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The Possibility of an Anti-Humanist Anarchism
Published in 2000

Summary (English)
Please find below fragments of a work in progress. They
attempt to rethink Bookchin's animus vis-a-vis the
poststructuralism of Derrida & Guattari, Derrida and
Foucault and the postmodernism of Baudrillard in "Re-
enchanting Humanity", Todd May's "The Political
Philosophy of Poststucturalist Anarchism" the triadic ecology
of Guattari and a recent essay by Patrick Hayden on
naturalist ontology. And here's a few of fragments of
autonomous thought.
'This text was presented to the Research on Anarchist List
and placed on the web with the agreement of the author, Joff
(JPB1MMS@MAIL.BOLTON.AC.UK).
Rsum (Franais)
Fragments d'un travail en cours. Tentative pour repenser
l'animosit de Bookchin, dans Re-enchanting Humanity,
l'gard du poststructuralisme de Derrida & Guattari, Derrida
& Foucault, le postmodernisme de Baudrillard, The Political
Philosophy of Postructuralist Anarchism , de Todd May, la
triade cologique de Guattari et un essai rcent de Patrick
Hayden sur l'ontologie naturaliste. Ce sont donc quelques
fragments de pense autonome.
Ce texte a t prsent dans la liste de diffusion " Recherche
sur l'anarchisme " et plac sur le Web avec l'accord de
l'auteur, Joff (JPB1MMS@MAIL.BOLTON.AC.UK).
Introduction
My writing not only contributes to environmental philosophy
for it is a work of environmental philosophy. Such a work
unashamedly operates out of a radical philosophical tradition.
The tradition is Enlightenment bound and humanist in
emphasis.
This tradition begins, for the purposes of this thesis, with
Feuerbach and Marx. Yet, the fetters of the tradition of
"critical criticism" are free enough not to lead to a
constriction of ideas. Thus, the position of my work is at once
experimental and yet "rooted" in the Enlightenment tradition.
It is this curious in-between or interstitial zone that will be
explored. The equivocation nestles in-between two
apparently irreconcilable structures of thought, namely, the
philosophy of the "totality" and the philosophy of otherness
or "difference".
In questioning the in-between of the totality and
poststructuralism's (PS) emphasis upon positive difference
and the confrontation between a defence of Enlightenment
humanism and its contemporary erstwhile detractors, an
experimental and "monstrous" thinking emerges. In the
juxtaposition of the "totality" and the "different", what is
sought after is not a forced synthesis or reconciliation of
difference, but a possibilising and a playfulness. In chartering
unknown seas, new territories uncover generous spaces of
experimentation and thought. This is perhaps the dangerous
task of post-human philosophy : "the manufacture of
materials to harness forces, to think the unthinkable".
In thinking this peculiar in-between, the metaphor of a
"force-field" of ideas is employed. A force field of ideas
abandons the search for an "extorted" reconciliation of
oppositions (Hegel's will-to-system) but instead brings into
the foreground the relationality of ideas which at once both
attract and repel. Such a structure is dynamic, fluid and less
rigid than a staid system which demands the unification of
opposites "at any cost".
A defence of Enlightenment ideals that is historically situated
requires the examination of the concepts of humanism and
naturalism, in order to demonstrate that the "gay"
abandonment of such principles by "postmodern nihilism" is
never fully extricable from the tradition that is rebelled
against.
The following points hope to illuminate the possibility of a
"transhuman(t)" anarchism which is ecologically sensitive,
tolerant of diversity, yet which sees the role of stewardship as
essential for guiding the planet away from imminent collapse.
Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault are taken as representatives
of the canon of PS and Bookchin's thinking is taken as
representative of green (anarchist) political philosophy which
roots itself in the humanist and naturalist tradition of the
Enlightenment.
First and foremost, by demonstrating the interrelationship
between PS and Bookchin's social ecology, it will be shown
that the incommensurability argument Bookchin employs is
unwarranted and ungenerous. The incommensurability
Bookchin sees between classical and dialectical logic renders
Bookchin's own observations contradictory.
Incommensurability implies that rational standards are
relative or internal to a tradition or culture or paradigm in
which they are articulated. In this sense incommensurability
implies relativism. Thus, Bookchin is on slippery ground
when he contends that : Brute facts " are distortions of reality
in dialectical reason because for dialectical reason Being is
not an agglomeration of fixed entities and phenomena".
His defensive claim that analytic logic has no validity in
testing the rationality of dialectical logic can be turned on his
own conjectures and therefore his argument warrants further
reflection. It is arguable whether such a defensive claim is a
serious defect of social ecology. Furthermore, this form of
argument is now disintegrating given the fact that the once
opposed traditions of "continental" and "analytical"
philosophy are engaging with and merging into one another.
Derrida and Rorty are thinkers who attempt to bridge the gap
between these two approaches to philosophy.
Therefore, notwithstanding Bookchin's protests, the question
of rational dialogue, for those who have ears to listen,
between PS, social and deep ecology and anarchism ought to
be posed. In order to disclose the interconnections and
affinities between PS, anarchist political philosophy and the
possible fruitful co-optation of them by ecological thought
demands that several centripetal concepts receive close
attention. The concepts of the rhizome and arborescence,
hierarchy, dualism, and becoming will be assessed in order to
think the possibility for a commensurable discourse between
two "apparently" intransigent rivals.
At first glance, it is surprising that anarchism has
demonstrated such a lack of tolerance towards PS theory. PS
explores indeterminacy, the realm of appearances, freakish
becomings, fragmentation, and positive otherness. In summa
: the celebration of chaos. Anarchism, etymologically, is a
state without order, a stateless and chaotic state without the
State. In celebrating the social order that emerges in the
absence of the ordering principle of the State, anarchism thus
emphasises creativity and spontaneity.

The Concept of Naturalism
Naturalism is a philosophical position which is open to a
multiplicity of possible variations. From a general
perspective a naturalist contends that whatever exists exists
as natural phenomena. Naturalism thus rejects seeking
explanation at the level of the super-natural. Yet, naturalism
is not necessarily synonymous with materialism. Materialism
is logically distinct from naturalism because naturalism is
compatible with varying ontological positions. The chief
tenets of naturalism are as follows :
1. Knowledge of the universe is gained by analysis of "natural objects" which are
conditioned by the impact of natural causes. The universe of natural objects is knowable since it is
governed by a causal and spatio-temporal order.
2. Changes in the nature of natural objects are primarily explained through the
operations and impacts of natural causes.
3. A natural cause or system of natural causes which impacts upon a natural object is
explainable as a natural process.
4. The natural order is grasped as a system of natural processes. "Nature is in principle
intelligible in all its parts, but it cannot be explained as whole".
5. A natural methodology discloses the workings of the natural world in terms of natural
causes and is testable through examination of the consequences of natural causes.
6. The natural is intelligible, if and only if, natural processes are regular. As a
consequence a natural methodology seeks to disclose natural laws which govern the universe of
natural objects. Human beings as natural objects are in principle governed by the same natural
processes which account for the change of vegetation and animals. The natural method is thus
applicable to the domain of social and mental life. Humans, on this account, are immanent, they
are natural objects.
7. Recourse to nonnatural methodology occurs only in moments of despair. For the
most part, all humans naturally apply the natural method since they intrinsically possess natural
properties as natural objects.
8. The practice of reason is consistent with the applicability of the natural method and
science is the paradigm of reason's application.
9. Scientific rationality is not infallible and theories as such are subject to revisions and
even abandonment if better theories (more true?) manifest themselves. Science's fallibility implies
that there can be no ultimate certitude for any scientific theory. Theories are rigorously tested
against rival theories and there is nothing contradictory in believing a theory to be true and
recognising that it may well be false by future standards.
10. Mathematics and geometry do not point toward a transcendent Platonic ontology in
which timeless numerical essences reside as distinct from the natural order. As such, numerical
entities, according to naturalism, do not necessarily imply nonnatural objects.
11. Naturalism recognises that are other ways of experiencing the natural world but
contends that the only cognitive mode of experience fitting for rigorous explanation is the scientific
mode.
12. Naturalism defends an ontological pluralism which rejects the claim that all natural
objects are reducible to one form of natural object. All natural objects share a fi xed level of reality.
No exceptional natural object is more real than another.
13. Naturalism recognises that humans are unique in their capacity to hold and pursue
values but instead of elevating the species above the rest of nature's inhabitants, naturalism
perceives the human species as a natural phenomenon subject to natural laws which can be
uncovered by a natural methodology. Naturalism contends that moral disputes are resolvable
through the rigorous practice of the natural method. Contra a morally irrefragable intuitionism,
naturalism defends the testing of moral arguments and scientific theories alike through the
examination of testable consequences. And lastly,
14. Naturalism is adamantly this-worldly to the extent that it considers philosophical
problems as natural problems. Philosophy thus enquires after the human, natural object and
speculation concerning transcendent entities is rigorously avoided.
Dialectical Naturalism
Central to the project of dialectical naturalism is the
transcendence of the dualism subject/object. Such a project
thinks that each conjunct is not immune to the residue of the
other. The philosophy of social ecology thus incorporates an
ontology of nature which is at once material and subjective.
Subjectivity resides in nature in various degrees and is not
exclusive to the mental processes humans possess. If we
concede that subjectivity inheres within every element of
nature then the hierarchically structured subject/object
dualism is rendered questionable by a way of thinking that
examines the relationship between entities in terms of what is
held in common rather than what is radically other.
The question arises however : from a humanist viewpoint,
how can we maintain the uniqueness of the human subject?
Traditionally, the subject is considered as unique precisely
because of its capacity to transcend nature through its
capacity for self-consciousness. If the transcendence of
nature into the realm of culture is rejected as dualistic then it
is difficult not to fall into the trap of creating an egalitarian
biosphere in which every entity deserves equal respect.
Furthermore, is not the introduction of subjectivity within
nonhuman nature itself an anthropomorphic gesture?
But a more interesting question is to inquire as to whether
one can ever fully extricate a perspective from an
anthropomorphic position. Is an other-regarding perspective
irredeemably contaminated with anthropomorphic remains?
However, Bookchin is guilty more than most on this point in
the sense that he is blind to his own anthropomorphizing and
yet excessively critical of deep ecology's "biocentric"
conception of nature. Dialectical (naturalistic) reason opposes
itself to intuitionism and mysticism precisely because of the
unreasoned, cloudy and arbitrary nature of visceral feelings.
Bookchin is an ardent defender of Enlightenment reason (in
the form of Hegel's philosophy of optimism) and thinks that
deviation from a commitment to reason is one step nearer to
National Socialism whose perverted "ecologism" was based
upon intuition and anti-rationalism. Dialectical reason as well
as opposing itself to mysticism also critically questions
instrumental (conventional) reason which it perceives as one-
dimensional and "coldly analytical".
The form of reason Bookchin subscribes to then is a
dialectical reason which is organic, critical, developmental
yet analytical and ethical. Dialectical reason conceives the
interrelationships between particular entities as mediated
through the "totality". Entities within the totality are forever
unfolding in a perpetual process of coming into being and
passing away. This process is a process of becoming which
Bookchin derives from Heraclitus and later in Hegel. Nature
is then in a process of continual development and each entity
has boundaries which are continually being redefined.
Bookchin's philosophy of nature then perceives the working
of dialectics in the sphere of nature, society and
consciousness.
