Conceptualizing 'Everyday Resistance'

A Transdisciplinary Approach

Anna Johansson, Stellan Vinthagen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351368384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Everyday resistance is about the many ways people undermine power and domination through their routine and everyday actions. Unlike open rebellions or demonstrations, it is typically hidden, not politically articulated, and often ingenious. But because of its disguised nature, it is often poorly understood as a form of politics and its potential underestimated.

Conceptualizing 'Everyday Resistance' presents an analytical framework and theoretical tools to understand the entanglements of everyday power and resistance. These are applied to diverse empirical cases including queer relationships in the context of heteronormativity, Palestinian daily life under military occupation, workplace behaviors under office surveillance, and the tactics of fat acceptance bloggers facing the war against obesity. Johansson and Vinthagen argue that everyday resistance is best understood by accounting for different repertoires of tactics, relations between actors and struggles around constructions of time and space. Through a critical dialogue with the work of James C. Scott, Michel de Certeau and Asef Bayat, they aim to reconstruct the field of resistance studies, expanding what counts as resistance and building systematic analysis.

Conceptualizing 'Everyday Resistance' offers researchers and students from different theoretical and empirical backgrounds an essential overview of the field and a creative framework that illuminates the potential of all people to transform society.

Part I
A Theoretical Framework

Resistance as Everyday Counter Practice

1
Everyday Resistance as a Concept

If we operate with a superficial understanding of resistance, we sometimes have problems detecting even large-scale resistance, if it occurs as aggregation of more individualized and scattered forms. Mahdavi (2008) shows how women in Iran have to deal in their everyday with the “komite” (the Iranian morality police) that enforces strict dress codes and behavioral rules in public spaces. However, she argues that there is a “sexual or sociocultural revolution” happening in Iran today (2009, 3). It is subtle and often hidden and uses small signs and steps in order to push the limits of how you are able to dress and behave, and sometimes it bursts, and mobs attack the “komite” (2009, 6). This happens mainly among youth—the majority of Iran—in Tehran and other urban centers mainly, and it involves “music, dancing, alcohol, and premarital sex—all punishable offenses” (2009, 7).¹ Mahdavi claims this youth culture is so strong the regime has to adjust to it progressively. “I watched women both uptown and downtown walk the streets of Tehran wearing more and more makeup and dressing less and less Islamic in style. Shrinking and colorful headscarves replaced long, black, loose-fitting and conservative hejâb, and form-fitted overcoats replaced looser, more conservative mânto” (2009, 8). This cultural resistance seems connected to an ongoing modernization or Westernization, and is informal, dispersed and individualized, not organized, ideologically united or with leadership (which eventually got organized in the Iranian “Green Revolution”, or rebellion of 2009). Several years before the outbreak of the Arab Uprising Bayat (1997a, 1997b, 1997c, 2000, 2009) wrote a lot on the “informal people” who during many years have conducted resistance in Iran and the Arab world and who sometimes are brought together as “social non-movements” (2010, 14–19), i.e., individuals brought together by the activated “passive networks” in a social space of temporal affinity, which enable a coordination despite the lack of formal leadership, formal organizations and united plans or strategies. The research by Bayat and Mahdavi on ongoing everyday resistance reminds us how all the major revolutionary changes have taken researchers preoccupied with formal leadership by surprise (e.g. the regime changes in Eastern Europe 1989 and in Soviet Union 1991, or in South Africa 1994, and the Arab Uprising 2011, etc.) (Goodwin 2011). Thus, if we are interested in how people can liberate themselves in repressive contexts, it seems we have to pay close attention to the everyday forms of resistance that precede (and follow) the drama of revolutions.

Basically, this chapter is an overview of the existing theories and conceptualizations in the field, in which we show the plurality and the main tendencies, the many disciplines involved and varied understandings of everyday resistance. A main conclusion is that the field lacks an accepted understanding of what the phenomenon in question is, and how to empirically study it. It is also not clear what its key characteristics are, and what roles it plays in politics, social change or life of people, and we certainly do not know how its meaning changes in different contexts and historical periods.

