Counter-conducts as a mode of resistance Ways of ‘not being like that’ in South Africa.DOC

Key words: resistance, Foucault, counter-conducts, governmentality, protest Introduction The social sciences have developed a wide array of ways to study power relations, forexample lite

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 MichelFoucault, can be used to disaggregate the concept of resistance and highlight how someresistant 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 tointerpret forms of social protest in new ways, particularly in terms of the ways in which theyfacilitate or hinder ethical self-reflection and militant lives Examples are provided fromcontemporary South Africa, specifically the Occupy Umlazi protest and a township youthmovement known as ‘izikhothane’ or pexing In very different ways these protests are publicassertions 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 radicaltheorists

Key words: resistance, Foucault, counter-conducts, governmentality, protest

Introduction

The social sciences have developed a wide array of ways to study power relations, forexample literatures on compulsory and productive power, ideology and hegemony, sovereignpower and governmentality, biopower and discipline, structural and institutional power, toname but a few.1 In contrast, discussions of protest, dissent, and resistance are far lessfrequently disaggregated and systematically unpacked with anything like the same level ofdetail, and are often confined to the final ‘what is to be done?’ chapter of monographs onglobal power relations The dominant perspective on resistance, termed here a ‘resistanceapproach’, tends to see it in terms of opposition to hegemonic structures of power, and to

1 Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall (eds) Power in Global Governance (Cambridge; CUP, 2005); Roland

Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge; CUP, 2000); Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault (Oxford; Blackwell, 1996); Doerthe Rosenow, ‘Decentring global power: The merits of a Foucauldian approach to International Relations’, Global Society, 23, 4 (2009),

497-517.

seek movements which can offer a coherent and progressive counter-hegemonic challenge tothe status quo.2

In contrast, this article draws on the work of Michel Foucault to propose a ‘counter-conductsapproach’ as one way to nuance and complicate our understanding of resistance, suggestingthat it can draw attention to modes of protest which form in parallel to techniques ofgovernmentality; are deeply interpenetrated with the power relations they oppose; and whichfacilitate or enable the production and performance of alternative subjectivities throughprocesses of ethical self-reflection: ways of ‘not being like that’ This is illustrated throughtwo South African examples of social phenomena (rather than ‘movements’) which can bedescribed as protests (public performances of opposition or rejection of dominant actors,policies or norms): the Occupy Umlazi demonstration, and the youth phenomenon of pexingwhich has swept township malls These are very different movements (indeed the second isdifficult to even describe as a social movement) and both are problematic subjects ofresistance 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 whichspecific movements challenge or overturn dominant power relations As well as illustrating anumber of the broader criticisms of the global Occupy protests, Occupy Umlazi arose out adesire to prevent violence and physical confrontation, and ended with (at least to a certainextent) the reincorporation of contentious politics within formal structures of community andstate politics The practice of pexing – as we will see below – is even harder to locate within

2 Brian Doherty and Timothy Doyle, ‘Beyond Borders: Transnational Politics, Social Movements and Modern

Environmentalisms’, Environmental Politics, 15, 5 (2006), pp 697-712; Stephen Gill, ‘Toward a postmodern prince? The battle in Seattle as a moment in the new politics of globalisation’, Millennium, 29, 1 (2000), pp 131-140; Bice Maiguashca, ‘Governance and Resistance in World Politics’, Review of International Studies, 29,

1 (2003), pp 3-28; Mark Rupert, ‘Globalising Common Sense: a Marxian-Gramscian (re)vision of the politics

of governance/resistance’, Review of International Studies, 29, 1 (2003), pp 181-198.

progressive, politicised struggles for a better society, and has led veterans of the 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 thesecases in a rather different way – as forms of conduct which subvert dominant techniques forthe production of responsible subjects A counter-conducts approach is useful not just inbetter understanding such movements on their own terms (although I would argue this is alsothe case), but for comprehending wider forms of power relation in which movements areinextricably entwined In order to understand the contemporary politics of resistance it isnecessary to explore the sorts of counter-conducts which reproduce, and are themselvesproduced by, prevailing forms of governance and governmentality As such, to neglect thestudy of these counter-conducts – as many governmentality scholars have by and large done

anti-to date – is anti-to unduly diminish the broader study of governmentalities, losing much of whatmakes 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, andhighlights the different questions such an approach requires us to ask of social phenomenasuch as the South African examples The final part of the article returns to the two cases toshow how they look quite different according to a counter-conducts approach Particularattention here is given to the ethical and constitutive forms of ‘becoming’ practiced in these

