Section 3 : 
Philosophical Perspectives and Theoretical Frameworks
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People :
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Author : Abraham P. DeLeon

Author : Alejandro De Acosta

Author : Alex Khasnabish

Author : Allan W. Antliff

Author : Anthony J. Nocella II

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SECTION III. Philosophical Perspectives and Theoretical Frameworks

DIALOGUE 3. (On a mountaintop, between two who are in fact one)



Alejandro de Acosta





A: See, there are movements. They issue calls, call out to each other, too.



B: Yes, other self, and I hear, in their distant calls, discourses, stories.



A: Look, somewhere someone finds or loses a self, as if one of us were to vanish to the other.



B: Yes, and look, somewhere, a political act, one or more, unfolds, unfold. Already here, on this mountaintop, you and I, other self …



A: I am not so sure. From up here all of this might come to seem strange, unlikely, incomprehensible.



B: Fragile, at least.



A: No homogenous space …



B: … no plinth, no socle …



A: … on which it is all gathered.



B: What negotiations were necessary to begin telling this story …



A: … or to jump in somewhere in the middle, saying, see, look … ?



B: What anamnesis …



A: … or healthy amnesia …



B: … to say: this is and is not a self;



A: … to say: this is and is not politics.



B: Ah. This story folds back upon itself.



A: It involutes, yes.



B: …



A: One answer, for us, here on the mountaintop: ethical negotiations.



B: If so, their aftereffects are what we by custom call consent, consensus, assembly, consulta … do you remember how we spoke before our ascent?



A: Yes, those sessions in which it was in bad taste to assume ahead of time what was under discussion, its ramifications.



B: Another answer, kind other self: we are folding not just speech but life back on itself.



A: The most paradoxical lesson?



B: It would concern power that is not power …



A: … an ethics that is finally amoral. Can we even speak of this here?



B: Some like to ask what such-and-such would “look like” … as I wonder what you, other self, look like.



A: But it is not a matter of representation, is it? I can’t see you at all.



B: The desire that the lesson could matter, that speech could come to feel concrete …



A: … some say “real,” but here on the mountaintop …



B: Yes, even here, other self, direct action in discourse.



A: A story that, atomic, reinvents life?



B: I know this: it is our ever-receding goal.



A: It is also our ever-present discovery, if you remember the experiment that brought us here.



B: It is for others to take up now. For us it is a goal that is finally not a goal.



A: And yet we are not without the lesson that is a sign, a place-holder that is not a compromise. That is why we are two.



CHAPTER 12. To Walk Questioning: Zapatismo, the Radical Imagination, and a Transnational Pedagogy of Liberation



Alex Khasnabish



Terrible have been the struggles between those of above and those of below, between the powerful and the dispossessed. Much has been written of the reasons and causes for these clashes. The truth is, they all have the same foundation: the powerful want to bring down the world the ceiba holds up; those of below want to keep the world and memory, because that is where the dawn comes from.[42]



The powerful fight against humanity.



The dispossessed fight and dream for humanity.



This is the true history. And if it does not appear in primary school textbooks, that is because history is still being written by those above, even though it is made by those below.



But even though it’s not part of the official curricula, the story of the birth of the world and the map that explains where it is, is still being held in the scars of the mother ceiba.



The eldest of the elders of the communities entrusted the secret to the Zapatistas. In the mountains, they spoke with them and told them where the note was left by the first gods, those who gave birth to the world, so memory wouldn’t be lost.



Ever since, because they were born without faces, without names, and without individual pasts, the Zapatistas have been students of the story taught by the land. One dawn in the year 1994, the Zapatistas became teachers; consulting the old note of memory, they could teach how the world was born and show where it is to be found.



That is why the Zapatistas are students and teachers.



From “Democratic Teachers and the Zapatista Dream” by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos (2001, pp. 275–76)

Lessons in Dignity



Standing in the streets of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the first hours of the new year in 1994, Zapatista spokesperson and military strategist Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos explained the presence of the army of masked, armed indigenous insurgents occupying the central plaza, administrative offices, and streets of the old colonial capital of Chiapas, Mexico, to a group of reporters and other anxious onlookers. Rather than speaking the doctrinaire language of modernist revolution, Marcos unapologetically described the Zapatista uprising as an urgently needed “lesson in dignity” given to the rest of the Mexican nation and, as would soon become clear, the rest of the world by the insurgents and support bases of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) in the face of the creeping oblivion materialized in the form of colonialism, imperialism, racism, genocide, and capitalism (Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos 2002, pp. 211–12). Marcos elaborated upon the significance of this lesson by extending his pedagogical analogy:



[the uprising] should be a lesson for all. We cannot let ourselves be treated this way, and we have to try and construct a better world, a world truly for everyone, and not only a few, as the current regime does. This is what we want. We do not want to monopolize the vanguard or say that we are the light, the only alternative, or stingily claim the qualification of revolutionary for one or another current. We say, look at what happened. That is what we had to do. (ibid.)



Marcos’s description of the Zapatista uprising as a “lesson in dignity” invokes the language of pedagogy not only as a morally powerful justification for the EZLN’s insurgency, it would also turn out to be prophetic in terms of Zapatismo’s resonance transnationally.



From a geopolitical perspective, January 1, 1994, marked the first day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force, binding Canada, the United States, and Mexico together in a continental neoliberal capitalist market. It also marked the end of the short-lived neoliberal “end of history” rhetoric that had been so enthusiastically trumpeted by capitalist elites and their intellectual defenders in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This rhetorical invocation of “the end of history” was a phrase meant to stand for the end of the great ideological conflicts that had marked so much of modern history and the ascendance of neoliberal capitalism along with some tattered trappings of liberal democratic practice. It also signified the defeat of traditional actors of the established Left on a global scale as organized labor, communist and social democratic political parties, progressive social movements, and institutionalized social justice actors found themselves rudderless and bereft of credibility and grassroots capacity after decades of tepid and uninspired political practice aimed, at best, at ameliorating the worst consequences of capitalism and other oppressive systems such as racism and patriarchy and, at worst, angling to get a seat at the table with powerholders and thereby join their ranks. The challenge to the proclamation of history’s end would not come from these disciplined, defeated, and coopted sectors—especially not from those in the global North; instead, the most profound challenge to this hegemonic claim would come from the far southeast of Mexico in the state of Chiapas where, in the early hours of the new year, thousands of armed and masked indigenous Mayan insurgents emerged from five centuries of indigenous resistance and persistence in the face of genocide, racism, and exploitation and declared “¡Ya basta!”—“Enough!”—to the systems of power that sought to deny them their very right to exist. Identifying NAFTA and neoliberal capitalism as only the most recent incarnation of five centuries of creeping oblivion manifested in the form of genocide, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, racism, exploitation, and brutal marginalization, the insurgents of the EZLN also positioned themselves as the legitimate heirs to the unfulfilled radical promise of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) and its most storied and uncompromised hero, Emiliano Zapata.[43]



Seizing several towns and hundreds of ranches throughout the state, the insurgents of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation declared war on the federal executive of the Mexican government and the Mexican Army while announcing their intention to march on Mexico City and allow the Mexican people to freely and democratically constitute a government of their own choosing. After the first day of January, the Zapatista rebellion would take a path that no one could have anticipated as armed insurgency was met by massive state repression and both, in turn, were met by the spontaneous and unexpected force of Mexican and international civil society organizing massive demonstrations in order to compel an end to the hostilities and bring the government and the Zapatistas to the negotiation table. Under the weight of massive national and international pressure, the Mexican government declared a ceasefire on January 12, 1994, and while it would hardly mark the end of violence in Chiapas, it would mark the beginning of an entirely new phase of the Zapatista struggle—one reliant much more upon the word than the gun. As Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos would remark, “We did not go to war on January 1 to kill or to have them kill us. We went to make ourselves heard” (Womack, 1999, p. 44). The Zapatistas were certainly heard—throughout Mexico and around the world and while they were clear from the outset that they were not the vanguard of some new monolithic revolutionary movement, that they were always only one pocket of rebels seeking to struggle for a new world alongside other rebellious pockets elsewhere (see Subcomandante Marcos, 2004), as a movement they would take on the roles of both student and teacher in a vital, urgent, and creative pedagogy of radical resistance and alternative-building that would engage a diversity of others in struggle far outside the borders of Zapatista territory in rebellion.



The Zapatistas’ New Year’s Day uprising has, in the years since, come to be widely regarded as one of the most important sparks to light the fuze of what would become the global anticapitalist/alter-globalization “movement of movements” (see Ronfeldt et al., 1998; Callahan, 2004; Cleaver, 1998; Khasnabish, 2010, 2008; Kingsnorth, 2003; Klein, 2002; Midnight Notes, 2001; Notes from Nowhere, 2003; Olesen, 2005; Solnit, 2004). Despite this recognition—in fact, at least in part because of the Zapatistas’ idealization as icons of militant resistance—many observers and activists in the global North have failed to come to terms with one of the most significant lessons offered by Zapatismo: namely, that liberation is an imperfect and ongoing practice, one that necessitates not only the construction of a new world capable of holding many worlds but the nurturing of new subjectivities inspired by new imaginations who are capable of inhabiting such a world. But new imaginations and new subjectivities cannot simply be rhetorically ushered into being, they have to be socially produced and reproduced. Against this backdrop, in this chapter I take up Zapatismo—the radical imagination and political practice of the Zapatista movement—as a pedagogy of liberation directed toward the cultivation of new ways of being in the world that aim to take us beyond the failures of past revolutionary struggles. Drawing on research conducted with alter-globalization activists in Canada and the United States as well as a critical history of the Zapatista movement and insights from contemporary radical political theory, in what follows I explore the relationship between a radical imagination of sociopolitical possibility and the formation of new subjectivities in the context of the encounters and affinities provoked by Zapatismo’s transnational resonance in the north of the Americas.

Beautiful Myths and Radical Imagination



Few radical movements have had as much attention directed at them as the Zapatistas. Any number of factors could be said to account for this, including: the EZLN’s seemingly anachronistic appearance as a revolutionary insurgent force at “the end of history”; the unmatched communicative skills of the Zapatistas’ spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos; the Zapatistas’ deft use of a variety of strategies to engage “civil society” at national and transnational levels; the romanticization and projection of revolutionary hope and desire onto the Zapatista movement by others located far beyond the living context the movement occupies. For many observers located in the global North, the resonance of Zapatismo has been described in terms of a facile and consumptive romanticism (Hellman, 2000; Oppenheimer, 2002), a product of digital communications infrastructure (Knudson, 1998), and a phenomenon driven by “globalizing” discourses such as liberal democracy and human rights (Olesen 2005; Tarrow 2005), to name only a few of the dominant iterations. This list could surely be endlessly elaborated and no doubt include various attempts to “prove” that the Zapatista movement is just another manifestation of a basic struggle for inclusion and recognition, is reducible to a narrow set of material grievances and inequalities, or is an example of the cynical and self-serving manipulation of poor, child-like indigenous peoples by self-proclaimed revolutionaries.



Equally prevalent of course is the valorization of the movement, characterizations which could be thought of as “beautiful myths” that celebrate very selective aspects of it while omitting others, particularly those that relate to the living, imperfect, and uneven experiences of struggles for radical social transformation. While “myth” is a term often deployed in a pejorative and denigrating sense, it is worth considering that myth is not merely something untrue or a constructed origin story, rather, it is perhaps best understood as a kind of interpellating mode of signification or speech, one which “calls” to subjects and in so doing simultaneously works to form them (Barthes, 1972, p. 124). Every system of meaning-making and power makes use of myth; the real question is how and to what end. For example, without using it as a basis from which to launch a delegitimization of Zapatismo or its resonance, Adrienne Russell (2005) has identified three central “myths” that have been central to the constitution of a network identity among international supporters: first, that of Subcomandante Marcos as a universal, “timeless,” “uberhuman” figure; second, that of the Indigenous peoples of Chiapas as “noble warriors” paradoxically “backward” and “advanced”; and finally, the myth of the “neoliberal beast” that functions as the adversary to be confronted. The point to understanding these myths is not to affirm or debunk them, rather, it is to understand what they make possible with respect to emerging fabrics of resistance and alternative-building, as well as what their circulation and consumption might inhibit and obscure. Rebecca Solnit’s (2004) inspiring characterization of the Zapatista struggle is an example of the promise and limitations of deploying such beautiful myths:



The Zapatistas came as a surprise and as a demonstration that overnight, the most marginal, overlooked place can become the center of the world. They were not just demanding change, but embodying it; and in this, they were and are already victorious … They understood the interplay between physical actions, those carried out with guns, and symbolic actions, those carried out with rods, with images, with art, with communications, and they won through the latter means what they never could have won through their small capacity for violence. (pp. 34–35)



Solnit’s assessment of Zapatismo is compelling and it contains many truths but it also celebrates dynamics (communicative action, moral victory, change through symbolic contestation) that have played very well among sympathetic activists and observers primarily in the global North for whom symbolic and communicative resistance to systems of power and domination have become fetishized because materializing collective resistance and alternatives to the status quo often seems so difficult in a context so thoroughly colonized by capital.



There is, of course, nothing wrong and very much right with the identification of the importance of strategies of symbolic and communicative resistance, nor is there anything misguided in celebrating the successes of struggles like the Zapatistas’. That said, when these beautiful myths become the dominant tropes that circulate about the Zapatistas, other equally or even more important lessons slide from view—and not without consequence. The assertion that “overnight” the Zapatistas managed to draw the world’s attention or that they were simply “embodying” change obscures the decades-long work that went into making such things possible. Such assertions also do no justice to the fact that the attention of “the world” has been fickle and the work of sustaining it has required a great deal of time, energy, and creativity on the part of the Zapatistas. These myths also obscure the fact that the Zapatistas’ struggle is a work-in-progress, one that demands constant renewal and revisioning and is also a site of contestation and conflict. Rather than locating their struggle at the apogee of a revolutionary trajectory the Zapatistas have sought from the moment of their public appearance to explicitly and self-consciously locate their struggle as one among many. Not only this, they have also repeatedly affirmed that theirs is not a revolutionary blueprint, it is a living and imperfect process that requires constant reflection, critique, and reformulation. The Zapatista narrative of radical collective social transformation being a long-term, difficult, and uncertain process that is nonetheless necessary is something that has not been picked up as enthusiastically by those who have been receptive to Zapatismo’s resonance as have their rhetorically brilliant slogans. Finding fault with radical social change movements is a fashion and is often linked to generating political or academic capital, but it is also not the same thing as engaging in a process of respectful and solidaristic critical engagement with other radical social transformation processes. If we do not attend to the much more complex and nuanced lessons Zapatismo has to offer as opposed to reveling in the beautiful myths circulating about it, we miss what is most urgent and timely in the Zapatistas’ pedagogy of liberation. At a moment when radicalized mass movements in the north of the Americas are conspicuous in their absence in the face of a rising protofascism aimed at engineering a new sociopolitical order predicated on permanent war, surveillance, oppression, exploitation, and misery, it is all the more urgent to attend to the “lessons in dignity” that movements like that of the Zapatistas have to teach.



So how can the reasons for and consequences of Zapatismo’s resonance, particularly at the level of the transnational, be productively engaged in a way that takes us beyond the celebration of beautiful myths? How can the significance of Zapatismo be understood not only as a discrete phenomenon but in terms of what it reveals about the relationship between radical social change movements, radical social transformation, and radical knowledge production? Rather than myth, critically exploring this dynamic foregrounds the inherently political work of meaning-making and bring the production and circulation of narratives of resistance and possibility into focus. As Jeff Conant (2010) argues in his examination of the poetics—“the making of meaning through language”—of Zapatismo, “[s]tories of resistance … help to strengthen resistance, rooting it more deeply in belief and in practice, and thus sustain it” (11).



In the same vein, Eric Selbin (2003) contends that it is necessary to understand “the role played by stories, narratives of popular resistance, rebellion and revolution which have animated and emboldened generations of revolutionaries across time and cultures” (p. 84). This focus upon the importance of the work of meaning-making in relation to radical struggle is absolutely central in terms of understanding the lessons offered by Zapatismo as a pedagogy of liberation.



Indeed, many activists and organizers I spoke with who had experienced Zapatismo’s resonance emphasized precisely this point. Describing his own experience with Zapatismo during our conversation in the fall of 2004, Rick Rowley, a radical filmmaker with Big Noise Tactical, noted that “Zapatismo’s not like an ideology that’s easy to lay out; it’s not structured like that.[44] It’s more like a structure of myth and parables but so much of it just so clearly articulated something that was in the water already just waiting to be spoken,” specifically in relation to new forms of radical organizing and strategies for social transformation. Patrick Reinsborough, cofounder of the smartMeme Strategy and Training Project, used similar imagery in his own explanation of the significance of Zapatismo when we spoke in the spring of 2004: “even having had that brief stint as a military struggle [the Zapatistas] were very clear right from the beginning that their battleground was really being set on their own terms. They said it was a war of ideas, a war of words, more than a war of guns or bullets.” Elaborating on this, Reinsborough pointed to the lessons taught by the Zapatistas in terms of the nature of radical struggle. Zapatismo, Reinsborough contended, illuminated the vital need for radical struggles to work to “decolonize people’s imaginations” by stressing “the importance of networks, the importance of contesting idea space and that the system really is most vulnerable not where a line of riot police might be gathering or most vulnerable in a military sense, it’s most vulnerable at its intellectual underpinnings.” At the same time, it is worth repeating that a critical and engaged analysis of the work of meaning-making as it relates to the living experience of radical struggle is precisely the opposite of the uncritical, romanticized, and facile consumption of rhetoric and the celebration of a movement as if its primary purpose is that of icon or inspiration for others.



During our conversation in the winter of 2004, Justin Podur, a regular contributor to ZNet, member of the Canada Colombia Solidarity Campaign, and a self-described “camp follower” of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, powerfully articulated the danger of making a fashion out of a movement. Describing Zapatismo’s resonance within activist circles in Canada and the United States, Podur noted that in fetishizing Zapatismo, all too often activists have drawn the wrong lessons from the Zapatistas and, in so doing, have actually undermined the struggles they saw themselves as contributing to:



There are really cynical people who will say that [the Zapatistas are] a fashion, a fad. I think [the Zapatistas have resonated among northern activists] sometimes for the wrong reasons too. I think a lot of people who could and should continue to help a movement in a place like Venezuela [haven’t] because they can’t handle the idea that Chávez tried to take power in a coup in 1992 [but] they didn’t have a problem with the Zapatistas doing the same in ’94, that’s not even on the spectrum. [These activists believe that] the Zapatistas, they don’t want to take power, they’re Indigenous, they want to transform the way that power’s exercised, but Chávez is after power [and] we can’t support something like that, that’s old style Marxism. It’s crazy, and it’s crazy because the target of the US foreign policies, of the economic policies, of the militarism is the populations of these countries, is the population of Mexico, is the Indigenous population of Chiapas, exactly the same way as is the population in Venezuela. They’re the obstacle in people’s plans to exploit the resources of the region and to exploit the labor of the people and because of these fetishes I think people don’t see that. In that sense the fad about Zapatismo has been really destructive because there are other groups, there are other processes, and nobody cares about them because they don’t understand why the Zapatistas are important and why the Zapatistas are not important. Long before 9/11 in the anti-globalization work people were doing there were a lot of debates about violence and the debates were really superficial. The nonviolence people would say, “we want to be nonviolent like Gandhi” and the violence people said, “we want to be violent like the Zapatistas” and it was just the stupidest thing in the world because the nonviolence people didn’t know a damn thing about Gandhi and the violence people didn’t know a thing about the Zapatistas. I really wish that people would see [the Zapatista struggle] in that context as one piece of a struggle that’s going on all over the world but all over the continent especially.



The fetishization of Zapatismo as a struggle activists elsewhere can project all their desires for “authentic” and “revolutionary” struggle on to leads not only to a consumptive appropriation of other people’s struggles, it also contributes to a narrative about radical social transformation where certain actors play the role of protagonist while others are accorded the status of supporting cast. This is much more than an academic distinction because the way in which we narrate genealogies of struggle frames our imagination of what possibilities exist for resistance and alternative-building. As Podur points out here, the valorization of the Zapatistas’ “revolutionary model” or, even worse, a facile romanticization of their tactics and structure in fact works directly against what the Zapatistas have worked so hard to do since their public emergence on January 1, 1994: connect themselves and others to a larger fabric of struggle in which no one stands above anyone else and to explicitly reject the notion that there is only one path to revolutionary change.



The language of myth, parable, and imagination invoked by the analysts and activists above is profoundly significant. Elsewhere, I have described Zapatismo as an “insurgent” or radicalized imagination of political possibility (Khasnabish, 2010, 2008, 2007) and this dimension is core to understanding its resonance among and significance for the fabric of radical sociopolitical struggle. So what is radical imagination? Put simply, it is a process by which we collectively map “what is,” narrate it as the result of “what was,” and speculate on what “might be.” It is both cognitive and corporeal and, rather than being necessarily spectacular or dramatic, it can be quite mundane. While the capacity to envision that which does not yet exist is obviously a human capacity, the radical imagination is also necessarily a collective process, something that arises out of dialogue and encounter rather than emerging fully formed from the mind of a gifted individual. Furthermore, while imagination is a terrain of political struggle it is not reducible to “ideology” in any simplistic sense of “false consciousness” or “fetishism.” Instead of the interpellating force of myth, which calls to and creates subjects, the radical imagination embodies a more rich, complex, agent-driven and ongoing working-out of affinity (see Haiven and Khasnabish, 2010). It is in the space of radical imagination that Zapatismo’s resonance, particularly transnationally, acquires its power and significance and it is within this same space that it becomes possible to refer to Zapatismo as a pedagogy of liberation in the sense that it is not a roadmap for revolution but a constant provocation to rethink radical sociopolitical struggle even as we live it. So what are some of the core tenets of the radical imagination of Zapatismo? To begin with, issues of power, autonomy, and dignity are central to it. As autonomist Marxist theorist and longtime Zapatista supporter John Holloway eloquently explains, “What is at issue is not who exercises power, but how to create a world based on the mutual recognition of human dignity, on the formation of social relations which are not power relations … This, then, is the revolutionary challenge at the beginning of the twenty-first century: to change the world without taking power. This is the challenge that has been formulated most clearly by the Zapatista uprising in the south-east of Mexico.” (2002, 17–20). Elaborating on the Zapatista challenge Holloway identifies, in an interview in 2001 during the March of Indigenous Dignity, Subcomandante Marcos described what made the Zapatistas so different from other revolutionary movements:



Our army is very different from others, because its proposal is to cease being an army. A soldier is an absurd person who has to resort to arms in order to convince others, and in that sense the movement has no future if its future is military. If the EZLN perpetuates itself as an armed military structure, it is headed for failure. Failure as an alternative set of ideas, an alternative attitude to the world ….You cannot reconstruct the world or society, or rebuild national states now in ruins, on the basis of a quarrel over who will impose their hegemony on society. (García Márquez and Pombo, 2004, pp. 4–5)



This refusal to claim a “power-over” others and the affirmation of a collective “power-to” create a world rooted in dignity, democracy, justice, and liberty is an essential element with respect to Zapatismo as a radical imagination. It also offers important lessons with respect to rethinking revolutionary action in light of the grotesque failures of past movements that sought to build ambitious transformative visions atop the persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered bodies of all those who opposed them.



Marcos has furthered this point, which challenges the familiar modernist dynamic of revolutionary movements aiming to seize the state through arms in order to actualize the revolution, noting, “The EZLN has reached a point where it has been overtaken by Zapatismo,” and, in so doing, rhetorically affirmed a critical distance between Zapatismo and the EZLN (ibid., p. 5). While the EZLN is the armed wing of the insurgency and exists to defend Zapatista territory in rebellion, Zapatismo is “a political strategy, an ethos, a set of commitments claimed by those who claim a political identity” (Callahan, 2004, pp. 218–19). This “ethos” identified by Callahan hinges on an approach to politics based on the pursuit of “democracy, liberty, and justice”—the banners of the Zapatista struggle from the moment of its public emergence—for all. While notions such as “justice,” “democracy,” and “freedom” are inherently plastic in that their meaning depends on the subjectivity espousing them and the context in which they are deployed, they become radical signifiers within the discourse of Zapatismo precisely because of its radical critique of power. For those activists who have been most receptive to Zapatismo as a radical imagination, concepts such as “democracy,” “liberty,” and “justice” are not limited to their liberal democratic interpretations, rather, they are markers for a radical political practice aimed at contesting and moving beyond both the systemic nature of marginalization, violence, and exploitation as well as revolutionary praxes that operate according to a logic of hegemony or which claim to know the “true” revolutionary path. But in order to explore Zapatismo as a pedagogy of liberation, it is necessary to examine it not only as a radical imagination of political possibility but to take it up in the context of some of the radical lessons learned by the Zapatista movement in the process of its formation, lessons that would come to deeply inform Zapatismo as radical imagination and liberatory pedagogy transnationally.

Encounters between Worlds in la Montaña



The history of the Zapatista struggle can be traced back decades and even centuries to indigenous struggles against colonialism, nationalist struggles for independence, and radical struggles for revolutionary sociopolitical and economic transformation. For my purposes here, it will suffice to begin this lesson drawn from Zapatista history in the 1950s. At this time, and in a state marked by extreme inequality, enduring racism, and seemingly endless capacity for violence and brutal repression by elites in defense of their own interests, many young indigenous people sought exodus from the lack of land and opportunity in established highland communities, forming new communities in the Lacandón Jungle that would become experiments in social and political organization. Left to themselves, confronting common concerns, and bereft of their traditional leaders and ranks of honor, these migrants chose to emphasize the importance of community over hierarchy and thus turned to the community assembly where all people over the age of sixteen would meet to reach consensus over all decisions concerning the community (Womack, 1999, p. 18). The assembly materialized the principle that it was not the authorities who ruled the community but the community that ruled the authorities—a principle that the Zapatistas would make central to their movement and enshrine in the slogan mandar obedeciendo, “to lead by obeying” (ibid., p. 19).



While these migrant communities and their directly democratic practice would become the Zapatista base and backbone, the other vital element needed to generate this movement would arrive in the form of cadres from the urban guerrilla struggles in Mexico that took place in the late 1960s and through the ’70s. Indeed, contemporary Zapatismo originated out of the encounter between indigenous communities in the Lacandón Jungle and highlands of Chiapas and the urban revolutionaries who arrived in the state in the early 1980s. The EZLN itself was born in a camp in Chiapas on November 17, 1983, with six insurgents—three mestizos and three indigenous—present (Muñoz Ramírez, 2008, p. 21).[45] While these urban revolutionaries—cadres from the Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (Forces of National Liberation, FLN)—arrived in Chiapas to organize campesinos for a revolution, the outcome of this encounter would be significantly different than this classically modernist revolutionary objective. In fact, rather than “revolutionizing” these communities, the urban insurgents experienced profound challenges to their ideological perspectives and found them reshaped by indigenous realities, a grounded and critical pedagogical moment that actually allowed for the emergence of the Zapatista struggle itself. Amid the mists of the highlands and the heat of the jungle, indigenous communities and urban revolutionaries encountered one another and found that the defeat of revolutionary dogmatism was not enough to catalyze a new social change movement. To bring a new radical politics into being—what would ultimately become Zapatismo—required a new praxis, one born of the urban revolutionaries’ critical reading of Mexican history and current economic and political context combined with the communities’ own experiences of resistance and persistence in the face of genocide, racism, exploitation, and marginalization.



