Day: January 2, 2013

Three models of “resistance” — Introduction

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Introduction

Image: Elena Feliciano, Resistance

A glance at the way “resistance” has been theorized over time — in both political and extra-political contexts — might help illuminate the Left’s changing sense of its own subjective agency during the last sesquicentenary. Three models may serve as an index to its shifting historical aspirations, and capture its oscillating feelings of hopefulness and helplessness at the prospect of their attainment. Before embarking upon this exposition, however, a few facts regarding its political usages should be particularly borne in mind:

First, as Stephen Duncombe pointed out a few years ago, the concept of “resistance” is in a way inherently conservative.[1] It indicates the ability of something to maintain itself — i.e., to conserve or preserve its present state of existence — against outside influences that would otherwise change it. Resistance signifies not only defiance but also intransigence. As the editors of Upping the Anti put it a couple years back, “resistance” automatically assumes a “defensive posture.”[2] It thus appears to be politically ambivalent: it depends on what is being conserved and what is being resisted.

Secondly, “resistance” as a property can belong to any number of things, whether conscious or unconscious. The world, or nature, can “resist” our conscious attempts to transform it. Likewise society, or second nature, can prove similarly recalcitrant. Either way, this “resistance” tends to be unconscious (always in the case of the first, and usually in the case of the second). With nature, the conditions that obtain at any given moment appear objective and material. With society, by contrast, the conditions that obtain at this or that historical juncture appear quasi-objective and ideological.[3] The situation can be reversed, however. Insofar as society and the world operate unconsciously to transform the general conditions of existence, groups and individuals can consciously choose to resist these processes. Continue reading →

Wilhelm Dilthey

Three models of “resistance”

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Untitled.
Image: Photograph of Wilhelm Dilthey

1. The “resistance” of the world to humanity’s conscious attempts to transform it

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In 1890, the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey authored a remarkable essay on “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification.”  Against some of the prevailing interpretations of his day, Dilthey argued that the reality of the external world was neither an immediately given fact of consciousness nor the product of unconscious inferences linking cause to effect.  On the contrary, he asserted that the reality of the world outside of the self comes to be known to individual subjects only by encountering resistance [Widerstand] to the will.  Recognition of the external world’s reality thus arises from “[the] consciousness of voluntary motion [entering] into a relation with the experience of resistance [Widerstandserfahrung]; in this way a…distinction develops between the life of the self and something other that is independent of it.”[10]

Resistance in this model stands as the original ground on which all subsequent differentiation takes place.  Here the “I” is first separated off from a “not-I” that opposes it.  But unlike the Fichtean philosophy from which these terms are derived,[11] “I” and “not-I” for Dilthey are not distinguished (at least initially) by an act of cognition.  This cleavage is first realized, rather, through an act of volition.  In other words, the intuition of a world that exists apart from the ego does not come about through the self-positing activity of the subject in making itself an object of contemplation or thought,[12] as in Fichte.  It manifests itself through an act of the will, in the subject’s efforts to subjugate the whole of reality unto itself — thereby satisfying its every appetite.  The “pushback” it experiences in trying to enforce its will then prompts an awareness that something exists outside the self.  Thus does consciousness enter into existence, circumscribed within a world that is not of its making.  It learns the limits to its own subjective agency by encountering resistance to its sovereign will.

For Dilthey, then, this experience not only formed the basis for understanding the world as an independent and objective entity — i.e., as something separate from the self.  It was also to an equal extent the source of the ego’s self-understanding as an autonomous and subjective entity.  Dilthey went on to explain that “the difference between a ‘self’ and an ‘other’ is first experienced in impulse and resistance…,the first germ of the ego and the world and of the distinction between them.”[13]  This initial moment of separation is then necessary to lend legitimacy and significance to the network of distinctions educed from it.  “The entire meaning of the words ‘self’ and ‘other,’ ‘ego’ and ‘world,’” explained Dilthey, “and the differentiation of the self from the external world is contained in the experiences of our will and of the feelings connected with it…The core of this distinction is…the relationship of impulse and restraint of intention, of will and resistance.”[14] Continue reading →

Three models of “resistance”

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Untitled

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Image: Ferdinand Schmutzer,
Portrait of Sigmund Freud (1926)

2. The “resistance” of humanity to its own self-conscious transformation

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Go to Three models of “resistance” — 1. The “resistance” of the world to humanity’s conscious attempts to transform it

The second major historical conceptualization of “resistance” examined in this essay comes by way of psychoanalysis directly, rather than through the indirect affinity between Freud’s reality principle and Dilthey’s account of the reality of the external world.  Indeed, Freudian analysis largely hinges on the various forms of resistance the analyst encounters in trying to disembed layers of repressed experience buried in the patient’s unconscious: “[The] opposition…during psychoanalytic treatment…against our effort to transform what is unconscious into what is conscious…is what we perceive as resistance.  We…[name the] pathogenic process demonstrated by this resistance…repression.”[36]

Here the operative concept is the “resistance” — whether conscious or unconscious — of the subject (and more specifically the ego)[37] to the task of working through its own past, which has been systematically repressed.  Once again, this resistance expresses an extreme conservatism.  In part, the subject avoids revisiting its own history because it finds many of its experiences traumatic and disturbing.  But the patient is not simply afraid of its past.  It is also afraid of its future.  The subject is gripped by a primitive urge for self-preservation, and balks at the prospect that it might potentially become something other than what it already is.  Having fallen in love with the symptoms of its own unfreedom, the analysand stubbornly resists the idea of living without them.

This notion of “resistance,” I submit, corresponds to the work of figures like Karl Korsch, Georg Lukács, and above all Wilhelm Reich early in their careers.  Each of these thinkers sought to digest the legacy of the international workers’ movement in the aftermath of its defeat between 1917 and 1923.  Following the spectacular series of capitulations, conciliations, schisms, and betrayals that shook the Second International in the decades leading up to World War I, all three authors came to the conclusion that the greatest obstacle to the proletariat’s emancipation was the proletariat itself — or more precisely, its inability to “work through” its own reified forms of consciousness.  For the emancipation of the working class was to be self-emancipation.  The “resistance” thus encountered was no longer that of the world maintaining itself against the actions of humanity.  In this case, the “resistance” was instead that of humanity in preserving its present condition of unfreedom against the challenge of fulfilling its destiny. Continue reading →