Resistance/refusal: Politics of manoeuvre under diffuse regimes of governmentality

Abstract

How do contemporary subjects navigate, withstand and even contest the particular governmental assemblages that define regimes of power today? The article addresses this question by considering ‘refusal’, which has emerged as an increasingly potent empirico-theoretical anthropological concept by, in part, marking an explicit contrast with the longer-standing concept of ‘resistance’. Through analysis of resistance and refusal literatures, and with reference to fieldwork with Burmese grassroots activists and Rohingya civil society actors, the article delineates resistance and refusal as divergent but intertwined tools for engaging different aspects of any given apparatus of power. Where resistance describes opposition to direct domination (sovereign modes of power, following Foucault’s schema), refusal describes the disavowals, rejections and manoeuvrings with and away from diffuse and mediated forms of power (governmentality). To the extent that contemporary apparatuses of power typically constitute a hybrid assemblage of sovereign and governmental forces, subjects of population groups draw upon both resistance and refusal tactics in their navigations of these apparatuses, navigations that refigure the collective resisting/refusing subject. Resistance and refusal hence operate in a quasi-dialectical relation, meaning that through a play of recursivity between apparent converse strategies (direct confrontation versus evasion) groups come to fortify stronger positions from which they can persist. Resistance and refusal not only constitute the conditions of each other’s possibility, sharpening the particular interventions that each makes, but demonstrate the necessity of a politics of manoeuvre in which subjects—as individuals and part of collective groups—oscillate between direct confrontation and governmental navigation.

Controlling academics: Power and resistance in the archipelago of post-COVID-19 audit regimes

“…It is cynicism practised alongside others and against the techniques of domination themselves, for ‘the cynic care of the self involves care for others as well’ (Casalini, 2019). It is also a means of speaking truth to power ( parrhesia ) before potential allies in a conspiratorial way potentially more efficacious than the direct and open defiance of confrontation in ‘resistance’ (Prasse-Freeman, 2020; see Foucault, 2001).…”

“…We must come to see how both audit and camp regimes are specific species of ‘midway terrain’ (Negri, 2018: 14–23). Despite the schematic in which these technologies are often ascribed to one rationality of power or another, they ‘typically constitute a hybrid assemblage’ of power modalities (Prasse-Freeman, 2020: 3). What is important is how that hybridity is exploited by government ministers, university vice-chancellors, and even some academics in fairly idiomatic ways.…”

“…On the other hand, refusal signifies ‘the disavowals, rejections and manoeuvrings with and away from diffuse indirect forms of power (governmentality)’, which suggests a more efficacious means of arriving at counter-conducts (Prasse-Freeman, 2020: 3). If we accept this distinction, it then becomes an imperative in the anthropological study of audit to identify the space of manoeuvre between ‘direct confrontation’ and ‘governmental navigation’ (Prasse-Freeman, 2020: 4), as well as the ways in which that space is produced by certain technologies of domination and then counter-produced by ‘techniques of the self’. Study of the ethnographic experiences of this kind of quasi-governmental technology, which was typical in the camp, can provide invaluable anthropological insight into precisely this manoeuvring space.…”

“…The suggestion is that we must stop thinking and acting like prisoners of the factory and start thinking and acting like the zek. Though ‘each governmental regime has different contours’ (Prasse-Freeman, 2020: 4), and refusal therefore takes different forms depending on those contours, the rationality common to those regimes provides a certain stability to those contours. Historical and contemporaneous exploration of different governmental regimes will clarify what is stable across them and enable identification of the ‘porous regularities’ common to the typifying relations of camp and audit regimes (Toker, 2019: 28).…”

Tactical dissonance

“…Sovereignty, as Jessica Cattelino (2008) argues, is also interdependent , asserted, enacted, and co‐constituted through processes of governance and state making. In particular, studies of North American indigenous communities have shown how assertions of sovereignty have inevitably entailed speaking in and ratifying the same registers of the state, in what Jean Dennison (2017) calls “entangled sovereignty.” Assertions and claims to recognition are rife with contradictions, and Audra Simpson's (2014) use of “refusal” to reject the state's unjust authority to grant this very recognition highlights the incommensurability of Western notions of sovereignty with indigenous political logics (see also Coulthard 2014; McGranahan 2018; Prasse‐Freeman 2020). Sovereignty, then, is ever paradoxical, hinging on contradictions between fracture and interdependence, and enacted through forms of claim making and rejection.…”