Jason Adams, "The Constellation of Opposition" (Part 1)

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"The Constellation of Opposition"


Jason Adams

Introduction: The Constellation of N30

The protests that occurred around the world on November 30, 1999 (N30) were truly without precedent. They mark an important turning point in what had become increasingly fragmented struggles of new social movements constructed around various forms of antiauthoritarian politics, identity politics and ecological politics as well as traditional class struggle politics. In the cultural rebound against universalism after the 1960s, new social movements continuously sought to create autonomous space for the particularity of youth, queers, women and people of color as well as for the general ecology of the planet. While there have been enormous strides made since that time, the downside has been that in general, they have not succesfully articulated the intersectionalities of these various oppressions and resistances. This failure has resulted in fragmented, single-issue politics with no visible option other than reformist -- rather than transformational -- political activity. At the same time, traditional class-oriented movements have been in continual decline due to the rise of a global neoliberal economy since the 1980s. Faced with such circumstances, labor unions have often opted to merely "protect their own" leaving most low-income women, people of color, immigrants and students to fend for themselves. Throughout the three decades following the 1960s and lasting well into the final years of the 20th century, it seemed therefore that a constellation of opposition would not likely emerge, meaning of course that reformism was destined to become the new reality of social movements.
N30 was a turning point because it articulated for the first time the irreducible interconnectedness experienced but not recognized within the praxis of contemporary social movements. Never before had so many divergent groups and perspectives converged, successfully swarming and disrupting a "common enemy," as did the tens of thousands who filled the streets of Seattle and dozens of other cities around the world. Many people who had been never really understood the intersectionalities between oppressions experienced dramatic revelations about them for the first time in their lives. In the midst of the third day of protests, one elderly woman reflected, "isnt this extraordinary, I've been around since the sixties and my dad in the thirties with UAW and this is really happening for the first time. Its great." A rank-and-file Teamster agreed heartily; "there was a banner, and it said 'Teamsters and Turtles Together at Last' -- that was so wonderful. Of course we belong together. The same people who exploit natural resources exploit human resources. We belong together." Perhaps from a less traditional perspective, a bare-chested member of the Lesbian Avengers explained her perspective; "the WTO went against too many people at once; you know, labor, environmental movement, women's rights, animals rights -- every different type of group of people was affected by this. That was their worst mistake ever, they pissed off too many people and now we're going to fight back unified and that's what's going to help us."

Yet this was no simple return to the homogenous politics of the past; in fact it was precisely the immense diversity of individuals and groups present that allowed a type of untamed, spontaneous, critical, tentative "unity" to emerge in the form of a movement of movements. As Hop Hopkins of the Brown Collective argued afterward, "solidarity doesn't mean that we don't talk about the issues that separate us. That's the biggest change that I see happening -- race, class, gender, sexism, heterosexism -- if that's not in your analysis then you're only half-stepping and you're not really working for the revolution." As a result of the shifts in the self-consciousness of these movements the need to find common nodes of communication amongst and between the many divergent movements, while also maintaining the self-determination of all involved, could finally be actualized.

