Refusal as a political new beginning
Paramilitary officers stationed down Mount Alebban kept the [Moroccan] villagers in check, documenting every move up and down the mount by protestors and clandestine visitors. Signs and banners were drawn on walls and floors at the camp, and sculpted on rocks, producing the [camp] as a site of resistance and refusal: ‘We refuse the depletion of our resources’, ‘we refuse‘ to bow’, ‘this is our land’, ‘we have rights’, ‘we are not leaving’. . .
To refuse is to say no’, Carole McGranahan (2016: 319) argues. ‘Refusal marks the point of a limit having been reached: we refuse to continue on this way’ (ibid.: 320, italics in original). As a political stance, refusal does not signal the ending of the predicament but indicates a new beginning. Many studies converge in defining refusal as constitutive and generative of something new, including political spaces, communities and subjects (ibid.: 322). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12726
And yet, refusal can entail a nonpolitical beginning
[Maurice] Blanchot contributed a short text entitled “The Refusal.” “At a certain moment, when faced with public events, we know that we must refuse. Refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not discuss or voice its reasons. This is how it remains silent and solitary, even when it affirms itself, as it should, in broad daylight”. . . Blanchot refused. He said no. A “firm, unwavering, strict” no. Blanchot not only rejected de Gaulle, but politics in general. It was what he later described as “a total critique,” directed against the techno-political order of politics and the state. . . .
Blanchot rejected de Gaulle and the false choice between civil war or the general — the civil war was already underway in Algeria and continued after de Gaulle came to power — but he also refused to formulate a political demand, a different path, a different solution. The refusal was “silent.” In this way, there was a difference between Blanchot’s refusal and other contemporary interventions (Roland Barthes, Socialisme ou Barbarie, the Situationists, etc.) that took the form of political analyses and mobilization. Blanchot did not mobilize. The rejection was, of course, a political intervention — or, at least, an intervention in politics. . . .
[But the] refusal did not give rise to a political community in any traditional sense. There was no identity, no nation, no republic, not even a working class, nor a program around which the community could unite. . .As Blanchot put it, “the refusal is accomplished neither by us or in our name, but from a very poor beginning that belongs first of all to those who cannot speak.” The refusal was, therefore, a mute statement. It pointed to a gap in representation and did not refer to any recognizable political subject. https://illwill.com/the-movement-of-refusal#fn62 (endnotes deleted)
Huh? A more complicated example of not-speaking as refusal
This aid architecture supported the burgeoning civil society to train Ettadhamun residents in the skill of ‘interpersonal communication’ (tawasul bayna al-afrad) for the purpose of managing social conflict. Yet the members of the only non-religious association in the neighbourhood of Nogra reject the liberal recommendations of their trainers and carve out a tense neighbourhood co-presence without dialogue with their Salafist neighbours. . . .
The basic principle to adopt, Sihem [the meeting facilitator] suggests, is that ‘there is no absolute truth’ (ma famash heta haqiqa thabita). Some participants nod their heads in agreement but Fethi, a young man. . ., intercepts with an objection:
Fethi: Well, there are absolute truths for some people. We live in a Salafist neighbourhood and these guys believe they enact God’s law from the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him).
Sihem: Okay yes. But you can ask them to explain their point of view. What is their rationale (logique) for following this old law to the letter?
Fethi: No, you can’t ask them for their reasons. I know these guys, they are neighbourhood kids (oulad houma). I grew up with them and went to school with them long before they became Salafist. I even have a cousin who is a Salafist. They don’t engage in conversation if someone asks them to explain their position. They just turn around and leave.
Sihem: That’s the biggest problem in our country [Tunisia]. The dictatorship wanted people to be naive and uncritical. This is why we have so much extremism among our youth. But I encourage you to keep trying to speak with your Salafist neighbours. If they leave the discussion with one single doubt about their position, then you have won. This is the power of dialogue (hiwar).
Fethi retorts: Maybe this is case with other people. But not with the Salafists. They are convinced. They want to live in God’s country. If it’s not Tunisia, it’s Syria. We want to live in a people’s democracy. If it’s not Tunisia, it’s Italy.