It is at this point that we begin to see the questionable
omnipresence of dialectics. It is her draws out those
contradictory aspects of a thing and thus renders them
explicit. In this way, implicit potentiality is given its full
actuality or realisation. Bookchin is aware that one of the
assumptions necessary for this perception is that there is
teleological development towards greater complexity or
differentiation within the universe. Dialectical naturalism
celebrates the process of "natural" becoming and advances a
"vision of wholeness, fullness, and richness of differentiation
and subjectivity." Reason is defended here as the means
through which latent potentialities are identified. Thus, the
unleashing of latent potentialities by the articulation of
reason, for Bookchin, is the means through which social
development occurs. A "rational society" emerges out of the
unfolding process of reason's development.
In a clear sense then, the abandonment of reason which
Bookchin perceives in several areas of social life signals the
combined obsolescence of social development and the
excrescence of the irrational. A social ecology is thus
considered ethical given the prescriptive ethical import in the
statement that being "must ripen into the fullness of its
being". The political question which arises is : who is to
decide what constitutes the fullness of a being's being? Who
is to decide what a being is to become? And furthermore,
what are the means for disclosing the constitution of a being's
being?
It is also legitimate to ask whether the warping of the
development of an entity within nature by another entity
constitutes an unethical act? If this were so, then animals,
plant and insects, would be humorously considered to live
unethically. In the human sphere, the political implications
would necessarily encourage passivity in a global agreement
to let all being be in order for them to fulfil their latent
potentiality.
But perhaps these questions are unwarranted. Perhaps we are
trying to extract a confession from Bookchin under duress.
Bookchin replies to the question concerning ethical acts by
maintaining a strict incommensurability between process-
orientated dialectical philosophy and "analytical" philosophy
which directs its attentions to "brute facts." Bookchin
considers that answers to dialectical questions can only be
answered by dialectics and hence dialectical reason. A logic
premised on the principle of identity A equals A, can hardly
be used to test the validity of a logic premised on A equals A
and not-A.
It is here that the dispute with antihumanism, mysticism and
"postmodernism" appears in bold relief. Bookchin is
contesting the dominance of other forms of nondialectical
reason. Other forms of consciousness and different ways of
conceiving the workings of things are considered as a
betrayal of social development, a betrayal of Enlightenment
ideals and their overt quest for liberation. In more ordinary
terms one could say that this is sheer intolerance (of
diversity, of other voices) on Bookchin's part. Professor
Kovel in examining the invective in Bookchin's prose
contends : "Dialectic, instead of unfolding, becomes static,
frozen in an endless series of vendettas". In less personalistic
terms, we could argue that the reconstructed Hegelian logic
Bookchin employs renders the existence of positive
differences problematic.
Rhizomatic Naturalism
The potential incommensurability between the naturalist
ontologies of Deleuze and Bookchin will now be assessed.
But firstly the organic metaphor or "image" of the rhizome
will receive attention.
Rhizome, dualism and supersession
We shall concern ourselves here with an alternative image of
thought whose alternative perspective is anarchistic (for it
essentially opposes itself to an image of thought which is
State-orientated). One possible objection is that the reading
here is too literal.
The objection is taken on board but what is significant is the
tracing of potential affinities between the perception of
thought as nomadic and experimental and the traditional
political philosophy of anarchism. Deleuze and Guattari are
principally interested in lines of flight and moments of
deterritorialisation that escape the binary coding of the State
apparatus. Deleuze and Guattari think becomings,
multiplicities, and proliferation as a form of counter-praxis to
binary oppositions. They are interested in what escapes from
social cleavages. Instead of East-West they look for the
ruptures and breakthroughs that are occurring elsewhere.
Thinking otherwise than molarity (the molar), they seek to
disclose rebellions in the North and the South.
Molecularity is discerned as a potential site of creativity and
refusal. Normal identities, binary-molar apparatuses
(male/female, culture/nature) are contrasted with provisional
identities of becoming. The rhizome is an image of thought
which attempts to account for thought's trajectory and speed.
It is contrasted to the traditional image of Occidental thought,
the tree and the root. The rhizome is different from roots and
radicles. Rats which swarm over each other are invoked as an
instance of a rhizome. Rhizome contains both lines of
segmentarity (recuperation) and lines of deterritorialisation
(escape). Rhizomes are compared with arborescent
structures. The rhizome contains elements which resist the
sedentary structures of hierarchy and centralised organs.
Deleuze and Guattari do not merely affirm one component of
the dualism in favour of the other. This point is argued by
Tomlinson : "All Deleuze's "systems" can be regarded as
temporary strategic constructions, as the transitory
fortifications of an advancing nomadic war machine". For
Deleuze and Guattari, there are knots of arborescence in
rhizomes and rhizomatic offshoots in roots. In summa :
rhizomes are acentred, nonhierarchical and are best defined
as permitting the circulation of evasive states of intensity.
The model of the rhizome examines what flees and what is
produced by fleeing. Couchgrass is a wonderful image
Deleuze and Guattari provide in order to distinguish the
growth of grass as distinct from the growth of trees.
Couchgrass grows between paving stones, it springs up
everywhere. Couchgrass is a weed, it is rhizomatic.
The production of desire, for Deleuze and Guattari, is looked
upon as a rhizomatic process. The rhizome is above all a way
of grasping connection and coupling, a way of understanding
extra-textual relationships (the effect of a book on the
reader's intensity "outside" of a book). In the case of writing,
Deleuze and Guattari maintain : "Writing webs a war
machine and lines of flight, abandoning the strata,
segmentarities, sedantarity, the State apparatus".
The question arises : to what extent are the concepts of the
rhizome and horizontality useful as tools for social ecology
and anarchism? Kropotkin elaborated, contra Darwin, a
conception of evolution that emphasised the role of mutual
aid in social evolution. The rhizome shares similar features
with Kropotkin's notion of the affinity group which is a
collectivity that spontaneously emerges for specific needs or
ends.
In thinking the relationship between Deleuzian PS and
ecological politics, Patrick Hayden contends that Deleuze
expounds a naturalistic ontology. Hayden reworks the
concept of naturalism in order to account for Deleuze's
critique of the "verticality" of Occidental thought.
Two troubling lacunas are present in Hayden's analysis. The
first is that Hayden fails to expose Deleuze's employment of
"machinic" metaphors which are the bedrock of Deleuze's
rhizomatic philosophy. The second is that there is dearth of
analysis concerning the impact of Nietzsche's
lebensphilosophie upon Deleuze's philosophical trajectory.
On Hayden's interpretation, Deleuze's naturalism celebrates
the interrelationships between human and nonhuman life
without recourse to metaphysically static binary oppositions
(essence/appearance). The pragmatics of Deleuzian
naturalism asks for the "effects" a way of thinking have upon
us. Thus, Hayden is right to note the search for different ways
of living and thinking by Deleuze and Guattari which are
sensitive to and in tune with the environment.
Hayden fails to note the effect of Nietzsche's philosophy of
innocent becoming and this-worldly atheism upon Deleuze's
own thinking. In looking for a way of thinking which escapes
Platonism's positing of pure transcendent Being (the real of
Ideas), Deleuze seeks to re-unite the (bio)-diversity of the
natural world with the natural world's "real conditions of
material difference and process of becoming".
Deleuze develops a pluralistic naturalism through a reading
of Lucretius and Spinoza. In thinking through the concept of
nature, Deleuze reads Lucretius as refusing to succumb to the
temptation to totalise. In refusing to seek a final unification
of the different elements of nature, what is celebrated is
precisely the diversity and difference which inheres within
nature. This refusal connects up with tenet (naturalism) 4
outlined above. The realm of Ideas is jettisoned for it
supports the idea that nature is an imperfect copy of
transcendent Being. Individuals, species, environments are
considered as non-totalisable sums. The multiple is
celebrated over the One. Deleuze reads nature distributively,
that is to say, as an open ended interplay of the various
plurality of elements which compose it. Nature is a
continuous process of becoming, a process of formation and
deformation.
Deleuze searches for a way of thinking that can align itself
with the fluctuations of "reality". If nature fluctuates because
it is continually becoming then a rigid dichotomy (humanity
and nature) is an unsuitable tool for describing such a reality.
This is precisely the point that needs to be underscored.
Deleuze and his collaborator, Guattari, call for a way of
thinking that celebrates the different and the singular which
counters the urge to totalise or unify. The plane of
immanence is the concept employed to celebrate difference
and singularities. Deleuze and Guattari's model of evolution
rejects the arborescent image of thought based upon descent
(genealogy) in favour of a rhizomatic conception of species
development in which the "traversality" of species combined
with a continuous interaction with the external environment
is given greater weight.
The political dimension to Deleuze's naturalism takes the
form, according to Hayden, of a creativity of concepts,
practices, and values which "best promote the collective life
and interests of diverse modes of existence inhabiting the
planet". Deleuze's micropolitical analysis thus examines
local, often temporary ecological situations. In doing so,
ecological activism, as one struggle amongst many , steers
clear of "universal abstractions" (the ideal of equality for all)
and thus concentrates on the particular and the singular.
Furthermore, Guattari stresses micropolitical processes with
respect to the workings of molecular revolutions. Thus spoke
Guattari : For the last decade [1970s] battle lines widely
different from those which previously characterised the
traditional workers movement have not ceased to multiply
(immigrant workers, skilled workers unhappy with the kind
of work imposed on them, the unemployed, over exploited
women, ecologists, nationalists, mental patients,
homosexuals, the elderly, the young etc.).. But will their
objectives become just another "demand acceptable to the
system" or will vectors of molecular revolution begin to
proliferate behind them.
The rejection of universal abstractions does not necessarily
entail the outright refusal to examine macropolitical
phenomena. As Deleuze says : "every politics is
simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics". Deleuze
perceives ecological problems in terms of the translation
between local and global ecosystems. Deleuze analyses the
construction of the planetary ecosystem beginning with the
combination and intersection of local phenomena which
together compose the global ecosystem.
For the purposes of the central contention of this thesis, we
ought to make a comparison between the rhizomatic-thinking
of Deleuze and the social ecology of Bookchin. Bookchin's
social ecology argues that the domination of nature stems
from a deeply entrenched historical domination of human by
human. Reason and domination, on this account, are mutually
exclusive. Integrated World Capitalism infects "reason" with
a contaminated conception of reason which desires
production for the sake of production (instrumental
means/end reason).
The message is clear : it is only by reconfiguring a radical
(uprooting) revolutionary politics that reason's struggle will
be victorious. Bookchin defends such an uprooting of
thought, praxis and values by enunciating the value of
decentralised communities which practice locally based
democracy. Furthermore, Bookchin's dialectical naturalism
re-situates human and nonhuman life within bioregions
which are sensitive to complex evolutionary phenomena.
Human and nonhuman are intertwined and function
according to the ecological principle of mutualism or
symbiosis. Other noteworthy precepts of social ecology
include the implementation of environmentally friendly
(alternative) technologies (solar power, wind power and so
on) and the celebration of cultural (ethnic, local) and
biophysical diversity.
Hayden claims that there are points of intersection here
between social ecology and rhizomatic thinking. However,
Bookchin has attacked Deleuze regarding the explicit anti-
humanism which pervades his work. PS, in general, is
rejected given its decentring of "Man". On the other hand,
Deleuze wishes to transcend what he sees as a one-
dimensional Enlightenment rationality and more particularly
the unchallenged march toward a rational society by Marxist
theoreticians. The presuppositions underlying the idea of
progress and the teleological belief in the messianic ending of
history with the arrival of heaven on earth is further attacked
by Deleuze who wishes to think free from systems of closure.
