Abstract
Resistance—political, physical, or philosophical—emerges in thresholds of contact where the “sides” engage, and sometimes one side gives way to the other. This study works in the thresholds of political resistance and an unsettled philosophical stance to examine a singular event in which the author’s intentional being in the protest “gave way.” It attends to two incompatible notions of subjectivity—an oriented/intentional lived subjectivity that is potentially available to, and claimed by, human experience and post-intentional, posthuman subject assemblages that are not accessible to human experience—to examine the potential of resistance for both civil disobedience and post-phenomenological qualitative inquiry.
Resistance—political, physical, or philosophical—emerges in thresholds of contact where the “sides” engage, and sometimes one side gives way to the other. Protesters stand up to police; “post” philosophers stand up to Enlightenment humanism. In this article, my thoughts move dialectically (Greene, 2007) across impenetrable thresholds of political and philosophical resistance to examine a singular event in which the author’s subjectivity (self-consciousness) gave way. I am thinking with incompatible notions of subjectivity, being, and becoming to examine the potential of resistance for civil disobedience and post-phenomenological inquiry.
Subjectivity is considered from two “incompatible” ontologies, namely, (a) an oriented/intentional lived subjectivity that is potentially available to, and claimed by, human experience (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 2009; Weiss, 2006; Young, 1980), and (b) post-intentional, posthuman subject assemblages that are not accessible to human experience even as intentional beings plug into them (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987; Clough, 2010; Lorraine, 2011; Vagle, 2014). Drawing on firsthand “experience” of a protest march on inauguration day, 2017, and video recordings viewed months after the event, I map various subject irruptions as a singular phenomenon with two coordinates: the arrivals of pre-conscious beings (when I found myself being-in-protest) and flows of unconscious choreographies (when being-in dissolved into “becoming protest”). The confluence of arrivals and flows created an undertow beneath the current of the march that stirred, pulsed, shifted, and extinguished over the course of the event. The mapping of that current moves along and across borders of subjectivities that the protest incited. The very incompatibility of these pre-conscious arrivals and unconscious flows produced a potential for writing about it.
Preview
On January 20, 2017, my friend E. and I participated in an “unpermitted” protest march in Washington, D.C., that turned violent. During the pre-march rally, I felt self-consciously out of place—a privileged, White, tenured, male, 40+ years older than the anarchist organizers chanting “1-2-3/fuck the bourgeoisie!” When the 2,000 or so protesters started marching, the energy concentrated and intensified. Somewhere on 13th Street, a trashcan rolled in front of oncoming traffic; a brick shot through a UPS storefront window. My self-consciousness had given over to the event—being protester dissipated into becoming protest. Looking back, I see this dissolution as a series of incitements that suspended self-awareness, a mile-long threshold bordering two states of consciousness (one corporeally oriented, the other not). A materiality of incitement: the smells of pepper spray and smoke; the quickening body of protesters/spectator-protesters/spectators; the sounds—above the chanting, just ahead, out of sight, calling, aligning, attuning—distant whirs of a helicopter, an eerie lack of sirens, soft drumming, the dull resonance of heavy things (dumpsters, newspaper boxes) overturned, and bricks hitting, sometimes puncturing, heavy glass. Somehow these were entangled in a shift from being to becoming, undetected at the time. What happened?
This anecdote foregrounds two ontologies and their corresponding notions of subjectivity—that of being-protester-in-the-world and that of becoming protest. The former is drawn from my own self-awareness (however, fleeting and unformed), as I found myself always already being-in-the-protest. The latter is mapped from the liminal places where human orientation frays (Latour & Hermant, 1998), and the ego dissolves into intensities that transcend and absorb it back into the (un)folding of things gathering and dispersing.
This is not a study of violent or nonviolent resistance. Nor am I a seasoned resister (this was my first act of civil disobedience since 1973!). My engagement in the march was as much being-spectator as being-protester. I write my way back (reducere) to a particular experience which was also the slipping away of experience. Conceptually, I ask, Is becoming-event thinkable in the same way being-in-event is? And can an inferred threshold, approached through the thinking hither and thither of a (non)experience, help explain how the one lead to the other? Finally, can these intentional and post-intentional perspectives-in-play generate new ways of understanding the potentiality of political (and philosophical) resistance? At the very least, might their incompatibility preserve the impossibility of a coherent account and a humility toward the claims we make about “our” experiences?
