Counter-conducts as a mode of resistance Ways of ‘not being like that’ in South Africa.DOC

Counter-conducts as a mode of resistance: Ways of ‘not being like that’ in South Africa CARL DEATH Abstract This article argues that a ‘counter-conducts approach’, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, can be used to disaggregate the concept of resistance and highlight how some resistant practices work to subvert dominant ways of being One of the features of a ‘counterconducts approach’ is an attention to the interpenetration of forms of power and resistance, governmentality and alternative modes of subjectification Such an approach can be used to interpret forms of social protest in new ways, particularly in terms of the ways in which they facilitate or hinder ethical self-reflection and militant lives Examples are provided from contemporary South Africa, specifically the Occupy Umlazi protest and a township youth movement known as ‘izikhothane’ or pexing In very different ways these protests are public assertions that ‘we are not like that’ As such they each challenge mainstream social values, yet they also have quite problematic implications for progressive politics and radical theorists Key words: resistance, Foucault, counter-conducts, governmentality, protest Introduction The social sciences have developed a wide array of ways to study power relations, for example literatures on compulsory and productive power, ideology and hegemony, sovereign power and governmentality, biopower and discipline, structural and institutional power, to name but a few.1 In contrast, discussions of protest, dissent, and resistance are far less frequently disaggregated and systematically unpacked with anything like the same level of detail, and are often confined to the final ‘what is to be done?’ chapter of monographs on global power relations The dominant perspective on resistance, termed here a ‘resistance approach’, tends to see it in terms of opposition to hegemonic structures of power, and to Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall (eds) Power in Global Governance (Cambridge; CUP, 2005); Roland Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge; CUP, 2000); Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault (Oxford; Blackwell, 1996); Doerthe Rosenow, ‘Decentring global power: The merits of a Foucauldian approach to International Relations’, Global Society, 23, (2009), 497-517 seek movements which can offer a coherent and progressive counter-hegemonic challenge to the status quo.2 In contrast, this article draws on the work of Michel Foucault to propose a ‘counter-conducts approach’ as one way to nuance and complicate our understanding of resistance, suggesting that it can draw attention to modes of protest which form in parallel to techniques of governmentality; are deeply interpenetrated with the power relations they oppose; and which facilitate or enable the production and performance of alternative subjectivities through processes of ethical self-reflection: ways of ‘not being like that’ This is illustrated through two South African examples of social phenomena (rather than ‘movements’) which can be described as protests (public performances of opposition or rejection of dominant actors, policies or norms): the Occupy Umlazi demonstration, and the youth phenomenon of pexing which has swept township malls These are very different movements (indeed the second is difficult to even describe as a social movement) and both are problematic subjects of resistance from the perspective of radical political traditions By ‘problematic’, I mean that both these phenomena could be easily dismissed as irrelevant or politically compromised by a ‘resistance approach’, which focuses on the degree to which specific movements challenge or overturn dominant power relations As well as illustrating a number of the broader criticisms of the global Occupy protests, Occupy Umlazi arose out a desire to prevent violence and physical confrontation, and ended with (at least to a certain extent) the reincorporation of contentious politics within formal structures of community and state politics The practice of pexing – as we will see below – is even harder to locate within Brian Doherty and Timothy Doyle, ‘Beyond Borders: Transnational Politics, Social Movements and Modern Environmentalisms’, Environmental Politics, 15, (2006), pp 697-712; Stephen Gill, ‘Toward a postmodern prince? The battle in Seattle as a moment in the new politics of globalisation’, Millennium, 29, (2000), pp 131-140; Bice Maiguashca, ‘Governance and Resistance in World Politics’, Review of International Studies, 29, (2003), pp 3-28; Mark Rupert, ‘Globalising Common Sense: a Marxian-Gramscian (re)vision of the politics of governance/resistance’, Review of International Studies, 29, (2003), pp 181-198 progressive, politicised struggles for a better society, and has led veterans of the antiapartheid struggle to shake their heads and ask: is this what the struggle was for? In contrast, this article seeks to show how a counter-conducts approach helps us to understand both these cases in a rather different way – as forms of conduct which subvert dominant techniques for the production of responsible subjects A counter-conducts approach is useful not just in better understanding such movements on their own terms (although I would argue this is also the case), but for comprehending wider forms of power relation in which movements are inextricably entwined In order to understand the contemporary politics of resistance it is necessary to explore the sorts of counter-conducts which reproduce, and are themselves produced by, prevailing forms of governance and governmentality As such, to neglect the study of these counter-conducts – as many governmentality scholars have by and large done to date – is to unduly diminish the broader study of governmentalities, losing much of what makes this approach so fruitful and interesting.3 The next section introduces the two South African cases The article then turns to the concept of counter-conducts in Foucault’s work and those who have developed it more recently, and highlights the different questions such an approach requires us to ask of social phenomena such as the South African examples The final part of the article returns to the two cases to show how they look quite different according to a counter-conducts approach Particular attention here is given to the ethical and constitutive forms of ‘becoming’ practiced in these See discussion in Carl Death, ‘Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian analytics of protest’, Social Movement Studies, 9, (2010), pp 235-251 For work which does foreground resistant practices see Andrew Barry, Political Machines (London; The Athlone Press, 2001); Louisa Cadman, ‘How (not) to be governed: Foucault, critique and the political’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28, (2010), pp 539-556; Arnold I Davidson, ‘In praise of counter-conduct’, History of the Human Sciences, 