3 See discussion in Carl Death, ‘Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian analytics of protest’, Social Movement Studies, 9, 3 (2010), pp 235-251 For work which does foreground resistant practices see Andrew Barry, Political Machines (London; The Athlone Press, 2001); Louisa Cadman, ‘How (not) to be governed: Foucault, critique and the political’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28, 3 (2010), pp 539-556; Arnold I Davidson, ‘In praise of counter-conduct’, History of the Human Sciences, 24, 4 (2011), pp 25-41; Louiza

Odysseos, ‘Governing Dissent in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve: “Development”, Governmentality, and

Subjectification amongst Botswana’s Bushmen’, Globalizations, 8, 4 (2011), pp 439-455; William Walters, Governmentality: Critical Encounters (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), as well as other articles in this special

issue.

cases, and the manner in which they encapsulate ways of ‘not being like that’ incontemporary South African politics.

Occupy Umlazi and Pexing Soweto

Starting with the Occupy movement immediately locates the discussion in a relativelyfamiliar context for social movement theorists and activists From 2011 movements likeOccupy, 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 intheir payments, and then took their protests to the houses of those politicians and judges whosupported the evictions.5 Such protests were criticised by the Spanish government, whoargued ‘that homes are homes, and homes are private If you want to make a politicalstatement, you should do so through the political system, not in front of people’s privatehomes’.6

In contrast to global Occupy protests, in South Africa very high levels of so-called ‘servicedelivery’ protests have rocked townships since the early 2000s, coalescing around issues likewater, sanitation, electricity, housing, crime, corruption and political accountability.7 Whilst

4 Dan Bulley, ‘Occupy Differently: Space, Community and Urban Counter-Conduct’, Global Society, this

special issue; Sam Halvorsen, ‘Taking Space: Moments of Rupture and Everyday Life in Occupy London’,

Antipode, 47, 2 (2015), pp 401-417; Chris Rossdale and Maurice Stierl, ‘Everything is Dangerous: Conduct and Counter-Conduct in the Occupy Movement’, Global Society, this special issue; Maurice Stierl, ‘“No One Is Illegal!” Resistance and the Politics of Discomfort’, Globalizations, 9, 3 (2012), pp 425-438.

5 See http://artisticactivism.org/2013/04/escrache-in-spain/ (accessed 27 August 2013).

6 Marina Prentoulis and Lasse Thomassen, ‘The legacy of the indignados’, openDemocracy, 13 August 2013.

Available at indignados (27 August 2013).

http://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/marina-prentoulis-lasse-thomassen/legacy-of-7 Richard Ballard, Adam Habib, Imraan Valodia and Elke Zuern ‘Globalization, Marginalization, and

Contemporary Social Movements in South Africa’, African Affairs, 104, 417, (2005), pp 615-634; Hannah J Dawson, ‘Patronage From Below: Political Unrest in an Informal Settlement in South Africa’, African Affairs,

113, 453 (2014), pp 518-539; Ashwin Desai, We Are The Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (New York; Monthly Review Press, 2002).

the term ‘service delivery’ protest marginalises their political and democratic significance, ithas 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’sMovement – decided to occupy a councillor’s office in Durban and grounds in protest at poorliving conditions, police violence, and unresponsive elected representatives To this degree itwas typical of the wider protests.9 However, the Umlazi Occupy movement was ratherdifferent due to a number of factors First was the invocation of the global ‘occupy!’ languageand 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 andcomprised up to 3,000 occupiers at a time’.11 Third was the fact that the initial decision tooccupy was actually in order to forestall conflict escalation and prevent the councillor’s officebeing destroyed by a group of angry protestors intent on physical violence The occupystrategy 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 andcommunity groups, and the occupation actually ended ‘following the election of a new wardcommittee – which included a 60 per cent representation of occupiers who were part of theCrisis Committee – and a disciplining of the ward councillor’.12

8 Peter Alexander, ‘Rebellion of the Poor: South Africa’s Service Delivery Protests – A Preliminary Analysis’,

Review of African Political Economy, 37, 123 (2010), pp 25-40.

Ethekwini municipal office in Umlazi, 20 July 2012 Available at http://abahlali.org/node/8972/ (accessed 20 May 2015).

10 Photos, videos and documents from the occupation are available at www.abahlali.org

11 Shauna Mottiar, ‘From “Popcorn” to “Occupy”: Protest in Durban, South Africa’, Development and Change,

44, 3 (2013), p 612 See also China Ngubane, ‘Occupying Umlazi: Hesitant Steps Towards Political Ideology in

a Durban Township’, Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies, 41, 3 (2014), pp 355-370.

