Anarchism in Universities

At its most self-indulgent, academia views itself as the pursuit of knowledge. In practice, such pursuit is hedged in by official bureaucracies, networks of influence and patronage, neoliberal funding pressures, and the burdens of workload and performance pressure. But even knowledge has two sides. It can mean the extension of maps and grids which contain and control a space, the reinscription of the unknown into the field of the known. It can also mean a relationship with exteriority, a voyage into the unknown, the construction of new languages and ways of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari have christened the former as royal and the latter nomad thought, and trace their impacts in different contexts. Both exist within academia, but royal thought predominates. Activist thought is necessarily nomadic, expressing the exterior which royal thought subsumes or denies. Activist knowledge is constructed, by and large, outside universities, in the everyday life of activist movements and by activists who write down their thoughts and become the “theorists” of the movement (people like Starhawk, Alfredo Bonanno, Hakim Bey). But there is also nomadic thought within universities, and a surprising number of anarchist theorists – such as John Zerzan, John Moore, Colin Ward and Murray Bookchin – have emerged from the university system without losing their (perceived) relevance for (some) activists.

It is the relationship between interiority and exteriority which defines “anarchic” trends in academia. Whereas royal, “mainstream”, or “problem-solving” approaches seek to paper over the cracks of the system and solve its problems by putting difference and problems under the microscope, nomad, “critical” or “radical” theory reaches out into exteriority, becoming something which escapes, to a degree at least, the grasp of the imperative to encode on behalf of the system. Royal science reinteriorises the outside; academics continually speak only to themselves, and speak of an outside – their own and the state’s – in order to master it (witness the parochially academic attempts to reinterpret anti-capitalism as a liberal demand-politics, a new populism, a proto-Marxist movement). The royal academic seeks to contribute to the system’s policies and responses, to make it work better, or to contribute to an abstract Truth which is a name of the state. But the nomad knowledges constructed on the critical wing of academia can sometimes be appropriated to sustain or expand movements of resistance.

The paradox of academia is that while there are many nomad thoughts, many critical tendencies fleeing to various degrees the grip of systematised knowledge, there are precious few anarchists. Critical academic work has an extensive spread. Some of the tighter-organised disciplines (psychology and economics for instance) have pushed critical perspectives out almost entirely. (Critical economists and psychologists, usually identified with IPE and psychoanalysis respectively, can be found scattered through departments of politics, cultural studies, sociology and so on). More often, such perspectives are tolerated as alternatives, as a necessary part of a healthy intellectual exchange – and often as the disavowed lifeblood which secretly drives innovation in the entire discipline. So one has critical social policy studies, critical or human security, peace (as opposed to war) studies, critical geography, critical international relations and so on. Within each subject or “discipline”, it is usually easy for an anarchist to pick out the interesting approaches from the defence-mechanisms of the system, nearly always leading into the marginal and peripheral theories beyond the mainstream.

But even on the periphery there are problems. Isolation, and functional similarity, should cause critical academics to band together. But academia is also a half-feudal, half-bureaucratic craft-economy in which competition for similar posts pits dog against dog. School formation thus flourishes, in which the closest allies band together against their nearest rivals differentiated from them in a “narcissism of minor differences”, often constructed as patronage-networks of scholars whose reputation is built on their mutual citations. At worst, the result is akin to Trotskyite sectoids – each school defends its orthodoxy, and uses whatever influence it has (in article refereeing, appointments, distribution of references and badges of prestige) to exclude or marginalise dissent.

Though varying between disciplines, dominant trends in critical academia are people importing French theory (usually rather badly), often attached to a cult of democracy, and hence reformist; people on the left wing of mainstream approaches such as analytical philosophy; Marxists (and ex-Marxists) of various kinds; and empirical scholars using ethnography, action research and suchlike. Some critical academics are also involved in solidarity activism in their particular area, in trade-union work, or in mobilising activist academics, but a surprising number seem to be critical on paper only, and otherwise don’t lift a finger against the system, and many more are politically moderate, drawing from their theory a quasi-liberal outlook. Anarchists and quasi-anarchists tend to operate in one or another of these currents – hence there’s anarchistic quasi-Marxists using varieties of autonomism, there’s “philosophical anarchists” on the fringes of analytical theory, there’s Foucauldian, Lacanian and Deleuzian quasi-anarchists in poststructuralism (some of these terming themselves “postanarchists”).

