Constructive Resistance
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Constructive Resistance Lilja_9781538146484.indb 1 12/19/2020 4:22:19 PM OPEN ACCESS The author is grateful to the Swedish Research Council (VR), which has provided funds for this study. This book publishes results from three different VR projects: (1) Reconciliatory Heritage: Reconstructing Heritage in a Time of Violent Fragmentations (2016-03212); (2) The Futures of Genders and Sexualities. Cultural Products, Transnational Spaces and Emerging Communities (2014-47034); and (3) A Study of Civic Resistance and Its Impact on Democracy (2017-00881).’ Lilja_9781538146484.indb 2 12/19/2020 4:22:19 PM Constructive Resistance Repetitions, Emotions, and Time Mona Lilja ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Lilja_9781538146484.indb 3 12/19/2020 4:22:19 PM Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www .rowman .com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 by Mona Lilja All photographs © Ola Kjelbye All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020948897 ISBN 9781538146484 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781538146491 (epub) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Lilja_9781538146484.indb 4 12/19/2020 4:22:19 PM To my husband, Mikael Baaz Lilja_9781538146484.indb 5 12/19/2020 4:22:19 PM Lilja_9781538146484.indb 6 12/19/2020 4:22:19 PM Contents Foreword ix Acknowledgments xv 1 Constructive Resistance: Emotions, Repetitions, and Time 1 PART I: RESISTANCE AND REPETITION 2 Resistance and Repetition: The Emotional Construction of Preah Vihear Temple Replicas 27 3 Constructive Resistance: Communicating Dissent through Repetitions 45 4 Layer-Cake Figurations and Resistance in Cambodia 61 PART II: RESISTANCE AND EMOTIONS 5 Dangerous Bodies, Matter, and Emotions: Public Assemblies and Embodied Resistance 77 6 Constructive Resistance as Emotional Reality Effects: Strategies of Representation of the Japanese Civil Society 85 7 Artifacts, Affects, and Authenticity: Constructive Resistance in Museum Spaces 103 PART III: RESISTANCE AND TIME 8 Geographies of Time and Resistance 123 vii Lilja_9781538146484.indb 7 12/19/2020 4:22:19 PM viii Contents 9 The Politics of Time and Temporality in Foucault’s Theorization of Resistance: Ruptures, Time Lags, and Decelerations 137 10 Bodies, Non-bodies, and the Desert: Resistance and Political Time Concepts in Photo Images 153 11 Conclusion 169 Index 179 Lilja_9781538146484.indb 8 12/19/2020 4:22:19 PM Foreword We are familiar with representations of resistance: massive events that con- front oppressive forces head on. These dramatic acts of dissent range from public rallies and street marches to labor strikes and civil disobedience cam- paigns. Sometimes they are brutally repressed, sometimes they go unnoticed, sometimes they lead to revolutionary change. Mona Lilja’s impressive book on Constructive Resistance is part of a scholarly movement that urges us to think of resistance in broader and more productive ways. It is part of a body of literature on everyday forms of resis- tance that ranges from early influential conceptual contributions (such as Scott 1990) to more recent empirical studies (such as Sombatpoonsiri 2015). Lilja writes in the wake of such inquiries and stresses, with them, that the most powerful forms of oppression are not necessarily institutional structures but societal norms that determine what is acceptable, moral, and rational, and what not. I am deeply honored by the opportunity to offer a few opening remarks to Constructive Resistance. They are designed to contextualize and introduce the key themes of Lilja’s timely and compelling book. There is no space here to engage in detail either her arguments or the meanwhile extensive and complex bodies of literature on the issues at stake—except to note that we do, indeed, live in an age of resistance. For several years now resistance move- ments have emerged in all parts of the world, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street and widespread street protests in Hong Kong (Wight 2019). They are symptomatic of a larger malaise that emerges when existing institutional structures and decision-making processes are unable to deal with and solve major political tensions and problems (see Carter 1970; Solnit 2019). Constructive Resistance urges us to look not only at dissent that opposes existing forms of domination and exclusion, but also, and primarily, at ix Lilja_9781538146484.indb 9 12/19/2020 4:22:19 PM x Foreword resistance practices that open up thinking space and allow us to imagine a different future. Doing so entails making a number of theoretical and empiri- cal shifts, away from focusing on direct challenges to the existing order and away from understanding power as purely oppressive. Instead, the key is to see and appreciate the productive sides of power and resistance: the potential that lies in generating sociopolitical change. Lilja calls such practices “constructive resistance” because they are primar- ily about exploring how we can imagine the world differently and how these alternative visions can eventually become acceptable and form the bases of new sociopolitical relations. These counter-visions and counter-discourses have a lot of parallels with what decolonial scholarship seeks to do: to go beyond exposing the legacies of colonialism and, instead, focus on validating different ways of being and knowing, as, for instance, those that are entailed in largely neglected Indigenous epistemologies and political orders (see, for instance, Capan 2017; Mignolo 2009; Graham et al. 2011). Understanding how constructive resistance can yield power and generate change is rather daunting and requires addressing several conceptual and empirical challenges. Two stand out. First: everyday forms of dissent are, as Lilja acknowledges, inevitably entangled with the complexities of life. They may produce as much acquies- cence as they entail resistance. Compromises have to be made. Does a young graffiti artist in the West Bank engage in resistance when spaying a sub- versive slogan on a public wall under the cover of darkness (see Ball 2020; Weitzel 2019)? Or is this covert act ultimately legitimizing the occupation and strengthening what Herbert Marcuse (1965) called repressive tolerance: providing an illusion of dissent and, in doing so, further legitimizes forms of domination? Second: constructive resistance can only work over time, by changing how we—as collectives—think and imagine the word differently. This slow transformation of values cannot be understood through conventional notions of human agency and the types of causal models that prevail in much of the social sciences. A constructive everyday act of resistance—whether it is a graffiti sprayed anonymously on a wall or a refusal to use racist language— does not cause a particular political event. Its effects cannot be measured in terms of direct and immediate outcomes. Most people will not even notice. But taken together, countless acts of constructive resistance, enacted over a long period of time, can spread through society and open up the potential for new ideas and values to become acceptable. In doing so, constructive resistance provides the preconditions for meaningful social and political change. This is how opposition to slavery eventually turned into the aboli- tion movement and generated new societal norms and new political practices (see Hutchison 2020). This is how the women’s movement emerged and Lilja_9781538146484.indb 10 12/19/2020 4:22:20 PM Foreword xi moved from the margins of society to a powerful force of social transforma- tion (Lerner 1993). And this is how countless political struggles are waged today, from same-sex marriage campaigns to attempts at addressing racism and structural violence. Lilja engages these two challenges in a fascinating manner. To illuminate the power of constructive resistance she explores the role of representations and how they enact an interactive relationship between time, emotion, and repetition. Representations are important because they are one of the most important ways through which individual experiences become collectively meaningful and acquire political significance (see Hutchison and Bleiker 2014). Such representations go way beyond the obvious, such as media depic- tions of protest movements. They come in visual, verbal, and performative forms and include, as Lilja outlies, museum exhibitions, photographs, stories, or reproduction of cultural artifacts. Representations shape how we view the world: they delineate what we can see and feel and conceptualize from what lies beyond our vision and comprehension. The political nature and consequences of this division of the visible and invisible are meanwhile well recognized and widely discussed (see Rancière 2004). Lilja enters these discussions by showing how repetition is at the core of how we see, feel, and represent the world. They are crucial to how power and productive resistance work. Repetitions entrench alter and transform values. They are part