The alt is to dismantle regimes of control through direct action, allowing for open resistance allowing true liberation.

Since sovereign power is about claiming the monopoly to violently or forcefully repress certain behaviour and/or command other behaviour, resistance becomes a matter of breaking such commands or repressions; that is, doing what is illegal or doing things for deviant interests and circumventing, undermining the sovereignty of power centres. Individuals, smaller groups or larger collectives in the form of organizations or popular movements can do this as a peaceful and disobedient challenge or with competing violence, as in, e.g., Tunisia and Syria, 2011. Sovereign power is a form of power that demands absolute obedience and therefore the resistance that develops is undermining these values, institutions and representatives. Resistance is, in a corresponding way, typically openly defiant and challenges through rebellions, strikes, boycotts, disobedience and political revolutions, by overthrowing kings, governments and regimes, with the attempt of ever more clever applications of violence, counter-power and strategies of power play. This might, however, not only be an open challenge of laws or rules of the sovereign, but it can also be done in hidden or disguised ways in which the laws or rules do not, in practice, influence behaviour – or only influence behaviour when costly and intensive surveillance and control is possible. This kind of hidden resistance has been studied by Scott (1989, 1990), and among the examples are the thousands of soldiers that silently and individually deserted from the Confederation army, and as such, according to Scott, contributed to the defeat of the Southern states in the US Civil War. Thus, sovereign power will be countered by resistance that is claiming a different sovereignty that undermines the monopoly of the king, or that defies the pressure to obey and to subordinate to the sword. This resistance needs to transform, manage, undermine or in other ways challenge key mechanisms of power: commands, prohibitions, punishments, monopoly of violence, fear, obedience habits, status symbols, claims of legitimacy or legality or sovereignty. Resistance will succeed when this sovereign power is either: (I) publicly challenged in a sustained way by key sectors/groups in society of which the de facto sovereignty depend; or (II) so effectively undermined in real behaviour that sovereignty becomes non-effective due to widespread hidden/disguised non-compliance with the rules; or (III) the capacity for and monopoly of violence is effectively under- mined by challenging and competing armed groups that at least in certain geographic areas limits the control of sovereign power centres. These forms of resistance have already been extensively explored and discussed within studies of revolution, social movements and terrorism. Therefore, we will not go into the details of resistance against sovereign power in this article. However, the same cannot be said of biopower or disciplinary power; here resistance is not so clear and there has been a lack of academic research in this area. Resistance to disciplinary power The power of discipline trains and controls individuals through institutions and scientific discourses while simultaneously punishing, pedagogically, in proportion to the violations, and it mainly builds up, trains and forms. Here we are given a programme of how to do things, and people are then monitored, trained and exam- ined, in order to make improvement, self-control and more effective use of force possible. Power is interested in the small details: the description of every movement of the body, the scientific study of behaviour and reconstruction of bodies, and ways to do things. Here technique and new improvements of organisation and skills are at the centre. And, importantly, improvement is rewarded. Here the carrot-and-stick approach is used in a measured and predictable way. The goal is to get individuals to keep themselves under surveillance, discipline themselves and train themselves; but this is done through the values and goals that reflect the inter- ests of other and not the individual. Power transforms a person into a tool for other interests, and a tool that is increasing its productivity and effectiveness. It creates new subjects. Since disciplinary power is about training, examination, functional organisation of space, time tables, detailed surveillance and study – resistance to discipline will be about either openly refusing to participate in the construction of new subjectiv- ity/capacities/skills/organisations, or the de facto transformation of such social con- struction into something else – something not useful for power interests. The power of discipline is met by forms of resistance that challenge through avoiding, rearticu- lating discourses and by destabilising the institutional control of behaviour. Here we find other types of more ‘everyday resistance’ and discursive forms of chal- lenges, which might be hidden or disguised and are not typically