Resistance

Resistance, The Not-Yet-Become

To end this volume with a chapter on resistance is to evoke a sense of hope, of contingency in the present. Rather than a closing down, it’s an opening up. We’re performing a different kind of ending, you and I, one that courts possibilities of different kinds of worlds, that charts geographies of care and solidarity, ethics and responsibility, and of responsiveness to each other in the broadest human and non-human ways.

This is a chapter, a coda, concerned with the not-yet-become that recognises both the pasts and the futures that exist within the present moment (Anderson, 2006). It aims to be animated by a sense of hope and a recognition of both the diverse abundance of our world and its state of unfinishedness. To talk of resistance is to acknowledge the world’s incompletion, its state of always becoming, and to seek more just, more sustainable, more ethical ways of being here in the world (Bloch, 1986: 221).

It is perhaps more than a little ironic, then, that in courting a sense of possibility and change, in trying to encapsulate the idea of new worlds, I use the word ‘resistance’ which is a word that seems to drag, that means to slow down, to stop. Certainly, through resistance, many social movements, activists and other (extra)ordinary beings going about their (extra)ordinary lives do want to slow things down, to stop them. They want to halt environmental destruction, to arrest climate change, to end injustice, to fight racism, to smash the patriarchy, to dismantle neoliberalism and so much more. These are resistance movements and acts of resistance. But they are not only about stopping or slowing down. The very act of resistance is an act that invokes and produces new possibilities, new worlds.

In this chapter, it is my aim to discuss resistance as an act of hope. I approach it as a productive act, as an act of creation. I will look to the generative potential of resistance movements and of academic work with and on them (for example, Routledge, 2003; Chatterton, 2005; Bosco, 2007; Featherstone, 2008; Brown and Pickerill, 2009; M. Wright, 2010). [Page 706]Resistance movements create new geographies, they (re)produce different ways of being different. To take such an approach is to act as a ‘theorist of possibility’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xxviii). I do not ignore the fact that resistance movements almost inevitably fail to live up to their goals. Indeed, I believe a focus on the particularity of resistance movements and a recognition of power relations within them are vitally important (Sparke, 2008). A focus on possibility, however, shifts attention from lack to abundance. It acknowledges the diverse worlds that are, right now, being produced. It attends to the ways the world is continually reshaped in more just and more sustainable ways. And, in so doing, it recognises that attending to the generative potential of resistance is itself a generative act.

My argument is that acts of resistance are always generative, always more-than-human and always relational. They are generative because acts of resistance bring into being new worlds, they produce new subjects and subjectivities and realise new geographies; they are more-than-human because non-humans, emotions, things, beings, sounds, connections and movements all help shape and actualise resistance in all its messy forms (resistance is not, unlike representations to the contrary, solely a human affair); and they are relational because one never performs these acts or creates those worlds alone. There is no world out there waiting to be acted upon, talked about, resisted against or researched, just as there are no pre-existing subjects to do the acting, talking, resisting or researching. The world is its enactment. Following Barad (2008), I stretch the notion of performance to include others beyond-the-human and to attend to the role of matter in this co-constitution. To resist is to intervene in the world’s becoming, to make it anew, and to do this involves more than just humans. This leads me, ultimately, to the ontological. To attend to the more-than and relational worlds of resistance requires ontological politics. It requires a different understanding of the nature of being.

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