Poststructural Anarchism

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In the last couple of years, I have discovered post-structuralism. I wish I’d known about it sooner, as the discovery has been a revelation and a joy.

Post-structuralism is basically a theory of language and knowledge that claims that words and terms do not have a fixed meaning. Instead, their meaning is dependent on context, and context is inevitably indefinite, slippery and ultimately limitless, implying that there is no such thing as certain knowledge.

It’s called poststructuralism because it takes on the structuralists who claim that words do instead have a fixed meaning within a stable and universal structure of language. Poststructuralists contest that the structure is specific and stable, thus rendering meaning more contingent. Instead, meaning is very much in the mind of the reader at least as much as the author (indeed some argue that it is only the reader’s interpretation that matters), and is shaped by historical and political forces including race, colonialism, gender etc..

I hope this very amateurish explanation makes sense. When I learned about it, I realised that this is how I had been thinking for a long time, in particular about the discourse of diplomacy and the language of power, but without any kind of rigorous framework or, to be honest, a clear understanding of what I was doing. Words - and absent words - signify much more than what they merely - attempt to - describe. They indicate a vast and ultimately endless chain of political and social context (endless because, at minimum, the meaning of any word depends on the meaning of adjacent words and so on and so forth ad infinitum), a context we must identify if we are to understand the true forces at play in any linguistic formulation. For example, I attempted a deconstruction like this on a recent Financial Times article by the former head of MI6.

Poststructuralists do not claim that there is no truth and that all knowledge is ‘relative’, as critics allege1. Instead they argue that meaning is inherently unstable and strictly non-universal. There is not necessarily, and indeed is only rarely, a broadly accepted interpretation of a word or descriptive term. But this does not mean there is no ‘truth’ underneath it all. It’s just that any description of that truth is inherently unstable and itself carries a whole universe of political, social etc bias and interpretation.

So, poststructuralism is an important route into understanding power - who is attempting to define what’s going on, who’s naming it, and what is their agenda by picking some words and concepts over others (because what is ignored - or is invisible - is equally important to consider as what is included). Your colonialism is my self-determination. Your sacred mission is my genocide. Your failure to mention me is an attempt to erase me and my significance.

But can poststructuralism offer more than a method of interpretation of words, terminologies, concepts etc? Does it have practical implications for our politics? Already, in helping us understand power, then, yes, it does. But Todd May in his 1994 book ‘The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism’ takes it further, in ways that I think are very relevant for our current circumstance.

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When I give talks about anarchism, I’m often asked at the end, ‘But what can I do?’. One satisfactorily anarchist but in truth inadequate answer would be, it’s up to you: the whole point of anarchism is that it’s about your choice, your self-determination and indeed your own method of revolution. It’s not for me to say.

But I don’t think this is enough. We are confronted today by deeply-entrenched systems of power and embodied ideology, in everything from the institutions and laws of the state, to the petty tyranny of the workplace or indeed the unaffordability of housing. This is a hell of a lot to take on. It is an all-embracing, self-reaffirming thought- and power-system that I call a ‘Gestalt’, an allegedly rational concept that is complete and all-but-impregnable to any critical argument (thus implying that we need an alternative Gestalt to replace it - a topic that I take up in my next book).

And I thoroughly reject the singular archetype of a vanguard-led revolution, an archetype informed by the American, Russian or French revolutions, of usually a self-appointed group of men operating, often secretively, to their own agenda and imposing it on everyone else, merely replacing one form of domination with another supposedly-superior, more ‘popular’, system.

This method wouldn’t work in overthrowing the current system in any case. Any attempt at organised revolution would be instantly snuffed out by the overweening power of the contemporary state, operating in the interests of capital, and today hugely empowered by the incredibly ubiquitous machinery of modern surveillance, powers far surpassing the violently intrusive tools of the GDR’s Stasi, until now the most extensive state surveillance history has witnessed. We wouldn’t stand a chance. Just look at what Trump’s state is doing to opposition in the US, or what the British government has done to Palestine Action. They know absolutely everything. The British government, that paragon of democracy and accountability, employed undercover police officers to form decades-long sexual relationships with environmental or animal-rights activists in order to ‘gather intelligence’ (a grotesque abuse only now being investigated). The police even spied on the family of a murdered child, Stephen Lawrence, because that family was critical of the police. Today, the British government is demanding that Apple provide a ‘back-door’ into all of its users’ iCloud data, a ‘back door’ that it will have, in secret, secured from all other tech firms who have not had the guts to resist, let alone, of course, tell us.

So what’s the alternative? Todd May offers an answer. His book synthesizes classical anarchist thought and post-structuralist philosophy. In particular, he tries to step past traditional anarchist philosophy’s most salient ‘weaknesses’, namely its assumption that human nature is essentially ‘good’ and that power is inevitably ‘bad’ or repressive. I’m not aware of many anarchists who believe this rather simplistic account but anyway let’s continue.

May argues that post-structuralism allows a new way to think about these ideas. Firstly, that instead of focusing on the state, there should be a ‘tactical orientation’ (an idea inspired by Foucault) that we should confront power in all places that it occurs including the workplace, gender and race relations or cultural practices, a kind of ‘micro-politics’.