Deleuze's philosophy seeks to leap over the "deterministic
presuppositions of traditional essentialism and humanism"
which are evident in Bookchin's paean to Hegelian dialectics.
Hayden's point is that Bookchin examines only one surface
of ecological phenomena namely its "inner" dialectical
development without seeing phenomena as entwined with an
"outside". Hayden's analysis is fundamentally weakened
given the fact that one of Deleuze's main influences was
Nietzsche who inaugurated a "deconstructive" practice that
sought to chiefly expose the hidden motivations lurking in
Occidental thought, namely philosophy's hidden desire or
will-to-power. The concept of becoming is centripetal to
Nietzsche's philosophy of the eternal recurrence and the Will-
to-Power. Yet, a grasping of the critique of the transcendent
world of essences, the beyond or Nirvana by an immanent
rhizomatic naturalism is blunted without recourse to the
becoming-Nietzsche of Deleuze.
Nietzsche set in train one of the most hostile critiques of
Christianity and of Occidental culture and Nietzsche was one
of the main spurs for Deleuze's philosophy of affirmation. To
grasp the meaning of Deleuze's plane of immanence thus
requires foregrounding Spinoza's and Nietzsche's
philosophies of power and affectivity. Hayden fails to
provide such an analysis.
In contrast to Hayden, Gare notes the impacts of Nietzsche
and Bergson upon Deleuze's thinking and contends that
Deleuze constructs a Nietzschean philosophy of nature out of
philosophy, mathematics and scientific advances. More
importantly, several of Deleuze's chief concepts are omitted
from Hayden's otherwise thought-provoking essay. The
machinic assemblage, the Body-without-Organs (BwO), and
the mechanosphere receive no mention whatsoever. Such a
selective reading cannot but give the impression that Deleuze
and Guattari enunciated a soft and woolly passivity. On the
contrary, Guattari calls for ever greater control and
manipulation of the "mechanosphere" given the constant
human abuse of fragile ecosystems.
Furthermore, it can be argued that Deleuze and Guattari's
collaborative Anti-Oedipus enterprise was directed toward a
rethinking and reconstruction of ontology itself. The a
naturalistic ontology ought to be put into parentheses here.
The traditional tools of ontology (being, object, qualities,
pairs) are replaced by Deleuze and Guattari with the concepts
of planes, intensities, flows, becomings, and couplings. Rigid
binary oppositions (a chief example is the man/woman
dualism) are avoided and in their place we find "a continuum
of interacting embodied subjectivities".
Yet, it is legitimate to inquire as to whether a machinic
ontology is necessarily gender neutral or nature oppressive.
Grosz and others have been quick off the mark to note the
potentially sexist metaphors employed by Deleuze and
Guattari. The use of machinic metaphors may well express a
phallic drive whose obvious desire is to plug into, couple up
and oppressively connect up with everything it can dominate.

C(ha)osmos
Guattari's later work unequivocally aligns itself with thinking
of a green hue. Guattari's Les Trois Ecologies will receive
examination here.
A triadic ecology problematises the subject/object dualism.
The subject is decentralised and configured from an
exteriority of components (the unconscious, the body).
Guattari names these as components of subjectification. The
hermetic self-certain interiority articulated by Descartes is
questioned by Guattari for its one-dimensional emphasis.
There are other "ways of existing" which would seem to be
irreducible to the "realm of consciousness".
Guattari is principally interested in the possible emergence of
new paradigms of ethico-aesthetic thinking and praxis. Such
paradigms rethink the relationship between human
subjectivity and the context (environment) within which it
engages. Subjectivity seems to imply the role of the
unconscious in relation to the human and natural
environment. In comparison, Bookchin's analysis of the
unconscious is conspicuously absent in his philosophy.
With emphasis upon the creative potentiality of subjectivity
or new ways of existing, Guattari looks toward the future. He
is in effect offering a "futurist agenda". Such a futurist
agenda attempts to think the intersection of the human with
cybernetics and more particularly with computer-aided
subjectivity. In schizoanalysing the ecological, a cartography
of subjectivity transcends predefined territorial limits (the
orthodoxy of Oedipus for example) with the formation of
new perspectives "without prior recourse to assured
theoretical foundations or the authority of a group, school,
conservatory, or academy".
New perspectives emerge from the intersection of social,
mental, and environmental ecologies. The triadic intersection
of the socius, the psyche, and "nature", Guattari believes, is
an essential nodal point for decoding the general degradation
of social relationships, the mind, and the environment.
Guattari refuses to separate the elements of the triad. In
schizoanalytic language, they form an assemblage.
Schizoanalytical social ecology challenges the dualism
between nature and culture with the perception that nature
and culture are inseparable. Neither "human work" or the
"natural habitat" are legitimate either/or choices. A
"transversal" understanding of the interactions between
ecosystems, the "mechanosphere" and social and individual
universes of reference is encouraged by Guattari in order to
rethink the possible detrimental effects of isolated social,
psychological and environmental ecologies.
It should be noted Guattari is arguing from an
anthropocentric as opposed to biocentric viewpoint. Guattari
and Negri claim that communism's "call to life" celebrates
the slender hope of a reconfigured human solidarity.
However, this observation needs to be balanced for the
argument presupposes the very dualism which is brought into
question. Guattari does not wish to rehearse traditional
debates. In a very important sense he is calling for a new eco-
logic.
This eco-logic is a "logic of intensities" which examines "the
movement and intensity of evolutive processes". What
Guattari is seeking to describe are "processual lines of flight"
that are secreted from entrenched totalities and identities. In
other words Guattari is attempting to think of one-off events
which once combined with subjective assemblages provide
examples of new existential configurations in which social,
psychic and natural elements function in a nondestructive
milieu. The political project of triadic ecological praxes is the
affirmation of new forms of subjectivity (new forms of
knowledge, culture, sensibility, and sociability).
The social ecologies of Bookchin and Guattari both see
capitalism as a system of economics hostile to the life of
ecosystems. Yet, Guattari is innovative from the viewpoint of
capitalism's tactic of "intension", that is to say, the way
capitalism nestles into "unconscious levels of subjectivity".
Guattari drives the point home :
It has become imperative to confront the effects of capitalist power on the mental ecology of daily life,
whether individual, domestic, conjugal, neighbourly, creative, or personal-ethical".
Processes of re-singularisation and the practice of the art of
dissensus rather than a "mind-numbing" or levelling
consensus are defended by Guattari as tactics to de-stabilise
capitalist subjectivity. It must be borne in mind that Guattari
is advancing a generalised ecology which incorporates the
"whole of subjectivity and capitalist power formations". A
generalised ecology eschews a sole concern for the welfare of
animals or trees. Yet, it also refuses to rigidly demarcate the
three ecologies. The art of the eco endeavours to formulate
this kind of "praxis openness".
On the subject of mental ecology and the ambivalence of
desire, Guattari makes the interesting point that violence is
the consequence of complex subjective assemblages and not
an essential attribute of the human species. Guattari
maintains that violence is not "intrinsically inscribed in the
essence of the human species". This would seem to trouble
Bookchin's alignment of Deleuze and Guattari with an anti-
humanism.
Bookchin is eager to denounce those he sees as condemning
the human species (or what he calls humanity) for its
apparently disastrous effects upon the environment. If
capitalism or Integrated World Capitalism (Guattari's
concept) is to be challenged then new values, and new
ecological praxes must be invented.
Guattari believes that an environmental ecology of the future
ought to be much more than a "mere defence of nature". It is
worth quoting Guattari in full here :
Increasingly in future, the maintenance of natural equilibria will be dependent upon human intervention;
the time will come, for example, when massive programmes will have to be set in train to regulate the
relationship between oxygen, ozone, and carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. In this perspective,
environmental ecology could equally be re-named "machinic ecology", since both cosmic and human
practice are nothing if not machinic - indeed they are machines of war, in so far as "Nature" has always
been at war with life!"
What Guattari means by the comment that "Nature" has
always been at war with life is far from clear. Furthermore,
the meaning of Guattari's demand for an ethics and politics
fitting for the technological developments which are under
way in respect of the "general destiny of humanity" is even
less clear. Yet, Guattari's continual reference to humanity
ought to repel the designation of Guattari as a vulgar anti-
humanist. Moreover, Guattari's open call for a return of the
practice of resingularisation and his affirmation of the art of
dissensus rather than "neo-liberal consensus" does not
necessarily imply that Guattari was anti-universalist. Contra
Ferry's reading of differential thinking, resingularisation
(process of becoming and mode of experimentation) does not
necessarily imply universalism (legal rights for the whole of
humanity). What Guattari points toward are the technological
developments (data-processing, genetic engineering) which
mean that the definitions of the human being are increasingly
subject to forces of an alien and exterior nature. Such a
subjection requires a rethinking of the human subject in
relation to its environment and its future(s).
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" 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.
Obviously if we reject all grand narratives then social
ecology's grand narrative of human liberation must also be
rejected.
The May-June evenements 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 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.
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 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).
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".
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".
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. 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" 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.
Poststructuralist Anarchism
Todd May formulates the relationship between anarchism
and PS political philosophy in terms of PS thought forming a
framework for thinking the concrete and particular without
recourse to universal transcendent ideals. May constructs a
"triadic" ethical schema which distinguishes formal, strategic
and tactical political philosophies. Formal political
philosophy would include the abstract formulations of Rawls
or Nozick. Formal philosophy would thus defend one pole of
the is-ought dichotomy. A strategic political philosophy
approaches the is-ought dichotomy in terms of the tension in-
between the two. The in-between neither supports one nor the
other disjunct but thinks the relationship in terms of
application and real political programmes. Thus, Lenin in
asking "what is to be done?" is exploring the abstract
formalism of political philosophy in connection with the
pragmatic utilitarian sphere of politics. A strategic analysis is
therefore encompassing and unitary in the sense that it tends
toward single goals, for example, the dictatorship of the
proletariat.
Tactical political philosophy is more akin to the uprisings of
1968. Rejecting representation in the form of a vanguard
party whose goal is the articulation of worker's interests (for
the "people" cannot formulate their own interests!), a tactical
analysis is bound to the particular and the multiple. Concern
with universal interests emanating from a particular group or
class are absent from tactical PS philosophy.
In this sense, May contends, anarchism, at least in the
classical anarchism of Kropotkin and Proudhon, is a
precursor of French PS. Contra the coercion endemic in the
coldest of all cold monsters, classical anarchism desires
maximum freedom beyond the realm of domination. PS's
denunciation of the domination of marginal groups
(homosexuals, ethnic) clearly has principles compatible with
an orthodox anarchist position.
The differences and similarities between classical anarchism
and PS political philosophy are identifiable with respect to
the constitution of power. Tactical thinking perceives power
as dispersed throughout the socius whereas traditional
conceptions of power consider power as emanating from a
central source (the State). Kropotkin believes that power
stifles chaotic-order and voluntary mutual aid organisations
such as the lifeboat association (one could call this self-
organisation or autopoiesis in modern terms). And this is
precisely the point that philosophers like Deleuze and
Foucault contest.