24, (2011), pp 25-41; Louiza Odysseos, ‘Governing Dissent in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve: “Development”, Governmentality, and Subjectification amongst Botswana’s Bushmen’, Globalizations, 8, (2011), pp 439-455; William Walters, Governmentality: Critical Encounters (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), as well as other articles in this special issue cases, and the manner in which they encapsulate ways of ‘not being like that’ in contemporary South African politics Occupy Umlazi and Pexing Soweto Starting with the Occupy movement immediately locates the discussion in a relatively familiar context for social movement theorists and activists From 2011 movements like Occupy, the Indignados and the Arab Spring politicised public spaces – parks, streets, schools, communities, universities, etc – across many countries in protest against austerity, inequality, corruption, and the poverty of democratic institutions and practice In Spain Los Indignados also took politics out of the formal democratic institutions and into the streets and squares Activists here developed the practice of escraches, where protestors arrived in support at the houses of tenants or mortgage-holders about to be evicted for falling behind in their payments, and then took their protests to the houses of those politicians and judges who supported the evictions.5 Such protests were criticised by the Spanish government, who argued ‘that homes are homes, and homes are private If you want to make a political statement, you should so through the political system, not in front of people’s private homes’.6 In contrast to global Occupy protests, in South Africa very high levels of so-called ‘service delivery’ protests have rocked townships since the early 2000s, coalescing around issues like water, sanitation, electricity, housing, crime, corruption and political accountability Whilst Dan Bulley, ‘Occupy Differently: Space, Community and Urban Counter-Conduct’, Global Society, this special issue; Sam Halvorsen, ‘Taking Space: Moments of Rupture and Everyday Life in Occupy London’, Antipode, 47, (2015), pp 401-417; Chris Rossdale and Maurice Stierl, ‘Everything is Dangerous: Conduct and Counter-Conduct in the Occupy Movement’, Global Society, this special issue; Maurice Stierl, ‘“No One Is Illegal!” Resistance and the Politics of Discomfort’, Globalizations, 9, (2012), pp 425-438 See http://artisticactivism.org/2013/04/escrache-in-spain/ (accessed 27 August 2013) Marina Prentoulis and Lasse Thomassen, ‘The legacy of the indignados’, openDemocracy, 13 August 2013 Available at http://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/marina-prentoulis-lasse-thomassen/legacy-ofindignados (27 August 2013) Richard Ballard, Adam Habib, Imraan Valodia and Elke Zuern ‘Globalization, Marginalization, and Contemporary Social Movements in South Africa’, African Affairs, 104, 417, (2005), pp 615-634; Hannah J Dawson, ‘Patronage From Below: Political Unrest in an Informal Settlement in South Africa’, African Affairs, 113, 453 (2014), pp 518-539; Ashwin Desai, We Are The Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (New York; Monthly Review Press, 2002) the term ‘service delivery’ protest marginalises their political and democratic significance, it has been difficult to link these protests together in order to create a broader counterhegemonic movement in South Africa.8 However, in June 2012 a group of protesting shackdwellers – arising from amongst Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Unemployed People’s Movement – decided to occupy a councillor’s office in Durban and grounds in protest at poor living conditions, police violence, and unresponsive elected representatives To this degree it was typical of the wider protests However, the Umlazi Occupy movement was rather different due to a number of factors First was the invocation of the global ‘occupy!’ language and slogans (such as a critique of ‘the 99%’) and an explicit identification with this transnational movement (including a public screening of the documentary Occupy Wall Street).10 Second was the duration, in contrast to the more usual ‘flash-in-the-pan’ protests The occupation lasted a month and inhabited ‘a large tent on loan from a local church and comprised up to 3,000 occupiers at a time’.11 Third was the fact that the initial decision to occupy was actually in order to forestall conflict escalation and prevent the councillor’s office being destroyed by a group of angry protestors intent on physical violence The occupy strategy was thus intended to draw in more radical protestors and convince them of the value of non-violent action The ‘Occupy Umlazi’ protestors were well-connected to church and community groups, and the occupation actually ended ‘following the election of a new ward committee – which included a 60 per cent representation of occupiers who were part of the Crisis Committee – and a disciplining of the ward councillor’.12 Peter Alexander, ‘Rebellion of the Poor: South Africa’s Service Delivery Protests – A Preliminary Analysis’, Review of African Political Economy, 37, 123 (2010), pp 25-40 DLF, Press Statement: DLF calls for solidarity with the occupation of the Ethekwini municipal office in Umlazi, 20 July 2012 Available at http://abahlali.org/node/8972/ (accessed 20 May 2015) 10 Photos, videos and documents from the occupation are available at www.abahlali.org 11 Shauna Mottiar, ‘From “Popcorn” to “Occupy”: Protest in Durban, South Africa’, Development and Change, 44, (2013), p 612 See also China Ngubane, ‘Occupying Umlazi: Hesitant Steps Towards Political Ideology in a Durban Township’, Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies, 41, (2014), pp 355-370 12 Mottiar, op cit, p 615 This example has many familiar features of twenty-first century social movement activism, and exhibits some of the characteristics which have puzzled or disappointed many radical activists and theorists The Occupy movement is easy to write-off as fatally contradicted in its use of the system whilst protesting the system; more interested in words and images than action; and rooted in middle class and academic groups rather than workers or the poor 13 The right-wing press have repeatedly drawn attention to the ‘infuriating’ way in which anticapitalist protestors buy coffees or sandwiches, and UK Home Secretary Teresa May famously said of the London encampment at St Paul’s in 2011: ‘These are anti-capitalist protesters but we have seen photos of them drinking their Starbucks coffee and using their Mac computers’.14 Facile as this critique is, it is symptomatic of elements which have made many critical theorists uncomfortable about the radical and progressive potential of Occupy 15 Although Occupy Umlazi has very clear differences to other manifestations of Occupy, for example in terms of its relationship to local communities and the marginalised poor, it was also a primarily symbolic and declaratory occupation, rather than a strike, blockade or attack on