The desire to locate political space: a methodological discussion

ABSTRACT

This article explores the role of the critical scholar in constituting agency and political space in academic work. It problematizes how our desire affects what we find, and do not find, what we can see and hear in our research material. We focus specifically on how agency and political space are studied from a governmentality perspective and in resistance studies. Ultimately, we elaborate how can we remain obedient to the rules of the neoliberal institution of the university while perceiving ourselves as political subjects and suggest how we can make explicit how our complicities and desires affect our research findings.

KEYWORDS:

• Methodology
• desire
• power
• agency
• resistance

1. Introduction

In times when knowledge making is explicitly used as a political battleground and certain fields of study are threatened by actors who claim that these fields are political, in contrast to the supposedly non-political knowledge production in other academic subjects, it is important to reemphasize the politics involved in all knowledge production. It is also, we believe, important to do some self-scrutinization within the fields of knowledge that are under attack, in order to safeguard their position.

Critical research, in gender studies and in other fields in the social sciences that draw on postmodern and postcolonial theories, is particularly targeted by critics who label this research as merely ‘value-based positions’, a criticism which has taken a populist turn during the last few years. It is within this context that we in this article want to problematize the agency of the scholar – the critical scholar in particular – in terms of our desire to locate political space. By ‘critical’ we mean problematizing and questioning the orders by which we are governed, produced, oppressed or enslaved. We want to put the spotlight on the intellectuals who in their inscription of the subject so often emerge as transparent and without interests (Spivak 1988).

As scholars in Peace and Development Research, an explicitly normative discipline, we are aware that a number of different institutional and individual desires are at play, such as the desire to challenge and criticize dominant power relations and to contribute to making the world more peaceful, equal and sustainable, as well as producing knowledge that is relevant in the lives of those we research. As scholars in this discipline, we are given authority and the privilege of constituting (development) subjects who are to be reformed and whose lives are to be bettered, as well as proposing how this should be done. As critical scholars, we are deeply aware of the colonial, classist and gendered power relations involved in the processes of constituting subjects, agency and progressive societal transformation. This conundrum of contributing to knowledge that can be used progressively at the same time as acknowledging the inherent problems in such a mission, is the core focus of this text.

Specifically, we focus on our desire to find, or not find, political space in research material, and on the limitations that our theoretical perspectives, and our desires as scholars place on what we can see and hear – and hence on what we do/produce. In other words, we are concerned with how research shapes ‘how we come to know or think of human beings as agents, or how they come to think and know themselves as such, and what the implications are’ (Dean 2015, p. 191). These issues are important since they raise thorny methodological questions, such as what we as (critical) researchers want to find in order to produce a world that needs to be saved and how our knowledge production becomes relevant to (and productive of) the worlds that we imagine and inhabit. This article seeks to open up the box of how a double desire – to destabilize existing orders and engage with practices of everyday life – shapes how we make claims about the effects of power. We thereby problematize what our knowledge production implies for the possibilities of political imagination.

What we want to do is to highlight a few challenges involved in our academic work on agency, power and the subject, and how we inscribe events, actions and people in terms of political subjectivity. Thus, rather than positioning ourselves in relation to these problems in other people’s work, this exercise should be understood as an effort to scrutinize the challenges as they have appeared in our own work but which nevertheless are relevant to a wider audience of critical scholarship.

The text will proceed as follows. First, we explain how we apply the concept of desire in this article and explore its role for us as critical scholars in terms of our engagement with rules and orders. We then discuss some of the ways in which the political and the political subject are understood in relation to power and power structures in critical literature, particularly in governmentality and resistance studies. Thereafter, we investigate more closely what the desire to enable political imagination might involve methodologically. We discuss, first, the moves involved in destabilizing orders and, second, how we classify acts in terms of political subjectivity. Finally, we will argue that, in a context of the increasing use of technologies of agency and performance to govern scholars within the university, critical research may involve an element of transference that allows us to remain obedient to the rules of the neoliberal institution of the university while perceiving ourselves as political subjects. We end the article with suggestions of what we, as scholars, can do in order to make our complicities and desires more visible in our work.

2. The desire of the critical scholar

When we make claims about the effects of power through theoretical frameworks that view the agency as a result of how individuals are inscribed as subjects in relation to a particular order, we might also want to ask how we as researchers are inscribed and inscribe ourselves as subjects and in relation to what order. How is the knowledge we produce shaped by the institutions that govern us and by our desires as critical researchers? How are we called upon to recognize our moral obligations? And what is the kind of being/scholar to which we aspire? What are the methodological consequences of the answers to these questions?

