“Reverse Discourse” Revisited: Cracks, Formations, and a Complex Understanding of Power

Introduction

Notable scholars within International Relations (IR) have nuanced the concept of resistance, as well as, more generally, paving the way for acknowledging how Foucauldian approaches support thinking about resistance within IR (see e.g. Death 2016; Odysseos, Death, and Malmvig 2016; Lilja and Vinthagen 2014; Malmvig 2016). Based on this theme, this special issue aims to further carve out forms and nuances of resistance.

Not surprisingly, there are several papers in Global Society that address creative responses to power, as well as power’s responses back. Not least, a recent special edition of the journal has made the study of resistance more complex by embracing “counter-conducts”; that is, a concept that was recently recovered from Michel Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population (2009) lectures. We find the constructive use of the concept of counter-conducts interesting and original. However, in our thinking, the valorisation of the concept, in some senses, leads to an omission of Foucault’s multiple forms of resistance. Resistance, in Foucault’s texts, is sometimes described as resistance against authorities (sometimes the state and other governing units, and sometimes local authorities; Foucault 2009, 201; Foucault 1982, 329–331; Foucault 1991, 149). In other texts, however, he describes resistance as a discursive phenomenon. Discursive resistance, which appears as repetitions of signs across time, more generally, does not signal major ruptures, breaks or discontinuities. Indeed, this resistance, which occasionally aims to establish alternative truths, could be seen as a slow-motion form of resistance as it suffers from the inescapable time-lag of processes of signification (Lilja 2021, 2018). It is the strategic codification of different points of resistance that, in the end, becomes the hotbed for radical social change (Foucault 1990, 96; Bhabha 1994). Sometimes, these more linguistic forms of resistance take the form of reverse discourse. According to Foucault (1990, 101–102):

There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and “psychic hermaphrodism” made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of “perversity”; but it also made possible the formation of a “reverse” discourse: 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. There is not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy.

What is revealed here is how resistance profits on power (Butler 1995, 237). Resistance uses power’s own terminology not only to rupture and deconstruct power but also to (re)construct new subject positions. The resistance is made possible by discourses, which comprise power, but also open up cracks to resist it. Or as expressed by Marta Iñiguez De Heredia (2022), “the idea of reversed discourses exposes how power can be asserted but also hindered with the same discourse”.

Departing from the above, we hereby present a special issue that focuses on “reverse discourse”, in order to examine previously unaddressed aspects of the concept, while also proposing and developing new approaches, and encouraging new lines of research within Foucault’s scholarship on resistance. Below, is an in-depth discussion on how this special issue theoretically develops the concept of reverse discourse.

A more elaborated outline of reverse discourse

As stated above, resistance appears in many different forms in Foucault’s elaborations of dissent, such as, among others, discursive resistance (including reversed discourse), counter-conducts, anti-authority struggles as well as technologies of the self (Lilja 2018, 2021). Sometimes, Foucault displays the existence of marginalised, alternative and challenging discourses as a kind of resistance; such as in his discussion on subjugated knowledge and historical knowledge struggles (Medina 2011). In other texts, however, Foucault shows the complexity of each and every discourse, and how one single discourse contains both traces of power and resistance (Foucault 1980).

As a discursive phenomenon, resistance is pictured as creative and small-scaled practices, with the ability to create real change. Political struggles and subversive acts occur as micro complexities – for example, as words and sentences, which inform the dominant discourses. It is resistance that constantly pops up in networks of power, and the existence of power depends on messy points of resistance. The resistance is about longer, irregular time-processes. Still, it can give rise to “a revolution” after a delay of time. Or as expressed by Foucault: “it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible” (Foucault 1990, 96; Lilja 2018).

Reverse discourse could be seen as one discursive strategy of resistance, which is anchored in material bodies. When analysing reverse discourses, we must emphasise the role of matter in the shaping of subjects. As stated by Foucault: “the deployments of power are directly connected to the body to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures” (Foucault 1990, 151–152). What is needed, he claims, is an analysis in which we display how the biological and the historical are bound together in an increasingly complex fashion, in which both power and resistance play a central role. As power is part of shaping bodies, resistance also revolves around material bodies, how they have been perceived and valued, as well as how they are negotiated and (re)invested. In the text below, these processes are further interrogated as we outline some themes, through which we query and develop Foucault’s concept of reverse discourse.

