judith butler on anarchism, precarity, and palestine

clastres’ autonomism

In the opening essay of Society Against the State, “Copernicus and the Savages,” Clastres does two things. First, he demonstrates how ethnology has been captured by a kind of ethnocentrism that has made it possible to speak about societies without political power, a kind of evolutionary trajectory wherein there are ‘underdeveloped’ societies and ‘developed’ ones based on their proximity to the Euro-American norm of the State-form. Second, he convincingly demonstrates the importance of “the decision to take seriously, at last, the men and women who live in primitive societies…” (20). He concludes by stating that, 1) “Societies cannot be divided into two groups: societies with power and societies without power…” instead, “political power is universal, immanent to social reality…and that it manifests itself in two primary modes: coercive power, and non-coercive power” (22), 2) coercive political power is merely one kind of power, “a particular case, a concrete realization of political power in some cultures…” (22), 3) the political is present in societies even where political institutions are absent” (22-23).

He lays out the task of a general political anthropology, which is to be split into two lines of inquiry: 1) “What is political power? That is: what is society?”, 2) “What explains the transition from non-coercive political power to coercive political power, and how does the transition come about? That is: what is history?” (24) This is directly a challenge to a Marxist conception of social development. As Clastres notes, citing Lapierre, “the truth of Marxism is that there would be no political power if there had not been conflicts between social forces.” But Clastres answers with a question: “what of societies without conflict, those in which ‘primitive communism’ obtains” (25)? He does not argue that some societies have their political bases in conflict, by which I understand him to mean “historical” conflict in a Marxist sense: class conflict, or the dialectical opposition of the ruling class (the State) versus the laboring class (the proletariat).

What Clastres does in this essay is make the case for understanding the political autonomously from the State-form, and power autonomously from coercion. It is not that these things must always remain separate, but instead that when they come together we should not take these as natural conditions, but rather as conjunctural ones.

radical pedagogy: toward a minor education exam reading list

Area 1: Articulating Critical Pedagogy

Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1983).

———, “Literacy and the Pedagogy of Voice and Political Empowerment,” Educational Theory 38(1), 1988: 61-75.

———, “Utopian Thinking Under the Sign of Neoliberalism: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Educated Hope,” Democracy and Nature 9(1), 2003: 91-105.

———, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1(1), 2004: 59-97.

Henry Giroux and Susan Searles Giroux, “Challenging Neo-liberalism’s New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 6(1), 2006: 21-32.

Curry Stephenson Malott and Bradley Porfilio, Critical Pedagogy in the 21^st Century: A New Generation of Scholars (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2011).

Peter McLaren, “Revolutionary Pedagogy in Post-Revolutionary Times: Rethinking the Political Economy of Critical Education,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 432-462.

———, “The Future of the Past: Reflections on the Present State of Empire and Pedagogy,” in Peter McLaren and Joe L. Kincheloe, Critical Pedaogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007): 289-314.

———, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (Boston: Pearson, 2007).

———, “Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy,” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 6(2), 2010: 1-11.

Peter McLaren and R. Farahmandpur, “Reconsidering Marx in Post-Marxist Times: A Requiem for Postmodernism?,” Educational Researcher 29(3), 2000: 25-33.

Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo, “Not Neo-Marxist, Not Post-Marxist, Not Marxian, Not Autonomist Marxism: Reflections on a Revolutionary (Marxist) Critical Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 10(3), 2010: 251-262.

Peter McLaren, Gregory Martin, Ramin Farahmandpur, and Nathalia Jaramillo, “Teaching In and Against the Empire: Critical Pedagogy as Revolutionary Praxis,” Teacher Education Quarterly (Winter 2004): 131-153.

Matthew Smith, Jean Ryoo, and Peter McLaren, “A Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” Education and Society 27(3), 2009: 59-76.

 

Area 2: Critiquing Critical Pedagogy

Anne C. Bell and Constance L. Russell, “Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy, and the Poststructuralist Turn,” Canadian Journal of Education 25(3), 2000: 188-203.

Gert J.J. Biesta, “Pedagogy Without Humanism: Foucault and the Subject of Education,” Interchange 29(1), 1998: 1-16.

James Campbell, “Education and its Discontents: The Pedagogy of Henry A. Giroux,” Critical Studies in Education 33(1), 1992: 96-109.

Jane Durie, “Emancipatory Education and Classroom Practice: A Feminist Post-Structuralist Perspective,” Studies in Continuing Education 18(2), 1996: 135-146.