Our own research projects (Hansson 2013, 2015, Hellberg 2014, 2015, 2018) have shared trajectories with regard to how our theoretical and methodological approaches developed as a result of how we came into being as a specific kind of researchers. We started our research projects with a strong focus on structures that dominate subjectivities. As a result, the people with whom our studies came to engage were seen as either passive victims or active resisters. Becoming aware of the critique against such a way of limiting the repertoires available to ordinary people within structures of power, and identifying this lack in our work so far, we reworked our research to address practices of subject formation, hybridity and resistance. We entered the field with an empirical focus on social institutions and the micropractices of everyday life. In the field, our desires were reshaped in relation to the people we studied. Their recognition became important and made us wary of the complexities of interpreting the extent of oppression and the room for manoeuvre, and of complicity and resistance. It became essential to contribute that which would be recognizable and relevant to the people we studied which, in turn, could legitimize our very presence in the field. Returning to the university in Sweden, context relevance was not what would render us status in the academic hierarchy. Rather this had to do with whether we were be able to theorize our work in ways that are acknowledged and appreciated by academics who did not know or did not care for the context. As we progressed through the different phases and developments of our research projects, our different desires shaped our analysis and our writing in ways that have had profound effects on our production of knowledge.

What do we mean by desire here? From Lacan [1970] 2007 we take the notion that the subject’s desires are the desires of the other. This is grounded in the process of identification, whereby the subject works on herself to become the subject that will be recognized by the other. However, the subject does not know what will grant such recognition from the other; instead, she takes it that she will be recognized for being that which the other lacks, that is: that which the other desires. The other in our investigation may be the other critical scholar from whom we want recognition, but it may also be our object of study. We often relate to these two types of others in ways that involve quite different rationales. However, the scholar does not just replicate that which the other desires. First, we must be reminded that we do not know what the other lacks, and that our idea of the desire of the other is therefore based on our own idea of who the other is, creating a distance between actual want and desire. Second, we will try to position ourselves in relation to what we think the desire of the other is. While in the everyday we may not know who the other wants us to be, there is a vast literature on what the critical scholar should be/do that shapes our desires (see, for example, Horkheimer 1982, Foucault 1997a, Butler 2001). This discussion on critique also drives the institutional demands on who we should be.

What critique means has been extensively discussed. Frankfurt school member Max Horkheimer described the theory as critical insofar as it seeks ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’ (Horkheimer 1982, p. 244). According to Foucault, critique comes from the desire evoked by the obligation to accept rules, and lies in asking the question ‘how not to be governed?’ He locates the desire not to be governed in the perception of the rules as unjust (Butler 2001). In Butler’s reading of Foucault, critique is about not accepting as true the basis for those rules by questioning the knowledge upon which order is established, and bringing into light its limits and the points where transformation is possible. This critical practice is not the result of the freedom of the soul but of how we come into being in relation to the rules, that is, how we form ourselves as ethical subjects in relation to those rules. If our desire then, based on the above, is a result of that which we think the other lacks, we can also read in the desire to be critical an idea of how the other relates to power, truth and order, that is, to ‘being governed’.

So, what then can we say about the desires of critical scholars? Critique has to be understood in relation to that which it is a critique of, that is, it is not one thing but many (Butler 2001). It is therefore obviously impossible to homogenize the group of critical scholars, as they have different theoretical perspectives and are driven by different desires. As mentioned above, in our own work we may identify a double desire. This double desire comes from two different points of departure; on the one hand, the traditions of critical theory and postmodernism that aim to problematize and destabilize existing orders, dominating practices, ideologies, discourses and institutions and the way they foreclose alternative orders; and on the other hand, qualitative research focusing on understanding social institutions and the micropractices of everyday life through empirical work (Alvesson et al. 2000, p. 7). How this double desire is played out is also connected to how we as scholars prioritize certain others from whom we want recognition, whether it is the other critical scholar, the people whose lives we study or others. These desires may significantly shape the interpretations we make, and the effects we want to produce. Following from that, it seems that our moral obligation is to produce knowledge that enables social change, emancipation and possibility for resistance against domination. In that sense, we aspire to be activists for social justice and freedom, to contribute to people’s empowerment, or even save the unfree from oppression. ‘Activist’ here does not refer to an ‘activist scholar’ who engages in social struggles, as discussed by Coleman (2015). Critique in a Foucauldian sense involves ‘a distant view’ (Foucault cited in Coleman 2015, p. 265), and the critical activist scholar is therefore rather one who through academic work aims at liberating people from the very order that is their precondition, that is, to show how ‘being otherwise’ is possible (see Mahmood 2011, for a discussion of the liberatory project of poststructuralist feminist theory).