The Event
I rewind and replay moments drawn from 16 short videos shot by E. on his Zoom video recorder, presented in chronological order below. The numbers in the margin refer to specific recordings from which the anecdotes are elicited. The lack of connective text between anecdotes is intended to intensify the immediacy and flow of events.
002. “. . .and I stole this from a motherfucking Trump supporter!” shouts the youth-in-black (hood, cap, scarf, jacket, gloves, pants, boots) to a small circle of cheering comrades as he places the Trump for President/Make America Great Again flag onto the small pile of burning Trump posters. My friend E. and I are looking on. E. is in the inner ring, I am behind him in the outer ring. An old familiar anarchist chant starts up: “A.K. 47/Send the cops to piggy heaven.” I didn’t identify with it during the anti-war protests of the 1970s and do not now. Phone in hand, I begin recording. Self-conscious of my body location: the outside circle, but inside Logan Circle and a ring of White U.S. Marshal vans that had quietly materialized as the group of protesters gathered. Self-conscious of my voice: or rather, my silence, my non-joining the chant. It came as a relief when the chant turned to “No borders/No nations/Fuck deportations. . .” or the crowd pleaser, “No Trump/No KKK/No Fascist USA.” Self-conscious of my dress: camouflage, not black; carrying a transparent tote bag with snacks and water, per the rules of the Festival of Resistance, a “permitted march” scheduled for later that day. Most of the time this self-consciousness was felt as a dis-orientation on my body rather than crystallized into doubt about my age, privilege, or commitment to the march.
007. The march is on. Flanks of people—those in black mostly comprising the front phalanx—wheel through Login Circle out onto P Street, headed east*. (*I have a distinct memory of heading east on P, but this would have delivered us to 12th Street, not 13th where we ended up. My reporting is “true” to my experience, whether or not it corresponds to the “actual” course of the march.)
008. Above, gray skies hang over Victorian houses; below, black boots and Converse All Stars, but also duck boots and New Balance; ahead, black hoods, masks, the occasional black and white keffiyeh or helmet. Flags: the traditional Black Flag; the Black with the “Enclosed A” (Ⓐ anarchy is the mother of order); the anarcho-socialist Red and Black; others. Moving is relaxed, oriented to the front. The dim sounds of stadium horns and drums, the calm gray skies and chilly air are reminiscent of the annual Thanksgiving Day football contest between my high school and our arch-rivals at the (no longer standing) Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, 40 miles ahead, due east.
010. We have (somehow) turned onto 13th Street, headed down toward the Mall.
Approximately 11:00 a.m., half hour to swearing in, E. and I are discussing the risks and merits of designating schools as safe zones. I’m in the middle of saying something about working with the school board when a sound of incitement (incitement) punctuates things. (Moments after two loud metallic bangs, we walk past a Washington Times dispenser lying in the road.) The incitement stops me mid-thought. After a 7 second pause, E. picks up the conversation, gets it (me?) back on track.
011. 13th Street is littered with municipal trash cans and newspaper dispensers, like this yellow Washington Post Express branded with the Enclosed A in red spray paint. A taxi driver, inching against the grain, through debris and people, honks in syncopated solidarity (and self-preservation?) with the drumming. The crowd cheers. E. and I have stopped conversing. The sky brightens. The pace quickens, unifies. Chants syncopate (or are syncopated by) the incitements (crashing glass and metal) up ahead. No sirens.
012. An incitement close by punctuates my chanting “No Trump/No K. . .” My voice just drops out of the scene. We walk through a small barricade comprised of overturned City Paper and Apartment Showcase dispensers and trashcans. I am silent; a strident chant “Whose streets?/Our streets!” coheres in the video (I do not remember this from the event itself). People walking faster; a few running toward the front. One drags a dispenser over to an intersection, picks it up, and hurls it into the crosswalk, where someone is carrying a U.S. flag. It is not clear whether this was intended as a message for the flag bearer, a strategy to block the side street, or just adrenaline’s need to make noises like gun shots. No sirens. A half dozen U.S. flags on 4′ aluminum poles lie, gathered in the street like a bouquet of faded flowers.
015. An abandoned U.S. Marshal van, its white exterior inscribed with inverted As, sprayed in black paint. A brick smashes through the back-seat window on the driver’s side (no one is inside). Gliding away from the car, a Black Flag gently unfurls, rejoining the flow. Some marchers move swiftly forward; others slow down to take pictures.
