Table Of ContentNandita Chaudhary · Pernille Hviid
Giuseppina Marsico · Jakob Waag Villadsen
Editors
Resistance in
Everyday Life
Constructing Cultural Experiences
Resistance in Everyday Life
Nandita Chaudhary Pernille Hviid
(cid:129)
Giuseppina Marsico Jakob Waag Villadsen
(cid:129)
Editors
Resistance in Everyday Life
Constructing Cultural Experiences
123
Editors
Nandita Chaudhary Giuseppina Marsico
Lady IrwinCollege Department ofHuman, Philosophicand
University of Delhi EducationSciences
NewDelhi, Delhi University of Salerno
India Fisciano (SA)
Italy
Pernille Hviid
Department ofPsychology JakobWaagVilladsen
University of Copenhagen Department ofPsychology
Copenhagen University of Copenhagen
Denmark Copenhagen
Denmark
ISBN978-981-10-3580-7 ISBN978-981-10-3581-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-3581-4
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Epigraph
Retrospection on an Irresistible Seminar
We have needed persistence
And considerable assistance
To locate the actual existence
Of true Resistance!
Not enough, the wheat and maize
From fertile Indian fields.
We craved exotic specimens
And sought the rare botanic ones!
And did we locate resistance?
You bet we did!
Across the globe
In sailing boat and city bus
Diversity with common thread.
From Pyramid land came graffiti
Of extraordinary variety
Every artist paints a story, silently
Laughing at power.
From land’s end in the Americas
And from Denmark’s jagged coast
Child’s mischief as protest
To sitting straight in school
And other inapt rules
v
vi Epigraph
From hearth and home,
From mothers and daughters
Voicing new found confidence
Masked as compliance, slyly.
Acting as teacher
Replaces acting out
The sandal fits the wearer
Its Eureka moment!
From the classic Indian stage
A streak of zestful novelty
‘I’m not a clone of long ago
But an artiste with a mind’ you know.
We traversed miles of space
From the wondrous city of Copenhagen
To dismal Assamese tea estates
And found the links we sought to trace.
Even imperious Indira’s story
Featured as her quest for glory
Unrelenting dominance
Was her nemesis.
Our complex mythologies
Yielded epistemologies
Mother-son dyads prevail
Oedipus, not unique to Freud!
Guts and gumption, brass and boldness
Not surrender, asserting rights
Speech as weapon, silence as tool
These are words for true resistance!
Let’s thank our friends who travelled far
Also those who travelled near!
To confer on ideas, ancient and modern
To meet old friends and make new ones.
Farvel! Auf Wiedersehen! Au revoir! Adieu!
Adios! Phir Milenge! Poittu Vaango! Namaste!
Chennai, India Anandalakshmy
October 2016
Foreword
Persisting Resistance as Resource for Development
This book is treacherous. At first glance, the notion of resistance is simple—a
toddlerwhoisperformingatempertantrumtoparents’orders,aprotesterfacingthe
acts of police brutality, and the dieting person persuading oneself not to eat an
appealing sweet—are all resisting some social or personal agenda. And as such
agendas are everywhere in human lives and societal set-ups, resistance is so much
anordinaryeverydaylifehappeningthatitseemstrivialtomakeitintoanobjectof
investigation. Yet, it is often the most ordinary phenomena that are of profound
importance for understandingthe world. I considerthephenomena of resistancein
all of their variety offorms to be of such kind.
Resistanceisafrequentphenomenoninhumansocietieswherethegoal-oriented
actionsbysomemaybeactivelyunappreciatedbyothers.Frictions between social
groups, social relationships that are of tumultuous nature, and simple petty jeal-
ousies can lead to dramatic resistance actions (Fig. 1).
The case of Gustave Courbet—by now a “classic” in realist painting in art
history but then (1860s–1870s) a very controversial figure in the Parisian art and
politicalworlds(Chu1992)—illustratesthecentralityofresistancesintheordinary
life of any society. The international participants of the workshop in New Delhi
experienced the resistance by the Indian consular authorities when revealing the
goaltogotoIndiatoparticipateinaworkshoponthetopicofresistance.Thetopic
becameinterpretedintermsofpoliticalresistance—andquiteunderstandablymade
theofficialswaryaboutthestrangecaravan offoreign scholars wanting tocometo
Delhi all at the same time, and all proudly claiming they go toa workshop on that
topic. As expected in the work of any organization, that wariness turned into
demand for more documented support for the innocence of the academic activity.
All got the visas needed, but the extended bureaucratic processes of resistance,
triggered by the use of the word, is a good lesson for us in academia about the
implications of our scientific terminology for ordinary social practices.
vii
viii Foreword
Fig.1 ‘TheSalonResisting
theEntrance’byGustave
Courbet(caricaturefrom
1873).SourceLeGrelot,
Dimanche,25Avril1873
Resistance—as a word of common language—triggers the process of suspicion
(resistance to what? resistance of what kind?). As a term to be used in scientific
analysis, it is meant to be neutral—but, as it often happens, the connotations of
everyday language terms can easily flavour the intended neutral term. The
bureaucratic negotiations around getting the visas indicated it well.
Resistance as a Scientific Concept
The issue of resistance is not trivial for the purposes of science. Besides its use in
the physical sciences (e.g. in case of electricity), it becomes particularly important
as abasic processof survivaland development in thecase of all sciences that deal
withopen-systemicphenomena:biology,psychology,anthropologyandsociology.
