Everyday Resistance

Everyday Resistance

1. What is "everyday resistance"? - is a practice that people do in their everyday lives in ways that might undermine power

   • What are examples of "everyday resistance"? Some deal with specific social spaces, such as the workplace , the family or gay/queer spaces. 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, or white, middle class singles resisting stigmatization. Studies may also cover specific themes, such as resistance and stigma or resistance and consumption/shopping.
     • Women in a lower-class neighborhood in Nicaragua do, therefore, arguably resist (using humor) the sexist cultural framework and discursive structure that subordinate them by making them complicit.
     • Common strategies of resistance such as cynicism and skepticism towards the management reproduced power rather than undermining it.

2. What can be ironic about resistance? (hint: power structures)

   • According to Scott, the form of resistance depends on the form of power. He says that if we only care about "real resistance" then "all that is measured " is basically the "repression."
     • Furthermore, everyday resistance is done informally so it is not planned or organised like the "real resistance."
     • The “public, symbolic confrontations ... intended as discursive negations of the existing symbolic order ... fail unless they gain attention”, while everyday resistance “by not openly contesting norms of law, custom, politeness, deference, loyalty and so on leaves the dominant in command of the public stage”
     • Not all of it is politics but like Katsiaficas calls "anti-politics" of " the first person" in which individuals do not act on abstract principles, distant goals or on behalf of large-scale collectives, but based on their own desires and values by trying to implement change locally, informally and directly
   • Agents of resistance often simultaneously promote power-loaded discourses, being the bearers of hierarchies and stereotypes as well as of change. Hence, each actor is both the subject and the object of power – the subject is exposed to the ranking and stereotyping as well as promoting repressive “truths” – thus being both an agent exercising powers and a subaltern who has been subjugated and reduced to order by disciplinary strategies.
   • we could then argue that resistance and its actors need to be seen in a relation to power throughout the analysis.
   • It is through particular power discourses situated in certain contexts that resistance and power is framed and understood in which actors understand themselves and their identities. To us that means consciousness will vary immensely.
   • Our first claim is that since resistance needs to be understood as oppositional, it exists in a relation to power, and, therefore, cannot be determined without a power analysis. This is not only necessary in order to detect what is resistance, but in order to understand the ways in which resistance operates, how it is connected to power and in what sense it is partly autonomous or intertwined with power. An analysis of a particular configuration of power will reveal the kind of norms, rules or ideals that are maintained, and how, with what discourse, institutions and techniques.
     • When power involves space and time bondage, as with slavery in the US South, then everyday resistance, logically, manipulates borders and regulations of space and time
       • Resistance is inconceivable without power since resistance is essentially oppositional to something, and affects existing power. Resistance changes over time since it has to adapt to the changes of power. But also power is reacting to resistance. During historical change, new techniques of power and resistance are developed, explored, rejected, refined and reinvented. Change does happen as a result of these struggles, and neither power nor resistance (permanently) “wins”. Both continue to exist, at the least as temporary tendencies, subterranean desires or potential activity.
   • Adnan study of poor peasants in Bangladesh, and the transformation of covert resistance into overt forms, shows “that there were sequential shifts in the respective strategies of domination and resistance … which shaped each other interactively over a dynamic trajectory.”
   • Most tend to see resistance as a reaction to power, as an act against something that already existed and provoked a response: thus resistance, they argue, has to be secondary.
     • However, maintain that “resistance” is an original activity that acts without the consent of power, thus by itself. As such, as an activity ruled by itself, it can be seen as leading the interactive dynamic, in line with Hardt and Negri (2004). In their view only resistance (the “Multitude”) is able to produce, while power (the “Empire”) is simply an attempt to organize, capitalize or prey on production done in freedom, or on social life itself.
   • Power and resistance affect each other throughout history, in what we would instead describe as a spiral, or rather constant spiral-dynamics of actions and reactions, of innovations and counter-innovations, measures and counter-measures.
   • It is necessary to treat power as plural, as combined configurations, in which any subject always exists in an intersection of these powers.
   • Resistance might resist one power while embracing another.
   • These three power systems – occupation, sexism and religion – are intertwined because they organize the same human bodies and subsequently the intertwining of power/resistance also occurs.

3. Resistance is important for understanding power

4. hidden, disguised, or maybe even invisible and not politically articulated .

   • An example, would be being vegan because people see it as a routine they don't identify it as resistance even though it is.

5. Everyday resistance suggests that resistance is integrated into social life and is a part of normality; not as dramatic or strange as assumed – even if it is still unclear how common it is.

6. 2 forms of resistance: public and disguised resistance. Both relate to three forms of domination (material, status and ideological), which results in six types of resistance.

   • Everyday resistance was created by James Scott in 1985 and it is a theoretical concept.
     • Scott looks on class struggles in repressive contexts from anthropological and political science perspectives. He also comes from a social science perspective.
       • Scott applies a division that is too strong between dominants and subalterns while simultaneously overemphasising the role of resistance. Many have argued and disagreed with Scott on that claiming that these are the most important factors in everyday resistance.

7. Everyday resistance is less confrontational and is "light" on the instrumental side while "heavy" on the symbolic side. It is usually safe because it is more about what it symbolises rather than an aggressive action.