C. Alejandra Elenes, “Reclaiming the Borderlands: Chicana/o Identity, Difference, and Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 47(3), 1997: 359-375.

Scott Ellison, “On the Poverty of Philosophy: The Metaphysics of McLaren’s ‘Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy’,” Educational Theory 59(3), 2009: 327-351.

• [Peter McLaren responds: “Afterwords,” Educational Theory 60(3), 2010: 391-393.]

Nirmala Erevelles, “Educating Unruly Bodies: Critical Pedagogy, Disability Studies, and the Politics of Schooling,” Educational Theory 50(1), 2000: 25-47.

Sandy Grande, “Whitestream Feminism and the Colonialist Project: A Review of Contemporary Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis,” Educational Theory 53(3), 2003: 329-346.

———, “Red Lake Woebegone: Pedagogy, Decolonization, and the Critical Project,” in Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 315-336.

Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 463-487.

Wendi Kohli, “Critical Education and Embodied Subjects: Making the Poststructural Turn,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 511-520.

Patti Lather, “Critical Pedagogy and its Complicities: A Praxis of Stuck Places,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 487-498.

Zeus Leonardo, “The Souls of White Folk: Critical Pedagogy, Whiteness Studies, and Globalization Discourse,” Race, Ethnicity and Education 5, no. 1 (March 2002): 29-50.

Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore, Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 1992).

• [Includes: Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy,” Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 297-325.]

Jan Masschelein, “How to Imagine Something Exterior to the System: Critical Education as Problematization,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 521-530.

Gregory Martin, “The Poverty of Critical Pedagogy: Towards a Politics of Engagement,” in Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 337-353.

William F. Pinar, “The Unaddressed ‘I’ of Ideology Critique,” Power and Education 1(2), 2009: 189-200.

William F. Pinar and C.A. Bowers, “Politics of Curriculum: Origins, Controversies, and Significance of Critical Perspectives,” Review of Research in Education 18 (1992): 163-190.

Willem L. Wardekker and S. Miedema, “Critical Pedagogy: An Evaluation and a Direction for Reformulation,” Curriculum Inquiry 27, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 45-61.

Eric J. Weiner, “Critical Pedagogy and the Crisis of Imagination,” in Peter McLaren and Joe L. Kincheloe (eds.), Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now? (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 57-77.

 

Area 3: Articulating a Radical Pedagogy

Pole 1: Ranciere and Anarchic Pedagogy

Gert Biesta, “Say You Want a Revolution…Suggestions for the Impossible Future of Critical Pedagogy,” Educational Theory 48(4), 1998: 499-510.

Gert Biesta and Charles Bingham with Jacques Ranciere, Jacques Ranciere: Education, Truth, Emancipation (New York: Continuum, 2010).

Abraham P. DeLeon, “The Time for Action is Now! Anarchist Theory, Critical Pedagogy, and Radical Possibilities,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 4, no. 2 (November 2006). [http://www.jceps.com/print.php?articleID=67]

———, “Oh No, Not the ‘A’ Word! Proposing an Anarchism for Education,” Educational Studies 44, no. 2 (September 2008), 122-141.

Issue 42(5-6) Educational Philosophy and Theory – special issue on Rancière

Daniel Friedrich, Bryn Jaastad, and Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Democratic Education: An (Im)possibility that yet Remains to Come,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 42(5/6), 2010: 571-587.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Richard Kahn, “Critical Pedagogy Taking the Illich Turn,” The International Journal of Illich Studies 1(1), 2009: 37-49.

Jennifer Logue and Cris Mayo, “Imagining the Future: What Anarchism Brings to Education” [review of Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective], Journal of Philosophy of Education 43, no. 1 (2009), 159-165.

Todd May, Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Ranciere: Equality in Action (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

Nina Power, “Axiomatic Equality: Ranciere and the Politics of Contemporary Education,” Eurozine, from http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-07-01-power-en.html [accessed July 6, 2010].

Jacques Ranciere, trans. Kristin Ross, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

Stephven Shukaitis and David Graeber with Erika Biddle (eds.), Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations/Collective Theorization (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007).

Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2006).

———, “Anarchy in the Classroom,” The New Humanist 120(5), September/October 2005. [www.newhumanist.org.uk/1288/anarchy-in-the-classroom]

———, “Anarchism, Utopias and Philosophy of Education,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 35(4), 2001: 627-646.

 

Pole 2: Benjamin’s Critique of Violence and the Strategy of Refusal

Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1986).

