The concept of resistance, meaning literally to stand against, entered the social sciences primarily from politics and culture. While there is a clinical psychoanalytic definition of the term, and a technical one used by the physical sciences, it is really resistance in a critical politico-cultural sense that has had the greatest impact in the field.
Resistance in a political context is often thought of as the property of the left. The famed French (and often communist-led) Resistance against the Nazi occupation immediately comes to mind. But the concept was first introduced into the modern political lexicon from the right, by Edmund Burke, who argued for the necessity of resisting revolutionary "progress" in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke was incensed at the French overthrow of birthright authority and the leveling of classes (he was particularly horrified by the thought of the hairdresser who thinks himself the equal of his betters). These, and other such revolutionary abuses, fly in the face of time-tested tradition and threaten to upset the natural order of things. As such, it is the "best wisdom and the first duty" of every Englishman to stand against such radical change, with "jealous, ever-waking vigilance" (p. 54).
The conservative call for a resistance against change was taken up by Burke’s countryman Matthew Arnold. By the mid-nineteenth century the republican ideals of the French revolution had the lead over Burke’s beloved tradition, and nature, after Darwin, was harnessed to progress. A new principle of resistance was needed—and for Arnold, it was culture. As "the best that has ever been thought and said" (as he defines it in Culture and Anarchy, 1869), culture offered a means with which to rise above the politics, commerce, and industry of the day and supply a universal standard upon which to base authority and order.
Karl Marx, exiled in England when Arnold was writing, also thought resistance a conservative ideal. In their 1848 Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels paint a heady portrait of dynamic change: traditions overthrown, nature transformed, nations dissolved, people uprooted; a world where "all that is solid melts into air" (p. 38). For Marx, resistance is not the answer—it’s the problem. It is capitalism’s bourgeois caretakers who are resisting the system’s own logic. Capitalism has socialized the means of production, yet ownership is kept in the hands of the few. The revolutionary solution is to tear asunder this final resistance and herald in the new world.
Resistance moved leftward with the anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century. Mohandas K. Gandhi, waging a battle against British rule in India, advocated a political philosophy of satyagraha. In Sanskrit this word means "insistence on the truth," but Gandhi also used it to denote "civil resistance." This conflation of meanings makes a certain sense, as for Gandhi it was the untruths of colonial rule—that power must rest upon violence, that English culture comprised the "best that has ever been thought and said"—that needed to be resisted more fiercely than even the British themselves. To be free of European bodies on Indian soil was one thing; to be free of their ideas, their prejudices, and their technology was another. Drawing upon both Burke and Arnold, but turning these ideas on their head, Gandhi advised the practice of civil disobedience, not merely in the streets, but through a political and spiritual return to traditional Indian culture and practices like khaddar, the hand-looming of cloth.
Radical resistance, defined in part as the rejection of foreign cultures and the celebration of indigenous traditions, spread across the globe as European colonies in Africa and Asia were overturned by struggles of national liberation. Gandhi’s strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience was not adopted by all. The Caribbean psychiatrist-cum-rebel Frantz Fanon made the case for bloody resistance in his influential The Wretched of the Earth (1963). Indeed, for Fanon it is the very violence of the resistance that will clear the way to a new society. But for all their differences, Gandhi and Fanon agreed on one thing: that the enemy that one had to resist the most virulently was the enemy one had internalized—what the Tunisian writer and activist Albert Memmi referred to in his 1957 book The Colonizer and the Colonized as "the colonizer within."
The concept of resistance returned to the West via concerns with identity and identity-construction. In the early 1960s the American sociologist Erving Goffman argued that the job of total institutions like prisons, hospitals, and armies is to create—or recreate—their charge’s identity in order to integrate them into the system. However, Goffman observes, the patients in the mental institution he studied actually formed their identities by eliding institutional demands and creating "underlives" within the institution. In brief, it is in resisting the definitions pressed upon them that inmates of institutions develop their own sense of identity: "It is against something that the self can emerge" (p. 320). Goffman’s book, Asylums (1961), was not merely a critique of total institutions, but a critical assessment of the postwar "Free World" of big business and the welfare state, mass media, and compulsory education—a mostly benign, but nonetheless totalizing system.
It was in resistance to this benign totality—the ticky-tacky little boxes where everyone comes out all the same, as Pete Seeger sang in 1962—that a youth counterculture emerged in the 1960s, as young people created "under-lives" by defining themselves against The System. Some of this resistance was political—opposition to the American war in Vietnam, for instance—but it was also a stylistic confrontation: new styles of clothes, forms of music, and types of intoxicants. In other words, it was cultural resistance.