While Subcomandante Marcos, who would become the Zapatistas’ spokesperson and one of their chief military strategists, and the other guerrillas had come to Chiapas to educate the masses about the necessity of a Marxist revolution, the indigenous communities they encountered understood their world in ways revolutionary orthodoxy could not possibly speak to fully. In the course of the difficult process of clandestine survival and organization, Marcos and the other urban revolutionaries began to realize that indigenous notions of time, history, and reality were fundamentally different from what they had been taught to believe (Harvey, 1998, p. 165). In order to be taken seriously by the communities, Marcos and the other guerrilleros needed to demonstrate their capacity to understand and survive in the rugged, mountainous terrain not as a physical rite of passage but because of the significance of this context for the communities as “a respected and feared place of stories, myths, and ghosts” (ibid., p. 165). While Marcos had come to teach politics and history to the communities, he quickly discovered that this revolutionary education, steeped in its own assumptions, made no sense to the communities (ibid., p, 166). In effect, the urban guerrilleros had to be reeducated and become new subjects capable of inhabiting the realities of the indigenous southeast if they were to be anything other than another failed group of radicals preaching incomprehensibly and ineffectually in a vain effort to recruit followers to their cause. This reeducation process included: learning indigenous languages; slowly coming to comprehend radically different ways of making sense out of the world; renouncing a politics based on Euro-Enlightenment assumptions and subordinating their own political expectations to the needs of the communities themselves; and giving up on a revolutionary politics of the vanguard and embracing a collective decision-making process grounded in the collective. The nondogmatic, radically democratic, and self-reflexive approach to radical social struggle and transformation that would come to characterize the Zapatista movement is poetically encapsulated in another Zapatista slogan, preguntando caminamos, “asking, we walk.” Ultimately, of course, this process of radical, grounded education transformed not only the urban guerrilleros but the communities as well. In the canyons and Lacandón Jungle of Chiapas, the Chol, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Tojolabal Mayan migrants who had been practicing communal decision-making in a directly democratic way through community assemblies found their political practice further radicalized in light of the emerging politics of Zapatismo. The outcome of this radical reeducation process cannot be overstated. As Neil Harvey explains, “[i]nstead of arriving directly from the city or the university, the EZLN emerged out of la montaña, that magical world inhabited by the whole of Mayan history, by the spirits of ancestors, and by Zapata himself” (ibid., p. 166).



By the time members of the Zapatista base communities voted to go to war against the federal executive and Mexican Army in 1992, the EZLN had severed all ties with the Forces of National Liberation and the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee had been created as its highest body of authority (Womack, 1999, p. 192). Tellingly, by the time the communities voted for war, geopolitical conditions seemed everywhere to point to the fallacy of such an action. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the disarray of the traditional Left in the face of neoliberal capitalism’s ascendance, and the now uncontested place of the United States as lone remaining superpower, in the eyes of the Zapatista military leadership an armed uprising in the Mexican southeast seemed strategically unwise. The Zapatista base, however, arrived at a very different conclusion, and this discrepancy says much about the way authority, knowledge, experience, and power circulate within the movement. As Mexican historian Adolfo Gilly (1998) explains:



The channels through which communities, on one side, and the leadership of the EZLN (or for that matter any other left-wing organization), on the other, get their perceptions of the surrounding society are not the same; nor are the filters and the codes according to which they are interpreted. This difference, invisible to all in “normal” times when the capital decision—insurrection—is not in play, comes to light at the moment of making that decision. For that reason, while some see in the “disappearance of the Soviet Union” a negative factor, others who are distant from that interpretation of an upheaval, regarding which they are not concerned, measure by other methods—against the arc of their own lives—the maturation of conditions for rebellion. (p. 303)



In place of geopolitical analysis, theoretical sophistication, or even narrow pragmatism, the Zapatista base communities in Chiapas measured the conditions, cost, and possibility of rebellion “against the arc of their own lives,” a perspective that would deeply infuse Zapatismo as political praxis in the years following the uprising and explain much about what has made the movement so compelling to others transnationally. Rather than seeking validation in abstract laws or theoretical orthodoxy, Zapatismo espouses a commitment to radical social transformation that is grounded ethically in the lives of those who constitute the movement. These same subjects are the ones who are responsible for collectively elaborating the way the movement knows the world, imagines possibilities beyond what exists now, and articulates paths toward liberation. As the Zapatistas have repeatedly demonstrated since their public emergence in 1994, none of these processes is static and none of the destinations are forever fixed because real revolutions are made not through blueprints or the insight of an enlightened vanguard, they are paths made by those who walk them.

Zapatismo as Radical Pedagogy



As this fragment of Zapatista history should make clear, neither the EZLN nor Zapatismo are products of a pure revolutionary trajectory. Indeed, this is what has made both of them so significant within the Mexican context and outside of it. At the intersection of urban guerrillas seeking favorable ground for revolutionary organizing, migrant indigenous communities practicing a new kind of politics, and a sociopolitical and economic context marked by extreme violence, exploitation, and repression, Zapatismo emerged as an audacious declaration of hope and possibility. At the crossroads of this encounter it was actually the defeat of the Marxist, modernist revolutionary ideology of the FLN cadres in the face of a radically different lifeworld where the roots of Zapatismo lie. Taking the best lessons from the urban revolutionary legacy conveyed by the FLN guerrillas, and perhaps most importantly by Subcomandante Marcos, Zapatismo as radical politics and radical imagination only emerged once it was deeply grounded in the social fabric of the communities that came to constitute it.



This is not to suggest there is some essential indigenous core to the Zapatista project, that it is simply an extension of the nature of being indigenous. Indeed, as many of my research partners engaged in a variety of radical struggles emphasized, it is a dangerous and reductive form of romanticism that wants to see in the struggles of indigenous peoples some eternal, premodern, naturalistic identity that can show nonindigenous peoples and societies the way out of the overlapping crises we now confront. As indigenous media-maker and activist Rebeka Tabobondung explained to me during our conversation in the winter of 2004, “I think that people are increasingly becoming unsatisfied with Western institutions, belief systems, systems in general, and looking towards Indigenous people for hope, for fulfillment, spiritually or inspirationally.” Tabobondung went on to describe the limits of this desire to find fulfillment in someone else’s being, identity, or struggle when she discussed attempts made in the early 2000s to convoke an Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism on indigenous territory inside the borders of the Canadian state:[46]



[the problem of essentialism and romanticism was] something that [the organizers talked about in the process of planning] the Third Encounter…. To non-Native people who were part of it [we wanted to make it clear that this wasn’t about coming] here to help Native people, don’t come here just to help us, but when we understand what capitalism is doing to people and to the planet then, in fact, our struggles are your struggles, so people can take ownership over that and I think that the Zapatistas were trying to appeal to that as well—this has been happening forever, now it’s just happening to everybody.



Stephan Dobson, member of the Canadian Union of Public Employes, academic, and a member of the planning committee for the Third Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, echoed Tabobondung’s comments when he discussed the critical problem with romanticism as it relates to sociopolitical struggle during our conversation in the fall of 2003:



I’ve seen [romanticization] in action and it’s a problem of sustainability. People find out that it’s not real or that they’re dealing with the image rather than the really existing conditions [and they then feel betrayed by that]. ’Cause, from my perspective, while you’re imagining a better world, how do you actualize it? My frustration with that kind of imagination way up here [is it] strikes me as dogmatic idealism…. It’s always the revolution’s elsewhere, Nicaragua was really the one when I was an undergraduate, here it is, opportunity, it’s happening, you have to be a part of it, you have to mobilize because it’s the leading edge, it’s something new and it takes on all of the hopes and dreams and the aspirations and ambitions, but those struggles [are] directly here, so while you have all this wonderful solidarity going on with Zapatistas you’ve got a thousand Patricia Pats moving in on Oka.[47] No justice on stolen land.



This is certainly not to say that indigenous struggles do not occupy positions of primacy with respect to a wider fabric of radical social justice struggle—indeed, both Tabobondung’s and Dobson’s reflections above point in precisely the opposite direction. In the context of settler states like Canada and the United States, for example, coming to terms with the enduring reality of coloniality and finding ways to radically unsettle it in solidarity with indigenous struggles for autonomy should be a principle pillar of any radical social justice struggle and yet it is often rhetorically invoked without being manifested materially (see Alfred 2005). But what this points to, beyond the necessity of addressing coloniality as the material basis critical to the very existence of settler states, is that there is no retreat to an “other”—pure, uncontaminated, authentic, holistically grounded—that can save us from the systems of violence, domination, and exploitation that structure people’s lived realities.



So what of Zapatismo as radical imagination and radical pedagogy at the level of the transnational? Throughout this piece I have brought the words of my research partners to bear on elements of Zapatismo in order to shed critical illumination on them from the perspective of those who experienced the resonance of this radical movement. These reflections are only a very small fragment of work I have done elsewhere (see Khasnabish 2010, 2008a, 2008b, 2007) that has sought to explore Zapatismo as a radical and transnationalized political imagination. These brief reflections are by no means meant to be representative of the depth of Zapatismo’s resonance among radical social justice activists elsewhere but they do stand as a testament to it. In more than a year of ethnographically grounded research that engaged activists and organizers from across Canada and the United States who self-identified as having had politically significant encounters with Zapatismo. These encounters took a tremendous variety of forms as Zapatismo has circulated transnationally through diverse channels, including: the Internet; academic, activist, and journalistic writing; solidarity delegations and report-backs; Zapatista communiqués, denunciations, speeches, and the writing of Subcomandante Marcos; visual media and a host of other artifacts associated with the Zapatista movement. Many of the people with whom I worked had direct experience with the Zapatista struggle on the ground in Chiapas, although the depth of such commitments varied widely, while others had only encountered Zapatismo in mediated forms. The collectives and organizations represented by the organizers and activists with whom I spoke were similarly diverse ranging from non-governmental organizations such as Global Exchange to radical media-making collectives like Big Noise Tactical to transnational anticapitalist networks such as Peoples’ Global Action to groups engaged in direct action struggles against the daily realities of capitalist violence and exploitation like the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. Of course, one need look no further than writing that has emerged from the ranks of the alter-globalization movement itself to encounter a rhetorical confirmation of the significance of Zapatismo to this “movement of movements” (see Kingsnorth, 2003; Klein, 2002; Notes from Nowhere, 2003; Solnit, 2004).



Far from merely celebrating them as icons of militancy, the conversations I had with diverse activists and organizers in Canada and the United States as well as activist media produced about the Zapatistas and Zapatismo situate them as vital pieces of a global rebellion against neoliberal capitalism and elite domination of people and the planet. Transmitted via diverse channels, Zapatismo found resonance in the midst of a multiplicity of different struggles because it did not offer an answer to the challenge of building mass movements capable of changing the world, rather, it served as a constant source of provocation and inspiration for radical struggles seeking paths beyond the violence, oppression, and exploitation of current systems of power as well as the failures of past movements in attempting to address them. Of course, Zapatismo as a transnationalized radical pedagogy also foreground elements of the Zapatista struggle while downplaying others. Prominent in activists’ writings and reflections about the significance of Zapatismo for their own understanding of struggle are notions of hope, inclusivity, imagination, dignity, communication, democracy, and a radical sense of possibility as well as an equally radical critique of power. These elements are most certainly present in Zapatismo, particularly with respect to the communiqués and communicative actions directed toward “civil society” transnationally; however, the prominence of these concepts as opposed to others relating more directly to the difficult work of building a living revolutionary struggle in the midst of formidable challenges from state repression to lack of resources also speaks to the subjectivities and contexts for which Zapatismo has proven such a potent imagination.



The emphasis upon a powerful rejection of neoliberalism, the affirmation of human dignity, peace, autonomy and interconnectedness, and the desire for dialogue, coupled with a valorization of communicative and symbolic action rather than violent insurrection cannot be divorced from the Northern context within which Zapatismo as radical pedagogy and radical imagination has resonated. This has always been a problematic dynamic as people view movements elsewhere through the lens of their own desire for change and their own understandings of struggle, and this has certainly happened with respect to the Zapatistas (see Hellman, 2000; Meyer, 2002). However, this ambiguity has also been a fundamental element of the Zapatistas’ appeal. In transmitting Zapatismo and its radical lessons about revolution to people living, working, and struggling outside of the indigenous communities of Chiapas, Marcos’s writing in particular has foregrounded those elements of Zapatista discourse most likely to speak compellingly across a variety of disparate contexts. In addition, activists outside of Chiapas have also actively participated in reading the Zapatista struggle from their own position, a reading necessarily colored by one’s own experience. None of this makes the encounter between activists transnationally and the Zapatistas—however this encounter has been mediated—inauthentic. Rather, it suggests that the significance of the Zapatistas as rebels on a transnational political scale has to be understood less in terms of a monologue-like “inspiration” and more as a dynamic dialogue given shape by the contexts it occurs within. Once again, we return to the space of pedagogy in order to explore and explain Zapatismo’s radical significance: issues of power, privilege, context, and subjectivity necessarily impact the way one learns about themselves, others, the wider world, and the possibilities therein. This is not a debunking of the transnationalized encounters between Zapatismo and those who have proven so receptive to its radical, unclosed lesson plan, rather, it is to suggest that this process of encounter and the pedagogical moments attached to it are deeply enmeshed in the living contexts in which they occur.



Indeed, what Zapatismo demonstrates so compellingly is that powerful, socially transformative movements emerge not from some singularly important revolutionary subject but through an unending process of critical encounter that reshapes all those involved. As Fiona Jeffries—an activist, writer, and academic who has done considerable solidarity work with the Zapatistas—expressed during our conversation in the winter of 2004, “that is [the Zapatistas’] strength, their historical subject is not in any singular being, their historical subject is people’s desire for freedom and justice and dignity.” This description applies not only to the migrant indigenous communities who would eventually constitute the Zapatista base and the urban guerrillas who would join them in the jungle and mountains, it also speaks to the experience of those who would encounter Zapatismo as a transnationalized radical imagination. In this sense, the movement itself needs to be thought of not only in organizational and political terms but also as a space for experiments in knowledge production, radical imagination, subjectification, and concrete alternative-building. Alberto Melucci (1985) once said of social movements, “The medium, the movement itself as a new medium, is the message. As prophets without enchantment, contemporary movements practice in the present the change they are struggling for: they redefine the meaning of social action for the whole society” (p. 801). In this sense, radical movements like the Zapatistas are spaces of prefiguration and possibility, living processes of resistance and alternative-building that are vital to the elaboration of ways of envisioning and enacting radical and even revolutionary social transformation.

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CHAPTER 13. Anarchism, Pedagogy, Queer Theory and Poststructuralism: Toward a Positive Ethical Theory, of Knowledge and the Self



Lucy Nicholas



Many anarchist pedagogical practices and perspectives can be understood alongside poststructuralism and queer theory because they are concerned with subjectivity, in terms of shaping individuals according to maximum possible “autonomy.” [48] This is a process that both perspectives tend to consider as fundamentally situated and collective. As such,anarchist approaches to pedagogy can easily be allied with poststructuralist ideas about the subject as nonfoundational and, therefore, while not predisposed to any particular way of being, having the potential to be fostered according to a particular ethic. My concern in this chapter is to offer a formulation to anarchist approaches to pedagogy, of what, according to poststructuralist ideas of the subject, autonomy can be, and how it can be fostered, maximized, and maintained.



This chapter will argue that poststructuralism and queer theory share the ethical impulse of anarchism, that is, a dedication to a kind of “autonomy,” but offer to anarchism a pedagogical praxis that overcomes the possible impasse of nonfoundational poststructuralist ontology, while acknowledging the complex terrains on which power operates to restrict this autonomy. Queer theory shares with the poststructuralist anarchist perspective the ethical impulse that the self (especially the sexual self) must be a willed creation, a result of some kind of agency free from coercion, alongside a more complex ontology that rejects a simplistic individualistic autonomy as the root of this.



Poststructuralism and poststructuralist-influenced queer theory widen the definition, terrain, and mechanisms of power and subjectivity in a way that has deep implications for attempts to construct transformative educative processes that are premised on an ethics of freedom or autonomy. They widen what can be considered the terrain of power such that the way that we become subjects is implicated in power that can either be dominating and restrict our “autonomy,” or more positive and enabling. This has implications for the concerns of pedagogical theory such that the terrain of learning must also be expanded so that anarchist pedagogy, I argue, should [and sometimes already does] include a concern with how we learn to be subjects, and with making this process as “autonomous” as possible. I argue that because poststructuralism gives a more central role to discourse production in this process of the formation of subjectivity and the maintenance of power (understanding discourses as Michel Foucault does as “bodies of knowledge”), poststructuralist-informed anarchist pedagogy should also be concerned with the centrality of discourses in learning how to be a self. I argue that the concept of learning should be widened to include all of the ways that subjects learn how to “be,” which are often implicit and informal, and often prelimited by discursive contexts.



Poststructuralism has famously been criticized as ethically lacking (Seidman, 1995). Likewise, queer theory has also been widely understood as merely an oppositional mode of thinking. For example, Dynes surmises that “At best … they [queer studies] amount to a revolution of subtraction, eroding existing norms and verities, rather than a revolution of addition, creating new values. What passes for reinventing is merely disinventing” (1995). This chapter will (along with a wide body of literature) contrarily argue that this very “disinvention” and deconstruction of poststructuralism and queer theory is able to offer an ethical impulse and a pedagogical praxis that, while similar in telos to anarchism, avoids the traps of foundationalism, individualism, and closure.[49]

Implications for Anarchism of Poststructuralism and Queer Theory



This section will consider the ways in which poststructuralism and queer theory impact on anarchism that have implications for anarchist epistemology and pedagogy. It will argue that they widen the terrains and definitions of power such that the constitution of the self and subjectivity should be a concern for an anarchist ethics of “autonomy.” It will argue that the account of subjectivation offered by poststructuralism and queer theory has the implication that the notion of “autonomy” must be transformed to avoid assumptions of a reductive liberal individualism at its root and take into account the unavoidable constitutive aspects of relations with others, discourses, and social context that shape what autonomy can be. The ways that we learn to be selves (identity formation), and the extent to which they are as “autonomous” as possible should be a concern for those concerned with developing pedagogical practice that departs from anarchist ethics. This then shifts what the aim of an anarchist-informed pedagogical practice can and should be, from the assumption of the possibility of an atomized autonomous self, to a practice concerned with making the social constitution of selves as explicit, participatory and nonoppressive as possible. How this could be achieved will be the concern of the second and third sections.



Foucault’s primary challenge to and development of conceptions of power is in the idea that power does not operate through a top-down repressive mechanism wherein the source of domination is easy to posit. Instead, ze posits a productive conception of power, in that power operates by constituting the discourses within which we are “subjected”:[50]



In a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth. (Foucault, 1980, p. 93)



The implications of this for a practice dedicated to fostering autonomous subjects, then, is that it can no longer be understood as the liberation of preexisting autonomous subjects from a repressive power. It must shift to a coexisting concern with individual subjects and the “economy of discourses of truth” within which they have the possibility of existing.



Foucault suggests that, due to this constitutive nature of power, power relations are unavoidable. This again renders definitions of anarchism that depart from a repressive notion of power and merely oppose power over others, and advocate the freeing of an essential cooperative and free subject, as limited in their strategies. This is not to deny that there has always been an element of a more productive understanding of the subject in anarchist theory, especially that concerned with pedagogy, which has often used metaphors of cultivation to illustrate the ways that subjects require fostering toward anarchist ideals. For example, Geoffrey Fidler (1989) charts that classical anarchist texts concerned with education made reference to “the naturalist metaphor of the educational gardener or farmer” and discussion of the “art or technique of cultivation” (p. 23). However, Fidler also identifies that this discourse of cultivation was often situated in a broader ontological discourse of subjects being cultivated or shaped toward a preexisting, natural proclivity to cooperation or autonomy.



However, the concept of productive power and of the subject as fundamentally constituted in discourse elaborates on and lends theoretical weight to these tendencies in anarchist thought, as well as limiting the conditions under which autonomy can be fostered. This ontological point of departure impacts heavily on what should, then, be understood as the terrain of the political, that is, the terrain on which domination and power can operate and on which anarchists must attempt to resist it.



Cooper and Blair (2002) argue that one of the implications of Foucault’s redefinition of power is the extension of the terrain of the political to culture, such that “doing culture work—changing behavior, attitude, norms—is just as important, if not more important, than changing laws.” (p. 523). This is not to deny that there has always been an understanding within anarchism of “the internal tyrants, far more harmful to life and growth … [of] ethical and social conventions” (Goldman, 1969, p. 227), but poststructuralist approaches to anarchism explicate and emphasize this focus. For example, Saul Newman (2001) in the germinal poststructuralist anarchist text From Bakunin to Lacan summarizes this redefinition of power and domination: “I employ a deliberately broad definition of authority: it refers not only to institutions like the state and the prison etc.; it also refers to authoritarian discursive structures like rational truth, essence, and the subjectifying norms they produce” (pp. 12–13).



The discourses that constitute the self, and the process of this constitution, what Foucault calls “subjectivation” now become primary sites of authority and dominating relations and therefore matters of concern for those dedicated to anarchist ethics. Poststructuralism, then, offers a full account of the way that subjectivity and intersubjectivity is a site of power and dominance by narrating the way that they are produced according to dominant hierarchical ethics and assumptions, an account that can supplement the ever-present anarchist concern with what Foucault would call the “colonization of souls” (Amster, DeLeon, Fernandez, Nocella II & Shannon, 2009, p. 124). However, this necessarily impacts on the “telos” of anarchism, in that there can no longer be some ideal of a pure site of individual autonomous volition that needs to be freed from repressive power.



There is now a tension, then, which means that a focus only on how discourses limit and restrict subjects would be to negate how subjects may negotiate this contradictory position of a “subjection [that] consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency.” (Butler, 1997, p. 2). For my concern with learning, then, the important insight is “the way in which the discursive practices constitute the speakers and hearers in certain ways and yet at the same time is [sic] a resource through which speakers and hearers can negotiate new positions” (Davies & Harre, 2003). This is the “doubled vision” (de Lauretis, 1987, p. 10) of poststructuralist notions of agency that allows for a refined understanding of it from within a firmly social and intersubjective, situated ontology. This “doubled vision” suggests that discourses, in their nature as both enabling and restricting, have the possibility of being fostered as more or less enabling.



While it is clear that this poststructuralist conception of power refines the notion of autonomy, there is still a clearly “autonomous” or antiauthoritarian impulse in much poststructuralist, queer and deconstructionist thinking. Dynes (1995), for example, while critical of queer theory, rightly identifies in my view that the theory contains “a substantial heritage of nineteenth-century romantic anarchism and utopianism” and that “The hidden goal, the longing in fact, is untrammeled self-affirmation without bonds or boundaries.” Indeed, Judith Butler’s (1990) clearly stated aim in per germinal work Gender Trouble is that per vision is a politics “that will take the variable construction of identity as both a methodological and normative prerequisite, if not a political goal.” (p. 5). However, Dynes finds this dedication to “self-affirmation” alongside a radical critique of the subject to be paradoxical and makes these claims of anarchist utopianism alongside charges of solipsism. I would argue the opposite, that this autonomous impulse is grounded in, and developed from, the firmly social ontology outlined above, which has implications for practices that seek to maximize this autonomy.



But how is this dedication to autonomy possible within the delimited conception of autonomy resulting from the restrictions of productive power? And how can it be ethically justified if power is always the source of subjectivation? I will argue that autonomy can be understood not as a natural proclivity but as a situated capacity. In being constituted by discursive power regimes as opposed to precultural entities (May, 1994; Newman, 2001), subjects, then, can be understood as having no proclivity toward either mutual disinterest or mutual aid, but rather as having capacities that are shaped by a discursive context that is constantly being (re)constituted. This is Foucault’s “thin” conception of humyn nature that has often been charged with precluding agency. However, the key to “agency” in this conception, and in Butler’s (1990) similar notion of “performativity,” is that the discourses within which we learn how to “be” are not fixed and transcendental, but are being constantly reconstituted, and engaged with “in a living and reflective way” (Butler, 2005, p. 10). This is a process that allows reconstitution on different terms, albeit terms that always depart from the discourses they are wishing to transform. Thus, according to this ontological basis, it is possible to posit humyn nature as a situated potentiality that is not always predetermined by discourses not of its making, but has the possibility of being fostered according to anarchist principles. This leads Butler (1997) to conclude, “the subject is neither fully determined by power nor fully determining of power (but significantly and partially both)” (p. 17). In Paul Patton’s (1994) words, Foucault can be understood as offering “an historically grounded belief in the human capacity to transcend limits to the autonomous use and development of human powers.” (p. 61). This means that the ethical aim of anarchism, while ontologically possible, can no longer be justified by this ontology alone, and must be argued for on ethico-political terms, such that it may be demonstrated that a purposive “stylistics of existence” (Foucault, 1990, p. 71) would be the most ethically desirable way of being as a result of a nonfoundational ontology. In Foucault’s words: “From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.” (Foucault, 1984, p. 351). The corollary of an ontology that posits an inherently nonfoundational but situated subject endowed with capacities for purposive existence, then, is that the most beneficial and effective means of achieving this type of “autonomy” would be a purposive and willed collective intervention into the discursive production of subjectivity.



To summarize, the limits to traditional notions of autonomy presented by this ontological reconceptualization do not need to present an obstacle to the principle of freedom but, rather, aid in considering the real conditions of agency and therefore for maximum possible autonomy. They lift the veil of misdirected hopes for a foundational autonomy that must be freed from repression or an atomized personal autonomy and lend the concept a more social premise and social goal. Contemporary approaches to anarchism that depart from a nonfoundational conception of the subject but maintain a normative stance of freedom (Bey, n.d.; CrimethInc., n.d.; Holloway, 2002; May, 1994; Newman, 2001), demonstrate how a constructivist ontology does not obviate a value-stance. The fact that there is no “I” that is not a set of relations does not preclude a “ground for moral agency and moral accountability” (Butler, 2005, p. 8).

What Would a Poststructuralist Anarchist Pedagogy “Look Like”?



Given that power is pervasive in interaction, how, then, to distinguish which discourses, and which pedagogical practices, are positive and maximize collective autonomy, and which are exploitative and dominating? And how to ensure that discourses do not congeal into authoritarian compulsarities? A distinction between “extractive” and “developmental” power developed from Foucault (Patton, 1994) can help me to resolve this possible impasse of value distinction. And deconstruction offers strategies that are useful for considering how such positive, developmental discourses and ways of being could be maintained and prevented from sliding into dominating, “extractive” power.

“Developmental” Power Not “Extractive” Power:



If, as Foucault claims, power is pervasive because of this ontological situation of subjects being constituted by their relations with others and their sociocultural discursive contexts, how can we distinguish between positive relations and contexts that are fostering “freedom” and negative ones that are fostering dominance? Despite per positing of this pervasiveness, ethical distinctions can still be made from Foucault’s redefinition of power that prevent it from postmodern nihilism and make it possible to use this analysis of power as a point of departure for a poststructuralist anarchist ethics. Foucault implies that positive and negative manifestations of constitutive power relationships can be distinguished. The most explicit clue to Foucault’s ethical telos is in the following statement: “I do not think that a society can exist without power relations … The problem, then, is … to acquire the … morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible” (Foucault, 1997, p. 298). This demonstrates that there is the possibility of power relations that are nondominating, that Foucault’s favor lies with these, and that they must be fostered through particular “practices of the self.” Foucault offers examples of practices of (co-)constitution that ze considers positive, and others considered negative. For example, ze states that “the care of the self also implies a relationship with the other insofar as proper care of the self requires listening to the lessons of the master. One needs a guide, a counselor, a friend, someone who will be truthful with you.” (Foucault, 1997, p. 287) Some examples are specifically pedagogical, for example Foucault has illustrated this distinction between desirable and nondesirable power relations through recourse to the example of different learning relations:



I see nothing wrong in the practice of a person who, knowing more than others in a specific game of truth, tells those others what to do, teaches them, and transmits knowledge and techniques to them. The problem in such practices where power—which is not in itself a bad thing—must inevitably come into play is knowing how to avoid the kind of domination effects where a kid is subjected to the arbitrary and unnecessary authority of a teacher, or a student put under the thumb of a professor who abuses his authority. (Foucault, 1997, pp. 298–99)



The aspects of learning valorized here, then, are guidance and the transmission of knowledge, and the aspects opposed authoritarian. Paul Patton (1994) has developed this distinction, and similarly emphasizes how Foucault’s positing of “power over” (understood as one agent affecting the action of another agent) as an inherent aspect of social relations still allows for normative distinctions between desirable and undesirable types of “power over.” Patton summarizes how:



So long as human capacities do in fact include the power of individuals to act upon their own actions, we can see that Foucault’s conception of human being in terms of power enables us to distinguish between those modes of exercise of power which inhibit and those which allow the self-directed use and development of human capacities. (p. 68)



From C.B. Macpherson, Patton develops and applies to Foucault a distinction between “extractive” power over and “developmental” power over, a distinction which has a clear normative premise. Departing from a nonfoundational ontology, then, developmental power must maximize the capacities of subjects. Patton (1994) offers the following as examples of developmental power relations: “I can affect the actions of another by providing advice, moral support, or by passing on certain knowledge or skills” (p. 63). Similarly, Amy Allen (2005) has argued that, despite Butler’s insistence that subjects are formed in the context of norms (akin to Foucault’s discourses) that precede and shape them, these norms can be distinguished between those that are subordinating and those that are nonsubordinating. Ze states that “If we resist the idea that subjection per se is subordinating, then this opens up the possibility of conceptualizing forms of dependency, attachment and recognition that are not subordinating.” (p. 210). In terms of educational alternatives, while the learning relationship necessarily entails power relations according to the Foucauldian ontology, “there are … structural alternatives to the carceral school, classroom, and society, because there are power relationships and technologies that are not dominating” (Wain, 1996, p. 358). The focus of transformative projects must, then, become the participatory creation of discourses within which subjects can develop and to which they can attach and identify with, that are not subordinating and extractive. The third section of this chapter will consider some examples of alternative, noncarceral discourses and relationships in specific relation to sexual subjectivity and how knowledge about how “to be” sexual is transmitted in these examples.



Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1994), heavily influenced by Jacques Derrida and deconstruction, has charted how, when engaging unavoidably with power relations, what can distinguish positive, nonsubordinating, and “developmental” relations from normative engagements that uncritically replicate dominating relations, is engaging in them in a “scrupulously visible political interest” (p. 153). I take this to mean that in order for such practices to not betray their own premises, it is necessary to make this developmental power “scrupulously visible,” for it to be an open and consensual process and to prevent it from congealing into further tyranny. In the following section I chart how a constant deconstructivist impulse is indispensible for the continuation of “scrupulous visibility” central to the developmental power relations that I argue characterize a poststructuralist anarchist approach to pedagogical praxis.

Deconstruction as an Ethical End:



If individual autonomy and the over throwing of power per se can no longer be considered the end or “telos” of anarchism, what alternative end can poststructuralism offer to anarchists? Anarchist activists have long noted the potential for anarchy interpreted as “lawlessness” to reconstruct hierarchy, and the potential for the “tyranny of structurelessness” (Freeman, 1996) due to its individualistic tendencies. Likewise, critics have suggested that Judith Butler’s oppositional “postidentity order” lacks a more programmatic vision of what a nonoppressive identity order would look like (Seidman 1995, p. 136; Stoetzler, 2005). Alongside others (Stoetzler, 2005), I argue that for many poststructuralists and theorists of deconstruction, this absence of programmatic visions is an ethical and purposive strategy in order to avoid just this closure of individualistic tyranny mentioned above. I argue that there is a clear deconstructive ethic in Butler’s Gender Trouble, an implicit normative ethic that values critical modes of thought and nonclosure in an attempt to make the ongoing processes of subjectivation “scrupulously visible.” I suggest that this minimal ethical principle as an end-point or “telos” is the strength of queer theory and something that both reflects and develops a similar impulse in anarchism, and is a strategy that should be applied to anarchist pedagogy as a means to maintain nondominating practices. Any other positive ethical principle risks closure and the replication of authority.



Anarchists are often reluctant to elaborate what anarchism would or should “look like” and what an ideal anarchist subject would or should “be like,” for fear of being prescriptive and betraying anarchist principles. For example, Chomsky (2003) states, speaking specifically to the subject of education and drawing on the ideas of Bertrand Russell, that owing to “how little we really know about the aims and purposes of human life … the purpose of education … cannot be to control the child’s growth to a specific, predetermined end, because any such end must be established by arbitrary authoritarian means” (Chomsky, 2003, p. 164). Likewise, Butler found that any attempt to illustrate per theory with examples that subvert the normative constitution of gender or demonstrate “performativity” resulted in the canonization of these examples as programmatic prescriptions of how to “do” queer or nonheteronormative gender correctly. In Butler’s (1993) later book, Bodies that Matter, Butler addresses the ways that Gender Trouble was understood, and states that “by citing drag as an example of performativity … [it] was taken then, by some, to be exemplary of performativity.” (p. 230). Likewise, Butler also addresses the way that “queer” has become an identity or a noun, so that queer is taken to be a subject position that one can become rather than a strategic act or something that is done. For Butler, then, queer, (or some other term for this same deconstructive impulse that has not yet been normalized—Butler remains open to renaming this impulse), must remain a verb, an act of de-normalizing, and never congeal into a noun. It must remain a critical perspective that can take a discourse and make it “queered from prior usage” (p. 228). This ideal of queer as a verb has led Butler to conclude that “the critique of the queer subject is crucial to the continuing democratization of queer politics” (Butler, 1993, p. 227). I suggest that this constant critique of discourses must be the primary function of pedagogical practices that seek to maximize the autonomy of subjectivation. This constant critique would avoid the tyranny of what Butler would call the “forcible production” of the “compulsory practice” (Butler, 1993, p. 231) of certain subjectivites, of which normatively gendered subjectivity is a paradigmatic example.



Likewise, in order to maintain this ethical principle of nonoppressive subjectivation and to evade the ever-present possibility of closure, many other poststructuralist, deconstructionist, and queer theorists have refused to posit an ethical “end-point” or “telos” any more clear than a perpetual critical relation of openness. For example, Diana Fuss’s (1991) germinal concept of “‘analysis interminable,’ [is] a responsibility to exert sustained pressure from/on the margins to reshape and to reorient the field of sexual difference to include sexual differences” (p. 6). Indeed, this fluidity and self-criticalness, along with the reluctance to define what anarchism might “look like,” preferring instead to define it around a common ethic, has been identified as an aspect of “postmodern and poststructural methodological trends of contemporary anarchism” (Armaline, 2009, p. 137). Anarchist pedagogues have summarized this line of thinking: “If ideas and accepted practices have a way of hardening, of rigidifying over time, then criticism must not be an isolated event but an ongoing practice. If thinking differently, seeking freedom by creative engagement with new possibilities, is the objective, then there is no end to ethical criticism” (Cooper & Blair, 2002, p. 529).



Butler’s (1993), and other queer theorists’, normative bottom line, then, a bottom-line that I argue can be usefully applied to anarchist pedagogy, can be understood as a strategy of deconstruction as an end in itself which would have the corollary of inexhaustibly expanding “available schemes of intelligibility” (p. 224) such that nobody’s subjectivity was prerestricted by a limit to existing modes of being. And the agency to undertake this deconstructive process, this critical mode of being or “stylistics of existence” (Foucault, 1990, p. 71), is a fundamentally relational, intersubjective capacity. Due to the enabling of “agency” by our location in discourses we did not choose, the attempt to expand the “available schemes of intelligibility” (Butler, 1993, p. 224) will necessarily depart from the discourses in which we become subjects but did not choose. This leads me to argue that a poststructuralist anarchist pedagogical praxis would entail the dual strategies of inexhaustible deconstruction of prevailing discourses, and ongoing reconstruction and “reiteration” (a Butlerian term developed from Derrida) of these discourses through various strategies such as subversion and transformative reiteration.

Pedagogical “Strategies of Freedom”



Theorists have emphasized the important way that the discourse of pornography serves a pedagogical function in informally and tacitly “teaching” people how to “be” a sexual subject (Hunter, 1988; Hurley, 1990). This example illustrates the very implicitness and uninterrogated nature of normalizing subjectifying discourses that is at odds with the principle of autonomy as purposive and “scrupulously visible” outlined above. The taken-for-granted nature of discourses is what allows subjects to be constituted according to a dominant discourse, in which individuals are not participants, but merely subjects. Hunter (1988) describes for example “the ‘moral machinery’ of popular education aimed, as Foucault puts it, at the ‘normalization of the population’” (p. 75). However, I would like to consider what pedagogical practices would need to entail in order to embody the moral machinery of autonomous subjectivation, specifically in terms of sexual subjectivation. I argue that, due to the queer impulse of the self-willed “doing” of being sexual, anarcho-queer communities and practices offer rich strategies and examples.



According to the ontological premise that power is unavoidable, and the normative distinction I have drawn on between extractive and developmental power, developmental pedagogical practices, in order to avoid dominating relations, must be in the interests of fostering nonrestrictive “schemes of intelligibility” (Butler, 1993, p. 224) that develop the capacities of subjects toward a purposive “stylistics of existence” (Foucault, 1990, p. 71). In order for such normative practices to not betray their own premises, they would need to be explicit and transparent and open to constant critique by all participants. It is not my place here to chart the ways in which mainstream institutions and practices of education do not embody this process of subject formation, but anarchists have long charted how mainstream education embodies processes of subjectivation quite at odds with purposive and transparent practices. (See Gabbard, Chapter 2, and Todd, Chapter 4 in this volume)



For a poststructuralist anarchist pedagogical praxis, the transparency of processes of subjectivation needs to be fostered, as well as a means of making this process more purposive. This needs to take into account that subjects are constituted in collectively shared discourses. I argue that these two needs can be addressed through the dual processes of de-construction—a strategy discussed above that could ensure against uninterrogated implicit and normative processes of the constitution of selves—and a purposive reconstruction of discursive contexts according to the will of those constituting. I say “dual processes” as I posit that these practices must be constant, inexhaustible, and concurrent to avoid the possibility of domination by closure.

Deconstruction/Reconstruction: “A riot for the mind”:



Kenneth Wain (1996), in considering the usefulness of Foucault for thinking about education, analogizes Foucault’s strategy of genealogy to deconstruction, as a transformative process whereby understanding the historical constitution of discourses and practices and ways of being allows us to understand how it could be otherwise. Foucault implies that deconstructive thinking is a strategy of freedom: “Since these things … have been made, they can be unmade, as long as we know how it was they were made” (Foucault, 1988, in Cooper & Blair, 2002, p. 517). Cooper and Blair (2002) argue that Foucault’s ideal of problematization as an intellectual imperative opposed to polemics holds the function of “opening possibilities for transformation” (p. 521). Thus “genealogy provides us with the tools for a project of freedom, of going beyond our ‘limits’” (Wain, 1996, p. 355). The implication of Wain’s, Cooper’s, and Blair’s arguments is that education should be reunderstood as a process of deconstructive analysis that helps us to understand why things are as they are and to make it possible to make them otherwise.



Much of anarchist practice is dedicated to this very project of deconstruction and constant critique to ensure that relations do not congeal into uninterrogated authoritarianism, as well as the creation of alternative ways of being. Below I will chart some anarcho-queer practices dedicated to the deconstruction of gender and sex norms. However, because the “critical relation depends … on a capacity, invariably collective, to articulate an alternative, minority version of sustaining norms or ideals that enable me to act” (Butler, 2004, p. 3), a deconstructive pedagogical strategy that is compatible with poststructuralist anarchist ethics must be supplemented with reconstructive practices that create enabling and developmental discourses. I am reluctant, given this inexhaustibly critical impulse, to offer any examples as the “summary moment” (Butler, 1993, p. 223) of these ideal discourses of poststructuralist anarchist pedagogy given the warnings above. However, there are and have been some practices that illustrate such an approach to praxis.



The “prefiguration” noted as an ever-present but growing aspect of anarchism (Franks, 2006, p. 97; Greenway in Purkis & Bowen, 1997, p. 175; Heckert 2005) can be understood in just these terms, as a re-constructive supplement to oppositional critique, according to the desires of the participants: “breaking rules for the sake of breaking rules is merely transgressive. Breaking rules to produce new realities is prefigurative” (Heckert, 2005, p. 42). Because poststructuralist ideas about discourse as constitutive of subjectivity extend the notion of learning, all aspects of a culture or subculture can now be understood as instrumental in the constitution of the subjectivities of the members of that culture. This has led me to argue elsewhere (Nicholas, 2007) that an example of this positively developmental and pedagogical culture is embodied in prefigurative practices and discourses in the DIY punk scene/ culture. For example, the creation of zines (hand-made, often photocopied amateur publications), lyrics to songs and their dissemination in lyric sheets, spoken-word explanations of songs at shows, workshops and discussion groups, festivals, and the alteration of language.



As I have discussed elsewhere (Nicholas, 2009), the approach to sharing information in anarchist communities often represents an attempt at doing so through developmental pedagogical relations. For example, free skools, skill-shares, workshops, discussion groups, and book groups are often features of anarchist spaces such as social centers and festivals.[51] These modes of sharing knowledge are noncompulsory, explicit, and noncoercive and nonhierarchical in their form and content. They tend to encourage maximum participation from all attendants and emphasize the sharing—rather than administering—of knowledge. This embodies Bakunin’s ideal of “mutual instruction, an act of intellectual fraternity” (Bakunin, 1970, pp. 41–42). It is the ideal of “work-partners” (Bhave, 2008, p. 10) instead of instructor and pupil, a relationship far more conducive to a collective and nonhierarchical reiteration and recreation of discourses or bodies of knowledge. The byline on the Toronto Anarchist Free University website is “a riot for the mind” (See Jeffery Shantz, Chapter 7 in this volume), neatly summarizing how such practices are premised on the mind as a terrain of anarchist struggle.



An interesting aspect of such knowledge sharing that further demonstrates an alliance with the notion of subjectivation as a terrain of struggle, is that there is often a central emphasis on discussing, and deconstructing, aspects of identity and selfhood. For example, Between the Lines DIY fest held at the Cowley Club Social Center in Brighton in 2008 and 2009 held a workshop on the topic of “different kinds of relationships” that was a discussion concerned with deconstructing traditional relationship structures (including sexual relationships) and considering possible alternatives, and the possibilities of conducting relationships premised on anarchist ethics while attempting, through its title, to avoid prescription. Additionally this fest held a discussion group on deconstructing gender, a common feature of many DIY, punk, and anarchist fests, such as Belladonna DIY Fest held in Wollongong, Australia, which also held a workshop on sexuality. I have also charted elsewhere (Nicholas, 2009) how anarchist free skools and similar practices are often concerned with deconstructing gender and sexuality norms. For example, Freeschool Vancouver holds Sexuality Learning Groups that depart from collectively reading Foucault’s History of Sexuality. Additionally, Free Skool Santa Cruz describe their workshop series “Unpacking Gender Norms” as follows: “We will examine where the gender-binary system and heterosexism come from, how they are carried out, and how we reproduce them within our own communities.” (Free Skool Santa Cruz, 2008). This is paradigmatic of the concurrent deconstructive/reconstructive practice that I am referring to in that it is concerned with deconstructing the genealogy of sexuality norms, and with analyzing how these are reproduced in the interests of transformative practices of learning how not to reproduce them.



Queer anarchist communities are particularly engaged in prefigurative practices that are concerned with transforming gender and sexual identity. Many of these practices can be considered pedagogical in the sense developed here in that they offer discursive contexts in which participants reconstitute their gender and sexual identities, that is they widen the resources and bodies of knowledge within which subjects learn to “be” and learn to be sexual. The urgency of this prefigurative impulse among gender nonconformists is no surprise given the compulsory nature of binary gender identity, that one cannot “be” without “doing” gender (Butler, 2004). For example, empirical researchers have noted the discursive, as well as institutional, borders to possible ways of being gendered: “Transgender individuals’ understandings of themselves and their ability to formulate alternative identities depend[s] … upon existing cultural categories as well as institutional pressures to be one gender or the other.” (Gagne & Tewkesbury, 1998, p. 95, emphasis added). This reemphasizes the necessity of “a capacity, invariably collective, to articulate an alternative, minority version of sustaining norms or ideals that enable me to act” (Butler, 2004, p. 3).



The emergence of explicitly anarchist prefigurative queer spaces that set out to do just this has grown since the 1990s. These include the annual international convergence Queeruption, local Queeruption collectives, events and convergences, and similar practices under the moniker of Queer Mutiny. It has been noted in both sociological and human geography contexts (Brown, 2007a; Brown, 2007b; Nicholas 2009, pp. 8–9) that these spaces embody the poststructuralist conception of anarchism outlined above. A primary way in which they do this is by being premised not on a positive identification with a particular gender or sex category, that is by using queer not as a noun or subject position but, rather by being premised on a shared deconstructive impulse. Brown (2007a) notes that in “these activist spaces … queer is still more than simply an umbrella term for all those who are ‘othered’ by normative sexuality. Indeed, ‘queer’ in these spaces is as opposed to homonormativity as it is to heteronormativity … [Here] Queer celebrates gender and sexual fluidity and consciously blurs binaries. It is more of a relational process than a simple identity category” (pp. 196–97).



Additionally, Brown (2007a) has noted that these spaces and practices fit with poststructuralist concepts of power as productive and ontology as situated in that “queeruptors are interested in making modest, low-key attempts to reengage their ‘power to-do,’ which is always part of a social process of doing with others.” (p. 197).



It is interesting that, in the aspects of these queer spaces concerned with (the erotic aspects of) sexuality such as the play spaces, play parties, or sex parties at events such as Queeruption, or at events organized by various Queeruption or Queer Mutiny collectives internationally, the central concern of their behavioral policies is not with regulating practices, but with regulating the relations between people. Such events often have a “safer spaces policy” collectively created according to consensus models that outlines the desired behavior of participants that must be consented to before participation. The principle concerns of anarchist approaches to erotic desire and sexuality included in such policies are neatly summarized by a description of the “Radical Sex 4 Sexy Radicals” workshop series held by Free Skool Santa Cruz: “autonomy, consent, negotiation, respect, and pleasure.” (Free Skool Santa Cruz). This demonstrates that the ethos is relational, not prescriptive, through a concern with consent and mutually positive relations between participants, but that specific sexual practices are otherwise not usually mentioned in re-constructions of sexuality, only in de-constructions.



It is obvious why such projects of deconstruction and reconstruction are so urgent for those with transgressive sex and gender identities and why anarcho-queer communities offer such rich examples of prefiguration with the intention of expanding the “fund of ideas” (Archer, 1996, p. xiii) from which we can perceive ourselves and others. However, while my examples are mostly restricted to the examples of deconstructive and reconstructive interventions into gender and sexual socialization due to space restriction, this process is allegorical to all aspects of subjectivity or “ways of being” and is just one illustration of a restrictive, congealed, uncritical, and preexisting compulsory discourse that is at odds with anarchist principles of maximizing a collective but purposive self-willed way of being.



However, it is interesting to note that, even in a community specifically dedicated to and premised on the principle of inexhaustible freedom of sexual identity and practices, there is still the risk of the congealment of dominant norms. This is one of the criticisms leveled at the Queeruption gathering in Amsterdam in 2003 by a collective from the Queeruption Berlin group. They suggest that there has been “the establishment of a queer ‘convention’” (Queeruption, 2003) in terms of compulsory hypersexuality.



To reiterate, and return to Butler’s concern over the congealment of “queer” into a fixed subject position, Butler (1993) argues that this reconstruction and this self-naming must not be understood as a singular act of transgression and empowerment that follows from deconstruction and overthrows previously dominating discourses and replaces them with inherently developmental ones. Rather, this reconstruction of discourses must be an ongoing process alongside the ongoing process of deconstruction of discourses. In Butler’s terms, “As much as it is necessary to … lay claim to the power to name oneself and determine the conditions under which that name is used, it is also impossible to sustain that kind of mastery over the trajectory of those categories within discourse” (p. 227). Returning to Butler’s concern, then, and offering a possible alternative for rethinking this deconstructive impulse, those activists who critiqued queer spaces for just this type of normalizing congealment suggest as an alternative conception the German term “Freiraum,” a word that they suggest needs to enter the English language. They define it as “Literally ‘free-room’; more like ‘freedom.’ Defined as ‘the opportunity to move freely and develop one’s individual ideas’” (Queeruption, 2003). Perhaps this, then, is just the term that is needed when Butler (1993) suggests that queer “will doubtless have to be yielded in favor of terms that do that political work more effectively” (p. 228).

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CHAPTER 14. Anarcho-Feminist Psychology: Contributing to Postformal Criticality



Curry Stephenson Malott



In their search for ways to produce democratic and evocative knowledges, critical constructivists become detectives of new ways of seeing and constructing the world. (Joe L. Kincheloe, 2005, p. 4)



Considering how Kincheloe’s postformal psychology as critical revolutionary practice might be extended and contributed to through the engagement with new, or too often ignored, ways of seeing and constructing the world, what I understand to be the more democratic impulses of the vast, diverse tradition known as anarchism will be explored here. I will situate this focus on anarchy within the history of the feminist movement, which played a central role in Kincheloe’s (2008) critical pedagogy. For example, in Kincheloe’s (2008) Critical Pedagogy Primer, he argues that black feminist and cultural studies scholar bell hooks is one of a handful of “important figures in the emergence of critical pedagogy” (p. 59). Hooks’s (1984) contribution to critical pedagogy through feminism, according to Kincheloe (2008), was to challenge the white, middle-class point of view of the women’s movement that assumed their experiences represented the experiences of all women. That is, hooks (1984) argued that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which served as the basis for 1970s feminism, was based on “the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle and upper class, married white women—housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life” (p. 1). That more that Friedan alluded to has famously become known within feminist literature as careers. Hooks’s (1984) critical contribution here is that she extended feminist discourse to include considerations of race and class. Challenging Friedan, hooks (1984) notes that what was not being addressed was the question of who would be taking care of the kids of white, middle-class women once they began their more fulfilling careers. Summarizing this crucial point, hooks (1984) notes that white, middle-class feminism “did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all nonwhite women and poor white women” (pp. 1–2). Summarizing this contribution Kincheloe (2008) notes that “hooks and other women of color moved many feminists toward an effort to challenge an entire system of domination” (p. 83). Critical pedagogy, partly because of the feminist work of hooks, is not just focused on the notion of rights and access, but on the ability to “identify and eradicate the ideology of domination that expresses itself along the axes of race, class, sexuality, colonialism, and gender” (Kincheloe, 2008, p. 83).



This focus on ideology has allowed critical pedagogy to better understand how sexist oppression is based on the belief that women are inferior, primitive, less advanced, more emotional and less rational than men. Because oppression is based on worldviews or interpretive frameworks that are internalized and perpetuated by all members of society, even those most negatively hurt by the idea, the structure of domination is always more complex than simple dichotomies suggest. Sexism is therefore not just a struggle between men and women, but it is a social system that becomes part of the cultural, taken-for-granted, hegemony of the dominant society. Consequently, women internalize and perpetuate sexism with men. Kincheloe (2008) interprets this insight concluding that, “one’s actions in pursuit of resistance to oppression are more important than one’s race, class, or gender—one’s positionality” (p. 83). Not only is ideology more important than positionality when it comes to the work of resisting the doctrinal system and oppressive structures and arrangements, but their abolition (such as patriarchy) not only benefits those who are most hurt (i.e., women) by them, but those who benefit the most (i.e., men) by them are also better off under more positive conditions. Hooks (2000) makes this point crystal-clear in Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, in the following somewhat lengthy, but highly significant, passage:



Males as a group have and do benefit the most from patriarchy, from the assumption that they are superior to females and should rule over us. But those benefits come with a price. In return for all the goodies men receive from patriarchy, they are required to dominate women, to exploit and oppress us, using violence if they must to keep patriarchy intact. Most men find it difficult to be patriarchs. Most men are disturbed by hatred and fear of women, by male violence against women, even the men who perpetuate this violence. But they fear letting go of the benefits. They are not certain what will happen to the world they know most intimately if patriarchy changes. So they find it easier to passively support male domination even when they know in their minds and hearts that it is wrong. (p. ix)



It is this complex context where those who benefit the most from an oppressive ideology and practice would actually, in the long run, be far better off if it ceased to exist, rendering hooks’s feminism so foundational to critical pedagogy in general and Kincheloe’s approach in particular. In Teaching Native America across the Curriculum: A Critical Inquiry (Malott, Waukau, and Waukau-Villagomez, 2009) I contribute to this line of reasoning arguing that those “goodies” referred to by hooks (2000) are not as objectively beneficial as they may seem. Consider:



While those deemed “white,” on average, receive more material privileges than non-whites, most people who fit within current definitions of whiteness would also be better off without the institutionalization of white supremacy. Simply stated, a united working class/human species would be far better equipped to create a socially just world than a divided one. In A Call to Action (2008) I made the point that white people, while at times made to feel special or superior because we are white, have been left to rot and die of cancer at alarming rates in de-industrialized areas such as Niagara Falls, New York. My intentions here are similar. That is, this book, in part, is designed to offer white people (and others) a worldview not based on the false supremacy of Europeans, but one that acknowledges the contributions of Africans, Native Americans, and others to modern democracy and scientific knowledge production. Solidarity, in this context, is not a polite gesture made by the assumed superior to the assumed inferior, but rather, it is an acknowledgment of the awe-inspiring achievements of the non-European world that paved the way for Europe (and those of European descent) to begin emerging from the Dark Ages—a process still underway. (p. 3)



It is within this context of universal improvement that our epistemological bazaar begins to overlap in significant ways with anarchist theory. For example, like the bourgeoisie feminist movement that ignored issues of race and class, which hooks and others confronted during the 1970s and 1980s, Emma Goldman and other female anarchists around the end of the nineteenth century confronted the sexism of foundational male anarchist scholars such as Proudhon and Kropotkin (Leeder, 1996). Making this point in “Let Our Mothers Show the Way,” Elaine Leeder (1996) notes that “anarchist women added new dimensions to the tradition which could not be found in the teachings of Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Bakunin. Anarchist women believed that changes in society had to occur in the economic and political spheres but their emphasis was also on the personal and psychological dimensions of life” (p. 143).



For example, Proudhon, it is argued, believed in patriarchy and that the role of women as the domestic force in life represents the natural division of labor rendering them subordinate to men and thus unable to divorce. However, Emma Goldman still drew on Proudhon’s work borrowing his conclusion that property is theft, and turning it on the sexist discourse and practice informing it by “arguing that woman, as private property of man, was having her freedom and independence stolen” (Leeder, 1996, p. 144). Unlike the white, colorblind feminists, bell hooks challenged in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, Goldman (1969), a Jewish woman who emigrated to the United States (New York City) in 1885 at the age of sixteen, was conscious that “the true patron saints of the black men were represented” not in Lincoln, who only “followed when abolition had become a practical issue” (p. 76), but in the radical white abolitionists such as John Brown and others. Goldman, as an anarchist, recognized the importance of the abolition of all forms of coercive power from capitalism, slavery, to patriarchy. One critique of Goldman’s work might be that she focused on white abolitionists without sufficiently recognizing the agency and resistance of Africans themselves in America. However, because this sophisticated focus is not universal within the feminist tradition, there are those who see no future in feminism as a theoretical framework for political praxis.



For example, some anarchists, such as Susan Brown (1996), argue that because feminism does not possess, as a central, universal commitment, the overthrow and abolition of the basic structures of power, it is not able to provide the theoretical relevance to liberate all of humanity. Consequently, Brown (1996) argues for a more general theory for “human freedom” as part of the process of moving beyond feminism. While coming to essentially the same conclusion as the like of hooks and others in the resistance to a larger system of domination and exploitation—white-supremacist, patriarchal capitalism—she chooses to abandon the language of feminism for anarchism. While this might seem like a minor issue, much can be said about the power of language and the importance of naming the world and therefore the importance of calling ourselves feminists so as to name and oppose sexist oppression, calling ourselves antiracists so as to name and oppose institutionalized white supremacy, and calling ourselves anarchists and Marxists so as to name the capitalist relations of production and oppose the process of value production. However, in the educational Left there are hard, deep lines of division drawn between Marxists (including anarchists, radical environmentalists, and others who take industrialism and a class-based approach to analysis and practice) and postmodernists (including, among others, feminists and critical race theorists).



