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CHAPTER 14. Anarcho-Feminist Psychology: Contributing to Postformal Criticality

Curry Stephenson Malott

In their search for ways to produce democratic and evocative knowledges, critical constructivists become detectives of new ways of seeing and constructing the world. (Joe L. Kincheloe, 2005, p. 4)

Considering how Kincheloe’s postformal psychology as critical revolutionary practice might be extended and contributed to through the engagement with new, or too often ignored, ways of seeing and constructing the world, what I understand to be the more democratic impulses of the vast, diverse tradition known as anarchism will be explored here. I will situate this focus on anarchy within the history of the feminist movement, which played a central role in Kincheloe’s (2008) critical pedagogy. For example, in Kincheloe’s (2008) Critical Pedagogy Primer, he argues that black feminist and cultural studies scholar bell hooks is one of a handful of “important figures in the emergence of critical pedagogy” (p. 59). Hooks’s (1984) contribution to critical pedagogy through feminism, according to Kincheloe (2008), was to challenge the white, middle-class point of view of the women’s movement that assumed their experiences represented the experiences of all women. That is, hooks (1984) argued that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which served as the basis for 1970s feminism, was based on “the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle and upper class, married white women—housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life” (p. 1). That more that Friedan alluded to has famously become known within feminist literature as careers. Hooks’s (1984) critical contribution here is that she extended feminist discourse to include considerations of race and class. Challenging Friedan, hooks (1984) notes that what was not being addressed was the question of who would be taking care of the kids of white, middle-class women once they began their more fulfilling careers. Summarizing this crucial point, hooks (1984) notes that white, middle-class feminism “did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all nonwhite women and poor white women” (pp. 1–2). Summarizing this contribution Kincheloe (2008) notes that “hooks and other women of color moved many feminists toward an effort to challenge an entire system of domination” (p. 83). Critical pedagogy, partly because of the feminist work of hooks, is not just focused on the notion of rights and access, but on the ability to “identify and eradicate the ideology of domination that expresses itself along the axes of race, class, sexuality, colonialism, and gender” (Kincheloe, 2008, p. 83).

This focus on ideology has allowed critical pedagogy to better understand how sexist oppression is based on the belief that women are inferior, primitive, less advanced, more emotional and less rational than men. Because oppression is based on worldviews or interpretive frameworks that are internalized and perpetuated by all members of society, even those most negatively hurt by the idea, the structure of domination is always more complex than simple dichotomies suggest. Sexism is therefore not just a struggle between men and women, but it is a social system that becomes part of the cultural, taken-for-granted, hegemony of the dominant society. Consequently, women internalize and perpetuate sexism with men. Kincheloe (2008) interprets this insight concluding that, “one’s actions in pursuit of resistance to oppression are more important than one’s race, class, or gender—one’s positionality” (p. 83). Not only is ideology more important than positionality when it comes to the work of resisting the doctrinal system and oppressive structures and arrangements, but their abolition (such as patriarchy) not only benefits those who are most hurt (i.e., women) by them, but those who benefit the most (i.e., men) by them are also better off under more positive conditions. Hooks (2000) makes this point crystal-clear in Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, in the following somewhat lengthy, but highly significant, passage:

Males as a group have and do benefit the most from patriarchy, from the assumption that they are superior to females and should rule over us. But those benefits come with a price. In return for all the goodies men receive from patriarchy, they are required to dominate women, to exploit and oppress us, using violence if they must to keep patriarchy intact. Most men find it difficult to be patriarchs. Most men are disturbed by hatred and fear of women, by male violence against women, even the men who perpetuate this violence. But they fear letting go of the benefits. They are not certain what will happen to the world they know most intimately if patriarchy changes. So they find it easier to passively support male domination even when they know in their minds and hearts that it is wrong. (p. ix)

It is this complex context where those who benefit the most from an oppressive ideology and practice would actually, in the long run, be far better off if it ceased to exist, rendering hooks’s feminism so foundational to critical pedagogy in general and Kincheloe’s approach in particular. In Teaching Native America across the Curriculum: A Critical Inquiry (Malott, Waukau, and Waukau-Villagomez, 2009) I contribute to this line of reasoning arguing that those “goodies” referred to by hooks (2000) are not as objectively beneficial as they may seem. Consider:

While those deemed “white,” on average, receive more material privileges than non-whites, most people who fit within current definitions of whiteness would also be better off without the institutionalization of white supremacy. Simply stated, a united working class/human species would be far better equipped to create a socially just world than a divided one. In A Call to Action (2008) I made the point that white people, while at times made to feel special or superior because we are white, have been left to rot and die of cancer at alarming rates in de-industrialized areas such as Niagara Falls, New York. My intentions here are similar. That is, this book, in part, is designed to offer white people (and others) a worldview not based on the false supremacy of Europeans, but one that acknowledges the contributions of Africans, Native Americans, and others to modern democracy and scientific knowledge production. Solidarity, in this context, is not a polite gesture made by the assumed superior to the assumed inferior, but rather, it is an acknowledgment of the awe-inspiring achievements of the non-European world that paved the way for Europe (and those of European descent) to begin emerging from the Dark Ages—a process still underway. (p. 3)

It is within this context of universal improvement that our epistemological bazaar begins to overlap in significant ways with anarchist theory. For example, like the bourgeoisie feminist movement that ignored issues of race and class, which hooks and others confronted during the 1970s and 1980s, Emma Goldman and other female anarchists around the end of the nineteenth century confronted the sexism of foundational male anarchist scholars such as Proudhon and Kropotkin (Leeder, 1996). Making this point in “Let Our Mothers Show the Way,” Elaine Leeder (1996) notes that “anarchist women added new dimensions to the tradition which could not be found in the teachings of Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Bakunin. Anarchist women believed that changes in society had to occur in the economic and political spheres but their emphasis was also on the personal and psychological dimensions of life” (p. 143).