We can take the example of Foucault’s work on the Iranian revolution to discuss how the double desire to destabilize orders and engage with everyday practices may play out. Foucault described the Iranian revolution as ‘the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane’ (Foucault 2005, p. 222 cited, Mezzadra et al. 2013, p. 10). Foucault saw in early Christianity and contemporary political Islam ‘a form of experience that can only posit itself in hostility to liberal modernity and its biopolitical subject, a form of experience which liberalism can only comprehend as threatening and fearful to its biopolitical project’ (Mezzadra et al. 2013). Foucault has been much criticized for his approach to the Iranian revolution. The editors of Foucault and the Iranian revolution, Afary and Anderson, argue that the reason for what they criticize as a problematic stance in relation to the revolution was that Foucault’s particular poststructuralist discourse, leftist bias and opposition to the ‘secular liberal or authoritarian modern state’ (Afray and Anderson 2005, p. 136) made him uncritical. Their argument is that the particular scholarly institution within which he wrote, his opposition to the order of liberal modernity and biopolitics and his desire for resistance, all fundamentally shaped what he could see and how he understood what people were doing and with what possible effects. Bernauer (2006), on the other hand, apart from criticizing Affray and Anderson for missing the complexity of Foucault’s writings on Iran, argues that Foucault’s openness to the processes in Iran was a result of his personal experience of the role of the Catholic Church in the Solidarity movement in Poland and the liberation theologies in Brazil. In Foucault’s writings, it is also clear that he was strongly affected by his personal meetings and conversations with people in Iran, and their reflections on Islamic government. He saw them as sources for political creation and a political will that attempted to open a ‘spiritual dimension in politics’ (Foucault cited in Afray and Anderson 2005). Without claiming to know Foucault’s desires, we can see that the views on what shaped his analysis and writing differ, both in terms of the importance of how he inscribed himself in relation to a particular order and in terms of the role of the personal experience of change processes and meetings with involved actors in everyday life.

3. Political space – scholarly concerns in governmentality and resistance studies

Our research interest in power relations and the practical technique of governing of subjects led us to the biopolitics/governmentality literature. This literature (Foucault 1991, 2003, Dean 1999, Walters 2012) helped us understand and problematize the way in which advanced liberal societies and subjects are governed. It places emphasis on how freedom and choice can be understood to be part of governing strategies rather than being the ‘outside’ of rule, and it shows us how technologies of responsibilization play a central role in achieving the ends and goals of government. To us, another important contribution of this literature is its focus on how (bio)political strategies of governing have differentiating effects on how populations are understood and targeted (Agamben 1998, Duffield 2007, Reid 2012, Walters 2012).

In this body of literature, the subject is always seen as being within the realms of power but nevertheless has the potentiality to imagine itself and the world differently.¹ This possibility of a political space in the relationship between governing structures and the effects on people’s lives were at the heart of our research focus. At the same time, the assumption that power is productive of the subject and that government structures its field of possibilities (Foucault 1977 [1975], p. 194, 2000, p. 341) raises difficult (methodological) questions in terms of analysing concrete situations and actions as ‘agency’ and ‘effects’ of power.² For example, how can we empirically explore the performance of agency and freedom? How can we make claims about the ‘effects’ of power? How can we make those claims in terms of the production of identities and subjectivities? How well do we need to know, and how well can we know the subject and its discursive embeddedness in order to make those claims? Scholars who engage with social struggle have raised similar concerns. For example, Coleman emphasizes how such engagements can ‘unsettle attempts to read resistance through available theories, categories, and scholarly problematics’ (Coleman 2015).

