ‘after’ or ‘beyond’, but rather a working at the conceptual limits of anarchism with the aim of revising, renewing and even radicalizing its implications. Post-anarchism, in this sense, is still faithful to the egalitarian and libertarian project of classical anarchism – yet it contends that this project is best formulated today through a different conceptualiza-tion of subjectivity and politics: one that is no longer founded on essentialist notions of human nature or the unfolding of an immanent social rationality. . Psychoanalysis, in my view, is crucial to developing a fuller account of the potentialities of the subject – one that goes beyond the Foucauldian notion of ‘subject positions’.

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This debate has some relevance to post-anarchism today, as many post-struc-turalist-inspired theorists of contemporary activism – Hardt and Negri being among the most prominent, but also Richard J.F. Day (2005) – tend to see a Deleuzo-Spinozian motif of immanence, abundance, flux and becoming as the most appropriate way of thinking about the decentralized affinity groups and ‘rhizomatic’ networks that characterize anti-capitalist radical politics today. Although I have always considered the anti-statist thought of Deleuze (and Guattari) to be invaluable for radical politics, my own approach tends to place more emphasis on the idea of a ‘constitutive outside’: the idea – theorized in different ways by thinkers like Lacan and Derrida – of a kind of discursive limit or void which exceeds representation and symbolization.

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CONCLUSION

What I see as particularly important is the need to develop a universal dimension for collective politics – *one which is built upon localized practices of resistance, but which also goes beyond them and allows links to emerge between actors on a politico-ethical terrain defined by an unconditional liberty and equality. This is why the question of radical democracy is central: radical democracy – seen as a series of **mobilizations and practices of emancipation, rather than as a specific set of institutional arrangements – is the form of politics that allows liberty and equality to be combined and rearticulated in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

*any form of re ness as cancerous distraction

**how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..

ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)

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