Beyond Power and Resistance

Politics at the Radical Limits

Peter Bloom

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783487554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Processus politique

Has political resistance has lost its ability to confront political and economic power and achieve social change? Despite its best intentions, resistance has often become incorporated and neutered before it achieves its aims, as new forms of power absorb it and turn it towards their own ends. Since the Enlightenment, the opposing forces of power and resistance have framed our view of society and politics. Exploring that development, this book shows how resistance can, ironically, reinforce existing status quos and fundamentally strengthen capitalist and colonial desires for “sovereignty” and “domination”. It highlights, therefore, the urgent need for new critical perspectives that breaks free from this imprisoning modern history. In this spirit, this book seeks to theorize the radical potential for a post-resistance existence and politics. One that exchanges a permanent revolution against authority with the discovery of novel forms of agency, social relations and the self that are currently lacking. That aims to construct economic and social systems based not on the possibility of freedom but enlarging the freedom of possibility. In the 21st century can we move beyond power and resistance to a politics at the radical limits that eternally expands what is socially possible?

Chapter 1

The Tyranny of Power and Resistance

The very existence of power and resistance often seem to be universal. They are thought to be timeless elements in the creation and recreation of society. It is commonly assumed that just as there have always been forces of coercion and authority, there has also always been opposition to such power. If this relationship does not define every life, it certainly seems to be the motor of generational change and societal evolution. To quote Foucault, ‘There is no power without resistance’. Echoing these sentiments more poetically, Margaret Atwood declares, ‘I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light’.

This logic is both rationally persuasive and emotionally resonant. It tells a familiar story of human affairs – where even the greatest empires ultimately fall and where glory always fades. In which the dreams of progress are delivered through the sweat and blood of popular movements. Despite its common sense and romance, it is profoundly deceptive. It makes natural what is socially constructive, and makes universal what is localized to a time and place in human history. This is not to say that resistance is all together new. However, it is to make clear that its dominance as a way for making sense of ourselves, our world and our ability to change it certainly is.

Present-day events give these concerns an especially pressing urgency. The dawn of the millennium held forth the potential for putting aside past divisions of race and class for a new world of shared global prosperity, democracy and liberal freedom. The reality of the twenty-first century has, of course, played out much differently. It has been marked by the rise of international terrorism, the resurgence of Western militarism and an ongoing economic crisis. Fundamentally it has simply updated many of the worst aspects of the modernism from which it was born – inequality, imperialism and oligarchy. Politically democracy, only recently unquestioned in its goodness and historical inevitability, is now increasingly challenged for its ineffectiveness and role in strengthening elite rule against popular interests.

In the wake of this disappointment, exciting new resistance movements have emerged. The millennium began with the resurgence of anti-globalization campaigns aimed at dismantling the current economic order for a more environmentally and socially sustainable international system. It also produced a mass ‘stop the war’ movement protesting the disastrous invasion of Iraq and the continued hawkishness of Western leaders. In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, there arose ‘occupy’ movements across the world seeking to take on the influence of the 1% in the name of the 99% alongside the inspiring struggles associated with the ‘Arab Spring’. More recently, the advent of austerity has bred fresh challenges to the growing economic and power of financial capital.

Nevertheless the tide of war, exploitation and oppression seemingly march onward unabated. Armed international conflict – fuelled by national fears of global terror and age-old struggles over material resources and political power – are intensifying. The reality of corporate globalization and financial domination is rapidly spreading despite its shown economic unfairness and creation of mass insecurity. The failure to address climate change is bringing us ever closer to the very brink of extinction.

This has led many to question whether ‘resistance is futile?’ There is a reason that this is often referred to as the ‘age of cynicism’. People may know that the system is unjust and destined for destruction but feel powerless to change it. The best that can be accomplished are small-scale reforms and enhancing one’s own personal morality. Nevertheless, politics, both theoretically and popularly, is still predominantly defined by the discourse of ‘power and resistance’. Yet, is resistance our only hope for transforming society and creating a better world?

AIM

This book hopes to take a radically different approach for theorizing the possibility for social change. It does not advocate for a better resistance, nor is it primarily concerned with why individuals and groups do or do not ‘resist’. Instead it wants to trace out historically where and how the ‘subject of resistance’ first emerged; what types of power it had in the past and continues to paradoxically support; and what are new ways to conceive and put into practice the transformation of social relations. It is, quite simply, an attempt to go beyond the politics of power and resistance.

