https://edinburgh.academia.edu/JamieHeckert
Chapter 5
Jamie Heckert
JH: A number of scholars have drawn on your work in developing anarchist theory, including myself and several other contributors to this volume (particularly Lena Eckert). This has been enabled by recent developments, variously labelled ‘postanarchism’, ‘poststructuralist anarchism’ and ‘postmodern anarchism’, in which the writings of figures such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard and Baudrillard are read as continuous
with (and perhaps superseding) anarchist traditions of theory and praxis. (Are you familiar with this body of literature, by the way?) Reading your work in an anarchist light has also been enabled by your public statements, including a recent interview in which I heard you refer to yourself as a ‘provisional anarchist’.[3]Could you say a bit more about your relationship with anarchist identity?
JB: I am not sure I understand anarchism as an identity, but rather as a movement, one that does not always function in a “continuous” fashion. There are at least two points of reference within contemporary politics for my concerns. The one has to do with Anarchists Against the Wall. The other has to do with the way in which queer anarchism poses an
important alternative to the rising movement of gay libertarianism. Although I am sure that the anarchists against the wall in Israel/Palestine are interested in the history of the anarchist movement, it seems to me that this is a case in which direct action against a military force and a segregationist politics is a very powerful event. If you follow, for instance, the weekly demonstrations at Bi’lin, you can see that human bodies are put into the path of machines that are building the separation wall, are exposing themselves to tear gas, and literally producing an interruption and redirection of military power. The point is to enter into the scene, the building, the movements, to stop them, to redirect them, but also to deploy the body as an instrument of resistance. Of course, it is important that there are cameras there, on the scene, and these machines function as counter-machines, documenting Israeli state violence, but also interrupting its effort to control media coverage of its own actions. Since racism is at the basis of this segregation wall, we see as well the “scandal” of violence being done against Israeli activists. Of course, the outrage is
much greater against those sorts of injuries and deaths than against any that are inflicted against Palestinians or, indeed, other internationals on the scene. There is an important “queer anarchist” component to these demonstrations, and it has to do with episodic, direct action, drawing on older traditions from ACT UP, for instance. But it also has to do with exposing and stopping the violence of an ostensibly legal authority.
I think this last is important to point out, since when the legal regime is itself a violent regime, and legal violence consumes all recourse to due process or legal intervention, then anarchism becomes the way of contesting and opposing the violent operation of the state.
Compare this with new forms of gay libertarianism that we have seen emerging in places like the UK, Belgium, and the Netherlands. There the clearly racist opposition to new immigration and the phobic relations to populations from North Africa or the Middle East, mainly Muslim, have recruited gay advocates who espouse personal freedom, the right to private property, and market relations. Although libertarian views such as these usually subscribe to a minimal or “private” state apparatus, these proponents of gay libertarianism invariably do the bidding of the state, supporting anti-immigration efforts, and defending forms of nationalism or Eurocentrism that are patently exclusionary and racist. In this way, gay libertarians befriend the state, are even recruited by them, and help to sustain state violence against other minorities. It is important to recognize here that “freedom” means personal liberty, and it is in no way linked with the struggle for equality or the struggle against state violence. But any minority has to make allies among those who are subject to arbitrary and devastating forms of state violence. It is in this way that I think queer
anarchism is “smarter” about state power, and legal violence in particular. Gay libertarianism imagines it is defending the rights of individuals, but fails to see that individualism is a social form which, under conditions of capitalism, depends upon both social inequality and the violent power of the state. This last becomes clear in anti-immigration politics.
So anarchism in the sense that interests me has to do with contesting the “legal” dimensions of state power, and posing disturbing challenges about state legitimacy. The point is not to achieve anarchism as a state or as a final form for the political organization of society. It is a disorganizing effect which takes power, exercises power, under conditions where state violence and legal violence are profoundly interconnected. In this sense, it always has an object, and a provisional condition, but it is not a way of life or an “end” in itself.
