On resistance in the post-political city: conduct and counter-conduct in Vancouver

Abstract

The paper contributes to understandings of contestation and resistance in urban politics, using a land use struggle against a “big-box” development in Vancouver, Canada as an example. It surveys Foucault's work on “governmentality,” highlighting the centrality of the notion of resistance in this work before focusing in particular on Foucault's yet underexplored conceptions of “conduct” and “counter-conduct”. These concepts offer an analysis of urban politics beyond the binary of successful implementation of city policies or their failure, and of cooption or revolt; therefore, proving especially useful in the analysis of urban governance which is increasingly characterised as “post-political”.

Keywords:

• counter-conduct
• Foucault
• governmentality
• post-political city
• urban geography
• urban politics
• Vancouver

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to those who agreed to be interviewed for this project. I also thank the anonymous referees and the editor whose input has been very useful for sharpening the argument. I am indebted to Matt Hannah, Nadine Marquardt, Eugene McCann and Cristina Temenos for their extremely helpful and encouraging comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Elements of the article were presented and discussed at the Association of American Geographers meetings in New York City (2012), the INURA Annual Conference in Tallinn (2012), the International Geographical Congress in Cologne (2012) and the RC 21 – Sociology of Urban and Regional Development conference in Berlin (2013). The usual disclaimers apply.

Funding

Research for this study was funded in part by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

Notes

1. The term “big box retail” refers to “retail outlets that are several times larger than the average store in the same retail sector” (Hernandez & Simmons, 2006, p. 468). They usually belong to a chain, and often cluster in suburban power centres / power nodes (Hahn, 2000; Hernandez & Simmons, 2006).

2. The application by Wal-Mart was furthermore objected because of the chains controversial labour politics.

3. Thus, the elaboration of key terms, their operationalisation for empirical analysis and the analysis of contemporary governmentality itself is left to Foucault's successors – which naturally leads to conflicting accounts. Some of them accuse each other of false interpretation and misunderstanding of Foucaults work (e.g. Barnett, 2005; Barnett, Clarke, Cloke, & Malpass, 2008; Curtis, 1995; see also Lemke, 1997). Importantly, the inaccurate interpretation of governmentality as a particular “mentality” of government as suggested in some of the early papers on governmentality has led to some misinterpretation and a misleading focus on “mentalities of government” (Lemke, 2005, p. 334; Senellart, 2007, p. 399, note 126). Also, governmentality studies are not to be confused with discourse analysis, with which Foucault's name is intimately linked as well (Rose et al., 2006, p. 89).

4. Miller and Rose (1990) even defend a focus on the analysis of programs. In their view the reproach of the limited focus on programs misinterprets what governmentality studies are about: precisely the programs and necessarily also the vision of the “programmers”, and their “will to govern”.

5. He analyses different forms of counter-conduct in the Middle Ages in detail in the lecture on 1 March 1978 and sketches out some counter-conducts in the mid eighteenth century in his last lecture on 5 April 1978 (Foucault, 1978/2007, pp. 355–357). He finds these struggles both in individual behaviour as in strongly organised groups (Foucault, 1978/2007, p. 204). He also refers to it in a lecture given to the French Society of Philosophy a few months after finishing the first governmentality lecture series (Foucault, 2007). Here, he does not use the term “counter-conduct” but “critique” and “critical attitude”. However, he refers to the same idea and uses similar examples as from the lecture on 1 March 1978 (see also Cadman, 2010). In various interviews he furthermore elaborates on the notion of counter-conduct in regard to contemporary gay movements (see for detailed references the discussion in Davidson, 2011, pp. 32–34). The notion of conduct is further developed in The Subject and Power (Foucault, 1982: apparently written several years earlier; see Davidson 2011, footnote 4) and The History of Sexuality Volume 3 (Foucault, 1984). In the 1979 lecture series (Foucault, 1979/2008), which deals mostly with neoliberal governmentality, the concept of counter-conduct is absent.

6. Interviews conducted in 2008 in Vancouver by author.

7. In favour of the opposing groups it has to be acknowledged, that a re-zoning application in Vancouver will almost always be approved, sometimes subject to changes. There were only three instances of rejected applications out of 53 between 1999 and 2005. All refusals occurred under the previous left-wing COPE council, two of which were the rejection of the first re-zoning application of Canadian Tire and Wal-Mart in 2005 (Cho, 2007). Also see Cho (2007) and Sussmann (2006) for an analysis of further protests against the re-zoning applications.

8. The interviewees always refer to the first application (by Canadian Tire and by Wal-Mart), against which they were also active.

9. To rezone means to legally change the land use of a specific site through amendments to municipal by-laws. A rezoning in Vancouver always requires council approval and a public hearing (Cho, 2007).