Claire Fontaine, “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike”

“The State and the Bosses Only Understand One Language: Strike, Blockade, Sabotage,” from http://translationcollective.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/the-state-and-the-bosses-only-understand-one-language/ [accessed November 12, 2010].

“Infinite Strike,” from http://translationcollective.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/infinite-strike/ [accessed November 12, 2010].

Pole 3: Towards a Minor Education

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Dana Polan, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

 

toward an anarchic metaphysics of law

As usual, block quotes in red.

*****

Based on my reading of Jacques Derrida’s essay, “Before the Law,” and the work of Robert Cover, I’ve begun to try to think about an anarchic metaphysics of law. This seems paradoxical, and on the surface, it is. Law is typically conceptualized as an instrument of social control, a way to keep people in line – perhaps to be exploited by the State and capital. This is only partially true.

There are a few basic problematics in thinking about law that I have identified in the reading I have been doing. First, the moment of the founding of the law. Second, the role of the judge (interpreted broadly, to include the jury). Third, the representability of the law. Fourth, the ontological foundation of the law. And finally, the aporia of law.

The founding of law

There are (at least) two important stories which tell us about the foundation of the law. One is a familiar one to us: Athena’s founding of a court in The Eumenides by Aeschylus. Aeschylus describes the mythical founding of Athenian law. The founding of the law occurs in the moment in which a shift from a legal economy of vengeance, represented by the Furies, to a legal economy of law, represented by Athena as judge and a group of Athenian men as jury, takes place. Aeschylus, writing early in the time of Athenian democracy, wants to valorize the newly formulated system of laws, so he distinguishes for his audience the figures of vengeance, the Furies, from the figure of wisdom, Athena. The Furies ultimately pursue Orestes, who has just killed his mother, Clytaemnestra, to Athens, where they place themselves under the judgment of Athena. The procedural aspect of the case hinges upon a disagreement over how the crimes of matricide or patricide are valued, ultimately necessitating a judgment that will put an end to the cycle of murder and revenge. According to the Furies, matricide is absolutely wrong, in that it destroys ones flesh and blood: “Matricides: we drive them from their houses.”[1] Apollo counters with an inquiry:

Apollo: “And what of the wife who strikes her husband down?”

leader of the Furies: “That murder would not destroy one’s flesh and blood.”[2]

Apollo’s response to the Furies sets up the first view of justice in the play – the order of vengeance:

Why, you’d disgrace – obliterate the bonds of Zeus // and Hera queen of brides! And the queen of love // you’d throw to the winds at a word, disgrace love, // the source of mankind’s nearest, dearest ties. // Marriage of man and wife is fate itself, // stronger than oaths, and Justice guards its life. // But if one destroys the other and you relent – // no revenge, not a glance in anger – then // I say your manhunt of Orestes is unjust. // Some things stir your rage, I see. Others, // atrocious crimes, lull your will to act. // Pallas will oversee this trial. She is one of us.[3]

His act of drawing attention to the Furies’ selective notion of justice highlights the limits of the legal order of vengeance, and prompts a series of events that begin to shift the play from the order of vengeance toward the order of law by proposing a trial overseen by an outsider to the situation, but an insider to the social milieu of Apollo, the Furies, and Orestes.

The second story is that provided by Deleuze and Guattari. D&G provide us with a story of the foundation of the State as an all-at-once, and as fully formed. The State arrives through a dual process of conquer and pacification. The law is imported all-at-once as an aspect of the pacification process, which includes the distribution of State entitlements, privileges, and so on. This is one reason John Rawls’ notion of distributive justice fails, as it rests upon a founding violence that is replicated in each and every act of distribution.

The two stories serve two different purposes. In Aeschylus, the founding of Athenian law is a progressive moment, a triumph of reason over non-reason, of consistency over inconsistency. Such a story masks the violence of the law and the State. In D&G, however, we are provided with a non-progressive foundation story, a story which foregrounds the constitutive violence of the law and the State.

The judge

Between The Eumenides and the Oedipus plays by Sophocles, we see the emergence of a legal order that contains an important figure: the judge. The ideal judge is autonomous from the State. The ideal judge is one who places himself under the same legal order as the rest of the polis. However, we know that this is not the case. The judge is part of a much larger legal apparatus directly controlled by the state. The election of professional judges, the collusion of judges and the police, and many other pressures prevent the figure of the judge from ever achieving that ideal (of course there are exceptions to this, but I would argue that they are not the norm, they are rare).

The representability of the law and the ontological foundation of the law

See my previous post on Derrida’s “Before the Law.”

