Epilogue. Anarchism & Academia, Insurrection & Illegality: Age Old Tensions Revisited

Abstract

[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2012 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]The North American Anarchist Studies Network (NAASN) has positioned itself within the continental anarchist milieu as a network of idea producers, activists, theorists, historians, critics, students and teachers. Some of us are entrenched in universities, others with independent writing and research endeavors, but the thread that runs throughout remains stable - anarchist studies. Whilst some of us identify chiefly as activists and others as we are all anarchists. Borrowing from Barbara Epstein, David Graeber1 writes in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology1 that anarchism has replaced Marxism as the discipline of critical scholarship, whilst lamenting the lack of anti-Statists within the academy. If Graeber's account is correct, and Marxist scholars are moving aside for a new generation of anarcho-academics, how does this assertion compare to counterpoints proclaimed by other portions of our movement that scorn our studious eye?Since the anarchist movement is fluid, amorphous, and more of a 'network of networks' than anything else, it is sometimes hard to pinpoint where there borders start and end. What are the boundaries of our movement? Can Ted Kaczynski, Noam Chomsky, the Conspiracy of Fire Cells, and the NAASN membership ranks really exist within a singular label? Amongst this taxonomic challenge, one can easily locate numerous anarchist-linked individuals and projects that have explicitly anti-academic tendencies and thus exhibit categorical ideological cleavages. In their final communique entitled, As With Christ, Bash Back! News Is Dead, the anarcho-Queer insurrectionary network diagrams its enemies, including academics, as the anonymous author(s) write:Death to Christianity. Death to religion. Death to all state and corporate infiltrators. Death to the turncoats. Death to academics. Death to rapists. Death to liberal provocateurs. Death to the collegiate co-opters of gendervariancy.3This label of serves as a form of erasure, flattening all students, teachers, etc. into a mish mosh of homogeneity - of enemy status.In the 2012 book, Queer Ultra Violence chronicling the activities of the Bash Back! network, the editors explicitly attack those that would lend an academic lens to their movement. In the book's conclusion, the editors give examples of contemporary scholars focused on Queer theory writing:Some idiot tries basing his thesis on the riots at the G20; Judith Butler delivers a speech at a conference at the New School about anarchism; Jack Halberstam seeks to valorize the negative and trace the anti-social turn; a class at the University of California is called criminal queer (yet the instructor denounces the activity of insurrectionaries on that very campus) - one after another academics line up to jump on the negativity bandwagon. Each appropriates the activity of insurgents toward the ends of strengthening their own careers. They take anti-social activity and use it to reproduce the Academy as a central engine of society itself. This is the ultimate treason.4This attack on the Queer theorists, both named and unnamed, cites a form of opportunism, a cashing in on the product of struggle. Many are quick to link such appropriations as a recuperation of anarchism, but not all references to social war are equal. While one can quickly point to the recuperative value of AXE body spray's Anarchy Is Here advertising campaign5 or Kanye West & Jay-Z's No Church In The Wild6 music video, a conference paper analyzing an emergent social movement serves a very different function.Animal Liberation Front prisoner of war Walter Bond (aka Abdul Haqq) has expressed contempt for animal liberation scholars and anarchist-academics on numerous occasions, including during his rail against Derrick Jensen's book End Game, writing:I seem to have lost my patience with a great number of the mouthpieces in this 'movement', It's gotten to the point where everyone with a laptop and an opinion about Animal Liberation, Earth Liberation or Human Liberation thinks that everything they have to say is professionally valid. …