by Todd May
A review of ”From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power”, Saul Newman, (Lexington Press)
1.
The overall goal of Saul Newman’s new book, ”From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power”, is to offer a critique of the way power, and specifically political power, is commonly conceived. He avoids the standard approach to such discussions that runs through an embrace or modification of Marx, turning instead to the more neglected arena of anarchism and articulating it with current thinkers associated with the term “post-structuralism.” Newman argues that what he calls the “place of power,” the idea that treatments of power seem often to constrain it conceptually to a certain region or type — in effect, essentializing power into a natural kind — misconceive the true operation of power. Power is, as many recent thinkers have argued, more diffuse and uncircumscribed than traditional progressive treatments of it, especially Marxism, have been able to recognize.
2.
The book starts with a treatment of Marxism, showing that, for Marxists, the place of power is always in the economy, and that non-economistic approaches to power are not considered. The discussion here focuses on the idea that, since Marxists have often thought of the state as determined by economic power, they have not been loath to assume state control in order to change economic relations. The consequences of such thought, long criticized by anarchists, have been manifest throughout the history of our century.
3.
Anarchism, by contrast, rightly sees that Marxism has missed the role of state power in social relations. Unfortunately, anarchists seem to want to place all power at the state level, and thus merely substitute one place of power for another. On their view, the state is the site of power, and resistance lies in the natural impulses of a humanity uncontaminated by such power. Eliminate the state, and deleterious power relations will fall away by themselves.
4.
At this point, Newman turns, in an interesting twist on the standard accounts, to the anarchist Max Stirner in order to criticize the kind of humanism inherent in much other anarchist thinking. For Stirner, the human is not a natural resource of uncontaminated resistance, but rather an empty site, a project to be realized. This project can be realized either in oppressive or non-oppressive ways. The question is, then, how to conceive power and resistance if neither is relegated to a natural place.
5.
Michel Foucault begins this process through his analyses of the multi-form ways power operates. However, he falters because, by seeing power everywhere, he seems to preclude the possibility of conceptualizing resistance without returning to a site outside of power that is uncontaminated by it. Such a site would be as essentialist as that offered by anarchism.
6.
Deleuze and Guattari, by seeking new conceptual categories for power, undermine the idea of distinct places of power and resistance, especially in their concept of the “war machine.” However, by counterposing desire and the social, they return to many of the categories their work was designed to resist.
7.
Derrida, by dislocating much of the oppositional structure that characterizes political (and other) thought, offers an opening for re-conceiving power and resistance. If power and resistance are intermeshed in ways that preclude separating them into distinct sites, then a thinking that involves Derridean categories such as differance and infrastructure may be more appropriate to understanding their operation. Derrida does not, however, offer a treatment of the subject of resistance, the political actor.
8.
Here, finally, Lacan, the real hero of Newman’s book, becomes relevant. For Lacan, power contains its own lack. The signifier is internally riven, allowing resistance to occur within power rather than outside of it. If the Lacanian subject is both encrusted in and resistant to power in its very structure, then both power and resistance exist without distinct and essential places, are dispersed and multi-form, and can be thought without the problems that have characterized treatments from Marx to Deleuze and Guattari. A post-anarchist thought, which takes seriously the anti-authoritarian impulse of anarchism while jettisoning its humanist treatment of power and resistance, would start from here.
9.
Newman believes that by using a Lacanian framework, one utilized also in the work of Ernesto Laclau in his discussion of the logic of the empty signifier, one can at the same time embrace an ethics of critique and avoid any essentializing character to which the terms of the critique might lend themselves. If this sounds like Derrida’s deconstructive approach to language, it should. What Newman seeks to provide is an approach to progressive thinking that takes off from anarchism and post-structuralism rather than Marxism and that sees the impulses behind these movements as providing not only an approach to conceiving power but as also, inextricably, an approach to language.
10.
There are several aspects of ”From Bakunin to Lacan” that particularly commend it. First, unlike many of the accounts that refer to the thinkers cited, the book is clear and coherent. The summaries it provides of the views of such difficult philosophers as Lacan and Deleuze are both accurate and readable. This is a difficult virtue to achieve in such a work. Second, Newman has funneled a wide range of views into a single program of political theory. The book does not read like a set of disconnected chapters but as a movement progressively through several views toward a coherent theoretical approach to the conception of politics. Finally, in contrast to my own work, which was focused on Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard in contrast to Derrida and Lacan, Newman’s book seeks to articulate an anarchism aligned with the deconstructive elements of recent French thought.
11.
The question that remains for me is whether such an attempt succeeds. I believe that it does not, chiefly for reasons that motivated me to move away from Derrida and Lacan in the first place. I am not convinced that by utilizing a deconstructive approach to language and politics there is room for the kind of collective action that seems necessary for political success. Indeterminacy is, to my mind, a weak basis for political thought and organizing. It tends to drive people apart rather than bringing them together.
I understand that Newman is concerned, as he is right to be, that the bringing together too often runs the risk of embracing once again essentializing concepts and authoritarian forms of power. It seems to me, however, that an adequate political approach cannot avoid this risk; its task is to articulate a conception of language that sees meaning — and the political categories that arise from it — as determinate but contingent, rather than necessarily indeterminate. The choice, in short, does not seem to me to lie solely between a Derridean/Lacanian indeterminacy (or always-threatened determinacy) and an authoritarian essentializing determinacy. A third possibility, and to my mind the right one, would be a contingent determinacy, a determinacy that can float around the edges, be criticized and changed by genealogical or other critique, but that retains its power to provide the kind of ethical edge that Newman seeks (but seems to me not to find) in Derrida and Lacan.
12.
That said, I recommend the book highly to scholars of progressive thought. Newman seems to me to be right on target in seeing anarchism rather than Marxism as the proper jumping-off point for progressive political theory; and in that his work, moreover, is in keeping with the current trend of anti-globalization movements around the world. Whether one ultimately chooses Foucault/Deleuze/Lyotard or Derrida/Lacan as the proper inheritors and modifiers of classical anarchist thought remains to be seen. That Newman is providing an interesting and original perspective, rooted in the right place, cannot be denied.