JH: Thank you for that thoughtful and thought-provoking response. I am particularly moved by the clear appreciation of compassion and equality I read in your critique of building walls around nations or identities. To follow on from your last statement, can I ask here how you conceptualise the state? I’m thinking of Foucault’s writing on governmentality and how it was prefigured by the Jewish anarchist philosopher Gustav Landauer when he wrote: “The state is not something which can be destroyed by a
revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.” In this way, I wonder, is the practice of disrupting state violence, of troubling state power and the individualised identities with which it is intertwined, not also a way of living, of relating differently? In other words, is the undermining or overflowing of walls and borders not potentially a “continuous” process?
JB: My one worry about this formulation is that it can be taken to mean that the state is permanent. We can say that the state is permanent, but certain state formations are not. But maybe it is equally true to say that because there is no “state” that is not at once a state formation, states are the kinds of arrangements that come into being, alter, and are dissolved. It seems to me that the right to revolution depends on the possibility of the state
being dissolved by the concerted will of the people. This is a certain power that popular sovereignty has over state sovereignty, and I want to hold on to this notion. It is true that certain states project their permanence, even try to institute that permanence, but they can only do this through fortifying the effects of their legitimacy and, of course, their armed power – army and police alike. So does it not make more sense to say that the state is always in the process of re-instituting its effect of permanence, and that critical interventions can be made at the various sites where that re-institution takes place. In other words, that re-institution is not guaranteed, and that lack of guarantee can be exposed by strategies we call anarchist.
JH: Is there a connection between your conception of anarchism as intervening in the re-institution of the state and your earlier work on the performativity of gender?
JB: Perhaps the question is actually about the relationship between reiterative performatives and Walter Benjamin’s influential distinction between law-preserving and law-founding violence. My sense is that every time law is reiterated, it is “re-founded” and “re-instituted.” This becomes most important in relation to the general strike, that is, the strike that is not protected by law, but which aims to bring to a standstill an existing
regime of law. One could say that we are sometimes under an obligation to pull the brake of emergency on gender norms. I suppose Irigaray meant something like this when she suggested we jam the machinery of sexual difference.
JH: I’m asking this because for many of us, particularly queer anarchists and anarcha-feminists, anarchism is simultaneously about interrupting or halting the institutionalisation of the state in favour of popular sovereignty and subverting everyday disciplinary identities and hierarchical relationships. It seems to me the latter has long been a theme in your work.
JB: Yes, it is. I would also point out that there is an operation of freedom and agency which is not the same as that which is stipulated as the personal liberty of the individual under liberal democratic regimes. Of course, I want legal protections for certain kinds of freedoms, but if the version of freedom produced by the idea of legal protection becomes all we think of freedom, then surely we are constrained in some unacceptable ways. It
is important to point out that various forms of gender regulation and social hierarchy and exclusion work through domains of power that are not reducible to law, but this also means that the forms of resistance and claims to freedom we make cannot be fully conceptualized within the rubric of law. This is one way to insist that the claims of a radical social movement must exceed those of legal reform, even if those legal reforms
are sometimes useful for that movement. My sense is that anarchism is an important mode of thought and action precisely when we have to figure out where and how to enter into regimes of power, what opportunities exist for their subversion. To some extent, this is a function of a contingent situation and the possibilities it opens, but this also means that
agency is not always institutionalized or institutionalizable. In fact, if political agency is to remain critical, it must weigh the costs of institutionalization and resist any full institutionalization. This does not mean that we have to avoid all institutional practices, but only that they not become the restrictive norm for radical political change.
JH: I’m in agreement about the value of doing subversive work within institutional
settings and also very aware of the challenges, emotional and political. Are there particular aspects or examples of anarchist, feminist and/or queer politics you particularly appreciate for enabling these operations of freedom, or even popular sovereignty?
