Post structuralist anarchism

Exploring the leaky body, eh?

It can mean a lot of things. If it means, "the workers are united in that they all want the same thing, " that would be false. If it means, "the workers are united in that they have certain interests in common, " it would be true.

hmmm, i always thought 68 failed because there was too much factionalism, not enough support from outside and nastiness from the french state and its tentacles. still, whatever you say...

also, you realise that not every poststructuralist agrees with baudrillard...

also poststructuralism prevented feminism and marxism from dying a very nasty and painful death, and both have now advanced way way way beyond anarchist thought...

also it doesn't deny any basis for solidarity, it just reassesses the site of contestation into less one-dimensional terms and says, let's try and deal with the complexity of reality and stop living in the 19th century...

also it says nothing about discourses 'creating us'- it says identity is discursively negotiated (very very different), and anyway, remember that it has disagreements within it like any other school of thought anyway...

also it has brought about new methods of participatory research that has broken ooodles of boundaries, particularly in vastly reducing hierarchy in academia and bringing it more into real life, as well as opening up new avenues where there is struggle and bringing new analyses of that struggle to the fore...

some poison 8)

if so, i must be bourgeois cause i don't know what that is...

is this related to the proletariat's "historic mission"?

i'll be less confused if you can define historical consciousness without any words over 3 syllables long.

if i chat to someone else about work, or being a student or whatever, i rarely find that the phrase "historical consciousness of the proletariat, the negation of capital" comes up in conversation. work is boring, being a student is stressful and frequently not very educational, there are lots of problems that we share and which we can work together on, but historical proletarian consciousness is not one of them.

you tell me.

which workers? all of us? what are we united on? did we agree to be united for the smashing of capitalism?

now saying that the workers in the fast-food stores in New Zealand are united is at least slightly meaningful, but only with reference to the context. (http://www.supersizemypay.com/) and even then its a tenuous statement to make.

Stuff like Deleuze & Guattari - maybe not arch-poststructuralists but IME the most quoted of their ilk, by no means reduces hierarchy in academia - rhizomatic lines of flight deterritorialisation etc. etc. etc. on and on and on.

They're responsibly for a massive pile of shit writing found on the walls of many art galleries and press releases. Arts Council loves all that crap.

http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/d&g/arhizome.html

and in their own words:

The material conditions of class society are pretty much universal (remnants of feudalism and other systems are around, but rapidly disappearing) - as such these material conditions - exploitation, capital accumulation affect just about everyone.

However, the cultural reflections of this differ widely - consumerism, exurbs, manual vs. clerical vs. 'creative', more fundamental stuff like ethnicity, gender which both affect and reflect class relationships - these aren't universal experiences. Poststructuralism, from what I've seen of it, seems to locate itself almost entirely in the cultural domain - if everything's determined by language then material conditions become secondary.

i don't know much about all that so i will take your word for it. i was just talking about the 'little guys' (e.g. Dyck or Grosz. oh crap they're both feminists but you get the picture) who just do normal researchy stuff but tend to apply more embodied/reflexive/participatory methodologies to their normal work, leading from the daddies like deleuze but not being farty about it.

i'm not a big social theory man myself so i will plead ignorance on deleuze et al

I'm pretty ignorant on Deleuze et al as well - tried to read A Thousand Plateaus and got fucked off with it. Haven't read any foucalt etc. The research stuff you mentioned sounds interesting, but it also sounds like it could've been done without recourse to D&G.

I'm sure the button or revol will be along shortly to tell me that D&G aren't post-structuralists anyway.

i think you quoted me more than a little disingenuously there. and your suggestion that poststructuralist thought makes unity impossible is a bit of a misreading as well.

i think a post structuralist would argue that the discursive production of a revolutionary subject is problematic, that in this case, the discourse that is intended to be liberatory ends up creating the subject it claims to represent. Surely the most radical attacks on capital are not carried out by people grouped together around the identity of proletariat but around a common struggle against a common oppression. I can't imagine that anyone says "let us unite my proletarian sibling!" when looking to unite with other workers.

Struggle arises from the contradictions that power creates, although the basic contradiction of capital is universal, it is manifested in particular circumstances and resistance is surely likewise rooted in these particular circumstances.

Hi

An advocate of Left Anarchist Working Class Autonomy might, if they'd been drinking and came over a bit sentimental. Imagine that.

I’d have said your position was distinctly structuralist, defining the working class as a helpless phenomenon within capital’s framework rather than master of its own destiny, the most awesome creative force ever to walk on this sorry planet. But hey, what do I know? I’m posting on Introductory Thought again. Sorry.

Love

LR

There is a really good short piece by Deleuze called "Many Politics" in Dialogues it is like anti-Oedipus reduced to ten pages. A good intro. Also his piece Postscript on The Society of Control rules ...

cheers

Dave

I have no problems with poststructuralism, in my opinion it's just an application of historicism to new fields, most of Foucaults analyses don't seem incompatible with Anarchism or even Marxism, saying that mechanisms of control have changed over time due to conscious effort on the part of rulers seems fairly accurate. And poststructuralism scores over marxism in that it includes power structures in its analysis as well as economics.

