Postanarchism in a Nutshell

Jason Adams

2003
Contents
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

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 In the past couple of years there has been a growing interest in what some have begun calling
“postanarchism” for short; because it is used to describe a very diverse body of thought and
because of its perhaps unwarranted temporal implications, even for those within this milieu, it is
a term that is more often than not used with a great deal of reticence. But as a term, it is also one
which refers to a wave of attempts to try to reinvent anarchism in light of major developments
within contemporary radical theory and within the world at large, much of which ultimately
began with the Events of May 1968 in Paris, France and the intellectual milieu out of which the
insurrection emerged. Indeed, in the preface to Andrew Feenberg’s recent book on the events,
When Poetry Ruled the Streets, Douglas Kellner points out that poststructuralist theory as it
developed in France was not really a rejection of that movement as is sometimes thought, but
for the most part was really a continuation of the new forms of thought, critique and action
that had erupted in the streets at the time. As he puts it, “the passionate intensity and spirit of
critique in many versions of French postmodern theory is a continuation of the spirit of 1968
Baudrillard, Lyotard, Virilio, Derrida, Castoriadis, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and other French
theorists associated with postmodern theory were all participants in May 1968. They shared its
revolutionary elan and radical aspirations and they attempted to develop new modes of radical
thought that carried on in a different historical conjecture the radicalism of the 1960s” (2001, p.
xviii).
Thus, whether it is fully self-conscious of this fact or not, it is ultimately against this back-
ground that “postanarchism” has recently emerged as an attempt to create a hybrid theory and
practice out of the most compelling elements of early anarchist thought as well as more recent
critical theories that have emerged out of this and similar milieus around the world, thus rein-
vigorating the possibility of a politics whose primary slogan is “all power to the imagination”
in our own time. It should come as no surprise that this would eventually take place since it
is well-known that anarchism was a major element of the events; this is evidenced not only in
Raoul Vaneigem’s statement that “from now on, no revolution will be worthy of the name if it
does not involve, at the very least, the radical elimination of all hierarchy” (2001, p. 78) but also
in a remarkably resonant statement by Michel Foucault a decade later, in which he stated that
“where Soviet socialist power was in question, its opponents called it totalitarianism: power in
Western capitalism was denounced by Marxists as class domination; but the mechanics of power
in themselves were never analyzed. This task could only begin after 1968, that is to say on the
basis of daily struggles at the grass roots level, among those whose fight was located in the fine
meshes of the web of power” (Gordon, 1980, p. 116).
These are just two of the most obvious examples of this legacy, but countless others like this
could easily be dug up to make the case further — even if it might be countered that many of the
participants were also largely influenced by existentialism, phenomenology, the Frankfurt School
and Western Marxism in general, it is undeniable that a strong anarchistic, anti-hierarchical ethic
permeated the entire affair just as it has the theorists who emerged out of it. Thus it can clearly
be seen how anarchism has, though perhaps indirectly, nevertheless been a major influence on
many of these thinkers, all of whom produced the main body of their works in the aftermath of the
events. Paul Virilio for instance, has often directly expressed his affinity with anarchism, citing his
participation as one major reason for this. Despite widespread delusions asserting the contrary,
poststructuralists did not simply “give up” on insurrectionary and other social movements after
May ’68 either.

