I cite

Freud: group and transference

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud concerns himself with man as a member, man in his belonging to: how is that that to which man belongs, belongs to him?

We should note that the German title refers to Massenpsychologie. The English "group" could have been translated as mass or as crowd. I consider the book in some detail for several reasons: first, because of the way the group is enclosed in the individual; second, because of the link between transference and the group; third, because many of the elements of Freud's account reappear in later writers' discussions of crowds. What is crucial in this text is the primacy of the group to the individual. Group psychology--belonging, connection, will--comes first. The individual ego develops out of it in a process that is unstable and incomplete.

Group psychology, Freud tells us, is concerned with the simultaneous influence of a large number of people, generally strangers, on the individual. It thus concerns man as a member of a race, nation, caste, profession, institution, or crowd organized at a particular time for a specific purpose. What's interesting to Freud is that man's insertion into a group leads to thoughts, feelings, and actions that are unexpected. He wants to understand the nature of the mental change effected by groups.

I have italicized insertion into a group because in some ways Freud's account actually seems to be inverted, an account of the group's insertion into the man or, differently put, the enclosure of the group in the individual. Perhaps it makes sense to say that there is an ambiguity here as to what is incorporating what: does the group incorporate the man or does the man incorporate, internalize, introject the group? Is it possible that there is a reciprocal, albeit uneven and not without remainder, incorporating? And might this unsteady, unstable site of overlap be the space of the subject such that subject is necessarily collective? 

Freud develops his account by quoting extensively from Gustave LeBon's The Crowd. There are two significant elements in the first passage from LeBon that he lifts: the fact that individuals in a group are in the possession of a kind of 'collective mind that makes feel, think, and act in manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation' and the idea that the psychological group is a 'provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements.' Neither of these points interests Freud. He basically assumes that LeBon's ideas are in keeping with his. What he wants to know is what it is that unites individuals into a group, but LeBon isn't telling.

Instead, LeBon is talking about things like a racial unconscious, an 'unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main by hereditary influences.' This substratum is similar in everyone. Individual characteristics are a kind of superstructure of difference built on this common base. This suggests that the base is common, that it consists in the group. The group is again incorporated in the individual. As I see it, the problem with this sort of claim, one manifest in its racism, is an assumption of substantial content. It is insufficiently formal. So a similarity is implied and inserted into what is formally the press and presence of many, of the crowd. Similarity is assumed when all that can be assumed is commonality.

One might expect the argument to be that this unconscious is what manifests itself in the crowd. Somewhat surprisingly--at least Freud is surprised--LeBon's argument is instead that new characteristics, characteristics not previously possessed, are displayed. The first is a sense of invincibility that accompanies a loss of a sense of responsibility. Freud writes this off as not surprising--of course our deepest selves lack responsibility; the crowd enables the individual to 'throw off repressions.' Note, insofar as the repressions that mark the individual are thrown off, it's the crowd that returns. More interesting is the second: contagion. It is kin to hypnosis. The third is suggestibility. I should add that nearly everyone who writes about crowds describes crowds in terms of contagion and suggestibility. We see the language of contagion, for instance, in discussions of the movements of 2011 as well as in networked media.

Freud's next two pages consist almost entirely of long passages from LeBon on contagion and hypnosis. He notes that there is an assymetry in LeBon's account. Contagion refers to members effects on each other. Suggestibility, particularly when understood in terms of hypnosis, suggests something else entirely. Who is the hypnotist?

Before investigating this problem, Freud includes another long quote from LeBon:

Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian -- that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.

Freud approves, finding this helpful for understanding the individual in the group. Again, he seems to me to invert his point since the passage seems to describe the primitive group within the individual, sedimented as the hereditary components of the unconscious.

Freud next turns to the group per se and repeats various elements of LeBon's description, saying that the group is changeable, irritable, impulsive, credulous, incapable of perseverence, desirous, intolerant of delays in the satisfaction of its desire, open to influence, and that it thinks in images. The group is inclined to extremes, obedient to authority, respectful of force, it goes to extremes. It has a thirst for obedience: it is an 'obedient herd.'  "It wants to be ruled by force and to fear its masters." At the same time, because it is not ruled by personal interests groups may be devoted to ideals. In short, in groups extremes exist side by side.