016. We turn the corner onto I Street. NW. I hear E. saying, “Bank of America’s about to go down.” All but one of the bank’s thick windows are holes or empty frames with jagged edges. A brick sails through. People are cheering. Next door, a person with a crow bar hammers away at a Starbucks window; it yields and glass showers over his hooded head. A brick sails though the Starbucks window. Then more bricks, trash cans; some make it through, some bounce back. A woman shouts, “Don’t film us join us!” The first blast of a siren echoes down the narrow corridor of I Street from behind us; a riot squad magically appears on our left. More sirens approaching from the rear. Marchers funnel down the street; some lock arms and the crowd pushes to a trot. Someone sets off a roman candle in the direction of the police. A young woman, holding her bicycle as a shield, is walking backward; she is attempting to slow down the police line in full riot gear—a dozen on motorcycles and two dozen on foot—that entangles with her, shoving her to the side as they disentangle. She appears unhurt; a few spectators help her up and retrieve her front wheel. Behind the foot patrol are a dozen police on bicycles and a squad car barking commands over a loud speaker. Apparently, a gulf now separated “rioters” from spectators: spectators like me find ourselves standing to the side, filming; rioters are those who are running away from D.C. riot police in full pursuit.
Being a Resister, Researcher, Writer
We learned later that 212 marchers, contained and arrested in the park at the end of the block, were being charged with felony riot. This article is not a defense of violent resistance, nor an exposé on Jeff Session’s draconian tactics to stifle civil disobedience (Barry, 2017). I admire the conviction of the protesters but not their tactics. But I abhor the Trump administration’s intolerance of dissent. Mark Hand (2017) notes, for example, how law enforcement is currently emboldened to elevate the sanctions for acts of non-violent resistance to the same level as for violent acts: States and localities are already passing measures to deter or prepare for protest activities. Individuals opposed to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota faced fierce attacks from police. In reaction to these protests and other actions against the fossil fuel industry, the state of Oklahoma adopted a measure designed to suppress protests. . .Under the Oklahoma law, individuals will face a felony and a minimum $10,000 fine if a court determines they entered property intending to damage, vandalize, deface, impede or inhibit operations of the facility. The statute also targets any organization “found to be a conspirator” with the trespasser, threatening these groups with a fine “10 times” that imposed on the intruder, or as much as $1 million. (p. 1, emphasis added)
Actions, however intended, have unintended consequences. But erasing the categorical distinction between non-violent and violent resistance leaves precious little space for civil disobedience and is an affront to American freedoms protected by the First Amendment. If, as some claim (Tufekci, 2017; White, n.d.), spontaneous acts of protest are ineffective, why are they perceived as so dangerous by autocrats and law and order regimes?
Micah White, a co-founder of the Occupy Movement, considered Occupy a “constructive failure” that taught us to rethink street protests in terms of affect, not effect.
. . .the main trigger for the next revolutionary movement will be a contagious mood that spreads throughout the world and the human community. . .activists abandoning a materialistic explanation of revolution. . .and starting to think about how to spread that kind of mood, how to make people see the world in fundamentally different way. That’s about it. The future of activism is not about pressing our politicians through synchronized public spectacles.
At this moment, I don’t see how a more radically democratic society can be achieved by simply abolishing (or, for that matter, privatizing) government. And, to White’s critique, might not mass “spectacles” help generate the very contagion (affect rather than immediate effect) he proposes? I did not regret taking part in the anarchist protest, nor was I ashamed of being (at times) a spectator. But “being” is not an uncontested “fact” that stands apart from the world. Had we been slightly closer to the front, we likely would have been perceived as felons by the D.C. Police and arrested. Recording the event—something I had done in Black Lives Matter marches, envisioning myself as an active participant on the lookout for police misconduct—positioned me as a spectator by the anarchist groups, and potentially worse: a surveiller for law enforcement rather than the resistance. White (n.d.) argues that learning to use social networks to benefit social movements is one of the greatest challenges of activism. “The biggest risk is becoming spectators of our own protests” he says. Being-in-resistance harbors no neutral nor fixed positions. Both labels—protester and spectator—might categorize my behavior. But they do not begin to describe my being-in the resistance.