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 Virilio’s involvement, along with that of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari in the Autonomia and
free radio movements in Italy and France in the late 1970s, Foucault’s engagement with queer
liberation and prison abolition movements in the 1980s, Luce Irigiray and Judith Butler’s con-
nection with third-wave feminism in the 1990s and Derrida and Agamben’s work with the Sans
Papiers/No Border movement as well as Hardt and Negri’s extensive ties with the antiglobaliza-
tion movement of the past several years should alone be more than enough evidence to destroy
that myth. Further absurd critiques that are sometimes heard, which seek to take a rather unique
example such as cyberfeminist Donna Haraway to argue that poststructuralists are universally
uncritical of technology or a neo-nihilist like Jean Baudrillard to prove that they unwaveringly
reject the possibility of resistance are also quite ignorant since the flip side of such untrue and
totalizing statements is that a politics of “resistance” was a central element throughout the entire
corpus of Foucault’s work, just as the relentless critique of “the art of technology” in all its forms
ranging from military ordnance to television has been crucial throughout Virilio’s work.
Indeed, far from the images some would give of it, poststructuralism emerged out of a much
larger anti-authoritarian milieu which began by taking what up to that point had existed as
radical, but still abstract theories and put them into practice in the streets of Paris; for all its
limitations over the years, because its origins are to be found here, it nevertheless contains many
strong anarchistic elements that are not found elsewhere; therefore, it would seem obvious that
amongst these thinkers there would likely be a great deal of radical theory that would be of
use to anarchists today who wish to keep their theory relevant to the contours of a structure of
domination that does not exist outside of space and time but which is constantly in a state of flux
and transformation.
As mentioned, the term “postanarchism” has emerged recently as a term that could be used to
describe the phenomenon whereby this radically anti-authoritarian poststructuralist theory has
developed and mutated and split off into dozens of hybrid critical theories over the past three
decades, finally coming back to inform and extend the theory and practice of one of its primary
roots.
Anarchism seems to perpetually forget the lessons of recent events that have shaped the lived
present we inhabit daily, all to the unhappy ends of a fetishization of on the one hand the “proud
tradition” of the past and on the other the “glorious promise” of the future. As we have seen in
the example of the anarchistic events of May ’68, it is not simply poststructuralism that is inform-
ing anarchism today, but in fact the reverse is and has certainly been the case as well, despite
this having been largely ignored by almost everyone — until recently. In order to understand
what the emerging phenomena of postanarchism “is” in the contemporary moment, first of all
one should consider what it is not; it is not an “ism” like any other — it is not another set of
ideologies, doctrines and beliefs that can be laid out positively as a bounded totality to which
one might conform and then agitate amongst the “masses” to get others to rally around and con-
form to as well, like some odd ideological flag. Instead, this profoundly negationary term refers
to a broad and heterogeneous array of anarchist theories and practices that have been rendered
“homeless” by the rhetoric and practice of most of the more closed and ideological anarchisms
such as anarchist-syndicalism, anarchist-communism, and anarchist-platformism as well as their
contemporary descendants, all of which tend to reproduce some form of class-reductionism, state-
reductionism or liberal democracy in a slightly more “anarchistic” form, thus ignoring the many
lessons brought to us in the wake of the recent past.

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 Postanarchism is today found not only in abstract radical theory but also in the living prac-
tice of such groups as the No Border movements, People’s Global Action, the Zapatistas, the
Autonomen and other such groups that while clearly “antiauthoritarian” in orientation, do not
explicitly identify with anarchism as an ideological tradition so much as they identify with its
general spirit in their own unique and varying contexts, which are typically informed by a wide
array of both contemporary and classical radical thinkers.
Interestingly enough, all of this is to a surprising degree quite in line with the very origin of
the term in Hakim Bey’s 1987 essay “Post-Anarchism Anarchy”. In this essay, he argues that the
thing that is keeping anarchism from becoming relevant to the truly excluded of society, which
is also the thing driving so many truly anti-authoritarian people away from anarchism, is that it
has become so caught up in its own tightly bordered ideologies and sects that it has ultimately
mistaken the various doctrines and “traditions” of anarchism for the lived experience of anar-
chy itself. Between the dichotomous prison of a tragic past and impossible future, he says that
anarchism has become an ideological doctrine to be adhered to rather than as a living theory
with which to gum up the decentered works of the postindustrial society of control, all of this
resulting in the universal foregoing of any real politics of the present, a point also made by Raoul
Vaneigem in May ’68, but in regards to society in general. Bey goes on to emphasize the various
ideological anarchisms’ lack of attention to real desires and needs as being as reprehensible as
their reticence in the face of more recent radical theory, those challenging thoughts and ideas
that might appear to be “risky” or uncomfortable at first glance, especially to an anarchism in-
creasingly comfortable in its form, not unlike the post-industrial temp worker, who at the end
of the day plops down into the Lay-Z-Boy and stays there out of sheer exhaustion; if we were to
resist this temptation and open anarchism up to an engagement of this sort, he argues, “we could
pick up the struggle where it was dropped by Situationism in ’68 & Autonomia in the seventies
& carry it to the next stage” (1991, p. 62) far beyond where the grassroots radicals, anarchists,
existentialists, heterodox Marxists and poststructuralists have ever taken it in the past.
But for Bey, a postanarchist politics would really only become possible if anarchists could
somehow find the will to abandon a whole host of leftover fetishisms which have kept anar-
chism in its own private little network of self-imposed ideological ghettoes, including all types
of ideological purity, conceptions of power as simply blatant and overt, fetishisms of labor and
work, biases against cultural forms of resistance, secular cults of scientism, anti-erotic dogmas
which keep sexualities of all forms in the closet, glorifications of formal organization to the detri-
ment of spontaneous action and territorialist traditions that link space and politics, thus ignoring
the possibility of nomadic praxis. Fourteen years later, after some important foundational work
by radical theorists such as Andrew Koch, and Todd May, this schematic formulation of ‘postan-
archism’ reappeared under the same sign but in a rather different and more fleshed-out concept
developed by the Australian political theorist Saul Newman in his book “From Bakunin to Lacan:
Antiauthoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power”.
Here the term refers to a theoretical move beyond classical anarchism, into a hybrid theory
consisting of an synthesis with particular concepts and ideas from poststructuralist theory such
as post-humanism and anti-essentialism; Newman explains that “by using the poststructuralist
critique one can theorize the possibility of political resistance without essentialist guarantees: a
politics of postanarchism…by incorporating the moral principles of anarchism with the postruc-
turalist critique of essentialism, it may be possible to arrive at an ethically workable, politically
valid, and genuinely democratic notion of resistance to domination…Foucault’s rejection of the

