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Abstract and Contents
List of abbreviations used
Introduction

Chapter 1. False Start.

There is, apparently, no point. So I can’t write on.
Yet with a tip of the hat to a fulminating Beckett, glowering in the corner after another unwarranted and uninvited act of intertextual plagiarism, I’ll write on.
Take postmodernism as a whole. Already an inauspicious way to start a sentence, launch a critique or endear a reader. How can such a fragmentary and possibly self-contradictory morass of ideas, objects and texts be considered as a whole, when in fact the very concept of totality is one that postmodernism could be said to set its face against? If the tautology can be allowed, then it might be said that postmodernism (in its mulitvalencies, multiplicities and expansive multifacetedness), as opposed to that which is sometimes considered as a particular strand of postmodernist thought, i.e. deconstruction (that which is to be the explicit focus of this dissertation), has provoked many a consideration of the troubling – or at times well nigh apocalyptic, if some of the commentators are to be given credence – implications of its thought for what has traditionally be understood by the term ‘politics’. Variously pilloried for being French (and hence historically specific to disaffected French Marxists in the wake of the events of May 1968), unhistorical (and hence blithely unaware of how its irrelevant fiddlings play directly into the hands of transnational capitalists while they are busy torching Rome in order to collect on the insurance policy), or just plain male, the list of those who have sought to insulate the realm of politics from the predations of postmodernism grows yearly longer. Leftists (of varying hues from red to black), feminists, anti-imperialists, even environmentalists, have more often than not expressed negative reactions to the impact of postmodern thought upon the conditions for political engagement and practice. My contention in this chapter will be that a consideration of leftist critiques of postmodernism reveal what is at best an ambiguous relationship to the concept of authority, a relationship that becomes decidedly problematical when examined from an anarchist perspective.
Perhaps, though, there already emerges a disingenuous double strategy in the course I propose to chart. A consideration of leftist critiques of postmodernism, only to mount a counter-defence of deconstruction? This positioning of deconstruction as a strand of postmodern thought is one with which Derrida himself is clearly at odds. Most recently he has written that he is:

taken aback by a certain eagerness to speak of Specters of Marx or my work in general as if it were merely a species, instance, or example of the ‘genre’ postmodernism or poststructuralism. These are catch-all notions into which the most poorly informed public (and, most often, the mass circulation press) stuffs nearly everything it does not like or understand, starting with ‘deconstruction’. I do not consider myself either a poststructuralist or a postmodernist. I have often explained why I almost never use these words, except to say that they are inadequate to what I am trying to do. (M&S, pp.228-229)

Yet the situation remains that much of what is written criticising deconstruction is perfectly content to locate it under ‘catch-all’ rubrics such as postmodernism. So in a sense my position is that by commencing an attempt to try to establish a political efficacy for Derridean deconstruction from an anarchist point of view with a re-reading of leftist critiques of postmodern thought, I am not necessarily obliged to accept the frames of reference that these critics employ. For this reason I am most definitely not engaging in the discussion regarding which particular ‘pigeon-hole’ deconstruction should be conveniently popped into and forgotten about. Hence a reading of leftist critiques of postmodern thought does not seem to me to be entirely unreasonable when the critiques are being read not in order to rebut them but rather to provide a reading of authority – that being a propitious entry point to offer an articulation of anarchism and deconstruction. Thus, in a somewhat roundabout manner, an underlying assumption is being slyly admitted to here: that although deconstruction cannot be unproblematically taken as one of the threads that make up a ‘broader’ tapestry of postmodern thought, this is in fact the case for some of the writers considered below. This, hence, necessitates an eschewal of the frames of reference of those writers, which leads to the situation where, in raising the question of, and questioning, authority, any circumspection for sacrosanct authorial intention goes largely by the board. This is not, as the typical caricature of deconstruction would have it, a self-written licence to make absolutely free with the text. Rather it is a stating of the position that a text critiquing Baudrillard does not constrain me to respond merely in terms of Baudrillardian thought, but that it can be encouraged to offer up alternative readings that are consequently more productive.
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1.1 FEAR OF FOUCAULT
Frederic Jameson’s essay ‘Postmoderism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ would seem a good point to embark upon a review of left-wing reactions to postmodern thought. [1] Originally published sixteen years ago, and sixteen years after the events of May 1968, the essay seems at this moment in history to mark neatly the intervals between some past and some (this particular) present. Yet it seems ironic that at the time of the Miners’ strike (the ‘present’ in which Jameson was writing) he was able to suggest that ‘individuals and collective subjects [might] regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralised by our spatial as well as our social confusion’ (p.54). One can only assume that the striking miners had not enjoyed an opportunity to be spatially or socially confused in the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, else their struggle against Thatcherite neo-liberalism might have come to a much quicker and stickier end. The essay is well-known, and scarcely warrants yet another recapitulation. So, whilst not wanting to misrepresent a text of more than fifty pages, I shall turn directly to the passages pertinent to my argument.
Jameson writes that:

the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic – the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example – the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself. (pp.5-6)

