Counter-conducts as a mode of resistance: Ways of ‘not being like that’ in South Africa
CARL DEATH
Abstract
This article argues that a ‘counter-conducts approach’, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, can be used to disaggregate the concept of resistance and highlight how some resistant practices work to subvert dominant ways of being. One of the features of a ‘counter-conducts approach’ is an attention to the interpenetration of forms of power and resistance, governmentality and alternative modes of subjectification. Such an approach can be used to interpret forms of social protest in new ways, particularly in terms of the ways in which they facilitate or hinder ethical self-reflection and militant lives. Examples are provided from contemporary South Africa, specifically the Occupy Umlazi protest and a township youth movement known as ‘izikhothane’ or pexing. In very different ways these protests are public assertions that ‘we are not like that’. As such they each challenge mainstream social values, yet they also have quite problematic implications for progressive politics and radical theorists.
Key words: resistance, Foucault, counter-conducts, governmentality, protest
Introduction
The social sciences have developed a wide array of ways to study power relations, for example literatures on compulsory and productive power, ideology and hegemony, sovereign power and governmentality, biopower and discipline, structural and institutional power, to name but a few.[1] In contrast, discussions of protest, dissent, and resistance are far less frequently disaggregated and systematically unpacked with anything like the same level of detail, and are often confined to the final ‘what is to be done?’ chapter of monographs on global power relations. The dominant perspective on resistance, termed here a ‘resistance approach’, tends to see it in terms of opposition to hegemonic structures of power, and to seek movements which can offer a coherent and progressive counter-hegemonic challenge to the status quo.[2]
In contrast, this article draws on the work of Michel Foucault to propose a ‘counter-conducts approach’ as one way to nuance and complicate our understanding of resistance, suggesting that it can draw attention to modes of protest which form in parallel to techniques of governmentality; are deeply interpenetrated with the power relations they oppose; and which facilitate or enable the production and performance of alternative subjectivities through processes of ethical self-reflection: ways of ‘not being like that’. This is illustrated through two South African examples of social phenomena (rather than ‘movements’) which can be described as protests (public performances of opposition or rejection of dominant actors, policies or norms): the Occupy Umlazi demonstration, and the youth phenomenon of pexing which has swept township malls. These are very different movements (indeed the second is difficult to even describe as a social movement) and both are problematic subjects of resistance from the perspective of radical political traditions.
By ‘problematic’, I mean that both these phenomena could be easily dismissed as irrelevant or politically compromised by a ‘resistance approach’, which focuses on the degree to which specific movements challenge or overturn dominant power relations. As well as illustrating a number of the broader criticisms of the global Occupy protests, Occupy Umlazi arose out a desire to prevent violence and physical confrontation, and ended with (at least to a certain extent) the reincorporation of contentious politics within formal structures of community and state politics. The practice of pexing – as we will see below – is even harder to locate within progressive, politicised struggles for a better society, and has led veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle to shake their heads and ask: is this what the struggle was for? In contrast, this article seeks to show how a counter-conducts approach helps us to understand both these cases in a rather different way – as forms of conduct which subvert dominant techniques for the production of responsible subjects. A counter-conducts approach is useful not just in better understanding such movements on their own terms (although I would argue this is also the case), but for comprehending wider forms of power relation in which movements are inextricably entwined. In order to understand the contemporary politics of resistance it is necessary to explore the sorts of counter-conducts which reproduce, and are themselves produced by, prevailing forms of governance and governmentality. As such, to neglect the study of these counter-conducts – as many governmentality scholars have by and large done to date – is to unduly diminish the broader study of governmentalities, losing much of what makes this approach so fruitful and interesting.[3]
The next section introduces the two South African cases. The article then turns to the concept of counter-conducts in Foucault’s work and those who have developed it more recently, and highlights the different questions such an approach requires us to ask of social phenomena such as the South African examples. The final part of the article returns to the two cases to show how they look quite different according to a counter-conducts approach. Particular attention here is given to the ethical and constitutive forms of ‘becoming’ practiced in these cases, and the manner in which they encapsulate ways of ‘not being like that’ in contemporary South African politics.
