Poststructuralism, particularly as it is embodied in the works of Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard, has defined a tradition of the type of political philosophy we have here called “tactical.” The political commitments of these thinkers run directly counter to the dominant traditions of political philosophy, be they formal or strategic, and define a possibility for political philosophizing that offers a new, and perhaps better, perspective for political intervention. In order to circumscribe their project strictly, we must realize as well that the texts of these thinkers diverge not only from those of their contemporaries in other countries and traditions, but also from the work of French contemporaries who have been classified as poststructuralist. Jacques Derrida, for instance, though sharing some of these thinkers’ epistemological and metaphysical commitments, remains without a clearly articulated political philosophy. On the other hand, Jean Baudrillard, though focused upon politics, is a strategic thinker rather than a tactical one. His thought tends toward the reductionist and comprehensive rather than the multiple and local. Henceforth, we shall reserve the term “poststructuralist” for the common perspective sketched by the work of Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard. Nothing of philosophical significance is meant to hang on this reservation; it is merely a convenient way of circumscribing a political line of thought.
There is a tradition of political thinking that, though ambivalent regarding its commitment between tactical and strategic thinking, possesses the kinds of general political perspective and analysis that could characterize it as a forerunner to current poststructuralist thought. That is the tradition of anarchism. Moreover, anarchism, since it has articulated its philosophy in a general way rather than through specific analyses, provides the outline of a framework within which to understand poststructuralist political philosophy. Like poststructuralism, anarchism rejects representational political intervention. For anarchists, the concentration of power is an invitation to abuse. Therefore anarchists seek political intervention in a multiplicity of irreducible struggles.
The [anarchist] rejection of centralization in an organization dedicated to producing “the embryo of future human society” is part of the larger, central theme of anarchism: the rejection of representation. What Bakunin and the Jura federation rejected in their dispute with Marx was representation on the political level. To the anarchists, political representation signifies the delegation of power from one group or individual to another, and with that delegation comes the risk of exploitation by the group or individual to whom power has been ceded. It is a mistake to view the anarchist diatribes against the state as the foundation for its critique of representation. The state is the object of critique because it is the ultimate form of political representation, not because it is founding for it. Bakunin, defining “the sense in which we are really Anarchists,” wrote that “we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interest of the immense majority in subjection to them.”
The crucial element in representation, then, is the transfer of power. In order for liberation to occur, individuals and groups must retain their power; they cannot cede it without risking the loss of the goal for which all political struggles occur: empowerment. For anarchists, the goal must be reflected in the process; otherwise, the permanent possibility of distorting the revolutionary process will be imminent. Leninist vanguardism is anathema to anarchists, precisely because it represents the ultimate form of representation. Some anarchists, most notably Proudhon, even resisted the immersion into any political activity at all, arguing that the moment one enters into political organizing one begins playing the very game that needs to be overcome; liberation arises through the construction of alternatives, not through the destruction or reformation of insupportable realities. “We must not suppose the revolutionary action is the means of social reform, because this so-called means would simply be an appeal to force, to arbitrariness, in short a contradiction,” wrote Proudhon in a letter to Marx.
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The antirepresentational character of poststructuralist micropolitics occurs along two registers, one epistemic and the other political. The epistemic attack on representation we have already seen. It consists in the denial that people have a nature or a natural set of interests that their political liberation will allow them to express or fulfill. At this level, representation is not oppressive; rather, it is false, or at best implausible. To talk about representing the interests of others as though those interests were either natural or given, even in the unfolding of a historical destiny, is simply to be mistaken in one’s view of what people are like: it is to commit the error of humanism. However, as the poststructuralists recognize, this error is not politically neutral. Bound to the epistemic error is a political significance, one whose consequences have played themselves out over the course of the past two centuries of Western history. Micropolitical analysis, if it is not to fall into epistemological and political inconsistency (or worse), must reject the attempt to explain the victims of various oppressions to themselves and must content itself with talking to them about how their situation arose. “In my opinion,” Deleuze once told Foucault in conversation, “you were the first—in your books and in the practical sphere—to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others.”
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Micropolitical theory, then, must be seen as carrying through the anarchist critique of representation. By articulating the epistemic problem of representation in its entwinement with the political one, poststructuralism has completed that critique by showing where political representation fails. This completion was unavailable to traditional anarchism because of its commitment to a humanism whose foundations are not the alternative to representation, but the very core of the problem itself. Once this is recognized, not only does the problem of representation become clear, so does the place of theory in political struggle. “Who speaks and acts?” Deleuze asks, answering: “It is always a multiplicity even within the person who speaks and acts. All of us are ‘groupuscules.’ Representation no longer exists; there’s only action— theoretical action and practical action which serve as relays and form networks.”