For example, Proudhon, it is argued, believed in patriarchy and that the role of women as the domestic force in life represents the natural division of labor rendering them subordinate to men and thus unable to divorce. However, Emma Goldman still drew on Proudhon’s work borrowing his conclusion that property is theft, and turning it on the sexist discourse and practice informing it by “arguing that woman, as private property of man, was having her freedom and independence stolen” (Leeder, 1996, p. 144). Unlike the white, colorblind feminists, bell hooks challenged in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, Goldman (1969), a Jewish woman who emigrated to the United States (New York City) in 1885 at the age of sixteen, was conscious that “the true patron saints of the black men were represented” not in Lincoln, who only “followed when abolition had become a practical issue” (p. 76), but in the radical white abolitionists such as John Brown and others. Goldman, as an anarchist, recognized the importance of the abolition of all forms of coercive power from capitalism, slavery, to patriarchy. One critique of Goldman’s work might be that she focused on white abolitionists without sufficiently recognizing the agency and resistance of Africans themselves in America. However, because this sophisticated focus is not universal within the feminist tradition, there are those who see no future in feminism as a theoretical framework for political praxis.

For example, some anarchists, such as Susan Brown (1996), argue that because feminism does not possess, as a central, universal commitment, the overthrow and abolition of the basic structures of power, it is not able to provide the theoretical relevance to liberate all of humanity. Consequently, Brown (1996) argues for a more general theory for “human freedom” as part of the process of moving beyond feminism. While coming to essentially the same conclusion as the like of hooks and others in the resistance to a larger system of domination and exploitation—white-supremacist, patriarchal capitalism—she chooses to abandon the language of feminism for anarchism. While this might seem like a minor issue, much can be said about the power of language and the importance of naming the world and therefore the importance of calling ourselves feminists so as to name and oppose sexist oppression, calling ourselves antiracists so as to name and oppose institutionalized white supremacy, and calling ourselves anarchists and Marxists so as to name the capitalist relations of production and oppose the process of value production. However, in the educational Left there are hard, deep lines of division drawn between Marxists (including anarchists, radical environmentalists, and others who take industrialism and a class-based approach to analysis and practice) and postmodernists (including, among others, feminists and critical race theorists).

To the new generation of critical educators and those who are curious or interested, I say nonsense, resist choosing sides, we should embrace our critical diversity to the fullest extent possible. This requires humility and a refusal to take oneself too seriously. It is, in fact, all good. We need to realize that there are legitimate critiques regarding our own practices and conclusions. For example, postmodernists tend to be correct when they charge Marxists with being transmissive/banking/traditional in terms of pedagogy. Marxists, at the same time, tend to be correct when they charge postmodernists with not challenging the basic structures of power and obsessed with identity and triviality. I do not believe the solution is to argue the Left needs to adopt a new theory. I believe the solution resides within a more conscious effort to engage in honest, critical self-reflection and not get so defensive and threatened when we are challenged. Another related component of moving forward, as suggested by the title of this chapter, is to expand and engage more critical traditions. With this spirit of solidarity in mind, let us move into a discussion of the history of anarchy and how it might contribute to our postformal, feminist approach to educational psychology.

In my study of anarchy I begin by considering the philosophical and historical roots of what we might call an anarchist conception of human nature. After this first section, we explore how these insights might inform a postformal, feminist psychology contributing to our move toward a new discipline. Finally, we consider barriers and challenges we will continue to face in the foreseeable future in our attempts to put into practice, as part of a larger critical education movement, postformal approaches to teaching and learning for life after capitalism and without the white supremacist, homophobic, patriarchal hierarchies of what we hope to be distant memories of a time no longer thriving. Throughout this chapter we continue to revisit central aspects of the dominant psychological paradigm as we make our postformal anarchist case against it.

Anarchist Psychology

We begin our investigation with the scientific anarchist work of Noam Chomsky. Because there are so many talented anarchist writers, and therefore so many potential places of departure, it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect upon why Chomsky was chosen. As not only a leading scientist in linguistics since the 1950s, where he has more precisely connected the field to the essence of human nature, but also one of the world’s leading public intellectuals known for his anarchist politics and ceaseless critique of U.S. foreign policy and its ongoing imperialist ambitions, Chomsky’s astonishing achievements and critical credentials demand we actively pay attention to and learn from his point of view, yet without passively accepting all his ideas dogmatically and mechanically. Rather, the challenge is to engage them with as much scientific objectivity as humanly possible, aware that our own subjectivities and interpretive frameworks always serve as our first lens or filter as we construct knowledge about the external world.

Of particular importance to our present investigation are the connections between Chomsky’s scientific investigations regarding human nature and his anarchist politics. As we will observe in the following discussion Chomsky’s choice to embrace and contribute to anarchism is based on his assessment that anarchy most closely matches the essence of human nature. In other words, Chomsky’s anarchism, in many fundamental ways, is informed by the conclusions of science. The significance of Chomsky’s work as a scientist cannot be overstated, especially situated in the context of the early twenty-first century, when an anti–Western science postmodernism has come to dominate critical theory. That is, while many postmodern, cultural critics, anarchist writers, and other critical activists brilliantly outline and contextualize the social context in which anarchism and other forms and modes of counterhegemony exist through struggle, Chomsky’s point of view, that is, the biological context of human nature, offers a unique perspective that I believe is valuable in constructing a postformal anarcho-feminist psychology socially situated.