property, and it ended with (at least to a certain extent) the reincorporation of contentious politics within formal political structures The next case, however, is even more uncomfortable The latest ‘youth craze’ to sweep South African townships, known variously as ‘pexing’ or izikhothane, has been widely criticised from all positions on the political spectrum It involves huge crowds of 15-18 year olds (and sometimes much younger) gathering for staged ‘contests’ outside shopping malls in Soweto and Witbank where gangs compete to show off their expensive clothes, food, jewellery, mobile phones, and drink.16 There is nothing particularly new about this (and South African 13 Bulley, op cit; Halvorsen, op cit BBC, ‘Theresa May says St Paul’s protesters should leave’, November 2011 Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15588987 (accessed 27 August 2013) 15 Death, ‘Counter-conducts’, op cit; Halvorsen, op cit; Stierl, op cit; Graham St John, ‘Protestival: Global Days of Action and Carnalivalized Politics in the Present’, Social Movement Studies, 7, (2008), pp 167-190 16 Patience Bambalele, ‘Izikhothane tear up R100 notes’, The Sowetan (SA), 15 November 2012; City Press, ‘Brash bling and ghetto fabulous’, City Press (SA), October 2012; Simon Howell and Louise Vincent, 14 township culture has often had an element of the flamboyant about it), 17 but what has grabbed national attention is the way in which these youth are demonstrating their wealth by destroying the items as they show them off Shoes are burnt, clothing torn, drinks poured on the ground, phones smashed, even money is torn apart Conspicuous consumption is now accompanied by conspicuous destruction.18 The object of the competition is not denial or renunciation of personal possessions or luxury goods, but rather a demonstration of such personal wealth to the degree that the cost is no object Yet it also displays a scrupulous attention to the price of goods, with extensively ritualised and formalised rules ‘Scores’ and values are written down and compared, and there is an intimate awareness of which brands are currently fashionable and valuable For one observer, gangs are engaging ‘in conspicuous consumption as a form of war with the branded products used as the artillery’.19 Style and stylishness are key, and intriguingly there are at least echoes here (exaggeration to the point of parody) of older traditions of the African flaneur, dandies, and township extroverts 20 A 2014 UK Guinness advert featured Congolese sapeurs who transform themselves from working men into superbly dressed icons, whilst the narrator intones that ‘in life, you cannot always choose what you do, but you can always choose who you are’.21 ‘“Licking the Snake” – the i’khothane and Contemporary Township Youth Identities in South Africa’, South African Review of Sociology, 45, (2014), pp 60-77; Megan Jones, ‘Conspicuous Destruction, Aspiration and Motion in the South African Township’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 14, (2013), pp 209-224 17 Sarah Nuttall, ‘Stylising the Self: The Y Generation in Rosebank, Johannesburg’, Public Culture, 16, (2004), pp 430-452 18 Jones, op cit 19 Penelope Mkhwanazi, Conspicuous Consumption and Black Youth in Emerging Markets, unpublished MBA dissertation (Pretoria: University of Pretoria, 2011), p 20 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley; University of California Press, 2001); Nuttall, op cit; Adebayo Williams, ‘The Postcolonial Flaneur and Other Fellow-Travellers: Conceits for a Narrative of Redemption’, Third World Quarterly, 18, (1997), pp 821-841 21 BBC, ‘Congo sapeurs: Is the Guinness ad true to life?’ 18 January 2014 Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-25783245 (accessed March 2014) See also Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar, Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa (London; Hurst, 2004), p 135 The South African pexers take this flamboyance to an extreme, and the profligate destruction of high value goods has met with widespread condemnation There is also, unsurprisingly, a strong (at least potential) link with crime as participants whatever they can to attain the most desirable items, and there was a widely reported suicide of a 14 year-old boy apparently because his father could not afford the clothes he wanted But the participants themselves, interviewed by a South African researcher, reveal that they are both self-aware and capable of self-reflection on the nature and function of their actions One reported that ‘it’s showing off to tell others that you can afford this and tear the clothes because you will get better ones and you can afford You want to be seen this thing means nothing to you, you will get another one’.22 Another revealed the degree of explicit calculation of monetary value involved, stating that ‘we also used to pex with credit cards but over time that did not get popular because we are not too sure how much money is in there’ 23 Most recognised the wasteful and dangerous elements of the activity, and predicted they would quickly grow out of it One observed that ‘this thing is wasteful people are hungry out there who need food and I waste food; who need clothes and I just tear them up’.24 In this parodying of wider cultural practices of ostentatious demonstration and ‘peacocking’, however, it is possible to see a (perhaps nascent, frequently un-reflective) critical attitude toward consumption and wealth One participant noted pointedly ‘I like to pex with money because it is like you are wasting the ultimate thing’, and another observed that ‘even adults pex, they will be in their cars and brag about tyres, and tell each other that I drink Hennessey They might not burn them and waste but they it too’ 25 The topic of corruption and elite 22 Mkhwanazi, op cit, p 59 Mkhwanazi, op cit, p 64 24 Mkhwanazi, op cit, p 89 25 Mkhwanazi, op cit, pp 58 and 94 23 consumption has dominated South African public discourse, 26 and Achille Mbembe argues that parodying the official ‘tendency towards excess’ in popular forms of politics is a pervasive phenomenon in postcolonial Africa.27 By pushing it to an extreme, the pexers help make evident the emptiness or superfluity behind modern hyper-consumer culture 28 And the reaction of mainstream society to these bonfires of designer labels reveals a pervasive unease with wastefulness and ostentatious wealth within a society which also has deep-rooted strains of asceticism.29 This ‘movement’ is not a conventional social movement, and nor is it directly political It has been widely condemned from all sides of the political spectrum, and even some of its erstwhile ‘heroes’ – such as businessmen and ex-convict Kenny Kunene (AKA the sushi king: known for his ostentatious wealthy lifestyle including eating sushi off the naked bodies of female dancers) – have distanced themselves from it As such it has much in common with many other youth movements and the ‘moral panics’ they produce The battles between Mods and Rockers in