Postmodem Anarchism Postmodem Anarchism Lewis Call LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Oxford LEXINGTON BOOKS Published in the United States of America by Lexington Books A Member of the Rowman& LittlefieldPublishing Group 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland20706 PO Box317 Oxford OX29RU, UK Copyright © 2002 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication InformationAvailable Library of CongressControl Number: 2002117242 ISBN 0-7391-0522-1 (cloth: alk. paper) Printed in the United States of America 9"'The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSIINISOZ39.48-1992. For Mom and Dad, who taught me to question Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Postrnodem Matrix I. Toward an Anarchy of Becoming: Nietzsche 31 2. A Thought Outside the State: Foucault 61 3. The Giftof Postmodem Anarchism: Baudrillard 89 4. Anarchy in the Matrix: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling 117 Bibliography 143 Index 153 About the Author 161 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Professor Mark Poster fo r helping me to discover my interest in postmodemism. I would also like to thank Dr. Robert Blackman fo r many long and fa scinating discussions about anarchism. Dr. Sharif Gemie, editor of Anarchist Studies, was kind enough to provide me with a forum in which I could articulate and develop many of my ideas. Thanks to Professor Craig Harlan for all those hurried hallway conversations about Richard Rorty. Thanks to Chelle for careful proofreading and assistance with Nietzschean experiments. Most especially, I want to thank Professor George Cotkin for his patient encouragement; without his guidance, this book might never have happened. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 21 (spring 2001): 48-76. A version of chapter 4 appeared in Anarchist Studies 7 (1999): 99-117. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors and publishers of these journals for permission to reprint this material. Lyrics fr om "Everyday is a Winding Road" by Sheryl Crow, Brian MacLeod and Jeff Trott© 1996 Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp., Old Crow Music, Weenie Stand Music and Trottsky Music. All rights o/b/o Old Crow Music and Weenie Stand Music administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All rights o/b/o Trottsky Music administered by Wixen Music Publishing Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014. Introduction The Postmodern Matrix The recent advent of hypertext as a profoundly new fo rm of writing has been heralded by some as a pedagogical gold mine; it also seems to confirm certain postmodem predictions regarding the decline of linear narrative. 1 Hypertext, which deconstructs conventional text by interspersing such text with nonlinear hypertextual links, is now used by wide segments of the population throughout the postindustrial world. Hypertext also makes it tempting to view ideas, con­ cepts, and intellectual developments not in terms of a linear progression, as was once fa shionable, but rather through the metaphor of the web, or as cyberpunk 2 pioneer William Gibson would have it, "the matrix." The metaphor of the ma­ trix is especially tempting, not only because it seems to conform to our present technological condition, but also because it fits nicely into an interpretive framework which has been employed with some success by a number of promi­ nent structuralist anthropologists and literary critics. While Claude Levi-Strauss and Cliffo rd Geertz inquired into the deep structure of certain non-Western mythological traditions, Roland Barthes and Marshall Sahlins provocatively pointed out that the same technique could easily be applied to an analysis of contemporary Western bourgeois culture.3 Could we not, as an interesting ex­ periment in structuralist intellectual history, apply the same methodology to the history of postmodem philosophy? Indeed, if we provisionally accept the provocative thesis of Gilles De leuze and Felix Guattari, perhaps a certain insight may be gained by abandoning those histories of thought which articulate suspi­ cious teleologies in fa vor of a new model, more "rhizomatic" in nature, in which thought is conceived as a web or matrix, with every "node" connected to every other.4 This approach might also address some of the historiographic concerns raised by Jacques Derrida, who has pointed out that "successively, and in a regu­ lated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of meta- 2 Introduction physics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix ...is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. "5 Derrida is right to be skeptical of the centered "metaphysics of presence" which has dominated Western thought since Plato, for