Deleuze disputes the a priori assumption that power
necessarily suppresses and as such power is not necessarily
the negation of humanity. There is nothing lurking
primordially or existing pre-formed behind the alienated
worker and no true knowledge waiting to be appear from the
veil of ideological manipulation. In anarchist terms, there is a
definite, albeit ahistorical and abstract, human essence
waiting to emerge from the inhumanity of life under Capital.
The paradox, of course, of the anarchist view of the human
animal is as follows : if the human animal is naturally social
then why is the State's existence such a widespread
phenomena? If the State presumably acts contrary to
humanity's "true" nature then why have humans implemented
the most ruthless and predatory economic system human
history has ever seen? Thus, anarchism from the perspective
of PS philosophy is staid if it retains the assumptions of a
benign human essence and the suppression assumption
regarding the effects of power.
The negation of humanist naturalism affirms instead the
creativity of power as a process of constitution-constituted
between the subject and object of power. The subject is
simultaneously a produced-producer rather than merely a
producer from forces of an altogether alien nature.
It ought to be noted that classical anarchism is not a
homogeneous "movement". Emma Goldman's thinking is
difficult to incorporate into a humanist naturalism mould, for
she adopted a Nietzschean philosophy of affirmation which
in principle is prospective, that is to say, it concerns itself
with the future as a possibilising of experimental (inhuman)
becomings and practices.
Furthermore, a more contemporary anarchist, Colin Ward
explicitly abandons humanist essentialism which perceives
human consciousness as the centre of the universe and the
ordering principle which orders everything around it. Ward in
his discussion of the interaction of complexity, order, and
harmony maintains that : Anarchy is a function, not of a
society's simplicity and lack of social organisation, but of its
complexity and multiplicity of social organisations.
Cybernetics, the science of control and communication
throws valuable light on the anarchist conception of the
complex self-organising process... The anarchist alternative is
that of fragmentation, fission rather than fusion, diversity
rather than unity, a mass of societies rather than a mass
society. If consciousness is both product and producer then a
theoretical resistance to a de-centring of consciousness is in
danger of producing its own anthropocentric arrogance. A PS
anarchism thus examines the positivity of power and also
must search for a paradigm of thought which transcends a
narrow humanist essentialism.

The Concept of Humanism and the Promise of Enlightenment
What is humanism? As a philosophical worldview humanism
celebrates what it claims to be the highest and most distinct
qualities of the human being. Several standard interpretations
of humanism argue axiologically that human beings possess
superior value over other entities. Humans are seen as
dignified creatures worthy of the highest consideration. The
rational, autonomous self free from the dictates of
unconscious animality is cherished as the site of humanity's
unique potentiality. The "soul" or "mind" is a centripetal
concept. The universe, in a sense, revolves around the "soul"
or "mind".
The Renaissance humanist Vico supports this point when he
says :
[it is] a truth beyond all question that the world of civil society has certainly been made by man and that
its principles are therefore to be rediscovered within the modifications of our own human mind".
Humanism in the Renaissance returns to Greece and Rome to
re-birth the concept of paideia. Humanism in this sense
celebrates education in the humanities. From another
perspective pleasure and toleration are foregrounded as
responses to a debilitating religious dogmatism, zealousness
and asceticism of the Medieval Age. To add a further
distinction we ought to note the role the concept of God plays
in humanist formulations. Humanism is by no means
inconsistent with nor is it incompatible with a religious point-
of-view. In fact, humanism, on the whole, defends and is
tolerant of the right to express religious convictions.
Yet, the twentieth century has witnessed the growth in what
we could call a godless humanism. The latter is a much
stronger form of humanism for it jettisons the concept of God
as the overarching valuer. The human subject, for example,
in Sartre's aggressive existential humanism, is unique with
regard to its capacity for self-determination and is the source
and creator of all (moral) value. Renaissance humanism
compared with its twentieth century form stutters as an
inchoate adventure to openly express atheistic tendencies. In
summa : humanism once traced to a truly human setting in
which God is expelled from the universe, confers human
beings with the responsibility as the ultimate demiurge and
sole intrinsic value bearer and bestower. Man left to himself
fulfils his potentialities as a free, creative and rational social
being.
Bookchin's insights into the predicament of modernity are
illuminating. If Enlightenment is the bursting asunder of
humanity's "self-imposed tutelage" (Kant) then anti-
Enlightenment is the return of the cultural dark ages of
superstition, mysticism, and the irrational. Bookchin's search
for a re-enchantment of humanity traces the tendencies which
desired the cold and manipulating instrumentalism that led to
the gas chambers. What Bookchin's thesis, in effect, boils
down to is a defence of ecological subjectivity and the role it
plays in the unfolding of self-consciousness. Malthusianism,
sociobiology and deep ecology are chastised for their
apparent antihumanism.
Yet, Bookchin criticises the employment of an abstract
conception of "Man" or "Humanity" but baulks at a way of
thinking that decentres subjectivity such as sociobiology
which notes the impact genetics and the environment have on
the constitution of human beings. "Man" is more than a
white-male-middle-class entity. "Man" unifies the composite
of ethnic, gendered, sexual differences. Bookchin is cautious
to invoke a one-sided biological emphasis which exists at the
expense of underemphasising the role consciousness plays in
human affairs. Similarly he attacks deep ecology for its anti-
anthropocentric impulses which Bookchin contorts into
misanthropic statements. Contra biocentrism, Bookchin
defends what is "essentially" unique in the human species.
From a social ecological perspective, humanity registers a
unique potentiality for rationality. At its best, a socio-
ecological awareness is a lived rationality which fosters
cooperation, empathy, a sense of responsibility for the
biosphere, together with new ideas of community and
consociation. Bookchin's Hegelian social ecology claims that
it is a transcendence of philanthropos and misanthropos. The
quintessence of the nature of each conjunct is preserved in a
more complex whole. Social ecology thus aims to transcend
the anthropo-centric and the bio-centric for Bookchin's
organic dialectic implies no centricity. Bookchin conceives
"first nature" and "second nature" in terms of organic flow
from one to the next which contravenes classical logic's
demand for stable identities. Bookchin re-configured
humanism is thus an "ethics of complementarity". The
culmination of an "ethics of complementarity" is located in
the utopos of a "free", nonhierarchical, nature. "Free" nature
is thus the synthesis of "first" and "second" nature.
The Enlightenment is read by Bookchin largely in terms of a
liberation movement away from superstition and domination.
Historically, anarchism is derived from the Enlightenment
belief in the powers of reason to rationally re-order society
(revolution) and its placing of value in humanity as a unique
species with unique capacities. Classical humanism is
perceived by Bookchin as a largely regressive movement
looking backwards historically towards ancient Greek society
and their positive values concerning education and
civilisation. Enlightenment humanism, on other hand, moved
away from the classical viewpoint towards a more
prospective position. It is here that anarchism and the
Enlightenment share a common thread. Liberation from
superstition also meant the prospective reconstruction of
society along communistic lines. Thus spoke Bookchin:
"Enlightened humanism is a hopeful message that society can
be rendered not only rational but wise and not only ethical
but passionately visionary".
Transhuman(t)ism
In thinking the "outside" of Hegel's confinement of reason,
Deleuze avoids the necessity of firmly establishing identities
and concluding the resolution of opposites. Resistance to the
"infernal machine" can thus entertain practices which are not
subsumed under the banners of grand "Ideals" and class
antagonisms crying out for supersession. Nodal points of
opposition in the form of desires, experiences and events thus
assume an autonomy that is not easily recuperable in terms of
the System. Temporary autonomous zones (TAZ) of
experimentation are thus perceived as troublesome for they
as such go uncoded.
Dialectical reason in a sense therefore sacrifices difference
for the sake of unity and codification. PS political
philosophy, as enunciated by Deleuze and Guattari, moves
away from conventional political strategies and thinks instead
that revolution is possible when particular configurations of
desires are allowed to freely congregate. A nomadic politics
is thus tactical, experimental and exploratory. New aesthetic,
moral, political and ecological codes are engendered by such
tactical praxes.
However, one must guard against the unthinking acceptance
that a nomadic politics is a universal panacea for the
maladies of what one is opposing. Plant rightly notes that
codification and stability are valuable in countering the
movements of the State apparatus, though generally, tactical
politics shuns the urge to make dogmatic universal
judgements. Tactical manoeuvres thus protect themselves
against impulses that congeal a fluid tactical alliance into a
prescriptive strategy applicable to every social, political, and
ecological situation. Molecular revolutions are best
considered as local, heterogenous and ephemeral phenomena
capable of reflecting global issues, even though they function
by subterranean (transversal) connections. In fact, it could be
argued that local actions are effective if they thought about
on a global level.
Rosi Braidotti in her book Nomadic Subjects has noted that a
different kind of nonparty eco-politics is possible if we think
coalitions in terms of the temporary and mobile (nomadic).
Ecological and feminist affinity groups, for example,
synchronise and congregate for the purposes of limited and
local upsurges. This point again affirms the possible
coalitions or "mutant machines" to be made between
anarchism and politically informed PS philosophy.
The issues are rendered even more complex by Perez. Perez
sets out to demonstrate the conjunction between desiring-
production, schizoanalysis and an an(archical) and
nonhier(archical) way of life (a Nietzschean innocence of
becoming). Brackets are employed by Perez to make a
distinction between a specific and new kind of micro-politics
and a relapse into old models of the party-vanguard.
Central to Deleuze and Guattari's theory of desire is the
perception that desire is both active and reactive. Desire
offers the double possibility of desiring its own repression
(fascism and Reich) and liberation (futural possibilities).
What is of importance for ecopolitics is the claim by Deleuze
and Guattari that Capital is itself propelled towards its own
limit of collapse and exhaustion by an immanent logic of
deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation.
According to this form of analysis, the unconscious of the
employer/employee alike are both bound up with Capital's
schizophrenic desire to channel (recode) and experiment with
the flows of the universe (capital, desire). It could be argued
then that the wreaking of ecological destruction is desired by
desiring-machines desiring-production given that hierarchical
structures (the collusion between Oedipus and Capital)
disseminate schizophrenic desire deep into the heart of the
socius.
"The schizophrenic deliberately sets out the very limit of capitalism : he is its inherent tendency brought
to its fulfilment; its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel. He scrambles all the
codes and is the transmitter of the decoded flows of desire".
An(archical) machines are precisely those machines that
experiment in confounding the codes and liberating the flux
of revolutionary desire. The point to be made is that PS
anarchism is constructed here by rethinking an(archism) as
no longer definable as the abolition of the State. An(archism)
and non(hierarchical) modes of organisation are then
experimental ways of living, feeling and thinking. An(archy)
is thus an ethics of nonfascist living.
One of the problems of Perez's reading of PS and anarchism
is that he reads an(archism) with rose coloured spectacles.
Deleuze and Guattari's conception of lines of flight and
experimentation as emitting a danger of their own is
underexplored by Perez. Too-rapid deterritorialisation
engenders its own kind of despair. The outcome from lines of
experimental flight are not necessarily positive. "You don't
reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly
destratifying".
Yet, Deleuze and Guattari are ambivalent on the matter of
an(archic) deterritorialisation for they also claim that "one
can never go too far enough in the direction of
deterritorialisation : you haven't seen anything yet". Hegel
was the arch-enemy of Deleuze. In this respect, the PS of
Deleuze clearly objects to the absolute demand for
inclusiveness by Hegel. For Deleuze, there are forces and
dynamics which are alien to the smooth functioning of the
Hegelian totality.
The other qua otherness disrupts the "closure" of systems.