12 Mottiar, op cit, p 615.

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 radicalactivists and theorists The Occupy movement is easy to write-off as fatally contradicted in itsuse of the system whilst protesting the system; more interested in words and images thanaction; and rooted in middle class and academic groups rather than workers or the poor.13 Theright-wing press have repeatedly drawn attention to the ‘infuriating’ way in which anti-capitalist protestors buy coffees or sandwiches, and UK Home Secretary Teresa Mayfamously said of the London encampment at St Paul’s in 2011: ‘These are anti-capitalistprotesters but we have seen photos of them drinking their Starbucks coffee and using theirMac computers’.14 Facile as this critique is, it is symptomatic of elements which have mademany critical theorists uncomfortable about the radical and progressive potential of Occupy.15

Although Occupy Umlazi has very clear differences to other manifestations of Occupy, forexample in terms of its relationship to local communities and the marginalised poor, it wasalso 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 contentiouspolitics 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 (andsometimes much younger) gathering for staged ‘contests’ outside shopping malls in Sowetoand 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

13 Bulley, op cit; Halvorsen, op cit.

14 BBC, ‘Theresa May says St Paul’s protesters should leave’, 4 November 2011 Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15588987 (accessed 27 August 2013).

15 Death, ‘Counter-conducts’, op cit; Halvorsen, op cit; Stierl, op cit; Graham St John, ‘Protestival: Global Days

of Action and Carnalivalized Politics in the Present’, Social Movement Studies, 7, 2 (2008), pp 167-190.

16 Patience Bambalele, ‘Izikhothane tear up R100 notes’, The Sowetan (SA), 15 November 2012; City Press,

‘Brash bling and ghetto fabulous’, City Press (SA), 6 October 2012; Simon Howell and Louise Vincent,

township culture has often had an element of the flamboyant about it),17 but what has grabbednational attention is the way in which these youth are demonstrating their wealth bydestroying the items as they show them off Shoes are burnt, clothing torn, drinks poured onthe ground, phones smashed, even money is torn apart Conspicuous consumption is nowaccompanied by conspicuous destruction.18

The object of the competition is not denial or renunciation of personal possessions or luxurygoods, but rather a demonstration of such personal wealth to the degree that the cost is noobject Yet it also displays a scrupulous attention to the price of goods, with extensivelyritualised 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 oneobserver, gangs are engaging ‘in conspicuous consumption as a form of war with the brandedproducts used as the artillery’.19 Style and stylishness are key, and intriguingly there are atleast echoes here (exaggeration to the point of parody) of older traditions of the Africanflaneur, 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 alwayschoose who you are’.21

‘“Licking the Snake” – the i’khothane and Contemporary Township Youth Identities in South Africa’, South African Review of Sociology, 45, 2 (2014), pp 60-77; Megan Jones, ‘Conspicuous Destruction, Aspiration and Motion in the South African Township’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 14, 2

(2013), pp 209-224.

17 Sarah Nuttall, ‘Stylising the Self: The Y Generation in Rosebank, Johannesburg’, Public Culture, 16, 3 (2004),

pp 430-452.

18 Jones, op cit.

19 Penelope Mkhwanazi, Conspicuous Consumption and Black Youth in Emerging Markets, unpublished MBA

dissertation (Pretoria: University of Pretoria, 2011), p 1.

20 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley; University of California Press, 2001); Nuttall, op cit;

Adebayo Williams, ‘The Postcolonial Flaneur and Other Fellow-Travellers: Conceits for a Narrative of

Redemption’, Third World Quarterly, 18, 5 (1997), pp 821-841.

21 BBC, ‘Congo sapeurs: Is the Guinness ad true to life?’ 18 January 2014 Available at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-25783245 (accessed 6 March 2014) See also Stephen Ellis

and Gerrie Ter Haar, Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa (London; Hurst,

2004), p 135.

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, astrong (at least potential) link with crime as participants do whatever they can to attain themost desirable items, and there was a widely reported suicide of a 14 year-old boy apparentlybecause 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 ofself-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 andyou can afford You want to be seen this thing means nothing to you, you will get anotherone’.22 Another revealed the degree of explicit calculation of monetary value involved, statingthat ‘we also used to pex with credit cards but over time that did not get popular because weare not too sure how much money is in there’.23 Most recognised the wasteful and dangerouselements 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; whoneed 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 attitudetoward consumption and wealth One participant noted pointedly ‘I like to pex with moneybecause it is like you are wasting the ultimate thing’, and another observed that ‘even adultspex, 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 arguesthat parodying the official ‘tendency towards excess’ in popular forms of politics is apervasive 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 thereaction of mainstream society to these bonfires of designer labels reveals a pervasive uneasewith wastefulness and ostentatious wealth within a society which also has deep-rooted strains

of asceticism.29

This ‘movement’ is not a conventional social movement, and nor is it directly political It hasbeen widely condemned from all sides of the political spectrum, and even some of itserstwhile ‘heroes’ – such as businessmen and ex-convict Kenny Kunene (AKA the sushi king:known for his ostentatious wealthy lifestyle including eating sushi off the naked bodies offemale dancers) – have distanced themselves from it As such it has much in common withmany other youth movements and the ‘moral panics’ they produce The battles between Modsand Rockers in the UK in the 1960s were ‘visible reminders of what we should not be’.30

