Todd May - Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism

Preface

This book began as a conversation on a train headed from Pittsburgh to Washington to attend the Eastern Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association. I was trying to explain to a friend, Mark Lance, what the political theory of poststructuralism was all about. He listened more patiently than he should have and then said, "It sounds like anarchism to me." That comment was the seed of an article, "Is Post-Structuralist Political Theory Anarchist?"which appeared in Philosophy and Social Criticism in 1989and eventually of the present work.

I believe that people familiar with feminist theory will discover that much of the perspective developed here has resonances with feminism, and some may wonder why I have not discussed those resonances in the text. The explanation is simple, having to do with the limitations of my own expertise. It would take a grasp broader than my own to do justice to both feminism and poststructuralism at the same time. I must, therefore, leave that task to someone else.

Introduction

Political philosophy, especially in the Continental tradition, is a project perpetually haunted by crisis. This is of necessity, because it inhabits that shifting space between what is and what ought to be. Unlike much of traditional ethics, on the one hand, and metaphysics on the other, which also inhabit that space, the work of political philosophy is dictated by the tension between the two, rather than by one of the poles. That is why Kant distinguishes ethics from justice, arguing that justice requires the balancing of a multiplicity of wills rather than merely the correct determination of the will.1 On his view, the task of ethics is primarily to discuss what ought to be, as divorced from what is, and only later to ask how the ought applies to the is. That view remains with us, alive still in such disparate ethical projects as utilitarianism and theories of practical reasoning.2 (I shall propose below a view of ethics that rejects this kind of divorce of the ought from the is.)3 Alternatively, metaphysics focuses on the pole of what is; its project is to describe our world. But metaphysics is not entirely separable from considerations that may broadly be called ethical: it partakes of the normativity inhabiting the epistemology that provides its foundation.

1 "Justice is therefore the aggregate of those conditions under which the will of one person can be conjoined with the will of another in accordance with a universal law of freedom" (Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, trans. John Ladd [Indianapolis: Boobs-Merrill, 1965], p. 12). Kant, of course, tries to resolve this tension by positing the unity of freedom at a higher level. This attempted resolution does not, however, affect his recognition that there is a tension to be addressed between what is and what ought to be.

Political philosophy, however, has only discussed the ought given what is. As the social configuration shifts, so must the philosophical approach.

"Philosophy," wrote Theodor Adorno, "which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed."4 The obsolescence Adorno refers to is that predicted by Marx after the communist revolution, an obsolescence that was to overtake philosophy only by its realizationthe unity between its concrete existence and its goal. What Adorno sees correctly here, cast in Hegelian terms, is that without the discordance between the world as it exists and the world as it is envisioned (and, for Marxism, to envision the world is always to draw its possibilities from its existence), there is no need for (political) philosophy. Political philosophy is precisely the articulation of that discordance.

It is fitting, and perhaps even welcome, then, that political philosophy is now in crisis. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has reshaped the terrain so that the foundation of existence upon which was built much of the vision of what could be has also collapsed. This is the meaning of the slogan that Marxism is dead. It is not that Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union offered a model for political change. That idea was abandoned by all but the most obdurate many years ago. Rather, until recently, the discourse of Marxism still seemed to provide enough hope and enough sense to political philosophy that its shortcomingsboth in theory and in realityappeared reparable. However, the rejection by its subjects of the entire spectrum of Marxist thought and intervention laid waste to that appearance.

2. For an example of the former. seeJ.C.C. Smart's "An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics," in Smart and Bernard Williams's Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). For examples of the latter, see the Hobbesian theory of David Gauthier in Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1986) and the more Kantian treatment of Stephen Darwall in Impartial Reason (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).

3. See Chapter 6, below. The view proposed in that chapter is not the only way for ethics to bind the ought with the is. Naturalist theories do so as well, though in a very different way. See, for example, Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) and Peter Railton, "Moral Realism," Philosophical Review, vol. 95, no. 2 (1986): 163-207.

4 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 3.

This does not mean, of course, that as political philosophy capitalism is triumphant. We have not entered the end of political philosophy or, as some have argued, the end of history with capitalism providing its final unity.5 It would take more insularity to pronounce the end of the tension between the world as it exists and the world as it could be or ought to be than even Western supporters of Soviet Marxism possessed after Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin. What is needed is not less political philosophy, not less critique, but more. And it has been not the least of historical Marxism's faults that its discourse suppressed that "more" for so many years.

The purpose of this essay is to sketch the framework of an alternative political philosophy, one that differs from its dominant predecessors, especially free-market liberalism and Marxism, not only in the vision it provides but also in the level and style of intervention it advocates. The framework is drawn from a tradition of political philosophy that is current but has not yet received attention precisely as a framework, namely, French poststructuralist thought. In this framework I include, for reasons that will become clear, the writings primarily of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Francois Lyotard.

Poststructuralist political thought has offered, though not precisely in these terms, an alternative vision of political intervention that articulates the tension between the world as it is and the world as it could be, particularly since the collapse of the Marxist project. That the framework it provides has not been much discussed as such is in part owing to its nature: it avoids global discourse in favor of concrete, limited analyses. In poststructuralism, macropolitics gives way to micropolitics. It might seem at first glance, then, that the attempt to situate those analyses within a more general philosophical framework would constitute a betrayal of the poststructuralist project. Later we will see how, by grafting poststructuralism onto a tradition in whose light it has not been graspedthe anarchist traditionit is possible to articulate a poststructuralist framework without betraying its fundamental micropolitical commitments. However, it is necessary first to understand the political register upon which poststructuralist theory operates.