These developments in late 1999 raised hopes that "another world is possible" and that there might in fact be a movement that would at least potentially be capable of bringing it about. Interestingly, the most active elements of the various movements involved were said by many commentators to have exhibited an "anarchist sensibility," if not a clearly articulated affiliation with anarchism itself. But in the years after, the constellation of opposition that allowed for this intersubjectivist sense of autonomy-within-solidarity began to unravel back into its previous state of fragmentation and incommensurability. The healthy balance of tension that had united the previously fragmented movements had degenerated into something of a war between the various elements centered on the particularities of age, race, class, gender, and sexuality amongst other things. Even if the particulars could not be agreed upon, nearly everyone involved seemed to agree that the quest for forms of life as free as possible of domination and hierarchy was the primary glue keeping these movements "together." However it is undeniable that there were multiple lines of division that could be seen before, during and after N30; this is an unavoidable feature of any constellation of oppostion and is not necessarily negative. One line of division that emerged rather clearly was that between the "organizationalist" level of officiality such as the Direct Action Network on the one hand and the "postorganizationalist" level of unorganized affinities such as the Black Bloc on the other. Another important divisions was that between the traditional class-based movements and the new social movements; those organized around the so-called "identity politics" that emerged after 1968 on the one hand versus those organized around class politics such as the labor unions and socialist parties that emerged in the nineteenth century, on the other.
But even while one could argue that the organizationalist and class-based sections were perhaps stuck in an industrial-capitalist era when a primary center of power made such movements potentially powerful, it is clear in hindsight that the postorganizationalist and new social movements often made the equally fatal mistake of avoiding economic factors altogether. In their rush to emphasize the emergence of the new, they lost sight of what has remained of the old; this is nothing less than the mirror image of what the organizationalist and class-based movements have done in denying the emergence of the new and overemphasizing the continuity of the old. An important challenge then, would be to develop a more practically applicable hybrid analysis of the workings of contemporary power, which as Derrida would say, will always contains some specters from the past as well as some from the future. Such an analysis would emphasize the way that power operates in the practices of everyday life just as it would the way that it operates in "larger" institutions such as capitalism and the state. To put it clearly, what is needed today is an eclectic, pragmatic critique of the transformation of power and resistance since 1968 that avoids unwarranted overzealousness in order to develop a theoretical basis that would be more relevant to emerging situations marked largely by a sense of transitionality.
This was precisely the goal of the Total Liberation Project (TLP). Two and a half years after, dozens of activists and intellectuals involved in the antiglobalization movement converged at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. They came with the stated goal of expanding on and attempting to articulate more clearly what had become known as "the spirit of Seattle" as an alternative to the two-sided coin of the particularist single-issue new social movements on the one side and the universalist class-struggle movements on the other. The convergence intended to consider instead the potential viability of "visions that do not privilege any particular type of oppression over any other, yet which still successfully respect and further the autonomy of all movements within a greater context of solidarity." As it was during N30, all of this was deeply imbibed in a wide variety of anti-authoritarian analyses, all of which were dedicated to challenging the hybrid combinations of new and old forms of power; centralized, decentralized, repressive and creative.

The reaction to this attempt to move beyond these polarities tended toward the extremes; while there were many letters of support, the TLP also endured countless denunciations from those fragments of the "movement of movements" apparently dedicated to the absolute preservation of their particularity and the prevention of the emergence of a hybrid analysis of power and resistance in transition. Most of these denunciations sought to valorize the purity of ideology over the eclecticism of theory on the one hand, or to valorize the primacy of action over the "intellectualism" of theory on the other. But what is most ironic is that many of these exorcists refer to the events of May 1968 as proof to back up such points; because while action was indeed paramount at that time, there was also a very strong correlation between theory and practice in Paris, while the doctrinarity of ideology was eschewed. Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle for instance, was a self-described attempt to flesh out the beginnings of a theoretical basis for the revolts he hoped would follow in France and around the world; as he remarked in the preface to the Italian edition "those who really want to shake an established society must formulate a theory which fundamentally explains this society." In short, all too often, those who fetishize "action" while completely dismissing clear and deep theorization about that action often end upon entangled in a unanticipated dimension of the web of power or even worse, get tricked into serving as a pawn in someone else's game.

It is true that the TLP was primarily about theory; as has been stated, what it tried to do was to help articulate the experience in contemporary social movements that the shape of both power and resistance has become both decentralized and interconnected, with the intention of further developing the constellation of opposition that emerged during N30. This article then, can be considered a continuation of the TLP in that it seeks to theorize a "common story" -- with the intention that it be put to practical use -- about how oppressions are both decentered and interwoven in contemporary society and about how our resistances might be as well. It also marks a discontinuity with the TLP in that it confronts the idea that any "liberation movement" can ever really be total in a society marked by the continuing fragmentation of totalities. Ironically, this is precisely for the reason that the term "liberation" is defined by a view of power as ultimately repressive rather than also creative, a point that was mentioned by one of the most interesting intellectuals who took part, Todd May. In fact, upon reflecting on the event, it has become clear that while the TLP talked about "totality" and "liberation" throughout, perhaps what it was really working with was an unacknoweldged synthesis of early Frankfurt School critical theory, recent poststructuralism and the "new anarchism" of contemporary social movements. This realization came about after realizing the strength of May's presentation in which he outlined his theories of poststructuralist anarchism and contingent holism, which in fact reflect very closely the emerging character of the antiglobalization movement.

The most important lesson from this reflection -- which will be developed and considered throughout this article -- is that the constellation of opposition which emerged in Seattle would not have been possible during either the epoch of universality and class struggle nor the epoch of particularity and identity politics, but only became possible in the current transition to the epoch of singularity and limitless multidimensionality of identity.