Finally, Freud notes that LeBon's discussion of leaders is rather minimal. What he likes in it, though, is LeBon's account of a mysterious power, 'prestige,' as a kind of domination exerted by an individual or idea that paralyzes our critical faculty and fills us with astonishment and respect. Prestige, Freud says, arouses a feeling like that of fascination in hypnosis.

Freud is preoccupied with the leader because he wants to know what it is that ties the group together--the main thing he thinks is missing from LeBon's discussion. His hypothesis is that the answer is love, or emotional relationships. Love holds the group together. The individual gives up his distinctiveness to the group because he wants to be in harmony with its members. 

Before I continue we should keep in mind a few things at this point. First, we are talking about groups that range from race, to caste, to nation, to profession, to institution, to crowd. Second, these groups are all considered to be psychological groups. Whether an individual is physically in the group--in the crowd or in an institution--is no different from whether the individual is imagining or feeling himself to be in it--as with the nation or race. There is no difference between whether the individual is in the group or the group is within the individual. Third, the description of the group's behavior comes primarily from LeBon, who takes his description from Taine's account of the French revolution, that is, from descriptions of revolutionary masses.

It would be too easy simply to reject Freud at this point. Better, I think, is to try to get at what's compelling so far. Why, in other words, it might not be completely wrong to compare a professional organization, with one's membership in the imaginary community of the nation, with the experience of being in a crowd. When one thinks of oneself as a member of any group, one is occupying the position of that group towards a specific issue or question. One isn't thinking from one's own personal interests, but from a collective interest. Personal interest is subsumed in the collective. [Incidentally, the problem of the US--which might be the same as the problem of liberal democracy as well as any form of libertarianism--is that the collective is subsumed by the individual; the individual is prioritized.] This is a rather cognitivist illustration. What about something more affective? Here as an example we might think of nationalist responses to the burning of a state flag or perhaps to the invocation of threats. Or, with regard to professional organizations we might think of the way we apply certain standards of 'professional excellence' when we assess matters that we might approach differently under other circumstance ("well, I like X's work, but X is not right for this job"). 

Are we far removed from suggestibility and contagion? Not if we recall the mysterious 'prestige.' In professional situations we often respond to the fact of another's prestige--which is one of the reasons for double blind peer review. We also often find ourselves rather automatically repeating terms, phrases, ideas that have been suggested to us. I wonder if our often overstated critiques of others' work are reactive attempts to shake ourselves loose from these kinds of attachments. There could be, then, habits of mind that are not fully our own, that inhabit us in ways rather too much like the enthusiasm of the crowd at a football match. 

So Freud has accepted LeBon but wants to look further at what it is that ties together members of a group. He has suggested that the ties are emotional--love. To explore this further he turns to the church and the army. What is the intervening step? He says that what is really worthy of attention is the distinction between leaderless groups and groups with leaders. And, 'in complete opposition to the usual practice,' he will begin not with simple groups but with highly organized, lasting, artificial groups, again, church an army -- two groups, incidentally, not mentioned in his summary of LeBon.

According to Freud, church and army are groups that people don't typically choose to enter and that they leave only at high personal costs such as punishment or persecution. Each are headed by an individual (Christ, commander) "who loves all the individuals in the group with an equal love." This illusion of equal love is absolutely essential, Freud tells us. Everything depends on it. Christ stands in relation to the individuals in the church as a kind of elder brother or 'father surrogate.' In fact, because of the equality of members (each shares equally in Christ's love), the church is like a family. Members call each other brothers (and sisters). 'The tie which unites each individual to Christ is also the cause of the tie which unites them with one another." The army is basically the same, with the fundamental difference being that this familial structure is repeated in a hierarchical fashion (sections, units, squadrons, etc). What matters here to Freud is the double nature of the libidinal tie of the group: individual to leader, individual to individual. 

The tie to the group is libidinal, strong enough to limit one's narcissism. So, what kind of libidinal tie is it? Answering this question takes Freud to a discussion of the differences between identification and object choice. "Identification is known to psychoanalysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person." Additionally, from the very first identification is ambivalent; tenderness can become hostility. Freud's example (a nice convergence of identification and incorporation) is the cannibal who only devours those of whom he is fond.

The repercussion of the discussion of identification for Freud's account of the church and the army is that he oedipalize them, that is, present the group as ultimately no different from the family. 

