Scott: the weapons of the weak, the infrapolitics of hidden transcripts 48

Anthropologist James C. Scott starts off from the fact “that most subordinate classes throughout most of history have rarely been afforded the luxury of open, organized, political activity.”³ Open rebellions, which usually have a high cost in the lives of workers and peasants, are short-lived . Most of the time the struggle against the system is carried on using little known paths that traverse the terrain of infrapolitics, which “is essentially the strategic form that the resistance of subjects must assume under conditions of great peril.”⁴ Scott also defines infrapolitics as the

“insubordination of the powerless”⁵ that encompasses a “wide variety of low-profile forms of resistance that dare not speak in their own name.”⁶ Infrapolitics is quite elusive because it “is the silent partner of a loud form of public resistance.”⁷ It is therefore very difficult to determine where submission ends and resistance begins, “as the circumstances lead many of the poor to clothe

1 Foucault, 2001, p.117.

2 Foucault, 2011, p.218.

3 Scott, 1985, p.XV.

4 Scott, 1990, p.199.

5 Scott, 1990, p.XIII.

6 Scott, 1990, p.19.

7 Scott, 1990, p.199.

their resistance in the public language of conformity.”¹ Since infrapolitics includes a large part of the cultural and structural support for the most visible political actions on which our attention is focused,² studying it will help us to move beyond epiphenomena and to glimpse as well the more open and belligerent rebellions of the future.³ Researchers who fail to observe carefully what is happening here or who lack appropriate conceptual instruments will run the risk of inferring that the dominated are a political nonentity. This is the position of those who let the experience of everyday rebellion go to waste. Countering this wastefulness, Scott prefers to dedicate his study to

“the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them.”⁴ Their regular weapons are “foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on.”⁵ Some of these forms have been frequently used by the lumpen-proletariat that Marx despised. Such methods of struggle require little or no coordination; they rely on implicit understandings and informal networks; they often take the form of individual self-help and avoid direct confrontation with authority.

As an example of earlier interest in these forms of struggle, Scott cites the focus on the millenarian movements, whose defiant character is recognized by Marc Bloch. Such forms of resistance are not like those waged against slavery by great heroes like Nat Turner or John Brown.

They do not appear in the headlines of newspapers. Rather, they are like the millions of polyps that create a coral reef: “the multiple acts of peasant insubordination and evasion create political and economic barrier reefs of their own.”⁶ Their activity is rhyzomic, similar to the activity that Castells describes in the social movements that make use of communications media as tools.⁷ Perhaps the internet has accelerated and made more evident to middle-class social strata various forms of rebellion that formerly relied on more rudimentary and less visible devices. Old-fashioned rumors and scandalous gossip nowadays parade around as Tweets.

For Scott class resistance “includes any act(s) by member(s) of a subordinate class that is or are intended either to mitigate or deny claims (for example, rents, taxes, prestige) made on that class by superordinate classes (for example, landlords, large farmers, the state) or to advance its

1 Scott, 1985, p.289.

2 Scott, 1990, p.184.

3 Scott, 1990, p.19.

4 Scott, 1985, p.XVI.

5 Scott, 1985, p.XVI.

6 Scott, 1985, p.XVII.

7 Castells, 2012, p.140.

own claims (for example, work, land, charity, respect) vis-a-vis those superordinate classes.”¹ He considers this definition to have the advantage of focusing on the intentions of the dominated and not on their achievements. He finds, however, that discerning a clear and consistent intention is complicated by the fact that a theft, a work slowdown, or a desertion from an army led by a despot can have immediate benefits that sully the purity of intention required of rebels. What is worse, even the fall of the czarist regime—the result not of dubious everyday resistance but of a famous revolution waged by identifiable protagonists—could be devalued since it resulted from massive desertions from the army. That is why Scott states: “there is no necessary relationship between the banality of the act of self-preservation and of family obligations, on the one hand, and the banality of the consequences of such acts, on the other.” ² Therefore, “to ignore the self-interested element in peasant resistance is to ignore the determinate context not only of peasant politics, but of most lower-class politics.

It is precisely the fusion of self-interest and resistance that is the vital force animating the resistance of peasants and proletarians.”³ Nevertheless, Scott also considers the consequences to be problematic: strikes called to increase wages can bring about job-eliminating mechanization, revolutions can lead to dictatorships, etc.⁴ Intentions and results can serve the purpose of comparative analysis but not as criteria for determining what constitutes resistance. The principal criterion is that these are not rare and isolated acts but fit within a consistent pattern in which personal need and defiance of the system are intertwined: “The intrinsic nature and, in one sense, the ‘beauty’ of much peasant resistance is that it often confers immediate and concrete advantages, while at the same time denying resources to the appropriating classes, and that it requires little or no manifest organization. The stubbornness and force of such resistance flow directly from the fact that it is so firmly rooted in the shared material struggle experienced by a class.”⁵

As we have seen, one of the principal weapons of the weak is their discourse, but it is discourse that rarely allows itself to be openly insubordinate. Rather, it seeks ways to disguise itself so as to avoid penalization by the dominators. Scott speaks of public and hidden transcripts.