These are sciences that struggle with the non-predictable nature of their object
phenomena that is axiomatically guaranteed by the open-systemic nature of these
phenomena.1 For their theoretical innovation, concepts that overcome the impli-
cations of unilateral causality—“A causes B” without any assumption that B has
anything to do with that causal process—need to be overcome. A focus on resis-
tance—“A causes B under the resistance of B”—renders the unilateral causal
schememute.IfBresistsA,isthatresistancealso“causal”,similarlytothatposited
forA?Ifso,Whatis“causality”—apositedactofimpactoranegotiatedsettlement
1Inopensystems—thatdependfortheirexistenceuponexchangerelationswiththeirenvironments
—thefuturestateofthesystemcannotbepredictedfromtheantecedentstate.
Foreword ix
between impact and counter-impact? The notion of causality itself becomes
questionableasaviablewayofthinkingaboutthephenomena.Andthiswouldbea
major revolution in science since Aristotle and Avicenna.
The Systemic Nature of Resistance
Intheabstractworldofscience,resistanceisthesystemiccounterpartofaction—the
two are mutually linked in an oppositional unity. There is no action without cor-
respondingresistance,and—ofcourse—noresistancewithoutanaction.Resistance
is the process that unites a subject’s (S) action towards an object (S ! O) that
is linked with the object’s counteraction (O ! S) in some form. Of the latter,
therearemanyasfollows:neutralization(theactionrenderedinconclusivebysome
blockingordiffusion),redirection(theactiontowardsOisredirectedtowardssome
other, substitute, object, by the O). This entails the relevance of co-agency (both
SandOareactiveinrelationtotheirenvironments—ofwhicheach(other)isapart),
direction(everyactionisdirectedtowardssomeobject),andborder(theactionand
its resisting action are observable on their place of encounter, which constitutes a
border). Furthermore, the parts of the system (S and O) are assumed to be in an
asymmetric“powerrelation”—SisdominatingOwhilethelatterisresistingtheact
of dominance.
This abstract notion of resistance is a systemic version of the structural unit of
Gegenstand—a long-used but by now forgotten structural unit of the human psy-
che.ResistanceislocatedinthesystemicstructureoftheGegenstand(Fig.2).Itis
thus a part of the “minimal Gestalt” of human psychological functioning—a unit
with inherent location of the directed and intentional processes within the unit.
Bothofthesenotionsareoffundamentalimportanceforunderstandingthespecific
human features of the psyche.
First—asweoperateinirreversibletimethatcannotbeturnedaround—eachand
every phenomenon of the human psyche is directed to the always indeterminate
future. The intentionalextensionofmeaningsinasimple associationprocess—the
Fig.2 Resistanceinsystemic
Gegenstand.Therelationsof
SandOleadtoblocking,
neutralization,and
re-direction
x Foreword
word “cat” may evoke the associate of “mouse” (or, in our contemporary social
ecological conditions—“a can of cat food”)—becomes directed when viewed
within irreversible time. It may lead to the expectation of either the cat bringing a
recentlycaughtandnow-deadmousetotheownerasadisplayofhuntingsuccess,
or may trigger the owner to jump into the car and rush to the supermarket to buy
appropriatecanofthecat’spreferredgourmetfood.Inbothcases,thesimpleactof
association acquires the direction for the actions that are implied.
Secondly,theGegenstandstructureentailsinherentintentionality.Thenotionof
intentionality—thecoreofthepsychologicaltheoryofFranzBrentano—hasbeena
conceptual stumbling block for all of twentieth-century traditions in psychology
that have attempted to reduce the psyche to the directly observable phenomena of
behaviour or cognition (Valsiner 2012). Yet, human actions—from the
non-conscious to the highly deliberate ones—are not only directional but also
intentional—we want to act in ways we have set ourselves in terms of goals.
Likewise, at the immediate perception-to-actionchains, we act within the frame of
affordances—as emphasized by James Gibson—of the objects that link their
properties with our action options. From affordances up to premeditated actions,
humanbeingsareintentionalintheiractions.AccordingtoBrentano,everymental
phenomenonincludessomethingasobjectwithinitself,althoughtheydonotalldo
sointhesameway.Inpresentationsomethingispresented,injudgementsomething
isaffirmedordenied,inloveloved,inhatehated,indesiredesiredandsoon.This
intentional in-existence is a characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No
physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We could, therefore, define mental
phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object
intentionally within themselves (Brentano 1995, pp. 88–89, added emphasis).
The “object” in the English translation of Brentano is Gegenstand in the orig-
inal version (“Gegenstand der innere Wahrnehmung”—object of inner perception
—Brentano, 1874, p. 127). As such, it entails the basic scheme as depicted in
Fig. 2—the perceiving subject acts towards oneself (as object) in the process of
presenting,judging,affirmingordenying,andloving.Theseactsarebeingresisted
by the object (which is the subject itself). In other terms—resistance escalates
intentionality. Without resistance—of the self to one’s own self in the process of
intra-psychical perception—intentionality of the human psyche could not have
emerged.
Brentano did not include the focus on irreversible time into his theoretical
system. This major oversight did not allow him to develop the notion of inten-
tionality to cover its full implication in making sense of the human psyche. When
we—in this book—bring into focus the notion of resistance and link its inten-
tionalityinirreversibletimeframe,wecompletethetheoreticalwholethatBrentano
started but failed to complete. It was James Mark Baldwin a few decades later
(Baldwin 1892) who made the notion of persistent imitation—or the notion of
“trying, partially failing, and trying again”—into the central core of all develop-
mental phenomena. The intermediate part in that sequence—partial failing—is the
result of resistance.
