Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics Jesse Cohn 2006 Contents Acknowledgments 4 Introduction: The General Form of the Crisis of Representation 5 Part I: Hermeneutics 12 1. False solutions 13 2. The Necessity of a Critique of Representation 30 LABELING REPRESENTATION .............................. 31 PATRONIZING REPRESENTATION ............................ 32 IDENTIFYING REPRESENTATION ............................. 33 FOCALIZING REPRESENTATION ............................. 34 ONTOLOGICAL JUSTIFICATIONS FOR REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES . 35 Representationalism as Naturalism ......................... 35 Representationalism as Naïve Realism ........................ 35 Representationalism as Reductivism ......................... 36 Representationalism as Transcendentalism ..................... 37 ANTIESSENTIALIST CRITIQUES OF REPRESENTATIONALISM . 38 THE ETHICAL CONTENT OF ANTIREPRESENTATIONALISM . 39 MARXISM AND ANTIREPRESENTATIONALISM .................... 41 3. Anarchism as a Critique of Representation 45 ANARCHISM AS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORY . 46 ANARCHISM BEYOND NAÏVE REALISM ......................... 49 ANARCHIST ANTI-REDUCTIVISM ............................ 54 ANARCHISM AND POWER ................................ 55 ANARCHIST IMMANENCE ................................ 61 ANARCHISM BEYOND RELATIVISM ........................... 65 4. Anarchism Beyond Representationalism and Antirepresentationalism 68 BEYOND REPRESENTATIONALISM AND ANTIREPRESENTATIONALISM . 68 ANARCHIST THEORIES OF MEANING: MULTIPLICITY AND CREATIVITY . 69 ANARCHIST INTERPRETATION AS NON-VANGUARDIST PRACTICE . 81 5. Anarchist Hermeneutics as Ethics and Ecology 85 ONTOLOGY AND METHODOLOGY ........................... 85 RHETORICAL METHODOLOGIES ............................. 86 2 STRUCTURAL METHODOLOGIES ............................ 87 CONTEXTUAL METHODOLOGIES ............................ 90 FUNCTIONAL METHODOLOGIES ............................ 91 METHODOLOGICAL LIMITATIONS ........................... 92 TOWARD ECOLOGICAL READING ............................ 92 CONCLUSION: FROM ANARCHIST READING TO ANARCHIST WRITING . 97 Part II: Aesthetics 98 6. The Fate of Representation, the Fate of Critique 99 REFUSALS OF AESTHETIC REPRESENTATION . 100 ANARCHISM AMONG THE MODERNISTS . 102 THE IMPASSE OF ANARCHIST MODERNISM . 112 POSTMODERN ANARCHY ................................. 118 PROBLEMS WITH THE POSTMODERN PROJECT . 127 THE IMPASSE OF ANARCHIST POSTMODERNISM . 131 7. Reconstructing Anarchist Aesthetics 132 ANARCHY VERSUS DECADENCE ............................. 132 ANARCHIST ONTOLOGY, ANARCHIST AESTHETICS . 138 ‘‘CRITICAL IDEALISM’’ AS SOCIAL ANARCHIST AESTHETIC . 141 EFFECTS: EMPATHY, DISBELIEF, LAUGHTER . 148 THE LIMITS OF THE POLITICS OF STYLE . 157 8. Aesthetic Production 159 THE PROBLEM OF ALIENATION ............................. 159 THE REORGANIZATION OF CULTURE . 162 ALTERNATIVE CULTURE ................................. 167 VERNACULARIZATION .................................. 168 CONCLUSION: THE ONTOLOGY OF AESTHETIC REPRESENTATION . 170 Part III: Politics 172 9. The Critique of Democracy as Representation 173 ANARCHISM AND THE CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION . 181 10. The Critique of Economy as Representation 189 11. The Critique of History as Representation 202 12. The Critique of Identity as Representation 213 CONCLUSION: THE ONTOLOGY OF POLITICAL REPRESENTATION . 225 Selected Bibliography 227 3 Acknowledgments ONE OF THE SIMPLEST AND PROFOUNDEST TEACHINGS OF ANARCHISM IS THAT IT is only with the help of many, many others that one finds oneself. I want to thank everyone who made this book possible: Darlene most of all, for the gift of time and space in which to work, and for her endless love, enthusiasm, and (by no means least) patience; my students, for allowing me to try out some of these half-baked notions on them first, and for constantly inspiring me to the effort of interpretation and writing again; Silvia Dapía, for her gracious mentorship and friendship, and Ronald Creagh for his; and a whole generation of researchers for doing the hard work of re-opening the questions I have tried to address here, including Allan Antliff, Mark Antliff, Max Blechman, Daniel Colson, Uri Eisenzweig, John Hutton, Andrew M. Koch, HowardG. Lay, Patricia Leighten, Todd May, Saul Newman, Richard Porton, Richard Sonn, Alexander Varias, David Weir, and the late David Kadlec and John Moore. Special appreciation goes to Gareth Gordon and Steve Robinson, two of my unpaid professors, and to Carol Vandeveer Hamilton, who suggested to me what eventually became the theme of this book with a single question eight years ago. Quotations from Diego Abad de Santillan, After the Revolution (Louis Frank, translator) are