Constructive cracks or resistance formations

In this special issue, we locate reverse discourses in several places. For example, Mona Lilja (2022), when carving out the basic scaffolding of different forms of resistance “formations”, discusses the “Négritude” movement, which accentuated “race” to achieve political change (Lundahl 2009). Ann Towns (2022), on the other hand, discusses the strategies of female diplomats, while Tiina Seppälä (2022) elaborates on the “No one is illegal” campaign as a form of reverse discourse. These dissections all cast light upon different practices of reverse discourses and form the base from which we explore and add to the theorising of Foucault. Among other things, we suggest that reversals must not be analysed as a strict binary concept between a cemented discourse and a counter-discourse. Indeed, the reversal sometimes forms a pattern in a larger organic discursive struggle where various discourses are at play (Foucault 1990). As Towns (2022) concludes, when mapping reverse discourses, it is enough for one to only look for reversals as cracks in the discourses as an opposing tactic (Foucault 1990). Thus, a reverse discourse could probably be more or less “stable” or “swapping” on a sliding scale.

The above indicates that while reverse discourses are sometimes obvious and insisting, at other times they are composed by an ambivalent inscription of characteristics (Ferguson 1993, 30; Lilja 2008). For example, as displayed by Mikael Baaz and Mona Lilja (2022) establishing a reverse discourse is sometimes characterised by a humorous and ironic twist. The kind of irony used in this discursive struggle could be both “stable” – that is, irony which clearly signalises the opposite meaning – or unstable and “post-modern” (Booth 1974, 234–244; Colebrook 2004, 16–21; Lilja 2008, 36).

Lilja, in contrast to Towns, analyses “reverse discourse” as a particular resistance formation, in order to illuminate how a specific type of resistance comes into existence and begins to have a particular form. The concept of formation is deployed to capture both the process of resistance mobilisations as well as how a resistance assemblage takes on a particular shape of its own. By this move, her analysis precedes the notion of reversing “cracks” to capture the shape and key features of reverse discourse.

Whatever the “stableness” or “scope” of the reverse discourse is (is it a “crack” or a “formation”?), there is a constructive element in the reversal and reinvention of different truths. The notion of constructive resistance names the production of alternative images, organisations, discourses, or identities as a creative form of dissent (cf. Foucault 1990, 1997; Grosfoguel 2013; Lilja and Vinthagen 2014, 2018; Mignolo 2009; Lilja and Vinthagen 2007; Koefoed 2017; Sørensen 2016; Sørensen and Wiksell 2019; Wiksell 2020, 2021; Vinthagen 2005). There are several constructive moves in Foucault’s thoughts on reverse discourse. Among other things, as pointed out by Iñiguez De Heredia (2022), discourses might be countered and subverted, and when so doing, new subjectivities will emerge. Reverse discourse involves (re)constructing subject positions and thereby new ways of embodying one’s self, based on self-reflections and moral and critical considerations (Baaz and Lilja 2016). This resisting self-training is played out in relation to images of who one wants to be in the future and future potential courses of action (Foucault 1994, 363–366). The resistance of (re)moulding oneself is repeatedly done over time: it is a repetitive and patterned resistance.

The relationality between power and resistance

The different papers in this special issue suggest that the concept of reverse discourse invites us to revisit the relationality between power and resistance, and how resistance and power emerge in relation to each other. As pinpointed by Iñiguez De Heredia, one limitation is that Foucault’s departs from a focus on power rather than on resistance. For Foucault, resistance serves “as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, find out their point of application and the methods used” (Foucault 1982, 780). Indeed, resistance is sometimes parasitic on power or a reaction against it. At other times, however, power does not evoke resistance but instead these entangle in complex patterns. Here, the chain metaphor “might be expanded to include the power – resistance relation, in so far as power and resistance circulate together and are mutually constitutive” (Malmvig 2016, 263). In addition, the central role of resistance – and sometimes even resistance supremacy – must be acknowledged (Checchi 2021; Lilja 2022); such as when feminist resistance becomes the very base from which new forms of toxic masculinities, for example, “incels”, emerge. This situation, in turn, must be positioned in a larger historical analysis of interchanging relations of power and resistance.

To the above can be added that resistance is not always undertaken as a reaction to, and with the aim of challenging power, but can be the result of self-referential acts and emanate from a wish to be true to oneself. Arvidson and Axelsson (2017), in this regard, explore the term “self-loyalty” in order to display how resistance is sometimes played out to protect oneself rather than as an act of opposition (Baaz, Heikkinen, and Lilja 2017). In a similar vein, Mark Haugaard (2022), in his critique of Butler as overly determinist, suggests that power does not direct resistance, but there are multiple possibilities and room for manoeuvre when it comes to how the subject decides to act in the face of domination. He pictures social subjects as significantly creative and capable of things, which makes reverse discourse a sizable avenue for contesting. Haugaard suggests that reverse discourse involves an awareness of radical alternatives but also a pragmatic decision to use dominant discourse, as such a strategy, is valued as more effective than other ones.