the UK in the 1960s were ‘visible reminders of what we should not be’ 30 Cohen’s famous conclusion was that ‘our society as presently structured will continue to generate problems for some of its members – like working class adolescents – and then condemn whatever solution these groups find’.31 Both these South African cases – the Occupy Umlazi and the pexers – present significant challenges to those theorists and activists seeking to identify counter-hegemonic progressive 26 Deborah Posel, ‘Races to Consume: Revisiting South Africa’s History of Race, Consumption and the Struggle for Freedom’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33, (2010), pp 157-175 27 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, op cit, p 102 28 Achille Mbembe, ‘Aesthetics of Superfluity’, Public Culture, 16, (2004), pp 373-405 29 Carl Death, ‘Environmental Movements, Climate Change, and Consumption in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40, (2014), pp 1215-1234 30 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London; MacGibbon and Key, 1972), p 10 31 Cohen, op cit, p 204 resistance movements From a ‘resistance approach’, in which it is demanded we identify clearly whose side we are on, the response would probably be to write such movements off as at best an insignificant distraction, and at worst as counter-revolutionary forces 32 This is clear in the case of the pexers, but even discussion of protests by grassroots communities and the urban poor in South Africa has tended to constantly return to the failure of such groups to form a broader political movement and pose a coherent challenge to dominant power relations.33 Foucault, Social Movements, Counter-Conducts An alternative line of investigation into these movements might be termed a ‘counterconducts approach’, which draws its inspiration from the work of Michel Foucault Foucault has of course had a profound influence on the study of power, resistance and contentious politics;34 yet despite this, the direct influence of Foucault’s work on contemporary social movement studies is more limited than one might expect For example, a number of wellregarded readers and textbooks on social movements contain barely any mention of Foucault.35 This, I suggest, stems from the dominance of two intellectual traditions within social movement theory, and the ways in which Foucault’s approach is politically and methodologically troubling for both these traditions (and is itself an interesting aspect of the politics of modes of knowledge production, veridiction, and academic ‘care of the self’) First, US approaches to the study of social movements have been dominated by rationalist, positivist and behaviouralist approaches to social science.36 Indeed, modern social movement 32 Doherty and Doyle, op cit; Gill, op cit; Maiguashca, op cit; Rupert, op cit Alexander, op cit 34 Louise Amoore (ed.) The Global Resistance Reader (London: Routledge, 2005); Bleiker op cit; Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York; Columbia University Press, 2004); James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) 35 Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction, Second Edition (Oxford; Blackwell, 2006); Vincenzo Ruggiero and Nicola Montagna (eds) Social Movements: A Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008); Doug McAdam, John D McCarthy, and Mayer N Zald (eds) Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (Cambridge: CUP, 1996); David A Snow, Sarah A Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds) The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Oxford; Blackwell, 2007) 36 McAdam et al, op cit; Snow et al, op cit 33 10 relationship between power and freedom, government and resistance And it is the concept of counter-conducts which provides one of the most suitable analytical approaches for this task Briefly, the notion of counter-conducts was elaborated most fully in the Security, Territory, Population lecture course in 1977-78,46 and in a lecture Foucault gave in May 1978 entitled ‘What is critique?’ In this lecture he described counter-conducts as ‘the will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’.47 Counter-conducts are used here to describe resistance to processes of governmentality, as distinct from political revolts against sovereignty or material revolts against economic exploitation In the context of discussing the early Christian pastorate, Foucault observes that ‘if the objective of the pastorate is men’s conduct, I think equally specific movements of resistance and insubordination appeared in correlation with this that could be called specific revolts of conduct’ 48 He then explores forms of resistance to the Christian Church in the Middle Ages, showing how movements of asceticism, mysticism, the return to Scripture, the adoption of eschatological doctrines, and the formation of closed holy communities mobilised ‘border-elements’ which had been marginalised by the early Church.49 Moreover, these border elements were later partially reincorporated within the official history of the Christian Church When ‘threatened by all these movements of counter-conduct, the Church tries to take them up and adapt them for its own ends’, leading of course to the Reformation and counter-Reformation 50 He also discusses military desertion, Freemasonry, and medical dissenters as political rather than religious forms of counter-conduct, and in other places he reflected upon gay counter-culture, masturbation, and suicide as practices of counter-conduct 51 For Foucault such practices 46 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977 – 1978, ed M Senellart, tr G Burchell (Basingstoke; Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 47 Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed S Lotringer; tr L Hochroth and C Porter (Los Angeles; Semiotext(e), 2007), p 75 48 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op cit, p 194 49 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op cit, pp 204-15 50 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op cit, p 215 51 Davidson, op cit 13 represent the appeal ‘to be led differently, by other men, and towards other objectives than those proposed by the apparent and official and visible governmentality of society’ 52 Many of these examples reveal why radical theorists often find Foucault’s work on resistance uncomfortable and politically troubling This is important: Foucault’s conception of care of the self (le souci de soi) is not an easy, reassuring self-help, but a process of doubt, existential angst, and a politics of militancy, difficulty and discomfort.53 The terminology used to describe these social phenomena is dwelt on by Foucault, and he eventually rejects terming them ‘revolts’ as this term seems too precise and too strong He also considers and rejects terms like ‘disobedience’, ‘insubordination’, and ‘dissidence’ Dissidence is the closest, he feels, but in the context of when he was writing it was too closely associated with opposition to