In terms of what we sought to understand in our own studies – and here we also draw on Judith Butler – one central challenge is that within a framework that acknowledges that power forms the subject and provides the conditions for its existence (Butler 1997, p. 2), it is impossible to distinguish between the power that creates the subject and a power that belongs to the subject itself, its ‘own’ power (Butler 1997, p. 15, our italics), and an ‘irresolvable ambiguity’ arises (Butler 1997, p. 2). At the same time, power cannot fully capture the subject and, based on Foucault’s writing, we need to pay attention to the notion that there is ‘something in the social body, or in each person’ (Gordon cited Foucault 2000, p. XX) which always escapes being governed. This means that agency can be understood both as that which is made possible through the power and as that which can destabilize the coherence and certainty of its effects. Hence, as there is no exterior to power, the agency is to be understood as ‘ambivalent’ (Butler 1997, p. 15), but also as inevitable. Therefore, the task of analysing agency as/and effects of power requires attention to both multiple and intersecting governing structures and the agency of being governed within these relations of power (Hansson et al. 2014).

In order to acknowledge the space for agency within governing structures, one avenue that we chose in our research was to think of agency in terms of technologies of the self, that is, the reflected process by which the subject engages with power (Foucault 1997b). Such an understanding of agency means that acting in accordance with governing logics need not imply that we should understand it as a lack of political subjectivity. This approach has its ethical as well as methodological problems; we might lose precision and edge in our analysis when taking this stance and it can also be understood as depoliticizing as well as making the subject part of its own subordination, a problem to which we will return.

Along the way, we encountered another strand within the biopolitics literature that elaborates the notion that subjectivation involves the formation of the subject against practices of government. Thus, subjectivation is only possible within the order of government but nevertheless involves a possibility of subtracting oneself from that order. The subject is then a practitioner of the ‘art of not being governed quite so much’ (Foucault 1997a, p. 44). Such a subtraction can be understood as a production of political subjectivation that is always possible but not necessarily realized. From this perspective, Prozorov explains, using Badiou and Agamben, the world is populated with agents, but these agents become subjects only as they are no longer objects of the world, that is, through their taking exception to the order of the world. This political subject is at the same time taking place ‘in the world’ and distancing itself from its inscription into the order. This challenges Foucault’s understanding since in this view of subjectivation there is a possibility to be fully defined by one’s place in the world. Hence, beings can be agents but not subjects, as their agency is ‘wholly objectified by the order of the world’ (Prozorov 2015, pp. 35–40). These agents are thus not to be seen as political subjects. This form of agency is rather the rule than the exception, Prozorov argues, and it tends to appear as ‘the free expression of one’s worldly identity’, offering both enjoyment and security (p. 40). Such an understanding challenges Foucauldian analytics of power and governing because of the possibility Prozorov sees of either not being governed or being fully governed. Here, identifying political subjectivity thus becomes a matter of ‘finding’ instances of subtraction from the order, which, in turn, has specific consequences for how subjectivity can be analyzed in empirical settings.

Another approach which we only partly followed is research within the broad umbrella of resistance studies.³ We differed significantly – at least we assumed – from this field as the approach that we had adopted breaks up a clear division between compliance and resistance. From our perspective – and which was at the heart of our research focus – compliance may be seen as a reflected way of engaging with power and orders. We also did not subscribe to the assumption of the progressiveness of resistance which we saw as an underlying rationale in the resistance studies field.

The use of the concept of resistance produces images of a subject capable of agency and political change and the scholarly development in the field has gone from an early focus on ‘more obvious and dramatic forms of resistance’ (Lilja and Vinthagen 2018, p. 213) such as rebellions and demonstrations, to paying attention to more ’subtle and diffused articulations’ (Lilja and Vinthagen 2018, p. 213).⁴ Thus, according to later works in resistance studies clear distinctions (which we saw as problematic) between compliance and resistance as well as between the subject and governing structures have been loosened.

Much of the debate in resistance studies have nevertheless been related to the seminal publication by Scott, Weapons of the Weak, (1985) on ‘everyday resistance’. Here compliance can ‘hide’ resistance, since it tends to be hidden and disguised (Scott 1985, Vinthagen and Johansson 2013, p. 2). In such subtle forms of resistance, recognition might thus be something that the resisting actor wants to avoid (Lilja and Vinthagen 2018). In the tradition of those who focus on everyday resistance à la Scott, there is a tendency to focus on intention rather than recognition (Hollander and Einwohner 2004). This means that the room for manoeuvre appears through an agency that is within the subject itself rather than governed by structures in relation to which it acts. Thereby a separation between governing structures and the agency of the subject is created.

