RESEARCH/ANALYSIS FINAL ASSIGNMENT
onthehunt2
176
standard of correspondence between media lives and
people outside the stories is more likely to reproduce di-
visions among niche markets (selling to “teenage boys”
or “Hispanic women”) than to reenvision the world.
Shaw’s gamers want vision, not representation in the
conventional sense. Media can do that, too. From webi-
sodes to games to youth- authored memes for political
candidates, what world do we want, and how can we use
our new platforms to imagine it together? How do we
connect those platforms and images to the high stakes
of enfranchisement in everyday life? US children’s tele-
vision host Fred Rogers famously said that “if you know
someone’s story, you will love them.” Can we produce
and expect stories of inclusive regard and solidarity in
our representational future?
57 Resistance Stephen Duncombe
“Resistance,” as a keyword for contemporary media
studies, has a curious political lineage. It was first
adopted by the right, then crossed the aisle to the
left; its history marks the evolution of an idea and a
transformation in cultural politics.
The English word “resistance” is a derivation of “re-
sist,” stemming from the Latin— via the French— and
meaning to stand. Resistance has a technical scientific
meaning, “the opposition offered by one body to the
pressure or movement of another,” as well as a later
psychoanalytic one: the unconscious opposition to
repressed memories or desires. But it is the Oxford Eng-
lish Dictionary’s primary definition, “to stop or hinder
(a moving body); to succeed in standing against; to
prevent (a weapon, etc.) from piercing or penetrating,”
that conveys the meaning most often used in media
studies: resistance is a stand against an oppositional
power.
Writing Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790,
Edmund Burke is horrified by the French overthrow of
birthright authority, the leveling of classes, and other
such “usurpation[s] on the prerogatives of nature”
(1993, 49). (He is particularly horrified by the thought of
the hairdresser who thinks himself the equal of his bet-
ters.) The only response to such usurpations is to resist
the Revolution, and return to time- tested tradition. But,
as Burke understands, this resistance must go deeper,
for revolutionary France also holds the intimate dan-
ger of “teaching us a servile, licentious and abandoned
Keywords for Media Studies, edited by Laurie Ouellette, and Jonathan Gray, New York University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/odu/detail.action?docID=4717750. Created from odu on 2022-09-01 00:10:57.
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insolence” (54). Resistance, as such, is a matter of sub-
jectivity as well as statecraft.
Nearly a century later, Burke’s countryman, Matthew
Arnold, takes up the call of conservative resistance. Ar-
nold’s mid- nineteenth- century England was a world of
storm and strife: urbanization, industrialization, and
class warfare. The republican ideals of the French Rev-
olution had triumphed over Burke’s beloved tradition,
and “nature,” in the age of 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” (1883, xi), culture offered a means to
rise above the politics, commerce, and machinery of the
day and supply a universal standard upon which to base
“a principle of authority, to counteract the tendency to
anarchy which seems to be threatening us” (52).
Halfway around the world Mahatma Gandhi (1919)
was developing his own ideas of resistance, embracing
Arnold’s emphasis on culture, yet insisting it was the
idea that English culture constituted the “best that has
ever been thought and said” that needed to be resisted.
To free India of British soldiers and bureaucrats was one
thing, but liberation would come only when the coun-
try was free of British ideas, prejudices, and technology.
A culture of resistance was necessary, and its source, as
it was for Burke, was tradition. Gandhi counseled break-
ing India’s economic dependence on Britain by khaddar,
a return to the hand looming of cloth, and looked to
non- Westernized, rural India for political and spiritual
models.
Radical resistance, defined in part as the rejection
of foreign cultures and the celebration of indigenous
traditions, wound its way through the twentieth cen-
tury, as European colonies in Africa and Asia were swept
away by struggles of national liberation. This strain of
resistance makes its way back to the metropole with
those finding parallels between their own struggles and
anticolonialism. A key point of identification was the
fight against internalized oppression, what the Algerian
writer and activist Albert Memmi (1965/1991) referred
to as “the colonizer within.” In 1970, the US- based femi-
nist group Radicalesbians issued a manifesto calling for
“The Woman- Identified Woman” based in an under-
standing that “if we are male- identified in our heads, we
cannot realize our autonomy as human beings” (n.p.).