Everyday Resistance as a Research Field

Everyday resistance studies are about exploring how people act in their everyday lives in ways that might undermine power. In order to achieve clarity in our definitions and analytical discussions, we maintain an analytical-theoretical distinction between resistance and power, but as will become clear during our discussions, to “undermine power” is not a clear-cut either-or thing in the empirical reality, but rather complex, dynamic and both-and. This is so because power is intimately integrated into and exists in several ways in the everyday lives of people. And at the same time power and resistance are often intimately entangled. Our understanding of power will be developed in a more nuanced way as we proceed in the text, but for now we can say that power is here understood as power over people that is fundamentally limiting their potential (possible ways of life, identities, subjectivities, discourses and ways of behaving) through a variation of techniques (including hierarchies, stereotyping, discipline, violence, etc.) that is forming human existence in particular ways. In a Foucaultian sense, power is something practiced in all social relations throughout society, on all levels and in indeterminate struggles, negotiations and changing relations of forces. In line with Foucault, power is understood as sometimes forbidding, but primarily productive and basically decentered, heterogenic and plural, however, sometimes taking somewhat more stable forms, as “domination”. However, our analysis of everyday resistance aims to also suit other understandings of power, at least those that resemble Foucault’s, e.g. Bourdieu’s, Butler’s, Laclau’s, Lukes’, etc.

Everyday resistance is a theoretical concept introduced by James C. Scott in 1985 in order to cover a different kind of resistance; one that is not as dramatic or visible as rebellions, riots, demonstrations, revolutions, civil war and other such organized, collective or confrontational articulations of resistance (Scott 1985, 1989, 1990). Everyday resistance is quiet, dispersed, disguised or otherwise seemingly invisible to elites, the state or mainstream society; something Scott interchangeably calls “infrapolitics”. Scott shows how certain common behavior of subordinated groups (for example, foot-dragging, escape, sarcasm, passivity, laziness, misunderstandings, disloyalty, slander, avoidance or theft) is not always what it seems to be, but instead resistance. Scott argues these activities are tactics that exploited people use in order to both survive and undermine repressive domination, especially in contexts when rebellion is too risky.² According to Scott, the form of resistance depends on the form of power. Those who claim that “‘real resistance’ is organized, principled, and has revolutionary implications … overlook entirely the vital role of power relations in constraining forms of resistance” (Scott 1989, 51). If we only care for “real resistance”, then “all that is being measured may be the level of repression that structures the available options” (Scott 1989, 51).

Scott fundamentally transformed our understanding of politics, making the ordinary life of subordinated groups part of political affairs. He also directly played an inspirational role in the international establishment of “subaltern studies” as a distinct school that reformulated a “history from below” of India and South Asia (Haynes and Prakash 1991; Kelly 1992, note 1, 297; Ludden 2002, 7–11; Sivaramakrishnan 2005), and he still inspires numerous empirical studies on everyday resistance (Sivaramakrishnan 2005): with general applications (for example, Smith and Grijns 1997), on how covert resistance transforms into overt forms (for example, Adnan 2007) or on effectiveness (for example, Korovkin 2000). Some deal with specific social spaces, such as the workplace (Huzell 2005), the family (for example, studies of resistance among women in violent relationships, Holmberg and Enander 2004) or gay/queer spaces (Myslik 1996; Camp 2004). Others study everyday resistance and specific categories, often women, low-skilled workers, migrants, gay/queer people, Palestinians, minorities, peasants, but also sometimes “new agents” such as white-power activists (Simi and Futurell 2009) or white, middle class singles resisting stigmatization (Zajicek and Koski 2003). Studies may also cover specific themes, such as resistance and stigma (Buseh and Stevens 2006) or resistance and consumption/shopping (Fiske 1989), etc.

