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Summary: A POSTMODERN TREATMENT OF ANARCHY
Review: On An(archy) and Schizoanalysis Review by Patrick Frank ANARCHY: A Journal of Desire ON AN(ARCHY) AND SCHIZOANALYSIS by ROLANDO PEREZ (Autonomedia, POB 568, Brooklyn, NY. 11211-0568, 1990) 144pp. $10.00 paper. A guide to personal liberation, an effort to show us how to ``recognize the many faces of fascism in everyday life,'' and to ``live as a human being independent of the morality of exclusive binary oppositions, foundations, and institutions,'' this book sets a tall task for itself. Some interesting and valuable lines of thought are picked up, but most are not carried far enough. Perez takes as inspiration the musings of Antonin Artaud, the postmodern psychoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,and the later Nietzsche's rants. These sources are explored and quoted at some length, but without nearly enough commentary. Perez stays entirely too close to them, skimming their seductive surfaces and jumping from one to the other in rapid- fire succession. Perez is one of the few anarchist writers who takes postmodernism seriously, and he is right to find support in Deleuze and Guattari. Their decentered, schizoid brand of analysis can be extremely helpful to Perez's vision of ``free,uncoded individuals,'' yet this overdue rapprochement with postmodern thought is only haltingly done and needs further treatment. I hope he devotes his next book to this subject. He uses Artaud, rightly, to answer Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. This is not difficult to do if you mistrust the pomo thinkers' emphasis on the text and linguistic mediation; Artaud's primordial shrieks are a decided tonic to the pomo ``prisonhouse of language.'' Yet some postmodern ideas are oversimplified here.For example, nowhere in Barthes is ``the text now made God,'' as Perez claims; this is a flip denunciation. Perez's analysis of the capitalist state, with its constant spectacles and appropriation of oppositional forms, is basic post-Situationist boilerplate. His program of resistance is thoroughly individualized, as he strongly believes that the revolution must first occur within each of us ``desiring-machines'' (his term, borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari). This makes some sense, but I wonder if this focus on the individual, while it seems a reasonable response to the oppression of the spectacle, isn't also partly an outgrowth of the same detested society, with its shattering of the social web into an amorphous mass of self-gratifying individuals. Maybe his revolutionary individuality is only a warp-speed version of today's consumerism. He worries about the future role of art, and hopes for the day that art will escape hierarchical authority by ``becoming a-signifying.'' What this means is nowhere clearly stated, and his examples (Cage, Bukowski, cummings, Tzara) are, again, common currency. The book concludes with a meditation on the future role of women, and Perez rounds up the usual suspects (Freud, Sartre, phallocentrism) and shoots them with many of feminism's familiar bullets. Here as elsewhere, one can hardly quarrel with this book's basic thrust; its ideas could be developed further.
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Summary: PEREZ MAKES A DIFFICULT SUBJECT EASY TO UNDERSTAND.EXCELLENT
Review: On An(archy) and Schizoanalysis Rolando Perez Autonomedia $8.00 A book on recognizing and combating the fascism of everyday capitalist life. Perez gets into Neitzsche, psychology, our shared experience of pop/consumer culture and more, without making his points impossible to understand. --EXTREME BOOKS DISTRIBUTION
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