. . . even though theories of liberal deliberative democracy either historicize or imagine people connecting with an abstracted concept of the public through the affordances of literacy, capitalism, and technological advancement, the democracy promotion aid that I interrogate here focused on the way people spoke to people they already knew or knew enough about. This was definitely the case in communities that training programmes designated as being in conflict. In practice then, the public sphere they aimed at forging through training did not posit interlocutors as biographical strangers. It is also important to highlight that both Shaja ̔a members and Salafists deliberated with their respective publics (like-minded peers) through their associational life, mosque attendance, in cafés, and on social media. What they chose not to do was to speak to each other with a view to bridge their different worldviews. https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.14317?af=R (my underline)
Another way of looking at this
It’s those different worldviews in “What they chose not to do was to speak to each other with a view to bridge their different worldviews” that call to mind the cultural theory of the late Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas.
For them and their students, different worldviews consist of four basic cultures: hierarchist, individualist, egalitarian and fatalist. Each is defined by where people locate themselves in terms of the degree of social constraints and prescriptions they face (‘‘grid’’, high and low; strong or weak) and the degree of group cohesion with which they act (‘‘group’’, high and low; strong or weak).
“Each way of life needs each of its rivals, either to make up for its deficiencies, or to exploit, or to define itself against” Were high group/low grid egalitarians to eliminate low-group/low grid individualists, for instance, “their lack of a target to be against would remove the justification for their strong [high] group boundary and thus undermine their way of life” (Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990, 4). Or to take the meeting participants in the Tunisian case: While in conventional-culture terms they are all Muslims, they could be redescribed as differing in basic worldviews, some being more individualist (the principal questioner) or hierarchical (the facilitators) than others.
What is of interest to us here, though, is that shared tangency among the four cultures where they meet together in the two-by-two typology. “For a few individuals there is a fifth possible way of life, one in which the individual withdraws from coercive or manipulative social involvement altogether. This is the way of life of the hermit, who escapes social control by refusing to control others or to be controlled by others…” (Ibid, 7). While the terms, “withdraws” and “refusing,” capture what we have been discussing, that term, “hermit,” misleads. Those at the meeting know enough about their neighbors different worldviews to know what to withdraw from and refuse to talk about. They’ve already reached the point of knowing when worldviews are incommensurable. (If you think that latter point is depressing, keep in mind that one major reason why Wildavsky, a senior US political scientist, took such an interest in cultural theory was because it kept alive the notion of pluralism.)
So what?
Sounds a bit like advocating social tolerance, doesn’t it? Neighbors put up with what they disapprove of in the name of something like comity. There is some truth in that, but the matter’s more usefully complex.
The opposite of tolerance as just defined isn’t intolerance: In being intolerant, you’re still disapproving. The actual opposite of putting up with what one disapproves of is, as others have pointed out, indifference–not caring one way or another about whatever. And therein, I think, lies the insight.
What is going on with the neighbors is, actually, a kind of caring. Yes, it is caring one way rather than other ways, but whatever way it too is part of the public sphere. Practices of caring are of course socially constructed, but the “politics of care” is a rather narrow way of summing up the point made in the Tunisia and other cases.
In its most policy-relevant sense, this kind of caring centers on maintenance and repair of the public sphere. It is knowing enough about others to know that saying to them, “Good God, man, get a grip; we’re adults here,” gets you nowhere, while knowing all the time that these ensuing areas of non-discussion leave the remaining public sphere in need of constant repair. Some might call this repair arising from refusal, tact (see Russell 2018, 1 – 11).
It’s all well and good to insist that efforts to decouple, disengage or otherwise detach from the political is itself political. But that is hardly the human starting point for refusal: It is, after all, the planet that refuses to prioritize us (Stevenson 2017, 106). We label this “nature’s indifference,” but only because we refuse any denial that our priorities matter, and matter well beyond caring one way or another.
(Other sources:
Russell, D. (2018). Tact. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stevenson, A. 2017. About Poems and how poems are not about. Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Series #16. Northumberland, UK: Bloodaxe Books.
Thompson, M., R. Ellis, and A. Wildavsky 1990. Cultural Theory. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.)
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 