JB: I am impressed with Anarchists Against the Wall and other actions against the wall at Bi’lin which continue to divert the military and have solicited great support from global networks. The rallies against the confiscation of Palestinian property in East Berlin have been growing, and they are heartening to see. I am also in favor of organizations that help
non-documented peoples both in the US and in Europe, especially when that assistance has to remain below the radar of the law. In a sense, such actions are below the law, outside the law, even against the law, but are fundamentally movements to change law, and to hold existing law to broader standards of justice. My sense as well is that the student movements opposing the destruction of public education in many countries
right now are invariably coming up against police force, and it is crucial to find ways to resist police violence, and to expose its criminal dimensions. Similarly, squatter activism that seeks to lay claim to properties and to claim rights of inhabitation by virtue of having made that claim and set up that abode –these are critical movements. Smuggling medical aid into the Palestinian territorties when the borders are blocked has to be included among important movements of this kind. The large meetings in Chiapas against globalization a few years ago have to be included in my list, but so too do transgender activists who take to the streets with their queer allies in many countries even though it is precisely on the streets that they lack police protection or are subject to police violence. The same with unprotected sex workers (sometimes, as you know, these two groups overlap). I am hoping that in the state of Arizona there might be widespread non-compliance with the new racist laws. My hope is that every faculty member at Arizona University and Arizona State, for instance, will choose to teach Ethnic Studies courses now that they are legally
banned. If everyone taught them, then the universities would be unable to enforce such a hideous law, and the law would become powerless.
JH: Now, here’s a point I really want to explore: what enables the freedom of non-compliance? The way I understand it, it is not only this law which is vulnerable to non-compliance, but all law. Or, in other words, compliance is a necessary part of the re-founding and re-instituting of state power (in contrast, perhaps, to a collective reiteration of commitment to law produced through popular sovereignty, such as the EZLN[4]Revolutionary Laws). This compliance, in turn, is produced through various forms of state(-like) terrorism. As you wrote in Bodies that Matter, 典here must be a body trembling before the law, a body whose fear can be compelled by the law, a law that produces the trembling body prepared for its inscription.”[5] Is there something about anarchist(ic) practice that calms the trembling body so that you or I or anyone can act in ways
unconstrained by fear of the law and the threats of violence with which it is intertwined, particularly against those bodies inscribed as subjectable to violation: women’s bodies, queer bodies, brown bodies, criminal bodies, insane bodies, indigenous bodies, poor bodies, homeless bodies, undocumented bodies, animal bodies and all of the countless ways these inscriptions intersect? Or, in other words, what enables moments of, or transitions to, popular sovereignty, in spite of state claims of power?
JB: If the body trembles, it is through the tremble, as it were, that we act. It may take the trembling to submit or to act, and either one can act to calm it –the first through the fantasy that compliance will satisfy the law and leave us alone; the second through a resistance that either works furtively through the appearance of compliance or openly defies, and has to withstand the future that comes, that has to initiate whatever future comes.
JH: Since we last corresponded the Israeli military has attacked the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in international waters killing several people, wounding many more and arresting hundreds. I’m struck by the words of Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military spokeswoman, quoted in Al Jazeera: “we have the right to defend ourselves.”[6] How is it that people are, at times, able to become so disconnected from their empathy for others that the delivery of food and medical supplies is to be seen as an invasion by enemies? And what effects does this have on other intimate relationships with our own bodies and the bodies of others?
JB: Of course, one has to follow a very specific paranoid sequence to understand how “self-defense” could possibly be invoked by the Israelis here. If the ship carrying food and aid breaks the blockade, then the blockade will be broken and other ships carrying guns and materials for the construction of bunkers and artilleries will arrive, and those ships will be (in part or in whole) from Iran, which means that Iran is docking in Gaza. Even
so, the notion of self-defense only works if we accept the presupposition that the maritime border of Gaza ought to remain within Israel’s sovereign authority, and there is no legal backing for such a claim. The other ways of justifying self-defense seem to emerge from imagining a group of “mercenaries” boarding the ship at a second location; but most of all,
the self-defense claim is clearly refuted by the now highly documented and corroborated fact that the Israelis shot at the ship before boarding. So who precisely was defending themselves against attack?