Foucault thought anarchism was racist, in that class struggle is a historical adaption of earlier race struggles, like Saxon peasantry versus Norman aristocracy in the English revolution. But, he didn't seem to think this racism a terribly bad thing, as far as class struggle goes.

A Marxist viewpoint can be extended into post-structuralism. Take Raymond Williams, he saw language as a means of production, just like Marx, so all cultural productions are part of the means of production, all ways of changing the way the world is reproduced. So therefore, all cultural productions are part of the class struggle, or individual struggles, while not neccessarily aligning themselves with any extant class. This seems to me very post-modernist, if I've got post-modernism right. He applied this to modern forms of communication, but I reckon it can be applied historically, to all forms of culture, which may be anti-historicist, but may be more realistic.

If you take the point of view that anarchism has argued for a redistribution of power, rather than an abolition of power, then poststructuralism is entirely compatible with it. It's just an extension of materialism into analysis of the state. The state creates and recreates human nature, rather than human nature being essentially good or bad. This mutability is what Kropotkin argued.

However, this would all mean there is nothing beyond struggle, whether on an individual or general level, the only hope would be to change the situation that struggles occur in so that they become meaningless or less destructive. Or compassion.

does unity in a struggle presuppose a unified subjectivity?

i'm not quite sure what being conscious as a proletarian means. i think most people are aware that capitalism is a system that does not serve their needs or desires, they are aware of alienation, they are aware of selling their labour etc. What we are frequently not aware of is that it is the working class (as in those that sell their labour) who maintain and reproduce this system and it is thus within their ability to change it.

What is it to be aware as a proletarian? I think a revolution in terms of the means of production comes through a realisation of collective power through cooperation.

>hmmm, i always thought 68 failed because there was too much

>factionalism, not enough support from outside and nastiness from the >french state and its tentacles. still, whatever you say...

Not what I said. The post-structuralists are a product of that defeat, not the cause of it.

>also, you realise that not every poststructuralist agrees with >baudrillard...

That's where it all ends up. Once the rug is gone there's nothing left to stop you slipping all the way down the slope. The logic of relativism always leads to quiessence or seperatism and the logic of post-structuralism is the logic of relativism.

>also poststructuralism prevented feminism and marxism from dying a

>very nasty and painful death, and both have now advanced way way

<way beyond anarchist thought...

Disagree. It may have stopped them disappearing from academia, but academia is largely irrelevant (and I work there).

>also it says nothing about discourses 'creating us'- it says identity is

>discursively negotiated (very very different), and anyway, remember

>that it has disagreements within it like any other school of thought

>anyway...

But like any school of thought it has an internal logic that can be abstracted. If you read 19th century eugenicists and social Darwinists they're constantly fighting amongst themselves, but I don't think anyone would have any trouble with dismissing all of them as racist fucks. Besides which, Foucault and Derrida are quite keen on seeing us as the products of discourse and their influence is probably greater than any other post-structuralist thinker.

>particularly in vastly reducing hierarchy in academia and bringing it

>more into real life,

You're fucking joking aren't you? I teach this shit to first year students (as an english tutor) and it is completely inaccessable to anyone who hasn't first been trained in it. The language used is designed from the ground up to exclude the layperson; I spend half my time in class translating the stuff into something approaching plain english. I can't see how developing an entirely unnecessary technical language which is deliberately and willfully obscure reduces hierarchy in academia.

It's fun as an intellectual game and it's fun seeing if you can twist your brain into thinking in different ways, but as any kind of basis for your politics or as a description of reality it's pure bullshit.

Hi

That sucks really badly. Economics is the basis, not just another item on the shopping list of "oppressions".

Love

LR

Economics is a form of power relation, it doesn't override all other relations, unless you take all forms of possession to be economics, in which case you're right.

okayokay here's another go then...

i'm not sure- there's a difference between 'relativism' and 'baudrillard-ism'. and without an element of relativism there would be no class struggle anyway. struggle is situated and contextual. the drawing of absolutes from real life is bollocks because the world simply doesn't work that way, and as long as anarchism holds onto the high modernist metanarrative absolutes it will go no further than a trusting few. political ideology is like religion in that sense- truth claims are fine, so long as they accept their social/historical/cultural/etc position. It's not about selling out, it's about honesty

The idea that the logic of poststructuralism boils down to baudrillard is like saying the logic of anarchism boils down to the old pastoral romantics. it's just not true.

