Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation ................. 15790$ $$FM 02-21-06 11:07:07 PS PAGE 1 ................. 15790$ $$FM 02-21-06 11:07:07 PS PAGE 2 Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics Jesse S. Cohn Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press ................. 15790$ $$FM 02-21-06 11:07:08 PS PAGE 3 ᭧ 2006 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the inter- nal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance ם Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [1-57591-105-1/06 $10.00 8¢ pp. pc.] Associated University Press 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cohn, Jesse S., 1972– Anarchism and the crisis of representation : Hermeneutics, aesthetics, politics / Jesse S. Cohn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-10: 1-57591-105-1 (alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-57591-105-2 (alk. paper) 1. Anarchism—Philosophy. 2. Representation (Philosophy) I. Title. HX833.C57 2006 335Ј.83—dc22 2006000679 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ................. 15790$ $$FM 02-21-06 11:07:08 PS PAGE 4 Contents Acknowledgments 7 Introduction: The General Form of the Crisis of Representation 11 Part I: Hermeneutics 1. False Solutions 21 2. The Necessity of a Critique of Representation 39 3. Anarchism as a Critique of Representation 55 4. Anarchism Beyond Representationalism and Antirepresentationalism 79 5. Anarchist Hermeneutics as Ethics and Ecology 97 Part II: Aesthetics 6. The Fate of Representation, the Fate of Critique 115 7. Reconstructing Anarchist Aesthetics 152 8. Aesthetic Production 182 Part III: Politics 9. The Critique of Democracy as Representation 199 10. The Critique of Economy as Representation 216 11. The Critique of History as Representation 230 12. The Critique of Identity as Representation 242 Notes 257 Selected Bibliography 292 Index 312 5 ................. 15790$ CNTS 02-21-06 11:07:11 PS PAGE 5 ................. 15790$ CNTS 02-21-06 11:07:12 PS PAGE 6 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 Dapı´a, for her gra- cious 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, Howard G. 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 Robin- son, 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 Recon- struction 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 extend- ing permission to quote from the work. Attempts to locate the families of the authors were unsuccessful. This book is dedicated to Rosa. 7 ................. 15790$ $ACK 02-21-06 11:07:14 PS PAGE 7 ................. 15790$ $ACK 02-21-06 11:07:14 PS PAGE 8 Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation ................. 15790$ HFTL 02-21-06 11:07:16 PS PAGE 9 ................. 15790$ HFTL 02-21-06 11:07:17 PS PAGE 10 Introduction: The General Form of the Crisis of Representation A single but complex issue defines the representational crisis. It involves the assumption 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 func- tions 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 nar- rowing it. —Santiago Cola´s, ‘‘What’s Wrong With Representation?’’ The whole system of representative government is an immense fraud resting on this fiction: that the executive and legislative bodies elected by universal suffrage of the 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 symbolic 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 can be 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 something nondiscursive. Antirepresentationalism can also be articulated, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, as a prescriptive opposition to prac- tices of representing. While the first kind of claim is concerned with knowl- edge and the second with action, the two inevitably overlap: if you no longer 11 ................. 15790$ INTR 02-21-06 11:07:19 PS PAGE 11 12 ANARCHISM AND THE CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION accept ‘‘the notion of knowledge as accurate representation,’’ then you will oppose practices that appeal 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 areas in contemporary theory.’’ Postmodern critiques of representation extend modernist suspicion of representational art and litera- ture by questioning whether even high-modernist abstraction ever, in fact, constituted a successful exit from representation.3 At the same time, antirep- resentationalists 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 representative 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, paradoxi- cally, with the prevailing cynicism of the post-sixties era, for the critique of representation produces cynical conclusions incompatible with its own ethi- cal premises. As Nancy Fraser has argued, the position that sees representa- tions 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 while one- 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 norms has raised alarms. While antihumanist critiques of repre- sentation have usefully called attention to the possibility that even the most seemingly transparent representational systems, in speaking for a multitude, entail the silencing of its multiplicity, this has led to an ethical quandary. If every representation is an act of domination, and if every statement, every interpretation, and every staking-out of a position means making a represen- tation of things, then every work of art, every reading, and every political act, even those motivated by a wish to lend a voice to those who have been silenced, involves a further silencing. How, then, can we consistently think or practice in the absence of representation? The fact is that we cannot and do not. The show goes on—but as Terry Eagleton remarks, ‘‘the fact that ‘everything just goes on’ is the crisis.’’ Thus, the sanguine tone assumed by anthropologists George Marcus and Michael Fischer,