Some of you, who have come this far, may ask "Why should anarchists bother to learn about post-structuralism?". This text then is designed to provide some provisional answers. In doing so several inter-related themes within post-structuralism which can be utilised by anarchists, both as means of social change and of political analysis will be briefly described. Ideally from this text will grow a tree of related texts. Thus several key post-structuralist thinkers will be looked at in some depth. Hopefully these texts will provide both a guide to the central ideas of these thinkers in addition to substantive analysis of the relation of theses ideas to anarchist thought. As you read through the text please use the hotlinks for background information brief summaries of key terms and links to relevant sites. Actually many of these aren't working - aaargggh - so much to do!
There is much in this enterprise which is of necessity vague. To begin the term anarchist is problematic at its root. A working model of what is meant by this term must be provided. I do not feel equal to this task and there are I believe good reasons for this. To begin with is the resistance of the term itself to mean 'some-thing/one-thing', it of course means many things. Any future anarchist society would have experienced a raft of changes, we can't predict in advance what these might be. Is this too utopian to even talk of a future anarchist society? Perhaps then instead of a blueprint for a future society anarchism is a tool of political analysis. It does not concern itself with future society so much as it critiques existing institutions. There is a Zen saying about this approach, it states "Zen defines what a person is not, what a person therefore is, is obvious", substitute anarchism for person... Perhaps even it is a lifestyle, which may manifest as vegetarianism, luddism, asceticism, terrorism, person who spends time writing web textism and so on......The point here is then anarchism is I feel all of these things at particular times, sometimes all at once (i.e. Revolutionary Spain). Perhaps I've given myself away by citing Spain, its clear that I'm not aMurray Rothbard fan. Perhaps like Noam Chomsky I'm impressed centrally by the kind of worker management which flourished in Revolutionary Spain, that is I'm an anarcho-syndicalist. Well...not quite. At least where post-structuralist thought is concerned. Noam Chomsky is not its biggest fan, indeed I've seen some quite withering stuff from him on Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard. So be warned, Noam Chomsky thinks this stuff is a waste of time, a fad....I agree with him on most things but not this...He's Noam Chomsky and I'm not, believe what/who you like.
Still with me...good. So if we can agree for the time being that anarchism is all the above things and more...Then maybe some of the central insights of post-structuralism might be able to provide we anarchists with a few mirrors to stare into. Maybe we won't like, or recognise what we see.
Before going on I wish to clear up one small thing. Many of you will by now have heard the term post-modern, applied to everything from buildings to Madonna to difficult French philosophy (sometimes this wide usage is employed by difficult French philosophers). For the purposes of this text, and other related texts, the term post-modern will be avoided and instead post-structuralism will be used. These terms are not always interchangeable, post-structuralism simply stated, refers to a series of responses to the issues raised by structuralism, these two are intimately related. Post-structuralism may however be seen as one amongst many philosophies associated with post-modernity: there is much that is post-modern that is not in the slightest post-structuralist. Clear? Probably not! Trust me.
One of the better statements about post-modernism was made by Lyotard when he defined it as an 'incredulity towards meta-narratives', post-structuralism shares this incredulity. But wait a minute, what's a metanarrative? Well to tell you that I need to find a beginning. Lets say someone says to you as a critique of your anarchist position that people are 'naturally competitive'. Both these terms'naturally' and 'competitive' depend on meta-narratives for their meaning. If you replied 'there's nothing natural about it', then you are calling into question the meta-narrative they have employed. You see we anarchists do this all the time. If you think terms like democracy, justice and freedom are misused, or even abused, then you're already in the business of displaying an incredulity towards meta-narratives. Most of all if you wince when the term anarchy is employed to indicate chaos then read on.
Post-structuralist thought would suggest that in order for a word like anarchy to 'mean' what it commonly means in society there must be interpretive schema already in place. If you like these schema can be compared to the understanding you show when in a film the footage cuts from one location to another, or goes forward or backwards in time. When films were new and people needed guidance there would be card saying something like 'meanwhile back at the ranch' so the audience would understand the shift of location. Nowadays we all know how this works, we don't need the sign, the sign has in fact sunk below the film and become a meta-narrative (a story within a story), it is 'there' although we can't 'see' it. Likewise when you say anarchy and don't mean chaos people are confused, in order to deal with this confusion you have to find out what their assumptions are. These assumptions typically include: if there was no government people would run amok; society would break down and no would be safe. These assumptions all operate as meta-narratives, they are all questionable and, at least in part, ideological in origin.