the USSR from writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and was therefore too limiting He settles on the term ‘counter-conduct’; namely, a ‘struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others’.54 He later clarified that I not mean by that that governmentalization would be opposed by a kind of face-off by the opposite affirmation, ‘we not want to be governed and we not want to be governed at all’ I mean that, in this great preoccupation about the way to govern and the search for the ways to govern, we identify a perpetual question which would be: ‘how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them’.55 52 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op cit, pp 198-200 Louise Amoore, ‘Foucault Against the Grain’, International Political Sociology, 2, (2008), pp 275; Andrew Neal, ‘Rethinking Foucault in International Relations: Promiscuity and unfaithfulness’, Global Society, 23, 4, (2009), pp 539-543; Stierl, op cit 54 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op cit, p 201 55 Foucault, The Politics of Truth, op cit, p 44 53 14 This is ‘the art of not being governed quite so much’, or ‘the will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’.56 It is not a complete or total rejection of government Rather than looking ‘beyond government’ (as Nikolas Rose puts it), 57 a counter-conducts approach looks within government to see how forms of resistance rely upon, and are even implicated within, the strategies, techniques and power relationships they oppose As Foucault suggests, ‘the history of the governmental ratio, and the history of the counterconducts opposed to it, are inseparable from each other’.58 What I term here a ‘counter-conducts approach’ differs in some crucial ways, however, from how Foucault deployed the term in these lectures It seems as though Foucault intended to draw attention to specific acts which could be identified as counter-conducts, in contrast to other acts which could be identified as rebellions, revolts, etc I propose a more modest claim: that approaching certain identifiable acts (such as occupations or pexing) through a counterconducts approach, in contrast to a resistance approach, leads us to ask different questions Furthermore, it may lead us to reach different political conclusions about these phenomena What questions does a counter-conducts approach suggest, therefore? In previous work I stressed the importance of focussing upon ‘practices and mentalities’ rather than an actorcentric or organisational/movement-based approach.59 I set out the parameters of an analytics of protest, which would address the fields of visibility created, the forms of knowledge invoked, the technologies mobilised, and the subjectivities produced 60 This is crucial, and it is significant that both the South African cases addressed earlier were described in terms of verbs – occupation and pexing – rather than movements or organisations The second feature stressed in much work on counter-conducts is the destabilisation of the power/resistance 56 Foucault, The Politics of Truth, op cit, p 45 and 75 Rose, Powers of Freedom, op cit, p 281 58 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op cit, p 357 59 Death, ‘Counter-conducts’, op cit 60 Drawing upon Dean, op cit 57 15 binary.61 Even Hardt and Negri, who otherwise have radically critiqued existing notions of power and resistance with their polycentric and diffuse concepts of empire and multitude, still reify this power versus resistance binary For example, they claim that ‘the magic of Seattle was to show that these many grievances were not just a random, haphazard collection, a cacophony of different voices, but a chorus that spoke in common against the global system’.62 An important function of a counter-conducts approach is to destabilise this sense of common opposition As Foucault made clear, we need to escape the dilemma of being either for or against One can, after all, be face to face, and upright [debout et en face] Working with a government doesn’t imply either a subjection or a blanket acceptance One can work with and be intransigent at the same time I would even say that the two things go together.63 To me it seems clear that phenomena like Occupy, South African community protests and pexing all significantly complicate a binary view of politics as either radical or reformist, emancipatory or conservative However, in the rest of this article I want to stress a third implication or set of questions associated with a counter-conducts approach, which concern the ethical opportunities particular practices facilitate and the manner in which forms of resistance can become crucial sites for the collective performance, critique and reflection upon subjectivities This is a perspective on protest as a work of care of the self, and it can be illustrated through returning to the South African examples 61 Maiguashca, op cit Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York; Penguin, 2004), p 288 Emphasis added 63 Michel Foucault, ‘So is it important to think?’ in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954 – 1984, Vol 3, ed J D Faubion, tr R Hurley (New York; The New Press, 2000), pp 455-6 62 16 Ethics, Politics, Counter-Conducts Ethical issues are – or at least should be – at the very heart of a concern with governmentality and counter-conduct As Arnold Davidson suggests, ‘the notion of counter-conduct adds an explicitly ethical component to the notion of resistance’.64 Much of Foucault’s later work was of course explicitly concerned with questions of ethics, and his ethical stance is complex, subtle and – in the best spirit of his work – unsettling and problematic 65 He is a nonfoundational thinker, in that he refuses to build upon firm foundations, derived from a belief in human nature, a transcendental being, universal values, the veil of ignorance, or anything else Foucault’s ethics therefore stand on shaky ground, and are ultimately contingent The closest he comes to a more programmatic stance is the passage in ‘On the Ethics of Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom’, where he states a preference for forms of power relation which are strategic and reversible, rather than states of domination in which power relations have become sedimented.66 For Hindess, ‘Foucault has a marked preference for relationships of power that are reversible’.67 Whilst productive and influential, we should resist developing this into a foundation for a universal ethical code, however, from which we can simply ‘read off’ what to think in any context 68 Rather, for Foucault, ethics is more about ‘care of the self’ (as it was for the Greek thinkers he draws upon) Care of the self is inherently subjective, contextual, contingent and judgemental, and it provides a rather different way to think about the ethics of resistance 64 Davidson, op cit, p 28 Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982-1983, ed Frédérick Gros, tr Graham Burchell (Basingstoke; Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) See