For anarchism, the struggle is an important one, since we have good reasons for breaking bad laws. At the same time, when we see rogue states breaking international law, we have to respond with outrage. The point is not to be against all law, nor is it to live without any laws. The point, in my view, is to develop a critical relation to law which is, after all, a field
of power, one that is differentially applied and supported. We have to be part of the struggle to make law just, but no existing law will tell us what that justice is. In this sense, we have to seek recourse to extra-legal norms and values to decide strategies in relation to law.
JH: You’ve spoken about anarchism a number of times in public talks, but this is the first time, I believe, you have written about it for a public audience. Could you say something about that?
JB: Actually, I wrote about it in relation to Benjamin’s A Critique of Violence, and there I suggested that Benjamin posits an “extra-legal” perspective by which to judge criminal regimes of law.[7]When law becomes an instrument of state violence (and its coercive force is always in some ways implicated in that violence), then one has to engage forms of 電isobedience・ in order to call for another order of law. In this way, one has to become what Althusser called a 澱ad subject・ or a provisional anarchist, in order to unbind the law from the process of subjectivation. This happens in the general strike when one has to fail as a worker and as a citizen in order to expose an unjust economic mode of exploitation or a violent state regime, or both. We do not have access to natural law at such a moment, but only a certain upsurge of freedom, critique, and also an exercise of a critical
capacity, and a powerful negation. We might understand this upsurge as that part of popular sovereignty that is never fully codified in law, and upon which all law depends for its persistence, and which always potentially implies the dissolution of a particular legal code or regime.
JH: You’ve mentioned in this interview connections between anarchism and the transgression of, or halting of, gender norms. I see, too, connections with anarchism in your essay on surgical interventions done to intersex people, “Doing Justice to Someone”.[8]Could you say a bit more about the connections you see between anarchism and transgender, intersex and genderqueer politics?
JB: Time and again the new political efforts to establish marriage as an issue of civic equality or “gays in the military”as an issue of unequal treatment before the law stay within the structures of conjugality and the military, and seek only to achieve political aims within those frameworks. But what happens to a movement when it ceases to question the value of the military or, indeed, of conjugality itself? It loses its critical capacity, and it breaks alliance with all those gay, lesbian, trans, queer, bi and intersex
peoples who are struggling against heightened militarism, against structural
racism and nationalism, against the brutality of the police in relation to sexual and gender minorities, and who are trying to find ways of living and desiring that are sustainable outside of marriage norms and free of police and psychiatric violence. This last seems to be the ultimate goal of any movement of sexual and gender minorities – one that actually thinks analytically about existing social structures and insists on producing new
ones. Perhaps anarchism is in this sense linked to productive power.
JH: Do you have any other comments on links between anarchism and sexuality that we’ve not yet covered?
JB: Just one: that every effort, psychiatric or legal, to “regulate”sexuality causes damage and violence, but it also fails, since sexuality can be punished, but as long as the sexual person lives, sexuality cannot be extinguished by law (it would rather take “law” as its object than suffer a final death).
[2]This is the pre-proof version. For the final version, please see J. Heckert and R. Cleminson (eds.) Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power. London/New York: Routledge
HTTP: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=M16XIW8Q (accessed 30 July 2010).
[5] Judith Butler (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London:
Routledge, p. 101.
english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/05/201053133047995359.html (accessed 1 June 2010).
[7] Judith Butler (2006) ‘Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”’, in Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan (eds), Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, New York: Fordham University Press.
[8] Judith Butler (2001) ‘Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7(4): 621–6; reprinted in Judith Butler (2004) Undoing Gender, New York/London: Routledge.
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