Cohen’s famous conclusion was that ‘our society as presently structured will continue togenerate problems for some of its members – like working class adolescents – and thencondemn whatever solution these groups find’.31

Both these South African cases – the Occupy Umlazi and the pexers – present significantchallenges to those theorists and activists seeking to identify counter-hegemonic progressive

26 Deborah Posel, ‘Races to Consume: Revisiting South Africa’s History of Race, Consumption and the Struggle

for Freedom’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33, 2 (2010), pp 157-175.

27 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, op cit, p 102.

28 Achille Mbembe, ‘Aesthetics of Superfluity’, Public Culture, 16, 3 (2004), pp 373-405.

29 Carl Death, ‘Environmental Movements, Climate Change, and Consumption in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40, 6 (2014), pp 1215-1234.

30 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London; MacGibbon

and Key, 1972), p 10.

31 Cohen, op cit, p 204.

resistance movements From a ‘resistance approach’, in which it is demanded we identifyclearly whose side we are on, the response would probably be to write such movements off as

at best an insignificant distraction, and at worst as counter-revolutionary forces.32 This is clear

in the case of the pexers, but even discussion of protests by grassroots communities and theurban poor in South Africa has tended to constantly return to the failure of such groups toform a broader political movement and pose a coherent challenge to dominant powerrelations.33

Foucault, Social Movements, Counter-Conducts

An alternative line of investigation into these movements might be termed a conducts approach’, which draws its inspiration from the work of Michel Foucault Foucaulthas of course had a profound influence on the study of power, resistance and contentiouspolitics;34 yet despite this, the direct influence of Foucault’s work on contemporary socialmovement studies is more limited than one might expect For example, a number of well-regarded readers and textbooks on social movements contain barely any mention ofFoucault.35 This, I suggest, stems from the dominance of two intellectual traditions withinsocial movement theory, and the ways in which Foucault’s approach is politically andmethodologically troubling for both these traditions (and is itself an interesting aspect of thepolitics of modes of knowledge production, veridiction, and academic ‘care of the self’).First, US approaches to the study of social movements have been dominated by rationalist,positivist and behaviouralist approaches to social science.36 Indeed, modern social movement

‘counter-32 Doherty and Doyle, op cit; Gill, op cit; Maiguashca, op cit; Rupert, op cit.

33 Alexander, op cit.

34 Louise Amoore (ed.) The Global Resistance Reader (London: Routledge, 2005); Bleiker op cit; Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York; Columbia University Press, 2004); James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

35 Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction, Second Edition (Oxford; Blackwell, 2006); Vincenzo Ruggiero and Nicola Montagna (eds) Social Movements: A Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008); Doug McAdam, John D McCarthy, and Mayer N Zald (eds) Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (Cambridge: CUP, 1996); David A Snow, Sarah A Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds) The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Oxford; Blackwell, 2007).

36 McAdam et al, op cit; Snow et al, op cit.

studies as a field emerged in the post-WWII period at a time when rationalist approacheswere increasingly dominating US political science, and studying the attitudes and attributes

of large numbers of social movement participants was attractive for those using quantitativemethods and new technical capabilities At the same time, the field was defining itself inopposition to older ‘crowd psychology’ approaches which tended to regard mass mobilisation

as fundamentally irrational: a product of dislocation and anomie, driven by poorly integratedindividuals on the margins of society.37 In response many social movement theorists adoptedrational-actor models and sought to show that for certain groups, in certain political contexts,mobilisation was a logical and rewarding strategy which could produce results.38 The centralquestion in the field has thus historically been: why do people join movements? Theindividual is the unit of analysis here, and is often presented as a relatively homogenous,coherent and unified subject By questioning assumptions about rationality, subjectivity andagency, and particularly by doing so through the genealogical historical-philosophicalmethod, Foucault has been rather too methodologically troublesome to be easilyaccommodated within this field.39

The second dominant strand within social movement studies is the Marxist-Gramsciantradition, and it is this approach which is most influential in what I referred to above as the