reprinted from After the Revolution: Economic Reconstruction in Spain Today, Pages No. 11-13, 18-19, 23, 48, 50, 58, 64, 80, 89-91, 93, and 97, Copyright 1937. My thanks to Reed Elsevier for extending permission to quote from the work. Attempts to locate the families of the authors were unsuccessful. This book is dedicated to Rosa. 4 Introduction: The General Form of the Crisis of Representation A single but complex issue defines the representational crisis. It involves the assump- tion that . there is a world out there (the real) that can be captured by a ‘‘knowing’’ author . —Norman K. Denzin, Interpretive Ethnography Consider just two of the social practices in which representation functions centrally: literature and democratic politics. Both have operated historically as practices of exclusion. If representation . always pre-supposes a distance, then . literary representations and representative democracy always seem to extend the distance under the illusion of narrowing it. —Santiago Colás, ‘‘What’s Wrong With Representation?’’ The whole system of representative government is an immense fraud resting onthis fiction: that the executive and legislative bodies elected by universal suffrage ofthe people must or even can possibly represent the will of the people. —Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy IN OUR TIME, ACCORDING TO FREDERIC JAMESON, WESTERN THOUGHT HAS FALLEN under the shadow of an all-encompassing ‘‘crisis of representation’’ that calls into question the relationships between our concepts and the truths they are meant to denote, our images and the realities they are supposed to depict, our institutions and the interests they are supposed to serve.1 The broad scope and significance of the crisis are implicit in its central term. Concerns about representation cross disciplinary boundaries, straddling the realms of the sym- bolic and the practical, since ‘‘to represent’’ means both to stand for, as a symbol stands for a thing symbolized, and to speak for, as an elected official speaks for a constituency. It canbe articulated as the denial that representation is possible, or that it is what it purports to be: so Richard Rorty’s ‘‘antirepresentationalism’’ denies, in theory, that discourse can refer to some- thing nondiscursive. Antirepresentationalism can also be articulated, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, as a prescriptive opposition to practices of representing. While the first kind of claim is concerned with knowledge and the second with action, the two inevitably overlap: if you no longer accept ‘‘the notion of knowledge as accurate representation,’’ then you will oppose practices that appeal 1 Frederic Jameson, introduction to The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, by Jean-François ly- otard, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), viii-xii. 5 to the authority of such knowledge as erroneous or malicious. Thus, the critique of representation appears simultaneously in ‘‘two registers’’—the ‘‘epistemic’’ and the ‘‘political.’’2 It is not for nothing that Jonathan Arac has pointed to this issue as ‘‘one of the most vexed ar- eas in contemporary theory.’’Postmodern critiques of representation extend modernist suspicion of representational art and literature by questioning whether even high-modernist abstraction ever, in fact, constituted a successful exit from representation.3 At the same time, antirepresenta- tionalists have turned modernist attacks on ‘‘mimesis’’ into an assault on the representationalist underpinnings of interpretation.4 Not only has this undermined the claims of social researchers to produce a scientific discourse that accurately represents its object, it also places the represen- tative status of any political discourse in question. To represent, it would appear, is to dominate; there is no escape from representation; ergo, there is no end to domination. Here, the moral zeal animating the postwar generation of French theorists converges, paradoxically, with the prevailing cynicism of the post-sixties era, for the cri- tique of representation produces cynical conclusions incompatible with its own ethical premises. As Nancy Fraser has argued, the position that sees representations as indistinguishable from ‘‘power plays’’ puts in question the very possibility, let alone the content, of any kind of ethical engagement: ‘‘How, after all, can one argue against the possibility of warranted claims whileone- self making such claims as that sexism exists and is unjust?’’ In this way, the very ‘‘opposition between totalitarianism and democracy’’ has been placed under the sign of radical doubt.5 This reluctance to defend democracy and discourses of human rights as universal normshas raised alarms. While antihumanist critiques of representation have usefully called