The discussion of identification is detailed, detailed in a way that Freud notes has left the riddle of group ties untouched, shifting it over to the riddle of hypnosis. He got to hypnosis via 'being in love.' He explains that hypnosis is not actually a good object to compare with group formation because it is 'identical with it,' isolating 'the behavior of the individual to the leader.' In a group, the individuals have all substituted the same object for their ego ideal and  'have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.' (Because Freud is interested in the leader, he addresses the ego ideal and its relation to the ego in some detail; I might have to take this up in a subsequent post. For now, I am leaving it to the side because I am more interested in the group, not in the somersaults Freud does to try to discuss groups in terms of a leader.)

Freud wonders whether it would have been simpler just to talk about a herd instinct (he invokes Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace, 1916). But, he says no. What's really at work is the more complex structure he already outlined, the one where multiple individuals identify with one another in their love for the same object (his example is that of 'the troop of women and girls ... who crowd around a singer or pianist after his performance'). Trotter's problem, and the reason the herd instinct doesn't explain groups, is that it leaves out the leader. There isn't a herd instinct. There's a horde instinct. Man is a horde animal, an individual creature in a horde led by a chief.

And so, the primal horde, the originary form that the group revives. Recall the basic characteristics of the group: the dwindling of conscious, individual personality, the predominance of the emotions and the unconscious metal life, the focus of feelings in a common direction, the tendency to immediacy--"all this corresponds to a set of regression to a primitive mental activity." His note regarding the primal horde is even more telling: "The will of the individual was too weak; he did not venture upon action. No impulses whatever came into play except collective ones; there was only a common will, there were no single ones." He concludes that the oldest psychology is the group psychology; individual psychology has only come into prominence from it gradually and in a way that is still incomplete.

Then Freud forces himself to make a distinction and make individual and group psychology co-equally primary. Why? Because of the leader. Yet this reintroduces the problem of individual psychology at another level: how does one who is a member of a group become a leader or how is that after the leader dies there is another who can take his place: "there must therefore be a possibility of transforming group psychology into individual psychology." Freud's answer is nearly nonsensical--he explains how the primal father forced his individual sons into group psychology (denial of sexual access to women; restriction of libidinal ties redirects them toward group). That is, he inverts what he said he was going to explain. 

At any rate, Freud argues that the leader of the group is the same as the primal father, which is why the group wants to be dominated or led, why--and he quotes Le Bon here--the group has a thirst for obedience.

The mental differentiation part of the psychic development of the individual involves a separating from the group, but this separating is also an internalization (formation of ego ideal out of which the ego separates). The process is none to stable and liable to shock. Freud notes that it is conceivable that this separation can't be born for long and has to be temporarily undone (festivals). (To be clear, the primary direction of Freud's discussion involves the separation between the ego and ego ideal; I am trying to read it as the separation of the individual from the group. I think that this is fair insofar as the ego ideal is a figure of the group.) 

In his closing remarks, Freud returns to the myth of the primal horde: father feared and loved, killed by band of sons, sons fight among themselves for power, gynocracy installed during this period, "some individual is moved to take over the father's part and free himself from the group" -- he was the first epic poet who invents the heroic myth, the myth of the hero who slays the father. The hero claims to act alone -- but folklore reminds us that he is always accompanied by a crowd, like small animals, bees, and ants.

"The myth, then, is the step by which the individual emerges from group psychology."

He also schematizes being in love, hypnosis, and the group. In the latter two, sexual tendencies are inhibited in their aims; the object is substituted for the ego ideal, with the extra element of identification with others in the case of the group.

Michels: the rusty iron law of oligarchy

This post is a reading of Robert Michels' discussion of the iron law of oligarchy. Two questions underlie the reading: what is his critique of the party and what is the relation of his idea of the crowd to this critique? At this point, I only sketch some of the components of the latter idea rather than provide much of an analysis.

Robert Michels' Political Parties (1911) is the classic critique of not just the revolutionary party (or the 'modern party as a fighting organization') but the party form in general. His basic claim is well known. Parties tend to oligarchy -- it's an iron law. Sometimes overlooked is the fact that Michels' argument applies to democracy (or any kind of mass or collective governance) overall: democracy, of any kind, tends to oligarchy. What might work for a small group can't be carried out by masses directly, so they have to divide the tasks, delegate, specialize, report, and assign. Because leadership is technically indispensable, democracy leads to oligarchy.