Chomsky (2005) situates the heart of what I will refer to as his anarchist psychology firmly within the revolutionary impulse of the Enlightenment and the scientific tradition of Western counterhegemony. While postmodernists tend to focus on the oppressive nature of how Western science has come to be dominated by imperialist and capitalist interests, they too often present this tradition as if domination over non-Western knowledge systems was all it was ever about. Chomsky, on the other hand, focuses his energy on contributing to the democratic nature of early Enlightenment science, more or less ignoring the indoctrinating and exclusionary tendencies. I include Chomsky’s point of view because anarchist thought and practice, when not demonized by the discourse of domination, tends not to be traced any further back than to nineteenth-century anarchists, however important, such as Max Stirner, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin (see, for example, Guérin, 2005; Morland, 1997), suggesting that critical/ revolutionary theory and the European Enlightenment, and the subsequent scientific revolution, are separate and unrelated developments. Locating the roots of anarchy within science and the Enlightenment, as argued by Chomsky, reclaims both anarchy from demonization and science from the boss’s reductionistic process of colonialist wealth extraction and the subjugation of non-European-ruling elite peoples and perspectives/knowledges. That is, making these connections challenges the hyperdecontextualized reductionism that falsely disconnects science and politics.

Again, the significance of Chomsky’s scientific approach is highlighted by its uniqueness. For example, while many anarchist writers correctly understand that one’s view of human nature is going to determine one’s understanding of what kind of societies humans are capable of successfully creating thereby shaping future possibilities and interpretations of historical events, they tend to fail to transgress the idea that ones conception of human nature is purely subjective and a matter of personal preference or political commitments. Representing this point of view in Demanding the Impossible? Human Nature and the Politics in Nineteenth-Century Social Anarchism, David Morland (1997) notes that

… there is no universal agreement about the meaning of human nature. Broadly speaking, the controversy centers on whether human nature should be thought of as something innate to the entire species of Homo Sapiens or whether it ought to be viewed as a reflect of particular environmental circumstances. Human nature, it is argued, either is universal and something that is inherent in all of us, or is socially constructed within a given human and social environment … Political ideologies, including social anarchism often rely on a conception of human nature that draws on both dimensions of this argument. (p. 3)

The debate regarding the innate qualities of human nature in this context described by Morland (1997) tend to be centered around the issue of whether it is inherently good or evil. However, while this debate and foci are important, they fail to consider the insights of science, which, I argue, is an unfortunate oversight. It is curious that the only mention of Chomsky in Morland’s (1997) book is his observation that there are too many competing theories within anarchism to be able to identify a generalizable ideology. While it is true that Morland’s (1997) work is specifically centered on nineteenth-century anarchists, Chomsky, a twentieth-century anarchist, as demonstrated below, provides the Western scientific/Enlightenment link between sixteenth and seventeenth-century counterhegemonic scholars, such as Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, with the likes of Proudhon and others from the nineteenth century. In other words, Chomsky’s focus not only contributes to the debate regarding human nature, but his historical contextualization offers invaluable insights for understanding nineteenth-century anarchy.

One of the clearest examples of Chomsky’s historical understanding of what we might call an anarchist psychology is outlined in his essay entitled “Language and Freedom,” originally published in 1970, but recently reproduced in Chomsky on Anarchism (Chomsky, 2005). What follows is therefore an engagement with an anarchist psychology taking Chomsky’s work as a place of departure. Arguing that Western, “libertarian … thought and revolutionary acts of the late eighteenth century” (p. 102) are echoed within the work of Schelling (1775–1854), who identifies the essence of the human ego as freedom, Chomsky (2005) locates the roots of anarchy within the Romantic branch of the Enlightenment. As we observe below, Rousseau, one of the principal architects of Romanticism, has also played a significant role in anarchist psychology.

Although deemed to be not important by many leading historians of philosophy, such as Bertrand Russell (1945, 1972), Schelling, who was a student with Hegel, had such an inflated sense of self, it has been reported (see Gutmann, 1936), that his friendships were almost always sacrificed, would be absolutely livid to know he has been reduced to the status of unimportant. Whether such conclusions are justified is a matter of debate, but outlining Chomsky’s anarchist psychology leads us to his work nevertheless.

Highlighting the magnitude of his ego, Gutmann (1936), in an introduction to Philosophical Inquires into the Nature of Human Freedom (Schelling, 1936), argues that Schelling fashioned himself a leader of what he understood to be the new revolution that takes the notion of freedom to be the center of all philosophy and science (Gutmann, 1936). That is, Schelling argued that philosophy itself is an act of freedom, and thus the product of a free human, carried out by a species born for action, not just speculation, rendering philosophy’s place of departure being the announcement of said freedom. The connection to the Romantic Movement within Schelling’s focus on freedom here is instructive for understanding the philosophical roots of Chomsky’s anarchism. It is therefore not surprising that Chomsky (2005) identifies Rousseau’s insistence that the essence of human nature is freedom and consciousness of that freedom, which, he argues, is an endowment unique to the human species.

Examining the historical development of these ideas Chomsky (2005) locates Rousseau’s conclusions that mechanical philosophy can explain nothing of our freedom, that is, free will or consciousness, therefore identifies anarchy as contributing to this tradition of opposing what has developed into a behaviorist ontology dominant in today’s increasingly corporate-controlled system of mass schooling. That is, Chomsky (2005) notes that it is “striking” that “Rousseau’s argument against the legitimacy of established authority, whether that of political power or that of wealth … follows a familiar Cartesian model” where “man is uniquely beyond the bounds of physical explanation; the beast, on the other hand, is merely an ingenious machine, commanded by natural law. Man’s freedom and his consciousness of his freedom distinguishes him from the beast-machine” (p. 106). Any political or social system that assumes or treats the human species as not essentially free and independent therefore represents an attack on human nature.