‘resistance approach’ Of course, Marxist thought and politics was also a central intellectualinfluence on the rationalist US mainstream;40 yet in the more European tradition of socialmovement studies there has been a tendency to draw on theorists like Gramsci and toemphasise cultural framings and the potential of organic or grassroots intellectuals to contesthegemonic state-capital formations.41 The study of ‘new social movements’ – such as

37 Cohen, op cit; Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 3rd Edition (Cambridge; CUP, 2011).

38 McAdam et al, op cit.

39 Walters, Governmentality, op cit, chapter 4.

40 Tarrow, op cit.

41 Amoore, The Global Resistance Reader, op cit; Ruggiero and Montagna, op cit.

feminism and environmentalism – was intellectually significant whilst Foucault was writing,

and was clearly both influential for Foucault’s work (The History of Sexuality, for example)

and influenced by the approach of so-called ‘postmodernists’ to social science However,Foucault’s empirical focus on power relations rather than contemporary social movementsmeant he was not heavily referenced; moreover many social movement theorists of the 1960sand 1970s shared a neo-Gramscian or ‘Critical Theory’ emancipatory project.42 As a resultmuch of this tradition is committed to a theoretical binary between power and resistance Inprevious work I have argued that one of the key contributions of a counter-conducts approach

is to destabilising this binary, which is politically uncomfortable and often difficult for manysocial movement theorists and activists.43

It is clear, however, that resistance, dissent and the assertion of certain kinds of freedom playcentral theoretical roles within Foucauldian conceptions of power and governmentality Just

as social movement studies has tended to ignore Foucault, so do many accounts ofgovernmentality neglect the central role played by forms of resistance or counter-conduct.44

This neglect has some potentially worrying implications for the field Without a more seriousconsideration of resistance, governmentality analysis risks becoming little more than anadjunct or supplement to neo-Gramscian analyses of the hegemonic and increasingly all-pervasive power of modern capitalism.45 Precisely the distinctive original contribution of agovernmentality approach is the way it encourages us to see the mutually constitutive

42 Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye: An analysis of social movements, translated by Alan Duff (Cambridge: CUP, 1981).

43 Carl Death, ‘Counter-conducts in South Africa: Power, Government and Dissent at the World Summit’,

Globalizations, 8, 4 (2011), pp 425-438.

44 Examples include classic texts such as Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds) Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government (London; UCL Press, 1996); Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London; Sage, 1999); Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge; CUP, 1999).

45 E.g in Gill, op cit; Jonathan Joseph, ‘The Limits of Governmentality: Social Theory and the International’, European Journal of International Relations, 16, 2 (2010), pp 223-246; Ronnie D Lipschutz and James K Rowe Globalization, Governmentality and Global Politics: Regulation for the rest of us? (London; Routledge, 2005); Rupert, op cit.

relationship between power and freedom, government and resistance And it is the concept ofcounter-conducts which provides one of the most suitable analytical approaches for this task

Briefly, the notion of counter-conducts was elaborated most fully in the Security, Territory,

Population lecture course in 1977-78,46 and in a lecture Foucault gave in May 1978 entitled

‘What is critique?’ In this lecture he described counter-conducts as ‘the will not to begoverned thusly, like that, by these people, at this price’.47 Counter-conducts are used here todescribe resistance to processes of governmentality, as distinct from political revolts againstsovereignty or material revolts against economic exploitation In the context of discussing theearly Christian pastorate, Foucault observes that ‘if the objective of the pastorate is men’sconduct, I think equally specific movements of resistance and insubordination appeared incorrelation with this that could be called specific revolts of conduct’.48 He then exploresforms of resistance to the Christian Church in the Middle Ages, showing how movements ofasceticism, mysticism, the return to Scripture, the adoption of eschatological doctrines, andthe formation of closed holy communities mobilised ‘border-elements’ which had beenmarginalised by the early Church.49 Moreover, these border elements were later partiallyreincorporated within the official history of the Christian Church When ‘threatened by allthese movements of counter-conduct, the Church tries to take them up and adapt them for itsown ends’, leading of course to the Reformation and counter-Reformation.50 He alsodiscusses military desertion, Freemasonry, and medical dissenters as political rather thanreligious forms of counter-conduct, and in other places he reflected upon gay counter-culture,masturbation, and suicide as practices of counter-conduct.51 For Foucault such practices

46 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977 – 1978, ed M.

Senellart, tr G Burchell (Basingstoke; Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

47 Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed S Lotringer; tr L Hochroth and C Porter (Los Angeles;

Semiotext(e), 2007), p 75.

48 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op cit, p 194.

49 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op cit, pp 204-15

50 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op cit, p 215.

51 Davidson, op cit.