That was because their logic is fundamentally flawed, but i take your point.

so even if foucault says we are products of discourse (which i'm still unsure about, but let's say...) how does this affect the whole revolutionary project? not much at all. there are still classes, there is still a necessity for change. as products of discursive construction, our agency is only mildly affected, since there would be less impetus for revolt perhaps. still, challenging and transgressing such discourse can be done, and is particularly useful as a basis on which new forms of participation and reclaiming social space can be made.

you misunderstand me- i am talking about real research, not fartsy theory. i acknowledge, from first hand experience that the theory is pretty heavy stuff to read (although have you ever tried to read hegel? he was one of those high modernists you seem to idolise), but in creating a far more embodied, far more self-aware research base, it has massively reduced this sort of twatty language in real research (certainly in geography). the boundaries being pushed by some of these people, both in more accesible language and greater subject participation through techniques like participatory action research, the influence of poststructuralism has brought a lot of academia out of bullshit showy word-flexing. academic research is moving more and more away from this sort of lexicon, thanks to a background in poststructuralist thought, which can't be a bad thing at all.

i guess there's not much opportunity to read and engage with social research when you're an english lecturer who specialises in sci-fi

... sorry that sounded like a snipe- it wasn't meant to be

This has things exactly the wrong way around. The rise of post-structuralism, or more generally post-modernism, in academia doesn't signify (see what I did there?) that Marxism has been transcended, but instead that many radical academics have retreated politically.

It's been a while since I had to deal much with the works of Soja and the rest of the post-whatever geographers, but at the time the main thing that struck me was how much less their ideas amounted to in the end than those contained in the single volume of David Harvey's "Social Justice and the City", essentially the founding text of radical geography. In the context of this thread, Harvey's "Condition of Postmodernity" is of some significance too.

surely any new ideas are difficult to understand? don't you think Marx, Kropotkin, Chomsky, Debord are all difficult to understand at first - this doesn't mean they're responsible for upholding hierarchies - does it?

Anarchism is cock in that sense. When I hear or read Chomsky yattering away about some kind of fundamentally good human nature and creativity being oppressed by the capitalist system, and its true expression being found in anarcho-syndicalism I'm absolutely moved to wincing and fidgeting. It's so embarassing to hear someone quite sensible come out with such a pile of shite. Structuralist thought is religious dogmatism.

However I also have to assert that this conversation has become incredibly wanky and 'decontextualised' from the forces of class antagonism.

essentially tho structuralists are wrong and don't really see complexity in say, things like bureaucracy.

Take the Glasgow Housing Association (something I know a bit about). You could view it as a tool of the man which is being used to fuck social housing and rip the piss out of the working class, and broadly speaking you'd have the right idea, but in the way it operates and breathes there are dozens of rivulets of power (the discursive products if you like, and a complexity that that analysis can eschew) which wouldn't mind being autonomous at all, yet overall it is a bureaucracy that is quite conservative and has no pressing urge to disaggregate, even while it must use these incipient bureaucracies in order to exercise power (which of course encourages disaggregation).

i'm quite confused at your assertion that Chomsky is a structuralist, if anything he is much closer to the Cartesian tradition regarding the individual than structuralism.

And talk of a human nature is thoroughly unstructuralist.

okay, explain this please. chomsky is totally used as The Example of structuralism (in what i've been reading, which is mostly comparing him to foucault).

and someone-smarter-than-me tried to explain why human nature isn't structuralist, but i didn't get it, and stopped asking so that she wouldn't yell at me. if human nature is based on the understanding that the structure of being human (some biological essence) means that there is a fundamental nature, then how is that not structuralist?

well you've been reading some odd stuff - chomsky, as far as i can tell, has his own brand of linguistics (that 'universal grammar' silliness) that has an entirely different approach to the matter than structuralism.

to look at things more generally than the matter of linguistics - Chomsky and other such essentialists believe that there is a more or less static concept of meaning. structuralists tend to deny this, and believe that the bulk of a sign's meaningis 'produced' purely in its relationships to other signs. the difference with post-structuralism - inasmuch as the two can be divided - is an emphasis on the failure of such production, the 'irreducible gap', as Lacanians are wont to say. for sign, you can substitute whatever you're talking about - human subjects, classes, etc.

structuralism is against human nature, because it sees structures of subjects, rather than structures in subjects. let us turn to our time's finest pedagogue, MS Paint:

here, is the standard, dare i say bourgeois, view of the subject (i won't put words in chomsky's mouth since i'm not aware of exactly what he believes on this matter, but his view of linguistics implies this sort of take on things). there is this big melting pot called Dude, and all of these different features make up the one entity. it tends to view humanity as 'variations on a theme' - there are these basic parts, emotions, chomsky's ;universal grammar' and so on, and in various combinations they make subjects.

compare...Structuralist Dude!

as you can see, it is the RELATIONSHIPS between people/places/things that is important to a structuralist view. when we call someone a doctor, for instance, we're not referring to some mighty internal force of doctor-ness, we are implying that she has a certain relationship to her patients, the NHS, etc. obviously, everything works both ways - ie, part of Dude's Boss' subject relies on him exploiting dude, and so on. it doesn't take much effort to see that there is already the possibility of vast differences between subjects, just as there are possibilities for vastly different relations of production, sex, and so on. although there are important distinctions between the two orthodoxies which i won't go into while we're working with facetious Paint drawings, you can see that a 'marriage to Marxism' (and other ideologies of class struggle) is possible, since both have this focus on relations.

are you seriously going to sit there and tell me that, i dunno, Slavoj Zizek is a tough read (compared to other academic texts)? there are ways into it that aren't Glas in the original French.