open. As Scott (1989, 1990) has outlined, resistance might then take on practices such as, e.g., foot-dragging, escape, sarcasm, passivity, misunderstandings, disloyalty, slander, avoidance or theft. The open method of challenge is hard to sustain once discipline is a dominant feature of society and when institutional correction systems are in place for those who do not conform. Some individuals will sometimes deviate from the standards and norms of disci- pline, but will simultaneously contribute to the accumulation of knowledge about deviance, and thus contribute to the development of new disciplinary techniques. Sometimes such deviant persons are collected in certain institutions such as mental Journal of Political Power 115 hospitals, poverty service centres, prisons or similar behavioural correction facilities. Escape from discipline might still be possible through other means, such as the following: retreating into one’s own mental world; by showing outward compliance while maintaining inner aggression towards the values and norms of discipline; and by relocating to a physical retreat or some kind of non-society wilderness area or refuge, where a different life is possible (such as the ‘mocambo’ or ‘quilombo’ societies created by escaped slaves in Brazil). However, all of us will grow up within these ‘truth regimes’, and most people will have to, in most of their life and activities, participate in the disciplinary project in a society that is organ- ised according to the techniques of discipline. When people do this, discipline will constantly reconstruct their behaviour and discursive practices along with their sub- jectivity, which makes them what they are throughout the processes in which they participate. Thus, resistance will be possible throughout the whole process, in the application of each training moment and in each new behavioural rule or discursive norm. For example, negotiating one’s relationship to allocated punishments and rewards might undermine the function of discipline (Lilja 2008). Parts of the non- violent peace movement, for instance, assign high status and rewards to those who go to jail for what is perceived as emancipatory activism (Nepstad and Vinthagen 2008). Thus, to be punished by the state suddenly turns out as a reward. To change the punishment–reward relations, which we are under the authority of, can be seen as one way of resisting disciplinary power, as outlined by Foucault. A key way in which resistance towards discipline is possible in a Foucaultian perspective, according to Butler, is through reiteration, rearticulation or repetition of the dominant discourse with a slightly different meaning. Foucault speaks about this as reversed discourses (Foucault 1981, p. 101; Foucault in Butler 1995, p. 236), which are used to describe how subalterns involve the categories and vocabularies of the dominating force or superior norm, precisely in order to contest it (Butler 1995 p. 236). The idea is to use the possibility of a repetition that repeats against its origin (Butler 1997, p. 93). Foucault writes about the formation of a ‘reverse’ discourse, stating that: ‘homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified’ (Foucault 1981, p. 101). This reverse discourse is then parasitic on the ‘dominant discourse’ and resistance appears as the effect of power, as a part of power itself (Butler 1995, p. 237). The above exemplifies resistance against disciplinary power, by negotiating the very norm that composes the optimum for the subjectification. The fact that meaning can never be fixed becomes a powerful instrument to chal- lenge, change or contest dominant delimiting discourses, even if the effects of such resistance are conditioned on historical and discursive circumstances (Mills 2003). However, there are also other ways in which disciplinary power and its different ‘truths’ can be contested. For example, resistance against disciplinary power can be explored through Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, which refers to how the colonised becomes like the coloniser, but not yet the same. The coloniser experiences menace as Otherness slides into sameness, and the coloniser sees traces of himself in the colonised. This challenges the ‘fixed’ knowledge about who is the coloniser and who is the colonised. Authority’s near duplication composes a powerful representa- tion, and mimicry becomes a strategy to disturb the constructed differences on which authority is based. As the Other disciplines him/herself towards the norm, the dichotomy of Otherness and Selfness, us and them, becomes dissolved (Bhabha 1984, pp. 125–133, Bhabha in Childs and Williams 1997, pp. 129–133, Lilja 2008) Mimicry becomes interesting from a resistance perspective as mimicry of domi- nant behaviour, values, discourse or other normative rules will necessarily always be done with some slight difference – even when one tries hard to directly copy the dominant behaviour in the exact same manner. In real social life at least, the copy is always different to some degree, yet possibly very