This sentiment was further developed by the radical
black women of the Combahee River Collective, who in
1977 asserted that “we believe that the most profound
and potentially radical politics come directly out of our
identity” (1977/1983, 272), making the case for resistance
based within and upon the unique experiences of a per-
son’s ethnicity, gender, or sexual identity.
As the necessity of resistance was recognized at the
intimate level of personal identity, the scope of what
was to be resisted expanded dramatically. The political
failures of student resistance in 1968 confirmed what
French scholar Michel Foucault suspected: that power
was not something out there, easy to identify and over-
throw; instead it was everywhere, continuous, anony-
mous, intimate and even pleasurable: “the disciplinary
grid of society” (1980, 111). Whereas previous critics of
totalitarianism, from the left and the right, elevated the
ideal of the individual subject resisting against totalizing
society, Foucault countered that the subject itself was
problematic. This Enlightenment creature that made
new ideals of personal freedom possible also opened up
a new site of oppression: the individual’s mind, body,
and spirit. Because power is impressed upon and inter-
nalized into the subject, it raised the vexing problem of
who resists and what exactly are they resisting. Can one
resist the very subject doing the resisting?
Resistance remained a stated goal for Foucault, but it
had to be reconceptualized. The ideal of developing the
pure subject in opposition to the corrupting object of
Keywords for Media Studies, edited by Laurie Ouellette, and Jonathan Gray, New York University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/odu/detail.action?docID=4717750. Created from odu on 2022-09-01 00:10:57.
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society was rejected. “Maybe the target nowadays” he
suggests, “is not to discover what we are, but to refuse
what we are” (1984, 22). Resistance, then, becomes the
only legitimate subject position, and resistance be-
comes an end in itself.
Resistance, as it is encountered in media studies, is
most often cultural resistance. As the euphoria of the
anticolonization struggles and student uprisings of the
1950s and 1960s gave way to the rise of corruption and
dictatorships, noncolonization and neoliberalism, radi-
cal scholars began looking for resistance outside of the
political sphere: on the street corner, in the living room,
or at the dance hall, that is, in cultural expression. Cul-
tural resistance was, of course, first articulated by Mat-
thew Arnold, but it was a figure on the other side of the
political spectrum, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci,
who framed the contemporary discussion.
Antonio Gramsci (1971), writing from a fascist jail in
the 1920s and early 1930s, reflected on why the com-
munist revolutions he labored for in the West had so far
failed. Part of the reason, he concluded, was a serious
underestimation of culture and civil society. Power re-
sides not just in institutions, but also in the ways people
make sense of their world; hegemony is both a politi-
cal and cultural process. Armed with culture instead of
guns, one fights a different type of fight. Whereas tradi-
tional battles were “wars of maneuver”— frontal assaults
which seized the state— cultural battles were “wars of
position”— flanking maneuvers, commando raids and
infiltrations, staking out positions from which to attack
and then reassemble civil society. Thus, part of the revo-
lutionary project was to create “counterhegemonic cul-
ture” behind enemy lines. But if this culture was to have
real power, and communist integrity, it could not be im-
posed from above; it must come out of the experiences
and consciousness of people. Thus, the job of the revo-
lutionary is to discover the progressive potentialities
that reside within popular consciousness and from this
material fashion a culture of resistance.
It was this politico- cultural mission that guided the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the Uni-
versity of Birmingham in the 1970s. The CCCS is best
known for its subcultural studies, and it was within these
mainly working- class subcultures that researchers found
an inchoate politics of resistance: Mods one- upped their
bosses with their snappy dress; Punks performed the de-
cline of Britain with lyrics that warned “We’re your fu-
ture, no future”; Skinheads re- created a cohesive white,
masculine working- class world that no longer existed;
and Rastafarians turned the world upside down by re-
reading Christianity into a condemnation of the white
man’s Babylon. It was through resistant culture that
young people contested and rearranged the ideological
constructions— the systems of meaning— handed down
to them by the dominant powers of postwar Britain.
But cultural resistance needn’t always take place
against the dominant culture, it can also work through it.