To the new generation of critical educators and those who are curious or interested, I say nonsense, resist choosing sides, we should embrace our critical diversity to the fullest extent possible. This requires humility and a refusal to take oneself too seriously. It is, in fact, all good. We need to realize that there are legitimate critiques regarding our own practices and conclusions. For example, postmodernists tend to be correct when they charge Marxists with being transmissive/banking/traditional in terms of pedagogy. Marxists, at the same time, tend to be correct when they charge postmodernists with not challenging the basic structures of power and obsessed with identity and triviality. I do not believe the solution is to argue the Left needs to adopt a new theory. I believe the solution resides within a more conscious effort to engage in honest, critical self-reflection and not get so defensive and threatened when we are challenged. Another related component of moving forward, as suggested by the title of this chapter, is to expand and engage more critical traditions. With this spirit of solidarity in mind, let us move into a discussion of the history of anarchy and how it might contribute to our postformal, feminist approach to educational psychology.






In my study of anarchy I begin by considering the philosophical and historical roots of what we might call an anarchist conception of human nature. After this first section, we explore how these insights might inform a postformal, feminist psychology contributing to our move toward a new discipline. Finally, we consider barriers and challenges we will continue to face in the foreseeable future in our attempts to put into practice, as part of a larger critical education movement, postformal approaches to teaching and learning for life after capitalism and without the white supremacist, homophobic, patriarchal hierarchies of what we hope to be distant memories of a time no longer thriving. Throughout this chapter we continue to revisit central aspects of the dominant psychological paradigm as we make our postformal anarchist case against it.

Anarchist Psychology



We begin our investigation with the scientific anarchist work of Noam Chomsky. Because there are so many talented anarchist writers, and therefore so many potential places of departure, it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect upon why Chomsky was chosen. As not only a leading scientist in linguistics since the 1950s, where he has more precisely connected the field to the essence of human nature, but also one of the world’s leading public intellectuals known for his anarchist politics and ceaseless critique of U.S. foreign policy and its ongoing imperialist ambitions, Chomsky’s astonishing achievements and critical credentials demand we actively pay attention to and learn from his point of view, yet without passively accepting all his ideas dogmatically and mechanically. Rather, the challenge is to engage them with as much scientific objectivity as humanly possible, aware that our own subjectivities and interpretive frameworks always serve as our first lens or filter as we construct knowledge about the external world.






Of particular importance to our present investigation are the connections between Chomsky’s scientific investigations regarding human nature and his anarchist politics. As we will observe in the following discussion Chomsky’s choice to embrace and contribute to anarchism is based on his assessment that anarchy most closely matches the essence of human nature. In other words, Chomsky’s anarchism, in many fundamental ways, is informed by the conclusions of science. The significance of Chomsky’s work as a scientist cannot be overstated, especially situated in the context of the early twenty-first century, when an anti–Western science postmodernism has come to dominate critical theory. That is, while many postmodern, cultural critics, anarchist writers, and other critical activists brilliantly outline and contextualize the social context in which anarchism and other forms and modes of counterhegemony exist through struggle, Chomsky’s point of view, that is, the biological context of human nature, offers a unique perspective that I believe is valuable in constructing a postformal anarcho-feminist psychology socially situated.



Chomsky (2005) situates the heart of what I will refer to as his anarchist psychology firmly within the revolutionary impulse of the Enlightenment and the scientific tradition of Western counterhegemony. While postmodernists tend to focus on the oppressive nature of how Western science has come to be dominated by imperialist and capitalist interests, they too often present this tradition as if domination over non-Western knowledge systems was all it was ever about. Chomsky, on the other hand, focuses his energy on contributing to the democratic nature of early Enlightenment science, more or less ignoring the indoctrinating and exclusionary tendencies. I include Chomsky’s point of view because anarchist thought and practice, when not demonized by the discourse of domination, tends not to be traced any further back than to nineteenth-century anarchists, however important, such as Max Stirner, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin (see, for example, Guérin, 2005; Morland, 1997), suggesting that critical/ revolutionary theory and the European Enlightenment, and the subsequent scientific revolution, are separate and unrelated developments. Locating the roots of anarchy within science and the Enlightenment, as argued by Chomsky, reclaims both anarchy from demonization and science from the boss’s reductionistic process of colonialist wealth extraction and the subjugation of non-European-ruling elite peoples and perspectives/knowledges. That is, making these connections challenges the hyperdecontextualized reductionism that falsely disconnects science and politics.



Again, the significance of Chomsky’s scientific approach is highlighted by its uniqueness. For example, while many anarchist writers correctly understand that one’s view of human nature is going to determine one’s understanding of what kind of societies humans are capable of successfully creating thereby shaping future possibilities and interpretations of historical events, they tend to fail to transgress the idea that ones conception of human nature is purely subjective and a matter of personal preference or political commitments. Representing this point of view in Demanding the Impossible? Human Nature and the Politics in Nineteenth-Century Social Anarchism, David Morland (1997) notes that



… there is no universal agreement about the meaning of human nature. Broadly speaking, the controversy centers on whether human nature should be thought of as something innate to the entire species of Homo Sapiens or whether it ought to be viewed as a reflect of particular environmental circumstances. Human nature, it is argued, either is universal and something that is inherent in all of us, or is socially constructed within a given human and social environment … Political ideologies, including social anarchism often rely on a conception of human nature that draws on both dimensions of this argument. (p. 3)



The debate regarding the innate qualities of human nature in this context described by Morland (1997) tend to be centered around the issue of whether it is inherently good or evil. However, while this debate and foci are important, they fail to consider the insights of science, which, I argue, is an unfortunate oversight. It is curious that the only mention of Chomsky in Morland’s (1997) book is his observation that there are too many competing theories within anarchism to be able to identify a generalizable ideology. While it is true that Morland’s (1997) work is specifically centered on nineteenth-century anarchists, Chomsky, a twentieth-century anarchist, as demonstrated below, provides the Western scientific/Enlightenment link between sixteenth and seventeenth-century counterhegemonic scholars, such as Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, with the likes of Proudhon and others from the nineteenth century. In other words, Chomsky’s focus not only contributes to the debate regarding human nature, but his historical contextualization offers invaluable insights for understanding nineteenth-century anarchy.






One of the clearest examples of Chomsky’s historical understanding of what we might call an anarchist psychology is outlined in his essay entitled “Language and Freedom,” originally published in 1970, but recently reproduced in Chomsky on Anarchism (Chomsky, 2005). What follows is therefore an engagement with an anarchist psychology taking Chomsky’s work as a place of departure. Arguing that Western, “libertarian … thought and revolutionary acts of the late eighteenth century” (p. 102) are echoed within the work of Schelling (1775–1854), who identifies the essence of the human ego as freedom, Chomsky (2005) locates the roots of anarchy within the Romantic branch of the Enlightenment. As we observe below, Rousseau, one of the principal architects of Romanticism, has also played a significant role in anarchist psychology.



Although deemed to be not important by many leading historians of philosophy, such as Bertrand Russell (1945, 1972), Schelling, who was a student with Hegel, had such an inflated sense of self, it has been reported (see Gutmann, 1936), that his friendships were almost always sacrificed, would be absolutely livid to know he has been reduced to the status of unimportant. Whether such conclusions are justified is a matter of debate, but outlining Chomsky’s anarchist psychology leads us to his work nevertheless.



Highlighting the magnitude of his ego, Gutmann (1936), in an introduction to Philosophical Inquires into the Nature of Human Freedom (Schelling, 1936), argues that Schelling fashioned himself a leader of what he understood to be the new revolution that takes the notion of freedom to be the center of all philosophy and science (Gutmann, 1936). That is, Schelling argued that philosophy itself is an act of freedom, and thus the product of a free human, carried out by a species born for action, not just speculation, rendering philosophy’s place of departure being the announcement of said freedom. The connection to the Romantic Movement within Schelling’s focus on freedom here is instructive for understanding the philosophical roots of Chomsky’s anarchism. It is therefore not surprising that Chomsky (2005) identifies Rousseau’s insistence that the essence of human nature is freedom and consciousness of that freedom, which, he argues, is an endowment unique to the human species.



Examining the historical development of these ideas Chomsky (2005) locates Rousseau’s conclusions that mechanical philosophy can explain nothing of our freedom, that is, free will or consciousness, therefore identifies anarchy as contributing to this tradition of opposing what has developed into a behaviorist ontology dominant in today’s increasingly corporate-controlled system of mass schooling. That is, Chomsky (2005) notes that it is “striking” that “Rousseau’s argument against the legitimacy of established authority, whether that of political power or that of wealth … follows a familiar Cartesian model” where “man is uniquely beyond the bounds of physical explanation; the beast, on the other hand, is merely an ingenious machine, commanded by natural law. Man’s freedom and his consciousness of his freedom distinguishes him from the beast-machine” (p. 106). Any political or social system that assumes or treats the human species as not essentially free and independent therefore represents an attack on human nature.



While Descartes’s conception of mind, that it is unique to the species and beyond mechanical explanation, remains intact, his conception of body has been abandoned by the scientific community. Further contextualizing this history, Chomsky (1988) notes:



The Cartesian conception of body was refuted by seventeenth-century physics, particularly the work of Isaac Newton, which laid the foundations for modern science. Newton demonstrated that the motions of heavenly bodies could not be explained by the principles of Descartes’ contact mechanics, so that the Cartesian concept of body must be abandoned. In the Newtonian framework there is a “force” that one body exerts on another, without contact between them, a kind of “action at a distance.” Whatever this force may be, it does not fall within the Cartesian framework of contact mechanics. (p. 143)



While the notion of gravity as action at a distance with a physical explanation has been widely accepted in the scientific community, the implications for the mind as a sort of action at a distance holds the biological explanatory key for human freedom and therefore largely ignored. This negligence is astonishing given Chomsky’s conclusion that the notion of action at a distance continues to be the best explanation science has for human intelligence or free will. The brain might be matter designed to produce thought electrically, but the source of that animation remains clouded in mystery. This mystery represents, for many scientists, such as Chomsky, the limits of our species’ intellectual endowments. Simply put, there are some questions that are beyond the reach of human intelligence, such as, What is the scientific explanation for the source of the action at a distance that gives animation to life? For Chomsky, all species have limits. This should not be viewed as controversial. That is, most species of birds have built in genetically determined navigation systems, which humans and most other species, could never acquire.



Chomsky’s rejection of the racist and sexist pseudoscience that attempted to manufacture consent for stereotypical differences, which led him to focus on similarities among the human species coincided with feminist psychologists that objected to science informed by a hegemonic and thus unconscious sexist worldview. Outlining this history, Judith Worell (2000), in “Feminism in Psychology: Revolution or Evolution,” elaborates in great detail:



They pointed out that researchers and the people they studied were predominantly male; the topics they studied, such as aggression and achievement, reflected male concerns; and the results of research based on male samples were assumed to apply also to women. When women were studied, they were evaluated according to a male standard, so that women’s personality and behavior were seen as deviant or deficient in comparison. For example, early research that focused on sex differences claimed that in comparison to men, women were less motivated to achieve, less assertive, and less proficient in science and mathematics. These presumed deficiencies were then seen as stereotypes of all women and were used to deny women entry or advancement in male-dominated employment settings. (p. 185)



Extending this second-wave critique of modern, Western science’s tendency to produce knowledge informed by a process whereby the world is socially constructed as a series of hierarchically constructed dualities, such as male and female and white and nonwhite, Colleen Mac-Canty (2004) argues that third-wave feminism deconstructs the very notion of duality itself. Mac Canty (2004) critiques second-wave feminism for working “within foundational Western political theories such as liberalism and socialism” (p. 155). Third wave feminists, according to Mac-Canty (2004), on the other hand, “works to begin from the situated and ambodied perspectives of different(ing) women” (p. 155). Mac Canty (2004) identifies three main camps of third-wave feminism in the twenty-first century—generational/youth feminism, postcolonial feminism, and ecofeminism. Similarly, in Feminist Theories and Education Primer Leila Villaverde (2008) highlights many feminisms—Black Feminist Thought and Womanist Feminism; Latina/Chicana Feminism; Native American/Indigenous Feminism; Asian-American Feminism; Islamic Feminism; Lesbian Feminism; and Feminist Studies of Men. Contributing to this epistemological diversity, consider:




“Theorizing the Politics of ‘Islamic Feminism’” by Shahrzad Mojab (2001)





“Queer Black Feminism: The Pleasure Principle” by Laura Alexandra Harris (1996)





“The Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse, 1970–1980” by Alma Garcia (1989)





“Postcolonial Geographies of Privilege: Diaspora Space, the Politics of Personhood and the ‘Sri Lankan Women’s Association in the UK’” by Tariq Jazeel (2005)





“Puerto Rico: Feminism and Feminist Studies” by Alice Colón Warren (2003)





Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements by Michael Messner (1997)





The Agony of Masculinity: Race, Gender, and Education in the Age of “New” Racism and Patriarchy. By Pierre Orelus (2010)





While all of this work and all of these critiques, which barely scratch the surface of all that has been produced and is available, certainly affirm Chomsky’s focus on basic human similarities (i.e., a creative, self-actualizing drive), feminism emerged as part of the postmodern resistance movement against the reductionistic tendency of modern science’s exclusionary and colonizing impulse. It is therefore my intention here, as stated above, to argue that Chomsky’s democratic approach to Enlightenment science (rejecting hegemonic science) combined with postmodernism’s challenge to the Western scientific tendency to subjugate nonelite-Western knowledge systems and worldviews, work together to form a larger, complex whole.



For example, while there are many feminisms due to the complex nature of power and culture and therefore experience, humans, in general, seem to be genetically designed to creatively use and develop the ability to instantly understand language and be conscious of our own consciousness or freedom through self-reflection, freeing us, in part, from the impulse of reaction and internal drive, which, again, it is argued, is an endowment unique to humans. In other words, even those species such as apes, that are the most closely related to humans, do not possess the same genetically determined brains as us, rendering freedom and the consciousness of freedom outside their genetically determined endowments. Human nature is therefore, at its core, a question of defining the parameters of human cognition or intelligence. Because the notion of free will, for scientists such as Chomsky, is a little known property, human intelligence itself is not a well-defined property. While human freedom—a characteristic common to the species—appears to be a unique property, the independent essence of life is universal. That is, the primary quality of life (i.e., to be alive), in whatever species one refers, is that it is not driven or guided by external sources, even though intelligence can be manipulated. The limits and achievements of any given species are determined not by external factors, but by physical genetics, including brain structure and subsequent intellectual endowments. From this point of view the notion of race and gender are social constructs designed to perpetuate exploitative relationships with no real legitimate connection to objective science.



The above insight that intelligence is not a well-defined property and often manipulated to serve political interests of power is particularly important to education, which the extraenvironmentalism of behaviorism assumes, if not in theory, then in practice, the opposite. That is, behaviorism, and education in general, is based on the assumption that intelligence is well defined and therefore precisely measurable and externally controllable. However, further challenging the hyperenvironmentalism of this behaviorist pseudoscience, Newton’s conclusions also strongly suggest that the source of our free will is not external, but is a fully integrated aspect of the living human. Science can therefore help intellectuals understand that the alienation observed by externally controlled and manipulated wageworkers is a direct, negative consequence of the oppression and subjugation of free will. If the essence of the human species is freedom, then those whose authority is derived from their association with science should, therefore, adopt the social arrangements that most centrally embrace this democratic value—as a conclusion of science with political implications, and in the current neoliberal context, revolutionary implications.



For Chomsky, as previously mentioned, these arrangements are called anarchy. An anarchist psychology—Chomsky’s anarchist psychology in particular—is therefore consistent with accepted knowledge regarding the nature of human intelligence and free will within the scientific community. Chomsky (2005), always the rigorous scientist, rejects the use of detailed proposals to plan what a future society might look like because we do not know enough about the nature of human beings, institutions, society, and the implications of introducing humans to new social structures to validate such an approach. Rather, Chomsky (2005) suggests that the building of an anarchist society should be “experimental, guided by certain general ideas about liberty, equality, authority, and domination” allowing and encouraging people to “explore different ways of working through the maze and see what comes natural to them” (p. 221). It is within this practice that notions of spontaneous learning and informal learning take on new meaning.



An anarchist psychology is therefore based on the uncompromising respect for the intellectual freedom of the learner. The many subjugated knowledges represented within neocolonialist feminism, to take just one example, offers deep insight into the richness of intellectual freedom. It offers a global perspective that finds joy and solidarity in complexity and tension like when Chomksy’s fifty-plus years of fearless resistance to U.S. imperialism leads postcolonial, feminist, Marxist scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to passionately exclaim in her Columbia University office suite that she is no Chomsky because she comes from an elite class in India that exploited a lower class for thousands of years rendering her unwilling to forfeit complexity for unification.



However, there is a contradiction here, because of our current state of indoctrination and hegemonic internalization, most of us are not conscious of the insights offered by our unique positionalities. That is, most of us have never had the opportunity to pause and take the necessary years to reflect on the ideas, values, and beliefs of the dominant, capitalist society that we have internalized throughout our lives. As a result, capitalism, behaviorism, the idea that people need leaders because human intelligence is so extremely variable that the average person is incapable of making intelligent decisions concerning important matters such as the structure and nature of the economy and foreign policy, have been so normalized and naturalized that we reproduce these structures without realizing it. The role of anarchist psychology, it seems, is to pose challenges to students that would require them to critically self-reflect on the worldviews that they have acquired over the course of their lifetimes. Again, one of the primary reasons why this self-reflective work tends not to be practiced in schools is because of the continuing dominance of behaviorism and the banking model of education.



While the scientific community has long abandoned mechanical explanations for human consciousness, behaviorists, which Chomsky names environmentalists because of their external explanations of human intelligence, have based their entire framework and conception of human nature on the assumption that human intelligence and consciousness posses no unex-plainable force and are therefore merely the consequence of external conditioning (i.e., operant conditioning). That is, by reducing human intelligence and learning to the low-level conditioned responses performed by dogs and rats, behaviorism—which continues to be the dominant educational theory informing capitalist schooling (i.e., NCLB and Race to the Top)—ignores the self-reflective, complex intelligence, and free will that render humans a unique sociocognitive, intellectual species. In other words, behaviorism ignores the human endowment that leading Enlightenment thinkers such as Galileo have identified as our most noble gift (see Malott, Waukau, and Waukau-Villagomez, 2009). Reflecting on the insistence of certain scholars to base their behaviorist work on refuted conclusions, Chomsky (1988) provides insightful reflections: “One possible answer lies in the role that intellectuals characteristically play in contemporary—and not so contemporary—society … The standard image is that the intellectuals are fiercely independent, honest, defenders of the highest values, opponents of arbitrary rule and authority, and so on. The actual record reveals a different story. Quite typically, intellectuals have been ideological and social managers, serving power or seeking to assume power themselves” (p. 165).



Given this hegemonic role of science in the contemporary era, it should be expected that the universities, the official centers of knowledge production, should serve the interests of power and privilege before truth and the democratic values of the Enlightenment/science/philosophy—represented in Chomsky’s anarchist psychology. Because the official channels of knowledge production that are most centrally implicated in social reproduction or engineering, that is, colleges of teacher education, science alone, as argued above, is not enough to ensure structures of power are not designed to betray what we know about human nature—that is, its propensity for freedom and the create use of labor power and language. What our anarchist approach to postformal psychology therefore needs is a political militancy in defense of science against the behaviorist tendencies of neoliberal capitalism as a current manifestation of the life and legacy of which Columbus represented. Before we move on to the next section we can summarize some of the more central ways Chomsky’s anarchist psychology might inform our postformalism:




Unlike a lot of recent anarchist literature that seems to focus on that which is out of our immediate control, such as mainstream psychology’s devastating grip on not just the field of psychology but on society more generally (Fox, 2004), the driving force behind Chomsky’s work, from linguistics to anarchist critiques of foreign policy, is an untiring celebration of humanity’s most noble gift—our free will—expressed through our infinitely creative use of language. From this linguistic perspective the essence of humanity is therefore freedom—the freedom to think, engage, and create. Social arrangements that fundamentally betray this inherently human freedom, from Chomsky’s scientifically informed anarchist perspective, must therefore be condemned and deposed. For Chomsky it is Newton’s discovery of the previously mentioned action at a distance that contributes to the vast complexity and sophistication of human intelligence. The Cartesian insight regarding the uniqueness of human intelligence, which Newton, to his own displeasure, affirmed, led Descartes (1637, 1994) to the conclusion that “good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed” (p. 3). Kincheloe’s (2004) postformal cognitive theory is based on a similar conclusion, that “most students who don’t suffer from brain disorders or severe emotional problems can (and do) engage in higher-order thinking” (p. 19) in their daily lives, even if not encouraged or nurtured in formalized school settings.





Again, Chomsky’s anarchist psychology challenges postformalists to be cautious when waging wholesale attacks against Descartes, Newton, and Western science in general because there are, as demonstrated above, counterhegemonic insights too important and potentially revolutionary to disregard—the notion of action at a distance in particular, which could be used by postformalists to rightly argue that, in many ways, their work represents the conclusions of science than do those free-will-denying behaviorists claiming to be doing scientific work.





In other words, postformalism, unfortunately, has too often made the same mistake as behaviorism by rejecting science. The difference is that behaviorists reject science to advance an indoctrinating agenda, but call themselves scientists, whereas posformalists reject, in many ways, Western science in the name of social justice and embracing diverse epistemologies, but do not, of course, call themselves scientists. However, I would argue that the underlying liberatory, transgressive purpose of postformalism and contemporary anarchist movements is essentially the same as the democratic habits of the scientific mind embodied by the likes of Galileo, and more recently, Noam Chomsky. Science, after all, did emerge in Southern Europe as a revolutionary movement against the oppressive dogma, divine-right mysticism, and utterly brutal and barbaric colonizing impulse of the Roman Catholic Church.





Anarchist theory, from a Chomskian perspective, can legitimately invoke the authority of science and simultaneously expand the possibilities for taking postformalism to the streets, as it were. In other words, anarchists pride themselves on being practical or at the forefront of revolutionary movement (Graeber, 2002). Postformalism, with its emphasis on democratic knowledge production as part of the process of resisting dominant forms of oppressive and coercive power, can too easily fail to move the theory and practice or critical constructivism from the classroom to other areas of society such as places of employment and public places (i.e., parks, sidewalks, streets, etc.).




Toward a New Field: A Constructed, Situated, and Militantly Enacted Discipline



Beginning with Kincheloe’s ideas about a constructed and situated psychology, or the notion that the ideas people hold about the world, such as Western Europeans’ construction of Orientalism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Said, 1978), are not objectively fixed, but are rather socially constructed through historically developing relationships of power, is, no doubt, of extreme importance and thus a central component of our postformal approach to educational psychology. Similarly, dominant ideas about the nature of women are social constructions designed to manufacture consent for patriarchy from men and women. Postformalism therefore rejects the one right answer grand narrative ontology of formal science embracing, rather, a multilogicality that appreciates and learns from the knowledges and epistemologies subjugated, disrespected, and, in many instances, all but eradicated, by the enslaving and colonizing European forces that have transformed into neoliberal capitalism maintaining the same insatiable appetite for the accumulation of wealth that led Columbus and his hired hands to commit some of the most horrendous, barbaric forms of genocide never before witnessed by humanity.



For postformalists learning is consequently not just the passive transmission of facts, or the objective, decontextualized cognitive development of learners, but it is a form of development that is always socially and politically mediated in increasingly complex and contradictory ways by dominant and subordinate forms of power. Continually seeking ways of seeing and logics that are counterhegemonic is thus a drive force behind postformalism. Many of these worldviews/philosophies are the interpretive frameworks of those most oppressed and exploited women and men by the capitalist relations of production and the formalism of dominant society intended to normalize and naturalize the insane logics of capital.



Analysis alone, however, as our above engagement with anarchist psychology suggests, is not enough to transform the basic structures of power embedded within capitalist, industrial society. The contributions anarchist ways of seeing might inform Kincheloe and others’ postformalism are particularly instructive, especially at this time of crisis when the world’s people are growing ever more tired of the irresponsible practices and damages inflicted by an industrial, global capitalist ruling elite—the positivistic formalism of the boss’s science for plunder.



Aware of this challenge posed by critical theory, many of us on the educational Left argue that our work in teacher education challenging future teachers to assist their future students in developing critical consciousnesses and viewing themselves as creators of history rather than mere spectators or objects of historical developments constitutes action beyond analysis. On some levels this is correct. However, at the same time, our assumption that revolutionary change will automatically happen if enough people become critically conscious because of our biologically determined intelligence as a species, is, in some respects true, but at the same time naïve and I would argue even irresponsible. That is, revolution, or the displacement of ruling class power in the form of large multi-billion- and trillion-dollar corporations and corporate/ruling elite-controlled governments, has historically proven to be a very dangerous and costly (in terms of both resources, wealth, and human life) endeavor.



If teacher educators (and others), in sharing with the students they work with the revolutionary conclusions the evidence regarding the basic structures of power suggests, encourage future teachers to teach the importance of revolutionary action, then they must themselves demonstrate through action what this might look like in practice. The challenge, from the postformal perspective outlined in this volume, is therefore to model democratic, nonviolent revolutionary agency, or a militantly enacted postformal anarcho-feminist psychology. Operating within the parameters of institutional learning facilities poses significant barriers to such movement because, by design, as argued above, they are constructed against the conclusions of science to serve the elite interests of reproducing capitalist society. Aware of the domesticating impulse of institutions of education, another related barrier for the critical educator is overcoming the immobilizing fear of speaking for rather than with.



That is, aware of the historical role education has played in subjugating the knowledge of Native American and African peoples, for example, by speaking for and representing the other, many academics, especially whites, in their attempts not to reproduce this paternalistic tendency, too often resort to doing nothing as a safe way to avoid the negative effects of their internalized hegemonies. However, for the critical educator, this is not an option. For change to occur, risks must be taken, but with a persistent dedication to critical self-reflection. In our efforts to become transformative agents of change we must therefore not become too dogmatically wedded to a particular analysis or conclusion. For example, we must be conscious of the significant role of positionality in informing ones analytical place of departure.

A New Generation of Anarchists: Possibilities for an Enacted Militancy



First and foremost, we can reiterate by noting that the anarchist challenge is a challenge to more completely transgress the institutions of formalism, such as schools, colleges, and universities. While these spaces offer opportunities to produce knowledge from a diversity of epistemological frameworks, the qualitative limits to this work are defined by the institution itself. An anarchist psychology would extend Kincheloe’s insistence that learning is a libidinal, full-body experience, arguing that the revolutionary development of the mind flowers into full bloom only through the collective struggle against the indoctrinating institutions themselves and the capitalist relations of production.



Offering substantial hope here in “The New Anarchists,” David Graeber (2002) draws attention to the democratic organizing practices of a new generation of anarchist challengers to neoliberal domination. Often overlooked by Marxists and mainstream, academic, critical pedagogues and demonized by corporate media as violent, Graeber (2002) argues that such a mistake could not be more serious in these desperate times. Outlining who these new anarchists are and what their philosophy has looked like in practice, Graeber (2002) begins with the Indigenous, revolutionary Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico (see Khasnabish, chap. 12). The Zapatistas’ subjugated knowledge is precisely what Kincheloe’s postformalism argues is needed at this historical juncture.



Arguing that today’s global action networks against neoliberalism, such as the famous protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999, can be traced to the Zapatistas’ 1994 uprising and call for a worldwide network of opposition to neoliberalism, Graeber (2002) underscores the postformalism of today’s new anarchists. Important here is the meaning of globalization, which has incorrectly been identified as a negative development. This analysis stems from the negative consequences of the liberalization of capital. However, the international movement of capital is actually antiglobalizing because it limits the free movement of people, possessions, and ideas across borders (Chomsky, 1999; Graeber, 2002). In other words, deregulating capital has strengthened the ruling class and, as a result, limited the freedom of people creating a less globalized world. The Zapatistas’ call against neoliberalism is therefore a call for a more globalized world—a global movement against the abuses of ruling class power that takes the form of an international “network” rather than an “organizing structure” with a “central head or decision maker” and therefore has “no central command or hierarchies” (Graeber, 2002, p. 64).