Challenging the simple causality between power and resistance then means revisiting the resisting subject. This is also done by Iñiguez De Heredia (2022), who brings in a longer perspective on social structures. For example, when subjects use a discourse in order to subvert it they might do so from a resisting position, which was established before the emergence of the specific power-loaded discourse that they set-out to resist. Activist positions that emanate from class and gender structures might have a longer history than the specific discourse that the activists are trying to negotiate. This implies that “reversing the discourse” is not necessarily resistance that is evoked by power, but the resistance could be part of a serial and already ongoing resistance that is carried out from an already established subaltern position.

Finally, this special issue also illuminates how the power–resistance relationship is complicated by the fact that, at most times, different forms of power and resistance co-exist. For example, dominant discourses set the scene for the “who” and “what” of contemporary authorities. Or in other words, power-loaded discourses produce a script for how authoritarian power is expected to be exercised. Certain forms of power produce other forms of power. In James C. Scott’s terminology, this phenomenon is captured, as Iñiguez De Heredia (2022) points out, by the term “public transcript”. A public transcript is to be seen as an established pattern of speech, which comes to pose as a model for public performances (Scott 1990). Considering the complex entanglement between different forms of power and resistance, to suggest that power evokes resistance is a too simple conclusion.

Amassing strategies

Moreover, some papers in this special issue suggest the complex entanglements of different forms of resistance and argue that we must abandon the analytical take to distinctly carve out one particular practice of resistance. By drawing on the scholarship on resistance studies to further our understanding of “reverse discourse”, Baaz and Lilja (2022), for example, display how reversals almost never appear alone, but materialise as one strategy among many in a complex web of resistance. By following Foucault (2009), they point out that different forms of resistance may be experienced as isolated occurrences, with their own dramaturgy. However, acts of resistance are almost always linked with each other, while they emerge in the same context with particular discourses and conflicts. Thus, different forms of resistance struggles, despite their specificities, are not isolated from each other, but occur in the same web, which means that the resistance should be understandable in the light of these connections. By analysing the gay movement in the 1970s, Baaz and Lilja (2022) illuminate this by revealing how the reverse discourse of the calling-in-sick campaign was complemented with a sit-in, a parliamentary motion submitted by the Left Party, and a Gay Liberation Week, which all addressed discrimination against gay persons. All in all, the struggles over the classification of “homosexuality” in the 1970s involved complexity and display how resistance often transcends the often too simplistic insights of the IR discipline’s vernacular, including the unfortunate focus on resistance as being everyday and individual, or collective.

Seppälä does not focus on chains of resistance strategies but rather sheds light on the potential differences that are implicated in the ways that the same resistance strategy is performed from different subject positions. For example, how is the strategy of reverse discourse employed differently, and with different effects, depending on what subject position one speaks from? In Seppälä’s analysis, she explores the “No one is illegal” campaign in Finland and reveals how the campaign promotes the legal and political recognition of non-citizen subjects, with the support from citizen subjects. As suggested by Horsti and Pirkkalainen (2021, 196–197) and Shutzberg (2021, 2020), privileged positions can be utilised in solidarity work to resist relations of inequality more effectively. This has previously been discussed through the concept of “proxy resistance”, which signifies a practice that is performed in solidarity with someone who is embodying a precarious position (see Baaz, Heikkinen, and Lilja 2017; Seppälä 2022).

Conclusion

Above we have made a summary of some of the main theoretical findings of the authors of this special issue. By adding to the concept of reverse discourse as resistance to power, as originally formulated by Foucault, we would like to suggest the following:

• – Reverse discourse could be understood as both reversal cracks in a wider discursive struggle or as a resistance formation, with its special character.

• – When analysing reverse discourse, the simple causal relationship between power that evokes resistance must be dissolved.

• – In some situations, reverse discourse must be understood as an ambiguous strategy that is acted out through, amongst other things, humour and irony.

• – Reverse discourse is to be seen as a strategy, which functions in a complex interaction with other individual and collective resistance strategies. As a resistance strategy, it should be analysed in relation to its connections.

• – Reverse discourse must be understood as a constructive form of resistance and could be seen as both an individual and collective form of resistance.

Affirming these suggestions when exploring reverse discourse enables a deeper understanding of the concept and illuminates how resistance is often singular and multiple, now and then, organised and everyday, as well as individual and collective.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mikael Baaz

Mikael Baaz is a full Professor of International Law, an Associate Professor in Political Science and an Associate Professor in Peace and Conflict Studies. He works at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Baaz’s core research interest is various aspects of the international society, in particular international law, international criminal law, and resistance and social change. Together with professors Mona Lilja and Stellan Vinthagen, he has authored the book Researching Resistance and Social Change: A Critical Approach to Theory and Practice (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).

Mona Lilja

Mona Lilja currently serves as a Professor of Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Lilja’s areas of interest are the linkages between resistance and social change, as well as the particularities – the character and emergence – of various forms of resistance. She is the author of the recently published book Constructive Resistance: Repetitions, Emotions, and Time (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).