While Descartes’s conception of mind, that it is unique to the species and beyond mechanical explanation, remains intact, his conception of body has been abandoned by the scientific community. Further contextualizing this history, Chomsky (1988) notes:

The Cartesian conception of body was refuted by seventeenth-century physics, particularly the work of Isaac Newton, which laid the foundations for modern science. Newton demonstrated that the motions of heavenly bodies could not be explained by the principles of Descartes’ contact mechanics, so that the Cartesian concept of body must be abandoned. In the Newtonian framework there is a “force” that one body exerts on another, without contact between them, a kind of “action at a distance.” Whatever this force may be, it does not fall within the Cartesian framework of contact mechanics. (p. 143)

While the notion of gravity as action at a distance with a physical explanation has been widely accepted in the scientific community, the implications for the mind as a sort of action at a distance holds the biological explanatory key for human freedom and therefore largely ignored. This negligence is astonishing given Chomsky’s conclusion that the notion of action at a distance continues to be the best explanation science has for human intelligence or free will. The brain might be matter designed to produce thought electrically, but the source of that animation remains clouded in mystery. This mystery represents, for many scientists, such as Chomsky, the limits of our species’ intellectual endowments. Simply put, there are some questions that are beyond the reach of human intelligence, such as, What is the scientific explanation for the source of the action at a distance that gives animation to life? For Chomsky, all species have limits. This should not be viewed as controversial. That is, most species of birds have built in genetically determined navigation systems, which humans and most other species, could never acquire.

Chomsky’s rejection of the racist and sexist pseudoscience that attempted to manufacture consent for stereotypical differences, which led him to focus on similarities among the human species coincided with feminist psychologists that objected to science informed by a hegemonic and thus unconscious sexist worldview. Outlining this history, Judith Worell (2000), in “Feminism in Psychology: Revolution or Evolution,” elaborates in great detail:

They pointed out that researchers and the people they studied were predominantly male; the topics they studied, such as aggression and achievement, reflected male concerns; and the results of research based on male samples were assumed to apply also to women. When women were studied, they were evaluated according to a male standard, so that women’s personality and behavior were seen as deviant or deficient in comparison. For example, early research that focused on sex differences claimed that in comparison to men, women were less motivated to achieve, less assertive, and less proficient in science and mathematics. These presumed deficiencies were then seen as stereotypes of all women and were used to deny women entry or advancement in male-dominated employment settings. (p. 185)

Extending this second-wave critique of modern, Western science’s tendency to produce knowledge informed by a process whereby the world is socially constructed as a series of hierarchically constructed dualities, such as male and female and white and nonwhite, Colleen Mac-Canty (2004) argues that third-wave feminism deconstructs the very notion of duality itself. Mac Canty (2004) critiques second-wave feminism for working “within foundational Western political theories such as liberalism and socialism” (p. 155). Third wave feminists, according to Mac-Canty (2004), on the other hand, “works to begin from the situated and ambodied perspectives of different(ing) women” (p. 155). Mac Canty (2004) identifies three main camps of third-wave feminism in the twenty-first century—generational/youth feminism, postcolonial feminism, and ecofeminism. Similarly, in Feminist Theories and Education Primer Leila Villaverde (2008) highlights many feminisms—Black Feminist Thought and Womanist Feminism; Latina/Chicana Feminism; Native American/Indigenous Feminism; Asian-American Feminism; Islamic Feminism; Lesbian Feminism; and Feminist Studies of Men. Contributing to this epistemological diversity, consider:

• “Theorizing the Politics of ‘Islamic Feminism’” by Shahrzad Mojab (2001)

• “Queer Black Feminism: The Pleasure Principle” by Laura Alexandra Harris (1996)

• “The Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse, 1970–1980” by Alma Garcia (1989)

• “Postcolonial Geographies of Privilege: Diaspora Space, the Politics of Personhood and the ‘Sri Lankan Women’s Association in the UK’” by Tariq Jazeel (2005)

• “Puerto Rico: Feminism and Feminist Studies” by Alice Colón Warren (2003)

• Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements by Michael Messner (1997)

• The Agony of Masculinity: Race, Gender, and Education in the Age of “New” Racism and Patriarchy. By Pierre Orelus (2010)

While all of this work and all of these critiques, which barely scratch the surface of all that has been produced and is available, certainly affirm Chomsky’s focus on basic human similarities (i.e., a creative, self-actualizing drive), feminism emerged as part of the postmodern resistance movement against the reductionistic tendency of modern science’s exclusionary and colonizing impulse. It is therefore my intention here, as stated above, to argue that Chomsky’s democratic approach to Enlightenment science (rejecting hegemonic science) combined with postmodernism’s challenge to the Western scientific tendency to subjugate nonelite-Western knowledge systems and worldviews, work together to form a larger, complex whole.

For example, while there are many feminisms due to the complex nature of power and culture and therefore experience, humans, in general, seem to be genetically designed to creatively use and develop the ability to instantly understand language and be conscious of our own consciousness or freedom through self-reflection, freeing us, in part, from the impulse of reaction and internal drive, which, again, it is argued, is an endowment unique to humans. In other words, even those species such as apes, that are the most closely related to humans, do not possess the same genetically determined brains as us, rendering freedom and the consciousness of freedom outside their genetically determined endowments. Human nature is therefore, at its core, a question of defining the parameters of human cognition or intelligence. Because the notion of free will, for scientists such as Chomsky, is a little known property, human intelligence itself is not a well-defined property. While human freedom—a characteristic common to the species—appears to be a unique property, the independent essence of life is universal. That is, the primary quality of life (i.e., to be alive), in whatever species one refers, is that it is not driven or guided by external sources, even though intelligence can be manipulated. The limits and achievements of any given species are determined not by external factors, but by physical genetics, including brain structure and subsequent intellectual endowments. From this point of view the notion of race and gender are social constructs designed to perpetuate exploitative relationships with no real legitimate connection to objective science.