In her groundbreaking 1984 study Reading the Romance,
folklorist Janice Radway admits the obvious: romance
novels, through their depiction of women as driven by
and dependent upon the love of a man, articulate and
reinforce patriarchal values. Yet when talking to women
who enjoyed reading romances, she found something
else: a culture of resistance. Instead of celebrating the
dependency of a woman upon a man, fans derived a
vicarious power through the agency of a heroine who
picks and pursues the man of her desire. Furthermore,
just reading itself was recognized as an act of resistance:
housewives taking time to indulge in a personal plea-
sure was a silent strike against a patriarchal society that
expected them to be entirely other- directed.
The work of the CCCS and scholars like Janice Radway
led to a flowering of cultural studies looking at “resistant
readings” of the mass media and celebrating the agency
Keywords for Media Studies, edited by Laurie Ouellette, and Jonathan Gray, New York University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/odu/detail.action?docID=4717750. Created from odu on 2022-09-01 00:10:57.
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of cultural creation, recreation, and interpretation, yet
for the CCCS, as well as Radway, cultural resistance is
politically ambiguous. Such resistance opens up spaces
were dominant ideology is contested and counterhege-
monic culture can be created, but these contestations
and symbolic victories often remain locked in culture—
and thus don’t impact significantly the forces being re-
sisted. As John Clarke et al. write in Resistance through
Rituals, “They ‘solve,’ but in an imaginary way, problems
which at the concrete material level remain unresolved”
(2006, 47– 48).
Is cultural resistance, resistance at all? Malcolm Cowley
(1934/1976) raised this question nearly a century ago in
his memoir of his bohemian days in Greenwich Village of
the 1920s. Playful nonconformity, Cowley noted, which
may have shocked an older bourgeoisie that honored
hard work and sober thrift, no longer served the same
function. Within the context of consumer capitalism,
the bohemian call to be freed from yesterday’s conven-
tions translates all too easily into freedom to buy tomor-
row’s products. He is the jazz fan that Theodor Adorno
infamously dismissed as one who “pictures himself as
the individualist who whistles at the world. But what
he whistles is its melody” (1938/1990, 298). The cultural
rebel, far from resisting the system, is fueling its engine.
One needn’t be as pessimistic as Adorno to acknowl-
edge that resistance can be problematic. Not only is
what is being resisted dependent upon resistance, but
resistance depends upon what it resists. In other words,
resistance exits only in relation to the force it sets itself
against; without that force resistance has little coher-
ence or purpose. To return to our original Oxford Eng-
lish Dictionary definition, without something solid to
stand against, resistance tumbles over. What, then, is
the point of resistance if the very thing being resisted
must be maintained in order for there to be resistance?
If one accepts resistance as an end in itself, then there is
no problem. The point of resistance is an existential act,
a tactic of survival, as Michel de Certeau (1984) would
have it, within a larger strategy forever controlled by the
other. If, however, one pins one’s hopes upon resistance
as a means by which to contest that dominant force and
transform the larger culture, then resistance for itself is
not enough— it must pass into something else: revolu-
tion or reaction.
Reaction is the easier path. At its core resistance
was, and is, a conservative strategy. A conservative re-
sists what is new to conserve the old. If this resistance
to— this stand against— the new is successful, change is
halted, and the opposing force is vanquished, then the
conservative can fall comfortably— and victoriously—
back upon the old world he or she fought to retain. For
progressives, however, the process is more fraught. If
the stand is successful, and the force resisted is removed,
then in what direction does one fall? Forward, yes, but
forward to where? Resistance, with its eyes always upon
its adversary does little to provide a vision of the new
world to come.
Yet in acts of resistance new worlds can be glimpsed.
Culture— contra Arnold— is not delivered intact from
on high, but forged piecemeal from people’s interac-
tions with the world around them. Reacting against
dominant forces, people form new readings, new per-
spectives, new combination, and new cultures. This is
not an autonomous imagination, but a dialectical one.
Through resistance against what we do not like we begin
to figure out what we do, and standing against can be-
come a means to move forward.
For “resistance” to remain a relevant concern for me-
dia studies, it is not good enough to merely ask, resistance
to what? We must always also be posing the question, re-
sistance for what? Matthew Arnold once wrote that “free-
dom . . . is a very good horse to ride, but to ride some-
where” (1883, 344). The same might be said of resistance.
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