The aporia of law

I pick up again after my discussion of Derrida to note that we are left with an aporia. Derrida leaves us with an aporia where the law is inaccessible yet constantly performed, interpellated, and represented. In contemporary Western liberal democracies, the law is an integral component of the State apparatus and is wholly conflated with the bureaucratic representatives who administer it. It is this conflation that leads to the paralysis of the contemporary moment. As Benjamin notes:

I think of the modern citizen who knows that he is at the mercy of a vast machinery of officialdom whose functioning is directed by authorities that remain nebulous to the executive organs, let alone to the people they deal with.”[4]

We need, then, a conception of law that follows Derrida’s aporia in the opposite direction from which it is normally carried through: a separation of law from the State.

Robert Cover begins to provide this with his notion of “jurisgenesis.”[5] Cover notes that law is a “world in which we live,”[6] a set of norms or legal precepts and principles we communicate to others, not just demands on us form God, sovereign, the people, or society.[7] His conception of law, while very different from Derrida’s, nonetheless separates law from the State:

Law may be viewed as a system of tension or a bridge linking a concept of a reality to an imagined alternative – that is, as a connective between two states of affairs, both of which can be represented in their normative significant only through the devices of narrative.[8]

Of course, Cover’s work itself is ripe for deconstruction, but my point here is to link the separation of law from the state with the notion of narrative, which brings us back to the law as ideology. Cover then encourages a proliferation of law creation – or, in our terms, ideology creation – through what he terms jurisgenesis. Jurisgenesis is the creation of legal meaning.[9] A proliferation of legal meanings in relation to a single State enforcing a single legal order sheds light on one of Cover’s other contributions to legal theory – that every legal act of judgment is also an act of violence. On the macro-level, the State enforces a legal order, but communities of juridical sense (those communities engaging in jurisgenesis) are also enforcing legal orders. Already we have a system of legal orders that is in some sense weakly anarchic.[10]

We end up, then, with law in an undecidable space where it is both the force of the State expended to maintain its own existence and the anarchic impulse of human beings to create meaning in the world as a generative activity. Cover, however, ends up privileging the State in his final analysis:

It is not the romance of rebellion that should lead us to look to the law evolved by social movements and communities. Quite the opposite. Just as it is our distrust for and recognition of the state as reality that leads us to be constitutionalists with regard to the state, so it ought to be our recognition of and distrust for the reality of the power of social movements that leads us to examine the nomian worlds they create. And just as constitutionalism may legitimize, within a different framework, communities and movements. Legal meaning is a challenging enrichment of social life, a potential restraint on arbitrary power and violence. We ought to stop circumscribing the nomos; we ought to invite new worlds.[11]

His suspicion of social movements ultimately points to his underlying view that inviting new worlds is ultimately a reformist impulse, one meant to harness the power of social movements rather than to allow them the truly transformative role they could have in reconstituting a world without a State. Unlike Cover, then, who puts faith in the ability of the Supreme Court Justices, I prefer to continue to watch and participate as social movements continue to lay bare the State’s violence. The space opened up by separating law from the State and by turning to the jurisgenerative potential of social movements, we initiate a move toward a new legal order, one differentiated from the order of vengeance and from the order of Athenian law; this new legal order, though, is yet to be defined. Contemporary social movements may indeed contain within them the seeds of a new legal order, however. To name but a few: a decentering of the role of the judge, especially away from the intertwining of the powers of judge and State; a resistance to codification that could articulate the somewhat opposing ideals of freedom and equality better than could any state; a proliferation of value systems that could overlap temporally and geographically – imagine a single geographical space with several communities with different legal orders existing simultaneously. While it would be foolish to imagine a sort of utopic future without violence, a new legal order inspired by contemporary social movements would at least replace the masked violence of the State with a new constitutive violence, one that could, if possible, be imagined to be less coercive, destructive, and normalizing.

---

[1] Aeschylus, The Eumenides, p. 240, line 208.

[2] Aeschylus, The Eumenides, p. 240, l. 209-210.

[3] Ibid., p. 240, l. 211-222.

[4] Benjamin, “Some Reflections on Kafka,” 141.

[5] Cover, “Nomos and Narrative.”

[6] Ibid., 5.

[7] Ibid., 8.

[8] Ibid., 9.

[9] Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” 11.