The above insight that intelligence is not a well-defined property and often manipulated to serve political interests of power is particularly important to education, which the extraenvironmentalism of behaviorism assumes, if not in theory, then in practice, the opposite. That is, behaviorism, and education in general, is based on the assumption that intelligence is well defined and therefore precisely measurable and externally controllable. However, further challenging the hyperenvironmentalism of this behaviorist pseudoscience, Newton’s conclusions also strongly suggest that the source of our free will is not external, but is a fully integrated aspect of the living human. Science can therefore help intellectuals understand that the alienation observed by externally controlled and manipulated wageworkers is a direct, negative consequence of the oppression and subjugation of free will. If the essence of the human species is freedom, then those whose authority is derived from their association with science should, therefore, adopt the social arrangements that most centrally embrace this democratic value—as a conclusion of science with political implications, and in the current neoliberal context, revolutionary implications.

For Chomsky, as previously mentioned, these arrangements are called anarchy. An anarchist psychology—Chomsky’s anarchist psychology in particular—is therefore consistent with accepted knowledge regarding the nature of human intelligence and free will within the scientific community. Chomsky (2005), always the rigorous scientist, rejects the use of detailed proposals to plan what a future society might look like because we do not know enough about the nature of human beings, institutions, society, and the implications of introducing humans to new social structures to validate such an approach. Rather, Chomsky (2005) suggests that the building of an anarchist society should be “experimental, guided by certain general ideas about liberty, equality, authority, and domination” allowing and encouraging people to “explore different ways of working through the maze and see what comes natural to them” (p. 221). It is within this practice that notions of spontaneous learning and informal learning take on new meaning.

An anarchist psychology is therefore based on the uncompromising respect for the intellectual freedom of the learner. The many subjugated knowledges represented within neocolonialist feminism, to take just one example, offers deep insight into the richness of intellectual freedom. It offers a global perspective that finds joy and solidarity in complexity and tension like when Chomksy’s fifty-plus years of fearless resistance to U.S. imperialism leads postcolonial, feminist, Marxist scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to passionately exclaim in her Columbia University office suite that she is no Chomsky because she comes from an elite class in India that exploited a lower class for thousands of years rendering her unwilling to forfeit complexity for unification.

However, there is a contradiction here, because of our current state of indoctrination and hegemonic internalization, most of us are not conscious of the insights offered by our unique positionalities. That is, most of us have never had the opportunity to pause and take the necessary years to reflect on the ideas, values, and beliefs of the dominant, capitalist society that we have internalized throughout our lives. As a result, capitalism, behaviorism, the idea that people need leaders because human intelligence is so extremely variable that the average person is incapable of making intelligent decisions concerning important matters such as the structure and nature of the economy and foreign policy, have been so normalized and naturalized that we reproduce these structures without realizing it. The role of anarchist psychology, it seems, is to pose challenges to students that would require them to critically self-reflect on the worldviews that they have acquired over the course of their lifetimes. Again, one of the primary reasons why this self-reflective work tends not to be practiced in schools is because of the continuing dominance of behaviorism and the banking model of education.

While the scientific community has long abandoned mechanical explanations for human consciousness, behaviorists, which Chomsky names environmentalists because of their external explanations of human intelligence, have based their entire framework and conception of human nature on the assumption that human intelligence and consciousness posses no unex-plainable force and are therefore merely the consequence of external conditioning (i.e., operant conditioning). That is, by reducing human intelligence and learning to the low-level conditioned responses performed by dogs and rats, behaviorism—which continues to be the dominant educational theory informing capitalist schooling (i.e., NCLB and Race to the Top)—ignores the self-reflective, complex intelligence, and free will that render humans a unique sociocognitive, intellectual species. In other words, behaviorism ignores the human endowment that leading Enlightenment thinkers such as Galileo have identified as our most noble gift (see Malott, Waukau, and Waukau-Villagomez, 2009). Reflecting on the insistence of certain scholars to base their behaviorist work on refuted conclusions, Chomsky (1988) provides insightful reflections: “One possible answer lies in the role that intellectuals characteristically play in contemporary—and not so contemporary—society … The standard image is that the intellectuals are fiercely independent, honest, defenders of the highest values, opponents of arbitrary rule and authority, and so on. The actual record reveals a different story. Quite typically, intellectuals have been ideological and social managers, serving power or seeking to assume power themselves” (p. 165).

Given this hegemonic role of science in the contemporary era, it should be expected that the universities, the official centers of knowledge production, should serve the interests of power and privilege before truth and the democratic values of the Enlightenment/science/philosophy—represented in Chomsky’s anarchist psychology. Because the official channels of knowledge production that are most centrally implicated in social reproduction or engineering, that is, colleges of teacher education, science alone, as argued above, is not enough to ensure structures of power are not designed to betray what we know about human nature—that is, its propensity for freedom and the create use of labor power and language. What our anarchist approach to postformal psychology therefore needs is a political militancy in defense of science against the behaviorist tendencies of neoliberal capitalism as a current manifestation of the life and legacy of which Columbus represented. Before we move on to the next section we can summarize some of the more central ways Chomsky’s anarchist psychology might inform our postformalism:

• Unlike a lot of recent anarchist literature that seems to focus on that which is out of our immediate control, such as mainstream psychology’s devastating grip on not just the field of psychology but on society more generally (Fox, 2004), the driving force behind Chomsky’s work, from linguistics to anarchist critiques of foreign policy, is an untiring celebration of humanity’s most noble gift—our free will—expressed through our infinitely creative use of language. From this linguistic perspective the essence of humanity is therefore freedom—the freedom to think, engage, and create. Social arrangements that fundamentally betray this inherently human freedom, from Chomsky’s scientifically informed anarchist perspective, must therefore be condemned and deposed. For Chomsky it is Newton’s discovery of the previously mentioned action at a distance that contributes to the vast complexity and sophistication of human intelligence. The Cartesian insight regarding the uniqueness of human intelligence, which Newton, to his own displeasure, affirmed, led Descartes (1637, 1994) to the conclusion that “good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed” (p. 3). Kincheloe’s (2004) postformal cognitive theory is based on a similar conclusion, that “most students who don’t suffer from brain disorders or severe emotional problems can (and do) engage in higher-order thinking” (p. 19) in their daily lives, even if not encouraged or nurtured in formalized school settings.

