smash the structure

Anarchism beyond Enlightenment

“As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.“ - Michel Foucault

What can we salvage from the ruins of a dead political project like anarchism? Like the phoenix, anarchism contains an ember within itself that provides the seed for its own reawakening, for its own triumphant rebirth and flight into the very heart of contemporary political theory and projects of resistance.

A case for openness

Hegel got the Dialectic backwards. Instead of human history being a path towards a final synthesis, a final answer to all questions, it is the opposite. The Dialectic does not seek closure - the Dialectic is constantly expanding itself, keeping itself open, and most importantly, avoiding completion. Reason is an attempt at a closure of the Dialectic - of a final synthesis. It is in this gap that anarchism can function as a theoretical device, as a tendency for the Dialectic to stay open and expanding. Anarchism can become a critique of those totalizing structures which operate on the Grand Narrative of Reason, such as liberal capitalism, etc. It is an insistence that history and knowledge remain decentralized and in the hands of the people. not institutions who claim to have a monopoly on it.

The subject as a project

The autonomous subject is dead. We need to supplement anarchism with Foucault’s notion of the subject as a project. Only when we conceive of the subject as a product of institutionalized power relations can we fully articulate a coherent critique of the Humanist project, as a totalizing narrative that claims a monopoly over the production of subjectivity. If we accept the subject as a projectual entity, there is no longer a repressed essence which needs to be liberated as in classical anarchism. However, for the free development of subjectivity, we have grounds to resist those institutions and structures which demand a totalizing model of subjectivity, and the discourses and technologies of power which help to proliferate and manufacture these subjectivities.

Against capitalists subjectivity

Re-conceiving the anarchist struggle from within this theoretical framework provides us with ammunition to challenge the capitalist social order. Schools, offices, prisons, hospitals, all the traditional sites of Foucault’s analysis, are now open to examination in there relation to capitalism. Upon engaging in this examination, we find that these institutions of power are founded on the production and proliferation of capitalist subjectivity. The molding of people into submissive, calculative, units of economic production is the principle mode of sustaining the rule of Capital. An anarchist struggle against capital and the system of social relations it entails must begin at the level of subjectivity, of experimenting with new forms of being subjects and relation to other subjects. It must entail a step beyond calculation and self-preservation, and a rebellious willingness to experiment with new ways of living.

No truths, no masters

Truth as a political category always serves those in power. The ruling order owns the means of producing truth, and has the institutional firepower to proliferate the submissive subjectivities that it requires to sustain itself. If anarchism abandons its silly Enlightenment project of institutionalizing the humanist grand narrative, it can wield the contingency of truth as a weapon against those who hide behind it as protection. If the anarchist project can act to expose the contingency of our everyday existence, it can rupture the monotony of the present way we relate to each other, and create the space for truly liberating interactions between people and collectives.

Structures and Resistance

Every structure relies equally on its periphery as it does on its internal components. The development of a structure or institution is aided not exclusively by those forces that support it, but by those forces that oppose it and render opposition to it. The antithesis therefore renders the synthesis possible, and provides it with the grounding necessary for its development. 

This micro-political operation is nowhere more prevalent than in the domain of criticism and resistance. In every act of protest, we risk the chance of incorporation into the very structures we wish to do damage to and problematize. This is rooted in the fact that problematization and affirmation are rooted in the same Dialectical structure - in questioning something we risk affirming its grounding and render it stronger.

Capitalism,in its current form, is an organic and totalizing entity. It not only operates in its own self-encapsulated domain, but permeates all aspects of social existences, namely the formation of identity and the articulation thereof. With the organic nature of Capital, it exhibits this resilience to criticism and resistance characteristic of such complex structures. It has developed methods for co-opting and managing the seemingly most devastating of criticisms, the most potentially revolutionary of movements.

Take for example, the No Logo movement associated with the anti-globalization movement. This movement grounded itself in a critique of logos, and the way they established social hierarchies and allowed for capitalism’s colonization of  culture and various other social spaces. The idea was to find sources of clothing without logos, and to wear these instead of mass-marketed name-brands such as Nike, etc. The success of this movement was its own downfall. As more and more people started wearing No Logo clothing, No Logo itself became a fashion trend. The absence of the logo itself becomes a logo.This demonstrates two things. (1) Capitalism is capable of undermining the most revolutionary projects and incorporating them into it’s logic and organization. (2) The critique, in attempting to undermine structures of capital, often is colonized by these very structures and incorporated into them.

The Overflowing Subject

The modern era is characterized by an organization of reality, the structuring of experience in the form of science and philosophy. Such structures claim to apply a universal epistemological or ontological structure across the pluralities of human existence, categorizing and incorporating elements into a system of linguistic hierarchy. However, it is my thesis that reality is ontologically constituted as a state of overflowing – constantly exceeding reduction into a static and rigid structure. Human existence, in all of its wondrous complexity, cannot be labeled, institutionalized, or locked in a static ontological state. It is primarily fluid, ephemeral, and consequently in a state of flux and overcoming of limitations. It is these things which refuse to be labeled, which exceed the iron cages we have put them in, that are the most beautiful.

Let’s start with an example – time. The structures for dealing with time typically involve three distinct elements: past, present, and future. The inherent limitation of this structure very quickly becomes obvious – the “present” does not exist. It exists only as an infinitesimally small split between the future and the past, a crack in the face of ontological reality. The present can always be split in half and split in half again, infinitely. This is the perfect example of the inherent problem with applying a rigid structure to the way we experience temporality – the future, the past, and the present never actually fully describe experience precisely because experience of time is overflowing – it is irreducible to elements in a linguistic hierarchy.

Time is not the only domain which exhibits this illusive ontological status – spatiality also exceeds incorporation into a static system of physics or other structures of organization. Take the standard Newtonian system of physics which relies on number theory. According to this system, we can assume that the movement of a person walking down the street can be measured in inches. However, this ultimately collapses when we examine the process of incrementing a number. The person has moved .1 inches, then .11 inches, then .111 inches, then .1111 inches, etc. This process continues forever, so in theory, the person can never reach 2 inches. As we all know, we can walk down the street. However, spatiality and motion always overflow a container we try to put them in, and such paradoxes splinter and collapse a rigid system of organization.

It is my thesis that the subject is constituted in the same way – any imposition of identity, ontological truths, or metaphysical presuppositions inevitably leave out a component of subjectivity and quickly collapse. We can never lock the subject down, cage the subject in, as it is always becoming, in a state of ontological overflowing. Enframing the “human” in scientific terms, or religious terms, or metaphysical terms, is impossible precisely because the subject is not reducible to a singular totalizing structure. It is in a constant state of flux, fluidly breaking down and re-creating its boundaries and modes of being.