The problem for socialists is that socialism, too, tends to oligarchy (Michels was a member of the SPD and then the PSI; Lenin refers to him as 'the garrulous Michels'). Even those parties one might most expect to remain in tune with and accountable to the workers, even those organizations animated by ideals of democratic participation, even those championing the cause of the proletariat ultimately take on a whole slew of oligarchical characteristics. It's a sad but true fact of modern political life 

Consider some of the specific criticisms of the socialist party: the party as an entity is not identifiable with the totality of its members. It is created as a means to an end, but quickly becomes an end in itself, with interests of its own, detached from the class it ostensibly represents. It can well be, then, that the interests of the party do not coincide with those of the masses at all.  A problem with the socialist party, then, is that a party is a program (here I think Michels is mistaken, as will become clearer below; Michels describes multiple ways in which the party is more than a program; his larger argument, then, undercuts this claim). The party is not a social or economic unity. The socialist party might have a program based on the working class but its members can be from any class; class struggle reappears within the party. (The idea that class struggle will appear in the party seems right to me.)

Michels notes as well that the socialist party (which he understands to be a parliamentary party) 'gives a life to certain strata of the working class,' raising them up out of their proletarian position. In effect, the socialist party removes from the proletariat some of its best members. This may be involuntary, but in happens insofar as these members come to hold office in the party. The effect is that the 'involuntary task' of the socialist party is to deproletarianize the proletariat (which could perhaps even be thought of as prefiguring the abolition of the proletariat as a class; in practice, though, it is a form of embourgeoisement).

According to Michels, 'who says organization, says oligarchy.'  Or, more specifically, once there are paid officials, a distinction between electors and elected, a division of labor, and the necessity of leadership, all which seem necessary components of an organized party, union, association, or state, then we are deep in the midst of oligarchy. 

Excerpt from a great review of The Communist Horizon by Samuel Grove

Why not, then, the 'democratic horizon'? It is here that we reach the limits of democracy that Dean's book so astutely identifies. Democracy is a process, not a goal. It is measured quantitatively not qualitatively. It is empirical not axiomatic. It is no more a marker then of our actual place than the way the wind blows. Above all - and this we have learned from experience - democracy is not a means for attaining itself. The vote wasn't won through referenda. Rather it was won when 'the people' imposed its 'will' on the polity. For Dean the terms 'people' and 'will' are mutually constituting. That is, the 'people' only become once they have transformed themselves into a unified collective behind a certain ‘will’. We should not be put off by a failure to reach a democratic consensus or by the mere existence of reactionary dissent. For not everyone is 'the people'.

Dean's argument might appear controversial, but only if we pay no attention to history. For example, we do not have much trouble in saying that women won themselves the vote. And yet at the height of the suffragette movement in Britain, reactionary movements were able to gather more female signatories against their having the vote than the suffragettes could muster for it. So when we say that women won themselves the vote, we can only be using 'women' in a certain qualified sense.

The overthrow of capitalism will not come at the polling stations or the signing of petitions. Such devices, Dean argues, are essentially exercises in ratifying prevailing arrangements (the 'rendering the people' in terms of their 'demographic components'). It will come when the people will it and have the organisational form to achieve it. Dean is right. The people's will is communist because 'communism' is expressly for the collective in a way that brooks no qualification. As such, it is the only word we have in our political vocabulary that represents an unequivocal rejection of capitalism. This is why our horizon is communist.

Midway through The Communist Horizon Dean quotes Walter Benjamin on the perils of a certain strata of radical left wing intellectualism; one that has 'nothing in common' with a workers movement, and whose function is to 'produce, from the political standpoint, not parties but cliques; from the literary standpoint, not producers but agents or hacks who make [...] a banquet out of yawning emptiness.’ The truth is that theory is largely a 'banquet of yawning emptiness'. There is often a chasm separating the questions intellectuals ask themselves and the kinds of problems encountered by everyone else. The Communist Horizon is theory for everyone else and I can think of no higher praise for Dean's arguments than to say that they really belong, not in seminar rooms and lecture theatres, but in people's houses, workplaces and public haunts.

via review31.co.uk

Brecht Forum: Bruno Bosteels, Jodi Dean, and Astra Taylor

 

Video from my talk at Trent University -- The Communist Horizon

 

Theory & Event 15.3

Issue 15.3 features two articles, one on will, the other on the state. Each is an original and significant redeployment of a fundamental category in a new political and theoretical setting. Tracing the work of its category in various literatures and fields—for example, Lucretius, Pascal, and homonationalism, for Ahmed; Foucault, pluralism, and neoinstitutionalism, for Biebricher and Vogelmann—the articles opening this issue of Theory & Event challenge contemporary theorists’ assumptions regarding the salience of certain concepts—there is more life left in them than many of us have thought.

