Postmodern Nihilism
A hindered and bleak perspective regarding postmodernism inevitably reads postmodernism as nihilistic. Such an ungenerous perspective is evident in the work of Bookchin. Hardly alien to idiosyncrasy itself, anarchism ought to find it fruitful to listen openly to the (dark) theorists of the postmodern. Instead of outlawing the apparently idiosyncratic ‘philosophical tendencies’ [1] of Foucault, Deleuze et al, it is better to seek common ground than to secrete a theoretical xenophobia of sorts. Bookchin is correct in noting the post-modern question mark next to an unreflective affirmation of economic, market-driven progress. Bookchin’s perspective is however myopic with respect to postmodernism’s disillusionment in progress (progress for the sake of progress) for a disillusionment is also convalescence, a time for reflection, and is preparatory for an affirmation of human identity and destiny upon albeit radically renewed lines. For the purposes of this thesis, Foucault and Deleuze will be defended against Bookchin’s reading of ‘postmodern nihilism’, though Bookchin is obviously correct in noting Deleuze and Guattari’s questioning of grand narratives. [2]Obviously if we reject all grand narratives then social ecology’s grand narrative of human liberation must also be rejected.
The May-June événements of 1968 are of utmost importance if we are to understand the impetus behind ‘leftist’ postmodernism. At times, Bookchin seems to echo Jameson’s conclusions [3] concerning the phenomena of postmodernism. Bookchin in chartering the tendencies of postmodernism contends:

Postmodern is not only a nihilistic reaction to the failures imputed to Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, and progress but more proximately a cultural reaction to the failures of various socialisms to achieve a rational society in France and elsewhere in our country. [4]