The aim of this book is to challenge and ultimately transcend ‘power and resistance’ as a dominant paradigm for understanding social relations and politics. The book traces the history of this paradigm from the Enlightenment to the present, showing how values of ‘ruling’, ‘conquest’ and ‘authority’ continue to monopolize the ways individuals and communities make sense of the world and act to change it. Such prevailing ‘resistance’ subjectivities paradoxically reinforce existing status quos and more fundamentally global capitalism and neo-colonialism. What is needed is a new perspective that replaces desires to resist sovereign power with political movements that expand individual and collective capacities in order to give them ever new forms of political agency to transcend the existing ‘limits’ of social possibility.

THE POWER TO RESIST RESISTANCE

From rising economic inequality to the continued problems of political elitism, the need for resistance has never seemed so pressing. However, resistance is being challenged both conceptually and empirically. Theoretically, scholars highlight the critical role of resistance for ironically reinforcing power relations. In practice, a growing number of social movements are moving away from direct confrontation with power holders, in favour of community building. Nevertheless, concepts of ‘power and resistance’ continue to dominate philosophical and practical ideas of politics.

There is an emerging academic literature directly and indirectly putting into question established paradigms of power and resistance. Taking inspiration primarily from critical theorists like Foucault, these readings emphasize the role of power for positively producing resistance (Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994). Reflected, in turn, is the mutually reinforcing – rather than antagonistic – nature of the relationship between power and resistance (Mumby, 2005; Fleming and Spicer, 2007). These insights echo empirical work illuminating the function of socially constructed ‘resistance selves’ for strengthening prevailing cultural values linked to gender and class (Collinson, 2003) as well as broader ideologies of capitalism (Ezzamel et al., 2001; Contu, 2008). Going even further, in this regard, Bloom (2013; 2015) contends that resistance discourses paradoxically stabilize identity linked to dominant power relations.

Such scholarly perspectives reflect to a degree the changing character of many political movements. Enhancing, and in some instances replacing, the traditional struggle with, and for, authority is the prioritization of fostering novel forms of social interaction and participation. The aforementioned global ‘occupy movements’ and so-called Arab Spring reveal the effort to expand the scope and possibilities of contemporary liberal politics. More broadly, it shows the desire to create ‘new democratic spaces’ (Cornwall and Coleho, 2004) alongside more ‘empowered participatory governments’ (Fund and Wright, 2003) that increase the capacities individuals have for influencing and transforming their society.

These contemporary movements point the way towards a new politics that does not just resist the existing social order but reinvents it. It is the possibility, for instance, of transforming inequalities of corporate globalization into a more just international system of cooperating democratic networks (Hardt and Negri, 2005). Or the evolution of protests against police abuse into a deeper imagining of how to construct a society that does not need to be policed. It is the turning of growing fears over the ‘big brother’ surveillance state into fresh initiatives that use recording technology to radically hold public and private authority accountable.

The rationale for this book, therefore, is to challenge the power/resistance dynamic for conceiving social relations and the possibilities of change. It is an attempt, in this respect, to shed light on the historical rather than the essential nature of this ongoing prioritization of ‘struggle’ and defiance for and against authority, one that continues to reflect its capitalist and colonialist origins. Required instead is a novel understanding of how social orders dynamically provide us with different capacities and forms of agency, and the way politics is a continual articulation of and an attempt to expand beyond ‘the limits’ of these socialized freedoms.

(RE)DEFINING POWER/RESISTANCE

A crucial but difficult question is how to define power and resistance as well as their relationship to each other. Indeed both power and resistance defy any easy or singular definition (Hollander and Einwohner, 2004). Further, they can and do mean multiple things and are highly interpretative. As such, they are often best made known by their effects rather than their essence. To conceptually pin down what power and resistance are, in this regard, is to study how and in what ways they concretely exist in the real world. To this end, it is vital to critically understand how in practice specific forms of power are constituted and even reinforced through and by the idea and undertaking of resistance.

Power and resistance, importantly, are by no means essentialist concepts. There is no such thing as an inherent ‘essence’ of power. Rather, its only consistency is that it is essentially contested – equally in theory and in application (Connolly, 1983; Lukes, 2005). However, this is not to imply that power – or for that matter resistance – is completely relative. By contrast, their substance is found in their dominant and evolving social construction. There is no power or resistance outside of these historical construction and particular to a given social context. Along such lines, Haugaard (2010) proposes a ‘family resemblance’ account of power, examining it according to its multiple aspects in the diverse times and places it occurs.