similar to the original. This means that behaviours enacted in line with the dominant logic of existing soci- ety will be slightly or fundamentally different than the original logic. This can be due to mistakes, misunderstandings and differences in circumstances of its applica- tion, or simply the impossibility of being able to repeat it perfectly. Therefore, change of discourse happens through the same process that reproduces it, by (different) rearticulation or (changed) meaning reproduction. As in the above example of mimicry, resisting disciplinary processes is often connected to the rewriting of one’s self. This topic was brought up by Foucault at Berkeley University in 1980: If one wants to analyze the genealogy of the subject in Western societies, one has to take into account not only the techniques of domination but also techniques of the self. Let’s say one has to take into account the interaction between those two types of techniques, the point where the technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon himself. (Foucault in Habermas 1994, p. 86) In his later work, Foucault (1988a, 1988b), therefore, reconsidered his theorising by making reference to what he called ‘techniques of the self’ or ‘care of the self’. Foucault analyses – from a historical investigation of practices developed from Greece, Rome and onwards in the western tradition – how people, especially the higher strata in society, try to modify themselves according to standards, values and norms in society. In brief, the techniques of the self involve the practices through which individuals inhabit subject positions and transform existing subjec- tivities. According to Foucault, these practices consist of such things as diaries or other ‘narratives of the self’ (Foucault 1988b, Foucault in Nixon 1997 p. 322). It is a matter of applying diaries, confessions, therapy, diet, daily training schedules, etc. in a personalised way that gives another story of who you are and that attempts to reconstruct habits and abilities (Foucault 1988b, Burkitt 2002). Foucault was paying special interest to the Stoic techniques, among them the askèsis, a ‘training in thought and training in reality’ (1988b, p. 37), or a ‘kind of permanent self-exami- nation ... [with the] meditation on death [as] the culmination of all these exercises’ (p. 38). Thus, the technologies of self are in this sense an example of how individ- uals try to transform themselves and can be understood as a resistance to the kind of subjectivity they are given by power relations (Burkitt 2002, Thompson 2003, Lloyd 2012). In this care of themselves the technologies are the same as applied by discipline, but they are reappropriated and utilised for other ends in striving towards ‘autonomy’ (Allen 2011). To Amy Allen ‘autonomy’ is ‘the twin capacities to reflect critically upon the power-knowledge relations that have constituted one’s subjectivity and to engage in practices of self-transformation’ (2011, p. 44). And ‘since there is no outside to power, freedom always involves strategically reworking the power relations to which we are subjected’ (p. 51). Many researchers argue that self-reflection, the individual portraying of an image of oneself, proceeds through narratives in a process of making connections, developing a plot and giving meaning to different events. I may, for example, string events together where I can be seen as independent. By telling only these indepen- dent stories, I construct myself as an independent individual. Yet, perhaps there are other stories that can also be told about the same events and stories, which I leave out since they indicate a conflicting plot – not one in line with the one I wish to promote (Stern 2001, Lenz Taguchi 2004, p. 209). We construct ourselves through the selection of different subject positions and the knitting together of certain mem- ories, which are given meaning by the discourses of society. Medina (2011) suggests that ‘counter-memory’ or ‘counter-history’ is a Foucaultian resistance form that ‘puts practices of remembering and forgetting in the context of power relations, focusing not only on what is remembered and for- gotten, but how, by whom, and with what effects’ (p. 9). Such resistance makes ‘epistemic insurrection’ possible, in which subjugated knowledge communities uti- lise their marginalisation and made invisibility ‘to destabilize the epistemic status quo’ (p. 11). Its technique is to resist ‘the “omissions” and distortions of official histories, returning to lost voices and forgotten experiences, relating to the past from the perspective of the present in an alternative (out-of-the-mainstream) way’ (p. 13). If such resistance is able to create ‘disunity effects’, it might ‘destabilize a normative order by introducing a counter-perspective that resists and invalidates the normative expectations of the imposed dominant ideology’ (p. 15). It then ‘requires a “return to the origin” ... revisiting the texts ... “the primary points of reference” of the practice, and developing a new way of reading them’ (p. 16). As