[10] I differentiate between a weak sense of anarchism, which is the sense of an anarchism that is simply chaos without order and resembles Hobbes’ war of each against all. The sense of anarchism that jurisgenesis lays bare is a weak anarchism. A strong sense of anarchism, however, is a relationship between order and contingency, relations and freedom that is not Hobbesian in the least. What differentiates this strong sense of anarchism from its weak cousin is a set of communal relations. In other words, a community’s internal relations are communistic, but the external relations are anarchistic, without institution, state, or pre-established or transcendent relations.

[11] Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” 68.

 

critical pedagogy

I attended the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing – Bergamo Conference this weekend specifically to see a number of panel discussions taking place on Critical Pedagogy (CritPed). Especially interesting was that Peter McLaren, one of the ‘grandfathers’ of CritPed was in attendance. As you may or may not know, I have left the field of education, but I retain an interest in radical pedagogy, in part because I remain embedded within the university. Radical pedagogy, as I am beginning to conceptualize it, is dramatically different in its theory and practice than CritPed, for a number of reasons. Here, I’m going to do my best to summarize the conference sessions I attended.

First, by way of some information about Peter McLaren and CritPed: “The critical pedagogy which I support and practice advocates non-violent dissent, the development of a philosophy of praxis guided by a Marxist humanism, the study of revolutionary social movements and thought, and the struggle for socialist democracy. It is opposed to liberal democracy, which only serves to facilitate the reproduction of capital. It advocates a multiracial and anti-imperialist social movement dedicated to opposing racism, capitalism (both in private property and state property forms), sexism, heterosexism, hierarchies based on social class, as well as other forms of oppression. It draws its inspiration from philosophers of revolutionary praxis such as Paulo Freire, Raya Dunayevskaya, and other philosophers, social theorists and political activists and supports all those who yearn and struggle for freedom.” (from McLaren’s website)

I went to the conference with two basic questions to ask Peter. First, which of your books or articles does the most work in articulating what you imagine education and society to be in a post-capitalist future? In other words, what is CritPed’s positive project? This question was prompted by what I see to be an incredible gap in not only McLaren’s work, but in CritPed as a whole: no one ever seems to articulate what we’re moving toward other than general gestures toward a “post-capitalist, socialist” future. Second, why do you have this perpetual elevation of the concept of hope? The way it is mobilized in your work seems to fall into an implicit secular messianism; how would you respond to that? So, I was able to ask question one, but never got around to question two because the first occupied quite a bit of discussion.

There were two sessions in which Peter McLaren participated. Both were interestingly framed as conversations between the CritPed “old guard” and the rising “new guard.” The first, “Specters of Critical Pedagogy” was a panel discussion featuring Antonio Garcia (SUNY Brockport), Kristopher Holland (Indiana University), Brad Porfilio (Lewis U), Dennis Carlson (Miami U), and Peter McLaren (UCLA), and was most explicitly framed as a discussion between the old and new. The second session was a book discussion featuring Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo (Purdue U) discussing their book, Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism. Also present were two “critics,” Antonio Garcia and Denise Taliaferro-Baszile (Miami U). Rather than recount these separately, I’ll just talk about the themes that came out of both of these discussions, as well as a few other sessions on CritPed that took place over the weekend.

McLaren pointed to a general problem in CritPed and the critiques thereof: the current battle over the importance of transcendence and immanence in the political philosophies which inform various strands of CritPed. McLaren’s basic point was that in contemporary political theory there is an over-emphasis on immanence, especially in the work of Hardt and Negri and the growing body of work inspired by Deleuze and Guattari. A basic critique of immanence that he referenced a number of times went like this: if we wait for the self-organization of the masses, we rely on a pure voluntarism; to move away from this we need to develop a philosophy of praxis. He argued that dialectical critique and the notion of transcendence have been devalued. Instead of rejecting transcendence, he argued that we don’t have to choose between the two. However, he never fully explained how that would work.

McLaren set up CritPed as basically a practice of “radical negation.” He gave the example of the statement “I am not wage labor.” It’s formulation as a statement is the first negation, read as “I am NOT wage labor;” the second negation comes with a shift in emphasis to “I AM not wage labor.” This practice of double negation is in reality both a negation and an affirmation. Apparently this stems mostly from Hegel and Adorno, both are figures I am still grossly under-read in, so I’m taking his word for it at the moment. He was careful to stress that CritPed, and the new Marxist Humanism of which it is a part, contain no blueprints for the future, no positive projects; revolution and social change occur strictly through the practice of radical negation. The transcendent is associated with the vision of an alternative future, or what he repeatedly referred to as the “post-capitalist, socialist future.”