The passage itself would seem to be unimaginable without a poststructuralist sensibility, with the mimicking of a deconstructive gesture by attempting to show how the meaning of ‘win’ comes to be invaded by its polar opposite, ‘lose’. The trope is also used by Derrida in the essay on ‘Difference’, but while there Derrida is trying to show how ‘difference holds us in a relation with what exceeds (though we necessarily fail to recognise this) the alternative of presence or absence’ (D, p.151), here Jameson seems to be trying to construct an oxymoron predicated on the plenitude of meaning of the two words. The essay, though, does not juggle with these terms in order to engage with the indeterminacy of meaning, and the lines cited suggest a position at quite a remove from deconstruction. An initial observation might be that years after Barthes had scornfully characterised traditional literary criticism as being about ‘victory to the critic’, it seems odd to find this text dealing in terms of theorists ‘winning’ or ‘losing’. [2] The fact that the text is inimical to the Foucauldian position is not the problem (although further conclusions could be drawn from the disdainful reference to the ‘Foucault of the prisons book’, without even the courtesy to cite the work by its title). The problem is, rather, that the Foucauldian hypothesis is employed to polarise absolutely the binary of win/lose, with the powerfulness of the ‘vision’ being directly proportional and causally prior to the powerlessness of the reader. Given that the only ‘reader’ of whose feelings Jameson could conceivably have any intelligence is himself, the ‘reader’ cannot unreasonably be read as a vehicle for the expression of his own anxieties. These anxieties inform the very language of the text (‘powerful’, ‘terrifying’, ‘paralyzed’) and seem to result in the hyperbole of the theorist being guilty of ‘constructing’ a ‘terrifying machine’. While it might be over-literally pedantic to suggest that the ‘construction’ of the French penal system would have been a Herculean task even for a theorist of Foucault’s prowess, a more telling response would hold that Discipline and Punish is investigative and revelatory rather than visionary and creative.
It is instructive to compare Jameson’s reaction with that of another critic with a different political orientation. Randall Amster has written that Foucault invites us ‘to conclude for ourselves that such practices are being explicated so that they may be resisted. What else can be the end of such a critique, except to foster a spirit of resistance with an eye toward freedom?’ [3] The imposition or imputation of an authorial teleology (‘what else can be the end of such a critique…?’) goes somewhat against the grain of Amster’s essay, and indeed this one. Nevertheless the quotation shows that Foucault’s reconceptualisation of power is not necessarily antithetical to a left-wing politics. Hence the pessimism for which postmodern thought is typically taken to task for generating seems to appertain more to Jameson’s ‘terror’ of the Foucauldian model. So the question arises as to what exactly is at play in Jameson’s text, with this flight from Foucault and the shoe-horning of any responses into the absolute binarism of winning/losing? Echoing my comments above on Jameson vis-à-vis Barthes, Cixous writes that ‘we perceive that the “victory” always amounts to the same thing: it is hierarchized. The hierarchization subjects the entire conceptual organization to man’. In a curious reflection of Jameson’s win/lose trope, Cixous describes the binary opposition as a ‘universal battlefield. Each time a war breaks out. Death is always at work’. [4] So the death, here, could be said to be that of the ‘reader’ that Jameson attempts to ventriloquise: the actual reader finds his or her responses to Foucault already plotted out by a text that seeks to deploy said reader to underwrite Jameson’s own ‘terrified’ reaction. My proposition is that in the positing of such an absolute binary, with its necessarily concomitant hierarchisation (all orchestrated in the shadow of death, to follow Cixous), the text forecloses the possibility of any negotiation, banishes play, and hence demonstrates what I shall refer to as an authoritarian impulse.
At this point it would be fair to expect a clear explanation of what is meant by ‘authority’ in this context, given that it is the point upon which this reading turns. Alan Ritter defines authority as:

a way to secure compliance with a directive, distinguished by the ground on which the directive is obeyed. You exercise authority over my conduct if you issue me a directive, and I follow it because I believe that something about you, not the directive, makes compliance the proper course. This something about you that elicits my compliance is something I attribute either to your position or to your person. I submit to your authority because I think your position (say as president) makes you an appropriate issuer of directives, or because I think you are personally equipped (perhaps by advanced training) to direct my acts with special competence. [5]