such, coun- ter-history or epistemic insurrection involves ‘the constant epistemic friction of knowledges from below ... in the mutual contestation of differently normatively structured knowledges which interrogates epistemic exclusions, disqualifications, and hegemonies’ (p. 21). However, even though the narrator, in this view, becomes more of an agent and is involved in the making of her or his ‘self’, the subject is still formed by the dis- courses of their surroundings. Since power not only develops in relation to resis- tance, but resistance utilises power techniques, it sometimes becomes difficult to determine what is what. Lois McNay (2009) analyses the neoliberal focus on ‘self as enterprise’ and argues that ‘the experimental process of self-formation that this idea revolves around is uncomfortably close in structure to governance through individualization’ (p. 57). Sean Nixon writes: This represents a shift from an attention to the regulating and disciplining of the sub- ject to a more expanded formulation of agency. ‘Techniques of the self’ are still – it is important to underline – conducted within fields of power-knowledge and within the domains of a discrete number of discourses. They suggest, though, the putting into practice of discursive subject-positions in ways, which emphasize the dynamic nature of this process. (Nixon 1997, p. 322) The question then becomes how it becomes possible to see what is what, if a cer- tain ‘technology of self’ is creating power and/or resistance. Thompson (2003) argues that Foucault outlines a practice of self-constitution (formation, governance, knowledge and rule), not self-regulation (administration and ‘infatuation’). Self-formation is not self-fabrication. To produce something is to impose static form upon recalcitrant matter, to stamp being upon becoming. To be cared for rather than to care for one’s self is to live simply under the sway of programs and procedures defined by this logic. (Thompson 2003, p. 130) Thus, although prevailing interpretations maintain self-techniques are power mecha- nisms (e.g. McKinlay and Starkey 1998, Rose 1999), we suggest that people also are able to modify themselves differently and/or resist the processes of internalising power through alternative modes of self-making. Mohandas Gandhi’s ‘ascetic activ- ism’ is one such example (Howard 2013). Since the independence of India was understood by Gandhi as ‘self-rule’, there was a close connection made between the power of asceticism and the power of the independence movement: ‘Gandhi rit- ualized every aspect of his life, which became a testament of his commitment to the cause; it was his personal performance of ritual that was to be imitated’ in a way in which he ‘embodied symbols that communicated his political strategy – a strategy based on simplicity, self-sacrifice, and self-reliance’ (Howard 2013, pp. 77, 219). In his unique way of reinterpreting and applying the disciplines of asceticism as instruments for the goals of politics, he utilised the traditionally religious, inner- worldly and individual tradition of asceticism and expanded its scope to political, outer-worldly and collective activism (Howard 2013, p. 215). Without clearly belonging to any one of these traditional categories he transformed both traditions into his original kind of ‘ascetic activism’. There are different conditions under which alternative processes of self-making are made possible. For example, Wimal Dissanayake views the human agent as the locus from which action can be initiated to either reconfirm or resist discursive bur- den. The term agent thus ‘marks out a form of subjectivity where, by virtue of the contradictions and disturbances in and among subject-positions, the possibility of resistance to the ideological (that is, discursive) pressure is allowed for’ (Dissanayake 1996, p. x). In addition, it is more likely that more people would adopt other variations of identity if the passing of punishments and rewards would work differently or disappear. The hegemonic status of ranked or stereotyped images of identity could thus be negotiated through changing an individual relation to the grading systems (Lilja 2008). Moreover, there are different practices, which make possible alternative modes of self-making. For example, different strategies of hybridity are often applied to resist hegemonic identity positions. Resistance to biopower As stated above, biopower, or the governance of life/society, is not focusing on individuals and their training in institutions of control. Biopower is interested in the body of a population (a nation, members of an organisation, etc.) and its ‘health’ and ‘effectiveness’ as a totality. Biopower is interested in steering the general behaviour, stimulating the tendencies and governing of how life is reproduced, and how productive society is. It is a power that is trying to improve the quality of life of its members, their cooperative ability as well as other qualities of the population. The biopolitical form of power is about regulation of social life, social