We arrived at Logan Circle seeking an outlet for expressing outrage and disrupting the inauguration. Yet it moved, especially at the beginning, as an inlet; pressing in on my outrage and demanding an answer, “Who am I being in this protest? Anarchist? Socialist? Spectator?” The answer escaped the question, and the escape—the giving-over—was a kind of answer. At the giving-over point, the question (my human subjectivity) no longer mattered, no longer pressed corporeally. Intentional being-in, its ambivalent orientations and projections, gave over.
My writing investigates individual beings (wittingly or otherwise) becoming group resistance. It scrutinizes an event of giving over to protest, beyond the negative confines of identity (anarchist, felon, spectator), to think the transformative possibilities of resistance. It doesn’t ask, “who we are,” but rather, “how does being give over?” It doesn’t ask if acts of civil disobedience work (effect), but seeks to know how they matter (affect). But to think the materiality of protest beyond the limits of lived human experience requires an ontological shift to posthuman becoming.
Becoming Protest
Writing to the ineffable giving-over-to-protest-event is an entanglement of thresholds: (a) experiential arrivals and dissolutions of subjectivities during the march itself; (b) “transgressive” data (Koro-Ljungberg, MacLure, & Ulmer, 2017, p. 464), 4 months after the protest, that move through memories and video replays; (c) ontologies of being and becoming in the phenomenological and posthuman analyses; and (d) hybrid writing that seeks, in turn, proximity and distance from the event (van Manen, 1990). Hopefully attuning to/with these thresholds—experiential, informational, analytical, and expressive—will bring me closer to the giving-over event that, in calendar time, took place on inauguration day, January 20, 2017.
Thinking thresholds retains a dialectical stance (Greene, 2007) across incompatible commitments to subjectivity—for example, as a lived orientation (the phenomenological) “versus” intensities that position us unconsciously (the posthumanist). Yet the aim of the analysis is not to stake out oppositional territories but to map flows and stoppages of potentiality when, as in the giving-over event, subjectivities along the borders are dramatically on the move. But what is potentiality? Iris Young (1980) thinks of it as an organic capacity, made possible by body intactness, for-the-sake-of motility. If my arm is tied up (in a sling or with ribbons and bows), it encloses my being; even when not needing that arm to complete the task, my capacity to extend is compromised. I find myself always arriving in the world in an ambivalent state, sticking out, objectified. For Young, body intactness is its potential for motility. Alternatively, Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) think potentiality as intensities (human and otherwise) that flow from self-organizing assemblages—bodies on the move, composing, decomposing, recomposing via affinities among the hordes of whirling nature/culture energy fields; neighborhoods of discursive and material attractions; bodies that are machinic rather than organic, continuously actualizing out of the wild, unconscious potential lining up and breaking free. It is this ontological becoming that “I” suspend in the epi-phenomenon I call “my experience.”
So which is it: The potentiality of my organic body constrained or extended into the protest? Or the potentiality of a protest march into which the organic body and the being-protester dissolve? These incompatible potentials entangled the walk down 13th Street, lived and replayed, theorized and written down.
Early on, at least until the first incitement, my being-in the event was lived mostly as a disorienting pre-consciousness (002). The potentiality for extending into the protest was constrained by a body out of line (Ahmed, 2006). Silent voice and restive immobility moved self-consciously inward. Space was circular, peripheral, enclosed; time was nostalgic, distant; seeing reflected (and called into being) an objectified self, seeking invisibility.
When the walk ensued (007-008), being-in extended and realigned with a forward looking, less imposing gaze. Space was parallel, oriented toward the front; temporal horizons shifted from war protests (early 1970s) to a high school football game (mid-1960s). Seeing is less inward-directed; I am noticing flags, clothing, skies, architecture. My voice enters into the event, engaging E. in a discussion of safe zones.
Phenomenologically, my being-in the (re)event, up to this point, is organic and intentional, shifting in orientations from lesser to greater motility, contacting more or less tentatively the potentiality of being a resister. The existential horizons (times and spaces) of this preconscious being-in-protest shift also, increasingly opening up movement into the event, but remaining on this-side of dissolution. They are still “my experiences,” oriented to my spatial and temporal being-in.
And then the incitement—first of many—in the middle of our discussion (010), in the middle of my utterance, calls out. Not your ordinary distraction. When I cease speaking, I don’t sputter or try to collect my thoughts. It is as if I am not aware that I have ceased speaking. Or rather I am not aware of an “I am.” Not a question of where I was: “I” was not. E. eventually took over the conversation and drew me back.