The other is not necessarily "external" to the system for it is
conceivable that alien becomings reside in the interstices. A
discordant otherness is not necessarily negative. Deleuze is
not content to formulate a "negative" philosophy like the
dissonant "atonal" thought of Adorno. The other does not
oppose itself to the Same in order to affirm itself. It does not
contradict contradiction in order to derive a positive moment.
Above all, discordant otherness is potentially a creative and
essentially positive enterprise.. Singularities or one off events
are precisely those flashes which disrupt the smooth
incorporation and workings of the system. Deleuze describes
the flashes of intensity as singularities or lines of flight which
have a "nomadic" trajectory.
What is celebrated by Deleuze is a process of creativity
which exists in its own right and is thus not under the sway of
the unfolding of negativity. The schizophrenic process is the
model for the scrambling of the codes and the utterance of an
alien language which confounds the system of Freudian
psychoanalysis (a stuttering within one's own language).
Desire on this account is positive, it does not "lack"
fulfilment for it is essentially productive.
The Domination of Nature and Marx's Concept of Nature
Utopia has no-place "now", not even in our everyday lives,
not even in our collective imaginations. Communism is the
"now" anachronistic no-place of past adventures. Yet those
adept in theoretical matters still say that communism is a
humanism regardless of concrete evidence to the contrary.
The young, bold, and more interesting Marx desired the
revolution that would supersede all hitherto known
revolutions. He desired the advent of a truly human society, a
humanist society. What germinates under communism, for
the Red Terrorist Doctor, is a "practical humanism"
demanding the abolition of private property.
However, given that "practical humanism" limits itself to the
mediation of private property, it cannot introduce a "positive
humanism" for as such it concerns itself with a negative
relation to private property. "Positive humanism" returns
man's alienated self to itself. Furthermore, such a positive
moment inherent in humanism dialectically abolishes the
alienation between man and nature, man and his species
being, and man and his fellow comrades. Positive humanism,
in essence, is thus the positive transcendence of private
property (mediation) and self-estrangement. The proletarian
once lost in the desert of unjust dessert returns to his unique
(human) social essence.
It is difficult not to read the early Marx as propounding an
anthropocentric standpoint regarding nature. Indeed, the Paris
Manuscripts of 1844 in this sense can be read as a document
of theoretical anthropology. Nature is examined as the stuff
or material of human activity. A nonartefactual nature, for a
disciple of Hegel, is strictly nothing for man.
Marx thus accepts the idealist's view that the world is
mediated through the Subject. Without this mediation nature
is no thing. Nature's value is posited if there is a valuer
behind the valuation. Nature on this account is not
intrinsically valuable. In Hegelian terminology, "first nature"
lacks a concept. The first nature of natural evolution is
contrasted with the second nature of human society (law,
society, economy). On Marx's account, pre-history (that is
non-communist history) is subject to the blind dictates of
natural evolution. Thus, Marx makes no absolute distinction
between nature and human society. They constitute a
differentiated unity and as such are dialectically intertwined.
Marx's complex dialectical prose are often difficult to
unpack. However, we can read the sentence
"Society is therefore the perfected unity in essence of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature, the
realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature"
as a refusal to divorce the human and nonhuman spheres into
a rigid dualism. What is noted is nature's blind and
undomesticated residue that still remains within human
society. Human self-consciousness is differentiated from
cyclical natural history.
The revenge of nature : Adorno and Horkheimer offer
insights into the effects of the dialectic of Enlightenment
upon human society and nature. Nature (as internal
psychological nature) seeks to exact revenge against those
who reduced "her" to mere material for human purposes.
Adorno and Horkheimer consider the phenomena of German
fascism as a specific instance of the revenge of nature upon
history, a "revolt of nature" against the domination it has
suffered. The domination of nature at the heart of the
Enlightenment project has a human cost which is that man
purchases domination at the expense of their own natures.
The nature of concrete humans must be suppressed in order
that it may dominate others. "The suppression of nature for
human ends is a mere natural relationship". The consequence
is a denial of pleasure and a warped psychological
development.
Adorno makes the point better : "All the contrived machinery
of modern industrial society is merely nature tearing itself to
pieces". Reason is in a sense still too natural. Thus, the
Enlightenment spawns an antithesis deleterious to the nature
of the human and the nonhuman. Barbarism is spawned by
modernity's drive for technological and social progress.
Adorno and Horkheimer follow Nietzsche in thinking the
Enlightenment as a complex unity of reason and domination.
By the use of modern techniques of control, barbarism
nestles itself deeper into modernity's social and psychological
fabric. The domination of nature ensures that man's once
primal station in nature is transcended and then forgotten.
Thus modernity's radical humanism, which celebrates
humans as unique and deserving especial consideration,
carries with it the latent threat of species imperialism which
ultimately returns to haunt human relations themselves. Thus,
the domination of nature intertwines itself with social
hierarchy and control. The resolution of the antagonistic
predicament of civilisation and barbarism, Adorno maintains,
does not lie in the domination of the object by the
imperialising Cartesian subject. There is no final
reconciliation of the dialectic of Enlightenment in a perfect
unity of subject and object or in a return to an original,
primordial state.
On a more positive reading of Adorno we can see the flight
of man from nature as ultimately progressive though
Adorno's Marxism would view the reconciliation of man and
world in a future utopia as at best misguided and at worst
pernicious. "Adorno steadfastly refused to succumb to any
nostalgia for a prehistorical era of plenitude and harmony".
For Adorno the problem must address the issue of
remembrance. One of the preconditions of scientific control
is the obliteration of the memory of a past, or of a nature that
was free from instrumental reason. As Adorno and
Horkheimer say : "All reification is a forgetting". In
summary, the origin of the domination of nature is found as a
contradiction within nature itself. The domination of nature is
a consequence of nature in so far as it is the result of an
inability of self-reflection on the part of human beings. On a
rare positive note, the memory of suffering that results from
the domination of nature may yet animate the project of
liberation.
In tracing modernity's "ambiguous" transformation of reason
into rationalism, "the cold logic for the sophisticated
manipulation of human beings and nature", Bookchin
rethinks the domination of nature with a renewed emphasis
upon the structural social causes of domination, namely
hierarchy. Contra the Frankfurt School, Bookchin's thesis
perceives the domination of nature as emerging from the
hierarchical domination of man by man. The conceived
limited perspective of orthodox Marxism's analysis of the
class composition of Capital is transcended by a philosophy
which discloses the structural undergirdings of other pre-
capitalist formations and possible formations yet to come
(anarchist utopia).
Bookchin, to remind ourselves, is a defender of the
uniqueness of human being's capacity for self-consciousness
and hence rationality. Yet, reason's objective pursuit is
transformed into an instrumental, subjective reason. What
Bookchin is intent on demonstrating is the dissolution of
objective reason (a reason that incorporates ends as well as
means) through the practice of reason as instrumental reason.
Whilst Adorno's Victorian reading of Enlightenment
"progress" claims that progress necessitates increasing
control over internal and external nature, Bookchin believes
that the desire for control and domination stems in part from
the unconscious of reason itself which retains a residue from
pre-rational times. Subjectivity for Bookchin is not
synonymous with reason. Reason, from a socio-ecological
perspective, is subsumed under a much wider evolution of
subjectivity within nature. The failure to incorporate
rationality within the development of subjectivity, Bookchin
contends, lies at the heart of Critical Theory. A resituated
rationality would introduce nature within the compass of
sensibilite. This project, Bookchin contends, lies outside
Critical Theory's intellectual tradition.
However one of the problems in thinking about an (objective)
ethics in which nature is the matrix of ethical substance is
found in Bookchin's reference to a requisite ecological
wholeness of human beings which is founded upon unity in
diversity. Presumably an ecological unity in diversity implies
nonhierarchical relationships.
Yet Adorno contends that a reconciliation of opposites
negates the preservation of difference in the quest for
identity. Adorno shows that unity in the Hegelian system
(identity-in-difference) implies domination : subject over the
object, mind over matter, universal over particular, history
over nature. Adorno claims that a negative philosophy is
required which forsakes the final positive moment or
reconciliation of identity. Negative philosophy is thus the
philosophy of nonidentity in which the reconciliation of
difference evades domination. On this reading, identity
thinking is animated by a hostility to the other. The
domination of all that is deemed other is thus implicit in
Hegelian positive-identity thinking.
Bookchin recognises that the other is never fully allowed to
be other but finds no quarrels with the incorporation of
otherness into his own anarcho-Hegelianism.
"Hegel's concept of transcendence (aufhebung) never advances a notion of outright annihilation. Its
negativity consists of annulling the "other" in order to absorb it into the movement toward a richly
variegated completeness ".
But "variegated completeness" misses the point. The other
qua other is not recognised as pure positive difference for the
other's alterity is reduced or transformed by the very act of
incorporation. The other like Heidegger's being is never let
be. Thus, the complex expression unity-in-diversity conceals
a potential structure of domination and hierarchy.
One of the central counter-arguments regarding the claim that
evolution evolves towards ever greater degrees of
subjectivity, differentiation and complexity is the
conspicuous absence of historical evidence of linear social
progress. By omitting a final teleological drive in evolution it
is difficult to see how we are progressing towards greater
ecological sensibility.
Bookchin's anarchist "free-floating" (Mannheim) position
apparently is able to decode or extrapolate potentialities that
reside in the here and now and posit their actuality in the
future. But lacking a teleological structure Bookchin's
analysis is substantially weakened. Bookchin simply cannot
account for humanity's warped development without positing
transcendent ethical ideals. Nor for that matter is the eliciting
of a "free nature" inhering objectively in first and second
nature instantly discernible. Bookchin claims that a
transcendent "free' nature would "diminish the pain and
suffering that now exists in "first" and "second" nature".
"Free nature, in effect, would be a conscious and moral
nature, an ecological society". But, to what extent is such
objectivity a question of mere subjective preference and
personal proclivity? How would Bookchin diminish the pain
and suffering that exists on "first" nature if we mean by
"first" nature the animal kingdom? Is it desirable that one
should interfere in such a nature? After all, pain and suffering
are necessary consequences from the perception of nature as
"red in tooth and claw". It seem that Bookchin does not have
a mandate for such proclamations.

The Concept of Hierarchy
Hierarchy is examined by Bookchin from a quasi-historical
perspective. To repeat : the domination of nature stems from
the domination of man by man. The domination of man by
man precedes the domination of nature by man. The idea of
dominating nature germinated historically through the
implementation of rigid social hierarchies which congealed
fluid social life into vertical command and obedience
structures.
Of course, for Bookchin, the State is clearly the paragon
nemesis of a free, sensitive and nonhierarchical ecological
community. The State is an effect of authoritarian practices
rather than their cause. Obedience breeds obeisance.
However, instead of thinking the State within the parameters
of the base-superstructure model of economic development,
Bookchin looks further into cultural forms of domination.
Hierarchy on this account is not simply limited to class
exploitation but incorporates also familial, gerontocratic,
gendered, ethnic, political and social (organisational) forms
of domination. One of Bookchin's strong theses is that
nonhierarchical social formations form nonhierarchical
images of relationships with nature. Bookchin gives the
example of aboriginal ceremonies which express and situate
humans as part of the larger cosmos in nonhierarchical terms.
The image of or relationships with nature in a future
nonhierarchical anarchist society are as yet rendered
negative. We can only say what they are not. An anarchist
society is by definition free from structural (molar)
hierarchies such as the State (police, bureaucracy).