engineering, management or governmentality in which health, longevity, energy or vitality, sta- bility and growth of social life is in focus. Rabinow and Rose (2006) claim that biopower must include three elements: (1) truth discourses about the vital character of human beings (e.g. health science), (2) specific strategies for intervention upon the health and life of a population (e.g. health politics), (3) conditions of subjectifi- cation that facilitate individuals’ work on themselves according to the truth dis- course on health and life (e.g. health movements). A clear example in history of this kind of power is the welfare state – a state that puts its energy and focus on keeping the welfare of its citizens as its priority. Biopower uses statistics, predict- ability calculations and surveillance of patterns within the social body in order to assess how to act and manage the different changes in an optimal way. The goal is to increase evolutionary processes, and to build on biology and medicine in order to maximise the output and abilities of the population. This became a form of power of the modern state during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but was later optimised in the welfare state. Biopower is a gardening and cultivating form of power; one that uses surveil- lance, but is able to only react when some behaviour gets out of hand. It is a form of power that will be able to accept limited deviant behaviour, as risk management, if it is possible to use it for its own purpose; for example, making dissent a sign of a ‘free’ society. It is not concerned with the details of individual behaviour but the overall productivity, the effectiveness of combinations and use of tendencies, and of statistics. It is a power that creates, as Deleuze says, a ‘society of control’ and where ‘total information awareness’ makes it possible to predict behaviour, count on statistical probability and make certain concerted investments and assemblage of creative interventions possible even before things are getting bad, but only when that is necessary. What then are the characteristics, techniques, means, sites and illustrating exam- ples of resistance to biopower? Resistance to biopower and governance of life/soci- ety engages with the main techniques of biopower: the managing of large populations, of life and society, and the managing of huge information databases, surveillance techniques and statistical management. Since biopower is about creat- ing the infrastructure of population growth, increased production effectiveness through training and education of a population – resistance has to be about under- mining this exercise of power. However, biopower is an advanced form of power and poses particular challenges upon resistance. Building on Foucault, Dean (2010) has developed an ‘analytics of government’ and their ‘governmentality’ (rationalities, technologies, etc.), in which ‘government’ is understood as ‘conduct of conduct’ (pp. 17–18). This is, like biopower, some- thing applied in the whole fabric of society, by the state, as well as by corporations and civil society actors. Thus, a subset is the ‘government of the self, as a form of action of the “self on self”’ (p. 20). This approach opens up space for resistance, according to Dean, basically as ‘counter-conducts’ (p. 21). Foucault explains that ‘counter-conduct’ is a matter of conducts done differently, by other leaders (conducteurs), with other objectives, or procedures/methods (Foucault 2009, pp. 194–195). Examples of such ‘counter-conduct’ which Foucault analyses are Protestantism and peasant revolts at the time of reformation. Biopower is ‘pastoral’ in the sense that is seems positive and constructive; it even might feel like love and care. This is seen in the modern state, which in some senses, governs individuals and organises them as members of a population in the same way as a shepherd who cares for his flock. This power, Foucault argues, can be related to the Christian ideas, which relate Christ both to the notion of a ‘good shepherd’ and the ‘pastoral responsibilities’ of priests (Sharp et al. 2000, p. 17). Here, we have the social engineer that takes care of the subordinate population as a gardener takes care of the garden or the farmer takes care of the cattle, with knowl- edge, planning and nurturing, all in order to make increased exploitation possible and all within the purpose of power interests. Still, there is no sovereign gardener/ priest/farmer, but multiple techniques that are spread throughout society and exist in state institutions, corporations or cultural institutions that care for the nation or its population. The techniques of biopower might also be cultivated within groups and organisations normally associated with resistance, as for example in populist and anti-immigration movements that cultivate certain new or radical ideals and standards of how to strengthen and ‘develop’ the ‘nation’. Thus, biopower not only seems positive, it mobilises the whole society. Biopower is, therefore, a high stage of power production, but we also see