• Again, Chomsky’s anarchist psychology challenges postformalists to be cautious when waging wholesale attacks against Descartes, Newton, and Western science in general because there are, as demonstrated above, counterhegemonic insights too important and potentially revolutionary to disregard—the notion of action at a distance in particular, which could be used by postformalists to rightly argue that, in many ways, their work represents the conclusions of science than do those free-will-denying behaviorists claiming to be doing scientific work.

• In other words, postformalism, unfortunately, has too often made the same mistake as behaviorism by rejecting science. The difference is that behaviorists reject science to advance an indoctrinating agenda, but call themselves scientists, whereas posformalists reject, in many ways, Western science in the name of social justice and embracing diverse epistemologies, but do not, of course, call themselves scientists. However, I would argue that the underlying liberatory, transgressive purpose of postformalism and contemporary anarchist movements is essentially the same as the democratic habits of the scientific mind embodied by the likes of Galileo, and more recently, Noam Chomsky. Science, after all, did emerge in Southern Europe as a revolutionary movement against the oppressive dogma, divine-right mysticism, and utterly brutal and barbaric colonizing impulse of the Roman Catholic Church.

• Anarchist theory, from a Chomskian perspective, can legitimately invoke the authority of science and simultaneously expand the possibilities for taking postformalism to the streets, as it were. In other words, anarchists pride themselves on being practical or at the forefront of revolutionary movement (Graeber, 2002). Postformalism, with its emphasis on democratic knowledge production as part of the process of resisting dominant forms of oppressive and coercive power, can too easily fail to move the theory and practice or critical constructivism from the classroom to other areas of society such as places of employment and public places (i.e., parks, sidewalks, streets, etc.).

Toward a New Field: A Constructed, Situated, and Militantly Enacted Discipline

Beginning with Kincheloe’s ideas about a constructed and situated psychology, or the notion that the ideas people hold about the world, such as Western Europeans’ construction of Orientalism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Said, 1978), are not objectively fixed, but are rather socially constructed through historically developing relationships of power, is, no doubt, of extreme importance and thus a central component of our postformal approach to educational psychology. Similarly, dominant ideas about the nature of women are social constructions designed to manufacture consent for patriarchy from men and women. Postformalism therefore rejects the one right answer grand narrative ontology of formal science embracing, rather, a multilogicality that appreciates and learns from the knowledges and epistemologies subjugated, disrespected, and, in many instances, all but eradicated, by the enslaving and colonizing European forces that have transformed into neoliberal capitalism maintaining the same insatiable appetite for the accumulation of wealth that led Columbus and his hired hands to commit some of the most horrendous, barbaric forms of genocide never before witnessed by humanity.

For postformalists learning is consequently not just the passive transmission of facts, or the objective, decontextualized cognitive development of learners, but it is a form of development that is always socially and politically mediated in increasingly complex and contradictory ways by dominant and subordinate forms of power. Continually seeking ways of seeing and logics that are counterhegemonic is thus a drive force behind postformalism. Many of these worldviews/philosophies are the interpretive frameworks of those most oppressed and exploited women and men by the capitalist relations of production and the formalism of dominant society intended to normalize and naturalize the insane logics of capital.

Analysis alone, however, as our above engagement with anarchist psychology suggests, is not enough to transform the basic structures of power embedded within capitalist, industrial society. The contributions anarchist ways of seeing might inform Kincheloe and others’ postformalism are particularly instructive, especially at this time of crisis when the world’s people are growing ever more tired of the irresponsible practices and damages inflicted by an industrial, global capitalist ruling elite—the positivistic formalism of the boss’s science for plunder.

Aware of this challenge posed by critical theory, many of us on the educational Left argue that our work in teacher education challenging future teachers to assist their future students in developing critical consciousnesses and viewing themselves as creators of history rather than mere spectators or objects of historical developments constitutes action beyond analysis. On some levels this is correct. However, at the same time, our assumption that revolutionary change will automatically happen if enough people become critically conscious because of our biologically determined intelligence as a species, is, in some respects true, but at the same time naïve and I would argue even irresponsible. That is, revolution, or the displacement of ruling class power in the form of large multi-billion- and trillion-dollar corporations and corporate/ruling elite-controlled governments, has historically proven to be a very dangerous and costly (in terms of both resources, wealth, and human life) endeavor.

If teacher educators (and others), in sharing with the students they work with the revolutionary conclusions the evidence regarding the basic structures of power suggests, encourage future teachers to teach the importance of revolutionary action, then they must themselves demonstrate through action what this might look like in practice. The challenge, from the postformal perspective outlined in this volume, is therefore to model democratic, nonviolent revolutionary agency, or a militantly enacted postformal anarcho-feminist psychology. Operating within the parameters of institutional learning facilities poses significant barriers to such movement because, by design, as argued above, they are constructed against the conclusions of science to serve the elite interests of reproducing capitalist society. Aware of the domesticating impulse of institutions of education, another related barrier for the critical educator is overcoming the immobilizing fear of speaking for rather than with.