The Disintegration of Hegemony

Several years afterward, Michel Foucault argued that the events of May 1968 had fundamentally transformed the grounds on which the game of war would be played out in the years after. Rather than conflict emerging primarily on the macropolitical level of the workplace or the nation-state, there was a downward shift into the micropolitical realm of everyday life embodied in the intermeshed and conflictual capillary practices of individual subjects. This empirical realization was interwoven with his theoretical analysis that since the eighteenth century, the shape of power begins to transform from one of repression of individual subjects to one of both repression and creation of individual subjects. Consequentially, a movement to liberate the working class as a subjectivity might not really be liberating at all; without an analysis of the web of power, the "emancipated" workers might still impose authoritarian, racist, sexist, heteronormative policies in the new society that they create. The reason is that "workers" as a subjectivity have been created in particular ways by power emanating upward from below as well as downward from above. While he argued that power had been operating in this fashion for over two centuries by the time he was writing, he also argued that this understanding of power as a web did not become thinkable until the events of May 1968. Strangely, for some this perspective is fundamentally bleak in that with the death of the subject there is said to also be a concomitant death of resistance as well; yet Foucault argued that far from limiting resistance, this tranformation multiplied its possibilities into literally thousands of new arenas of conflict. These arenas are the political spaces in which the new social movements emerged as fragments in the 1970s and 1980s each reductively defining its unique particularity in the shape of a new form of universality.
Like Foucault, Andre Gorz argued that fundamental changes in society were leading towards the displacement of the industrial proletariat as the agent of social change and towards a fragmented "non-class of non-workers" instead. Yet for Gorz, the shift was primarily an economic one; that of the global shift to a neoliberal service economy under the global tutelage of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Of course this was to have great implications since the left had argued since its inception that the industrial proletariat was the central pillar of scoial change due to its strategic position in the economy. In the post-Fordist world of temporary labor, just-in-time production and ever increasing automation this hope was clearly becoming less and less of a possibility. Yet, like Foucault, Gorz argued that rather than spelling the end of the logistical possibility of transformational social conflict, this change would allow a broad array of new social movements outside the normalizing bounds of "class struggle" to freely emerge. These movements were largely constituted by those who had already been marginalized out of the system for some time; such positionalities could thus lead to a common movement for "autonomous production" (i.e., local production for local use) outside the bounds of the wage-labor system. Gorz hoped that this economic change would paradoxically serve as the midwife of a future "post-capitalist, post-industrial, post-socialist" society centered on the common theme of "the liberation of time and the abolition of work."
Between the two of them, Gorz and Foucault helped to lay some of the theoretical groundwork for the new social movement theories that emerged in subsequent years. The primary theorists in this vain such as Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci largely came out in agreement with these basic observations regarding the shift to a posthegemonic, postindustrial society. Touraine for instance, argued that the dissolution of a primarily economic foundation for power meant that the identity of the former industrial worker would become transformed into that of the "individual, a member of primary communities." These fragmented individuals would subsequently become the new centers of social upheaval; in other words, what had been a more or less cohesive society "turns completely into a field of conflicts" in the postindustrial era.. As a result of this change in the center of conflict, he became convinced that "the era of Revolutions is coming to an end" while a new era of permanent conflict and participatory democracy would emerge to replace it. Yet Touraine did not see these emergent conflicts as entirely decentralized; in fact he felt that in each historical period, a competition amongst movements for the position of the hegemony would emerge. Perhaps illuminating some residual authoritarian Marxian aspects within his thought, he extrapolated further from this that the role of the researcher was to determine before the fact which movement it was likely to be in order to help bring it into its own. Yet the one movement that could never become central for Touraine was anarchism, which he blindly associated with terrorism in order to justify his rejection of any anarchist sensibility as a major aspect of the new social movements. This rather problematic point is precisely where Melucci's more unorthodox, antiauthoritarian, egalitarian perspective becomes particularly useful as a means of correcting the limitations in Touraine.