Referencing contemporary thinkers, many of whom can be classified as post-Marxist (specifically Zizek, but also others), McLaren pointed to a “fetishization of [the] failure” of the left. He pushed back to emphasize the importance of articulating in clearer terms what the post-capitalist, socialist future would look like, which seemed to me to contradict his earlier statements (made the day before to me in conversation) about how there was no blueprint, no positive project in CritPed.

Overall, the discussions clarified a number of issues for me, as well as raised a few questions.

1. I have been correct in my basic critique of Critical Pedagogy that there is a lack of a positive project. At best, the “post-capitalist, socialist future” is vaguely defined.
2. The vagueness of CritPed’s project (beyond, of course, a type of Marxist-Humanist critique of things – highly reactionary I might add) opens up spaces of genuine confusion about the role of the State in CritPed. McLaren often seems to praise Hugo Chavez in Venezuela or Che Guevara and Fidel Castro’s Cuba, both of which are forms of state socialism that, as an anarchist, I find deeply problematic as exemplars.
3. McLaren has a fundamental misunderstanding of philosophies of immanence, especially Hardt and Negri’s multitude. The notion that the multitude is simply sitting back and waiting for the revolutionary moment to express itself is a reductive and simplistic reading, based on a bad reading. While I find Hardt and Negri somewhat unsatisfying in their conception of the multitude, surely Virno succeeds in A Grammar of the Multitude.
4. What is the use of CritPed to an anarchist theory of social relations? If anarchism is best described as an aspiration and a material practice (rather than a naive utopianism based in a naive theory of human nature), does CritPed provide us with any tools that make sense?
5. Why does so much of CritPed seem to verge on hysterical conspiracy theory? I mean, I’m all about making connections, but scholarly work demands a certain level of citation and illustration for a reason – quit making claims and not providing documentation for them, I’ll take you more seriously that way.
6. Is there a role in my own work for this notion of “radical negation?” Does my work need to focus more on productive theorizing (I have in mind here Deleuze and Guattari, or Hardt and Negri as models), or does it need more critique, as such (I am thinking here Adorno or the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, like Dick Hebdige or Stuart Hall)? What model of scholarly work is best for me?

I have a number of other directions I can go, but for now, this post is long enough.

 

On Anarchism

It’s probably a bit odd that I haven’t really had any direct postings yet on my political leanings, which are only latent in some of the earlier ones. And since I’m not exactly a prolific poster, it may be difficult still to figure me out at all. So, on the suggestion of a classmate/friend/blogger, I’m posting some preliminary remarks on my vision of anarchism.

On Anarchism

“We, the revolutionary anarchists, are the advocates of education for all the people, of the emancipation and the widest possible expansion of social life. Therefore we are the enemies of the State and all forms of the statist principle.” ~Bakunin

“This fiction of a pseudorepresentative government serves to conceal the domination of the masses by a handful of privileged elite; an elite elected by hordes of people who are rounded up and do not know for whom or for what they vote. Upon this artificial and abstract expression of what they falsely imagine to be the will of the people and of which the real living people have not the least idea, they construct both the theory of statism as well as the theory of so-called revolutionary dictatorship.” ~Bakunin

Anarchism is most often (popularly, at least) identified with the term chaos. When one comes out of the anarchist closet, the first reaction always seems to be along the lines of “well, won’t everyone just kill one another?”. This reaction is true when speaking of local or global politics. For example, Neoconservative international relations is entirely predicated on the assumption of a “state of anarchy” in which nation-states cannot predict each others’ actions, and given this global state of affairs it only makes sense to arm your own country to the teeth, maintain strict boundaries wherein absolute sovereignty may be established, and wars are fought to maintain order ripped out of chaos. One need not look any farther than the U.S. invasion of Iraq to see this form of international relations at work. But, at best, this is a weak form of anarchism that is only anarchy as such due to an etymological definition, not due to a theoretical formation.

It is important to distinguish between the mere fact of “without rulers” – or a weak anarchism – and the highly developed line of thinking of anarchism as a social and political theory (more properly, theories) – a strong anarchism. So, what I will articulate here under the term “anarchism” will be an elaboration of a strong sense of theoretical anarchism; one that can form the basis of a form-of-life that is social and political, not merely the absence of “rulers” but also the presence of self-organization.

Anarchism at its most basic level is desire for and action towards the non-existence of the State combined with a constant movement away from the sedimentation of institutionalized power in other non-State forms. At this most basic level, it is merely the recognition of the idea that people can and will self-organize in myriad ways without the need for a State hierarchy, systems of domination, or processes of accumulation of wealth. That’s it. It is not (yet) an assertion of anything else. It is not utopian or dystopian, normative or ethical.