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‘essential’ difference between madness and reason; Deleuze and Guattari’s attack on Oedipal rep-
resentation and State-centered thought; Derrida’s questioning of philosophy’s assumption about
the importance of speech over writing, are all examples of this fundamental critique of authority”
(2001, p. 158).
As is implied in Hakim Bey’s conception of postanarchism, here too it is obvious how the anti-
authoritarianism which Newman sees running throughout poststructuralist theory would have
emerged originally in the world-historic social movements at the end of the 1960s; in the pro-
cess, the radically anti-authoritarian spirit of anarchism, as one of the primary elements of these
milieu, mutated into a thousand different miniviruses, infecting all of these critical theories in
many different ways that are only now really being rediscovered. Yet, although he is critical of the
essentialism which he sees as endemic within the thought of canonic anarchists like Kropotkin
and Bakunin, Newman’s conception of postanarchism does not reject all early anarchist thought;
his embrace of Stirner’s egoism as the most important precursor to a politics of this sort illus-
trates this quite clearly. Finally, it should be noted that it is precisely in this sense that Newman’s
conception is actually quite similar to the “postmarxism” of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
in that while it is postanarchist it is also postanarchist (2001, p. 4) in that it is by no means a
total rejection of early anarchisms but rather a step beyond the limits defined for them by the
Enlightenment thought which had not yet really been subjected to a great deal of critique, while
simultaneously embracing the best elements produced by that same revolution in human con-
sciousness including such obvious aspects as the ability of people to govern themselves directly
without a sovereign lording over them; the viral strains of a mutant poststructuralism suddenly
reappearing in a new form after a long and nomadic exile.
Since the publication of Newman’s book in 2001, there have been several attempts to articulate
a conception of postanarchism that would bring on board many of his specific ideas regarding the
anarchistic elements of radical poststructuralist thought yet which would also bring it back out of
the halls of academia and into broader, more diverse, and more flammable environments, much
as Bey had originally described his conception of the term in 1987. Earlier this year, I started a
listserv and website by the name of postanarchism which was intended to do just that; I adver-
tised its existence on Indymedia websites all over the world, on Infoshop’s bulletin board and on
multiple radical activist and anarchist listservs all of which drew hundreds of anarchists, activists
and intellectuals, most commonly attracting those who somehow find a way to be all three si-
multaneously. Since that time there has emerged an increasingly dynamic discussion which has
ranged from the activist topic of social movements like the No Borders movement which has
taken on board the ideas of critical theorists like Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, Antonio Ne-
gri and Jacques Derrida, to the more strictly intellectual question of the extent to which early
anarchist thinkers such as Bakunin and Kropotkin were essentialist in their conceptions of the
human subject to the more explicitly anarchist discussion of what tendencies in contemporary
anarchism, such as insurrectionary anarchism, social ecology or anarchist-feminism might be
the most relevant in the contemporary world order.
There is now even talk of a postanarchism anthology which would collect the dozens of es-
says that have been circulating around the internet and bring them all together in one place; so
far the anthology will likely include such interesting proposals as one by former Black Panther
member Ashanti Alston on the outlines of what he conceives as a poststructuralist African an-
archism, combining the thought of Wole Soyinka, Sam Mbah, Todd May and Saul Newman as
well as another by Jesse Cohn and Shawn Wilbur which would critique Newman’s conception of