Beginning with the Zapatistas’ black ski masks, rubber boots, and white flags on their rifles symbolizing a paradox—guns that want to be silent—the new anarchists have embraced a playful engagement with outrageous symbolism matching the equally absurd era of neoliberal capitalism—an economic system that calls itself globalization while effectively limiting actual globalization (i.e., the free movement of people and information across borders) through such means as an explosion in the world’s border guards and the restriction of immigration from the underdeveloped so-called third-world to first-world or industrially developed areas.



Again, responding to the absurdity of the contemporary global context Graeber (2002) points to the street pedagogy of the ridiculous where anarchists in overstuffed, padded clown costumes lob fluffy stuffed animals at riot police confusing the military-minded police of the bosses. This pedagogical approach allows even the riot police themselves an opportunity to reflect on the absurdity of a system that treats humans like chattel and denies the creative impulse of the human biological endowment. Summarizing the spirit within these new anarchists Graeber (2002) notes that, “the general anarchistic inspiration of the movement, which is less about seizing state power than about exposing, delegitimizing and dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy from it” (p. 68) is not necessarily about rejecting all organization but is about “creating new forms of organization” (p. 70). For example, Graeber (2002) points to “spokecouncils,” which are:



Large assemblies that coordinate between smaller “affinity groups.” They are most often held before, and during, large-scale direct actions like Seattle or Quebec. Each affinity group (which might have between 4 and 20 people) selects a “spoke,” who is empowered to speak for them in the larger group. Only the spokes can take part in the actual process of finding consensus in the council, but before major decisions they break out into affinity groups again and each group comes to consensus on what position they want their spoke to take. (p. 71)



Such organizational structure, not unlike the ancient governing model practiced by the Mayan-based Zapatistas offers exciting prospects for what life after neoliberal capitalism could possibly look like in practice. In other words, a more horizontal and less hierarchical society is not just an impossible ideal, but is actually realistic. However, such prospects are not without real challenges.

Barriers to an Anarchist Postformal Pedagogy



The barriers to enacting an anarchist postformal psychology are many, both interpersonal and institutional. What follows is a brief summary of these two types of barriers. However, before we proceed I should pause for a moment and acknowledge that the interpersonal and the institutional are not separate and unrelated entities, but are rather part of the same larger whole. In other words, institutions exist because groups of individuals constructed them and even larger groups of individuals either support and uncritically reproduce them or challenge and oppose them. Many scholars have identified this type of relationship as dialectical because it represents a tension of competing interests where institutions determine who individuals develop into while individuals simultaneously shape institutions through both critical and uncritical agency.

Institutional



First and foremost, social structures, such as institutions of formalized education, have been constructed and developed around behaviorist models of lesson planning, curriculum development, and classroom management, and internalized by policy-makers, educational leaders, teachers, students, and caregivers to such an extent that they are viewed as just how it is, or a nonperspective. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, for instance, are examples of how behaviorist practices have been federally enforced through legislation. Of course nowhere within these examples of legislation does it say they are informed by behaviorist principles. Rather, they are presented as the objective results of what science tells us are the best methods of teaching literacy. The message is that they are not embedded with a political agenda, but represent an objective approach to learning.



Supporting this propaganda approach to education is the corporate media, which also has played a significant role demonizing the anarchist movement. Even many Marxists use the term anarchy to describe that which is assumed to be unorganized, undesirable, and unproductive, such as the anarchy of the market. While this tendency has historical presidents between Marx himself and prominent anarchists such as Bakunin, it is certainly not helpful to the movement for democratic globalization. However, the corporate media’s attack on anarchy has undoubtedly had far greater effects than Marxists who themselves tend to be ignored or demonized by the same media outlets.



Graeber (2002), for example, points to the media’s repeated insistence that the anarchists of the Seattle WTO protests were violent, despite the fact that they hurt no one. What the mainstream, corporate media seemed to be most frustrated with, argues Graeber (2002), was the fact that the new anarchists were decidedly not violent. That is, it is a lot more difficult to demonize and ignore a group’s ideology and position when they are nonviolent. The mass media would have had a much easier time convincing people anarchists were scary monsters had they actually been physically assaulting police officers and civilian bystanders.



It is therefore the challenge of critical postformal educators to demonstrate through our teaching and scholarship the practical reasons why critical theories and practices, such as anarchy, are favorable alternatives to the neoliberal order that currently dominates. People must come to understand that the current neoliberal trajectory is not only unsustainable, but it is dangerously irresponsible. The media has conditioned millions of people to equate democracy and freedom with capitalism rendering the struggle for genuine democracy an incredibly difficult undertaking. Consequently, many critical pedagogues have given up hope believing the only way paradigmatic change will come is through the catastrophic physical and economic collapse of the current system. What these institutional barriers suggest is that part of the solution requires an individual approach.

Interpersonal



While Chomsky’s anarchism provides us with much insight regarding the biological context of human nature, other anarchisms and critical psychological theories are needed to better understand the social cognitive context of the mind in and through society. To begin recovering from the psychological damage done by an indoctrinating, white-supremacist, patriarchal, neoliberal society necessary to more fully embrace an anarcho-feminist, postformal psychology and critical pedagogy, we need something more. In keeping with our anarchist theme of expanding the circle of criticality, we can turn to the anarchist psychology of the late Paul Goodman (2010) who understood that conforming to this society would lead to illness, but not conforming would lead to dementia because this is the only society there is. That is, there are no other realities to escape to.



Similarly, feminist reinterpretations of Freud’s work in the 1970s began to observe how women internalize sexist oppression as a result of living under patriarchy rendering the psychological life unhealthy for most women (LeLand, 1989). Others (Sa’ar, 2005) argue that the story of how women consent to patriarchy is more complex than just the result of the normalizing consequence of socialization. For example, Amalia Sa’ar (2005) notes that some women consent to the larger system of sexist oppression because they benefit materially from their racial and class associations and affiliations. The challenge for critical educators, as suggested above, is therefore to demonstrate that the result of a world without oppression and crude exploitation would be far better for everyone, even those who currently benefit the most from the negative system that exists.

Conclusion: A Postformal, Anarchist Self-Reflection



The pressures are great living in this neoliberal, hyperconservative U.S. context where the value of ones identity is measured by their position within capitalist society. Based on the values of that capitalist society, at this moment in its development, most people are defined as redundant, losers, failures, and therefore not useful to the system. Consequently, from the dominant set of values most peoples’ current circumstances are a mark of shame and worthlessness. However, from another marginalized and subjugated set of values it can be viewed as a badge of honor to refuse to participate in the process of value production, wealth extraction, and plunder. Most people who find themselves on the margins, however, are not there by choice and therefore do not necessarily posses a critical understanding of their circumstances. As a result, we either live with those internal tensions and try to help push ahead, or we resort to our capitalist conditioning and assume our tacit place within Jung’s collective unconsciousness. Transgression of our identities in capitalist society, however, requires a collective uprising where society liberates itself from its old roles as wageworkers and subservient to elite power. An informed and empowered population understands how dominant forms of power operate and takes action to deny its existence so democracy and the power of the people can flourish. In other words, our identity cannot fully transform if the larger economic and political social structure and distribution of power remain the same.



To be successful, radicals, especially the most privileged (i.e., white) radicals, must engage in this scholarship and movement building without romanticizing oppression and suffering so many of us fail to correct within ourselves. For example, it is a romantic, privileged point of view or belief that the most oppressed citizens are critical thinkers because they are oppressed. This is a naïve idea informed by a simplistic and wrong understanding of the role of ideas in creating consent to the basic structures of power. Believing that all white people are rich and uncritical because of white-skin privilege is an equally inadequate and essentializing interpretive framework. Taking these precautions heightens the prospects of reaching others counterhegemonically, which, I believe, is one of the primary responsibilities of the postformal, anarcho-feminist critical pedagogue. In other words, it is our task to oppose the power structure we benefit from, which means reaching its primary supporters—white people as a socially constructed political, economic force and ideology. Again, this is done not just because it is unfair, but because it is the necessary for all people to reach their full, supported, independent potential. Otherwise, we’re missionaries, and missionary ideology is colonialist. To reiterate, we do not only pay attention to white people, hardly, we also work in solidarity with diverse communities from around the world. This is fundamental to our work and global movement against power and privilege. Again, this work is not simple or clear-cut; it is complex, too easily contradictory, and never straightforward. We nevertheless continue to negotiate these spaces of tension and contradiction as we oppose dominant forms of exploitative and oppressive power—sometimes with success, and other times suffering bitter defeats, but always knowing the struggle will continue.

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CHAPTER 15. Paideia for Praxis: Philosophy and Pedagogy as Practices of Liberation



Nathan Jun

Introduction: A Pilgrimage to Forest Home



It is easy for academic workers, even those of us who consider ourselves anarchists, to become detached and disengaged from the sad realities of the world. During the two or so years I was writing my dissertation, I was often so engrossed in philosophical minutiae that I’d forget that the richest 2 percent of the world’s adults control more than half of the world’s wealth, while the bottom half owns barely 1 percent; that the combined wealth of the three richest individuals is greater than the combined Gross Domestic Product of the forty-eight poorest countries; that of the one hundred largest economies, more than fifty are corporations; that three billion people are living on less than one dollar a day; that twenty-five million people in Africa are dying of AIDS; that eight-hundred million people lack access to basic health care; that eight-hundred and seventy million people are illiterate; that seven-hundred million people are starving or malnourished. My reaction to these lapses of memory was always the same: I felt ashamed of myself. How could I sit in the comfort of my apartment in a clean, safe, middle-class neighborhood, an alien to the struggle, and write a dissertation about the evils of poverty and state-sponsored violence, all the while aware of my own complicity in the very system which generates these evils and unleashes them upon the world?



The role of intellectuals in general and academic workers in particular within the anarchist movement is famously ambiguous. Anarchists have long harbored skepticism toward formal academic institutions, which they tended to regard, rightly, as ancillaries of the existing social, political, and economic order. “It was not for the People,” Proudhon writes, “that the Polytechnic, the Normal School, the Military School at St Cyr, the School of Law, were founded; it was to support, strengthen, and fortify the distinction between classes, in order to complete and make irrevocable the split between the working class and the upper class” (Proudhon, 1972, p. 111). In a similar vein, Bakunin argues that “just as Catholicism once sanctioned the violence perpetrated by the nobility upon the people, so does the university, this church of bourgeois science, explain and condone the exploitation of the same people by bourgeois capital” (Bakunin, 1992, p. 124). Academics, in turn, are “by their very nature inclined to all sorts of intellectual and moral corruption,” chiefly a tendency toward arrogance and pomposity (Bakunin, 1990, p. 134). (Anyone who has spent more than five minutes at an academic conference can scarcely take issue with this observation). At their worst, Bakunin says, they are “modern priests of licensed political and social quackery [who] poison the university youth so effectively that it would take a miracle to cure them” and who produce “doctrinaire[s] full of conceit and contempt for the rabble, whom [they are] ready to exploit in the name of [their] intellectual and moral superiority” (Bakunin, 1992, p. 74). Regrettably all of Bakunin’s claims, though written in the 1860s and ’70s, remain just as true in the present day. As Peter Gelderloos writes:



We do not want to be like these people [bourgeois academics] … There is honor among thieves, and we prefer that kind to the honor of titled professionals. Imagine the hypocrisy, the blindness, of the social scientists studying “hierarchy and power” evident in one particular scene, the reception dinner at the end of the conference. A hundred ladies and gentlemen in expensive dresses and suits, gobbling up hors d’ouevres in a building guarded by private security in the capital of a poor country, only esthetically aware of the dozen t-shirt-and jeans-clad anarchists among them, some packing weapons because their very real struggle against hierarchy puts them in constant risk of attack by fascists, casually stealing silverware and filling plastic bags with banquet delicacies to feed themselves for the next few days. I recall one conversation: a flirty prof mentioned the lovely seaside hotel he stayed in during a conference in Barcelona. I couldn’t help but interject: “ah yes, there used to be a fishermen’s village there before they demolished it and built the artificial beach. It was really nice.” He didn’t get the irony. Let me repeat: we do not want to be like these people. (Gelderloos, 2007)



Even honest, clear-eyed, and well-intentioned academics—the kind of academics we want to be—constantly run the risk of valorizing the abstract and theoretical at the expense of the concrete and the practical. This is a serious problem since, as Bakunin notes, “abstraction can easily conceive the principle of real and living individuality but it can have no dealings with real and living individuals” (Bakunin, 2004, p. 35). In other words, theoretical analysis and other forms of intellectual work do not by themselves guarantee any meaningful connection with the concrete, lived experience of human beings, which is precisely why theoretical analysis tends to invite disengagement and detachment from reality. For this reason, Rocker writes, “all higher understanding, every new phase of intellectual development, every epoch-making thought, giving men new vistas for cultural activities, has been able to prevail only through constant struggle with … authority” (Rocker, 1997, p. 84). This illustrates one of the major challenges which anarchist academic workers face—namely, how to marshal our intellectual work in the lived struggle against authority and the service of human liberation. Two years after completing my dissertation, an assistant professor of philosophy in a provincial North Texas military town, it is a challenge which I myself face on a daily basis.



On July 17, 2010, the seventy-fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, my wife and I visited Forest Home Cemetery outside Chicago, where some of the most famous and beloved figures of the historical anarchist movement are buried. It was in that spot, in the shadow of the Haymarket Martyrs Monument, that a dear comrade of ours had chosen to celebrate his commitment ceremony. As happy as I was for Bill and his partner, the experience of standing amid the remains of those heroes was infinitely more harrowing than it was the first time I visited the cemetery. That was in 1999 when, newly radicalized in the aftermath of Seattle and flushed with a romantic revolutionary fervor, I ventured out to lay roses at the base of the Monument and upon the graves of Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and Voltairine de Cleyre.



Having been raised in a religious household, I am no stranger to the concept of pilgrimage; indeed I continue to appreciate it even though I have long since abandoned all religious creeds. To religious people, the point of pilgrimage is to draw near to holiness, to immerse themselves in the sacred. While most anarchists are not religious, we are nonetheless people of great and unwavering faith—faith in the values of liberty and equality, in the capacity of humankind to construct a world free of greed, oppression, and violence. More importantly, we belong to an old and august tradition populated by others who have shared this faith and have even laid down their lives in its name. Whenever I visit Forest Home, I feel a deep and profound connection to these heroic forebears; a profound sense of belonging to something larger and more powerful than myself; a visceral pride in the accomplishments and sacrifices of “my” movement throughout history. That was the point of past pilgrimages: to keep silent and solitary company, however brief, with giants—the giants upon whose shoulders we stand upon today. This most recent pilgrimage, however, was different. Gazing at the Haymarket Monument, looking down at the graves of Goldman and Parsons and de Cleyre, I thought about what these people did and wondered how I could dare to count myself among them. After all, what was I doing to merit the honorable title of “anarchist”? As Beckett would say, “very little, almost nothing.”



In my scholarly work I join Bakunin in condemning abstraction as politically, socially, and economically oppressive, yet isn’t there something incredibly hypocritical about this? Isn’t Bakunin right, after all, in intimating that scholarly work is itself a form of abstraction? More importantly, does not this abstraction entitle me to privilege—privilege which is denied to others, privilege which prejudices my work and alienates me from the class struggle, privilege which I consistently and constantly take for granted? And what, at the end of the day, does this abstraction do to promote the liberation of humankind? Does it perhaps do nothing? Worse, does it actually serve to perpetuate domination? In the face of such suspicion, it is little wonder that so many online anarchist and Left-socialist forums are constantly brimming with invective against “academics,” or that I often find myself feeling ashamed and guilty in the presence of comrades. Whether such suspicion and the accompanying self-doubt are warranted remains to be seen. My point is that I find myself thinking and worrying and getting depressed about these issues all the time, and I know that I am not alone in this. Any honest anarchist who finds himself or herself toiling in the bowels of academia and kindred institutions cannot avoid these feelings. The salient question, and one which I am keen to discuss in this essay, is whether they are rational or at least understandable; whether they can be overcome with a mind to transforming us for the better; whether they can impel us to think or act differently. I think they can, but only if we think carefully about our roles as teachers and scholars.

Anarchists as Intellectuals and Academics



Malatesta writes, “All of us, without exception, are obliged to live more or less in contradiction with our ideals” (Malatesta, 1993, p. 142). This, in my view, is the first and most important lesson of modern politics: that we are all hypocrites, that purity and authenticity are vain aspirations, that we are all accomplices with State and Capital whether we like it or not. What matters for anarchists, Malatesta continues, is that “we suffer by this contradiction and seek to make it as small as possible” (Malatesta, 1993, p. 142). We strive to be aware of our complicity and to do whatever we can to minimize that complicity without compromising our individuality and personal ideals. Clearly this recognition was enough to ameliorate Malatesta’s shame, if indeed he had any in the first place. But then again, Malatesta was a professional revolutionary, whereas I am simply a teacher and a writer of books. If I am being truly honest with myself, I cannot help but think this makes a difference. Surely people like Malatesta—people whom I admire very much, people whom I envy because they seem so much stronger and braver than I, because they accomplished much more than I could ever see myself accomplishing—could afford to be a bit bourgeois. Yet when I try to take Malatesta’s lesson to heart, it inevitably ends up seeming like a cop-out.



At the same time, are other comrades’ choices really that different from mine? After all, one must earn a living whether she likes it or not, and whether she chooses to work in a factory or in a university, she necessarily remains an accomplice to the very system she seeks to abolish. So the question becomes: given one’s distinctive talents, interests, and passions, how can one do the best for herself and for humanity as a whole? Clearly for some of us, the answer to this question lies in intellectual work. As Alexander Berkman writes:



Do not make the mistake of thinking that the world has been built with hands only. It has also required brains. Similarly does the revolution need both the man of brawn and the man of brain. Many people imagine that the manual worker alone can do the entire work of society. It is a false idea, a very grave error that can bring no end of harm. In fact, this conception has worked great evil on previous occasions, and there is good reason to fear that it may defeat the best efforts of the revolution. The working class consists of the industrial wage earners and the agricultural toilers. But the workers require the services of the professional elements, of the industrial organizer, the electrical and mechanical engineer, the technical specialist, the scientist, inventor, chemist, the educator, doctor, and surgeon. In short, the proletariat absolutely needs the aid of certain professional elements without whose cooperation no productive labor is possible. (2003, p. 190)



Bakunin, too, stresses the essential role of the intellectual proletariat which, he insists, “must now be imbued with a passion founded on reason for the socialist-revolutionary cause if it does not want to succumb shamefully to total ruin; it is this class henceforth that is called to be the organizer of the popular revolution” (Bakunin, 1990, p. 212). Unlike bourgeois intellectuals, whom Bakunin resolutely condemns, the intellectual proletariat is “upright, sincere, and devoted in the extreme …” (p. 212). Its mission, accordingly, is to “go to the people, because today, all over the world … outside of the people, outside of the millions and millions of proletarians, there is neither existence, nor cause, nor future” (p. 212). And although the intellectual proletariat by itself is too small to “organize a revolutionary force apart from the people,” it is sufficient to produce such a force if it works with and among the people (p. 212). The question, of course, is whether, how, and to what extent the intellectual proletariat can “go to the people” from within the universities, or whether there are other, more productive avenues for it to pursue.



In his “Prison Notebooks,” Gramsci famously argues that every socioeconomic class organically generates a network of intellectuals which administer and organize that class and construct a cohesive and uniform class identity within and across the social, economic, and political fields (Gramsci, 2001, p. 1138). At the same time, every class which “emerges into history out of the preceding economic structure, and as an expression of the development of this structure” finds “categories of intellectuals already in existence,” which, in contrast to “organic intellectuals,” Gramsci terms “traditional intellectuals” (p. 1139). Because traditional intellectuals—such as philosophers, artists, and the clergy—have continued to exist despite “the most complicated and radical changes in political and social forms,” (p. 1139) they have gradually come to believe in their own autonomy and independence from the ruling class and have erected a variety of self-serving mythologies to reinforce this belief. In reality, however, their continued existence has been permitted, not only by the ruling class, but by the “stratum of administrators, etc., scholars and scientists, theorists, non-ecclesiastical philosophers, etc.” organically generated within capitalist society. Once these traditional intellectuals have been “conquered and assimilated,” their function, like that of bourgeois intellectuals, is to organize, promote, and maintain “social hegemony and state domination” (p. 1143). In this capacity, they work chiefly as “creators of the various sciences, philosophy, [and] art …” and “‘administrators’ and divulgators of preexisting, traditional, [and] accumulated intellectual wealth” (p. 1143). Their value consists precisely in their putative “independence” (or, as we say nowadays, “objectivity”), which in turns gives them the magical ability to transform contingencies into timeless, universal truths or mere propaganda into “common sense.” Ultimately, Gramsci argues for the development of “organic intellectuals” within the working class coupled with the radicalization of bourgeois intellectuals (both traditional and organic).



Despite the flaws inherent in Gramsci’s analysis of intellectuals, most of which are already well known to the readers of this essay, it is clear that anarchists like Bakunin and Berkman are sympathetic to several of its key components. Both recognize, for example, that intellectual work in bourgeois society has been co-opted by capitalism and that, as a result, the vast majority of intellectuals consciously or unconsciously serve the interests of the ruling class. So, too, both recognize and appreciate the importance of the intellectual proletariat and argue for the incorporation of academics and other intellectuals into the revolutionary movement regardless of class origins. But what might these thinkers have to say about anarchists working in the universities? In fairness, there are many careers, such as military service or the chairmanship of Halliburton, which would appear to be closed to anarchists on the basis of prefigurative ethics. The reason, in both cases, is that conventional armies and capitalist firms are intrinsically hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, and exploitative institutions. Is the same true of universities? I don’t think so. Although it is true that the vast majority of contemporary colleges and universities are hierarchical, bureaucratic, centrally organized, and deeply authoritarian institutions—and that’s just the beginning of their problems—these aren’t intrinsic features of “the university” itself. One can imagine a university (or university-like institution) that is nonhierarchical and decentralized (in fact, the original universities were marked by both features to greater or lesser degree), whereas one cannot easily imagine a capitalist firm that is nonhierarchical, decentralized, nonexploitative, and worker-owned. The fact is that universities, despite their myriad problems, serve useful and valuable functions in society. What is more, there are no viable alternatives which, at least at the present time, could even begin to accomplish the same ends.



This is all the more reason why at least some anarchists ought to work in universities: to direct the existing power and influence of universities toward anarchist goals and to work toward transforming the universities from within with a mind to eventually making the current university model obsolete. As Kropotkin writes:



Repeating the formulation of Proudhon, we say: if a naval academy is not itself a ship with sailors who enjoy equal rights and receive a theoretical education, then it will produce not sailors but officers to supervise sailors; if a technical academy is not itself a factory, not itself a trade school, then it will produce foremen and managers and not workmen; and so one. We do not need these privileged establishments; we need the hospital, the factory, the chemical plant, the ship, the productive trade school for workers, which, having become available to all, will with unimaginable speed exceed the standard of present universities and academies. (1993, p. 22)



At present universities provide narrowly focused and hyperspecialized training that serves the interests of State and Capital. But what if we created universities that genuinely served the interests of humanity? Such institutions would be, to paraphrase Kropotkin, naval academies on ships, or trade schools in factories—places, in a word, where theory and practice are united and harmonized. To my mind, it makes sense to affect the transformation of existing institutions while simultaneously developing alternative institutions. To simply abandon existing institutions, especially those which contain so much transformative and revolutionary potential, strikes me as the height of folly.

Philosophy, Paideia, and Anarchist Praxis



Now I cannot speak for all academic workers, but about 75 percent of my own intellectual work is devoted to teaching, the remaining 25 percent to research and scholarship. Whether and to what extent this work is at all useful or valuable as anarchist praxis depends crucially on (a) what, how, and why I’m teaching; and (b) what, how, and why I’m writing, and here I think my discipline could ultimately provide some saving grace. There is not now, nor has there ever been, any consensus among philosophers regarding the definition of philosophy as such. Historically this has proven both a blessing and a bane, for although philosophy’s lack of any narrowly circumscribed subject matter has afforded a degree of flexibility and openness which few other disciplines can match, it has also given philosophy an unsavory reputation, memorably lampooned in Aristophanes’s The Clouds, for hairsplitting and abstraction.



This is why Russell, Ayer, Carnap, Quine, and various other early and mid twentieth-century “analytical” philosophers are so often characterized as reformers; by rejecting metaphysical speculation, shifting attention to linguistic and conceptual analysis, and seeking to reconstruct philosophy on the model of logico-mathematical and scientific inquiry, they collectively transformed philosophy into a “modern” discipline The truth of the matter is far more complicated. The early analytical philosophers were fiercely committed to Enlightenment thought and practice, the “distinctive assumptions” of which, according to Philip Pettit, can be roughly described as follows:




There is a reality independent of human knowledge of which we human beings are part.





Reason and method, particularly as exemplified in science, offer us the proper way to explore that reality and our relationship to it.





In this exploration traditional preconceptions—in particular, traditional evaluative preconceptions—should be suspended and the facts allowed to speak for themselves (Pettit, 2005, p. 7).





Although there is no doubt that analytical thinkers were reacting in part against what they saw as the muddle, imprecision, and opacity of their philosophical peers, they were far more troubled by those philosophers (e.g., Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche) and movements (e.g., German Idealism, Romanticism, Marxism, Nietzschean perspectivism, phenomenology, etc.) which posed a challenge to their key assumptions. These same assumptions, after all, not only provided the foundations of modern philosophy but also made possible:



The positive self-image modern Western culture [had] given to itself, a picture born in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment … of a civilization founded on scientific knowledge of the world and rational knowledge of value, which places the highest premium on individual human life and freedom, and believes that such freedom and rationality will lead to social progress through self-controlled work, creating a better material, intellectual, and political life for all, (Pettit, 2005, p. 12)



As Anthony Giddens notes, this “set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as an open transformation by human intervention” is the condition of possibility for all the other salient characteristics of modernity, a society “vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order … a society—more technically, a complex of institutions—which unlike any preceding cultures lives in the future rather than the past” (Giddens and Pearson, 1999, p. 94). This “complex of institutions” includes “economic institutions, especially industrial production and a market economy” and “a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and mass democracy” (p. 94). To this list Cahoone adds “new, powerful technique[s] for the study of nature, as well as new machine technologies and modes of industrial production that have led to an unprecedented rise in material living standards … capitalism, a largely secular culture, liberal democracy, individualism, rationalism, humanism” (Cahoone, 1996, p. 11). If certain strands of nineteenth-century philosophy developed in reaction to the Enlightenment project, then analytical philosophy developed first and foremost in defense of its emerging status quo.



I agree with Aaron Preston that “it is a mistake to regard analytical philosophy as a philosophical school, movement, or tradition, and that, instead, it is (and always has been) a purely social entity unified by what interactional memes, maintained at high frequency by conformist transmission” (Preston, 2005, p. 292). But even as a “social entity” analytical philosophy has distinguished itself in two ways: first, by successfully achieving the total professionalization of philosophical practice—that is, by redefining philosophy as a highly specialized academic discipline that is taught, studied, and practiced exclusively by trained experts within Anglo-American universities; and second, by narrowing the focus of the discipline to minute, technical, and highly specialized problems. When analyzed from a Gramscian perspective, it is not difficult to make sense of these phenomena. By the beginning of the twentieth century, philosophers-qua-“traditional intellectuals” were in direct competition with the new “organic intellectuals” (e.g., scientists and technicians) of modern industrial society. Facing obsolescence and desperate to prove their ongoing relevance, the philosophers rebranded themselves in the image of their competitors. It is important to recognize, however, that in doing so the analytical philosophers have largely renounced their role as traditional intellectuals, retreating into the minutiae of logical and linguistic analysis instead of serving the status quo as apologists armed with “eternal verities.” Unlike traditional intellectuals they do not think of themselves as serving God or mankind, let alone the ruling class, but rather the “profession.” To this extent we might say they serve the status quo “by omission”—that is, in virtue of their irrelevance.