The idea, and ideal, of cultural resistance, while first championed by Matthew Arnold, takes its radical articulation from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci held that hegemony is both a political and cultural process and thus part of the revolutionary project is to create a counterhegemonic culture. But if this culture is to have real power, and radical integrity, it cannot—contra Arnold—be imposed from above; it must come out of the experiences and consciousness of "the people." Thus, the job of the revolutionary is to discover the progressive potentialities that reside within popular consciousness and from this material fashion a culture of resistance.
It was this implicit politico-cultural mission that guided the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the 1970s. The CCCS is best known for its study of subcultures, and it was within mainly working class subcultures—punks, mods, skinheads, and Rastafarians—that researchers found an inchoate culture of resistance. For Stuart Hall and his CCCS colleagues, however, cultural resistance was politically ambiguous. Subcultures opened up spaces where dominant ideology was contested and counter-hegemonic culture was created; at the same time, these contestations and symbolic victories often remained purely cultural, leaving the political and economic systems untouched. Cultural resistance, unless translated into political action, becomes what Hall and others referred to as "imaginary" solutions to real-world problems (Hall 1976).
This raises a nagging question that dogs the whole project of politico-cultural resistance-. Is this resistance really resistance at all? The efficacy of cultural resistance has been questioned since at least 1934, when Malcolm Cowley, reminiscing about his Greenwich Village life in Exile’s Return, pointed out that while bohemians may have flouted Victorian values of thrift and savings, their libertinism and emphasis on style and innovation mesh quite nicely with the needs of consumer capitalism. As the Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno snidely remarked about the jazz fan of the era, "he pictures himself as the individualist who whistles at the world. But what he whistles is its melody" (Adorno 1938, p. 298). Resistance as a political strategy also has its critics. Resistance only exists in relation to the dominant power—"bonds of rejection" is what Richard Sennett calls this relationship in his discussion of Authority (1985)— and without that dominant power, resistance has no coherence or purpose. What, then, is the point of resistance if it rests on the maintenance of the very thing being resisted?
Michel Foucault, like his contemporary Erving Goffman, studied total institutions—prisons, asylums, and schools—but the French intellectual was interested in institutions of the mind as well. disciplinary boundaries and classification systems. The failures of radical political resistance in 1968 confirmed what Foucault had already known: that power was not something "out there"—easy to identify and overthrow. Instead, it was everywhere, continuous, anonymous, intimate, and even pleasurable: "the disciplinary grid of society" (p. 111), as he names it in Power/Knowledge (1980). For most critics, the individual subject/self is the hero of resistance against totalizing control; Foucault countered that the subject itself was problematic. The Enlightenment’s focus on the subject allowed for new ideals of personal freedom, but it also opened up new sites of oppression: the individual’s mind, body, and spirit. Because power is impressed upon and internalized in the subject, it raises a vexing problem: Who is it that resists and what exactly are they resisting? Can one resist the very subject doing the resisting? Resistance remains a stated goal for Foucault, but one that must be reconceptualized. The ideal of developing the pure subject in opposition to the corrupting object of society must be rejected. "Maybe the target nowadays," he suggests in "The Subject and Power" (1984), "is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are" (p. 208).
This idea of resistance is played out to its—perhaps illogical—conclusion by the playful postmodernist Jean Baudrillard. In his 1985 essay "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media," Baudrillard argues that strategies of resistance always change to reflect strategies of control. Against a system that excludes or represses the individual, the natural demand is one of inclusion: to become a subject. Today, however, people are bombarded with appeals for their participation—and yet they still feel that their choice or vote matters little. Against a system that justifies and sustains its existence by the political consent (or consumer purchases) of those it governs, the masses have devised a new strategy of resistance: apathy, "a massive desisting from will" (p. 109). A resistance to resistance.
Another path taken has been to move beyond resistance—to reimagine identities and politics not tied to the negation of the other. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri sketch a bleak portrait of an all-pervasive, omnipotent system of control: Empire (2000). They acknowledge that within such a system, political and cultural resistance is usually expressed in a generalized "being-against"—a negative resistance. Yet they also see the chance for something different. They argue, like Marxists before them, that the system itself is generating the very tools and social conditions that make transcendence possible. The system of Empire relies upon new communication flows, new forms of organization, and new subjectivities—all of which might give rise to radical identities, ideals, and collective actions not mired in the negation of being-against, thereby offering the subjectivity necessary for proactive social change, that is: a "being-for." The boldest, and perhaps most outrageous, proposal to move beyond resistance comes from the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek who, drawing upon ideas of Jacques Lacan in The Ticklish Subject (1999), proposes something he calls "the Act"—a radical act that jumps outside the coordinates of the dominant system, including any opposition tied to these coordinates. This act transcends resistance and its attendant disobedient obedience—but one might also legitimately ask: Where does an act like this lead?