Do academics bother to write about anarchism? A search of Zetoc, the academic search engine which archives journal articles from the 1990s and often earlier, reveals only eight articles on Max Stirner, seventeen on Situationism and 44 on Situationist (perhaps a dozen of which are about the SI as opposed to a separate trend in philosophy), and only one article on Hakim Bey. There are 144 hits for anarchism and 112 for anarchist, mostly on historical topics; “Luis Napoleon Morones and the Mexican Anarchist Movement, 1913-1920”, “Esperanto and Chinese anarchism in the 1920s and 1930s” and “An Overview of Individualist Anarchism, 1881-1908” being typical examples. There’s also a “Journal of Anarchist Studies” and an “Anarchist Studies Network”, both kept alive by a small number of anarchist scholars. History (whether social, political or “of ideas”) has always been especially receptive to the study of anarchism (with authors such as George Woodcock and Benedict Anderson keeping alive interest in historical anarchist movements), though this often leaves the misleading impression that anarchism died with Bakunin and is no longer relevant. Historian of ideas David Morland established the academic orthodoxy with his claim that anarchism relies on an essentialist, positive concept of human nature which allows it to deny the “need” for repressive control – a convenient repetition of the Hobbesian line and a misreading of the scholars Morland actually studied, let alone the broader field of anarchist theory. Two of the best-known recent works on “postanarchism” – Nicholas Thoburn’s “Deleuze, Marx and Politics” and Saul Newman’s “From Bakunin to Lacan” – both reinforce this view, and treat anarchism as both ending with Kropotkin and outmoded today.

This trend has been partly offset by the impact of the anti-capitalist movement. Even as a royal science, academia is enlivened and given energy by its “outside”; the anomaly, the emergence of unexpected or inexplicable events, is what provides the drive for change, the dynamic of “originality” and “novelty” which acts like a magnet on academics seeking publications, following fashions or hunting evidence for “schools” debates. In the streets, anti-capitalist activists created such a rupture, and the academic shockwaves reverberated through academia, creating a tide of new publications on global resistance, modules and even courses on activism, and an opening for radical academics to put forward alternative agendas. Much of this new work is recuperative, or else fails even at the most basic level to listen to what activists have to say. But new wave of anarchist-inclined theorists, such as Richard Day, Lewis Call, Simon Tormey, and Graeme Chesters, have come to prominence during this period, and “horizontal”, “chaotic”, or “post-representational” politics – the academic names for the approach taken by activists interested in affinity, direct action and opposition to hierarchy – has belatedly entered academic discourse (about thirty years after it first appeared among activists, but better late than never!)

So what is it like being an anarchist academic? Academia is one of the few places where a self-proclaimed anarchist is still just about employable. It still has some of the inner structure of a craft guild, and the energies of someone committed to social change can be “productive” of an output and originality which helps attain recognition for the quality and quantity of research. On the other hand, neoliberal pressures are increasing. It is difficult to avoid being turned into a mini-bureaucrat, or drawn into the construction and enforcement of technocracy. An academic who treats students as human beings instead of statistics or pests is sadly a rare thing. One needs confidence to develop and deploy alternative, student-centred teaching methods; it is easy to slip into the mode of authority-figure through the trap of “playing a role”. Self-defined activist research agendas lead to research which, while original, is sometimes not recognised by the mainstream. People often respond by chasing those fashions and funding opportunities which open a space for “misreading”, for creatively reinterpreting a dominant discourse to alternative ends (which is how we are left with such conceptual monstrosities as “non-majoritarian democracy” and “post-state citizenship”). There are pressures to compromise and conform to seem more acceptable to one’s “peers” (hence securing publications, jobs and funding). Dilemmas of how far to push things, pressures to fall into a camp or “school” for mutual protection (possibly diluting one’s politics as a result), pressures to prioritise the pressure of interiority, the constant exchanges between academics, over the force of exteriority which drives transformative engagement.

On top of all this, academic environments are becoming dangerously over-regulated. RFID-equipped student cards, card-access buildings and facilities, “gated” areas and buildings, CCTV cameras in “vulnerable” areas (even a few lecture halls), and the low-intensity goonery of a certain proportion of security staff are constant problems or threats. Tolerance is not what it once was; new “anti-terror” measures raise the spectre for each of us of being this generation’s Antonio Negri or anarchism’s Sami al-Arian. There have been witch-hunts in America lately against anarchist academics such as David Graeber and Ward Churchill; Italy still periodically locks up theorists; Germany bans “opponents of the constitution” from holding university posts. Being above-ground, with writings under one’s name in publications anyone with a library card can see, creates a degree of vulnerability about writing really radical things – perhaps one reason for the political moderation of most critical academics. In this regard, an openly anarchist academic is vulnerable in ways that someone immersed in the counterculture is not.

But with this come privileges – an income in excess over most activists, and indeed workers; the ability to attend events like the WSF, on university money, with time off work; to get paid for hanging round interesting mobilisations under the pretext of research; public credibility which can be used to attract media interest or present an alternative viewpoint; resources such as printing, photocopying and library access which can be appropriated for activist ends; the opportunity to influence the (mostly) young people coming through the education system; time and money to pursue reading and writing to a breadth and depth which would be hard to combine with an ordinary job or with life off the grid.

There are ways to make the most of being an anarchist academic, without being recuperated. A few of us manage to remain active, while also keeping up writing, teaching and publishing. But the pressures to conform are strong, and the need to “play the game” to remain tolerated creates constant strategic dilemmas. Universities are not really anarchist-friendly environments. But in a hostile world, they are among the few niches available, where some anarchists can find a not-very-comfortable home.