From: swilbur-AT-wcnet.org
Subject: [postanarchism] singular plural anarchism
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 18:49:48 US/Eastern


I've been doing some general reassessing of what i think is
at stake in the anarchism-poststructuralism encounter. I'm
starting to carve a manuscript out of my researches on the
american individualist and mutualist traditions, and have 
been dwelling somewhat obsessively on the inevitable "'So 
What?' Question." The motivations for my historical work are
largely presentist and chief among them is probably a more
or less "deconstructive" intuition that, despite the apparent
foreclosure of possibilities in contemporary politics, the 
margins of our political discourses are chock full of roads
not travelled because they have been forgotten, or because
their potential attractions have been hidden from view in
large part by our own unwillingness to look beyond a few
received truths about our radical heritage. 

I'm a bit surprised at the extent to which the introduction
of poststructuralism into the anarchist-theory mix has *not*
challenged the terms of debate over issues like "individualist
vs. collectivist anarchism." Obviously, nothing has been 
helped by the attempts to simply banish poststructuralism to
the "extreme individualist" side. I suppose supporters of
Bookchin's or Zerzan's anti-"pomo" writings might disagree,
but, honestly, those critiques are very hard to take seriously.
Poststructuralists differ in many regards, but their seems to
be a fairly broad agreement that, one the one hand, the 
individual subject "is not one" and is always-already bound
up in processes that are in some sense social, and that, on 
the other, those collectivities or communities that seem to
most closely resemble the dynamics of anarchist solidarity
are likely to be in important senses "unavowable" (or, at
some extreme, "communities of those who have nothing in 
common.") These seem to be concurrent insights, not of a sort
we can expect to reconcile through dialectical synthesis or
hierachical arrangement. At one time, it was probably an
important move to debate whether individuality or social
embeddedness was "prior." Looking over the various resolutions
of the questions, however, it's really hard to say whether
radical thought was best served by the insistance that
"solidarity precedes liberty" that is part of Bakunin's
thought or the recognition of "liberty, the mother, not the 
daughter of order" in Tucker's. The two are not even mutually
exclusive. Nearly all the major socialist writers acknowledged
the importance of both individual and society, and their
practical interconnectedness even within theories that seemed
to emphasize one side or the other. Skidmore, for instance,
starts with a very individualistic set of assumptions about
"natural rights" and shows that, in practical terms, their
realization passes through a necessary stage involving broad
manifestations of social solidarity. 

I suppose my basic question here is whether contemporary
approaches which strongly insist on the primacy of either
individualist or collectivist elements and solutions don't,
perhaps, betray a kind of more general concensus implicit
but incomplete in more "classical" anarchist thought. If 
there is, in fact, some major advance which poststructuralist
thought opens for us, perhaps it is the means to move beyond
a false opposition that was already questionable in the pre-
anarchist thought of someone like Thomas Skidmore. 

Derrida suggests that justice is related to the "more than one
voice"/"no more one voice." I'm wondering if in the work of
someone like Nancy, who inherits a great deal from Derrida,
the conjoined "singular plural" of recent work might point to
a more "just" approach to an old anarchist problem - one which
we might approach not as an "unbridgeable chasm" but as a
point where we must learn to be more radically pluralistic in
our own critical, intellectual work. 

-shawn



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