Sara Ahmed constructs a powerful willfulness archive. What is it that incites the charge of “willfulness”?  Who is willful and under what conditions? How are some made to bend to the will of others in the name of getting straightened out? Ahmed’s archive starts with the child, and then with the arm of the child, to explore the modes of authority, inclusion, and participation that close attention to willfulness reveals. The willful child becomes the feral, inner-city waif of London’s riots, the state both requiring and assuming that willfulness must be stamped out (the language of press and politicians reacting to the events of August 2011 echoes eighteenth century injunctions not only to discipline but to beat, even to break).  Ahmed attends as well to an additional kind of force, one that doesn’t just make another act against her own will but that operates more directly on the will itself, rendering the consequences of failing to will what one insists that one will too much to bear. Institutions may embody, instantiate, and enact this insistence on a particular will with the effect that those whose raced, sexed, and queer difference fail to conform, comply, or go with the flow are nearly automatically rendered willful.

Thomas Biebricher and Frieder Vogelmann throw down a provocative challenge to theorists embracing the Foucauldian concept of governmentality. What’s new about it? How does it succeed where other theories of the state have failed? Most appropriations of governmentality quickly dismiss previous accounts of the state, as if they were all written by idiots or apologists.  A more thorough consideration of the literature on the state—which Biebricher and Vogelmann clearly and concisely provide—demonstrates that interest group theorists, systems theorists, and neo-Marxists all had insights into operations of power that have been falsely considered unique to Foucault. So are Biebricher and Vogelmann enjoining us to forget Foucault (or perhaps operating as covert Habermasian hitmen)? No. On the contrary, they make a compelling argument that Foucault advances a new form of state philosophy. To this end, they treat governmentality as an archaeological category, a move that enables them to emphasize “governmentalities as discursive formations, as specific self-images of the state that require a particular knowledge about the state generated through appropriate technologies (e.g., statistics).” This enables them to specify the importance for Foucault of “a philosophy that has political effects without becoming political and that offers strategic knowledge” rather than knowledge to be used by the state.

Producing an issue of Theory & Event is a collective effort. It involves not only the work of the authors and editors, managing editor, and book review editor, but also that of readers, reviewers, and the editorial board. Issue 15.3 is even more of a collective product than usual in that it includes a symposium guest-edited by Neil Roberts and a special supplement guest-edited by Darin Barney, Brian Massumi, and Cayley Sorochan. Each responds to pressing contemporary events. Roberts brings together an array of contemporary theorists to consider the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida last spring. With pieces from Anna Marie Smith, Anne Norton, Michael Hanchard, Stephen H. Marshall, Ange-Marie Hancock, Mark Reinhardt, Christopher J. Lebron, and George Ciccariello-Maher, this symposium demonstrates the ongoingness of theorizing, the ways we are always to an extent in the middle of the events we endeavor to understand. The symposium introduction can be accessed at  http://staging01.muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v015/15.3.roberts.html

With their collection of articles, some written both in French and English, Barney, Massumi and Sorochan analyze and intervene in the contemporary Red Square struggles in Quebec. Opening with a chronology of the Quebec Student Strike written by Cayley Sorochan, the supplement to Issue 15.3 includes contributions from an array of theorists and activists: Alia Al-Saji, Olivier Asselin, Normand Baillargeon, Érik Bordeleau, Thomas Lamarre, Diane Lamoureux, Dominique Leydet, Krista Geneviève Lynes, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Jonathan Sterne, and Daniel Weinstock. The supplement to Issue 15.3 will remain open access for three months at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae.15.3S.html

You can also click on   http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/press_releases/summaries/tae_martin_quebec.pdf to see the publisher’s press release announcing the new issue.  We invite you to circulate  the link to Issue 15.3 and its supplement widely, exploiting all the forums, blogs, posts, and social media outlets available, to keep theorizing moving in pace with these events. 