To return then to the basics of post-structuralism and how this relates to the above discussion. Post-structuralist thought concerns itself, amongst other things, with peeling away layers of meaning, found in even the most rudimentary texts (texts here is a broad term indeed, it includes written works, paintings, architecture and so on). One of the most common criticisms of post-structuralism is that it just calls everything into question, it adds nothing. According to this position if you believe what post-structuralists tell you then you wouldn't be able to understand this sentence. This critique is in my view naive and simplistic, post-structuralism does question meaning, but it does not deal in absolutes, instead it offers a third way, playful and open. Thus you might understand this sentence, but your and my understanding may differ. How this difference is resolved is the issue.
As we have all experienced sometimes 'meaning' is 'fixed' for us. By fixed I mean something like held in place, constrained. For example if you were brought up in a religious environment then the terms God, evil, paradise and so on will have particular meanings relating to that environment, particular versions of what these terms mean. God might be, for example, seen as 'benevolent' or alternatively 'vengeful' or both. The point is that the term doesn't refer to 'a-thing' it refers to many things all at once, but it is expected that you will choose the right one when someone says God to you. That is you will 'give' meaning to the word God that depends on the context in which the word is encountered. The meaning you give to the term is in fact an operation of power. We can trace the operation of power through discourse, and out into the world of lived experience. As anarchists we can resist the power within discourse, but only if we first get a grip on how it operates, post- structuralism may provide at least one way of doing this. It should be noted here, and this is important, this is not a denial of other kinds of power. Power takes many forms, post- structuralism will not: feed the world, save people on death row or stop your government using your taxes to build weapons that you don't want, at least not by itself. What post- structuralism might do however, is allow you to cut through some of the bullshit rhetoric which is erected around practices that encourage and allow such things.
I think now I've spent enough time on background, more detail will be provided in subsequent texts for those who are interested. I now wish to move to two brief examples from post-structuralist thinkers. The first is Michel Foucault, who you might remember from 'Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Mass Media'. The second is Jacques Derrida, who you may not of heard of until now, such is life.
Michel Foucault wrote much during his life and only one example will be examined here. It is Foucault's examination of 'Madness', in his work Madness and Civilisation. Briefly, Foucault charts the development of a discourse around 'insanity', where once people may have labelled possessed, or simple minded, increasingly the idea of madness as a distinct state of 'being' arose. This state, madness or insanity, was contrasted with sanity. A hierarchy is implicit in this, sanity is good, insanity is bad. Sanity is 'normal', insanity is 'abnormal'. Right at the outset we can see the problems that anyone labeled insane is going to encounter, they are at the bottom of a hierarchical power structure. Foucault traces the development of a distinct kind of medicine around madness, psychiatry as its now known and shows how this kind of medicine rests essentially on distinctions between sane and insane, distinctions grounded in language. You see what we have here is a rigid partition being erected between two states of being, one sane the other insane. Power is what keeps this barrier in place, it attempts to fix the meaning of sane and insane, when in fact these terms are entirely problematic. Whilst we all share a notion of what insanity 'is', I'm less sure that anyone can show where sanity becomes insanity. For example if you are depressed after the death of a lover or friend or family member, this is not insanity, similarly if you are anxious before an important exam this is not insanity, but if you thought that the government was tapping your phone, the neighbours were watching you and the TV was sending you messages you might just have crossed the invisible line over to insanity. Equally: the government might be tapping your phone, the neighbours might be checking you out and the TV might be sending you messages (advertisements for example). I remember reading in a pamphlet fromCrass that if you are diagnosed insane in the USA then one of the most effective cures is to go to England where they are considerably less likely to diagnose insanity based on the same evidence. Thus insanity/sanity aren't 'things' that we can give a name to like rocks or trees, they are concepts (like God who I mentioned earlier). They might be useful tools, sometimes, but they are not 'real' or 'absolute', rather they are provisional and operate according to the assumptions that people make when they employ these terms.