People often take this non-existence of the state to be simply the weak form of anarchism stated above: the total chaos of non-organization. But this cannot be true, for coextensive with the evolution of humanity are forms of self-organization. And since humans, unlike amoebas, are endowed with some level of higher order thinking that allows us to reflect on and critique our own self-organization, we get highly complex social forms developing rather early. As Deleuze and Guattari note, the State is not some evolutionary moment (especially one in which we believe that evolution and social forms have culminated in such a form), but is coeval with human social forms. The State, in fact, is the history of conquering one group and overlaying the conquerors’ form-of-life over the conquered. Archaeologically speaking, we continue to find evidence of older and older complex societies that resemble what, even today, we know as States. But we also find evidence of non-State organization (Deleuze and Guattari refer to nomads as the paradigmatic example). The State, really, is one form-of-life that has an uncanny ability to capture and transform many other forms within it (in the same way capitalism can and does).

It is exactly this history that opens up space to begin to speak of anarchism as a complex social system, rather than some prehistoric state in which the social contract became necessary to prevent us all from killing one another in perpetuity.

Liberalism begins with the Hobbesian state of nature, which is anarchistic in a weak sense, in which the natural state of human relations is the war of each against all. In other words, liberalism is predicated on the idea that the natural state of human existence is to kill everyone else (Outside of the family group or tribe? I need to review my Hobbes…). So, the social contract is theorized in order to “fix” the problem, and part of the “fix” is the establishment of some entity that governs human relations. But liberal political theory wants to posit that this contract is predicated on the rational, autonomous, humanist subject, which means that at some point in history, human beings actually spelled out and agreed upon such a contract, setting in motion thousands of years of linear history culminating in the modern nation-state. Or, if we buy into European and/or American exceptionalism, only those societies which were most civilized and most fully human established a social contract – because, of course, Africa, Asia, and the America of the First Nations were not capable of such a thing.

Liberals tend to dismiss the revolutionary claims of anarchism (or marxism, or whatever) based on the ideas that it isn’t practical, or that it’s utopic. What they tend to ignore, though, is the specific historicity of their own position, and the fact that liberalism is the product of a highly contentious process over several hundred years that is historically contingent not teleologically transcendent. In other words, they are so beholden to their own ideology that they can’t even see that another world is possible. More specifically, they can’t see the fact that at the time that the Enlightenment gave rise to the possibility of liberalism it was itself revolutionary, utopic, and relatively undeveloped. All of which are criticisms lobbed at anarchism today as to why it (supposedly) won’t or can’t work.

Others try to define anarchism (such as here) through recourse to notions of human nature, or an absolute libertarianism. The idea of, I do what I want, when I want, though, is just as weak as the fictional “state of nature” posited by Hobbes. There is no human nature other than the biological impulse to self organize along with other complex systems (see DeLanda’s book on complexity theory). And supporting an absolute libertarianism actually feeds back into the myth of the state of nature, rather than recognizing that humans are social beings, and that there must always already be some sort of norming procedure that coheres a given community together. Yes, there is a fine line between community norms and domination, and key to an anarchistic form-of-life is the constant evaluation and negotiation of those norms, but it is not an absence of norms nor a permissive anything goes. Communities WILL establish norms and people WILL transgress those norms which WILL provoke some sort of a response from the community. Libertarian anarchism, then, is deeply flawed in that by relying solely upon vague notions of absolute human freedom they neglect the very nature of complex human life, which is communal. And with communities come norms.

What separates an anarchist form-of-life from other forms of social organization, then, is that all community norms are the result of an immanence, rather than a transcendent Law or State.

[Anyway, I said I would put down some introductory comments, and these are exactly that. They are by no means complete or even coherent at this point.]

Politics, Activism of the Absurd

As someone who has marched in Washington DC with CodePink, organized volunteer programs and campus-based activism, participated in boycotts, rallied here there and everywhere, and so on, I find myself conflicted when thinking about the current conservative activism around healthcare.

First, the notion of conservative activism seems a contradiction in terms. The people shouting down representatives at town hall meetings are generally the same as those who oppose “judicial activism” (usually informed by just awful thinking about the law as a concept and practice), who denounced anti-war activism as un-American and un-patriotic, and who are largely dismissive of libertarian and/or anarchist activism in such settings as community cop-watch programs, prison reform, and general youth-rights-expanding work. Having a CodePink protester arrested and castigated in the press for disrupting congressional proceedings to fund the war on Iraq is just fine; trying to have union members peacefully quiet hecklers is fascism. The double-standard is so obvious it is farcical.