also Thomas Lemke, ‘Critique and Experience in Foucault’, Theory, Culture, Society, 28, (2011), pp 26-48 66 Michel Foucault, ‘On the Ethics of Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault 1954 – 1984, Volume 1, ed P Rabinow, tr R Hurley et al (New York; The New Press, 1997), p 283 67 Hindess, op cit, p 102 68 Neal, op cit, p 541 65 17 We therefore have two potential avenues to explore, or sets of questions to ask, when considering the normative dimension of a counter-conducts approach The first is whether forms of counter-conduct produce power relations which are strategic and reversible, rather than sedimented states of domination The second is the ways in which counter-conducts can lead to practices of care for the self I will briefly consider the former, before focussing on the latter, with reference to the two South African cases discussed above as illustrations Unsettling power relations Both the South African cases appear to unsettle and destabilise dominant power relations, rather than directly reinforce or concretise them The Occupy Umlazi protest challenged both established democratic structures (such as the elected councillors) and the routines and traditions of popular protest in post-apartheid South Africa, which have often become violent, aggressive, short-lived, and anti-ideological One way to read the pexers is as a caricature of elite wealth and consumption, and an inversion of stereotypes of the poor and downtrodden masses Certainly the media and political reaction to the phenomenon has revealed the degree to which it has unsettled and disturbed dominant narratives of ‘what the struggle was for’ and the nature of post-apartheid society However, even in these cases, a crucial observation about practices of protest is the way in which they tend to produce and then police particular ‘legitimate’ forms of behaviour, visibility, knowledge, and identity This can take liberal forms – establishing autonomous civil society spaces, lobbying political representatives, pressing for the upholding of constitutional rights – or it can take radical forms, seeking to reject or challenge capitalist, statist or patriarchal power relations wherever possible, condemning conformity, enforcing militancy Both these forms of ‘disciplining dissent’ from within run the risk of enacting new 18 power relations and new codes of behaviour which can themselves become sedimented and entrenched.69 Anyone who has spent time in ‘the movement’, or with the trade unions, or faced the police at a protest, or even camped with Occupy, will know how quickly some people start to police or conduct the conduct of others even with these supposedly radical spaces.70 The few studies of the pexing phenomenon describe a set of highly ritualised practices – as in many forms of youth rebellion – with strict, if opaque and complex, dress codes and rules of behaviour, and vicious (and often irreversible) forms of exclusion for those who don’t follow these rules This is not a new observation – and Jo Freeman made a similar point in her famous critique entitled ‘The tyranny of structurelessness’ 71 – but it is an important reminder which a counter-conducts approach can re-emphasise Proposing a stance of ‘continual criticism’, or constant destabilisation, is therefore the conclusion of many Foucauldian treatments of protest movements and resistance This is of course important, and an entirely sensible conclusion to draw from Foucault’s view of politics as a never-ending game of agonistic contention It is something that is easy to say, but often difficult and troubling to practice in the context of particular movements, or under prevailing political pressure for ‘solutions’ and ‘alternatives’ That it is troubling in these ways is entirely appropriate for a Foucauldian contribution 72 But such a conclusion is easily appropriated by both liberal pluralists and radical advocates of the power/resistance binary discussed earlier As such, it is worth exploring the implications of Foucault’s work on ethics as care of the self as an alternative way to say something more about the political implications of a counter-conducts approach 69 Lara Montesinos Coleman and Karen Tucker (eds) Situating Global Resistance: Between Discipline and Dissent (Abingdon; Routledge, 2012) 70 Kelvin Mason, ‘Becoming Citizen Green: Prefigurative Politics, Autonomous Geographies, and Hoping Against Hope’, Environmental Politics, 23, (2014), pp 14-158 71 Jo Freeman, The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) Available at http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm (accessed 3/11/2012) 72 Amoore, ‘Foucault Against the Grain’, op cit; Stierl, op cit 19 Counter-conducts as ‘care of the self’ In his later lecture series, The Government of Self and Others, Foucault was far more explicitly focussed on the possibility of the care of the self as an ethical and militant project, and the role of practices of truth-telling and free speech 73 He sets out the aim of this lecture series as saying something about ‘truth-telling in procedures of government and the constitution of [an] individual as subject for himself and for others’ 74 Here he introduces the Greek concept of parrēsia which means ‘free-spokenness’ and free speech, and these lectures consider various different forms of parrēsia and their relationship to ‘work on the self and others’ Foucault suggests parrēsia is simultaneously a virtue, a duty and a technique, and is found in ‘the person who spiritually directs others and helps them to constitute their relationship to self’.75 Parrēsia is not discursive, nor rhetorical, nor empirical In fact, it is not anything to with the internal quality of the truth What is significant is the telling – and that the telling exposes the teller to a risk, or danger, from the person to whom the truth is told It refers to ‘the risk that truth-telling opens up for the speaker’.76 Here we begin to have a whole new set of questions to guide the analysis of protest, resistance, and movements, and which I suggest should be fundamental to a counter-conducts approach Of course we can ask what forms of selfhood, of subjectivity, particular movements or practices of protest produce But we can also ask how movements seek to cultivate care of the self How certain forms of protest encourage or discourage collective self-examination? Which forms of protest facilitate the practice of parrēsia – a risky truthtelling that will help others work upon themselves? What new standards and practices of self- 73 Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, op cit Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, op cit, p 42 75 Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, op cit, p 43 76 Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, op cit, p 56 74 20 conduct are produced through protest, and what new ‘shepherds of the human soul’ are created? What processes or technologies of intellectualised subject formation can protests enable?77 In fact, parrēsia