Theoretical Perspectives on Everyday Resistance

Besides agreeing that resistance is an oppositional activity, the literature on resistance differs in the meaning of the concept, at the same time as theoretical understanding and empirical scope varies tremendously (Hollander and Einwohner 2004; Lilja and Vinthagen 2009; Vinthagen and Johansson 2013). The classic theoretical frameworks for understanding resistance are based on the literature of Karl Polanyi, Antonio Gramsci and James. C. Scott (Gills 2000). Chin and Mittelman provide an overview and argue that these “three master theories of resistance[:] Antonio Gramsci’s concept of counter-hegemony, Karl Polanyi’s notion of counter-movements and James C. Scott’s idea of infrapolitics” (1997, 26), deal with different targets. Gramsci deals with “state apparatuses (understood as an instrument of education)”, Polanyi with “market forces” and Scott with “ideologies (public transcripts)”. Furthermore, these master theories deal with different modes of resistance (“wars of movement and position”; “counter-movements aimed at self-protection”; and, “counter-discourse”) (Chin and Mittelman 1997, 34, Table 1). Thus, we get a work-division between these “master theories”, where Gramsci and Polanyi deal with collective politics and Scott with individual everyday life, at the same time as they reflect on how globalization transformed conditions of resistance: “as societies became more complex, so too did the targets and modes of resistance” (1997, 34), and furthermore, as they argue, also the forms, agents, sites and strategies, become more diverse and complex (1997, 34–36). For our purpose, with a focus on the micro-level of resistance, it is Scott that becomes important. Unfortunately, we think this neat categorization of Chin and Mittelman treats Scott incorrectly, reducing him to an ideological and discursive struggle in the everyday. As a difference, we recognize how Scott very much (also) focuses on the material class war in the everyday. Furthermore, we would argue that at least de Certeau should be added here, perhaps also Bayat and Foucault, although Foucault has more of an indirect importance, as someone that provides help to understand the network environment of micro-relations and techniques that everyday resistance operates within. All of these authors we will discuss in detail in the process of developing our perspective. Now, we want to outline some of the main contributions in the research field of everyday resistance, and, in the process, show that none of the other publications have done what we are aiming to do here.

Previous Research

There are quite a lot of edited books that deal with everyday resistance that add to our understanding, but they fail to develop coherent theoretical tools and analytical frameworks, as is the aim of this book. Among the recent literature on resistance, two edited books: The Global Resistance Reader by Amoore (2005) or the Cultural Resistance Reader by Duncombe (2002) hold sway. While the former focuses on social movements, the latter centers on broader cultural, individual or “everyday” resistance exemplified by, for example, women shopping (Fiske, in Duncombe 2002, 267–274), smoking (Frank, in Duncombe 2002, 316–327) or women identifying with other women (Radicalesbians, in Duncombe 2002, 248–254). A more recent version of such a collected volume with diverse approaches is the SAGE Handbook of Resistance (2016), edited by Steve Vallas and David Courpasson. In a similar manner, the edited book, Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance (2000), gives close attention to how resistance played out in specific contexts, taking the domination/resistance couplet as a point of departure, but with a focus on the spatial dimension of domination/resistance, ignoring other dimensions that we suggest are important. There are also those edited books that more explicitly deal with everyday resistance. For example, Everyday Forms of Resistance in South East Asia (Kerkvliet and Scott 1986)that focuses on peasant studies in a regional context. Since all these are edited books they add a range of interesting perspectives to the field but cannot provide a coherent framework, neither in terms of theory, conceptual clarity, nor empirical scope. There are, however, some few books that do that, and they are key to our later discussions.

One of the few books that indeed does develop a coherent theoretical framework is the classic work by James C. Scott (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance, which is fundamental for the understanding of everyday resistance. It is a book that makes the locally developed concepts in Scott’s classic ethnographic study among peasants in Malaysia (1985) into a more general framework, shown to be applicable to serfs as well as slaves and other particular groups. Many have criticized Scott (see Gupta 2001; Howe 2000; Field 1994; Gal 1995; Gutmann 1993; Kelly 1992; Tilly 1991), without proposing a consistent alternative. One of these is O’Hanlon (1988), who argues in line with subaltern studies in general and claims that Scott applies too strong a division between dominants and subalterns while simultaneously overemphasizing the role of resistance. To O’Hanlon, “this is a major problem since acceptance and submission is probably the strongest element of subaltern culture” (1988, 214). Such a dichotomous understanding of resistance and power as Scott professes is not something we use, instead we argue that resistance and power are entangled, and subalterns are often divided along different positions in relation to class, gender and sexuality as well as race. Therefore, we prefer the concept “subordinated” as a broader and less charged categorization than “subaltern”, which is today often used to indicate the most subordinated in society.³

In another ground-breaking work, Life as Politics (2009) by Bayat, is a book that focuses on the urban poor in Third World societies and Muslim/Arab everyday articulations of resistance. Unlike Scott, Bayat shows a link between individualized and disguised forms of everyday resistance, on the one hand, and temporary mass mobilizations of the urban poor, on the other. But neither Bayat nor Scott has the ambition to create a theoretical framework that incorporates other key perspectives in the field of everyday resistance, such as de Certeau’s, or the power theory of Foucault or other poststructuralists of later style, as we will do throughout our discussions.

Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) looks in an unusual and refreshing way at how creative practices in liberal-democratic contexts from a perspective of postmodernism and cultural studies can be understood as resistance in the everyday. However, we argue both de Certeau and Scott fail to incorporate the power/resistance dynamics. de Certeau solves one of the main problems with Scott, that of his privileged (class antagonistic) intention. Instead de Certeau focuses on practice (creative ways of acting)—a solution we also follow, but by suggesting a framework that closely and continuously relates resistance to power. We try to avoid the main problem with de Certeau: that acting “differently” becomes resistance. de Certeau views too much as “resistance” and makes power disappear. In our attempt to go beyond both Scott and de Certeau, we will focus on what it means to understand everyday resistance as a subverting practice that is entangled in a dynamic with power.

Popular Dissent, by Bleiker (2000), is the first serious engagement with social science theories on discourse, Foucault, de Certeau and nonviolent forms of everyday resistance and activism. Bleiker (2000) criticizes Scott for not understanding that subordinates who deliberately are “maintaining a public posture of consent”, out of reasons of self-preservation or strategy, are not able to do so from any “pre- or extra-discursive knowledge” or “position of authenticity” (193). Like everyone else, subordinates “live in a community whose language, social practices and customs set limits … [and] provides the conceptual tools through which ‘reality’ makes sense” (193). To Bleiker the solution lies in combining strengths from both Foucault and Scott in order to avoid their respective weaknesses (2000, 193). Basically, Bleiker argues that Foucault is helpful for understanding power, while not equally so for resistance, at the same time as Scott is helpful for understanding resistance, while not when it comes to power. This is something we agree with and take inspiration from and try to pursue. Bleiker, however, does not develop a comprehensive understanding of all the social dimensions of everyday resistance; instead he focuses on the potential of cultural, linguistic and discursive aspects.

Similarly, David Couzens Hoy makes a foundational work in applying post-structuralist theory (Derrida, Foucault, Nietzsche, Žižek, etc.) in Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (2004). His focus is, however, more on developing poststructuralist approaches to ontology, ethics and critique, and he arrives at a suggestion of “post-critique” as an alternative. Hoy does not pay interest to methodology, empirical research or frameworks for analyzing cases of (critical) resistance.

Then we have two books that do innovative theoretical work to help us to find a new understanding of subordinated groups that previously have been limted to Marxist class theory or liberal human rights’ frameworks. Charles T. Lee outlines, in Ingenious Citizenship: Recrafting Democracy for Social Change (2016), a critique of the limited use of liberal human rights approaches for oppressed and marginalized people. Based on several in-depth case studies of migrant domestic workers, global sex workers, trans people and suicide bombers, Lee shows how those made “abject” to mainstream society fight for an integration into liberal citizenship in “ingenious” ways that unsettle and open up new cracks for further resistance, and ultimately hold a potential for transformation of the liberal hegemony. Lee does not totally dismiss human rights activism, but argues for its application together with everyday resistance in context-adopted, fluid and creative ways. Instead of typically arguing for a straightforward inclusion of marginalized groups through expanding liberal citizen rights, Lee argues that rights-based activism on behalf of groups that are oppressed and made into non-citizens (“abjects”) needs to combine with the innovative, ingenious and unsettling forms of everyday resistance applied by “abjects” themselves—as for example “hidden tactics”, “calculated abjection”, “morphing technologies” or “sacrificial violence”. Thus, in an original way Lee’s sophisticated theoretical and empirical analysis opens up a link between organized rights activism and everyday resistance. However, since this work is an attempt to make sense of “ingenious citizenship”, it does not aim to offer a general framework. The same applies to the next book.

In a similar but very different attempt, Kevin Van Meter’s Guerillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (2017) is building an approach that connects everyday resistance with more organized struggles. He starts from popular experiences, organizing and struggles and shows how, historically, working and poor people under slavery, in peasant life and throughout modern capitalism have been innovative in developing forms of resistance suitable to the context and realities of their exploitation. Van Meter argues that the “creation of counter-communities” through creative forms of solidarity, communication and mutual aid, is key to make both everyda...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Author Biographies
• Introduction
• PART I A Theoretical Framework: Resistance as Everyday Counter Practice
• PART II An Analytical Framework: Dimensions of Everyday Resistance
• Conclusion: Towards a Transdisciplinary Social Science Analysis of Everyday Resistance
• References
• Index