So what does this have to do with anarchism? Lots actually. Foucault's position can be used more broadly in relation to terms like criminal, radical, woman, black and so on. All of these terms are often used in ways which assumes their lower position in a hierarchy. Anarchist critiques of the position of women, criminals, radicals in relation to broad power structures can I belive make substantial use of some of Foucault's techniques. Having said that I'm not without concerns about Foucault's positions on some things and these problems will be raised in another text.
Moving now to Jacques Derrida, perhaps the more difficult of the two theorists, and also perhaps the one with the most to offer anarchist thought. It is frankly impossible to do justice to Derrida's ideas in a short work such as this, but if I may condense his ideas and apologise in advance to any readers familiar with Derrida's work. Amongst other things Derrida offers up an approach (it is not a technique) to texts known as 'deconstruction', which seeks to reveal the power structures which inhabit texts. I've already given some clues as to what we might look for in the discussion of meta-narratives above, but Derrida's work goes further. In short Derrida demonstrates the ways in which texts attempt to 'fix' meaning, by stopping the freeplay of elements within a text. But what does this mean, 'freeplay?'. Well that's a difficult one. There are several kinds of freeplay, you probably came across some in your High School Literature class. For example when I read George Orwell's 'Animal Farm', I thought it was a critique of leaving revolutions to a vanguard, expecting them to later use power wisely, this I was informed by my English teacher (authority figure) was wrong. The book is about Stalinist Russia, period! It is not a broad critique rather it is entirely narrow. Well I'm sorry but I still disagree, it is in part a critique of Stalinist Russia, but it also has broader importance. Stalin's Russia is gone, but Orwell's text remains an important reminder to revolutionaries everywhere to watch that you don't simply become what you set out to replace. 'Four legs good, two legs bad'. Isn't this just another way of creating divisions? Divide and conquer? The beginnings of patriotism and its ugly relative nationalism. Now this isn't really what Derrida's work is concerned with but it gives you some idea (I hope).
The discussion of Orwell's 'Animal Farm' above shows one way in which meanings are fixed, in this case the attempt was made by my English teacher, but there are much more subtle ways and it is these that Derrida sets to work uncovering. One of the most readily apparent things that Derrida focuses on is absence. For example, if you see a film about how the US Army won the war, and there are no images (that is an absence of images) showing the important work done by women, or no images of African-American troops, then you actually get a clear message about their role: they didn't have one. That is they have been pushed of the stage of history, not through any devious means, rather they are simply left out. It is a common experience for members of migrant or indigenous communities to feel left out of a range of things because of these sorts of absences. Here in Australia, until recently (and even still all too rarely) you never saw any Aboriginal characters in TV programs, if you were Aboriginal and got your view of the world from watching TV (like so many people do these days) you would wonder if you existed as part of Australia. In a similar way how must have Native Americans related to nearly a century of cinema depicting them as 'savages' or worse. The absence here is the absence of the actual culture possessed by Native Americans, instead in its place is a caricature of Native American ways of life. There is of course a reason for this, and it has to do with how meaning is fixed. If Native Americans were depicted as fully fledged people then it would be distressing to see them slaughtered en masse by the cowboys (heroes). But this isn't the case in the movies, Native Americans are 'savages' so its justifiable for them to be slaughtered. The justification for the actions of the cowboys depend on you accepting their view of Native Americans. The justification for the destruction of half of Vietnam during the sixties depends on you accepting, at least in party, that the Vietnamese were similarly somehow sub-human.
I hope that the above has gone some way towards whetting your appetite, and justifying the exploration of the points of contact between anarchism (as defined above) and post-structuralist thought. I don't expect that anyone having read the above will rush out and declare themselves post-structuralist and nor should they. The debate is far from over and much more work remains for us to do. As I have stated on other pages at this site, I would very much like to hear your views. If you think the above is a crock - then mail me! - telling me why...if you agree with me (stranger things have happened) then mail me...if you couldn't understand a word of this the mail me...
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© 1997 s.l.robinson@student.murdoch.edu.au
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