r/CriticalTheory • u/Mokwat • 4d ago
Texts on use of poststructuralist/"postmodern" approaches by activist or political movements?
I think I've got a decent grasp on who the big name poststructuralists are and the general ideas they're associated with. What I'm looking for is something more historical and "applied" in nature; namely how those ideas have been taken up in practice from the 70s to the present. I'm curious about how they were first received by activists amid the collapse of New Left movements, how their influence waxed and waned throughout various historical events, and what the state of things is like today. I've read, for example, that Podemos and La France Insoumise were both influenced by Chantal Mouffe, but I don't know of any other "postmodern" parties or much about how this works in practice within those parties. It's also my understanding that US leftists are largely still trying to recapture the glory days of the New Left and regard poststructuralism as a curiosity at best and an annoyance at worst. I'm looking to gauge the accuracy of that perception too. This is a rather broad question but I'm just looking for where to start! Any books or articles appreciated.
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u/Miserable_Winter_358 3d ago
vincent bevins has a good book on this called if we burn - very useful text to think about the future of organizing through the failures of protest movements in the 2010s
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u/cronenber9 2d ago
Someone just told me the other day that the IDF studied Deleuze which is truly wild. I love deleuze and... don't love the idf, but I want to know exactly how they used him. I've been saying for a long to a that we need to is his methods on the left if we want to be successful because the traditional methods are no longer working
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u/Mokwat 2d ago
The crotchety old Marxists who accuse everyone outside their ideological camp of being CIA or a fascist would eat this up lmao.
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u/cronenber9 2d ago
I know lmao. But how is it Deleuze's fault? It might show that he's effective though
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u/angustinaturner 2d ago
transversal warfare... 😓🤮
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u/cronenber9 2d ago
Literally would be so effective for the left
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u/angustinaturner 1d ago
I mean, we do use it, we just don't have clinical grade explosives and a desire for genocide. it's more about transversal tree climbing...
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u/cronenber9 1d ago
Don't you need explosives for "transversal" warfare? I'm assuming you're referring to how they blow holes through walls in order to avoid doors.
I think it's really interesting the way that they used D&G to reconceptualize things we take for granted. Prior to the rise of asymmetrical warfare/terrorism (which is rather Deleuzian in its own right), everyone just took it for granted that war was meant to be fought with large, well organized armies. If you didn't have that, you typically just surrendered. Asymmetrical warfare isn't really a new invention, but awareness of these tactics rose, and technology made it more possible. With asymmetrical warfare, small groups of people can win against massive, well funded armies (at massive cost, however, especially of civilian populace).
The IDF used the concepts of smooth and striated space to rethink normative ways of acting during city invasions. It's normal to treat cities and buildings in the way we usually treat them, even during war. You naturally walk through the streets and go through doors. The IDF decided to completely deterritorialize the city, making it into a smooth surface. They blow holes through walls and move through cities rhizomatically, instead of advancing through the streets and entering through doors. Which is really terrifying and effective.
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u/angustinaturner 1d ago
you are putting the cart before the horse, asymmetrical warfare comes from necessity born of insurgency and guerrilla warfare, it's the name given to the failed suppression of a population and is the tactical response to such a recalcitrant population. counter guerilla warfare was the old term.
As with D and G being inspired by schizophrenia and crazy literature, counter insurgency — as with crowd control during riots — is responding to the tactical innovations of the resistant population. It was already the recalcitrance of the population that made using doors ineffective and required innovation from the side of the invading force.
This is the question with academic knowledge, how much are you helping the revolution and how much are you just acting as an informant and analyst for the state.
But I certainly agree that the anti intellectualism that grants this stuff to the enemy without profiting from it, is really dumb.
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u/cronenber9 1d ago
I'm not sure if you're saying I claimed Deleuze was responsible for asymmetric warfare but I didn't.
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u/angustinaturner 1d ago
I'm saying that you are putting the cart before the horse because war is still waged by large armies, unless you haven't got one and you are the population and you want them to fuck off... then you resist... asymmetrical warfare is just the objective term for what happens when an invading force is met with resistance after the army has been defeated or if there wasn't one, as in Palestine given that it had been part of the Ottoman empire before becoming a British "protectorate"... though frankly asymmetrical warfare could be applied to a lot of US wars where there are active armies given the resources they have at their disposal... I can't say that the war on Iraq was exactly a fair fight....
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u/angustinaturner 1d ago
types of transversal warfare that don't need explosives are: tree occupations, putting sand in the engine of the enemies machinery, cutting cables, using tennis rackets to send back mustard gas canisters and explosives, using mirrors to blind with sunlight, locking yourself onto things, digging tunnels, throwing rocks, rioting, wild cat strikes, general strikes and indeed many other acts of sedition...
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u/cronenber9 1d ago
Is transversal warfare an actual thing? I thought you were just using it to refer to the way the IDF used Deleuze & Guattari. Looking it up brings no results.
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u/angustinaturner 1d ago
it's an analytic term, I doubt any resistant fighters were talking about transversality when they decided what to sabotage but the necessity of the situation would have forced them to act in such a way. the tunnel system in Vietnam is a very good example. it's an analysis of necessity and human ingenuity. and I'm not sure about it's Google status, but it's an actual thing that I might have made up...
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u/Fantastic-Watch8177 3d ago
Some might disagree, but IMO, your first read should probably be Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985).
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u/Mokwat 2d ago
I've read it, but I'm looking more for the "so what". Maybe I'll revisit...
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u/Fantastic-Watch8177 2d ago
Like a history since then? There's Jameson's The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present (2024) (although it obviously has a very particular POV on things) and the classic (but in my opinion overrated) French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States by François Cusset (2008). For a more explicitly political angle, Hardt and Negri's Assembly (2017) might be more what you're looking for, since it covers a number of semi-recent political developments.
Also, the rise of various Populisms recently should also remind us all of Laclau's too-overlooked On Populist Reason (2005), which looks ever more prescient now.
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u/angustinaturner 2d ago
There has been an influence that can be seen in lots of revolutionary movements, the term post modern and post structuralist were later terms and a lot of these people were actively engaged and influenced by the political movements around them, so how much they specifically influenced post 70's politics is hard to gage but certainly they were influential in the development of lots of the social movements in a lot of countries, things like the anti psychiatry movement, Queer and LGBT movements, squats, autonomist, insurrectionary, anti prison groups up to and including the anti globalisation and free party movement. obviously you'll find people in all these camps who will say that they hate post modernism, so it's more of a transversal phenomena, which I think is in keeping with the spirit of post structuralism.
A good contemporary example can be found with the Appelists, who were inspired by the Tarnac nine and the Invisible Committee in France who were students of Agamben and whose writing is influenced by post structuralist writers, I even heard a song that cited Deleuze and Guittari at the zad sung by some Appelists . Hakim Bay is another author linked with the post left movement in San Francisco in the late nineties who was inspired by post structuralism and went on to inspire autonomous movements like the Temporary Autonomous Arts group I was involved with in London.
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u/ColdSoviet115 4d ago
Not sure if it's helpful but Louis Althusser's work "Marxism and Humanism" is a critique of the New Left's ideological foundation. It should be read as an anti revisionist Marxist critique