That is, aware of the historical role education has played in subjugating the knowledge of Native American and African peoples, for example, by speaking for and representing the other, many academics, especially whites, in their attempts not to reproduce this paternalistic tendency, too often resort to doing nothing as a safe way to avoid the negative effects of their internalized hegemonies. However, for the critical educator, this is not an option. For change to occur, risks must be taken, but with a persistent dedication to critical self-reflection. In our efforts to become transformative agents of change we must therefore not become too dogmatically wedded to a particular analysis or conclusion. For example, we must be conscious of the significant role of positionality in informing ones analytical place of departure.

A New Generation of Anarchists: Possibilities for an Enacted Militancy

First and foremost, we can reiterate by noting that the anarchist challenge is a challenge to more completely transgress the institutions of formalism, such as schools, colleges, and universities. While these spaces offer opportunities to produce knowledge from a diversity of epistemological frameworks, the qualitative limits to this work are defined by the institution itself. An anarchist psychology would extend Kincheloe’s insistence that learning is a libidinal, full-body experience, arguing that the revolutionary development of the mind flowers into full bloom only through the collective struggle against the indoctrinating institutions themselves and the capitalist relations of production.

Offering substantial hope here in “The New Anarchists,” David Graeber (2002) draws attention to the democratic organizing practices of a new generation of anarchist challengers to neoliberal domination. Often overlooked by Marxists and mainstream, academic, critical pedagogues and demonized by corporate media as violent, Graeber (2002) argues that such a mistake could not be more serious in these desperate times. Outlining who these new anarchists are and what their philosophy has looked like in practice, Graeber (2002) begins with the Indigenous, revolutionary Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico (see Khasnabish, chap. 12). The Zapatistas’ subjugated knowledge is precisely what Kincheloe’s postformalism argues is needed at this historical juncture.

Arguing that today’s global action networks against neoliberalism, such as the famous protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999, can be traced to the Zapatistas’ 1994 uprising and call for a worldwide network of opposition to neoliberalism, Graeber (2002) underscores the postformalism of today’s new anarchists. Important here is the meaning of globalization, which has incorrectly been identified as a negative development. This analysis stems from the negative consequences of the liberalization of capital. However, the international movement of capital is actually antiglobalizing because it limits the free movement of people, possessions, and ideas across borders (Chomsky, 1999; Graeber, 2002). In other words, deregulating capital has strengthened the ruling class and, as a result, limited the freedom of people creating a less globalized world. The Zapatistas’ call against neoliberalism is therefore a call for a more globalized world—a global movement against the abuses of ruling class power that takes the form of an international “network” rather than an “organizing structure” with a “central head or decision maker” and therefore has “no central command or hierarchies” (Graeber, 2002, p. 64).

Beginning with the Zapatistas’ black ski masks, rubber boots, and white flags on their rifles symbolizing a paradox—guns that want to be silent—the new anarchists have embraced a playful engagement with outrageous symbolism matching the equally absurd era of neoliberal capitalism—an economic system that calls itself globalization while effectively limiting actual globalization (i.e., the free movement of people and information across borders) through such means as an explosion in the world’s border guards and the restriction of immigration from the underdeveloped so-called third-world to first-world or industrially developed areas.

Again, responding to the absurdity of the contemporary global context Graeber (2002) points to the street pedagogy of the ridiculous where anarchists in overstuffed, padded clown costumes lob fluffy stuffed animals at riot police confusing the military-minded police of the bosses. This pedagogical approach allows even the riot police themselves an opportunity to reflect on the absurdity of a system that treats humans like chattel and denies the creative impulse of the human biological endowment. Summarizing the spirit within these new anarchists Graeber (2002) notes that, “the general anarchistic inspiration of the movement, which is less about seizing state power than about exposing, delegitimizing and dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy from it” (p. 68) is not necessarily about rejecting all organization but is about “creating new forms of organization” (p. 70). For example, Graeber (2002) points to “spokecouncils,” which are:

Large assemblies that coordinate between smaller “affinity groups.” They are most often held before, and during, large-scale direct actions like Seattle or Quebec. Each affinity group (which might have between 4 and 20 people) selects a “spoke,” who is empowered to speak for them in the larger group. Only the spokes can take part in the actual process of finding consensus in the council, but before major decisions they break out into affinity groups again and each group comes to consensus on what position they want their spoke to take. (p. 71)

Such organizational structure, not unlike the ancient governing model practiced by the Mayan-based Zapatistas offers exciting prospects for what life after neoliberal capitalism could possibly look like in practice. In other words, a more horizontal and less hierarchical society is not just an impossible ideal, but is actually realistic. However, such prospects are not without real challenges.

Barriers to an Anarchist Postformal Pedagogy

The barriers to enacting an anarchist postformal psychology are many, both interpersonal and institutional. What follows is a brief summary of these two types of barriers. However, before we proceed I should pause for a moment and acknowledge that the interpersonal and the institutional are not separate and unrelated entities, but are rather part of the same larger whole. In other words, institutions exist because groups of individuals constructed them and even larger groups of individuals either support and uncritically reproduce them or challenge and oppose them. Many scholars have identified this type of relationship as dialectical because it represents a tension of competing interests where institutions determine who individuals develop into while individuals simultaneously shape institutions through both critical and uncritical agency.

Institutional

First and foremost, social structures, such as institutions of formalized education, have been constructed and developed around behaviorist models of lesson planning, curriculum development, and classroom management, and internalized by policy-makers, educational leaders, teachers, students, and caregivers to such an extent that they are viewed as just how it is, or a nonperspective. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, for instance, are examples of how behaviorist practices have been federally enforced through legislation. Of course nowhere within these examples of legislation does it say they are informed by behaviorist principles. Rather, they are presented as the objective results of what science tells us are the best methods of teaching literacy. The message is that they are not embedded with a political agenda, but represent an objective approach to learning.