Occupy Umlazi and Pexing Soweto
Starting with the Occupy movement immediately locates the discussion in a relatively familiar context for social movement theorists and activists. From 2011 movements like Occupy, the Indignados and the Arab Spring politicised public spaces – parks, streets, schools, communities, universities, etc – across many countries in protest against austerity, inequality, corruption, and the poverty of democratic institutions and practice.[4] In Spain Los Indignados also took politics out of the formal democratic institutions and into the streets and squares. Activists here developed the practice of escraches, where protestors arrived in support at the houses of tenants or mortgage-holders about to be evicted for falling behind in their payments, and then took their protests to the houses of those politicians and judges who supported the evictions.[5] Such protests were criticised by the Spanish government, who argued ‘that homes are homes, and homes are private. If you want to make a political statement, you should do so through the political system, not in front of people’s private homes’.[6]
In contrast to global Occupy protests, in South Africa very high levels of so-called ‘service delivery’ protests have rocked townships since the early 2000s, coalescing around issues like water, sanitation, electricity, housing, crime, corruption and political accountability.[7] Whilst the term ‘service delivery’ protest marginalises their political and democratic significance, it has been difficult to link these protests together in order to create a broader counter-hegemonic movement in South Africa.[8] However, in June 2012 a group of protesting shack-dwellers – arising from amongst Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Unemployed People’s Movement – decided to occupy a councillor’s office in Durban and grounds in protest at poor living conditions, police violence, and unresponsive elected representatives. To this degree it was typical of the wider protests.[9] However, the Umlazi Occupy movement was rather different due to a number of factors. First was the invocation of the global ‘occupy!’ language and slogans (such as a critique of ‘the 99%’) and an explicit identification with this transnational movement (including a public screening of the documentary Occupy Wall Street).[10] Second was the duration, in contrast to the more usual ‘flash-in-the-pan’ protests. The occupation lasted a month and inhabited ‘a large tent on loan from a local church and comprised up to 3,000 occupiers at a time’.[11] Third was the fact that the initial decision to occupy was actually in order to forestall conflict escalation and prevent the councillor’s office being destroyed by a group of angry protestors intent on physical violence. The occupy strategy was thus intended to draw in more radical protestors and convince them of the value of non-violent action. The ‘Occupy Umlazi’ protestors were well-connected to church and community groups, and the occupation actually ended ‘following the election of a new ward committee – which included a 60 per cent representation of occupiers who were part of the Crisis Committee – and a disciplining of the ward councillor’.[12]
This example has many familiar features of twenty-first century social movement activism, and exhibits some of the characteristics which have puzzled or disappointed many radical activists and theorists. The Occupy movement is easy to write-off as fatally contradicted in its use of the system whilst protesting the system; more interested in words and images than action; and rooted in middle class and academic groups rather than workers or the poor.[13] The right-wing press have repeatedly drawn attention to the ‘infuriating’ way in which anti-capitalist protestors buy coffees or sandwiches, and UK Home Secretary Teresa May famously said of the London encampment at St Paul’s in 2011: ‘These are anti-capitalist protesters but we have seen photos of them drinking their Starbucks coffee and using their Mac computers’.[14] Facile as this critique is, it is symptomatic of elements which have made many critical theorists uncomfortable about the radical and progressive potential of Occupy.[15] Although Occupy Umlazi has very clear differences to other manifestations of Occupy, for example in terms of its relationship to local communities and the marginalised poor, it was also a primarily symbolic and declaratory occupation, rather than a strike, blockade or attack on property, and it ended with (at least to a certain extent) the reincorporation of contentious politics within formal political structures.
The next case, however, is even more uncomfortable. The latest ‘youth craze’ to sweep South African townships, known variously as ‘pexing’ or izikhothane, has been widely criticised from all positions on the political spectrum. It involves huge crowds of 15-18 year olds (and sometimes much younger) gathering for staged ‘contests’ outside shopping malls in Soweto and Witbank where gangs compete to show off their expensive clothes, food, jewellery, mobile phones, and drink.[16] There is nothing particularly new about this (and South African township culture has often had an element of the flamboyant about it),[17] but what has grabbed national attention is the way in which these youth are demonstrating their wealth by destroying the items as they show them off. Shoes are burnt, clothing torn, drinks poured on the ground, phones smashed, even money is torn apart. Conspicuous consumption is now accompanied by conspicuous destruction.[18]
The object of the competition is not denial or renunciation of personal possessions or luxury goods, but rather a demonstration of such personal wealth to the degree that the cost is no object. Yet it also displays a scrupulous attention to the price of goods, with extensively ritualised and formalised rules. ‘Scores’ and values are written down and compared, and there is an intimate awareness of which brands are currently fashionable and valuable. For one observer, gangs are engaging ‘in conspicuous consumption as a form of war with the branded products used as the artillery’.[19] Style and stylishness are key, and intriguingly there are at least echoes here (exaggeration to the point of parody) of older traditions of the African flaneur, dandies, and township extroverts.[20] A 2014 UK Guinness advert featured Congolese sapeurs who transform themselves from working men into superbly dressed icons, whilst the narrator intones that ‘in life, you cannot always choose what you do, but you can always choose who you are’.[21]
The South African pexers take this flamboyance to an extreme, and the profligate destruction of high value goods has met with widespread condemnation. There is also, unsurprisingly, a strong (at least potential) link with crime as participants do whatever they can to attain the most desirable items, and there was a widely reported suicide of a 14 year-old boy apparently because his father could not afford the clothes he wanted. But the participants themselves, interviewed by a South African researcher, reveal that they are both self-aware and capable of self-reflection on the nature and function of their actions. One reported that ‘it’s showing off to tell others that you can afford this and tear the clothes because you will get better ones and you can afford. You want to be seen this thing means nothing to you, you will get another one’.[22] Another revealed the degree of explicit calculation of monetary value involved, stating that ‘we also used to pex with credit cards but over time that did not get popular because we are not too sure how much money is in there’.[23] Most recognised the wasteful and dangerous elements of the activity, and predicted they would quickly grow out of it. One observed that ‘this thing is wasteful... people are hungry out there who need food and I waste food; who need clothes and I just tear them up’.[24]
In this parodying of wider cultural practices of ostentatious demonstration and ‘peacocking’, however, it is possible to see a (perhaps nascent, frequently un-reflective) critical attitude toward consumption and wealth. One participant noted pointedly ‘I like to pex with money because it is like you are wasting the ultimate thing’, and another observed that ‘even adults pex, they will be in their cars and brag about tyres, and tell each other that I drink Hennessey. They might not burn them and waste but they do it too’.[25] The topic of corruption and elite consumption has dominated South African public discourse,[26] and Achille Mbembe argues that parodying the official ‘tendency towards excess’ in popular forms of politics is a pervasive phenomenon in postcolonial Africa.[27] By pushing it to an extreme, the pexers help make evident the emptiness or superfluity behind modern hyper-consumer culture.[28] And the reaction of mainstream society to these bonfires of designer labels reveals a pervasive unease with wastefulness and ostentatious wealth within a society which also has deep-rooted strains of asceticism.[29]