presence implies absence, and any fixed center must depend for its very existence upon an excluded margin. The matrix I wish to propose, however, is the very Other of the "matrix" of Western metaphysics which Derrida describes here, for the postmodern matrix has no center. It develops according to the model of the decentered computer network, and therefore has what Jean Baudrillard would call a certain hyperreality, but no "Being as presence." It is much closer to Barthes's vision of an "ideal text" in which "the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one."6 The postmodem matrix, like the "ideal text," is thus profoundly pluralistic and nonhierarchical: it has neither a single concrete origin nor a definite teleology, and none of its strands or nodes may be said to ruleover the others . Taking the centerless, hypertcxtual matrix as our model and postmodern philosophy as our topic of inquiry, we might then proceed as fo llows. Strand One begins, of course, with Friedrich Nietzsche. Sometimes regarded as "the last metaphysician in the West," sometimes hailed (or denounced, with equal enthusiasm) as the philosopher who marks the "turning point" into postmodernity, Nietzsche's importance in the history of nineteenth­ and twentieth-century philosophy is without parallel.7 If Nietzsche's apologists and critics are in agreement on any point, it is surely this : that Nietzsche's thinking represents what some postmodern ists might call a rupture. After Nietzsche, philosophy cannot proceed as it did before. His dispersed, nonlinear, aphoristic style combines with his powerfully destabilizing genealogical method to produce a thinking which calls everything into question: our epistemological confidence in our ability to understand the truth about ourselves and the world, and even our ontological confidence in our own existence as rational selves in possession of free will. Nietzsche's thinking lays waste to every received truth of the modern world, including those of science, politics, and religion. His philosophy is thus anarchistic in the strong sense of the term: it includes important elements of an anarchist politics, but (more importantly) it also contains an anarchy ofthought. Nietzsche's writing attacks hierarchy not only at the political level but at the philosophical level as well, undermining the very foundations of the deeply entrenched metaphysics of domination upon which the West has come to rely. The Postmodem Matrix 3 Where, one might well ask, is philosophy to proceed after this critique? The answer to this question is provided in large part by the author-positions who oc­ cupy the next two nodes on Strand One, namely Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Foucault radicalizes Nietzsche's thought-not epistemologically, which would be almost impossible, but in the more straightforward sense that Foucault gives the genealogy a specifically political dimension. Whereas Nietzsche used genealogy primarily as a weapon against Judeo-Christian moral­ ity, Foucault is much more interested in genealogy as a strategy fo r the subver­ sion of judicial discourses about prisons and punishment, or psychological dis­ courses about sexuality. And Foucault employs the genealogical strategy in a more patient, detailed, and empirical way than Nietzsche did in his Genealogy of Morals. Genealogy reaches its maturity in the works of Foucault. Like Foucault, Deleuze deploys Nietzsche's genealogy in a politically radical way, particularly in A Thousand Plateaus, the collection of profoundly nonlinear, genealogical counterhistories which Deleuze wrote with Felix Guattari. And it is in the work of De leuze and Guattari that the genealogy develops a specifically anarchist agenda. To be sure, Foucault's genealogy is heavily politicized, to the point where (as I argue below) his thinking may be read as a "thought outside the state." Deleuze's texts are much more explicit in this matter, however. Particularly in the "Treatise on Nomadology," Deleuze and Guattari acknowl­ edge that the kind of "nomad thinking" initiated by Nietzsche is profoundly at odds with all forms of statist thought. Strand Two begins with Sigmund Freud. Like Nietzsche, Freud obliterates the easy confidence in the primacy of reason and in the unity of the self which dominated Western thinking prior to the late nineteenth century. But whereas Nietzsche launches his assault with the weapons of poetic philosophy, Freud employs psychoanalysis, demonstrating that beneath our thin veneer of rationality lurk untidy sexual obsessions, neuroses, death instincts, and monsters of the id. The unconscious is a battleground for Freud, a place where the ego engages in a courageous but improbable effort to mediate between the conflicting drives of id and superego.