What Could It Mean to Oppose Ideology?
If the hallmark of ideology is that it begins from an answer or a conceptual framework and attempts to work backward from there, then one way to resist ideology is to start from questions rather than answers. That is to say—when we intervene in social conflicts, doing so in order to assert questions rather than conclusions. What is it that brings together and defines a movement, if not questions? Answers can alienate or stupefy, but questions seduce. Once enamored of a question, people will fight their whole lives to answer it. Questions precede answers and outlast them: every answer only perpetuates the question that begot it. The term anarchism is itself useful not because it is an answer, but because it is a question—because it is more effective than other terms (freedom, community, communism) at raising the questions we wish to ask. What does it mean to live without hierarchy, or to struggle against it? This single word offers endless points of departure, endless mysteries. Perhaps
