This book responds to contemporary challenges to the very concept of “representation” as they impact three fields of activity: interpretation, artistic creation, and politics. Contemporary theorists from Gilles Deleuze to Richard Rorty have radically called our traditional notions of representation into question: on what grounds can we claim that representations adequately “stand for” their objects, authorizing some to “speak for” others? Just as the “antirepresentationalism” of avant-garde art since modernism has shaken the authority of works of art, so postmodern “critiques of representation” have attacked the authority not only of our scholarly practices of producing interpretations – whether of literary texts, human behavior, social phenomena, or history itself – but of the social practices through which power and wealth are distributed. While this challenge to institutions has been hailed by some as liberatory, others have objected that we are left with no viable alternatives to “representation” per se. This “crisis of representation” is the shadow under which all projects of interpretation, art-making, and political transformation are now forced to labor.

Rather than seeking simply to defend a discredited “representationalism” against these critiques, I seek a more robust critical standpoint. I find a framework for this standpoint in the anarchism of Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and others. This fertile tradition of anarchist theory and practice, virtually ignored by contemporary theorists but newly resurgent in today’s anti-globalization movement, offers us vital resources for rethinking the bases not only of political economy but of aesthetic creation and hermeneutic understanding.

This book is intended to be at once a contribution to the ongoing renaissance of “anarchist studies” in the fields of art history and philosophy (as exemplified by recent titles such as David Kadlec’s Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture and Saul Newman’s From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power) and a call for new directions in theory. I intend multiple audiences for this work, including readers of literary theory, art history, and philosophy. For literary scholars, it introduces a new kind of critical methodology – an anarchist literary theory which draws on a rich tradition of theorizing about culture, signs, and the social to produce analytical insights into the workings of textual processes and power relations. Readers of literary history and the history of art will find a surprising take on the complex relationship between modernism and anarchism, a significant addition to existing studies of the subject, drawing on 19th- and early 20th-century French anarchist sources which have been heretofore unavailable to English-speaking audiences. Scholars in philosophy and the social sciences should form an important secondary audience for the first and third sections, which demonstrate the continuity of anarchist theory from the time of Proudhon to the present with a certain ecological worldview and “critical realist” stance. All three sections should carry substantial interest for readers of radical theory.

Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation is an ambitious entry into theoretical debates that have long since become stagnant and predictable, to the point where even complaints about “the banality of theory” have become banal. Not only does it propose anarchism as a fresh perspective from which to revisit dead-end theoretical debates over concepts such as “agency,” “essentialism,” “performativity,” and “realism,” it also offers a fresh perspective on anarchism, challenging both conventional readings of the tradition and the contemporary rereadings proffered by authors such as Kadlec and Newman. The anarchism which emerges from this reinterpretation is neither a musty rationalist faith in “human nature,” nor an irrational millenarianism, but a living stream of thought which leads beyond the sterile opposition of representationalism and antirepresentationalism.

A complete first draft of over 500 pages is currently under revision.

Created Summer 1997 -- Recreated Winter 2003

JessEcoh@cs.com