Nevertheless, even accepting their established heterogeneity, power and resistance remain rather consistent in how they are both theoretically and popularly understood – at least in terms of their ultimate social function. Power is primarily seen as a force for achieving domination. It is the strategies, discourses and relationships that create and sustain a status quo. Resistance, conversely, is the challenging of this entrenched state of affairs. Hence, Lukes (1974) proposes three faces of power: issue-based, agenda setting and ideological, with each sharing a basis in achieving a particular outcome, or the rule of certain actors, at the expense of another. Within the critical theoretical tradition, this division of power and resistance – as will be explored in greater detail throughout this study – is maintained. Despite substantial differences, the tradition is marked by a common opposition of a dominating power from a challenging resistance, whether it is Laclau and Mouffe’s separation of hegemony from antagonisms, Badiou’s situation from the event or Rancière’s policing from politics.

These theoretical accounts risk ignoring the more mutually constituting relationship between power and resistance. Power must conversely be approached as a ‘cluster of relations’ (Foucault, 1980: 198) that is socially created and mutually imbricating. In this spirit, power and, by association, resistance should be primarily conceived of as relational in character. According to Gergen (1995: 36), it is imperative to not

attempt to define power in terms of any set of behavioral, psychological or material coordinates. Rather the focus will be on discourses of power, their emergence within relationships, and their consequences as they come to possess a lived validity.

Power and resistance exist, hence, not in isolation but as dyads (Sharp et al., 2000) – constituent, evolving and stabilizing parts of a broader social order.

This fundamentally relational and mutually reinforcing quality of power and resistance is witnessed in their actual social existence. Indeed, resistance, far from being rare or necessarily earth-shaking, is in fact an everyday occurrence (Scott, 1985). The banal character of resistance can be seen in a range of daily and regular behaviours, from one’s chosen hairstyle (Kuumba and Femi, 1998) to feigning sickness in an attempt to avoid work (Prasad and Prasad, 1998). It is also captured in the normal use of so-called low culture to subvert dominant norms (Stallybrass and White, 1993). More critically, these normalized forms commonly strengthen existent power relations and ideologies (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1992).

This points to the need for a profound theoretical redefining of power and resistance. It is to recognize how resistance is always implicated within and formative of the power that it outwardly opposes. As Foucault famously declares, ‘Where there is power there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority to power’ (1978: 95–6). Crucial, then, is to understand how power and resistance mutually produce each other and ourselves as social subjects. It is to recapture their dynamic in a way similar to that of power/knowledge – in so much as power is linked to knowledge and vice versa. Likewise, power is constructed in and from its relationship to the resistance that seeks to transform it. The present era, in this regard, remains dominantly defined by this now entrenched theoretical relation of resistance to power.

(RE)APPROACHING THE POWER OF RESISTANCE

This book seeks to dramatically rethink how power and resistance are theoretically conceived and concretely approached. It adopts a perspective that takes seriously the stabilizing function of resistance and its role in shaping the contemporary practice of power and its opposition. Significantly this means going beyond discussions of singular instances of resistance. Instead, it demands treating it as a historical phenomenon – one that has come to dominate and shape ideas of politics and the potential for social transformation. Resistance stands as limiting social horizon of possibility, influencing how and in what ways individuals understand and challenge their social reality. At stake is to shed light on resistance as a principle social discourse through which individuals and groups continue to see the world and themselves within it.

Power is not merely – or even principally – repressive but productive. To quote again from Foucault,

What makes power hold good, what makes power accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasures, forms of knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network that runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. (1982: 225)

Resistance is likewise productive. Crucial is what in fact resistance produces and to what social ends.

Significantly, it shares a certain irony with power in terms of its productivity. Although power is assumed to be repressive, it actually positively creates social norms and practices; resistance is meant to challenge an entrenched social order but instead commonly reinforces it. Accordingly, it can be said that power and resistance are simultaneously and rather paradoxically both productive and stabilizing. A relational perspective of power is once more instructive for clarifying this seeming contradiction. Power, from this view point, is fundamentally formed by that which opposes it, because ‘the intelligibility of any assertion is only made possible through contrasts, differences and negations’ (Gergen, 1995: 42). Power and resistance, accordingly, form a ‘relational nuclei’ that constitutes and reproduces social relations. As such, while resistance may ostensibly seek to weaken a status quo, it ultimately often ‘operate(s) toward stabilization, the establishment of valued meaning and thus the exclusion of alterior realities’ (Gergen, 1995: 41).

It is crucial, then, to trace out how individuals are produced and stabilized as resistance subjects of power. ‘Every culture, every subculture, every historic moment’, according to Ortner (1995: 186), ‘constructs its own forms of agency, its own modes of enacting the process of reflecting on the self and the world and of acting simultaneously within and upon what one finds there’. Key is to understand how we are produced as resistance subjects – what agency and ways of knowing does it provide us with? To give but one modern example, Fassin (2008) notes the shift of the resistance subject from ‘revolutionary’ to ‘traumatized’ victim in the passage ...