Throughout the next six videos (011-016) (spanning somewhere between 5 and 30 minutes), the incitements increase in frequency and proximity. Other things are changing too, such as the light (getting brighter), the rhythm (quickening, aligning), and the accumulation of debris in the street. Furthermore, a syncopation 1 was taking hold, aligning energies (chanting, incitements, drumming, walking gates) and objects (trash cans, newspaper dispensers, American Flags): an investment of energy in objects, objects in energy. A debris of expression, an unlawful becoming, an “unmotivated upsurge of the world” (Baldwin, 2007, p. 70). A language of fragments, a beautiful incoherence, an absurd coherence. An order of chaos—direct, intact.
What is this intactness? Surely not as a healthy body, moving gracefully from its gravity-less here-and-now? Yet it appears, as I write, as damaged space of pure potentiality. An intact, dream-like motility, free of self-consciousness, full of unidentifiable grace. Except the here-and-now has become everywhere-and-now. I (re)live the (re)event which seems out-of-the-body, disembodied, neither oriented by nor disoriented to me. Along with positionality, horizons of my-time and my-space also dissipate. A hyper-attunement leaves no room for memory, names, or a “placed” ego. It is an attunement on the move and in the move.
The “thither” intact-ness of becoming-protest connotes wholeness only insofar as energies that are continuously reformulating themselves are potentially whole. The actual flows from the potential, “. . .a process of the coming together of virtual (unconscious) parts to express something actual (conscious)” (Hendricks & Koro-Ljungberg, 2015, pp. 265-266). Life’s potentiality is intact in its wild unfoldings, even as it actualizes into things that hold for a while (like marchers and debris) and then disperse. Intact-ness of an actual-being in the event is incited to the becoming potentiality of the event.
With some momentary regressions, like when E. called me back (010), the preponderance of this interval of the march was given over to the march itself. No longer was “I” oriented to spatial or temporal horizons, nor disoriented by facialities (exterior or interior) that impeded my being-protester (and made me a spectacle). I no longer “found myself already being in the event as a _______.” No longer was time and space “my” time or space. The discontinuity (Clough, 2010) with my intentional being yielded no distinct memories nor emotions. “I” was not “there” even as my body was carried along without gravity. Motility, in sync with the march, was not my own, not tethered to my self-aware body; not here, hither to my giving way. At some point, when the sounds of sirens suppressed the sounds of incitement perhaps (016), becoming protest gave way to being-in the march as a spectator. It was a soft landing, very much like waking from a dream. There was no guilty bystander syndrome, “why didn’t I _____?” “I” was just arriving on the scene myself.
Remaining Open (and Calm)
I end this brief analysis with two implications for moving forward. The first concerns the ontological unsettling of post-phenomenological inquiry; the second, the capacity to resist fascism.
An Unsettled Phenomenology
I do not believe that thinking with intentional and post-intentional perspectives can bring us to the very pivot when being-positioned-in-the-world gives over to becoming-world. But they do get us closer. As analogy, conscious thought just before falling into a dream and psychoanalysis of that dream will never bring us to the point of giving over to sleep. The threshold is neither experience nor dream, but a non-event, a “meanwhile. . .[in which] nothing happens, and yet everything changes” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 158). The best we can do is play along the borders, but this requires a schizoid attunement to intentional and posthumanist subjectivities. Which is to say, we must constantly re-tune. Inference and the imagination take over where intuition and intentionality give way. Ontological modulation is the mode of border-dwelling between pre-conscious being and the unconscious becoming that transports and dissolves being into pure potentiality for a while. The one cannot attune to, cannot hear, the other.
For phenomenological researchers, being out of tune can be a good thing. The need to understand lived experience remains paramount, but the risk of attributing too much centricity to human subjects is also great. The slippery slide back to humanism is the phenomenologist’s continuous threat. Clough (2010) notes that “the subject’s discontinuity with itself, a discontinuity of the subject’s conscious experience with the non-intentionality of emotion and affect. . .returned critical theory and cultural criticism to bodily matter” (p. 206). Nevertheless, the humanist tendency is strong. Clough points out how “critics and theorists who turned to affect often focused on the circuit from affect to emotion, ending up with subjectively felt states of emotion. . .” (p. 207). Transcendent humanism seems hard-wired to thought; ego dwells in “my” grammar; words (protester, spectator, felon; experience, voice, identity) are ever ready to privilege discursive agency over material agency. The human-centric “ownership” of “my” lived experience in the protest does not jibe with the unconscious, unintentional potentiality that overwhelmed and transcended it. Thus, the posthumanist checks and balances produce an ever-shifting, unsettled account of experience; a posthumanist resistance might save phenomenology rather than undo it.