The former are destined for onstage performance while the latter are recited backstage or

1 Scott, 1985, p.290.

2 Scott, 1985, p.294.

3 Scott, 1985, p.295.

4 Scott, 1985, p.295.

5 Scott, 1985, p.296.

become public only in cryptic form. Every subordinate group has a hidden discourse that contains a critique of power which it speaks behind the backs of the dominators, but it also possesses a public discourse that expresses submission. The impact of power can be observed on a daily basis in acts and discourses that show deference, express subordination, and seek to gratify the powerful.¹

The hidden transcripts are a constellation of discourses that put us on the track of social changes. I am interested in them not only for their hidden character but as a form of infrapolitics, that realm where everyday resistance gets expressed in ways that are not usually considered political. Such expressions of resistance do not always pretend to be such; they are uttered in everyday life, in spheres that are apparently non-public and not explicitly political. In this sense Scott supersedes the restrictions imposed by the tradition of Western thought on the political realm. Although Scott does not trace the history of the long tradition from which he is breaking, he has the advantage of being the first to mention explicitly his interest in exploring the infrapolitical realm.

3.3 Bayat: the silent encroachment of non-movements yields “life as politics”

Bayat advances the expansion of the scope of political action in four basic aspects. First, he makes explicit a broader conception of politics, as expressed in the title of his major work, Life as Politics.

Politics consists of the daily acts of survival in the world of labor (migrants who work without authorization), in the world of consumption (squatters who appropriate lots and connect to the electrical system illegally), and in the gender struggles (Muslim women who do not dress as the imams prescribe). Without dealing with political action in the relations of production, Bayat carries the break with tradition to the point of reconsidering the broadening of politics. Both Bayat and Scott raise to the condition of political act the actions performed by persons “driven by the force of necessity,”² that is, the actions that Aristotle had located on the level nearest to pure animality.

While Scott speaks of acts done out of self-interest, Bayat claims that “these actors carry out their activities not as deliberate political acts; rather, they are driven by the force of necessity—the necessity to survive and improve life. (…) Yet these very simple and seemingly mundane practices tend to shift them into the realm of contentious politics.”³

1 Scott, 1990, p.28.

2 Bayat, 2010, p.58.

3 Bayat, 2010, p.58.

Second, Bayat establishes as political subjects the non-movements, which he defines as

“collective actions of non-collective actors; they embody shared practices of large numbers of ordinary people whose fragmented but similar activities trigger much social change.”¹ The inclusion of the noun “movements” indicates that non-movements are embarked on social change, but unlike what happens in social movements, the individuals who “participate” in non-movements do not need to reach agreement or be guided by a program or an ideology. They are more flexible and fluid and produce their individual strategies.² They do not lobby or publish flyers.

Their main instrument is the “art of presence,” which presupposes prolonged actions.³ Non-movements do not engage in a politics of protest but in a politics of practice. Their power rests on their great numbers because a practice becomes normalized and acquires legitimacy when many individuals do it, even if in an atomized way. The sum total of these oft-repeated acts creates spaces for cultivating, consolidating, and reproducing counter-power.⁴ The numerical force in repeatedly performing the same action has an impact in itself; it operates without symbolic intermediations “through direct actions in the very zones of exclusion.”⁵ Bayat is more optimistic than Foucault: once inserted in the mass of a non-movement, the individual achieves freedom of speech; in other words, the parrhesiastic subject is the mass itself, that political non-actor disdained by tradition and its aristocratic minions.

Third, the street emerges as a metaphor for the descent of politics to the domain of the masses; it becomes the locus of politics. Bayat insists that the street is a privileged—and politicized—place for expressing discontent. Public spaces are used not only passively but actively in a manifestation of what Bayat calls “street politics,” the alternative for those who lack institutional channels for communicating and making themselves heard.⁶ By street politics Bayat means “a set of conflicts and the attendant implications between a collective populace and the authorities, which are shaped and expressed episodically in the physical and social space of the

‘streets’, from alleyways to the more visible street sidewalks, public parks, and public sport facilities.”⁷ We could say that parrhesiastic practice is made possible by the selection and appropriation of strategic venues. The street is the agora where the pariahs can have their say or,

1 Bayat, 2010, p.14.

2 Bayat, 2010, p.16.

3 Bayat, 2010, pp.26 and 45.

4 Bayat, 2010, p.20-21.

5 Bayat, 2010, p.5.

6 Bayat, 2010, p.11.

7 Bayat, 2010, p.62.

as in the case of the sidewalk vendors whom Bayat uses as an example, secure immediate improvement in their living conditions.

Fourth, the direct action of the masses, their quiet encroachment, gets direct results instead of just making symbolic gestures of defiance. Quiet encroachment “describes the silent, protracted, but pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the propertied, the powerful, or the public, in order to survive and improve their lives.”¹ Like Scott, Bayat thinks that such action of the dominateds can subvert the dominant ideology that renders them second-class citizens.² But he is more optimistic than Scott for he insists that non-movements succeed in determining the destiny of the dominated, improving their living conditions, and transforming cities.³ The poor provide for themselves what the state denies them: “in non-movements actors directly practice what they claim, despite government sanctions.”⁴ Separate individual actions obtain immediate benefits. At the same time, the impact of such actions transcends their practical, immediate, individual nature and makes itself felt in the social order: the more women project themselves in public spaces, the more besieged will be the patriarchal bastions; the more squatters invade urban premises, the less control the elites will have in the governance of cities. That powerful dynamic surpasses the sum of individual acts.⁵ Non-movements can reduce the state’s ability to govern by disregarding the instruments that the state employs: norms, rules, institutions, and relations of power.⁶ However, these achievements do not in themselves guarantee social transformation. Here Bayat takes a turn toward conventional politics, stating that only “the larger national movements have the capacity for such a transformation.”⁷

Although I think Scott has until now offered the most complete framework for orienting our incursions into the diffuse field of infrapolitics, I believe that Bayat makes substantial contributions to a more inclusive analysis of a politics of action (quiet encroachment), of actors (non-movements), of methods of struggle (art of presence), and of spaces (street politics). These conceptual tools allow us to get a better grasp of the silent advance of social changes.