In their take on the concept of everyday resistance, Vinthagen and Johansson emphasize the importance of distinguishing between resistance and other ‘expressions of difference, deviation, or individuality’ (Vinthagen and Johansson 2013, p. 3). The main characteristic of resistance, according to these authors, is that it involves acts that are ‘at odds with the interests or power exercise of the superiors’ (p. 20) and thus has a potential to undermine power. This means that actors do not necessarily regard what they do as resistance. Resistance, in Vinthagen’s and Johansson’s approach, becomes a question of identifying acts that can undermine power (and those that cannot).

Vinthagen and Johansson call for a recognition of the methodological challenge of privileging certain acts as ‘political’, particularly when it comes to identifying and recognizing resistance where it is not expected. Notably, because of the more eclectic approach to different forms of power and the focus on a much broader range of orders, compared to governmentality and biopolitics studies, resistance studies provide a possibility for analysing political subjectivity in relation to multiple, intersecting and often conflicting orders. Resistance might, however, also be ‘driven by a desire for escape and survival that is not framed as “political” at all’ (Lilja and Vinthagen 2018). Hereby we not only recognize the focus on recognition, intent and potentiality as methodological problems, but also the understanding of the political.

These different – but overlapping – ways of approaching the subject and its relations to power, in the above-mentioned literature, all have effects on how we understand the subject and its politics. Departing from the somewhat more grand statement scholarship of the governmentality and biopolitics literature we came to acknowledge, and learn from approaches that were more productive in our tasks to understand the micropractices of power and their production of subjectivities, such as postcolonial studies and critical geography. Informed and inspired by such work, we want to draw attention to some of the methodological problems and challenges that might be encountered in studies that make claims about the effects of power. Such a focus involves scrutinizing the choices we make when interpreting and classifying different strategies, acts and effects, and when defining subjects as either fully governed, compliant or resisting. We discuss how the claims that we make about power, agency and political subjectivity can be understood as shaped by our desires and our positions as scholars.

4. The critical scholar as activist and liberator – shaping political imagination

What are the effects of our desires on the way we do research and how we make claims about the effects of power? There are obviously different desires involved and different effects produced depending on the type of analysis. We will here engage both with what critical scholars do when focusing on techniques of government, and with those being governed as well as their engagement with governing structures.

The process of writing and knowing the subject and its political space is often erased in scholarly work, and, like others before us, we want to bring it into the light for a while in order to ask particularly how our desires shape what we see as order and recognize as political agency. We focus on two interrelated challenges. The first one, which has been much debated, is the risk of overstating the coherence and success of power (Rutherford 2007, Ferguson 2015). The second, and perhaps less debated one, is the problematic distinction between compliance and resistance involved in looking for expressions of political imagination, and the ensuing risk that we underestimate the complexity and that we miss out on that which goes on anyway. Let us discuss these challenges briefly. We will thereafter conclude this article by relating the question of our desire to locate political space back to how we are constrained by our university setting.

4.1. Establishing and destabilizing orders

How do we identify the order we study? The question is pertinent, particularly when we take as our point of departure perspectives that view spaces of freedom as formed within power relations. There is in both critical security studies and critical development research a strong (but not exclusive) focus on liberal order as particularly intriguing to investigate because of how it works through freedom, and because of its stability and expansion. It is identified as a continuous repetition, although constantly renewed in its expression.

In order to question and destabilize particular orders, we first need to establish their existence. Critique, in Butler’s reading of Foucault, is the response to a desire evoked by the obligation to follow the rules of the established order, and, as mentioned above, involves asking the question ‘how not to be governed?’ Avoiding claims that there is an originary freedom, Foucault specifies that the question is always asked in relation to a specific order and the want ‘not to be governed like that; not like that, not for that, not by them’ (Butler 2001). The orders we choose to study therefore tend to be a response to our own desire to act ethically and are chosen as a result of the order we find ourselves governed by. In our analyses, we bring to the fore how the order(s) is(are) restricting, even unjust, and requiring opposition, which is in line with Foucault’s second definition of ‘critique’ as not wanting to accept rules because they are perceived as unjust (Butler 2001). Working with theories of governmentality, we tend to reproduce the assumption of the inevitable expansion of liberal governance, which is obviously a limitation in today’s political landscape.