Yet the irrelevance of analytical philosophy to society at large has deep repercussions for the practice of philosophy in general. As a result of analytical hegemony, a de facto definition of philosophy has long since taken root that is considered normative for those who teach and conduct research within the Anglo-American academy, a definition which makes an engaged, socially and politically relevant philosophy virtually impossible. According to that definition, philosophy just is the set of “interactional memes”—the methodologies used, the topics studied, etc.—by those philosophy professors employed by elite philosophy departments in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Professional advancement and recognition within the discipline is determined in accordance with this definition; those who adopt alternative methodologies or study alternative topics will almost certainly be marginalized in various ways precisely because they are seen, at best, as doing “bad philosophy” and, at worst, as not doing philosophy at all. Most “elite” departments are invested with this status by tradition or, what comes to the same, because a preponderance of their faculty can trace their professional and philosophical lineages back to past analytical luminaries in a more or less unbroken succession. The underlying assumption, in all events, is that these philosophers—who ultimately share the same general concerns, discuss the same general topics, and utilize the same general methodology—should be regarded as the supreme arbiters, either implicitly or explicitly, of what counts as philosophy. They occupy the uppermost echelons of what might be called “the philosophical establishment”—the hierarchical network of professional relationships that determines topical, methodological, and disciplinary orthodoxies. What must be emphasized is that these “professional relationships” are nothing more than relations of power. The network they constitute is a purely social phenomenon that does not (and probably should not be expected to) act on the basis of “philosophical” considerations.



To this picture we must add an additional contour—namely, that philosophers employed by elite departments are generally paid obscenely high salaries compared to their lesser colleagues in the profession. The main duties they perform in order to receive such compensation are two: first, they publish research that is directed almost exclusively toward other members of the disciplinary ruling class; and second, they strive to replenish their numbers via the training and credentialing of graduate students. In order to meet the first duty, they must employ only those methods, discuss only those topics, and publish only in those journals that are met with the approval of their peers. More importantly, they must have ample time at their disposal, which means that they must avoid teaching undergraduates as much as possible. This necessitates the second duty, as the responsibility for teaching undergraduates is mainly outsourced to graduate teaching assistants. Of course, the overwhelming majority of Anglophone colleges and universities are not able to provide their faculty with these sorts of luxuries and privileges. Yet most junior faculty, having been trained in research-centered departments, are predisposed to regard publishing as their main priority even at institutions which emphasize undergraduate teaching. (It is little wonder that teaching is met with such disdain among academic philosophers, at least in my experience.)



The academic philosophical establishment regards philosophy as an essentially scientific and theoretical discipline for which rigorous argumentation and valid reasoning are the highest virtues. The goal of philosophical pedagogy, accordingly, is to instill basic familiarity with, and comprehension of, the range of theoretical problems that are regarded as distinctively “philosophical” and, more importantly, to cultivate the critical skills necessary to “philosophically” analyze these problems. It is important to recognize that this approach to philosophical practice and pedagogy differs markedly from that of our Greek and Roman predecessors, to say nothing of philosophers from ancient India, China, and other non-Western climes. Socrates famously claimed that the aim of those who practice philosophy is “to prepare for dying and death” (Plato 1950: II. 59), while Seneca upbraided teachers for reducing philosophy to argumentation, contending that their single-minded emphasis on logic demonstrated a “love of words” rather than a “love of wisdom” (Seneca 1925: epistle 108). This “love of words” has won the day, the result being that modern philosophy exists “to train [people] for careers as clerks or professors—that is to say, as specialists, theoreticians, and retainers of specific items or more or less esoteric knowledge” (Hadot, 1995, p. 38). The modern philosophy professor can ruminate for hours at a conference or in the classroom only to go home, spend an evening in front of the television, and never give his or her lecture a second thought. The same is true of any working professional whose “career” has been separated from his or her life.



There is no doubt that the study of philosophy is extremely conducive to the development of those general critical thinking and reasoning skills which are universally regarded as beneficial in every field of inquiry and endeavor. Indeed, to the increasingly limited extent that professors of philosophy are regarded as useful at all in higher education, it is mostly for our ability to help students develop these sorts of skills, not (or not mainly) to teach philosophy. Critical thinking and reasoning skills are also sine qua non for freethinkers and revolutionaries of all stripes, but that is obviously not why they are stressed by college and university administrators. Their goal, of course, is to produce the highly educated technical-managerial-professional class that is necessary to administer capitalist society on behalf of the ruling elite. In order to do their jobs well, members of this class not only require rote vocational training but also a moderate degree of critical intelligence (coupled, ideally, with an anemic or altogether nonexistent moral sensibility). This is by way of saying that while critical acumen may be necessary for the development of what we might call a “liberated consciousness,” it is scarcely sufficient.



“All rational education,” Bakunin writes, “is at bottom nothing save the progressive immolation of authority for the benefit of freedom, the final aims of education necessarily being the development of free men imbued with a feeling of respect and love for the liberty of others” (Bakunin, 2004, p. 41). Anarchists have long claimed, after all, that liberation is coextensive with education, which in turn requires a practiced ability to read, write, and think critically. The problem, which I have just illustrated, is that there is nothing inherently “radical” about teaching students “how to think.” Many students simply don’t want to engage in critical thinking even if they are able to learn how, and those that do are just as likely to marshal critical thinking in the service of self-interest or the manipulation and oppression of others. In order to make philosophical pedagogy a potentially anarchistic practice, one must pay serious attention to what students are thinking about, how they’re thinking about it, and to what end. Again, the goal cannot merely be to teach students “how to think.” If a student never learns what is worth thinking about, what questions are worth asking, what issues are worth caring about, et cetera, then her ability to think well is at best pointless (because she will never use it) and at worse dangerous (because she will apply it in harmful ways). The goal must be something altogether different.



The philosophical establishment, which is already inclined to regard teaching as a “necessary evil,” does not recognize this. Its goal, as I have already stated, is to protect itself and the larger political, social, and economic system of which it is a part. To this extent, it has a vested interest in keeping its pedagogical vision as vacuous and unthreatening as possible. “Teaching students to think” sounds gutsy, but in reality it is a soft-footed and conservative approach that leaves the status quo fundamentally unchallenged. So what is the alternative? What is philosophy (“the love of wisdom”) if it is not (or not just) a narrow, hairsplitting, logic-chopping discipline? In looking for an answer to this question, many are immediately drawn to Socrates, the spiritual godfather of Western philosophy. Socrates, after all, was not what we could call a “professional philosopher.” He wasn’t a specialist or a retainer of esoteric knowledge. He wasn’t interested in obtaining a tenure-track position at a university or padding his CV. He wasn’t offered a named chair or paid an extravagant salary to conduct research. In fact, he vehemently criticized the Sophists for teaching in exchange for money and, if we take the words of Plato at face value, insisted that these so-called “professionals,” with their trumped-up claims to knowledge and wisdom, were actually charlatans.



Socrates had no ideas of his own. Instead, he traveled from place to place in search of those who did have ideas (or at least claimed to) and, guided by nothing but a relentless desire for truth, subjected these self-proclaimed sages to persistent and even obnoxious interrogations. The inevitable result of these interrogations, as we all know, is that the sages were shown again and again to be fools. Socrates, meanwhile, was left with even more unanswered questions, increasingly convinced that he knew nothing at all. The fact that Socrates was willing—indeed, unshakably determined—to die for the sake of philosophy strongly suggests the converse—that is, that he lived for his beliefs. Preparing for dying and death isn’t about mastering a specialized academic discipline. On the contrary, as Plutarch noted, “at all times and in every place, in everything that happens to us, daily life gives us an opportunity to do philosophy” (Plutarch, 1936: no. 4). Philosophy is a praxis—a process by which an idea, concept, skill, or theory is realized, actualized, or implemented. Life itself is the idea or concept which philosophical praxis embodies.



It is precisely this openness to life, coupled with a desire to experience and understand it in all its richness and complexity, which underlies the ancient Greek educational philosophy of paideia. In the simplest and most general terms, paideia is analogous to Bakunin’s “integral education”—it is well-rounded, broad-based and holistic training, the goal of which is the cultivation of sensibility and excellence of character rather than the accumulation of knowledge. The Greeks believed that training in a wide range of scientific, theoretical, and artistic disciplines placed students in a better position to successfully overcome the internal and external challenges posed by human life and so to achieve happiness. Philosophical acumen, historical knowledge, esthetic sensitivity—these are all skills necessary for the pursuit of excellence (arête).



Philosophy is in many ways the heart and soul of paideia, emphasizing as it does the process of seeking rather than the act of finding. If we take seriously the sentiment which is repeated time and again throughout the works of the Stoics, the philosophical way of life is a search for knowledge about oneself and others. This search, which is something that one lives rather than lectures or writes or debates about, is coextensive with the development and practice of arête. Understood as a way of life, philosophy has the potential to make better people and better worlds. Understood as a scientific or theoretical discipline, as philosophy is today, it is seldom more than an accomplice of the status quo. This is best confirmed, perhaps, by asking what modern philosophers are willing to give up in defense of their doctrines and theories. If the answer is “not much”—and I suspect without cynicism that it is—we ought not to be surprised. After all, academic philosophy portrays itself as a dispassionate attempt to understand the world, a project that gets by perfectly well without martyrdom. Philosophy as a way of life is far more risky, since it calls upon the philosopher to examine and, ultimately, change herself.



This view of philosophy has never disappeared entirely but has continued to flare up here and there throughout history. Marx, to cite just one example, expands it by suggesting that the philosopher’s goal isn’t just to change herself but to change the world as well. In other words, philosophy as a way of life isn’t just an introspective spiritual exercise or a voyage of self-discovery but a conscientious attempt to unite theory and practice with a mind to opening up new and heretofore unforeseen possibilities for the human race at large. It is no mistake that Marx was first and foremost a political philosopher, because it is within the realm of the political that the unity of theory and practice finds its most visible expression. From this perspective, the goal of a philosophical way of life isn’t to offer solutions to abstract, universal problems but to immerse oneself in the dialectic of questions and answers, problems and solutions, etc. in order to discover what is possible, what might be done that hasn’t be done before. In an important sense, this process of immersion precedes all inquiries about what is the case or what ought to be the case. If modernity has been guided, at least in part, by a “love of words” (or, what comes to the same, the “love of images”), if it has been directed toward solutions rather than to problems, we ought not to be surprised if alternatives to modernity have presented and continue to present very different approaches. This does not automatically imply a simple recuperation of premodern philosophical methodologies. I would suggest, however, that anything that can be genuinely regarded as “postmodern” (in the sense of “going beyond” the modern, not just coming after it) has important lessons to learn from the ancient ideal of philos sophia, understood, again, not as a theoretical discipline but as a lived experience.



My own philosophical pedagogy, then, may be summarized as follows. First, it situates philosophy within a broad-based, multifaceted, and holistic learning context whose goal is the cultivation of a strong, sensible, principled, adaptable, and resourceful character. (Bakunin called this “integral education, the Greeks called it paideia). Following Emma Goldman’s advice, I draw heavily upon “the larger human expression manifest in art [and] literature … the strongest and most far-reaching interpreter of our deep-felt dissatisfaction,” recognizing with her that “an adequate appreciation of the tremendous spread of the modern conscious social unrest” cannot be ascertained from any one kind of source (Goldman, 2004, p. 2). Second, my pedagogy treats philosophy not as a theoretical or scientific discipline, but as a way of life founded on the praxis of seeking, questioning, complicating, problematizing, potentiating, “possibilizing.” To be sure, I am often compelled to ask students to think about traditional philosophical questions and arguments, as this is more or less unavoidable in the context of ordinary philosophy classes, but I strive as much as possible to avoid both abstraction and hairsplitting and to keep discussions grounded in the harsh and often frightening realities of the contemporary world.



Third, and most importantly, my pedagogy is an anarchist pedagogy because it seeks to advance, however minimally, the cause of total human liberation from oppression and inequality. To achieve this goal, it is not enough to teach students how to think; as an anarchist, I strive to help at least some of them learn to care, as caring is the condition of possibility for all of us to “break [our] mental fetters,” to “think and judge for [ourselves]” and to escape “the dominion of darkness” (Goldman, 2008, p. 38). If I am doing my job well, at least a few students will remember and puzzle over topics we discuss in class; they will think about and be troubled by issues they read about in our books; in short, they will be haunted. Initially, perhaps, this haunting will take the form of nagging, intransigent thoughts; over time, it has the potential to become something else: a deeply held conviction that something is wrong with oneself and the world coupled with a desire to do something about both. It is this feeling that brings a person, eventually, to anarchism. The aim of my anarchist pedagogy is to help students discover that feeling in themselves using the tools of philosophy.

Going to the People



How might these same ideas apply, if at all, to the issue of academic research? This is a thorny question, since research is something academic workers must do as a condition of employment and to this extent is often limited by more or less arbitrary and repressive institutional and professional standards. By and large, adhering to these standards tends to be severely at odds with the task of making one’s work interesting, relevant, or useful to individuals outside one’s discipline, let alone to radicals or other nonacademics. For this reason, even the most well-intentioned academic writing tends to be utterly useless as a form revolutionary praxis. That said, I take strong exception to the idea that academic writing as such is inherently useless, even in institutionalized forms. The foremost challenge faced by radical academic workers is overcoming the outmoded and elitist model of knowledge production that remains dominant in academic institutions. A secondary challenge is producing work within that model that actually contributes in some way to the possibility of revolutionary change.



Research, according to Gelderloos, is one “major area where the academy can be useful to anarchists.” He continues:



[Academics] have us cornered when it comes to investigation and critical debate. Anarchists are lazy researchers. Many prefer religion to research. Objective, and objectively false, statements that bear great importance for anarchist theory circulate freely in our circles. Some of the basic premises of primitivist, vegan, and historical materialist strains of anarchism would have been abandoned long ago if we’d had a culture of serious inquiry and debate. Instead we have name-calling on internet forums. I think we also could have made some headway on the eternal debate about the nature of formal and informal power and the extent to which each allows hierarchies to be established or challenged. But alas, in our circles it’s still anybody’s guess. (Gelderloos, 2007)



Certainly in the last ten years anarchist-related research has become increasingly acceptable within academia. This means it’s possible to safely pursue an academic career with anarchism as a principal research focus; it does not mean that all or even most anarchism-related research is or will be relevant, interesting, or useful to the anarchist movement. For that to even become a possibility, anarchist academics must be something like Gramsci’s organic intellectuals. That is, we must be a natural and integral part of the anarchist movement. Our work must emerge from within that movement and serve to reinforce and promote its interests (which are ultimately inseparable from the interests of humankind as a whole) rather than those of discipline, profession, institution,the academy, or the social and political system to which the academy belongs. This is not a matter of “activism” in some narrowly defined sense, but of passion, awareness, commitment, and historical sensibility. The last is pivotal, since anarchism, as I suggested earlier, is as much about the past as it is about the present. It is as much a lived tradition or history as it is a contemporary phenomenon. As such, a certain kind of historical consciousness would seem indispensible in making one’s work relevant from the standpoint of praxis.



If I am right about all of this, then it is not difficult to understand how a certain kind of intellectual work, even of a specialized academic kind, can be valuable. First, and most obviously, it is extremely beneficial for anarchists and other revolutionaries to apply the model of paideia to their own lives by actively seeking out the broadest possible range of practical and theoretical knowledge. In particular, it behooves anarchists to know as much as possible about our own past, which Bakunin rightly refers to as our “mental capital, the sum of the mental labor of all previous generations” (Bakunin, 1973, p. 351). Academic workers have a crucial role to play in this respect, for, although we are not the only individuals capable of engaging in historical research and other forms of productive and valuable intellectual work, we are ideally placed to pursue it owing to our greater share of access to time, resources, and institutional support.



Anarchist academics and other intellectuals are also well disposed to engage in “theoretical work, direct communication with lots of people outside our circles … intervention in public discourse” (Gelderloos, 2007)—in short, what Marx called “the ruthless critique of everything existing.” We are called to be, as Gramsci says, “constructers, organizers, permanent persuaders and not just … simple orators” (2001, p. 1143). Without theory, anarchism becomes a dogma on par with Leninism and most organized religions. Its principles become empty axioms whose truth is simply taken for granted and which have no purpose other than to mechanically justify practices. I strongly suspect there would be many more anarchists in the world if those principles were really as self-evident as we often take them to be. In fact, it is precisely our failure to better articulate and defend such principles that has fueled our ongoing historical insignificance across several key segments of Western society. No wonder Kropotkin writes, “The most important thing is to spread the truths already acquired, to practice them in daily life, to make of them a common inheritance” (Kropotkin, 2002, p. 265).



Obviously the task of “going to the people” and uniting with them in struggle involves writing to, as well as for the benefit of, nonacademic audiences. Even those non-tenured or non-tenure-track academic workers who must address a portion of our work to academic peers should strive as much as possible to make this accessible and relevant to non-academics. “With both irony and seriousness,” writes Gelderloos, “I call for the excommunication of all academic anarchists who produce not for the movement but for the academy. If you study networks, find ways to explain to [the movement] how to effectively extend networks to people currently plugged into the system (or some other useful question), not how to analyze our networks so they can be understood by outsiders, as intellectually stimulating as that task may be” (2007). In offering such explanations, moreover, we ought to strive as much as possible to avoid needlessly technical language and other self-consciously “academic” conventions which serve no purpose except to alienate outsiders and ingratiate ourselves to other academics. In short, academic workers should only observe academic writing standards to the extent that doing so is practically and professionally expedient; beyond this, our foremost goals in writing should include clarity, accessibility, sincerity, relevance, and effectiveness.



To what kind of nonacademic audiences should our work be addressed? The answer, which is the same as it was more than a century ago, has already been divulged. It is “the people,” which is to say, the whole mass of human persons who have been systematically oppressed, exploited, and disinherited irrespective of age, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, or national origin. Among these, it has always been clear that our foremost attention, at least for the foreseeable future, ought to be focused on those who have suffered the most—for example, members of the poor and working classes, racial and sexual minorities, displaced indigenous populations, and so on. This does not mean, however, that the better-off, including students and bourgeois intellectuals, should be completely neglected. Kropotkin is right to point out that “propagandizing” among them “requires so much erudition … that it involves a terribly unproductive waste of time and distraction of energy from incomparably more urgent matters” (Kropotkin, 1993, p. 45). But we obviously need to reach young people (and, to a lesser extent, fellow intellectuals) in order to replenish and maintain the strength of our own intellectual proletariat



In all of this, we must remember that our enemies are ready and willing to use our own intellectual work against us. As Gelderloos notes:



Simply producing information aids the system, even if that information seems to be revolutionary in its implications. This is because in democratic societies, people are pacified, and even if they are well informed they will not have gotten what they need to fight back. Information is not what’s lacking. It is the institutions of power, and not the people, that are positioned to act on this information, and even critical information coming from dissident academics can help these institutions correct themselves. (2007)



To prevent this sort of thing from occurring, we need to be careful when working within the academic establishment and exercise discretion in what we choose to study, publish, and write. In the long run, we need to build up networks of reliable alternative institutions that successfully bridge the academic/anarchist divide. Publishing houses such as AK Press and PM Press and organizations such as the North American Anarchist Studies Network (NAASN), the Transformative Studies Institute, and the Institute for Anarchist Studies are slowly but surely helping anarchist academics and independent scholars to produce, disseminate, and share work that is not only “credible” to their academic peers but also useful and relevant to their comrades in the anarchist movement.



I close by enjoining academic workers to always think about what we do in terms of what came before as well as what could be. We must remember that our work is in the middle, the present, the space of “what’s happening now,” and to this extent we can never afford to become distanced from the realities of the world. This doesn’t mean that we should all be activists as well as academics; it means that we should see our work itself as activism, and we should do so proudly and without shame. As Alexander Berkman writes:



It is sad to admit that there is a tendency in certain labor circles, even among some socialists and anarchists, to antagonize the workers against the members of the intellectual proletariat. Such an attitude is stupid and criminal, because it can only harm the growth and development of the social revolution. It was one of the fatal mistakes of the Bolsheviks during the first phases of the Russian Revolution that they deliberately set wage-earners against the professional classes, to such an extent, indeed, that friendly cooperation became impossible … (2003, p. 192)



In justice to the intellectuals, let us not forget that their best representatives have always sided with the oppressed. They have advocated liberty and emancipation, and often they were the first to voice the deepest aspirations of the toiling masses. (2003, p. 193)



As I made clear at the outset, I am still trying to come to terms with all of this myself. I’m nowhere near overcoming self-doubt; I have absolutely no idea how important intellectuals in general or my own intellectual work in particular are in the grand revolutionary scheme. Then again, I’m not sure that it matters. Over and above everything I’ve just outlined, I suspect what really matters for academics and intellectuals is just giving a real, honest-to-goodness, and passionate damn about what’s happening outside the classroom and the conferences. Only then, it seems, can we determine whether what we do in the classrooms and at the conferences is worth giving a damn about, too. In the meantime, I hope I’ve offered an honest appraisal of our situation and a fair case for the potential value and usefulness of our work within the anarchist movement. For my part, I continue to wrestle with self-doubt and will probably do so for a long time. But maybe the next time I visit Forest Home I won’t feel so alienated from my forebears. Maybe next time I will feel like I am part of their, our tradition once again.

References





Bakunin, M. (1973). Mikhail Bakunin: Selected writings. A. Lehning (Ed.), (S. Cox & O. Stevens, Trans.). New York: Grove Press.



Bakunin, M. (1990). Statism and anarchy. (M. Shatz, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



Bakunin, M. (1992). The basic Bakunin. R. Cutler (Ed.). Buffalo, NY: Prometheus.



Bakunin, M. (2004). God and the state. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger.



Berkman, A. (2003). What is communist anarchism? Oakland: AK Press.



Cahoone, L. (1996). From modernism to postmodernism. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.



Gelderloos, P. (2007). The difference between anarchy and the academy. Retrieved from http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Peter_Gelderloos_The_Difference_between_Anarchy_and_the_Academy.html.



Giddens, A. & Pearson, C. (1999). Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making sense of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.



Goldman, E. (2004). The modern drama. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger.



Goldman, E. (2008). Anarchism and other essays. Rockville, MD: Serenity.



Gramsci, A. (2001). The Formation of intellectuals. In V. Leitch (Ed.), Norton anthology of theory and criticism. New York: Norton.



Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a way of life. Oxford: Blackwell.



Kropotkin, P. (1993). Fugitive writings. Montreal: Black Rose.



Kropotkin, P. (2002). Anarchism: A collection of revolutionary writings. Mineola, NY: Dover.



Malatesta, E. (1993). His life and ideas. V. Richards (Ed.). London: Freedom Press.



Pettit, P. (2005). The contribution of analytical philosophy. In R. Goodin & P. Pettit (Eds.), A companion to contemporary political philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.



Plato (1950). Phaedo. (F.J. Church, Trans.). New York: Macmillan



Plutarch (1936). Moralia, Book X. (H.N. Fowler, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library.



Preston, A. (2005). Conformism in analytical philosophy. The Monist, 88(2), 292–319.



Proudhon, P.-J. (1972). The general idea of revolution in the nineteenth century. In M. Shatz (Ed.), The essential works of anarchism. New York: Quadrangle Books, 81–123



Rocker, R. (1997). Nationalism and culture. Montreal: Black Rose.



Seneca (1925). Epistles 93–124. (R. Grummere, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library.



CHAPTER 16. That Teaching Is Impossible



Alejandro de Acosta

1



That teaching is impossible is not a proposition to be argued for. It would be of little interest to offer it up for debate. It would be useless to defend it against the evidence of history or common sense. To consider that teaching is impossible is to open ourselves up to an experience of the most outlandish sort. In staging this experience I wish to contemplate the happy frustration of the urge to teach, and to affirmatively invoke the limits of all pedagogies.



It is useful for anyone who thinks that they teach to explore their urge to do so. This urge is an intimate matter, the libidinal support for the innocent claim that good ideas ought to be passed on to others. I call the claim innocent in that it usually leaves the good of ideas (and the Idea of the Good) implicit and unexamined; since the good remains unexamined, people may obtusely invoke their mere participation in efficient schooling as evidence that teaching is possible. That the school, as institution, survives; that the role of teacher is understood primarily in reference to the survival of the institution: these seem to be the only evidences necessary. But one can at least begin to account for and explore the complex of desires that aim at the role of teacher. Some of them wear the mask of the ego: “I am the one who impresses the lessons.”



Beyond the ego-mask, moving, that is, from what appears as inner to what appears as outer, one may observe the inevitable calcification of the urge to teach into the kinds of systems we call pedagogies. These may be described as organizations, not just of knowledge and methods of passing it on, but primarily of desire. They are institutional manifestations of the urge to teach, or rather, they are the ways in which the urge to teach, combined with other urges, invents for itself a gregarious existence, a school: “This is where the lessons are impressed.” In this sense, pedagogies may also be characterized as the fantasy of the efficacy of the urge to teach.



To say or think that teaching is impossible is to let go, however temporarily, of both the urge to teach and its more or less precisely formed collusions with other urges in gregarious forms, affirming rather that study is interminable, and so learning is endlessly frustrated and frustrating. To say or think that teaching is impossible is to assert that teaching on purpose, for a purpose, is impossible. For the urge in its gregarious form has other purposes, which concern the person of the teacher, his role, her specialization, in the context of the school; it has nothing in particular to do with learning. I am inclined to think that neither do schools. What anyone who thinks they are a teacher can do purposely is mainly of two natures:




One can transmit data, information. This is better known as communication. It is commonly assimilated to teaching, but, as students well know, really has nothing to do with it. This transmission is eminently possible and does not require a teacher.





One can model behaviors and practices, silently offering them up for imitation. This is not only possible, but inevitable. But to whatever extent we do it for a purpose, it is for one other than to teach them. In this modeling we exceed the role of the teacher.





Pedagogy, then, is precisely the in-between of the ego-mask and the school, their mutual insertion, the becoming-method or becoming-gregarious of an urge in a fantasy: “This is how the lessons are impressed.” In this sense to say or think that teaching is impossible is also to invoke the countless ways that learning takes place despite and beyond pedagogy. This is the beginning of the antipedagogical lesson. Let us consider it.

2



Sometimes, I think that I teach. When I do so I imagine I am not alone in underlining the evident gap between discussing practices and engaging in them. Classrooms have this virtue, that in them almost anything may be said; but to the degree that the desires that allow us to survive in such spaces remain unexamined, we will tend to confuse the ability to say almost anything with the ability to do almost anything. This gap in capacity is especially manifest for me in the context of philosophy or anthropology, in courses that take up topics such as spiritual exercises, mysticism, shamanism, or the many practices that P. Hadot calls “philosophy as a way of life.” I mean any topic where what is posited is not merely thinking differently in the context of a given way of life, but a thinking that (because it is not just a thinking) requires a conversion. Becoming someone or something else, living differently, in short. One can certainly talk about such matters endlessly, treating them as historical or sociological facts, without grasping what is vital in them—without, that is, being transformed in the doing.



The minimum form of the affirmation that teaching is impossible would then be that with regard to practices that require a conversion, at least, teaching is impossible. I found in myself, not just an urge to teach, to be the teacher, but to teach these topics, and the urge was frustrated. The role of teacher became, if not impossible, at least somewhat laughable. The reason was clear enough. No one can teach such practices in a school unless it is the school of such practices: Epicureanism needs the Garden … Thinking I taught, I communicated information concerning these practices, but at a great remove; I did not model them. Moreover, some of them seem separate from any known pedagogy: mystics don’t seem to me to have a school, but rather to be those who are usually expelled from schools. This is not because schools are dogmatic or authoritarian (though of course most are), but because of the sort of experience that mysticism seems to entail. (Or maybe not. One might go so far as to consider the maximum form of the claim, that the problem has to do with practice as such, with any practice other than those peculiar to schools as we know them.)