Furthermore, anarchism actively encourages noncoercive,
nondominating everyday relationships which extend
themselves to personal, family and workplace spheres. An
ecological society works toward the dismantling of coercive
relationships that exist in
"generations and genders, churches and schools, friendships and lovers, exploiters and exploited, and
hierarchical sensibilities toward the entire world of life".
Hierarchy and domination thus warp humanity's
development.
The difference between Deleuze's "horizontalilty" of thought
and Bookchin's anarchism comes into clear light when we
grasp the centrality of the notion of the human. Hierarchical
structures are opposed to the construction of a humanist and
ecological society. The question arises : if we jettison the
question of humanity how can we think nonhierarchical
becomings? How can we advocate the praxis of
deterritorialisation without implicitly supporting a
teleological drive in history?
Bookchin writes in very much the same spirit as the Left
Hegelians who rethought Hegel in 1840s Germany.
Bookchin's militant atheism is inextricably linked to his
defence of Enlightenment ideals of social progress,
rationality and the negation of superstition. Contemporary
irrationality/anti-humanism in the form of the quasi-theologic
of deep ecological thinking and the post-humanism of neo-
Heideggerians are instances of reversion to pre-modern
times. Such phenomena articulate, according to Bookchin, a
contemporary rejection of the "cold demands of secularity
and intellectual clarity".
According to Bookchin's observations, deep ecology,
especially the deep ecology of Devall and Sessions, delights
itself in "mythopoiesis and mystery". Bookchin again shows
his determination to uncover contemporary attempts to de-
align the Enlightenment project. Deep ecology, on this
account, re-introduces a religious essence with its concept of
self-realisation. The self here seeks self-effacement or
incorporation of an isolated ego into a larger totality namely
the self-in-Self. Through the desire for organic wholeness the
ideal of an autonomous rational self of the Enlightenment
disappears in the mystical fog of being one with nature. Deep
ecology, from this reading, debases hard won intellectual
skills, tool-making capabilities and the capacity for symbolic
language by humans. Deep ecology introduces an egalitarian
ontology which perceives no ontological divide between
human and nonhuman. Bookchin is suspicious of Devall and
Sessions' keenness to promote "deep ecological" thinking.
For Bookchin, deep ecology is a symptom of social decay
even more than it is one of its causes. Bookchin thinks that
the Earth First movement is opposed to a "people first"
movement. Deep ecology, Bookchin believes, has been
seduced by the wild side of mysticism and as such it needs to
return to a period of coldness, of "analytic sobriety". In
noting Devall and Sessions two ultimate norms for "true"
deep ecological thinking (self-realisation and biocentric
equality), Bookchin notes the sense of intuition as
unreasoned reflection, not as self-evident truths but a "sense"
or feeling.
Devall and Sessions maintain that the norms are beyond the
reach of critical analysis and beyond reasoned argument and
it is here that Bookchin mounts his diatribe. From where are
they derivable? Bookchin defends the methodology of
science as essential for "experiential proof". Bookchin stands
opposed to "divinations spun out by mystical gurus without
or without Ph.D.s'.
Devall and Sessions retort that such intuitions cannot be
challenged given that scientific methodology is too narrow.
Self-realisation is a shedding of the narrow "modern Western
self" which Devall and Sessions claim is isolated, hedonistic,
and materially egoistic. Self-realisation is a process of self-
effacement, effacement of the self in the Self (as totality).
The human self (the traditional rational autonomous self)
thus loses its hard won identity, its uniqueness, because it
merges with the whole.
Bookchin's objection to this form of reasoning is that the
inscription of the "self" onto inorganic phenomena is in fact
an anthropomorphic gesture. On this account the "Self" is
construed as a human imperialising self. Devall and Session
desire the transformation of an isolated self into an
interrelated self-in-Self. But Devall and Session imputes an
anthropomorphism inadvertently into nature. The earth is
endowed with "wisdom", wilderness equates with "freedom",
and life forms are said to emit "moral" qualities.
The desire for a biocentric democracy is questioned by
Bookchin by the following argument : if humans are nothing
but "plain citizens" in the ecosphere then humans may do as
they please in fulfilling their (we could say primitive, natural)
anthropocentric desires and natures. He would say what else
could we do. In such a scenario we should be exclusively
occupied with our own brute survival, comfort and safety
since nature seems to exhibit the ingrained values of self-
preservation and protection of one's own. If man becomes a
mere part of nature based on an egalitarian principle with
every other species, then man's actions are morally neutral.
But what is (morally or ecologically?) wrong with
extinguishing whole species in the interests of human
survival?
Heidegger and Anti-Humanism
Another significant attack upon the humanist tradition is
located in Heidegger's Letter on Humanism. Heidegger
responds to Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism with a
distinct anti-humanist accent.
An interesting perspective to address the reception of
Sartre's Existentialism by Heidegger is from the thought of
Lacoue-Labarthe. The Heidegger of the 1930s, according to
Lacoue-Labarthe, still operated within a metaphysical
tradition. Humanism, from this point of view, is grounded in
a metaphysics which emerges with Plato and ends
(prematurely) with Nietzsche. Thus, the Dasein in Being and
Time cannot fully decentre the traditional subject of
philosophy for it is still entrenched within an anthropocentric
tradition.
Heidegger's notorious Nazi affiliation is thus a consequence
of retaining a trace of metaphysical humanism. Heidegger's
Nazism is ironically a humanism of sorts : hence Lacoue-
Labarthe's pronouncement that "Nazism is a Humanism".
The elimination of humanism from Heidegger's thought
occurs by a rethinking of thinking itself (the praxis of
poetising) after 1935 witnessed in the Letter on Humanism.
Humanism leads to Nazism due to an excess of metaphysical
philosophy. From this perspective "reason" for a French
Heideggerian like Lacoue-Labarthe, retains a residue of
nihilistic onto-theology and productivist metaphysics. What
is implicit is the definition of humanism as a celebration of
abstract "Man" as a self-conscious autonomous, self-
legislating being.
The Letter on Humanism thus makes a plea not for the
construction of yet another system of anthropocentric ethics
but for a new ethos, a new way of dwelling. The critique of
Sartre takes a similar form to that of Heidegger's critique of
Nietzsche which questions the centripetal concept of value
and its relationship to the Will to Power.
What Heidegger is trying to stress is that if we centralise the
concept of value we run the risk of becoming oblivious to the
meaning of Being. By making the distinction between
thinking which is more sensitive to Being and philosophy
which is homesick (for it has lost its way toward Being),
Heidegger is making the point that a more primordial
relationship towards Being must be sought. For Heidegger,
ek-sistence is proper to Dasein (being-there). Human reality's
ek-static existence which "stands out" in the truth of Being
distinguishes human reality from other living creatures. To
use Heidegger's words : In any case living creatures are as
they are without standing outside their Being as such and
within the truth of Being, preserving in such standing the
essential nature of their Being.
Heidegger thinks that humans do not think their "essence" if
they see themselves as animale rationale or as a spiritually-
endowed being. The humanitas of human beings baulks at the
true dignity of man which is not to assume lordship over
Being but to shepherd Being in a more primordial and less
technologically arrogant non-dominating relationship. To
drive the point home thoroughly we need to read Heidegger
as questioning the role of evaluation itself. Sartre is situated
within a paradigm of value-positing connected to the Will to
Power as domination. Heidegger says it better : Here as
elsewhere thinking in values is the greatest blasphemy
imaginable against Being.
Lest we revel in the animus to irrationality and mysticism we
can sympathise with the general thrust of Bookchin's
reception of Heidegger's soil science if we put into brackets
the element of diatribe that inheres in Bookchin's prose.
While bearing in mind the need to keep in check (Nietzsche
would call him a rabid "anarchist dog" full of ressentiment
and loathing) Bookchin's virulent and ungenerous reading of
Heidegger's thought, it must be admitted that he does locate
the parts in Heidegger's oeuvre which border on the quasi-
mystical and the apocalyptic.
The question arises : if we become Heideggerian are we then
forced to dispense with the achievements hard won in
overcoming mysticism, superstition, and dogmatism during
the Renaissance and the eighteenth century? Are we forced to
return to a pre-conscious way of life in the vain hope of
capturing a more profound and less ruthless relationship with
Being or more concretely with voelkish culture? Are our
choices between a postmodern nihilism or a reactionary
belief in parochialism? Should we reject the concept of
humanism altogether? And if we do what new concepts will
be thought and what consequences will they have?
Systematising the Fragments
In order to shed light on the possibility of a PS ecopolitics,
the ramifications of the May-June events of 1968 that
precipitated new directions for French philosophy will now
be addressed. Baudrillard, Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari,
Irigaray and others are thinkers which produced and are still
producing "commanding changes" in the way we think about
the world.
Verena Conley points out that poststructuralism is concerned
with the construction of ecological subjectivities that are
machined by differential processes. Levi-Strauss is evinced
as a thinker who initiated to a degree the displacement of
Cartesian metaphysics and Sartrean (humanist) existentialism
which both emphasised the ontological priority of
consciousness. Conley maintains that the shift to a structural
logic encouraged the growth of ecological awareness. In
attempting to decentre the universal (masculine) subject the
rigid distinction between nature and culture is itself subject to
critique. What is under the microscope of analysis is the
abstract essentialising of "man" and "nature". Conley elicits
Guattari's concept of mental ecology to demonstrate that the
ecological awareness initiated by la pensee 68 called for
cultural as well as biological diversity. Poststructuralism's
illumination of processes of "difference" draws upon the
human and "hard' sciences in order to demonstrate that such
processes inhere within organic and inorganic realms.
Deleuze and Guattari and Bookchin all share an interest in
the findings of Prigogine and Stengers and seek to integrate
Prigogine and Stengers into their work. Prigogine and
Stengers"s thesis that nature is an open (chaotic) system is
employed by Conley to show that a new empathetic alliance
with nature is required.
Following on from the insights of Conley, it is instructive to
view a PS ecopolitics as not simply delimited to a narrow
research paradigm. A PS ecopolitics is inter-disciplinary or
more anarchically trans-disciplinary. The seeds of rhizomatic
thought sown by Deleuze and Guattari ought to be harvested
by an anarchist tradition that has always been rooted to green
politics. By redeploying the concepts of horizontality,
deterritorialisation, lines of flight, machinic assemblages and
desiring-machines as well as the concepts borrowed from
chaos and complexity theory such as bifurcation, threshold,
and disequilibrium, a PS eco-anarchism can develop a fruitful
philosophy of nature and society. In a sense the ecosystem
itself can be perceived as an assemblage.
The ecosystem, on this account, is an assemblage which
rhizomatically connects a multiplicity of organisms in terms
flows of matter and energy understood within a machinic
paradigm of evolution. Furthermore, the body (partial organs
such as the mouth, an eating machine ), the local ecosystem
(the river), and the biosphere (a machinic Gaia) are coupled
and connected together into one vast ecological machine. An
experimental synthesis of Nietzsche's lebensphilosophie and
complex, overhuman. However, the transhuman(t) is not
(necessarily) technologically optimistic (Extropian) nor
necessarily Nietzschean in emphasis (uebermensch).
Nietzsche's idea of the transhuman uebermensch is itself a
thought-experiment which calls for a radical rethinking of the
human, all-too-human.
