Both the universal and binary were false, of course. The existential condition of colonialism facilitated a flattening out or repression of the range of internal variation on both sides. A state of war tends toward extreme polarization; colonialism is a permanent state of war, whether in the low-intensity register of prolonged occupation, or the hotter moments of conquest, reconquest, pacification, and counterinsurgency. Accordingly, coloniality tends to generate Manichaean binaries, as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi observed.
Non-Western, Oriental, or so-called primitive cultures, including the Celtic, were portrayed as the polar opposite of the modern, occupying the space of the spiritual, the not-yet-disenchanted, the unilluminated—whether that was seen as a sign of danger and backwardness (as for the Utilitarian reformers, who tried to make India over with railroads and Shakespeare in the 1820s–30s) or salvation for the world (as for the theosophists, who took dictation from Buddhist “hidden masters” and added their force to the Indian nationalist movement in the 1900s–1910s). Whether the Enlightenment logic was evaluated as good or bad, or a little of each, depended on how you felt about mechanization, rationalization, and so forth, or whether you lived in England, Ireland, India, or the Ottoman Empire.
It bears mentioning that the words progressive and reactionary—in their most literal sense—entail relative direction, not necessarily political content or ideological value. One means to go forward in the direction of change, and the other means to generate friction, stoppage, or reversal. But what is the particular change we’re talking about, and what was the status quo? It seems more pertinent to ask what a specific vision of utopia looks like—what its content is—than which direction we need to move in to reach it from where we are now—whether we envision it as having existed in a prelapsarian past or as the destination of future redemption. The legacy of utopian thought contains both kinds of narrative.
Neither an across-the-board improvement nor unmitigated ruin, modernization was rather a radically destabilizing rearrangement in the status quo, which benefited some and harmed others. A critique of modernism (or colonialism) or any of the phenomena of modernity (or coloniality) is not necessarily a bid to “go back” but instead an attempt to seek a different way forward that doesn’t destroy beneficial aspects of an existing fabric, while improving on those aspects that were detrimental to the expansion of freedom and equality. Far from being reactionary, as an orthodox Marxist teleology would deem it, anticolonial critique of modernity was not necessarily an attempt to halt progress—as if the only options were to go forward or backward along a narrow track—but rather to choose a different direction—oblique, perpendicular, or spreading in a skewed delta of potential alternatives. In other universes, with other histories, maybe they are what modernity looks like. Resistance thus contains a range of adaptive, subversive, redirectional, or dialectically synthetic responses not just to halt or reverse modernity but also to generate alternate modernities or countermodernities.
Anarchism = Modernity?
And what about anarchism? In its attempt to solve the problems of oppression and exploitation, is it inherently modernist or antimodernist? Rationalist or Romanticist? This debate has implicitly structured much of the past and current terrain of Western anarchism. It also underlies a pervasive confusion among those who, in the effort to define anarchism historically, give up and dismiss it as incoherent and contradictory.
The crux is this: if by asking “Is anarchism modern or antimodern?” we mean “Is anarchism really part of the rationalist or Romanticist tradition? Is it a child of the Enlightenment or its counterrevolution? Does it do the work of Dionysus or Apollo?” then we fail to grasp that the cultural profile of modernity itself is not wholly identifiable with either side. Rather, its very fabric is woven from the dialogic counterpoint of both, as a play of energies that exists within the field of material conditions symptomatic of modernization. Generated in response to these conditions, anarchism is part of modernity, and like the rest of modernity, partakes in the same interplay of energies.
What’s unique about the anarchist tradition among Western political discourses is its continuous struggle for a synthesis between the two polarities, rejecting neither. Taken as a whole, it’s a cumulative attempt to find a balance by making contextually appropriate adjustments along the spectrum. Nowhere is it a reduction to one or the other, and indeed a quest for balance implies a critique of such a reduction at either end. True, even within the broadly drawn boundaries of anarchism, there are those who have staked out positions near to one or the other. But to argue over which pole truly represents the tradition is to hear only half the conversation. We might ask, for example, whether in a specific context the source of oppression is an excess of either instrumental reason or superstition, whereas the existence of rationality itself is neither disease nor cure. I like to use a lemonade metaphor: depending on the circumstances and what’s already been mixed, you might need to increase or decrease your ratio of lemon juice to sugar to reach the perfect balance. Without both, your lemonade is going to suck.
Is it meaningless—or unanarchistic—to try to identify boundaries? I don’t think so; on the contrary, refusing to do so makes the conversation meaningless. Maybe a more relevant way of putting this is that the anarchist tradition is a discursive field in which the boundaries are defined by a thematic, not a problematic, as Partha Chatterjee puts it in a famous essay on the conceptual difficulties of an Indian nationalist historiography. According to this formulation, it is necessary to distinguish two parts of a social ideology: “the thematic . . . refers to an epistemological as well as ethical system which provides a framework of elements and rules for establishing relationships between elements; the problematic, on the other hand, consists of concrete statements about possibilities justified by reference to the thematic.” The problematic includes an ideology’s “identification of historical possibilities and the practical or programmatic forms of its realization,” and the thematic “its justificatory structures, i.e., the nature of the evidence it presents in support of those claims, the rules of inference it relies on to logically relate a statement of the evidence to a structure of arguments, the set of epistemological principles it uses to demonstrate the existence of its claims as historical possibilities, and finally, the set of ethical principles it appeals to in order to assert that those claims are morally justified.”[9]
Anarchism is a thematic larger than any of its myriad manifestations, all of which can be considered anarchism if they refer to that thematic—if they are part of the anarchist conversation. This is also analogous to contrasting langue as “a language system shared by a given community of speakers”—that is, anarchists—with parole, “a concrete speech act of individual speakers”—that is, what’s said or done by any type of anarchist.[10] The totality of the conversation generated by a particular set of ethical questions and concerns can’t be identified solely with any one utterance, or any one answer to its defining questions.
The anarchist tradition is a continuously unfolding discourse—meaning not just the writings and rhetoric of anarchism but also its body of practices and history of performative acts. And the content of this discourse—the thematic that defines its boundaries—is the quest for collective liberation in its most meaningful sense, by maximizing the conditions for autonomy and egalitarian social relationships, sustainable production and reproduction. The tradition consists at the same time in the argument over what anarchism is, and the argument over the proper balance between a whole constellation of key pairs: freedom and equality, liberty and justice, the individual and the collective, the head and the heart, the verbal and the sensual, power relations and economic relations. India’s anticolonial history represented a similar conversation. Here too the totality of the discourse is characterized by a shared thematic of defining and attaining liberation, through a dialogic counterpoint of the modernist/rationalist lineage