So what is left in such situations? The mere intention to teach what is impossible to teach, I suppose: the urge in its raw and complicated form, not its calcification into a pedagogy. We can try to collectively give in to the will to knowledge, to more than idle curiosity. That is, to what is in fact possible given the practices and ways of life that make schools as we know them possible. (As opposed to, and without in any way devaluing, those that destroy them, or mutate them until they are unrecognizable.) But I find that this will and that curiosity are unevenly distributed. You, teacher, must seduce your students into a certain fascination. That is what I call modeling, at least when modeling has a chance of success. It is akin to what psychoanalysts call the transference, or to hypnosis when it is grasped that what is at stake in it is something other than mind control, that the one hypnotized must at some level accept the process. It must involve your body, teacher, your gestures, movements, laughter: the mask, its generation, and its corruption. Those particulars can never be bypassed in the mimesis of the model.



But even if the will to knowledge or more than idle curiosity can be modeled and imitated, (and I do think that they can, on purpose and accidentally as well!) I do not think it is wise to therefore claim that teaching has happened, and is therefore possible. Something else is at stake. In modeling, the teacher’s ego-mask is revealed in its development (from the urge to the role), but also in its happy failure: the failed transition from the urge through the role to its calcification as pedagogy and its sedimentation in schooling are all provisionally laid bare. In at least one important sense, the teacher is naked. What has been modeled and perhaps imitated is still quite separate from the topics in question, from the experiences at stake in them. What has been staged is rather an antipedagogical problem.

3



Can one pass on anything other than the will to knowledge and more than idle curiosity? What about less exotic practices, those that seem more at home in what we know as schools? For two years I was part of a university committee concerned with feminist studies. Once, in the course of a review of our work, we tried to define what constituted, for us, a specifically feminist pedagogy. The conversation was both frustrating and (at least for me) quite amusing. (“Giving students a greater role in planning the curriculum,” someone suggested. “Allowing people to speak from their experience,” another said. “Encouraging connections between class readings and real-world issues,” a third added. And so on.) The more concepts and examples that we collectively proposed, the clearer it became that we could produce no difference between a specifically feminist pedagogy and good pedagogy in general. It seemed as if the problem was that we had it as our goal to stay away from the humdrum of the generic, unmarked good, and to cleave rather to a more rarefied good, the sharp edge of feminist politics. But in that humdrum, generic, unmarked mainstream, there are said to be good teachers, are there not? Is their pedagogy not good? Many, arguably most, of them are in no way feminists. Our true problem was not our desire to cling to the specificity of feminism—it was that we assumed that were the ones who impressed its lesson, that our school was where the lesson was to be impressed, and that feminism, our method, our pedagogy, was to be how the lesson was to be impressed. We had supposed that teaching is possible.



Do these assumptions have anything to do with feminism as a way of life? If feminism can be learned, not as a set of theories or “studies,” but as an attitude, as something that can grow into a resistant politics, it is because some of us are capable of modeling it as it exists and develops in our lives. As such it has zero informational content, or its content is incidental. That something like feminism exists at all suggests that it was, at some point, invented. At that time those who invented it were not producing new information (at least that was not what was remarkable in their invention). They were problematizing existing practices and the ways of life they flowed out of and into, proposing new ones. That something like feminism is still possible, still remarkable, suggests that someone can stage that problematization anew, in effect reinventing feminism. What does any of this, however, have to do with schooling?



The committee’s troubling, unstated conclusion was that that we, presumably experts in feminism as “study,” could not guarantee that, in teaching classes with feminist content, we were teaching feminism. (A student could, for example, pass a course with flying colors and in some fundamental way remain oblivious to sexism. The same went us as teachers of the course). Or, if we were teaching feminism, we could not define in what ways we were doing so in the context of “feminist studies.”



It ought to be clear by now that this version of the antipedagogical problem does not merely concern feminism. So, where to go from here? One familiar path is that of a certain ressentiment, leveraged in this case against the good teachers who do not mark the differences that we do, leveraged against students who do not become feminists or whose feminism is alien to us, leveraged ultimately against ourselves, in our inevitable failure. This ressentiment is fed by the failure of an ideal of representation and inclusivity (its index: the presence of a certain sort of data, of information) to effect anything other than a reform in schooling—in the curriculum, I mean, in “studies,” defined according to the standards, the good, of what we know as schools.



Another path, which I admit I fell into as if by instinct, would be that of bemusement. It would be to simultaneously admit that teaching is impossible and that feminism, if it is a form of resistance and not just of study, will be reinvented quite despite those of us who, well-meaning, might think we are teaching it.

4



Let us consider, then, the lesson of resistance, turning from reformist to revolutionary pedagogies. Another university tale: I was once asked to speak at a symposium called “Achieving Success as a Latino.” I was asked by the organizers to address the difficulties Latinos and Latinas might encounter at a predominantly Anglo institution: “obstacles,” more generally, that all minorities face in the educational system. I said more or less the following: I don’t want to speak purely in praise of schooling, the overcoming of obstacles as progress, confusing the efficacy of schooling with the unqualified good of learning. I want to affirm learning in its entirety and as a process, with all of its conflicts and breakdowns, not to adopt a narrative of successes in the face of hardships. I regard phenomena such as Latinas dropping out of school, not going to college, feeling alienated in college, not just as problems to be solved institutionally, by schools or by groups in schools acting as their proxy. If we view all of these “problems” as negativities, deficiencies, bad attitudes, we miss their complexity, what in them is positive, is desire. I think Latinos and everybody else have countless reasons and ways to engage with schools. I also think that Latinas (and everybody else!) have good reasons to resist some or all of what is institutionalized as education. Among other things, I am referring to what we know as schools: generally, spaces where training, discipline, authoritarianism, bureaucracy, are made more or less efficacious; spaces that are often culturally hostile or indifferent, etc.



A young Latino indeed ought to ask himself, “What is school to me? Why should I risk my life for this?”—of course “life” here is not the life taken away by the gun or torture, but the life of one’s barrio, community, friends, family—because many aspects of what it means to feel in one’s own skin, at home, or in a community are threatened in schools. That’s on the side of the construction of identity, a sense of self. On the side of the destruction of identity, the desire that so many of us have to overcome what we’ve been told we are—that process and its freedom are also threatened in that schooling has always had to do with acculturation to a dominant culture, language, religion, etc. And also in the sense that schools neither teach nor favor rebellion. Institutionally this is discussed in terms of curriculum and catchphrases like “campus climate,” “diversity,” etc., but I think the real issue is one of power and gregarious desires: the school’s explicit and implicit hierarchies and their insertion into greater social arrays. Let us consider those seen as “problems” or at least having “problematic attitudes” as resisting. I think that they are right to do so, at least as right as the schools in exercising power and modeling gregariousness. Some are more at home here than others. People inhabit, move through, move in and out of a school, at different speeds, for different reasons, in different moods, using different gaits. To regard resistance as a problem to be resolved by the school, or by us as its proxy, is to fully reinforce the role of the teacher in the school: “I am the one who solves this problem”—“I transform this problem into the good of the lesson.”



The critical question is: how are we using the school? What are we doing here if teaching is impossible? And this implies its converse: how is it using us? What is it doing with or to us (acknowledging that “it” is not a thing or subject, but the anonymous, gregarious actions of others)?

5



That talk ended with a proposal that I now recognize as well-intentioned (perhaps influenced by the good intentions of the symposium’s planners) but poorly thought out. It was a gesture characteristic of a certain anarchism that claims for itself the side of the good, that proposes its revolutionary politics as the staging of the ultimate good.



I said: So much for the side of the institution! Schooling doesn’t—can’t—end there. Gregariousness certainly does not. It is part of being engaged with an institution, resistantly or not, that one tends to orient much of one’s discourse and practices around the institution. (Supposing one wanted to define institutions, it might be worthwhile to begin by describing the various forms of this operation of capture). It takes some distance (and dropping out, along with the other forms resistance takes, is a way to attain that distance) to be able to speak of schools as I have been doing, or of pedagogy as an outgrowth of the urge to teach. But really, there are schools everywhere. If I were to discuss the other possibilities for schooling I could of course talk about activism, popular education, etc., but I would rather race to the utopian end and propose that schools should have the ultimate goal of abolishing themselves as particular, separate, specialized spaces. My political proposal is that all of society be a school: that the social field be coeval with the space of learning. This means, of course, that there would be a series of spaces, remarkable places of learning, rather than one megainstitution. It could come about through a collaboration between those happiest with schools as we know them, and those who resist or refuse schooling, relatively or absolutely.



My antipolitical criticism of that political proposal is that making a plan for all of society (especially one with a grandiose slogan such as “abolish schools as separated spaces!”) without aiming at annihilating what we know as society is to give ourselves a Cause. The Cause of Making All of Society into A School. Now the mask is transformed. I am no longer in the role of teacher, but that of teacher-activist: “I am still the one who resolves this problem”—now putatively through revolution instead of reform. Schooling would be coeval with society in the worst sense, fostering in people not only the illusion that teaching is possible, but that freedom can be taught (anarchist pedagogy in its most nightmarish form). We would have set out with the best of intentions and ended up with the most grotesque gregariousness. It is true that study is interminable and that schools are everywhere; but schooling is not for all that omnipresent—it can and does end.



I would rather restate that teaching is impossible (and this time perhaps the modesty of the claim, so hard to see at first, begins to shine through). To focus our efforts, our analyzes, on failure and resistance is to grasp the eccentric but vital role of modeling in the transmission of practices. It is inevitable that modeling will meet resistance. A model may be imitated, counterimitated, or met with sovereign indifference. We might cooperate, we might fight, or we might ignore each other. In that social chaos, in its interstices of order and stillness, someone might learn something. But nothing about this can be guaranteed. Why assume, why hope, even, that we will all collaborate? Why sculpt the mask in a way that arrogantly banks on success? It is the urge to teach, again reaching for the form of its survival. “I impress the lesson that schooling is interminable.”

6



I have already said that modeling is inevitable, and implied that it may be done more or less purposefully. This is difficult because we habitually vibrate in sync with others who share our models, and in this local phenomenon the entirety of our interactions is to effect tiny variants, microimitations and counterimitations, of each other’s practices. The micropolitics of power; or, a day in school. But modeling is also impersonal and indefinite. Its tautological claim: “I am the one who lives as I live” or even “I am the one who expresses the model that I am modeling.”



The fullness of a self or a person is, as far as I am concerned, always and only an artifice, that of an apparently completed mask. The mask of the teacher, however, is incomplete. To think, to say, to embody “I am the one who impresses the lesson” is to simplify, to fool ourselves into identifying with our own mask, to frustrate the many other desires clamoring against the role, demanding, if you will, other masks. To seduce anyone else (to seduce oneself!) into fascination with a model is something else than to mistake oneself for the one who impresses the lessons. It is rather to display the urge, the mask, the frustrated tendencies to pedagogy and schooling, with all of their defects and failures—the failures of the simple mask of the teacher, the gregarious phenomenon of the school, and ultimately the failure of method, of all pedagogy. This impersonation shows what in the urge to teach is impersonal.



One way to conceive of this impersonality is the “silent teaching” R. Blyth reports on in his books on Zen. “We teach silently and only silently, though we may be silent or talk.” Silence: the offering up of the model for imitation, with no attendant command to imitate (or maybe with the most parodic of commands). Informationless speech, laughter, sighs … your body, again, teacher, in its becoming-mask. Everything else is a dance of data.



Irreparably, to live is to offer one’s life up for imitation. “People teach what they can. People teach what they teach. Everybody teaches everybody else.” This is what I was getting at in deemphasizing the distinction between what can be passed on purposely and what is passed on inevitably. I am more interested in whether such things are done gracefully, as one may live one’s life more or less gracefully. And perhaps the most graceful lesson is that teaching is impossible. But how is that to be passed on? “The only way to teach not teaching is really not to teach.”

7



One final antipedagogical lesson, this one specifically for my friends, the anarchists. I hope it is clear that I have written from my own resistance. I like to think that, despite my several decades of study, I have resisted schooling. But my distance is double, since I observe that I maintain a willful incompetence when it comes to political movements that amounts to a form of resistance. There are, after all, schools everywhere! It is my style, my predilection, my wu-wei regarding schooling, regarding the roles of academics and activists. I believe that everything I have proposed about the urge to teach, about schools, and about pedagogy applies mutatis mutandis to activism, organizing, movements. Try the experiment yourself: go to a rally or meeting looking for teaching. You will find it. Ah, the pedagogy of rallies and meetings!



Some activists and their theorist friends are busy looking to the primitive past or the utopian future for a humanity without social institutions, as though discovering their absence someplace, somewhere, could lead to their amelioration or eradication today. Now, the absence of a given institution, especially one that I find intolerable, such as money or the police, is indeed a fascinating question for study. But study is interminable; it only leads to more study. I prefer to add to study another practice, to model a kind of disappearance, an incompetence that is a way to absent oneself from routinized activities on the side of schools as well as the side of the movements. It is possible to live this as something other than a negation. And as in all modeling, what I can do is simply to offer up the urge to teach and the urge to act as some desires among many. We can try to (and I suppose that we should) eradicate whatever social institutions we find to be intolerable; but we can also do what we can, silently, to lay bare our desires as we discover them, our social teachings as they meet resistances that, after all, have their reasons. We can be naked, with a mask on. Naturally, to call oneself an anarchist is to wear a fanciful mask: “I am the one who …” But if anarchism is our perhaps inevitable pedagogy, anarchy could be something else: our antipedagogy.

References





Blyth, R. (1964). Zen and Zen classics, Vol. 2. Tokyo: Hokuseido Press.



Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a way of life. Oxford: Blackwell.



CHAPTER 17. Against the Grain of the Status Quo: Anarchism behind Enemy Lines



Abraham P. DeLeon



Everyone is undercover. It’s just a matter of degree. Look around—just about everybody you see is in disguise, terrified of being unmasked as the complex human beings they are. (CrimethInc., 2005, p. 306)



Infiltration: a word that may evoke a host of thoughts and fantasies from soldiers operating behind enemy lines, police informants gaining access to criminal organizations, or to scenarios of radicals inserting themselves into corporations or research labs. Whatever the scenario, infiltration can be tactic that anarchists pursue when thinking about operating within current institutional realities, especially if interested in teaching in public schools. Although this claim is entangled within complex relationships of power and privilege, struggle arises wherever domination coalesces, especially within institutional structures and settings (Sharp, Routledge, Philo & Paddison, 2000). Power conjures, “the threadings, knottings and weavings” of social relationships through a intertwining of the social, political, moral, educational, and historical realities of a given society. In this way, power is “crucially and unavoidably spun out across and through the material spaces of the world” (Sharp, et al., 2000, p. 22).



This chapter thus looks to situate itself and build radical pedagogy within the threads and knots of contemporary relationships of power; in-between what Holloway (2010) has called the “cracks” of capitalism, trying to “desperately find … faults beneath the surface, or to create cracks by banging the walls” (p. 8). Cracks have emerged through environmental disaster, economic collapse, psychological alienation, a crisis of identity, and decades of war and imperial aggression conducted by the West. It is under these historical conditions that resistance needs to be conceptualized. Creating, finding and exploiting “cracks” within a diffused and networked capitalism demonstrates that dated narratives of revolutionary struggle are no longer viable and there is “no guarantee of a happy ending” (Holloway, 2010, p. 9). Unfortunately, although these narratives may provide comfort amid an onslaught of capitalism, war, death, terror, and alienation, they do not open up, nor allow, alternative possibilities of resistance to form outside the boundaries they construct. In some ways, these may only help to reproduce the current order we find ourselves in. This does not mean that we should resign ourselves to the throngs of nihilistic defeat, as there is indeed potential for radical hope within the cracks of Empire. The multitude, with its potential for infinite possibilities, can build a complex and dispersed resistance through the breaks, tears, and folds of our social order (Deleuze, 1992), and the tactics and pedagogies that we envision as radicals can attempt to capture this spirit. Although the manifestations of these cracks and folds is yet to be seen, I leave the reader to their own radical imaginations in devising ways to subvert a networked and diffused machine (Shukaitis, 2009).



Evoking the metaphor of a “machine,” as I describe the multifaceted nature of contemporary capitalism, harkens to Trotter’s (1990) claim that colonialism operated in a very similar way, divorced from individual interactions and operating abstractly through “official” and “unofficial” discourses, forms of knowledge, ways of knowing, the morality of a given era, and the reproduction of knowledge to name a few. The analogy of a machine also challenges that human agency is solely at the center of how social system operate, because machines, “create, distribute, and organize populations and impose regimes of conduct, agency and effectivity” outside of individual actors and agency (Grossberg, 2010, p. 36). Radicals (within and outside the labor movement) had ingenious ways in which to deal with the machines of capitalism, occurring through tactics that spanned strikes, sit-ins, walking out, and subversion to even more direct forms like sabotaging machinery, bringing production to a halt. Sabotage is a tactic that anarchists need to rethink in light of how labor is now dispersed among a wide variety of institutional realities (factories, banks, corporations, and public institutions, for example), as well as the contemporary knowledge and abstract economies. The machines of capitalism that produced goods during the height of the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century provide us a way in which to think of societal machines and tactics that can be adapted for current conditions. How do we as anarchists, who want to teach and work with students, deal with the contradictions of being located within the same institutions that seek to discipline bodies and coerce us? How do we sabotage these machines and build a radical pedagogy from this perspective?



Sabotage provides a provocative conceptual framework in which to think about building alternative forms of resistance and aligns with ways in which anarchists have historically conceptualized direct political action. This is even more interesting when we think of how this will emerge through educational practice, as teaching allows us to directly engage ideology, challenging students’ conceptions about the world around them. With this type of important, dare I say political work, why do some anarchists shun the world of public teaching and service? Education is at the “front lines” of the contemporary ideological war conducted by corporate media, official organs of the State, and influential economic institutions. Whether that emerges through corporate textbooks that omit subaltern experiences and worldviews, standardized testing that stress rote memorization, or a curriculum that reproduces Eurocentrism and Western ways of knowing, education is invested in reproducing dominant conceptions of the world. However, sabotage can take myriad forms, and this chapter will build on the conceptual idea of building politics of infiltration.



It has been well established that police and other State agents have infiltrated radical political movements, especially with the rise of anarchist praxis over the past two decades (Borrum & Tilby, 2004). Anarchists should think about assuming this same tactic, using the idea of infiltration as a guiding way to think about our praxis within institutional realities and as a way to think about diffused forms of sabotage. Although anarchism is rife with identity and lifestyle politics that detests any signs of “selling out,” this has only proven to further marginalize us in the eyes of the larger society that we must work at convincing how terribly oppressive the current social arrangement is. In the end, our movement is going to have to be broad-based and span multiple identities, social locations, political affiliations, and a renewed sense of politics that seeks to look at how, “the contemporary world has been made to be what it is [and] make visible ways in which it can become something else” (Grossberg, 2010, p. 1).



Stoler (2010) discusses the idea of reading and analyzing “against the grain” of archival documents to unearth new interpretations and voices. This chapter urges radicals to think of our social actions along these same lines of thought: against the grain of dominant ideologies that serve to support historically oppressive realities. In this chapter, I will attempt to propose a politics of infiltration through a peculiar anarchist lens that seeks to subvert capitalism and its accompanying institutional realities through a diffused resistance stemming from bodies; bodies immersed in oppressive institutional realities. I dance through theoretical traditions to demonstrate how infiltration can be conceptualized as not only a physical practice (such as our work in classrooms), but also can be a theoretical framework in which to situate our practice, always looking for cracks, weaknesses, and opportunities to sabotage dominant conceptions of the world that demonstrates another world is possible. Although radicals may think of this action as “selling out,” I want to reframe teaching and working within institutions as a potential form of infiltration, inserting other ways of knowing and being into the academy to challenge systemically oppressive realities. Shannon (2009) reminds us that cooptation lurks around every corner and Shukaitis (2009) warns us of the recuperative nature of capitalism. Both of these realities are firmly acknowledged as risks, however, it should not immobilize us into inaction. Nor should this resign us to “ghettoizing” ourselves into intellectual enclaves where conversations are more about nodding our collective heads in agreement rather than challenging our own practices with alternative voices and tactics. Indeed, tensions can be the basis for a critical reflection about what we are actually doing in our practice and engaging a wide variety of techniques and approaches to explore these, such as writing and political organization. Communities of practice, whether in activism or through qualitative research, are an essential feature of building bridges with other like-minded activists and scholars (Rossman & Rallis, 2003). Cooptation and recuperation are indeed challenges we will face but should not stop us from doing something, keeping in mind the question that Lorde (2003) had when she struggled with the tools of the master (p. 25). This chapter will hopefully allow the conversation to continue about the role of anarchist theory in building alternative forms of praxis, pedagogy, and direct action, especially within the context of public education and the contradictions that anarchists face within hierarchical and coercive institutions.

Anarchism and Education



To say that anarchists have a complex relationship with education and its accompanying structures is an understatement. Anarchism seems to fall along a wide continuum of theories and ideas about the role(s) of education (Suissa, 2010). Anarchists in Spain during the revolution relied heavily on the potential of education (Gribble, 2004) while other more recent anarchists have demonstrated the necessity in sometimes dropping out (see the literature from CrimethInc. for a full context). My own work has tried to integrate anarchist critiques in how we think about education and our sense of self (DeLeon, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2010a, 2010b). Being located in position of privilege (as a university professor) but also being self and institutionally identified as an indigenous man (I self-identify as Mestizo, which captures my cultural experiences; see DeLeon, 2010b for a richer explanation) has also brought an interesting perspective maneuvering within institutions that do not support values or perspectives we currently hold about the world around us.



Speaking from my own positionality as a man of color, schooling has always been a personally coercive experience, particularly the highly effective ways in which the machines of schooling marginalize and erase cultural ways of knowing that are not enveloped within the dominant Eurocentric culture that exists in the United States, or what Grossberg (2010) calls “European or North Atlantic modernity” (p. 71). Because my parents never taught me to speak Spanish for the retribution they faced when they spoke it at school in the 1950s and 1960s, it never connected me to a crucial component to my own identity and sense of self that language provides (Reagan & Osborn, 2002). In other words, historically oppressed peoples (spanning ethnic, racial, class, gender, dis(ability), etc. locations) have always dealt with the contradictions faced when working within institutions of the dominant culture, especially within the context of past historical and colonial relationships (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). Despite this, work still has to be done inside of these institutions of domination or they will reproduce unabated. Although I realize a subject is never whole but a fractured self comprised of multiple identities (Barker, 2008), the machine will continue to produce a specific type of disciplined and fractured subject unless they are subverted.



As an intellectual that produces knowledge and has classroom responsibilities and for those that have similar experiences, we are at the “frontlines” of engaging dominant ideology as our students walk into our classrooms with perspectives, identities, and subjectivities that are mired in corporate media and other dominant discourses. Knowing and understanding our mutual roles in a larger social movement is an important facet of critical work. Anarchists have critiqued education for its reproductive and coercive realities, echoing the concerns of many radical theorists in education today (Darder, Baltodano & Torres, 2009). Education domesticates desires, disciplines bodies, and tries to stifle creativity and imagination for rote standardization and high-stakes testing. The perils of education are felt along class, gendered, and racial lines, along with disability and sexuality. Anarchists have tried to think about the possibilities of education through a variety of critically engaged societal assemblages, comprised of different social movements, living arrangements, intimate encounters, artistic expressions, identity politics, discursive constructions, alternative claims of truth, and marginalized spiritualities. These assemblages give us, “a properly utopian confidence that things can change because it is … in continuous variation” (Buchanan, 2000, p. 119). Like the concept of the assemblage that comes from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, anarchism not only possesses a developed utopian “spirit” (Newman, 2009), but is also a body of theory that can be applied to a variety of different circumstances, further demonstrating that “no society has to be organized in the way it is, that there is always another way [that] can be activated by thinking differently” (Buchanan, 2000, p. 118). Education is at the center of this construction, as it also contains the potential to activate a different way of thinking about society and our problems.



Education has the potential to lead to self-transformation when its processes are guided by ideas such as cooperation, limiting coercive experiences, allowing for the potential(s) for growth and self-discovery, and learning to think critically about the production and reification of knowledge. Critical pedagogy has established this possibility through work that seeks a political project that questions the fundamental nature and purpose of education from a variety of different perspectives (Darder et al., 2009). Marxist dominated, radical thought in education has tended to follow the traditions from the Frankfurt School of critical theory, but has also been invigorated with voices from postmodernism, poststructuralism, feminism, eco-justice, and other critiques. Glaringly omitted has been anarchist theory, a radical and activist orientation that is rooted in protest politics, direct confrontation of the police, alternative ways of living/being, and is injected with theoretical work found at the university (Amster, DeLeon, Fernandez, Nocella II & Shannon, 2009). Although associated with representations of political terror and general mayhem, anarchism emerges from a wide variety of perspectives and is not easily definable, making it highly adaptable for different contexts. Because it has tended to be open-ended, anarchism has been adapted to a variety of settings, and education seems to be a location in which anarchists should concern themselves with (Suissa, 2010).



Anarchism is embedded in a politics that seeks to resist hierarchies, coercive experiences, and official and unofficial State politics. Although this is at the core of what many anarchists do, it has also integrated work that questions rigid boundaries of sexuality, class, racism, gendered oppression, and other political projects. Because it has been infused with a variety of different perspective and positionalities, it lends itself to being easily adaptable to a variety of situations, critiques, and approaches (Amster, et al., 2009). Anarchism appears to match the conception of Grossberg’s (2010) vision of cultural studies, a “complex product of multiple lines of force, determination, and resistance, with different temporalities and spatialities” that has to be “constructed, narrated, fabricated” (p. 41). The multiple lines of force, to utilize his characterization, coalesce to produce an anarchist discourse that supports a relentless critique on coercive authority and inspires us toward praxis.



Although intellectuals are guilty of injecting our own biases and perspectives into the representations we construct, it is those that organize under anarchist theory and principles that seem to offer us a provocative approach in creating alternative resistance strategies toward a diffused and networked capitalism. It would appear that the autonomous and decentralized nature of anarchist theory and practice allows for an interesting set of tools in which to work with that appear to be equally diffused like the machines of contemporary capitalism. Capitalism exists over a global network that traverses boundaries, shaping ideologies and forms of knowledge to our most intimate knowledge of self (Rose, 1989). Anarchism has also traversed the boundaries of theory and history, a vibrant political project that has existed in various locations across the globe. Within the academy, anarchism has been networked with other radical theories, like feminism, eco-justice, and critical animal studies. This makes anarchist theory and practice stand apart from other radical traditions because of the alliances that have been formed with other disciplines, but is also the point that makes it so challenging to do anarchism and produce anarchist theory and research.



This challenge is also compounded with the nature of radical politics, as there are usually multiple and competing interests that need to be taken into consideration. For example, many conservatives can build their own strategies around common political, social, or economic interests (the Tea Party, “pro-life,” a return to “traditional” ways of life, etc.) and appear to meet the needs of its broad constituency. Although many conservative policies directly counter the economic needs of its base support as it has been pointed out in the literature, their influence remains and is one of the paradoxes of contemporary politics in the United States (Gilbert, 2011). Radicals and progressive activists are so divided among issues surrounding race, gender, class, identity, disability, or sexuality that these common links are not so readily apparent. Despite this, anarchism provides a discourse that traverses a diverse range of political principles, but it is also guided by radical praxis that has been utilized by a variety of social movements that are equally as diverse. This makes anarchist theory a position full of possibility, becoming a broad umbrella in which to situate a wide variety of political concerns.



From the streets of Seattle in 1999, the DIY movement in many alternative communities, to the kitchens of activists feeding the homeless for Food Not Bombs, these actions have been influenced by anarchist politics and can be “read” and analyzed through an anarchist lens. For us in education that are struggling with the meaning of our pedagogy in light of the hierarchical and coercive nature of most educational experiences in the United States, this can allow us to explore diverse political strategies, praxis, and movements to search for synergies between them and what we do as teachers and educators in our classrooms everyday. As this particular edited collection is dedicated to anarchist forms of pedagogy, this diversity of thought and praxis in anarchist theory can help us formulate some ideas about situating ourselves as anarchists within coercive and hierarchical institutions that we eventually would like to see dismantled.

