Rethinking resistance through and as affect

Abstract

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork with No TAV activists in Valsusa, in Alpine Italy, protesting against the planned construction of a new high-speed railway. Focusing on activists’ experiences of vulnerability and police violence, the article contributes to the recent ‘subjective turn’ in the anthropology of resistance and contentious social movements, and responds to calls to ‘de-pathologize’ and ‘de-exoticize’ resistance. It explores ways to reconceptualize the subjective experience of resistance through a focus on affect, vulnerability and becoming. Combining neo-Spinozist theory of affects with Judith Butler’s feminist perspective on agency and subjectivity, the article seeks to point a way beyond the limitations of established approaches informed by the work of Michel Foucault. Further, the article also shows how affects experienced during direct action are embedded in activists’ longer biographical narratives and gradually structured, through remembering and narrativization, to provide ground for a coherent subjective sense of agency. Third, the article highlights the difference a focus on affect makes compared to the more conventional sociological focus on emotion. The notion of affect helps us to move beyond a rationalist and instrumentalist approach to emotion in social movements. The article stresses the heuristic potential of a focus on affect, but also considers methodological challenges posed by such a perspective. It suggests that the methodological toolkit available to the ethnographers of contentious politics can be enhanced by drawing on the affective capacities of researchers’ own bodies in order to register the visceral intensities vital to the experience of resistance and the ongoing formation of insubordinate subjects.

From Affects to Contentious Politics.Dis

“…Mazzarella´s conceptualization is important from a methodological point of view because it softens the rigid distinction between emotions and affects. It is precisely in the oscillation between them that the possibility for the ethnographer to grasp social actors´ affects lies (Laszczkowski, 2019), even if always in an approximate, incomplete and imperfect way (Jansen, 2016), through processes of narrativization and remembering.…”

Resistance/refusal: Politics of manoeuvre under diffuse regimes of governmentality

“…While she attributes the impasse to the unwillingness of anthropology to engage ‘psychological theory’, I want to bring attention to Seymour’s definition of resistance, as it ‘refers to intentional , and hence conscious , acts of defiance or opposition’ (Seymour, 2006: 305 [emphasis added]), relying on a theory of human subjectivity and action that clashes with post-structural conceptions. While the recent so-called subjective turn in resistance studies (Alexandrakis, 2016; Krøijer, 2015; Laszczkowski, 2019) is to be applauded for its fine-grained ethnographic critique of such conceptualisations, even when displacing the stubborn belief in ‘the conscious will of autonomous political subjects to determine the directions of their self-transformation’ (Laszczkowski, 2019: 494), these theorists risk focalising the subject over the broader political assemblage.…”

“…In his ethnography of the ‘No-TAV’ mobilisation against a railroad infrastructure project through Northern Italy, Laszczkowski describes violent encounters with police (and the circulating narratives about those moments) as generating the affects that intensify his comrades’ devotion to the movement. Laszczkowski (2019) relays moments of mutual radicalisation experienced by fellow activists, in which they: ‘frequently recount the shock of the violence … but also the extraordinary sense of collective empowerment when they watched the police retreat’ (499); he also describes his own feeling of a ‘strong, inextricable sense of togetherness, defiance of the police and anything the police stood for’ (501–502) in those moments.…”

The existential spatiality of rebellion: Insubordination, counter‐conduct, and places

“…Sensible experiences are, nevertheless, linked by the interpretive strategy oriented toward local solidarity to the ordinary existence of subjects. Perhaps, these affective experiences can be ritually intensified without being necessarily grounded in the shared dwelling of subjects in solidarity (Gilson, 2018; Laszczkowski, 2019; Velicu & García‐López, 2018). Nonetheless, this accentuation of rituals, in contrast to the shared experiences of dwelling, deepens the relevance of their performative effects: intensive participation in rituals of affective solidarity can thus substitute the lived experience of direct engagement with adversaries.…”