The question is whether a rootless wandering (the
transhuman(t), which lacks an a priori human essence, the
suppression assumption of power and a teleology of history),
can sustain sustainable development without recourse to
ecological practices which are deleterious to the
environment? The point is recognised by Deleuze and
Guattari regarding the problematic of deterritorialisation.
There is always a danger that things will turn out badly in the
end when one becomes-nomadological. The line of flight that
experiments secretes its own sense of "strange despair", "like
an odor of death and immolation". Furthermore, it is
contestable that a wholesale rejection of the concepts of
history, civilisation and progress will make anything really
better. Chaos-centred, nonteleological (genealogical)
histories are by their very nature open ended. Therefore, one
may continue to think in-between humanism and anti-
humanism, social and deep ecology, the dialectic and the
different in a period of convalescence which is always
preparing for a time of new health. The equivocation of
reason may yet be an integral part of the Enlightenment
project.
Yet, our eyes ought not to look askance or be averted from
the plight of the planet by a runaway machine which seems to
seduce "postmodern" technophiles into sacrificing human.
all-too-human values at the altar of technological utopia. We
shall let Bookchin have the last words : The continuing
substitution of rationalism for reason, of scientism for
science, and for technics for ethics threatens to remove the
very sense of the problems that exist, not to speak of our
ability to resolve them. A look at technics reveals that the car
is racing at an increasing pace, with nobody in the driver's
seat. Accordingly, commitment and insight have never been
more needed than they are today.

Footnotes

1. This is of course a craftily reworking of Horkheimer's
exhortation that : "He who does not wish to speak of
capitalism should also be silent about fascism", Horkheimer,
M, "Die Juden und Europe", Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung,
VIII, 1/2, (193(), p.115, quoted in Jay, M, Adorno, Harvard :
Harvard University Press, 1984, p.47.
2. "The first task of philosophy, which is in the service of
history, once the holy mask of human self-alienation has
been discovered, is to discover self-alienation in its unholy
forms. The criticism of heaven is thus transformed into the
criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism
of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of
politics." McLellan, D (ed.), Karl Marx : Selected Writings,
Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1990, p.64. McLellan
quotes Marx in hisTowards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy
of Right : Introduction.
3. McLellan, D., Marx : Selected Writings, p.69, quotes from
Marx, Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,
"To be radical is to grasp the matter by the root. But for man
the root is man himself".
4. Deleuze, Vincennes Seminar, 7 March 1978.
5. Jay, M, Adorno, p.14.
6. "Postmodernism" is extremely difficult if not impossible to
define. Its growth stems from architecture, literary theory,
aesthetics and philosophy. Postmodernism challenges the
traditional bedrock that there is an autonomous stable subject
able to represent a stable, accessible reality. Postmodernism
is interested in the constitution of the autonomous, white,
male, heterosexual subject of philosophy. From particular
postmodern perspective, the constitution is subjected to
forces of an other-determined nature. For example, Foucault
claims that the "subject" is constituted through historical
discourses. Questions of normality/abnormality are defined
not by sole reference to physiological evidence but also by
contemporary social and political issues. Postmodernism is
also interested in the way language constitutes the world and
how meaning is social and provisional. Postmodernism thus
is interested in the question of representation. The
postmodern malaise regarding representation stems from the
claim that knowledge can no longer represent the real
(Baudrillard). The crisis of representation, as it has been
called is a crisis in transcendent principles. The relationship
between postmodernism and anti-humanism begins to make
sense when we begin to look at the waning of
anthropocentrism. Meyer captures much of my perspective
concerning postmodernism as a cultural phenomena. "Man is
no longer to be the measure of things, the center of the
universe. He has been measured and found to be an
undistinguished bit of matter different in no essential way
from bacteria, stones, and trees. His goals and purposes, his
egocentric notions of past, present, and future; his faith in his
power to predict and, through prediction, to control his
destiny - all these are called into question, considered
irrelevant, or deemed trivial". Meyer, L, " The end of
Renaissance? ", Hudson Review 16, p.186. Quoted in
Bertens, H, The Idea of
7. This concept I believe is my own. The concept examines
the interplay of the transhuman and transhumance.
Transhumance is a nomadic practice which involves the
movement of cattle and people from one area to another
according to the quality of the land.
8. Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, coined the word
'cybernetics' from the Greek word meaning steersman. He
defined it as the science of communication and control in the
animal and the machine. In examining the relationship
between the transhuman(t), cybernetics, and ecology one is
not advancing a Clynesian or an Extropian one-dimensional
technological optimism. Transhuman(t) anarchism takes on
board the insights into the human/inhuman condition
proffered by Nietzsche but sees them operating in
poststructuralist terms alongside scientific research into
(bio)-evolutionary and technological phenomena.
Transhuman(t) anarchism thus examines natural evolution in
terms of the chaotic and the non-linear as well as seeing
philosophy as concerned with alien becomings and the
posthumous (Nietzsche's philosophy of the future).
9. Pepper, Eco-Socialism: From deep ecology to social
justice, London: Routledge, 1993. Pepper notes Atkinson's
argument that anarchist political philosophy informs the
praxis of 'green utopianism', p.152, Atkinson, A, Principles
of Political Economy, London: Belhaven, 1991. However,
Pepper argues that anarchism is not primarily a philosophy of
nature although Bookchin has probably gone further than
most in constructing a philosophy of nature. The trouble with
Pepper's formulation is located in his comparison between
green anarchism and postmodernism. Pepper interprets
postmodernism as a rejection of universals (ideal fo equality
for example) and the idea of universal, steady progress. He
then implies that anarchism shares such a distrust in
Enlightenment ideals and that both postmodernism and
anarchism imply a cultural relativism. The intransingent
incorporation of social ecology into Pepper's framework
ought to repel the coding of anarchism as necessarily
relativistic. The incommensurability of scientific paradigms
is found in Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Paradigms.
10. Bookchin, Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on
Dialectical Reason, Monteal: Black Rose, 1990, p.36.
11. A 'stateless state' is misleading if the reader fails to
recognise that anarchism not only calls for a reexamination of
extant political structures but also states of consciousness. As
Hakim Bey says: 'The IDEA of the POLICE like hydra grows
100 new heads for each one cut off--and all these heads are
live cops. Slicing off heads gains us nothing, but only
enhances the beast's power till it swallows us. First murder
the IDEA--blow up the monument inside us - & then
perhaps... the balance of power will shift. When the last cop
in our brain is gunned down by the last unfulfilled desire-
perhaps even the landscape around us will begin to change',
Bey, H, Temporary Autonomous Zone.
12. Edwards , P, (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy,
London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967, p.448. 'There is room
within the naturalistic movement for any variety of otherwise
rival ontologies, which explains the philosophical
heterogeneity of the group of philosophers who identity
themselves as naturalists: it is methodological rather than an
ontological monism to which they indifferently subscribe, a
monism leaving them free to be dualists, idealists,
materialists, atheists or nonatheists, as the case may be'.
13. Edwards, P, (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy,
p.448.
14. Bookchin, Philosophy of Social Ecology, p.10.
15. Bookchin, Philosophy of Social Ecology, p.10.
16. Lukacs, G, History and Class Consciousness, London:
Merlin press, 1983, p.24.
17. Engels, F, Anti-Duehring: Herr Eugen Duehring
Revolution in Science, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978,
p.166-167.
18. Philosophy of Social Ecology, p.24.
19. Philosophy of Social Ecology, p.27.
20. Philosophy of Social Ecology, p.30.
21. Philosophy of Social Ecology, p.28.
22. Philosophy of Social Ecology, p.36.
23. Philosophy of Social Ecology, p.36.
24. Kovel, "Murray Bookchin: Nature's Prophet", Essay
'Negating Bookchin' in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
WWW page: http://www.cruzio.com/~cns.
25. Le Doeuff is also interested in tracing images of thought
found in the history of philosophy. Images of servile women
(prostitute, good wife), islands, insects, and clocks are
invoked in order to defend the idea that no philosophical
system is without its own images.
26. Radicle n. 1) the part of a plant embryo that develops into
a primary root; a rootlet. The Concise Oxford English
Dictionary, BCA, 1995, p.987.
27. Arborescent adj. 1) treelike in growth or general
appearance; 2) arboreal adj. living in or connected with trees.
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, p.55.
28. Krell and Wood (eds.), Exceedingly Nietzsche: Aspects
of Contemporary Nietzsche-Interpretation, London:
Routledge, 1988, p.159.
29. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi, London: The Athlone
Press, 1992, p.24.
30. On Lechte's reading of Deleuze, Western thought is
structured by dualism (reality/appearance) and the search for
essences. The Nietzschean Deleuze defends a different
ontology which celebrates becoming and a plurality of
appearances. See Lechte, John, Fifty Key Contemporary
Thinkers, London: Routledge, 1994, p.101-104.
31. Hardt, M, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in
Philosophy, London: UCL Press, 1993, p.72. The explicit
link between Spinoza's and Nietzsche's philosophies of
power is explored here with reference to Deleuze's
naturalism.
32. Hayden, P, Environmental Ethics, Summer 1997, Vol. 19,
No.2, 'Gilles Deleuze and Naturalism: A Convergence with
Ecological Theory and Politics', 187-188.
33. 'One of the most profound constants of Naturalism is to
denounce everything that is sadness, everything that is the
cause of sadness, and everything that needs sadness to
exercise its power. From Lucretius to Nietzsche, the same
end is pursued and attained. Naturalism makes thought and
sensibility an affirmation. It directs its attack against the
prestige of the negative; it deprives the negative of all its
power, it refuses to the spirit of the negative the right to
speak in the name of philosophy'. Deleuze, Logic of Sense,
quoted in Hayden p.189-190.
34. Hayden, p.192.
35. Singularity is a one off event. A freak.
36. Hayden, p.193. Deleuze and Guattari set us to explore
what escapes from the structures of hierarchy. Thus, in terms
of descent and evolution, Deleuze and Guattari note the
heterogeneous and wildly mutational becomings which
transverse species without the register of being rendered as
essences. It is above all a question of existential alliances. It
is a question of the becoming-orchid of the wasp and a
becoming-wasp of the orchid. See Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, p.10
37. Hayden, p.196.
38. Virilio, P, Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles,
trans. Polizzotti, Semiotext(e), 1990. Virilio thinks that
ecological struggles are one struggle amongst others such as
racial and women.
39. Guattari, Proliferation of Margins, Internet: Lazosubverto
web page.
40. Hayden, p.197, quotes from Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, p.213.
41. Hayden, p.197.
42. Hayden, p.199.
43. Hayden, p.199.
44. Foucault, M, The Order of Things: An Archaelogy of the
Human Sciences, Tavistock Publications 1970. 'It is no
longer possbile to think in our day other than in the void left
by man's dissapearance. For this void does not create a
deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled.
It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a
space in which it is once more possible to think,' p.342. In
accounting for the epistemic shifts away from humanism in
in the human sciences Foucault is famous for claiming that
'man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the end of
the sea'.
45. 'The will to a system is a lack of integrity' is a
Nietzschean saying which Deleuze would endorse.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows 26,
trans. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books.
46. Hayden, p.200.
47. Gare, A, Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis,
London: Routledge, 1995. 'Rejecting the anti-naturalism of
the other poststructuralists, Deleuze has embraced
Nietzsche's physicalism, and drawn on the ideas of the
Stoics, on the philosophies of Lucretius, Spinoza and of
Bergson and on various developments within science and
mathematics to elaborate a Nietzschean philosophy of
nature', p.70.