a corresponding biopolitical production of resistance, a gathering of the strengths, abilities and practices of the masses, of a population in resistance to this biopower. The creation of a resistance culture is parallel to biopower and governmentality. Resistance cultures are without central coordination or planning. Nevertheless, they have certain logics, forms and orientations that evolve from the communication and mutual knowledge of, or experiences from, similar power conditions. It is, similarly to biopower, not coordinated by a (would-be sovereign) resistance leader/centre, but is a multitudinous and heterogeneous diffusion of resistance techniques. These are spread from the pragmatic experience of necessary self-defence, creation of new space, cultivation of an ‘other’ and different ideals and values among individuals, subcultures and groups that do not subscribe to (all of) the ideals of dominant discourse. The beginning of full-blown resistance culture that undermines biopower might be all the kind of biopolitical practices in which people question certain aspects of control over their lives and the conduct of their conduct. Here, we see how the administration technology of a population’s everyday life is challenged, undermined or replaced by a large segment of society which instead uses alternative and self- governed practices. Many different forms of resistance techniques are utilised although, to our knowledge, no systematic investigation from a biopolitical perspective has been done so far; we want to indicate some of the resistance going on. To begin with, we find the individual self-modification technologies discussed in connection with resistance to discipline, which might spread and become part of a larger popular mobilization, as e.g. the exercises adopted by the millions within Falun Gong in China. As argued earlier, sometimes these technologies become part of an exercise of power, as when the cultivation of the self becomes a part of a neoliberal ‘enterprise’. However, some resistance communities try to avoid integration with biopower through the creation of autonomous conditions for alternative self-making projects: by fighting for the option to ‘leave’ society (e.g. the World Freeman Society which promotes the ‘Freeman on the land’), creating radically other forms of societies (e.g. ‘utopian’ or ‘intentional’ communities and Gandhian Ashrams) or developing alternative institutions that nurture life differently (e.g. home schooling and alternative medicine). In the ‘Freetown Christiania’ (1971) in the middle of Copenhagen ‘Christianites’ have successfully refused to provide statistics to the Danish state and maintained their collective property form despite years of attempts to privatise (Thörn et al. 2011, p. 7, 81). A different example is the knowledge commons in which subjugated knowledge is freely shared in an attempt to undermine corporate dominance through intellectual property rights, e.g. the free software of the GNU project or the ‘seed-banks’ that promote biodiversity. In these areas there are obviously many examples of initiatives and ongoing ‘counter-con- duct’, but it is less clear in what sense there are any options or ongoing practices that undermine biopower technologies and their effective application, especially since a key feature of contemporary neoliberal governance is (market structured) self-activities. Among the examples are perhaps those who refuse to participate in national surveys or parents who for religious or health reasons refuse to allow their children to participate in vaccination programmes (as e.g. some Anthroposophists in Järna, Sweden), or those who sabotage genetically modified organisms (GMO), such as activists in the UK acting in protection suites and digging up test fields. Resistance against biopower is then resistance that tries to avoid the managing of population policies and institutions by acting differently, in subcultures, and by cultivating a different set of values, practices and institutions. Also, this resistance will take on the challenge and develop non-productive forms of life and biological existence – forms of life that are not useful for the power regime. Furthermore, it will try to undermine social engineering of the population. Since biopower is not interested in the individual or detail per se and is not interested in complete subordination or everyone’s compliance – but general subordination, and increased tendencies and productivity of larger numbers – what individuals do may appear of little interest. If a few people opt out, move to the countryside, make their own life and refuse to cooperate with the dominant dis- course or biopower regime, it is not threatening the production of biopower. A few differing ‘others’ might even strengthen the effects of various biopolitical strategies. It is, however, threatening for biopower if its total information awareness is under- mined (e.g. through whistle-blowers such as Wikileaks or Snowden), or its ability to direct, organise and cultivate population behaviour in general is threatened.