Secondly, May suggests that instead of the naive belief that an anarchist society would allow our ‘true’ human selves at last to emerge, we should accept that subjectivity - our sense of ourselves - is inevitably a construct of other forces - cultural, racial, gender-based etc - some of which we may not be aware of. We should accept that power can be productive in shaping subjects, knowledge and indeed in generating resistance.

In the first argument, May is arguing that we should decentralize resistance, and take it to the places ‘where we are’. I very much agree with this. Power represses us in multiple locations and in multiple different and often unacknowledged ways. The workplace, for example, is one where the undeclared hierarchy of domination is often concealed within declarations of ‘horizontality’ or anti-managerialism, and camouflaged by the uniforms of chinos and open-necked shirts. The boss still has the power to ruin the employee’s life by sacking them (and in the case of the US thus taking away their healthcare, and thereby literally threatening their very bodies - even their lives!). This is an awesome and deeply repressive power that can and should be contested everywhere it occurs.

Indeed, I would go a step further than May to argue that such a pluralist and microcosmic approach is the only way plausibly to take on the whole system. A series of micro-revolutions, such as local people taking over the government of their own neighbourhood (perhaps even their own street or local school), may spread by example and imitation like moss across a forest floor, eventually to cover the whole country. Another match to the bonfire may be a strike at a tech company demanding employee ownership and control. Other neighbourhoods - or employees - witness the virtues of self-government and shared ownership and try it for themselves. Thus the whole top-down power structure of the contemporary state and the capitalist company is inverted - and this could happen quickly. But I realise of course that my theory is yet another singular template of potential revolutionary change as well as a theory that is a little too linear (if nevertheless dendritic) in a decidedly non-linear and indeed complex world. Who knows how it could happen? Who predicted the Arab Spring?

May’s analysis of power parallels his analysis of the location of resistance. He argues that power is not merely centralized in the state but has many dimensions, arising from many different sites and operating along multiple, intersecting registers - a web of practices with overlapping political effects. Political intervention must therefore occur at multiple, local sites simultaneously, addressing specific forms of domination wherever they emerge—in gender relations, race, workplace hierarchies, cultural practices, and beyond.

This is surely correct, but May then claims that power is in some way irreducible and always present. That it can be creative and productive as well as repressive, and that we must be more sophisticated in distinguishing what kind of power is at play. May argues that power ‘comes from everywhere’ and operates through countless everyday practices, that it is immanent within all relationships—economic, social, linguistic, psychological—rather than external to them.

I’m not so sure about this - all relationships? All inter-personal understandings? Everywhere? For me, power in its essence is about one person or institution making someone else do something other than what they would freely choose, an act that is inevitably dehumanizing and indeed humiliating (both to the person exercising power and the object of that power). This is pretty clear as a definition, in contrast to a broader claim of ‘ubiquitous immanence’. A subject and an object. Stalin, the evil genius of power, put it succinctly: ‘Who? Whom?’ - the essential question: who is doing what to whom? If so, then power is always coercive in some way, always repressive. The critical absence is consent. Thus, May’s reconceptualising of power relies upon what amounts, for me at least, to a redefinition of power - this is a kind of unintended poststructuralism of his argument, ironic really.

But May is surely correct in pointing us away from the drama and grandiosity of overthrowing the state and instead towards the micro-politics of everyday interactions. What I like about this argument is that this is where we actually exist. We are constantly subject to power relations every single day. Understanding those multiple and often concealed manifestations of power enables us to confront them using whatever method might be most appropriate for that time and place. There is no single method of revolution; there are many. This tallies with a more accurate understanding of the world and its manifold connexions i.e. that of a complex system which carries many different and sometimes unexpected qualities (tipping points, emergent properties etc.) that are distinct from a narrow ‘Newtonian” and linear understanding of how things happen (NOT ‘one thing leads to another’!). And indeed, encouragingly, complexity offers a theory of changing the whole - ‘phase change’: when the entire system shifts from one state into another.

There is an innate intelligence and invitation to creativity in this formulation. To put it into the loathsome terminology of modernity - this conception of the locality if not ubiquity of power empowers us to take it on. This conception also manifests a better method of spread, of contagion, of ideas themselves: that the rejection of contemporary ideology is perpetrated by persuasion not propaganda, by example not imposition. Non-violence of act, but also of words - for Derrida, the foremost exponent of poststructuralism, held that all exercise of definition was violent, in reducing something (truth) into something lesser, in claiming your right to interpret over mine.

The omnipotence of the state nevertheless cannot be forgotten. It sits atop all systems of power and enforces those systems, such as capitalism, through law. By its exercise of power - its claim of the right to power (which we never agreed to, needless to say) - it implicitly legitimizes all expressions of power. Thus, the removal of the state must remain a central objective of anarchism. May’s proposal of poststructural anarchism nevertheless offers a way to think about anarchism of the everyday, of the reality that in order to change society we cannot look to top-down revolution but instead to a constant and adaptive process of renegotiating relationships one-by-one. Both goals, the macro and micro, must be kept in mind as we develop our efforts of change which, given that we are in a complex system, must be highly adaptable and capable of revision if one method is found ineffective.

May’s achievement is to blend the insight and inherent contingency of poststructuralist theory into a proposal of what anarchists call praxis - the implementation of ideas into reality. And it is there of course that anarchism, like all political theory, must meet its test.

Am I now a post-structural anarchist? It depends on what you mean (and not what I mean) by post-structuralist and, indeed, anarchist…