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postanarchism, arguing that even Bakunin and Kropotkin were far less essentialist and more far
critical of scientism than he generally allows. As can easily be discerned by examining this trajec-
tory, the result of this listserv, website and ensuing anthology is that not only has the discussion
and the definition of postanarchism now become a hybrid of Bey’s and Newman’s conceptions
of the term, but it has also become that of dozens of others who have been writing about the
intersections between anarchism, poststructuralism and other critical theories since at least the
early 1990s, with a pace and dynamism that has been steadily increasing on into its crescendo in
the present moment. In this often unknowingly simultaneous endeavor, anarchists from all kinds
of backgrounds with all kinds of ideas have sought to make contemporary anarchisms relevant
to them in their own unique situations, often going beyond poststructuralism itself, borrowing
liberally from the best of contemporary radical theory including phenomenology, critical theory,
Situationism, postcolonialism, autonomism, postmodernism, existentialism, postfeminism, and
Zapatismo amongst others. Andrew Koch for instance argues that postfeminists such as Helene
Cixous, Luce Irigiray and Julia Kristeva all have a great deal to teach contemporary anarchists
about the authoritarian elements of patriarchal foundationalism; Ricardo Dominguez uncovers
poetic revelations in the links between Zapatista strategies of decentered netwar and eleuzo-
Guattarian rhizomatic forms of resistance to the State form, neither of which he reminds us,
need be “plugged in” to be effective.
Thus, it should be clear from all of this that the other than opposition to all forms of domination,
the only thing all of these theorists share is an extreme lack of consensus over what it means to
combine anarchism with these extremely divergent philosophies; in fact, while some have used
it as an excuse to whole-heartedly write off earlier tendencies such as anarchist-syndicalism,
ironically some of the main theorists touted as exemplary by such postanarchists, including Paul
Virilio, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have all flirted with versions of that exact tradition in
various parts of their works, even using terms like “general strike”, (Virilio, 1997, p. 41) “anarcho-
syndicalist” (Armitage, 2001, p. 19) and “One Big Union” all in the positive (Hardt and Negri, 2000,
p. 206).
What this means then, is that radical theory, just like the world in which it has emerged, is
always in a perpetual state of flux, a nomadism that never settles down, never completely hardens
into one particular shape and in which the “past” eternally returns in new and unexpected ways
in the present; many poststructuralist intellectuals, for instance, after having been denounced
as increasingly apolitical and obscurantist have paid heed to these calls by using much clearer
language and actively trying to engage their theories with the practice of actually existing social
movements.
This recent tendency, exemplified most clearly in certain works of Paul Virilio, Giorgio Agam-
ben, Jacques Derrida, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, can thus be seen as a return to the roots
of poststructuralism in the Events of May ’68 when intellectuals revolted against their roles as the
organizers of the cybernetic society and together with millions of workers, immigrants, women
and others, turned this world upside down, if only for a few brief, blissful moments. It is in this
way that the appearance of postanarchism in recent years can also be seen as an aspect of this re-
turn of the recently forgotten past, at least partially as a result of the return of a world-historical
social movement that has been challenging all forms of technocratic domination, carrying the
struggle of May ’68 and the Italian Autonomia to the next stage as Bey had hoped; a phenomena
perhaps best summed up, at least for the moment, by the proclamation, “neither the normaliza-
tion of classical anarchism nor the depoliticization of poststructuralism!”

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 To visit the postanarchism clearinghouse website or to join the postanarchism listserv, which
now has several hundred members from all over the world engaging in discussions like this,
please visit the “postanarchism” link at www.spooncollective.org

References
• Armitage, John 2001. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. London: Sage Publications.

• Bey, Hakim, 1991. TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Ter-
rorism. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.

• Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman, 2001. When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May
Events of 1968. Albany: SUNY Press.

• Gordon, Colin, ed., 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–
1977, Michel Foucault. New York: Pantheon Books.

• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

• Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso.

• May, Todd, 1994. The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press.

• Newman, Saul, 2001. From Bakunin to Lacan: Antiauthoritarianism and the Dislocation of
Power. Lanham: Lexington Books.

• Vaneigem, Raoul, 2001. The Revolution of Everyday Life. London: Aldgate Press.

• Virilio, Paul, 1997. Pure War. New York: Semiotext(e)

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Jason Adams
Postanarchism in a Nutshell
2003

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