Although Ritter’s formulation appears to overlook the element of coercion that often accompanies the exercise of authority (i.e. the ‘proper’ course might be the only one that avoids personal injury in certain extreme circumstances), its general direction is useful here. Hence, while obviously not engaged in such a quixotic project as to proffer a once and for all definition, bearing in mind Ritter’s concept of authority, I would venture, in a provisional fashion, that an authoritarian impulse can be perceived when a text assumes a position that tries to control the process by which meaning is generated. This could also be linked to a desire to represent subjects to themselves, rather than recognise and respect their heterogeneous alterity. Whether or not an attempt to control is successful is not relevant, indeed it would be one of the underlying tenets of this dissertation that it is inherent to the structure of language that control cannot be exercised and thus its apparent employ is but a fiction awaiting its recognition as such.
This, then, would be the motive behind my having observed that the historical moment Jameson occupied whilst writing of the subjects’ need to ‘regain a capacity to act and struggle’ was the same moment of the Miners’ strike. The authority that Jameson’s text assumes for itself is clearly seen to be fictive, for this representation of the incapacitated subject is a misrepresentation. In this sense Jameson is once again displaying the profound (and ungrounded) pessimism that is more usually imputed to the very postmodern thought that he is critiquing. [6]
Yet the authoritarian impulse is evident at a more conscious level, as when Jameson laments the loss of ‘precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity’ (p.49). While the phrase invites a more measured consideration, an all too cursory response might intimate that: (a) the very sense of the what is signified by the ‘Unconscious’ precludes any authoritative definition of what it is, much less a robust diagnosis of its penetration by ‘multinational capital’; (b) if ‘extraterritorial’ means beyond the borders of the territory, i.e. beyond the bounds of what is known, then it follows that there can be no realm of extraterritoriality, for in the same moment that somewhere, something, might be recognised as extra-territorial, it is simultaneously known and hence falls within the newly redrawn borders (indeed ‘borders’ is a most unsatisfactory term here, for clearly to be known as a border there must be comprehension of both its sides, separating one place from another, and thus there is no sense in speaking of knowledge of a limit to our knowledge – this would mean already having surpassed the limit being spoken of); (c) in what may be a striking example of self-contradiction (i.e. in an attempt to describe in linguistic form what defies language), I would suggest that the ‘Unconscious’ must always remain ‘extraterritorial’, and therefore can ‘offer’ us nothing, certainly not ‘Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity’. Here it is evident that Jameson is seeking a stable locus of ‘objectivity’, as when he mourns the fact that ‘our now postmodern bodies are […] incapable of distantiation’ (pp.48-49). This objectivity, or achievement of distance, would be the condition of the authority which permits beginning again the by now wearily familiar process of representing subjects to themselves. Thus it comes as no surprise to find the essay closing with a gesture towards ‘global cognitive mapping’ (p.54).
1.2 ALL AROUND THE WORLD (AND BEYOND)
The same global (some might say megalomaniacal or embryonically dictatorial) urge is clearly at work in Alex Callinicos’s Against Postmodernism. Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault are slammed right from the very first pages, for having ‘denied human thought the ability to arrive at any objective account of [fragmentary, heterogeneous and plural] reality’. [7] Callinicos disposes of the three writers in just one chapter, for a variety of reasons including the unforgivable omission of not having written in a textual vacuum (i.e. for showing the demonstrable influence of Nietzsche and Heidegger) and for not really being postmodernists at all, when ‘some’ of Derrida’s books ‘resemble nothing more than Modernist works of art’ (p.70). He subsequently goes on to argue that:

poststructuralism denies that theory can detach itself from the immediate context of meanings and purposes in which it is formulated. Consequently any critique of existing conditions cannot base itself on any general principles, but must proceed allusively, as Derrida does when he appeals to the ‘unnameable’. (p.94)