Second, working within the current system (whether right or wrong), these tactics seem counterproductive in this case. CodePink was forced to infiltrate hearings because there were no mainstream media outlets airing dissenting views, even when presented in “rational,” peaceful, and constructive ways. Even the so-called bastions of the “liberal media,” CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, abdicated their responsibilities in vetting the war. The healthcare “debate” is an entirely different story. Just like the “birthers” are getting plenty of airtime (even in the negative, Orly Taitz has gotten tons of opportunities to air her absurdities), the “liberal” and conservative media outlets (and they’re all conservative, really) are giving plenty of time and coverage to the “death panels.” Given copious media coverage – some of which on dedicated and popular right-wing networks or programming – it vacates any justificatory grounds these protesters may have had in engaging in these so-called “town hells.”

Finally, there is a part of me that just wants to say that this is “politics” as usual in America. I scare-quote politics here because what passes for politics in our case is truly absurd, and this absurdity is being rendered wholly visible in these “town hells.” If they are serving no other purpose, they are at least opening many people’s eyes to the fact that politics in this country died a long time ago, if they ever existed. What we have instead is the management of personal interests within the state, whereby the state’s remaining in power becomes the defining metric for valid discourse. Given such unnatural parameters for discourse, we cannot have valid politics; we are left with the process of policing. The logic of police is being illuminated by the current right activism by nature of the fact that it is so clearly incongruous for the reasons I elaborated above. The hypocrisy in justification and the tactics used, while not new, are coming together in a matrix of (un)intelligibility that just screams at us: This is all absurd!

So, while I find the outright distortions of fact (I’m being generous here…) extremely distasteful, I can’t help but wonder if in the long run the possibilities for undermining the state based on these events are worth the bullshit. The left has long been guided by a hermeneutics of suspicion that now seems to be creeping into the mainstream and now even intruding on the right (who had their own hermeneutics of suspicion, but one quite different than what is happening now). This isn’t just suspicion of big government, this is suspicion of the state as a form, the ability of the state to meet anyone’s needs at all.

Work’s Illusion

“This swarming little crowd that waits impatiently to be hired while doing whatever it can to seem natural is the result of an attempt to rescue the order of work through an ethos of mobility. To be mobilized is to relate to work not as an activity but as a possibility… Mobility is this slight detachment from the self, this minimal disconnection from what constitutes us, this condition of strangeness whereby the self can now be taken up as an object of work, and it now becomes possible to sell oneself rather than one’s labor power, to be remunerated not for what one does but for what one is, for our exquisite mastery of social codes, for our relational talents, for our smile and our way of presenting ourselves. This is the new standard of socialization. Mobility brings about a fusion of the two contradictory poles of work: here we participate in our own exploitation, and all participation is exploited. Ideally you are yourself a little business, your own boss, your own product. Whether one is working or not, it’s a question of generating contacts, abilities, networking, in short: ‘human capital.’…

The present production apparatus is therefore, on the one hand, a gigantic machine for psychic and physical mobilization, for sucking the energy of humans that have become superfluous, and, on the other hand, it is a sorting machine that allocates survival to conformed subjectivities and rejects all ‘problem individuals,’ all those who embody another use of life and, in this way, resist it. On the one hand, ghosts are brought to life, and on the other, the living are left to die. This is the properly political function of the contemporary production apparatus.

To organize beyond and against work, to collectively desert the regime of mobility, to demonstrate the existence of a vitality and a discipline precisely in demobilization, is a crime for which a civilization on its knees is not about to forgive us. In fact, it’s the only way to survive it.”

- From “The Coming Insurrection” by The Invisible Committee (pp. 32-33)

Social Warfare Resources

Check out these links:

The Coming Insurrection: This site has information about the Tarnac 9 (France), who were arrested for suspected terrorist activities based largely on circumstantial evidence and the zine found at this link.

Tiqqun: Tiqqun is the name of a French philosophical journal, founded in 1999 with an aim to “recreate the conditions of another community.” It was created by various writers before dissolving in Venice in 2001 following the attacks of September 11th.

Earth First! means social war: Earth First! formed in 1979, in response to an increasingly corporate, compromising and ineffective environmental community. It is not an organization, but a movement. There are no “members” of EF!, only Earth First!ers.

The Institute for Experimental Freedom: The IEF is a small publishing, distribution and culture production project of two friends and their closest cohorts.