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DISPLACING THE OUTPOST OF POSTANARCHISM1
Slavoj Zizek discovered a certain logical movement in the acceptance of a new theory:
[Fjirst, [the new theory] is dismissed as nonsense; then, someone claims that the new theory, although not without its merits, ultimately just puts into new words things already said elsewhere; finally, the new theory is recognized in its novelty.2
Is this not the path that critics of postanarchism have adopted over the years? First, postanarchism was dismissed as obscurantism, nonsensical, academicism, jargon- laden, and so on; next, Jesse Cohn and Shawn Wilbur, among others, claimed that postanarchism was not without its merits but ultimately just put into new words what was already said by the classical anarchists themselves;3 finally, postanarchism was tolerated and both sides have accepted their losses. The final stage has not been a divorce of postanarchism from classical anarchism in order to usher in a new edifice but precisely the reverse: there has been a consolidation or marriage of the two theories. In other words, it is now obvious that postanarchism has passed through two of these major phases in the development of its theory over the last three decades. First, postanarchism was criticised as an attack on the representative ontologies of classical anarchism. Second, postanarchism was defined as a re-reading of the traditional anarchists to reveal their quintessential post-structuralist nuances - always avant la lettre. It seems to me that (a) anarchism was always already postan- archism, and (b) postanarchism has itself always been a form of anarchism.
Viewed in this way, we may say that postanarchism functioned as a Vanishing mediator' between an old and a new version of anarchism. Vanishing mediators occur between two periods of stasis. But postanarchism does continue to be used as a descriptor for a particular type of anarchist project insofar as that project cannot be satisfied by recourse to tradition. In this case, I am more inclined to describe postanarchism as a 'displaced mediator' that can be revived at a moment's notice to reconfigure the normal anarchist discourse. After postanarchism we latch back onto the displaced mediator and explore its potential in the emerging stasis of postanarchist scholarship. The new terrain is defined by a reconciliation with what currently counts as postanarchism, particularly in the...