Thanks to eugene, renee, martin, and kathie for this thread.
>Martin writes:
>>I think I go beyond that. I think that people are resistors even though
>>they themselves would not ascribe resistance to their own behaviour. That
>>is why I would describe criminality as resistance. It is an act that goes
>>outside the prevailing norms either by necessity or choice. I might
>>wonder if one is "culturalised" into a "criminal culture" and would tend
>>to learning zero in Batesonian terms that it is not "resistance".
I've been thinking about resistance in terms of mimesis, as a "faculty" in
Benjamin's terms, which is part of our endowment, as living creatures, but
which of course has been transformed in our mediated phylogenesis, so that
like everything else in social reality, it is realized at different
'levels' of organization - both intra and inter.
Littowitz's article in MCA a while back shows that in children's
development, their mimetic orientation to others manifests as
identification & resistance -- the child, identifying with an adult,
resists being dependent by taking up an adult position in discourse (cf ).
Resistance in these terms is distinct from what Eugene described, in that
it's not deliberate. At the level of deliberate act, mimesis is best
theorized as performance -- no longer a behavioral gesture or instrumental
move toward an inarticulate object but a way of staging the self. That's
resistance in Eugene's terms.... It's putting the self on the line.
Kathie's point about perspective seems integral to a theory of resistance.
If individuals ARE 'within themselves' so to speak complex interfunctional
systems developing in sociocultural environment, then resistance can
manifest between "voices" internally and in relation to others AT DIFFERENT
LEVELS, and can be seen from different angles -- the crux of individual
development: i.e., self-world relations, occurs in dialogic interaction,
through which perspectives get interrelated - the dialogue may occur
"within" so to speak the person-in-activity -- that is, a person engaged in
activity can acquire perspectives embedded within the activity system and
set these in play internally -- OR of course it can occur across
individuals, which takes more effort.
Kathie also seems on the money (woops) when she invokes foucault -- i.e.,
that perspective cannot be understood in any neutral sense. It's always in
relation to some other perspective & always in terms of relative power.
Bakhtin gets credit too :)
And finally, kathie's invocation of transversal, as jay lemke has been
working on the notion, points me towards more thinking...
Hope there's more.
Judy
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