8. Is it a form of creative resistance?

   • Everyday resistance is not only a matter of creative ways of doing things “differently”, but also a silent, somewhat hidden way of (at least potentially) undermining power.

9. Key characteristics: 1. "pervasive use of disguise" which means that there is an ambiguous message delivers by an identified messenger.

10. Simi, Futurell, and Bayat all agree that the study of activism has become based on an implicit dichotomy of “normal activism” versus everyday resistance: “Researchers have not usually considered everyday forms of resistance to be what participants in established social movements do as part of their activism”

    • They argue that managing the stigma of being an activist in a certain social movement is a type of “veiled, identity-based resistance that occurs across many everyday contexts” The Aryans experience stigmatization through experience of “soft” repression such as ridicule, ostracism, and other “interactional conflicts”, which surge within the contexts of everyday life.

11. The word "everyday" in everyday resistance means "spectacular" according to Bhabha. It becomes the silent, mundane and ordinary acts that are normalised.

    • Therefore, conceptualizing and analyzing everyday resistance begins with a double identification of something as being part of the everyday, and that part as being an expression of resistance to power.

12. “Embedded resistance” is a kind of “almost unwitting resistance” in which subalterns “influence the nature of the hegemonic structure as they broaden their roles by working within the system … [and] continue to “embrace their role in the hegemonic system, and because, in hegemonic fashion, they are not motivated by a consciously articulated resistance”

    • Some even use “worker resistance” or “peasant resistance” as their concept, thus based on the actor category, or “consumer resistance”, based on the activity category.

13. Gramsci with “state apparatuses (understood as an instrument of education)”, Polanyi with “market forces”, and Scott with “ideologies (public transcripts)” and different modes of resistance.

    • 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” , and furthermore, as they argue, also the forms, agents, sites and strategies, become more diverse and complex. Still, we agree with Chin and Mittelman who argue that a limitation with Scott is that he overemphasizes class; forgetting that peasants also “are embedded in whole ways of life” and that “class is but one modality of identity in landlord–peasant or other forms of dominant–subordinate relations”.

14. de Certeau takes a starting point in language as a way of reading and talking, a way of using a system, when he develops his everyday life perspective on resistance. de Certeau “proposes an anti-Foucauldian path to understanding domination and resistance” that does not over privilege the apparatus of discipline

    • The everyday resistance of de Certeau is a matter of “tactics” that “depends on time” since it does “not have a place”. It is not securely placed anywhere, and has to be mobile, and “is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized … Whatever it wins, it does not keep.”
    • The problem with his interpretation is that everyday resistance is not visible the way he describes it.

15. For both Scott and de Certeau everyday resistance is a matter of the less visible and small actions by subalterns

16. According to Hollander and Einwohner theorists of resistance have addressed the issue of intent in three different ways (1) the actor’s conscious intent is crucial for the classification of an act or behavior as resistance; (2) assessing intent is close to impossible; and (3) an actor’s intentions are not central to the understanding of an act or a behavior as resistance.

17. Intent is irrelevant for the definition of a type of action, but relevant for understanding the ideas, strategic thinking, plans, psychology or cultural meaning that actors articulate when they resist.

18. What matters is how people are acting – not what their intention is. In fact one of the recurrent repressive mechanisms of dominance is the accusation against (recognized) resistance for not having legitimate, legal or otherwise “appropriate” intentions. In an ironic and most probably unintentional way, critical scholars of resistance in effect follow suit in that tradition when they demand a certain kind of “political”, “ideological” or “class” motive or claim of the activity in order to qualify it as “resistance”.

19. Everyday resistance acts are hard to capture since they rely on contextual tactics, opportunities, individual choices, temporality and it is shifting, moving and transient. It is not (yet) a long-term strategic planning by a collective that articulates a claim to a well-defined target.

    • social practice is the key to resistance
      • Key types: coping, survival-technique, accommodation or avoidance/escape.

20. Governance only comes in when someone else perceives a need to get things in “order”, distinguishing what is “right” from what is “wrong”, and succeeds to organize other objects, individuals or practices according to some external principle or rule that is established through force.

21. one has to carefully investigate practices of resistance that are produced as an ongoing interactive process of contradictions, multiplicity and complexity. The practice of dressing in flannel shirts, ripped jeans and working boots, is a practice of resistance in relation to the dominant gay culture, and at the same time it reinforces the norm of heterosexual, white masculinity.

22. Everyday resistance is a type of act available to all subaltern subjects, all the time, in some form or another. But not all will resist. And even those who do resist only do so sometimes and in relation to some systems of domination, while they might utilize other positions of dominance available to them. When they resist they will not always affect power; sometimes they will even strengthen power or create new forms of power techniques.

23. 1) Everyday resistance is a practice (not a certain consciousness, intent, recognition or outcome); (2) It is historically entangled with (everyday) power (not separated, dichotomous or independent); (3) Everyday resistance needs to be understood as intersectional as the powers it engages with (not one single power relation); and, as a consequence (4) It is heterogenic and contingent due to changing contexts and situations (not a universal strategy or coherent action form). Thus, the heterogenic and contingent practice of everyday resistance is – due to its entanglement with and intersectional relation to power – discursively articulated by actors, targets and observers, sometimes as “resistance”, and sometimes not.