Why save phenomenology? Because human experience—non-transcending, partially determined performance that it is—still matters. Saevi and Foran (2012), for example, warn, Today’s culture is forgetting the sovereignty of the subject in the homogenizing process of globalization. This forgetting of the subject, the person, the human being, the child, as the basis of experience and memory is not only a crisis for culture, but is. . .an educational crisis. We wish to raise. . .awareness . . . by asking once again to see the child. (p. 50)
Phenomenology helps us evoke the experiences of others and see their potential intactness. It illuminates our always already oriented bodies and the threads that bind (and blind) us to the world. It humanizes the world by illuminating our existential common ground. And here it goes too far—the world does not belong to us. The events that host our experiences are not ours either; we are given over to them.
The world is not a human object; it is not our world. Why do we assume possession of it? Marx (1974) suggests that [p]rivate property made us so stupid and one sided that an object is only ours when we have it. . .In the place of all physical and mental senses there has come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, into the sense of having. . .The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object: an object made for man by man. The senses have become directly in their practice theoreticians. (p. 162; in Berlant, 2010)
Yet surely, on some levels, our actual experiences are uniquely “ours.” The posthumanist critique can work not to erase human-centric experiences so much as to expose their true nature as epi-phenomena—that is, as fictions whereby moments of consciousness plateau out of material entanglements as if constituting the base condition of “our” existence.
Thus, an unsettled, post-phenomenology doesn’t deny lived experience; it merely puts it in its place. Experience and being are not awakenings as if from a long transcendent sleep; they are performances emerging from autonomous intensities that flow through the materiality of the world. Yet as fictions, they matter too. As Butler (2015) argues, “susceptibility [to the flow of intensities] alone does not explain passionate attachment or falling in love, a sense of betrayal or abandonment” (p. 7). Now the actor is possessed by the event, emotions follow affect: “. . .being touched first animates the sentient subject” (p. 7). “The task is to think of being acted on and acting as simultaneous and not only as sequence” (Butler, 2015, p. 6).
A schizoid phenomenology attunes to human attachments and the material intensities that perform and transcend them. The very incompatibility of juxtaposed ontologies is generative: Out of resistance, potential.
The Capacity to Resist
In 2014, the Obama Administration set up a new Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) grant program, a project intended to strengthen relationships between community groups and U.S. counter-terrorism agencies by, among other things, assisting communities with the early detection of troubled youth. The project targeted all forms of terrorist groups—foreign and domestic—including militia-based hate groups. The CVE was criticized from the start for potentially co-opting communities into their own self-surveillance. But today, the Trump Administration is redefining the worst aspects of the CVE, redirecting its focus exclusively on radical Islamic groups and changing its name to “Countering Islamic Extremism” or “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism.” The program “would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States” (Ainsley, Volz, & Cooke, 2017, p. 1).
The current administration is turning a blind-eye to acts of violence from the extreme right while suppressing non-violent civil disobedience among indigenous groups (Hand, 2017). For those on the political left, the need for resistance is acute, yet the penalties for resisting are growing severe. The day after the election, historian Timothy Snyder, recalling the critical early days of the Nazi Socialist Party before its fruition in the Third Reich, issued “20 Lessons from the 20th Century on How to Survive in Trump’s America.” Here is the first lesson: Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom. (Snyder, 2016, p. 1)
Where do non-violent resistance movements go from here? I believe we should remain open to their potential to affect change. The fact that resistance is already imposed upon us from above leaves us no choice but to resist the normalcy of fascism at every step. For better and worse, acts of civil disobedience incite us. Incitement—the thing that most distinguished the anarchist march from the permitted marches later that day and the massive Women’s March the following day—calls human subjects not to identify but to dissolve. Resistance is unlawful and dangerous; its affect intoxicates. But being’s giving over, par-adoxically, amplifies becoming’s capacity to resist. Well-disciplined, non-violent resistance transforms us from being subjects to becoming “the offspring of one’s events,” so that, in giving over to a righteous resistance, “we might become worthy of what happens to us” (Deleuze, 1990, pp. 149-150, in Colebrook, 2002, p. 35).
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.