Discourse of Resistance

The discourse of resistance is a way of pointing to a phenomenon at play when a number of words and concepts – “political,” “revolting,” “resisting,” “change,” “defiant,” “radical,” “rebel,” among others – are invoked as arbiters of value for cultural production. Paying attention to a discourse of resistance in representation of cultural production is different from analyzing the political strategies of agents themselves. The discursive exchange and representation I am talking about in this discourse of resistance is not the same as a history of ideas and debates about how to challenge power. My ultimate concern is how a neoliberal discourse of resistance – which reappears with only slight variations in media coverage, art world, and the academy – very effectively distances the subjects and contexts in which it is found from radical theorizations and experimentations of how to confront power.

Identifying how acts of resistance are put into discourse is productive in that it moves the discussion past a deliberation of the truth or falsehood. I am largely not concerned with the question whether or not a artist’s work resists.[2] In identifying a discourse of resistance that clings especially to some artists and musicians in the Arab world and elsewhere across the so-called Global South, I am less concerned with whether or not the artists are actually producing political strategies than I am with the production of power and knowledge that accompanies the discourse about them and their work. The question at the moment is not the political or social efficacy of an artist's work; it is how representative frameworks limit how we understand that efficacy. 

I am attempting here to define the “regime of power-knowledge-pleasure” that structures the political horizons within which politics in Arab cultural production seem to be confined.[1] Understanding how a particular discourse of resistance works opens up studies of politics in cultural production by insisting on exploring the relationship of this discursivity to power. By this I mean paying attention to what discussing resistance, representing it, celebrating it, does.

Next week, we'll build on critiques of resistance from across the humanities to pin down the specific regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that I call neoliberal orientalism.

Notes.

[1] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).

[2] As Foucault recommends, “the essential aim will not be to determine whether these discursive productions… lead one to formulate the truth… or on the contrary falsehoods designed to conceal the truth.” Ibid., 11, emphasis added.