Rethinking resistance through and as affect

Bibliographic Data

ID2956320
AuthorsMateusz Laszczkowski (0000-0003-1271-1064, University of Warsaw, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume19
Issue4
Pages489-509
Publication date2019-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnthropological Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1463-4996 • E-ISSN: 1741-2641
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1463499618793078
OpenAlexW2979909148
LanguageEN
Citations received22
References cited43

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork with No TAV activists in Valsusa, in Alpine Italy, protesting against the planned construction of a new high-speed railway. Focusing on activists' experiences of vulnerability and police violence, the article contributes to the recent 'subjective turn' in the anthropology of resistance and contentious social movements, and responds to calls to 'de-pathologize' and 'de-exoticize' resistance. It explores ways to reconceptualize the subjective experience of resistance through a focus on affect, vulnerability and becoming. Combining neo-Spinozist theory of affects with Judith Butler's feminist perspective on agency and subjectivity, the article seeks to point a way beyond the limitations of established approaches informed by the work of Michel Foucault. Further, the article also shows how affects experienced during direct action are embedded in activists' longer biographical narratives and gradually structured, through remembering and narrativization, to provide ground for a coherent subjective sense of agency. Third, the article highlights the difference a focus on affect makes compared to the more conventional sociological focus on emotion. The notion of affect helps us to move beyond a rationalist and instrumentalist approach to emotion in social movements. The article stresses the heuristic potential of a focus on affect, but also considers methodological challenges posed by such a perspective. It suggests that the methodological toolkit available to the ethnographers of contentious politics can be enhanced by drawing on the affective capacities of researchers' own bodies in order to register the visceral intensities vital to the experience of resistance and the ongoing formation of insubordinate subjects

Affect (linguistics · Affect theory · Agency (philosophy · Contentious politics · Epistemology · Ethnography · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Social movement · Social science · Sociology · Subjectivity · Vulnerability (computing · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

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