48. Deleuze and Guattari, 'There is no biosphere or
noosphere, but everywhere the same Mechanosphere'.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.69.
49. Grosz, E, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal
Feminism, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994, p.163.
50. Guattari, F, The Three Ecologies, trans. Turner and
Word, (New Formations 8 (1989): 131-47.
51. The Three Ecologies, p.131.
52. The Three Ecologies, p.132.
53. The Three Ecologies, p.133.
54. Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus distinguish their
own practice of schizoanalysis from the psychoanalysis of
Freud and Lacan. Schizoanalysis perceives desire as
inherently social and machinic.
55. The Three Ecologies, p.133.
56. The Three Ecologies, p.134.
57. Deleuze and Guattari's terminology.
58. The Three Ecologies, p.134.
59. Guattari and Negri, Communists Like Us, trans. Michael
Ryan, New York: Semiotext(e), 1990. 'Communism is
nothing other than a call to life: to break the encirclement of
the capitalist and socialist organization of work, which today
leads not only to a continuing surplus of repression and
exploitation, but to the extinction of the world and humanity
with it', p.11.
60. The Three Ecologies, p.136.
61. The Three Ecologies, p.138.
62. The Three Ecologies, p.138.
63. The Three Ecologies, p.140.
64. The Three Ecologies, p.142.
65. The Three Ecologies, p.146.
66. The Three Ecologies, p.146.
67. Conley, V, EcoPolitics, The Environment in
Poststructuralist Thought, London: Routledge, 1997, p.22.
68. Ferry, L, The New Ecological Order, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1995.
69. Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity, London: Cassell,
1995, p.172.
70. Lyotard is famous for noting the postmodernism openly
shows 'incredulity toward meta-narratives'.
71. Bertens, H, The Idea of the Postmodern. Bertens claims
that Jameson and others in effect stress that the contemporary
political arena is a 'free-for-all no longer controlled by the
relative (order) that used to be imposed on political debates
by the great, overarching political visions of modernity,
embodied in traditional party politics and trade unions',
p.186.
72. Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity, p.174.
73. Massumi, B, A User's Guide to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993, p.6.
74. Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity, p.186.
75. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Hollingdale,
London: Penguin Books, 1990, p.33.
76. 'Having attained the conscious level of "desiring
production", however, it remains unclear how a revolutionary
"machine" is to advance beyond a naive "life-style"
anarchism, raging with desire and a libidinal sexual politics,
and try to change society as a whole'. Bookchin, Re-
enchanting Humanity, p.199. The misinterpretation is echoed
in Bookchin's Lifestyle Anarchism: '[L]ifestyle anarchism
today is finding its principal expression in spray-can graffiti,
post-modernist nihilism, antirationalism, neoprimitivism,
anti-technologism, neo-Situationist "cultural terrorism",
mysticism, and a "practice" of staging Foucauldian "personal
insurrections"'. And again: 'Where social anarchism calls
upon people to rise in revolution and seek the reconstitution
of society, the irate petty bourgeois who populate the
subcultural world of lifestyle anarchism call for episodic
rebellion and their satisfaction of their "desiring machines"'.
Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An
Unbridgeable Chasm.
77. Massumi, B, A User's Guide to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, p.140.
78. Massumi, B, A User's Guide to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, p.140.
79. Massumi, B, A User's Guide to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, p.141.
80. See Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology, trans. Massumi,
New York: Semiotext(e), 1986.
81. Bookchin, M, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Montreal: Black
Rose Books, 1986, p.277. Compare Bookchin here with
Deleuze and Guattari's comments on 1968. 'May 1968 in
France was molecular, making what led up to it all the more
imperceptible from the viewpoint of macropolitics... The
politicians, the parties, the unions many leftists, were utterly
vexed, they kept repeating over and over again that
'conditions' were not ripe. It was as though they had been
temporally deprived of the entire dualism machine that made
them valid spokespeople', Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, p.216.
82. May, Todd, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist
Anarchism, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1994, p.3.
83. Nietzsche, F, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,Of The New Idol,
trans. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books, 1969, p.75.
84. May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist
Anarchism, p.59.
85. May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist
Anarchism,
86. 'The anthropological works of Claude Levi-Strauss, the
Psychoanalytical texts of Jacques Lacan, the structural
Psychology of Jean Piaget, and the Marxism of Louis
Althusser with its rejection of Marx's early humanism, share
a common conception of the subject as produced rather than
producing, as an effect rather than cause. Whether the
determination of the subject is through structures of myth and
kinship, the unconscious, the cognitive structures of the
mind, or the political (and especially economic) structure of
society, the theme is the same: humanism as a philosophical
project is fundamentally misplaced in seeking the
constitution of the subject in a subjective essence. The
constitution of the subject comes from outside its own realm
of reflection and decision, thus undermining at a stroke the
subject's transparency, voluntarism, and self-constitution',
p.76-77.
87. Ward, Colin, Anarchy in Action, Allen & Unwin, 1973,
p.58.
88. Marcuse's description of Capitalism
89. Plant, Sadie, "Nomads and Revolutionaries", Journal of
the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 24, no.1, 1993,
p.99-100.
90. Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, trans. Johnson,
Semiotext(e), 1983. 'Instead of betting on the eternal
impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of the
war machine in general, why not think that a new type of
revolution is becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutant
machines are alive, engaged in warfare, joining one another,
and tracing a plane of consistency that undermines the
organizational plan of the World State', p.113. The last part
of the sentence in particular ought to demonstrate that an
emphasis upon molecular revolutions and opposition toward
the State are not mutually incompatible.
91. Perez, R, On An(archy) and Schizoanalysis, New York:
Autonomedia, 1990.
92. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Lane, Hurley
and Seem, London: Athlone Press, 1983, p.35.
93. Perez, R, On An(archy) and Schizoanalysis, p.58.
94. This is of course an allusion to Foucault's reading of
Anti-Oedipus as an introduction to a nonfascist way of life.
95. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, '[B]ut it
would be oversimplifying to believe that the only risk they
fear and confront is allowing themselves to be recaptured in
the end, letting themselves be sealed in, tied up, reknotted,
reterritorialised. They themselves emanate a strange despair,
like an odor of death and immolation, a state of war from
which one returns broken: they have their own dangers',
p.229.
96. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p.160.
97. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p.321.
98. Deleuze, 'I Have Nothing to Admit', trans. by Janis
Forman, New York: Semiotext(e) 2.3, Anti--Oedipus (1977):
'I find among Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, And Nietzsche a
secret link that resides in the critique of negation, the
cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority of
forces and relations, the denunciation of power, etc'.
99. Edwards , P , (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy,
p.69-72.
100. Gregory, R. (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Mind,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, p.317.
101. Gide and Rist, The History of Economic Doctrines,
London, Harrap & Co., 1967. Bakunin here is quoted as a
supreme defender of reason and humanity. Bakunin
recognises "the absolute authority of science and the futility
of contending with natural law. No liberty is possible for man
unless he recognises this and seek in turn this law to his own
advantage. No one except a fool or a theologian, or perhaps a
metaphysician, a jurist, or a bourgeois economist, would
revolt against the mathematical law which declares that 2 + 2
= 4", p.624-625.
102. Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity, p.34.
103. Meszaros, I, Marx's Theory of Alienation, London:
Merlin, 1973.
104. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, quoted in Jay, Adorno.
105. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
London: Verso, 1979.
106. Jay, Adorno, p.63.
107. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
p.230.
108. Bookchin, M, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence
and Dissolution of Hierarchy, California: Cheshire Books,
1980, p.268.
109. Bookchin, M, The Ecology of Freedom. 'Subjectivity
expresses itself in various gradations, not only as the
mentalism of reason but also as the interactivity, reactivity,
and the growing purposive activity of forms,' p.275.
110. Bookchin, M, The Ecology of Freedom, p.276.
111. Bookchin, Philosophy of Social Ecology. 'Theodor
Adorno and Horkheimer's dark pessimism about the human
condition stemmed in large part from their inability to anchor
an emancipatory ethics in the quicksand provided by the
nature philosophy of their day', p.143.
112. Bookchin, M, The Ecology of Freedom, p.304.
113. Bookchin, M, Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green
Future, Boston: South End Press, 1990, 'What is warped
about the human condition is not that people actively
intervene in nature and alter it, but that they intervene
actively to destroy it because humanity's social development
is warped', p.203.
114. Bookchin, M, Philosophy of Social Ecology, p.47
115. Bookchin, M, Remaking Society, p.46.
116. Bookchin, M, Remaking Society, p.48.
117. Bookchin, M, Remaking Society, p.61.
118. Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity, p.93.
119. Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity, p.95.
120. Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity, p.95.
121. Wolin, R, (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993.
122. Heidegger, M, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, Krell,
D, (ed.), London: Routledge, 1993, p.229-230.
123. Heidegger, M, Basic Writings, p.251. Heidegger carries
on here by saying: 'To think against values therefore does not
mean to beat the drum for the valueless and nullity of beings.
It means rather to bring the clearing of the truth of Being
before thinking, as against subjectivising beings into mere
objects'.
124. Soil science is my concept which alludes to Heidegger's
interest in the peasantry's way of life which offered a more
primordial experience of the land or Being. Heidegger's
affection for the Black Forest and Alemannian-Swabian soil
has been duly noted by Zimmerman's Heidegger's
Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art,
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indian University Press,
1991, p.71.
125. Bookchin, Murray, Re-enchanting Humanity, chapter 6.
126. Rose, G, The Melancholy Science, London: Macmillan,
1978, p.8. This is an allusion to Adorno's practice of reading
philosophical fragments in terms of the 'totality'. Adorno, in
effect, searched for a 'style' of philosophy that expressed the
ambivalence of thinking the totality yet mourning a pure
grasping of the totality. The 'style' was located in part in
Nietzsche's employment of aphorism.
127. Conley, V, EcoPolitics, p.1.
128. Conley, V, EcoPolitics, p.11.
129. Conley, V, EcoPolitics, p.144.
130. Conley, V, EcoPolitics, p.149.
131. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p.1.
132. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Tomlinson,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, p.30.
133. Ansell-Pearson, K, Deleuze and Philosophy, London:
Routledge, 1997, p.86.
134. Goodchild, P, 'Deleuzian Ethics', Theory, Culture,
Society, Vol 1 4(2), p.41.
135. Goodchild, P, 'Deleuzian Ethics', p.41.
136. Goodchild, P, 'Deleuzian Ethics', p.40.
137. Goodchild, P, 'Deleuzian Ethics', p.43.
138. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p.112.
139. Goodchild, P, 'Deleuzian Ethics', p.44.
140. These are of course Nietzschean concepts constantly
employed throughout his corpus but more specifically in the
Genealogy of Morals.
141. Goodchild, P, 'Deleuzian Ethics', p.44.
142. This is an allusion to Bookchin's History, Civilization,
and Progress: Outline for a Criticism of Modern Relativism,
Internet: Anarchy Archives.
143. Zimmerman, M, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical
Rcology and Postmodernity, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994, p.326. 'In fact, a chaos-generated
future may be far more like a dystopian technological
nightmare than the ecotopian world of the radical ecologists,
the utopian world of counterculturalists, or even the less
ambitious 'pluralistic' and less domineering worlds of some
postmodern theorists'.
144. Bookchin, M, The Ecology of Freedom, p.302.