The task for the critical researcher can, according to the above, be seen as bringing this (unjust) order into view in order to expose it and make subtle governing techniques political. The reproduction of the theoretical perspectives we use, requires repetition. We (need to) show, over and over again, both the expansion of the liberal order to new spheres and the oppression and violence it involves, the latter legitimizing the desire not to be governed and the role of the researcher as a liberator. We read the documents and texts and bring out that which confirms our argument more often than bringing to light the struggles going on not just in the local context but within the global debates. Furthermore, we tend to make assumptions about how liberal governmentality shrinks the space for agency, as it is, by definition, constantly colonizing new lifeworlds. Thereby we create a space from which to say, ‘look we can liberate you’, and ‘we show this to you to enable your political imagination, and to show that other ways of thinking and acting are possible, even necessary’.

In our view, the issue here lies in the fact that we tend not to pay attention to criss-crossing lines of power but rather fit our observations into neat theories on liberal governmentality (and when we do, such criss-crossing lines of power tend to be interpreted as co-opted by, and eventually productive of maintaining, the liberal order). Relatedly, there is also a tendency to assume that liberal governing is successful and that the way government logics target their subjects equals the subjects that are produced in these relations of power. Such tendencies can be observed in the governmentality and biopolitics literature in its focus on neoliberal forms of rule and the production of certain types of (resilient) subjects.

In studies of resistance, the double desire may play out somewhat differently. When the practices of resistance are in focus in empirical studies, it is rather the nature of power and power structures, that is, the order in relation to which resistance is performed, that is established through the analysis of that performance. This means that the task of establishing the order as a fact becomes less significant and there is less desire to single out a particular liberal order as the order that is (or should be) opposed.

In feminist scholarship, there has been a methodological discussion about the tendency to identify a resister in each oppressed subject, a resister that responds to the logics of what the researcher wants to find. Abu-Lughod Mahmood, for example, have discussed the inclination to interpret acts that oppose what the researcher perceives to be an oppressive patriarchal order as expressions of feminist subjectivity, even when such a repertoire is not available to the objects of study (Abu-Lughod 1990, Mahmood 2011). Here we see the reverse risk of failing to see how such acts instead can be understood as the effects of other forms of power.

Returning to governmentality and biopolitics, when we focus on the liberal order, our ethics become, as for Foucault, a question of identifying and exploring subjectivities that oppose the biopolitical power that has our very lives as its object of government. Looking for a political subject or a mode of existence that opposes such an order, there is a risk that we become blind to the repressive effects of other orders and practices. On the other hand, there is also a risk if we do focus on the complexity and messiness of criss crossing lines of power that we have been arguing for (Hansson et al. 2014), namely, that we lose analytical strength in relation to those power structures that deserve our attention as critical scholars, with the simultaneous risk of inscribing the governed as an active part in their subordination (Chatterjee 1993). This approach could, therefore, be accused of being depoliticizing, in the sense that it erases clear lines between governing and the governed as well as making power relations so complex and context-dependent that it constrains the possibility of strong and coherent critique.

Thus, there may be trade-offs involved between analytical strength/critical edge and empirical depth and curiosity, as well as ‘the care one takes for what exists and what could exist’ (Foucault 1997a). Such trade-offs may also be shaped by what type of research is valued in certain academic traditions, where analytical strength and critical edge tend to be more highly valued.

This problematic urges us to engage more with possible uncertainties, and with empirical material and interpretations that may point to our claims about the liberal order as constructed and contingent. It urges us to pay more attention to intersecting and conflicting orders, not just as various expressions of liberal government but as non-liberal rationalities. We need to continue to highlight also the examples that point to the incompleteness of the liberal order, and to the effects of what people are doing and how they are negotiating and translating the order. Moreover, this task involves reflecting on how we contribute to shape what kind of political space is possible to imagine, how it is imbued with values, and what kind of political acts are hidden from view.

4.2. Constituting political space

When understanding, constructing and/or defining political space and political imagination in our studies, not only do we have the methodological problem of knowing or defining the order in accordance with our own perspectives and desires, but there are also three related issues that draw our attention in relation to knowing the subject. First, how do we know the order in relation to which the subject acts? (Knowing this would also involve knowing the subject.) Second and related, what acts do we recognize? Finally, how do we understand compliance in relation to a notion of agency?