From Bookchin’s Hegelian perspective, it is consistent to view a philosophy which reads otherness and difference to be positive, as hostile to Hegel’s grand narrative of the unfolding and omnivorous ‘Spirit’. One of the chief problems of Bookchin’s rejection of postmodernism is its failure to critique the very ideas which are densely articulated. Instead, a sociology of knowledge is provided which is blandly Marxist in the correlation of a fragmentary economic system and ideas which express that fragmentation. The content of postmodern ideas is not under the microscope of analysis. Bookchin instead connects the social function of philosophy with the prevailing economic system. Postmodernism from this perspective is merely an ideological support for the febrility of contemporary civilisation. But let us remember that Bookchin is writing from a political and anarchist point of view. Basically, Bookchin’s rejection of postmodernism is anchored in its questioning of the intellectual value of truth, objectivity (as opposed to relativism), rationality (as opposed to mysticism), progress (as opposed to romanticism), and universality (as opposed to the particular and irrecuperable). Such values ground anarchist philosophy in the Enlightenment tradition. Thus, from Bookchin’s perspective, oppositional movements which suffer from the de-valuation of all hitherto Enlightenment values are unable to engender effective and lasting radical change.
One objection to Bookchin’s reading of Foucault will serve as a linchpin for one of the main arguments of this thesis. Bookchin recognises Foucault’s historical disclosure of domination and oppression (which conceals itself under the name of institutional rationality and the humane treatment of abnormality). Yet Bookchin refuses to accept the thesis that there is a dark side, perhaps even a necessary dark side, of rationality and humanism. Foucault’s inventive and thought-provoking analysis of power ought to be of interest to anarchism, for Foucault refuses to echo and rehearse the mantra that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely (orthodox anarchism is contra the State - the extreme site for the concentration of power). Power in Foucault’s terms is neither good nor bad, it is a question above all of flux (the metaphor of the capillary nature of power has obvious affinities with a rhizomatic conception of desire) and the congealment of power, not about whether freedom is present if power is absent. The distinction between power and force is permissible if we see force as a wild presence which emanates from ‘outside’ of power’s confines. Force as such is transgressive for it is capable of breaking entrenched power formations and opening new vistas. Power is akin to the fortress, it is a form of territory construction. Power in this sense is the domestication of force. [5]
To identify coercion, domination, and repression and the like as essential expressions of power relations is to see only one half of the picture. Following Nietzsche, Foucault believes that power is best heuristically viewed as possessing positive as well as negative facets. Thus, to concentrate on the negativity of power is to fail to locate the actual manifestations of power itself. Emancipation from the ‘contaminating’ effects of power is thus to misinterpret its workings. The dichotomy between freedom and power is thus a false opposition. Foucault would object to the Frankfurt School’s Ideologiekritik. The Frankfurt School deludes itself in thinking that real interest would be transparent in the absence of social coercion. For Foucault power is not necessarily repressive, it does not necessarily universally always cause suffering. For Foucault, power is sometimes something to be enjoyed. Power is not a property of class membership, it is not a property at all in the real sense, rather it is a strategy. The notion of a strategy of power is reminiscent of Gramsci’s work. Power permeates society in a multiplicity of localised forms, it is not something symbolised simply in the sovereign. Thus, we can see straight away the divorce between Foucault and orthodox anarchism whose eternal bete-noire is the State. The micro-physics of power identifies power as operating both inside and outside of the State-apparatus. Therefore, to abolish the State does not by itself transform the network of power relations which exist as a complex strategy spread throughout the social system.
The ‘ensemble of ideas’ labelled Enlightenment humanism is defended by Bookchin from the parries of ‘bitter opponents’ such as Deleuze and Guattari. [6] Bookchin believes that Deleuze and Guattari in formulating a differing conception of philosophy and reason enter into a game of wild abandon in which anything goes. Yet, it ought to be noted that Deleuze and Guattari are interested in the underbelly of Occidental reason which escapes dogmatic thought. They follow Nietzsche in this respect, in the sense that Nietzsche asks the peculiar and uprooting question: ‘Granted we want truth: why not rather untruth?’ [7] If we take things at face value we forget that there is always another face to the problem.
A Nietzschean perspective inquires why this face is never examined. Bookchin here fails to grasp the subtlety of this mode of thinking. Bookchin conceives that anti-Oedipal strategies remain bound to evanescent, local and individual occurrences and thus fail to answer the wider social questions which explore the potentiality for liberation of populations and societies (free from domination and hierarchy). [8] This reading of desiring-machines as essentially insular and hermetic machinic assemblages is rejected by Massumi who contends that: ‘Becomings are everywhere in capitalism, but they are always separated from their full potential, from the thing they need most to run their course: a population free for the mutating’. [9] Massumi demonstrates a concern for the destruction of nature when he makes the telling point that: ‘The absolute limit of capitalism must be shifted back from planetary death to becoming-other’. [10] What is of significance for Massumi and others are the lines of flight rather than the lines of death that both equally are secreted out from the machinic workings of Capital. To drive the point home:

The equilibrium of the physical environment must be established, so that cultures may go on living and learn to live more intensely at a state far from equilibrium. Depletion must end, that we may devote ourselves to our true destiny: dissipation. [11]

The value, celebration and examination of local upsurges and ephemeral confrontations is precisely a lacuna which dilutes the impact Bookchin’s analysis. Bookchin is also inconsistent in two significant places. Firstly, in order to affirm the fertility of Deleuze’s affirmative philosophy we will look at the relationship between PS and anarchism more closely. It will be argued that Bookchin’s social ecology was pre-programmed to forsake a potential ally primarily because of the presuppositions derived from a Hegelian heritage. Secondly, the ‘nomadological politics’ [12] of Deleuze and Guattari and the ‘insurrectionary’ politics of Foucault offer a tactical and political methodology for confronting congealed power relations and for understanding the cancerous birth of micro-fascism. Bookchin fails to assess the possible productive relationship between the affinity group (classical anarchism’s model of social organisation) and the local and temporal coalitions of ‘nomadological’ revolutionaries. If anarchism cannot function in the absence of overarching and transcendent principles then anarchism runs the risk of abandoning fruitful tactical coalitions along ecological, racial, class and gender lines. Ironically, Bookchin in his celebration of 1968 endorses the very molecular revolutions Deleuze and Guattari sought to theorise concretely. Bookchin spoke thus:

It is clear that a molecular process was going on in France, completely invisible to the most conscious revolutionaries, a process that the barricades precipitated into revolutionary action. [13]