itself could be understood as a form of counter-conduct, an expression of ‘the will not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’ 78 It is a particular form of resistant or militant practice, involving quite a particular set of circumstances and conditions: disinterested, risky, public truth telling, that is intended to facilitate collective self-examination and the care of the self in others But there are other forms of counterconduct that also produce certain ways of being, ways of reflecting, and practices of the care of the self An example discussed by Henrietta Moore is the ‘Taksim Square Book Club’ in Turkey, in which protestors in June 2013 ‘stood silently and read books’ in the square amidst more turbulent protests against the Turkish government Moore concludes that ‘[a]t the root of political protest is the ethical imagination, the capacity and the desire to imagine and reimagine our relations to others and to ourselves’ 79 Such protests are an explicit attempt to refashion the self, through the intensity of the act of protest (and the relations with others that protest entails), in ways that run counter to that which hegemonic social norms expect, or governmentality fosters Indeed, this is at the heart of the counter-conduct as a sub-group of the broader field of resistance: ways of ‘not being like that’ They are akin to the forms of governmentality which they resist, in that they involve some degree of considered reflection or rationalisation, they presuppose certain types of freedom of action, and they involve certain regularised 77 William Walters, ‘Parrhēsia Today: Drone Strikes, Fearless Speech and the Contentious Politics of Security’, Global Society, 28, (2014), pp 277-299 78 Foucault, The Politics of Truth, op cit, p 75 79 Henrietta L Moore, ‘Protest politics and the ethical imagination’, openDemocracy, 12 August 2013 Available at http://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/henrietta-l-moore/protest-politics-and-ethical-imagination (accessed 27 August 2013) 21 visibilities, practices, knowledges and subjectivities 80 One could certainly argue that the freedom to ‘be otherwise’ is a fuller and richer conception of freedom than the freedom permitted to homo economicus within contemporary neoliberal governmentality Crucially, this is not simply the private or personal freedom of aesthetic self-creation as liberal theorists might assert, but as Sergei Prozorov describes it, a ‘confrontation with the social order that targets the very distinction between the public and the private, whereby one frees oneself from both the prescriptions of individual lifestyle and the conventions of social practice’ 81 Davidson also notes that Foucault’s conception of freedom has certain resonances with John Stuart Mill writing on ‘eccentricity of conduct’, but Foucault’s conception of freedom is not reducible to liberal individualism For Foucault counter-conduct is ‘the active intervention of individuals and constellations of individuals in the domain of the ethical and political practices and forces that shape us’.82 The Occupy Umlazi protest is of interest in this regard because of the ways in which it explicitly attempted to transform one routinized type of protest – the service delivery protest, with its toyi-toying, marches, flaming barricades and so on – into a more reflective and transformative collective protest It created a space of protracted occupation and the formation of a campsite community; used that space to show films and hold lectures, talks and discussions; and established links with other transnational groups and protestors These are all technologies of protest which facilitate processes of care of the self and others, and which a counter-conducts approach can identify and highlight These technologies of protest are neither particularly radical nor particularly unique, as they have been a mainstay of many counter-cultural communities since at least the teach-ins and communes of the 1960s, and they have been promoted most prominently within the transnational left at the World Social 80 Dean, op cit Sergei Prozorov, Foucault, Freedom and Sovereignty (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p 82 Davidson, op cit, p 32 81 22 Forums in the 2000s However, in the particular context of the South African protest tradition – with its historic emphasis on making the townships ungovernable – they represent a way of ‘not being like that’ and producing other sorts of conduct The pexers, however, are far more strikingly counter-cultural The degree of hostile commentary they have elicited confirms the degree to which they have transgressed dominant social values These include norms of hard work and thrift, accumulation, respect for elders, and a South African brand of puritanical, struggle-forged, ascetic self-sacrifice Pexing can therefore be seen as a set of performances and practices which have created very visible and prominent spaces of rebellion and inversion of mainstream social values 83 These are to some degree temporary and carnivalesque – with the widespread assumption that after the show, life returns to normal – but in the moment they are striking manifestations of the will ‘not to be like that’, and ‘not to be governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’ 84 We must also ask, however: to what degree these forms of behaviour allow or facilitate processes of introspection and reflection, or care of the self and others? This would be a fascinating agenda for further ethnographic and sociological research, but an initial conclusion would be that the pexers are largely unreflective and not see themselves as engaged in practices which are either political or which present a considered social critique That such views did emerge through research focus groups is interesting and important, but the public rituals of pexing are certainly not designed for critical self-examination and reflection One implication of this conclusion, however, is that we should not restrict our understanding of ‘care of the self’ to intellectualised forms of rational self-reflection, or the more 83 84 Nuttall, op cit Foucault, The Politics of Truth, op cit, p 75 23 conventional educational and deliberative processes of the Occupy Umlazi protests The pexers are performing alternative subjectivities in very direct, public and theatrical ways; not entirely dissimilarly from some of the forms of counter-conduct discussed by Foucault in his examples of movements of asceticism and mysticism, the adoption of eschatological doctrines, military desertion, and medical dissenters There is a form of collective reassessment and re-evaluation here, and a stance of militancy against prevailing social values and norms One interesting and thought-provoking connection between some of these social practices is their common stress on the notion of self-sacrifice Processes of self-denial, renunciation and re-creation recur in several of these ‘movements’ and represent an important alternative theme to widely