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ABSTRACT
Despite its emergence as a serious field of academic study, postanarchism harbours a number of ontological, epistemological, and even theological hang-ups - at least if CrimethInc., primitivism, and cyberpunk are any indication. Using a pair of postanarchism's more celebrated references - Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault - against it, then, this essay explores how many postanarchists' refusal of copyright and intellectual property in the digital age rather than helping free and/or empower postmodern subjects instead obscures their subjectivity, and perhaps their very humanity. In so doing, postanarchism too often panders to an elitist and naïve contemporary version of Gnosticism, which has itself re-emerged alongside the networked economy in the form of scientology, Kabbalah, and other 'secret', anti-world fundamentalisms in the West.
Keywords: Postanarchism, Gnosticism, cyberpunk, Lacan
He had tried when possible to pass over these thoughts ... to see no more than what was in front of his face and to let his eyes stop at die surface ofthat. It was as if he were afraid diat if he let his eye rest for an instant longer than was needed to place something ... the thing would suddenly stand before him, strange and terrifying, demanding that he name it and name it jusdy and be judged for the name he gave it. He did all he could to avoid this threatened intimacy of creation.
Flannery O'Connor.1
In a widely reproduced post to a Z Magazine Internet forum in the mid- 1 990s, Noam Chomsky decries what he sees as the crumbling of Western intellectual culture, specifically the emergence of 'postmodernist cults' led by, among others, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault.2 Because die discourse of these writers too often fads to meet the minimal standards of evidence-based argumentation required in all other academic fields, and exhibits 'appalling' scholarship 'based on padietic misreading',3 Chomsky considers any conclusions regarding mind and culture reached by diese 'dieorists' as so much nonsense, admitting elsewhere diat 'no one seems to be able to explain to me [what] the latest post-this-and-that is ... other dian truism, error, or gibberish'.4 Chomsky's colleague Murray Bookchin lucewise feels postmodernism has had a 'disquieting effect on the need for a coherent and rational body of radical political ideas' through its...