Issue 15.3 concludes with seven reviews:  Jill Stauffer reviews Bonnie Honig’s Emergency Politics; Stacy Douglas reviews Mark Rifkin’s Erotics of Sovereignty; Milo Sweedler reviews Simon Critchley’s The Faith of the Faithless; Tamkin Hussain reviews Timothy C. Campbell’s Improper Life; Isis I.O. Leslie reviews William T. Cavanaugh’s Migrations of the Holy; Tracy B. Strong reviews Henry Kissinger’s On China; and with thanks to our guest review editor Kennan Ferguson, Marc de Wilde reviews James R. Martel’s Divine Violence and Textual Conspiracies.

Richard Seymour says: "Maoist bear wuvs Jodi Dean's new communist horizon"

remediated from FB with thanks to Richard Seymour.

Video from my talk at the Brecht Forum -- The Communist Horizon

 

Bound books: The Communist Horizon (Verso)

Anarchy: "naughty, rebellious, insouciant, but deliciously safe"

Murray Bookchin's 1995 book, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism is remarkably prescient. 

Like it or not, thousands of self-styled anarchists have slowly surrendered the social core of anarchist ideas to the all-pervasive Yuppie and New Age personalism that marks this decadent, bourgeoisified era. In a very real sense, they are no longer socialists--the advocates of a communally oriented libertarian society--and they eschew any serious commitment to an organized, programmatically coherent social confrontation with the existing order. In growing numbers, they have followed the largely middle-class trend of the time into a decadent personalism in the name of their sovereign "autonomy," a queasy mysticism in the name of "intuitionism," and a prelapsarian vision of history in the name of "primitivism."

Today, intuitionism seems to take the form of emotionalism and experientialism, that is, an emphasis on the feelings and experiences of each as uncriticizable grounds for political positions. Similarly, primitivism seems to have become localism, a localism that privileges do-it-yourself and "small" as necessarily better than anything mass or large. What's interesting here is that emotionalism and localism characterize the campaign language of George W. Bush's compassionate conservativism, the way he depicted himself as speaking from his gut, the dominant culture's critique of intellectuals and rejection of science, the marketing language of organic, natural, and whole, the Chamber of Commerce's campaign on behalf of small business, and the racist anti-federalist politics of southern states  who don't want the government telling them what to do. Back to Bookchin:

Indeed, capitalism itself has been mystified by many self-styled anarchists into an abstractly conceived "industrial society," and the various oppressions that it inflicts upon society have been grossly imputed to the impact of "technology," not the underlying social relationships between capital and labor, structured around an all-pervasive marketplace economy that has penetrated into very sphere of life, from culture to friendships and the family. The tendency of many anarchists to root the ills of society in "civilization" rather than in capital and hierarchy, in the "megamachine" rather than in the commodification of life, and in shadowy "simulations" rather than in the very tangible tyranny of material want and exploitation is not unlike bourgeois apologias for "downsizing" in modern corporations today as the product of "technological advances" rather than of the bourgeoisie's insatiable taste for profit.

I appreciate the connection Bookchin makes to downsizing; it seems to me that the language of downsizing amplifies ideas that small is better and then connects with ideological elements of leaner, faster, fitter, and flexible, all of which describe guerrilla warfare, ideal new economy corporations, and the healthy bodies of the active-lifestyle class of tri-atheletes and pink ribbon marathons.

I don't think the rejection of technology applies, though (and I don't think it applied even in 1995 when Bookchin wrote this). Rather, personally networked communication devices are now part of lifestyle anarchism, crucial to the critique of institutions and bigness insofar as they enable connections that can be fantasized as fluid, horizontal, and voluntary. So rather than construing the enemy as industrial society, the enemy is "the state" as that which threatens networked communications. Danger comes from big government, but this danger can only be met by being small and lean, basically by running and hiding. Insurrection replaces revolution and seizing the state and making a better one is replaced by the momentary ecstasies of temporary autonomous zones (Bookchin has a scathing critique of Hakim Bey). 

A last bit, for now, from Bookchin:

The bourgeoisie has nothing whatever to fear from such lifestyle declamations. With its aversion for institutions, mass-based organizations, its largely subcultural orientation, its moral decadence, its celebration of transcience, and its rejection of programs, this kind of narcissistic anarchism is socially innocuous, often merely a safety valve for discontent toward the prevailing social order. With the Bey, lifestyle anarchism takes flight from meaningful social activism and a steadfast commitment to lasting and creative projects by dissolving itself into kicks, postmodernist nihilism, and a dizzying Nietzschean sense of elitist superiority.