prevalent social norms of accumulation, consumption, growth and development in liberal capitalist societies.85 As Karin Fierke’s fascinating recent study of self-sacrifice suggests, sacrifice is never something purely personal or individual, but rather implies ‘a relationship between the individual who is sacrificed and the community that is the beneficiary of that sacrifice’.86 Viewing phenomena such as South African pexers through a counter-conducts approach helps us to avoid easy rejections of them as reactionary, insignificant or insufficiently transformative, and to locate them in relation to other well-known social tropes and sacrificial performances – such as the religious ascetic, the North American pot-latch, or the urban flâneur – which perform alternative modes of being and alternative social and political rationalities within and alongside mainstream society 87 Furthermore, when viewing the 85 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op cit; Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, op cit; Paul Wapner, ‘Sacrifice’, in Carl Death (ed.) Critical Environmental Politics, Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp 208217 86 Karin M Fierke, Political Self-Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations (Cambridge: CUP, 2013), p 87 Mkhwanazi, op cit, p 105; Williams, op cit Holly High recounts the significance of the Native American potlatch within anthropological debates, and accounts for the emergence of the term from Chinook origin through to ‘Canadian laws that were aimed at eradicating potlatches (described as “Indian dances”) that were associated with wasteful profligacy’ In fact the pot-latch has more to with the transfer of gifts and debts between powerful elites than the ‘wasteful profligacy’ that the colonials assumed What it does share with pexing, perhaps, is the fact of being a complex social ritual which could easily be misread as straightforwardly irrational For High it was ‘it was a gift given in search not of reciprocity but recognition of punctuations in the 24 videos of township youth dancing and parading their extravagant clothes, in a flamboyant, competitive and non-violent register, there are at least potential echoes of the ‘gay culture’ and lifestyle Foucault found so fascinating an example of counter-conduct 88 In this sense, perhaps, pexing could be seen as ‘queer’: not in the sense of sexuality but rather in the persistence of an intransigent desire not to ‘fit in’ too easily 89 As Davidson concludes: ‘one of the most universal and dispiriting memories of every child’s life is the constant exclamation of adults: behave yourself Let us hope that it is an admonition that we can still learn to combat’.90 Conclusion We have arrived, therefore, at a conception of attentiveness to counter-conduct as a form of critique Highlighting counter-conducts draws attention to the physical, embodied practice and performance of critique: acts of ‘voluntary insubordination’ and having ‘the audacity to expose oneself as a subject’.91 Practices which risk being rejected by a ‘resistance approach’ for being insufficiently transformative can be re-evaluated through a counter-conducts approach as a mode of being otherwise and as forms of ethical self-creation At the very least, a counter-conducts approach suggests new and interesting questions to ask of resistant practices: what modes of selfhood and what processes of reflection on selfhood they make possible? What spaces exist here for militant and intellectualised subject formation? These questions can help disaggregate a range of nuanced ways of talking about resistance: as opposition, as revolt, as protest, as counter-conduct, as parrēsia, as being otherwise In the absence of this sort of more nuanced and disaggregated set of approaches to resistance, our assessment of contemporary power relations (especially through the prism of governmentality) can quickly become rather featureless, grey and oppressive Attention to arc of life’ See Holly High, ‘Re-reading the Potlatch in a Time of Crisis: Debt and the Distinctions that Matter’, Social Anthropology, 20, (2012), p 377 88 Davidson, op cit, p 33 89 St John, op cit, p 180 90 Davidson, op cit, p 39 91 Lemke, op cit, p 39 25 such diversity of practices is necessary to prevent a governmentality approach from becoming a supplement to neo-Gramscian studies of all-embracing hegemony Foucault remarked in 1979 that ‘politics is no more or less than that which is born with resistance to governmentality’.92 But, finally, these examples also remind us that the politics that is born with resistance to governmentality is not something easily valorised, or necessarily all that attractive to progressive political projects Counter-conducts include social practices which are much darker, more troubling and unsettling than the ‘usual suspects’ of idealistic global justice campaigners or the new princes of proletarian struggle Acknowledgements This article draws on previously published work as well as more recent fieldwork It has benefited from the opportunity to discuss it in different forms at the ‘Living in Transition’ workshop in Aalborg and the ‘Environmental politics and change in Southern Africa’ workshop at King’s College London, both in June 2013; the ‘Counter-conduct in Global Politics’ workshop, Brighton, University of Sussex, 10-12 September 2013, where a version of this paper was first delivered; the ISA Annual Conference in Toronto, 26-29 April 2014; and a roundtable on ‘Beyond Anti-Austerity? The Possibilities and Limits of Movements Resisting Neoliberalism’ at the University of Manchester, December 2014 The constructive comments of two anonymous reviewers are also acknowledged About the author Carl Death is a Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at the University of Manchester His books include Governing Sustainable Development: Partnerships, Protests and Power (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010); Critical Perspectives on African Politics: Liberal 92 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op cit, p 390 26 interventions, state-building and civil society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014) edited with Clive Gabay; Critical Environmental Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014); and The Green State in Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) 27 ... Encounters (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), as well as other articles in this special issue cases, and the manner in which they encapsulate ways of ‘not being like that’ in contemporary South African politics... ‘Canadian laws that were aimed at eradicating potlatches (described as “Indian dances”) that were associated with wasteful profligacy’ In fact the pot-latch has more to with the transfer of gifts... propose a more modest claim: that approaching certain identifiable acts (such as occupations or pexing) through a counterconducts approach, in contrast to a resistance approach, leads us to ask different