Melucci had been a student of Touraine's and thus held a number of concurrent perspectives with him; yet, as might be expected, there were also major aspects of Touraine's thought that he rejected. He agreed for instance, that new social movements dwelt in the space of everyday life and that they reject the aspiration to "seize power" that had so captivated the movements that came before them. Yet he rejected Touraine's idea that the rise and fall of the hegemonic movement necessarily results in the periodization of history, since this would imply that there was some sort of natural hierarchy of oppression underlying social life. Against this essentially Marxian analysis, he argues that "Touraine's idea of the central movement still clings to the assumption that movements are a personnage, unified actors playing out a role on the stage of history." He also rejected his teacher's belief that the role of the researcher was to pedagogically 'convert' actors to a higher level of understanding somehow unavailable to them; like Foucault, he argued that the role of the researcher was instead one of mutuality and equal exchange. And in line with Gorz, Melucci argued that contra classical Marxism, the "class struggle" of the early 19th century was not so much one between the newly proletarianized and the bourgeoisie as it was one between the elites and the non-proletarianized traditional subsistence communities. In arguing this, he amply demonstrated his belief that "new" social movements in fact had roots reaching back centuries to the struggles of those whose means of existence had always proven superfluous and extraneous (rather than fundamental) to the official structures of capitalism. In doing so, Melucci went beyond Foucault by showing that micropoltics ultimately had an effect not only the practices of everyday life but also on the functioning of institutions as well.
In recent years, the works of Gorz, Touraine, Melucci and other new social-movement theorists of the 1980s have come under somewhat of an attack for their exclusive focus on fragmentation of social movements and their avoidance of how this has lead to new forms of reductionism and therefore cooptation as well. Peyman Vehabzadeh's phenomenological analysis of contemporary social movements is perhaps one of the most unique and challenging to have emerged amongst these, employing the insights of Martin Heidegger and Reiner Schurrmann for the first time in this field. His argument is basically that the positivist sociological theories that emerged before him tended to take individual identity, "ultimate referentiality" and liberal democracy for granted: this lack of critical spirit is seen as contradicting the "new" in their theory and ultimately reinforcing the continuity of what currently is. This is because they "cannot see the great implications of their claim that society as a totality has come to an end" which is that sociology -- in its historical role as the legtimation of existing society -- has come to an end as well. Vahabzadeh's contribution goes beyond these "sociologies of action" to what he calls a "sociology of possibilities" that "prepares itself for the turning" by studying "the present entities and phenomenal arrangements." In this project of redefining new social movement theory within a more critical, postfoundationalist framework, Vehabazadeh questions most of the underlying assumptions of those that preceded him; rather than accept the subjectivity of identity as "natural" he points out that in fact it is constructed, since, as Schurmann argues, "identity does not precede conflict, but is born out of conflict."
This birth of identity is what he refers to as the "articulation of experience" that makes the collective action of contemporary social movements possible. It is important to remember however that the articulation of experience in this sense is not a merely an act of the will, but is primarily a reflection of the epoch in which subjects are situated. In order to illustrate this more clearly, Vehabzadeh uses the Zapatistas; in order to construct the possibility of a relevant social movement, a Zapatista identity was constructed by "articulating the experience of injustice and oppression" suffered by Mayan Chiapanecos. This was made possible by the 1992 land reform which "collapsed the hegemonic social imaginary" of the Mexico de las tres culturas that had been won by Emiliano Zapata and his comrades in the Mexican Revolution. As the Zapatistas advanced towards the new counterhegemonic social imaginary, their articulated experience as Mayan Chiapanecos "receded" into the general population, thus widening and diversifying the struggle. In short, the Zapatistas were able to break out of the boundaries of the hegemony of the Mexican neoliberal regime by building a counterhegemonic parallel power autonomous from the officiality of liberal democracy; therefore they can be seen to "offer the world the first non-teleocratic revolutionary praxis" of "utopia unnamed." This sort of transgressive praxis is precisely what Vehabzadeh sees as the most promising aspects of social movements more recently. By rejecting the discourse of rights under liberalism, contemporary social movements also reject their transformation into subjects of the existing order, which is a major step beyond the new social movements that Gorz, Touraine and Melucci were focusing on.
We now have a brief schematic of how various theorists have conceptualized this shift on a theoretical level; yet we would not really understand the full complexity of this without examining at least a couple of examples in greater detail. Therefore, we will look first at deep ecology and then at third wave feminism through Vehabzadeh's "sociology of possibilities" in order to begin to bring this emerging map into greater relief. Radical deep ecology movements have in the past decade articulated a common experience into a movement through the "primitivist" critique of industrial civilization laid out by John Zerzan and others sympathetic to his vision. Primitivists argue that the totality of industrial civilization should be abolished in order to recreate the space in which humanity and the rest of earth could potentially regain the "free nature" that it had so thoroughly domesticated. According to Zerzan, this