And so on, to the familiar closing rhetorical flourish, already plotted out by Jameson five years earlier, where we find Callinicos ending his tirade against postmodernism with the vision of ‘the possibility of a global social transformation which could impose a new set of priorities, based upon the collective and democratic control of the resources of the planet’ (p.174). The passages cited seem not to stand up even to the most passing scrutiny: one wonders what degree of ‘detachment’ from reality would be necessary in order to arrive at an objective account of it – death? Or perhaps an innovative transfiguration from Marxist critic to some superlunary omniscience? Mere (reality-bound) mortals can but stare and wonder. Again, the question arises as to precisely how any text could have ‘denied human thought’ anything? Regardless of one’s own reactions to French poststructuralism, at the very least its texts attempt to signal new horizons: quite how they would engender the perlocutionary force to deny (supposed) objectivity Callinicos leaves unexplained. Given that he clearly feels that he has access to just such objectivity, the logical conclusion of his having familiarised himself with the work of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault is that his own text should not exist – those works, ought, by his own judgement, have ‘denied’ him the objectivity to write his own account.
Ignoring the fatuous debate over taxonomy (whether modernist or postmodernist), Callinicos’s postulation of superordinate ‘general principles’ that lie beyond the ‘immediate context of meanings and purposes’ is equally and similarly as troubling as Jameson’s notion of extraterritoriality. Without wanting to repeat the same criticism of Callinicos as articulated above in response to Jameson, it might be asked here how these ‘general principles’ would be knowable if they lie outside the realm of our ‘immediate context’? In order not to partake fundamentally of the same order as our ‘immediate’ or even distant (whatever that might mean) contexts, i.e. that which is knowable to us, there would have to be a categorical break, a division which would inevitably place these general principles on the side of the unknowable, and so Callinicos’s position unravels its very own (Kantian) bootstraps by which it was so precariously holding itself up.
Even the language of the text seems unembarrassed by its authoritarian register, ‘denying’ some things and seeking to ‘impose’ others. Hence the central problem when it comes to Callinicos’s ‘global social transformation’. Clearly a transformation requires a transformer and a to-be-transformed – but in these formulations it is forever the to-be-transformed (call it the working class, or the global proletariat, or the disenfranchised poor) that provides the economic and/or moral justification to the would-be transformer. Thus it seems that we are not a world away from old-fashioned Leninist vanguardism, where the revolutionary elite seize power on behalf of, i.e. as the (usually self-appointed) representatives of, the oppressed class. Once more the question of authority seems to hinge on the desire to represent subjects to themselves. Callinicos is at least aware of this criticism of his position, for he cites Paul Patton as suggesting that his (Callinicos’s) arguments demonstrate a ‘perspective reflecting the will “to govern a multiplicity of interests” characteristic of “state philosophy”’. [8] From an anarchist point of view Callinicos’s project is obviously untenable, for my autonomy (and I use the word in a restricted and provisional sense, rather than intimate the resurrection of the Cartesian autonomous subject) will not be lightly surrendered just to sign up for the promise of someone else’s ‘global social transformation’.
Elsewhere the authoritarian drive is also evident at a more superficial level, not so much as a latent textual impetus but as a conscious appeal to authority per se, or as an attempt to institute or maintain an authority. Such would be the case with Liz Stanley and Sue Wise, who seek recourse to the authority that the retention of the Manichean female/male binary supposedly confers. They write that their:

feminist fractured foundationalist epistemology […] retains its foundations upon the category ‘Women’ and upon recognition of its binary relationship to the category ‘Men’. Without this, a distinctly feminist philosophy and praxis would no longer exist, would be dissolved into an apparently ungendered deconstructionist position. [9]

The recourse to this authority is in the face of a perceived threat from deconstruction, or perhaps a certain caricature of deconstruction, what Christopher Norris has identified (and rebutted) as ‘a species of all-out hermeneutic licence’. [10] And so, from literal to macroscopic authority – in Norris’s text, he sets the scene in his introduction by lamenting the ‘climbdown on crucial policy issues by the current Labour Party leadership’. A few lines later he muses ‘what hope, one might ask, for socialist values or left-oppositional thought…?’. [11] None, might come the terse reply, as long as we sheepishly continue to pin our hopes for change on the discredited politics of representationality. Eagleton, too, depressingly displays this macrocosmic and centralising approach to authority, when he describes his ‘imagined’ landscape of contemporary thought in the introduction to The Illusions of Postmodernism:

one might even come to imagine that there is no centre to society after all; but while this might be a convenient way of rationalizing one’s own lack of power, it could only be at the cost of acknowledging that there can logically be no margins either.

Thus Eagleton seems content to deal in the utter traditionalism of ‘political movements which were at once mass, central and productive’. [12]
So various forms of authority can be seen to thread their way through these leftist critiques of postmodern thought. The authority of the majority, with Eagleton, or of parliamentary democracy, with Norris; the authority to represent, as with Callinicos, or Stanley and Wise; or the authoritarianism which shows itself as a textual strategy that attempts to foreclose alternative readings and hence enforce a rigid binarism that would predispose the reader to follow and agree with the text’s propositions, as in Jameson. My own proposition, then, is that leftist critiques that offer a spirited (and principled) resistance to postmodern thought can also be seen to display a worldview that is intrinsically marked by its orientation by, and reliance upon, notions of authority. Perhaps the invitation that this dissertation hopes to hold out is to move beyond the grey horizon of authority and, in the positing of a productive imbrication of anarchism and deconstruction, demonstrate a textually political, as well as a politically textual, mode of address to our everyday lived experiences. As the first stage on this journey, the following chapter will examine in some detail key points in Derrida’s work, points that might hopefully offer a reading that is resistant to the depredations of self-aggrandising authority.

Continued:
Chapter 2. Departures
Chapter 3. The Bridge: Where it Hinges
Chapter 4. Journey’s End/New Beginning
Conclusion and Bibliography