When we make claims about the effects of power, and when we claim that individuals are accepting or refusing rules, how do we know in relation to what order the subject acts? Such claims depend on assumptions about the particular discursive embeddedness that shapes these subjects’ coming into being in a particular instance and what constitutes a danger to them. When we make the individual’s act part of our narrative of the order we assume that we know her/him. Part of the problem here lies in the abstraction demanded by our theoretical perspectives and the distance this abstraction requires from the individuals and groups about whom we make claims. As Jazeel and McFarlane (2010) argue, abstraction is useful and even necessary, but must involve accountability to the people and community and their context. The application of theoretical perspectives from a distance, and thus a turning away from the specificities of place, makes the fields of our studies seem repeatable, allowing for universal claims about the effects of certain orders. This critique is not new; for example, the subaltern studies project was specifically focused on problematizing the decontextualized and universalizing tendencies of Western critical scholarship. Here we would also like to point to the risk that the way our desires shape our criticality limits our possibility of hearing, seeing and interpreting the multiplicity of orders in relation to which people act. For example, Mahmood has discussed the inability of feminist scholarship to conceptualize agency outside the logic of repression and resistance and has suggested that the notion of the agency must be detached from ‘the goals of progressive politics’ (Mahmood 2011, p. 33).

In Bell’s words, ‘there is a risk that as researchers we are attracted to study the most obvious and visible lines of fractures and celebrate the most efficacious forms of resistance’ (Bell 2015, p. 62). Bell points to the need for curiosity with regard to the types of political imagination we cannot access and the forms of engagements that deserve our attention. We need to bring into view our compromises, paradoxes and collusions, and the silences, emotions and excesses that appear in our work. We need to ask ourselves what is hidden from view and what practices go on unnoticed by our methodological lenses and we need to be wary of the inevitability in the little interruptions of the present, ‘little interruptions that introduce hesitations, alterations in the way things rub along, that may well collectively and ultimately produce significant changes in power relations’ (Bell 2015, p. 61). Foucault’s notion that we are freer than we think we are (Bell 1996, p. 83), may mean that there is more potential for the political agency than we usually think, but it may also mean that what we do is more political than we think.

The challenges just described are well known in resistance studies, particularly since Scott’s contribution on everyday resistance was that it tends to be hidden and disguised. What is distinctive about acts of everyday resistance is their potential to undermine power. However, as resistance studies focuses on acts rather than processes of subjectivation, the challenge here lies in identifying the potential to undermine power. This places a lot of responsibility on the researcher to categorize acts as either potentially undermining or not. Yet again, this emphasizes the importance of the choices that the scholar makes, a methodological challenge that Vinthagen and Johansson touch upon in their conceptual paper (Vinthagen and Johansson 2013). Using a Foucauldian perspective to frame expressions of both covert and overt resistance further presents the risk of either reducing resistance to constant navigations that stretch the limits of government but achieve little in terms of change, or over-emphasizing the workings of power and obscuring what potential for change there is (Hale 2011, pp. 202–203 cited, Coleman 2015).

Below, we turn to the third of our questions in relation to how we constitute political space through the ways we understand compliance in relation to agency. Above, it was argued that the political subject is confident to speak and act on the truth, and is ‘indifferent to the opinion of others and to the structures of power’ (Foucault 2011, p. 318 cited, Mezzadra et al. 2013); a subject that takes risks in the face of danger. The compliant subject, on the other hand, takes no risks and effects no change. The risk that is referred to here is not the same as the risk-taking that is required of the resilient subject, a risk-taking that is acceptable within the desirable capacities of the adaptable and self-sustaining subject. Instead, the risk-taking we discuss here is the political subject putting something at stake when resisting the biopolitical regime.

In this context, we might ask ourselves what desire is at work when we make claims about the compliant and, how our understanding of the compliant relates to political agency. Who are the compliant? Who are the ones who, in contrast to political subjects, ‘merely live in order to fit in with and adapt to existing times or desire the sustainability of the conditions for their living the lives they do’ (Mezzadra et al. 2013, p. 11)? It is unclear to us whether this compliant subject is assumed to actually exist or if it is an abstraction for the purpose of the theoretical argument. Either way, we need to ask what the compliant subject does for us in our work. Are we at all concerned with the compliant as a (n active) subject? Who do we become as researchers in relation to the compliant?