domestication emerged as a direct result of the specialization and division of labor beginning with the advent of agriculture and then increasing with each technological development. Specialization thus "works to dissolve moral accountability as it contributes to technical achievement" which, as Zygmunt Baumann has argued ultimately allows events such as the Holocaust or the mass clear-cutting of forests to occur without opposition. A provocative argument to say the least, yet what is not understood by many of his supporters is that Zerzan bases much of his critique of civilization on the work of deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, who in turn rely on a Heideggerian understanding of being. In addition, Zerzan leans heavily on early Frankfurt School theorists such Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is to this book, followed by a consideration of Arne Naess, that we now turn in order to understand some of the fundamental theoretical bases of the primitivist movement.
In this book, Horkheimer and Adorno examine the nature of a society based on "rationality" in a deeply critical way that challenges many of Western civilization's basic beliefs and exposes their hidden uses. They point out for instance, that Enlightenment philosophers such as Francis Bacon hoped to "disenchant" the world through a notion of universal rationality which ultimately rationalized the domination of all of nature and reality through the pursuit of knowledge. The result, they say, is that all attempts at Enlightenment have finally become bound up in relations of domination and unfreedom; "the power of the system over human beings increases with every step they take away from the power of nature" since nature, like man, is reduced to that which is useful to the economic apparatus. After the Enlightenment, all pre-agricultural societies are defined as "barbaric" since rather than "mastering nature" in the Baconian sense, they let nature self-organize its own abundance and consciously live within the patterns of its natural cycles. Against what Zerzan calls the domesticating precepts of civilization, they point out that "abundance needs no law, and civilization's accusation of anarchy sounds almost like a denunciation of abundance." The new domination that emerges with Enlightenment is reinforced tautologically so that the defenselessness of women, Jews and nature at various points in history merely naturalizes their continued exploitation and oppression. Meanwhile, the concomitant rise of the culture industry ensures that any divergence outside the realm of the civilization it enforces is totally and immediately stamped out; "existence in late capitalism is a permanent rite of initiation. Everyone must show they identify wholeheartedly with the power which beats them." This "stamping out" occurs through their redeployment as exemplars "condemned to an economic impotence of the eccentric loner," though it is also true that even those who do not resist become increasingly isolated as well. An important point that Zerzan builds on is that this occurs through the advance of technology and communications; radio, television and cars ironically create subjects that "become more and more alike. Communication makes people conform by isolating them."
Though the critique is profound and important in its critique of civilization, Horkheimer and Adorno still cling to Vehabzadeh's ultimate referentiality -- in this case it is a "dialectical" critique where civilization replaces capital as the base, in order to reduce all other "superstructural" oppressions down to a single location. This comes out in those sectors of the deep ecology movement today who fail to see how flora and fauna forms of being could be of equal importance to human forms of being and who shrug off instances of mass human carnage as a "natural" corrective of some form or another. One attempt to remedy this situation, if their rhetoric is taken at face value, is found in Murray Bookchin's life-long project, the Institute for Social Ecology; in theory, it was supposed to be a sort of synthesis of human and ecological social movements. Yet like Horkheimer and Adorno, Bookchin's perspective is actually yet another form of ultimate referentiality; rather than a biocentric framework it is based on an anthropocentric one which states that man exploits nature because man exploits man as a central feature of capitalism. Today, however there are signs that this polarization is beginning to dissolve; Arne Naess, who coined the term deep ecology in 1973, has in recent years disavowed the more polarized threads of the movement. He has argued instead for a more pragmatic approach in the hopes that social movements would not be forced to come out in direct opposition to one another. In a 1997 interview he stated that "there is no contradiction between humans and wilderness," citing the thoursands of years of preindustrial human presence in Alaska as evidence. He goes further in arguing that due to the fundamental interconnectedness of contemporary social movements, people in the South should not be expected by Northern ecologists to engage policies that would threaten their very survival. Rather, he argues for a pragmatic cooperation between different types of activists in various parts of the world in order to maximize the potential transformation embodied within. This statement undoubtedly would come as a surprise to some, since Naess' definition of deep ecology is essentially that all forms of being have an intrinsic right to exist regardless of the Baconian clarion call to level flora and fauna merely to satisfy human desire. Yet it is precisely this type of pragmatic willingness to revise in order to develop a more thoroughly antifoundationalist perspective that will allow for the interconnections between different movements to be rendered visible and practicable.