Over the centuries the term “resistance” has changed its meaning repeatedly to include an ever expanding gamut of social phenomena, from protest movements to forms of cultural expression to practices of everyday life and so on. What remains constant is the clause of refusal, opposition or negation. Popular usage, however, usually limits the meaning of the term to the socio-political domain, as in the phrase “the masses resisted the government’s decision to go to war”. In the natural sciences “resistance” is used in the denotation of inverse relations, as in the case of electrical conductivity in physics, or immunity and self-defense in biology.
In the social sciences it usually leads one to think of social movements – collective action with some amount of planning, in opposition to some perceived injustice. But is that it? What about the child’s tantrum every other morning before leaving for school, the maid who occasionally ‘forgets’ to clean one of the rooms, the patient who falls sick right before an appointment with her psychotherapist? What about ‘insanity’ or ‘anti-social’ behaviour? What about dragging one’s feet or being plain lazy? Can these be called forms of resistance? Is resistance an action? Or can the lack of action be called resistance as well? Does it have to be intentional? Does it have to be collective? Is it progressive or can it also be regressive? Does it include only opposition, or can removing oneself from the system also be called resistance? What of transcendence? And finally what makes for successful resistance?
The above are some questions which arise when one begins to talk of resistance as a concept. An answer of any significant meaning to these questions, as this seminar hopes to formulate, will have to traverse through the apparent and discreet meanings that create social reality, through time and space, through the past and the present, through ideas and the actions, and finally through both macro and micro structures of life.
This seminar is envisaged to be about all that “resistance” implies. The following, therefore, are not themes by any means stipulated, but mere suggested lines of enquiry that one might choose to follow (or to resist).
1. Conceptualising resistance – reviewing the existing body of work/theorisation
2. Revisiting the idea of resistance – individuated resistance and collective resistance
3. Resistance - opposition as alternative
4. Postmodernism, idea of individuated resistance and denial of the systemic forms
A meaningful conceptualization of resistance, it would seem, necessitates a resistance to the construction of disciplinary prison houses. We, therefore, invite students of all disciplines to explore resistance as it gets translated in everyday life and at moments of societal rupture, in the culture, institutions and spaces of a society.