Anarchism, Sabotage, and a Politics of Infiltration



It is widely accepted that State agents have infiltrated radical social movements historically (Fernandez, 2008). Whether through direct insertion into radical groups or sophisticated crowd surveillance, the State is invested in destroying and subverting social movements that question State authority or the institutions of capitalism. State agents appear to have a tremendous amount of authority and autonomy in these operations and are able to take direct action against any individual or group deemed a threat. The political and social backdrop in the wake of September 11 has granted State agents and authorities even more direct control (Parenti, 2007). Radical, progressive, and liberal political groups throughout the United States have endured wiretaps, police raids, and State surveillance aimed at arrest, incarceration, or serving as informants (Borum & Tilby, 2004). Through these types of operations, the State attempts to envelop, discredits, or destroy social and political movements from within (Fernandez, 2008).



If this is indeed the reality in which the State operates through the police and other agencies, radical and progressive traditions of marches, sit-ins, boycotts, and other vestiges from our protest past seem wholly inadequate. Combine this with the diffused nature of contemporary capitalist arrangements and how it spans the milieu of social experiences, it becomes an even greater challenge to resist. However, we know this. We have historical evidence in which to study how other past actions have been done. There is potential evidence that exists from participants and survivors who have witnessed or experienced these State interventions that needs qualitative work to explore these stories further. The initial seeds in which to build from already exist for us to grow.



Using an analogy from nature (specifically “growth”) highlights my own commitment in imagining potentials that are organic in nature and reimagining traditional coercive relationships. Hierarchical arrangements, the ordering of life, spatial and architectural arrangements, and the privileging of positivist discourses and ways of knowing are byproducts of Enlightenment philosophy and European colonial projects (Legg, 2007). Although these have shaped the West in fundamental ways, resistance has to move beyond positivist ways of knowing and thinking about current social, political, and economic realities. This also means dispersing ourselves throughout a variety of social locations through insertion and infiltration, disguising oneself for the current task at hand. As CrimethInc. (2006) provocatively asks the reader, “Do you find yourself wishing that a passerby would take advantage of his squeaky-clean look to do some dastardly revolutionary deed?” (p. 306). CrimethInc. has provided an interesting way to think about direct action, especially since they urge us to become “that squeaky-clean passerby … [that] … acts certain ways so they can move through a repressive social environment without arousing suspicion” (p. 306). Because they claim that everyone is acting and playing their social role anyways, we are all “experts on acting” (p. 306) which is a key component to infiltration: playing a part that might not necessarily be one that an activist would normally personally adopt, but helps to “gather intelligence, spread disinformation [and] create disruption” (p. 306).



The official role of “teacher” requires us to assume certain subjectivities and a willingness to play institutional roles deemed “true” and “acceptable.” This is especially relevant for those of us who have radical politics and find the operations of schools at all levels in the United States to be particularly disturbing and repugnant. But being a teacher seems to encompass a performative spirit, as the classroom and the identity of teacher becomes a role in which to play out lived and embodied ideologies. Thinking of teaching as performance makes the classroom an exciting and invigorating space for learning, but, this performative reality of identity escapes school walls through our circumstances and those identities assumed by us through personal experiences, the media, and other forms of representation. Pelias (2008) discusses the performative role of identity, especially when it comes to gender or other socially sanctioned identities assumed valid and real.



I have been called forth, called to the theatrical and cultural stage, called to move my performing body as an ideological and disciplined subject. This interpolation turns my body into a site that is worked upon and into a source for understanding. I maneuver and am maneuvered among the scripts I encounter, sometimes consenting, sometimes resisting, but never escaping the apparatus of it all. I am caught, tethered to the system of my own and others’ making. I am an actor performing life. (p. 65)



The idea of performance and what this means for praxis and research is a provocative way in which to think how we assume our various identities because as Pelias aptly points out, resistance is also a vital component to the performances of everyday life.



Performance and performative methodologies, a burgeoning interest in autoethnography and critical qualitative research, demonstrates the importance of the body in interpreting and constructing what is considered “reality” (Markula, 2008; St. Pierre, 2008). Bodies lie at the heart of the experiential nature of human life and society, because we need to, “bring the body out from the shadow of the mind” (Hardt, 1993, p. 107) to better understand the role(s) of bodies in radical and revolutionary movements and insurgencies. Bodies can playfully resist or infiltrate historically oppressive institutions to sabotage from within: a fragmented and postmodern insurgency. “Insurgencies are the incubators of new ideas and knowledges; places where hopes and energies that there could exist other forms of social arrangements different from that what exists today, that there are alternatives, are cultivated” (Shukaitis, 2009, p. 63). What this entails though is an understanding of the importance that performance plays in the formation of our identities, but also in how we interact with others across a range of social spheres. Performance thus becomes a site of resistance that demonstrates how politics, culture, ideology, power, governmentality, and knowledge intersect through the bodies of historical actors (Denzin, 2003).



Anarchism addresses issues of identity and embodiment and thus is invested with the body, in terms of issues like race, class, or how sexuality has been constructed (discursively, ideologically, politically, economically, etc.) in the West (Heckert, 2005). Because anarchism has explored identity and its role in radical political struggles, anarchism provides a history of thinking about what identity means in contemporary society, stressing its socially constructed nature and the performative role it plays in building our inner self. CrimethInc. urges us to “spend time learning your character” (p. 308), but what does this mean within the context of education and specifically, becoming-teacher? Traditionally, teacher is associated with a specific way of being. Educational theories abound that tell us that behavior (usually collected under “behaviorism”) of students should be the locus of educational practice and a majority of educational thought has been traditionally grouped under this mantra: punishment for rules infraction, assigning grades for work that meets specific criteria, strict demarcation of time and space, and the closed system of knowledge that “official” school curricula reproduce (Apple, 2000).



Being “in charge” and the sole authoritarian voice that delivers curriculum divorced of historical context and other ways of knowing are ways in which teachers are constructed today. With the rise of standardized testing over the past several decades, this has also intensified. Art, social studies, physical education and other disciplines that are not tied to state tests are rapidly disappearing; the logic of schooling and education now being more directly tied to systems of accountability, coercion, and control (Hursh, 2008). Higher education has also not escaped this type of thinking about practice and the role(s) and interests schooling should serve. The recent rise in a standardized approach to education is at the forefront of educational thought, as debates are constructed within tight discursive parameters. Although these are the ways in which teachers have been constructed, we can resist these ways of being and begin to spread disinformation and establish ideological critique as a basis for an invigorated critical pedagogy.



Infiltration could also possibly occur through a variety of positions in educational settings. Substitute to part-time teaching, filling adjunct positions to even pursuing full-time work are all ways in which the anarchist can insert her/himself into the machines of contemporary schooling. Integrating critical discourses, forgotten histories, new forms of media that offer critiques of contemporary arrangements, exercises that allow students to deconstruct ideology, or providing evidence that helps students question the notion of reality itself are ways in which teachers can subvert the status quo. Through reflective and critical writing assignments, students can also explore their own forms of subjectivity. In the midst of an educational climate steeped in standardized measurement, these types of actions will provide a stark contrast to the experiences that most students become accustomed to while sitting in desks and doing what they are told, devoid of historical context and purpose.



Even leadership positions can be assumed for short amount of times to assure that the logics of the institution itself does not begin to infect the infiltrator, always with an eye on the dangerous possibilities of coercion and cooptation. But within these positions for short period of times, decisions can be made that greatly influence the lives of students and these should not be underestimated. Whatever action the infiltrator decides upon is irrelevant. The more important issue is recognizing the necessity in not shunning teaching or other ways in which to enter institutions as a political misstep, defeat, or secular sin, but instead a way to engage with others and to convince a broader public that other ways of knowing and organizing society indeed can and should exist.

Toward Exits: Infiltration and Lines of Escape



In this chapter I have tried to establish what anarchism can offer those who wish to teach in coercive and hierarchical educational institutions. Akin to “selling-out” in some radical circles, the desire to work with children and make direct impacts through ideological or curricular sabotage, organized under a loose network of resistance, is a strategy that seems to match the diffused nature of contemporary capitalism. Anarchism, especially when infused with other radical sensibilities, gives us an interesting set of tools and a language of the ever-present potential for resistance. Although anarchists have always stood in opposition to coercive institutions, anarchism can offer us ways to think about navigating the “reality” of institutional life through direct infiltration and subversion. However, I would argue, that anarchism is also about escape, or better yet, what Papadopoulos, Stephenson & Tsianos (2008) call “lines of escape” that “enables us to examine the often neglected engine of transformation which occurs without a master plan and without guarantees … a means, not an end” (p. 61). The work of an anarchist saboteur is not only in pointing out the inherent contradictions of contemporary capitalist arrangements, it is also in providing space for the imagination to flourish that seeks new possibilities for social organization, “transform[ing] the present as part of an organic process in which already existing tendencies are built on, nurtured, and actively engaged with” (Suissa, 2009, p. 244).



I have also highlighted the concerns anarchists face, as the recuperative and coercive nature of education, and Euro-modernity more broadly, cannot be underestimated. This means that anarchism has to be continuously aware of its own internal contradictions and its own sense of privilege, while also recognizing its marginalized space even within radical thought, fighting the dominant representations of anarchism as lawless, selfish, and individualistic, divorced of community responsibility. Even with this understanding, these words arise from an intellectual that is in the middleground of social experiences, between those of the dominant (my institutional role and its accompanying cultural capital) and the indigenous roots that I self-identify with and embody. The contradictions of contemporary capitalism are especially present in the bodies of those that exist in the margins or find their own construction of self that is torn between worlds of privilege, ambivalence, alienation, and oppression.



Despite this being a reality for some of us privileged enough to think and theorize about these issues, this does not resign us to defeat but can instead be a place to build political strategies that are adaptable to a wide variety of situations and contexts. This is also important for radicals, especially anarchists torn between wanting to perform public service but fear the coercive and institutional reality that spaces of education today now assume. Hardt and Negri (2004) argue that the multitude (comprised of you, me and everyone else) is a series of vast potentialities, from new ways to organize labor, exploring the imagination and its role in radical politics, to different ways of living together socially. “The multitude … might thus be conceived as a network: an open and expansive network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally, a network that provides the means of encounter so that we can work and live in common” (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. xiv). This is the strength and the challenge of our current historical moment. However, anarchist theory provides a way in which to think about the linking of these multiplicities and their anchor being in the notion of imaginative and radical practice: from infiltration to direct confrontation. And for teachers who also assume an anarchist stance toward social problems, this becomes even more important as we try to understand the contradictions of working in hierarchical institutions while maintaining a commitment toward a politics rooted in radical difference and reimagining coercive and hierarchical State institutions.

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AFTERWORD. Let the Riots Begin



Allan Antliff



Rooted in antiauthoritarian values often at odds with the “mainstream,” anarchists conceive of education as a site of critical reflection and creative license, where life and learning comingle, giving rise to ways of being that prefigure and realize our ideals on a practical level, as a lived reality. And on that score, as I read this book, I was struck again by the diversity of approaches and perspectives within anarchist pedagogy, as well as the many avenues awaiting further development. Saku Pinta’s study of the Industrial Workers of the World’s Finnish-American Work People’s College, for example, cites a college attendee reminiscing about the school’s curriculum, which included “Bogdanoff and ‘Kalle’ Marx.” The reference is to the Russian Marxist Alexandr Bogdanov, whose theories concerning the need for workers to organize autonomous educational institutions inspired a short-lived mass “proletarian culture” educational movement (the “Prolet’kult”) in the Soviet Union before Lenin intervened. Lenin, who opposed Bogdanov’s theory of Marxism as a “proletarian science” (which he had critiqued in his 1909 philosophical tome, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism), demanded the Prolet’kult be brought under State and Communist Party control. And so the organization was subsumed into the Soviet Ministry of Education where it continued propagating Bogdanov’s ideas on a much-diminished scale until it was shut down for good in the early 1930s. In its heyday, the Prolet’kult idea spread to the English-speaking world, contributing to a substantial workers’ education movement in the United Kingdom during the 1920s and ‘30s. Some of Bogdanov’s writings were translated into English and they circulated in other languages as well. Discovering his work figured in the curriculum of the Work People’s College is intriguing, given Bogdanov’s hostility toward anarchism, which he dismissed as “unscientific,” as opposed to Marxism, which was promoted as the class-based “scientific” knowledge system of the coming “proletarian” era. How IWW activists at the WPC reconciled the tenets of proletarian culture with the educational ideas of Kropotkin and other anarchists, then, remains an open question. Perhaps Pinta will take up this issue in a future study.



Then there are the innovations realized at the Toronto Anarchist Free Space and Anarchist Free School, which I helped found (in Fall 1998) and where I cofacilitated a number of courses before Jeff Shantz, who writes on these projects, joined (in July 1999 I left Toronto for a teaching position at the University of Alberta). During the time of my involvement I was completing my first book, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (2001), whose focal point is an anarchist educational institution and art school (a Francisco Ferrer-inspired Modern School) in World War I-era New York City. This history helped shape my contributions to the mission statement, art-related course offerings, and organizational logistics of the Toronto Anarchist Free School; and the Free School/Free Space experience, in turn, impacted on the art history I was writing. Other contributors to anarchist learning through the arts included Adrian Blackwell, who constructed an architectonic sculpture configuring the Anarchist Free School’s antihierarchical principles (Model for a Public Space, 1999) and Luis Jacob, who created an art installation utilizing records from our founding meetings (Anarchist Free School Minutes, 1999) to promote anarchist education in art gallery settings. It is fair to say, then, that in addition to Shantz’s focus on class-specific activism, the Toronto Anarchist Free School and Anarchist Free Space brought new ideas to the longstanding tradition of anarchist pedagogy in the arts.



But I digress. Shantz focuses on the ways in which our activities challenged the capitalist status quo for good reason. Anarchist educational projects routinely generate contestation, internally by virtue of the diversity of opinions and debates they encourage and externally by virtue of what they are: sites of learning at odds with the capitalist State-adjudicated socioeconomic system pervading today’s societies. Coming to grips with contestation is important, because we need to build our projects in full knowledge of what we are up against. One of the most exciting aspects of this book is its critical engagement with this issue in chapters such as David Gabbard’s analysis of the U.S. public school system or Joseph Todd’s discussion of contested terrain beyond State-based compulsory education where, as the home schooling movement reveals, absence of government authority is no guarantee that anarchic values are being realized. These studies are complimented by some very rigorous examinations of anarchic educational practices which foreground the gaps between aspiration and realization. I am thinking, in particular, of Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan’s discussion of Paideia, a long-running school in the city of Mérida, Spain, where students and instructors alike are constantly negotiating how best to realize anarchist educational values in conditions fraught with potential or real conflict. Matthew Weinstein’s analysis of the spaces of learning created by street medics at protests captures a different kind of tension. Here, under conditions of stress and emergency, we have an anarchist politics of “crisis pedagogy” in which street medics, “even when denying explicit connections to anarchism, adopt much of its ethos” out of necessity, proving once again that anarchism is nothing if not practical!



What is to be gained from pursuing educational projects under anarchism’s auspices?



Justin Mueller, Sarah Motta, and other contributors bring fresh perspectives to this issue in relation to many canonized theorists of antiauthoritarian pedagogy—A.S. Neill, Paulo Freire, and Ivan Illich, for example—revealing that anarchism can serve as a powerful evaluative tool for revisiting their ideas. Similarly, it is important to address relationships between anarchism, academic systems of learning, and the kind of “high” theory so valued in some quarters of the academy. Projecting anarchic values into university curriculums or creating anarchic academic spaces autonomous from such institutions is tricky terrain, as Elsa Noterman and Andre Pusey argue in their study of experimental educational projects in Leeds. Despite the problems, neither they nor Caroline K. Kaltefleiter and Anthony J. Nocella II are ready to give up on the idea that universities can serve as generative sites for anarchist politics. That said, how one goes about sustaining these politics is an important issue, particularly as more and more anarchists create spaces for themselves within the academy. Kaltefleiter and Nocella’s hands-on advice to anarchist academics for sustaining their militancy in a university setting is, arguably, an integral part of the process. Equally important is a willingness to theorize from a stance of engagement, Alex Khasnabish’s study of the Zapatista movement being a case in point. Now, I am not suggesting that ideas founded in academic theory have no place in anarchist pedagogy. Lucy Nicholas and Abraham DeLeon offer compelling arguments to the contrary, demonstrating “riots for the mind,” to paraphrase my favorite Toronto Anarchist U slogan, can also be weapons. My point is that anarchist pedagogy is not about critiquing the present state of affairs; it’s about subverting and transcending oppressive social formations so as to realize our freedom to creatively shape our lives in the fullest sense. Changing society anarchically through learning, therefore, is a process of “becoming anarchist” that necessarily eludes any final resolution.



Allan Antliff

Canada Research Chair

University of Victoria, Canada

CONTRIBUTORS



Alejandro de Acosta writes on anarchist philosophy and esthetics. He is currently composing amoral essays inspired by Gracián and Hume. Since moving to Austin, Texas, seven years ago, he has launched the micropress mufa::poema, publishing and freely distributing eight booklets of poetry and philosophy. He taught philosophy in the university setting for ten years.



Allan Antliff is Canada Research Chair, University of Victoria, and is the author of Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007) and editor of Only a Beginning (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004), a documentary anthology of anarchist writings and activism in Canada.



Abraham P. DeLeon is an assistant professor of Foundations of Education at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies. His research interests are interdisciplinary, spanning cultural studies, critical pedagogy, anarchist theory, critical animal studies, space and place, postcolonial theory, and autoethnography. Some of his writing has appeared in journals such as Educational Studies, Equity & Excellence in Education, Critical Education, and Theory in Action and in a wide variety of edited book collections. He was also a member of the editorial collective that published Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy (Routledge, 2009) and has coedited Critical Theories, Radical Pedagogies: Towards New Perspectives for the Social Studies with E. Wayne Ross (Sense Publishers: 2010). He lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his partner and feline companion.



Isabelle Fremeaux was, until December 2011, senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has left academia in order to start a Utopian experiment in radical education. John Jordan is an art activist. He cofounded the direct action groups Reclaim the Streets and the Clown Army, worked as a cinematographer for Naomi Klein’s The Take, coedited the book We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-scapitalism (Verso, 2004). Together they founded the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, a collective of artists and activists who develop action research projects focusing on creative forms of resistance and popular education. They cowrote Les Sentiers de I’Utopie, a book-film project about Utopian communities in Europe (La Découverte, 2011), which contains an initial version of the chapter published in this volume.



David Gabbard is a professor of educational foundations in the College of Education at East Carolina University. He has edited or coedited several important books dealing with contemporary educational policy issues, including Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy: The Effects of School Reform in a Neoliberal/Neoconservative Age (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008) and Education Under the Security State (Teachers College Press, 2008).



Robert H. Haworth is an assistant professor in the Department of Professional and Secondary Education at West Chester University. He teaches courses focusing on the social foundations of education, anarchism and critical pedagogies. He has published and presented internationally on anarchism, youth culture, informal learning spaces, and critical social studies education. He cofounded worker-owned and -operated Regeneration TV as well as other academic research collectives. Currently he is working on a coedited book on Critical Perspectives and Informal Learning, as well as writing a single-authored book entitled: Horizontal Imaginaries: Education, Spontaneity, and Desire.



Nathan Jun is assistant professor of philosophy and coordinator of the philosophy program at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. He is coeditor (with Shane Wahl) of New Perspectives on Anarchism (Lexington Books, 2009) and (with Dan Smith) of Deleuze and Ethics (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and the author of Anarchism and Political Modernity (Continuum, 2011).



Caroline K. Kaltefleiter is coordinator of women’s studies and associate professor of communication studies at the State University of New York College at Cortland and recent director of the Sacco and Vanzetti Foundation. She has over twenty years of broadcast activism experience as a news anchor and producer for public and community radio stations in Texas, Georgia, Ohio, and New York. She served as producer and director of the documentary Burn Out in the Heartland, which investigates the crystal methamphetamine culture among teens in Iowa and Nebraska. She continues to work on radio documentaries for National Public Radio and anchors a radio program titled The Digital Divide on public radio station WSUC-FM. She received her PhD from Ohio University in communication and women’s studies. She holds an MA from Miami University and participated in the Center for Cultural Studies, where she began her research on youth subcultures and activism including work on youth culture, capitalism, postfeminism, and popular culture. Her current research project articulates cyberfeminism within a discourse of new media studies. The project examines the construction, manipulation, and redefinition of women’s lives within contemporary technoscientific cultures.



Alex Khasnabish is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He is the author of two books, Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibility (University of Toronto Press, 2008) and Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global (Zed Press, 2010). He has also written several journal articles and book chapters about contemporary radical politics, globalization, and social movements. Khasnabish’s current research focuses upon the relationship between radical social change struggles and the radical imagination. He sees his academic work as an extension of his political commitments to an anarchist-inspired anticapitalist, antioppressive, and anticolonial practice.



Curry Stephenson Malott is an assistant professor in the Department of Professional and Secondary Education at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. His research interests are wide-raging, focusing most recently on the history of education from a Marxist perspective. He has published and presented in many areas of critical pedagogy from countercultures, cognition, neoliberalism, and leadership, to neocolonialism and Native North America. All of his work is connected by the common goal of contributing to the emergence of a postcapitalist global society.



Sara C. Motta focuses her research on the politics of subaltern resistance, with particular reference to Latin America. She has written about the Latin American Third Way Governments of the Concertación in Chili and the Workers’ Party in Brazil in relation to their role in stabilizing and normalizing neoliberal hegemony. A second strand of her research is focused on new forms of subaltern politics in the region, with particular reference to social movements in Argentina (unemployed movements), Venezuela (urban land movement) and Brazil (Landless Workers Movement and Solidarity Economy Movement). This research has led her to explore the politics of knowledge and the linkages between knowledge, power, and exclusion, as well as the ways in which new social movements are reinventing democratic and participatory forms of knowledge-creation that challenge the academic privilege of the academy. Methodologically, she is therefore interested in developing movement-relevant research and participatory research methods. As part of this she is also interested in the pedagogy of dissent and the use of popular education and critical education in and outside the university in the forging of struggles and practices of social justice.



Justin Mueller is a graduate student in political science, with a focus on political theory at Purdue University. His primary research interests include: anarchism as a movement, a political/social theory, and an analytical framework; democratic theory; politics and education; power and authority; political economy; political ideology; and U.S. foreign policy.



Lucy Nicholas is currently completing per PhD in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh considering the possibility of understanding the self and others without or beyond the lenses of sexual difference. Per research has focused on poststructuralist anarchism, queer theory, existentialist ethics, pedagogy, and broader gender and sexuality theory. Ze has published journal articles about poststructuralist anarchism, riot grrrl, DIY punk, sexuality and gender and presented internationally on the same topics. Ze is also a zine maker and an active member of anarchist, queer, and feminist communities.



Anthony J. Nocella II completed his PhD in social science at Syracuse University and has taught at SUNY Cortland and Hamline University. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Nocella has an interest in security, conflict and peace studies, cultural foundations of education, criminology, disability studies, critical media studies, critical animal studies, and environmental studies. He has taught workshops in mediation and tactical analysis, and assisted in a number of legal committees in the Americas, including working with the Mennonite Central Committee, American Friends Service Committee, and Christian Peacemaker Teams. Nocella has published more than twenty-five scholarly articles, cofounded more than twenty-five political organizations including the Sacco and Vanzetti Foundation, and serves on five boards including the American Friends Service Committee. He has cofounded four journals: Green Theory and Praxis, Peace Studies Journal, Journal on Critical Animal Studies, and Journal on Terrorism and Security, is on the editorial board of four other journals, and has published more than ten books including coediting Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy (Routledge, 2009) and An Economy of Sustainability: Anarchist Economics (AK Press, 2010). Feel free to contact him at: www.anthonynocella.org



Elsa Noterman is Program Associate at the Community Strategies Group of the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C., where she has worked since 2008. Her work includes research on community foundations and community groups working in rural areas of the United States. At CSG she also provides support for peer-learning sessions and publications for local groups working on social justice issues in these areas. While on a sabbatical year in the UK she helped to establish the Really Open University and coorganized several participatory workshops to collaboratively envision what an alternative university might look like and discuss the possible creation of a knowledge commons. She has a long-term commitment to working for social justice in a wide range of areas including in antiwar and anticapitalist movements, green affordable housing projects, and alternative education initiatives.



Saku Pinta has a PhD from the Politics, History, and International Relations Department at Loughborough University. His research examines moments of theoretical and practical convergence between class struggle and antiparliamentarian anarchisms and marxisms. He has been active in the labor movement, as a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, as well as other independent media and anticapitalist projects. His recent creative projects include work in the capacity of researcher, writer, and coproducer on the documentary film To My Son in Spain: Finnish-Canadians in the Spanish Civil War and as a researcher, writer, and actor in the feature-length docudrama Under the Red Star (2011).



Andre Pusey is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK. His research is looking at ways in which social movements engage in “value struggles” which both defend and (re)produce the common(s). He has been active in movements, such as Earth First! and the Camp for Climate Action, as well as autonomous social centers and an assortment of anticapitalist initiatives for a number of years. Recently he has helped to establish a group called the Really Open University, which aims to both resist savage spending cuts across higher education and open a up a space for critical dialogue and debate about the both the role and methods of education and knowledge production.



Jeff Shantz has been a community organizer, rank-and-file union activist and anarchist for decades. He has been active in a range of groups and projects (IWW, Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, Who’s Emma? Infoshop, Anarchist Free Skool, and Kick It Over magazine among others). His publications include numerous articles in movement publications including Anarchy, Social Anarchism, Green Anarchy, Earth First! Journal, Northeastern Anarchist, Industrial Worker, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, Onward, Arsenal, and Processed World. His writings have also appeared in academic journals including Critical Sociology, Critique of Anthropology, Feminist Review, and New Politics as well as numerous anthologies. His book Constructive Anarchy: Building Infrastructure of Resistance (Ashgate, 2010) is a groundbreaking discussion of contemporary anarchist projects. Currently he teaches at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver.



Joseph D. Todd is a doctoral student as Montclair State University (MSU) in the pedagogy and philosophy program and an adjunct instructor at MSU and Bergen Community College teaching both philosophy and education courses. His areas of interest involve reimagining student-teacher relationships, authority and discipline, learning and play, imagination and creativity, and learning technologies. He and his wife also homeschool/deschool/unschool their two children, who have never experienced the traditional educational paradigm.



Matthew Weinstein is a professor of science education at the University of Washington-Tacoma. He is the author of Bodies out of Control: Rethinking Science Texts (Peter Lang, 2010) and Robot World: Education, Popular Culture, and Science (Peter Lang, 1998), as well as many articles and chapters on the politics of human subjects and the project of critical science literacy more broadly.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS



I first and foremost want to thank PM Press for their support of this project. I can’t say enough great things about the folks who have helped to make this collaboration happen. I also want to thank all the authors who contributed to this volume. The work you are doing is inspiring, and I appreciate that you trusted me to publish your thoughts. Additionally, I want to acknowledge my lifelong partner Holly and my kids Rachel and Dylan. Your patience and critical feedback through this process have been invaluable. Having your ten-year-old child ask, “Why do we have to go to school?” works as a great springboard for reflection, discussion, and action. I also want to thank my mom and dad for being supportive over the years. Additionally I want to thank my brother for turning me on to punk rock at an early age.



I definitely want to thank many of my friends who have always been supportive and have pushed me in far-off directions I never thought possible. To name a few, Bryan Chu, Stacey Duncan, Chris Adams, Curry Malott, Eric Alvarez, Gregory Wegner, Joseph Caroll-Miranda, Mostafa Mouheeddine, Manal Hamzeh, Marc Pruyn, Peg Finders, Will Watts, Zack de la Rocha, and many more.



I think it is also appropriate to say “thank you” to the anarchists who are no longer with us. They have been integral in reenergizing some of our current movements to contest global capitalism and reimagining how we might organize ourselves differently. I keep learning so much from their raw honesty and critical work.



Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to Don LaCoss, one of the most thoughtful and dedicated people I have met. His insights and conversations meant so much to me during a rough spot in my life and through the process of getting this book together. He is definitely missed!



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