Supporting this propaganda approach to education is the corporate media, which also has played a significant role demonizing the anarchist movement. Even many Marxists use the term anarchy to describe that which is assumed to be unorganized, undesirable, and unproductive, such as the anarchy of the market. While this tendency has historical presidents between Marx himself and prominent anarchists such as Bakunin, it is certainly not helpful to the movement for democratic globalization. However, the corporate media’s attack on anarchy has undoubtedly had far greater effects than Marxists who themselves tend to be ignored or demonized by the same media outlets.

Graeber (2002), for example, points to the media’s repeated insistence that the anarchists of the Seattle WTO protests were violent, despite the fact that they hurt no one. What the mainstream, corporate media seemed to be most frustrated with, argues Graeber (2002), was the fact that the new anarchists were decidedly not violent. That is, it is a lot more difficult to demonize and ignore a group’s ideology and position when they are nonviolent. The mass media would have had a much easier time convincing people anarchists were scary monsters had they actually been physically assaulting police officers and civilian bystanders.

It is therefore the challenge of critical postformal educators to demonstrate through our teaching and scholarship the practical reasons why critical theories and practices, such as anarchy, are favorable alternatives to the neoliberal order that currently dominates. People must come to understand that the current neoliberal trajectory is not only unsustainable, but it is dangerously irresponsible. The media has conditioned millions of people to equate democracy and freedom with capitalism rendering the struggle for genuine democracy an incredibly difficult undertaking. Consequently, many critical pedagogues have given up hope believing the only way paradigmatic change will come is through the catastrophic physical and economic collapse of the current system. What these institutional barriers suggest is that part of the solution requires an individual approach.

Interpersonal

While Chomsky’s anarchism provides us with much insight regarding the biological context of human nature, other anarchisms and critical psychological theories are needed to better understand the social cognitive context of the mind in and through society. To begin recovering from the psychological damage done by an indoctrinating, white-supremacist, patriarchal, neoliberal society necessary to more fully embrace an anarcho-feminist, postformal psychology and critical pedagogy, we need something more. In keeping with our anarchist theme of expanding the circle of criticality, we can turn to the anarchist psychology of the late Paul Goodman (2010) who understood that conforming to this society would lead to illness, but not conforming would lead to dementia because this is the only society there is. That is, there are no other realities to escape to.

Similarly, feminist reinterpretations of Freud’s work in the 1970s began to observe how women internalize sexist oppression as a result of living under patriarchy rendering the psychological life unhealthy for most women (LeLand, 1989). Others (Sa’ar, 2005) argue that the story of how women consent to patriarchy is more complex than just the result of the normalizing consequence of socialization. For example, Amalia Sa’ar (2005) notes that some women consent to the larger system of sexist oppression because they benefit materially from their racial and class associations and affiliations. The challenge for critical educators, as suggested above, is therefore to demonstrate that the result of a world without oppression and crude exploitation would be far better for everyone, even those who currently benefit the most from the negative system that exists.

Conclusion: A Postformal, Anarchist Self-Reflection

The pressures are great living in this neoliberal, hyperconservative U.S. context where the value of ones identity is measured by their position within capitalist society. Based on the values of that capitalist society, at this moment in its development, most people are defined as redundant, losers, failures, and therefore not useful to the system. Consequently, from the dominant set of values most peoples’ current circumstances are a mark of shame and worthlessness. However, from another marginalized and subjugated set of values it can be viewed as a badge of honor to refuse to participate in the process of value production, wealth extraction, and plunder. Most people who find themselves on the margins, however, are not there by choice and therefore do not necessarily posses a critical understanding of their circumstances. As a result, we either live with those internal tensions and try to help push ahead, or we resort to our capitalist conditioning and assume our tacit place within Jung’s collective unconsciousness. Transgression of our identities in capitalist society, however, requires a collective uprising where society liberates itself from its old roles as wageworkers and subservient to elite power. An informed and empowered population understands how dominant forms of power operate and takes action to deny its existence so democracy and the power of the people can flourish. In other words, our identity cannot fully transform if the larger economic and political social structure and distribution of power remain the same.

To be successful, radicals, especially the most privileged (i.e., white) radicals, must engage in this scholarship and movement building without romanticizing oppression and suffering so many of us fail to correct within ourselves. For example, it is a romantic, privileged point of view or belief that the most oppressed citizens are critical thinkers because they are oppressed. This is a naïve idea informed by a simplistic and wrong understanding of the role of ideas in creating consent to the basic structures of power. Believing that all white people are rich and uncritical because of white-skin privilege is an equally inadequate and essentializing interpretive framework. Taking these precautions heightens the prospects of reaching others counterhegemonically, which, I believe, is one of the primary responsibilities of the postformal, anarcho-feminist critical pedagogue. In other words, it is our task to oppose the power structure we benefit from, which means reaching its primary supporters—white people as a socially constructed political, economic force and ideology. Again, this is done not just because it is unfair, but because it is the necessary for all people to reach their full, supported, independent potential. Otherwise, we’re missionaries, and missionary ideology is colonialist. To reiterate, we do not only pay attention to white people, hardly, we also work in solidarity with diverse communities from around the world. This is fundamental to our work and global movement against power and privilege. Again, this work is not simple or clear-cut; it is complex, too easily contradictory, and never straightforward. We nevertheless continue to negotiate these spaces of tension and contradiction as we oppose dominant forms of exploitative and oppressive power—sometimes with success, and other times suffering bitter defeats, but always knowing the struggle will continue.

References