Although it is not self-evident who or what acts are categorized as compliant in relation to a particular order, the act of categorizing individuals and groups, as well as acts, as such, serves the purpose of confirming the critical analysis of the researcher. The actions that are brought into analysis are the ones that serve to stabilize the critique, and the interpretation of these actions tends to be reduced to ‘adaptation’. However, when we engage with ‘the compliant’ more closely we tend to see that accepting or refusing rules are not mutually exclusive, but often simultaneous processes that are shaped by other criss-crossing lines of power. Still, the critical researcher run the risk of constructing a compliant subject that is not capable of political imagination, or of imagining otherwise. In so doing, we construct these subjects as objects that require our intervention and we also deprive them of responsibility for who they are.

5. A practice of transference?

In the above, we have discussed possible effects of our desire on the research we, as critical researchers, are conducting and on the knowledge, we produce about political subjectivity. We have argued that there is a core desire in much critical research to open up a space for political imagination. Based on Foucault’s definition of critique and the role of desire, we point to the risk that the critical scholar places focus on the orders that evoke her own ethical desire ‘not to be governed’ by an order that she perceives as unjust. Such a desire may shape how the lack of the other (whether colleague or object of study) is ‘known’ and who we as critical scholars want to become by setting our studies to work. There is thus a risk that the political imagination we want to open up for, as well as that which we search for in the other, is limited by what order we perceive ourselves as being inscribed by. Our desire thereby creates a certain tendency towards a universalization of our own political imagination. As we rarely engage in such explicit imagination, but look for it in others, it constrains what acts we recognize as political. As pointed out above, Mahmood has discussed this in relation to the universalization of the desire for freedom in feminist scholarship (Mahmood 2011, p. 30).

Moreover, the ethical responsibility of the researcher to evoke the political imagination of ‘the compliant’, becomes a responsibility for, rather than a responsibility to, the people the researcher study (Spivak 1994). A hierarchical relationship is thus created between the researcher with capacity and expertise, with political imagination, and the people she studies, who cannot imagine otherwise because of how they engage with power. Whereas Althusserian Marxism sees the philosopher as helping the working class arrives at the truth, the critical/Foucauldian researcher is helping people arrive at imagination. To make claims about compliance and resistance involves saying ‘we know who you are’, and ‘we take responsibility for opening up the possibility for contingency and imagination’.

Taking it a step further, inspired by Ilan Kapoor’s discussion of complicity and desire in participatory development (Kapoor 2005), we may argue that our desire to help people arrive at political imagination, and the responsibility it entails, may include an element of transference. Analysing what we do in terms of transference, we can see the claims we make about political imagination as a way to shift our unresolved conflicts onto our object of study. We could argue that we transfer upon our objects of study our inability to deal with our ethical concerns with the academic practices, institutions and relations that govern us. Do we, when we create a need to liberate ‘them’, implicitly try to liberate ourselves? Working in institutions that are increasingly governed through techniques of agency and performance (Dean 1999), the compromises we are forced to accept make the need for liberation all the more pressing. However, instead of addressing what we lament as the repressive policies of academia through collective action, which runs the risk of compromising our individual careers, we try to resolve the contradictions by placing the lack of political imagination elsewhere. Based on this line of reasoning, one might say that we ask more of the political subjectivity of our objects of study than we do of our own; if we liberate our objects of study we create a sense that we are free, which allows us to return to being governed by the institution of Western academia. By focusing on resistance, we may at the end of the day consider ourselves subversive while at the same time working with universalizing representational mechanisms. In this way, our double desires, that is, to destabilize orders as well as engaging with local lives, contribute to our success as knowledge producers in Western academia (Spivak 2015).

The critique we engage with allows us to form ourselves as critical scholars by rejecting the rules of liberalism in our scholarly work, with the other as our object of study, while remaining obedient to the rules of the liberal institution of the university. In fact, we obey through rejecting the rules, since rejecting the rules is what promises us academic success.

Although we do not see the possibility of solving these issues once and for all we still need to ask ourselves what we can do differently to recognize the limitations that our desires place on us as we do our critical analysis and to better understand the complex workings of power and agency. Again, following Kapoor’s discussion from a different context, we want to 1) commend the significant work that is being done in making explicit the complicities and desires in scholarly work, particularly by feminist scholars. More importantly, we want to recommend, as others have before us (eg. Spivak 1988, Ackerly et al. 2006, Jazeel and McFarlane 2010) that we make our desires explicit in conversations with our objects of study, inviting them to respond and to problematize the orders we try to stabilize and our interpretation of their agency. Finally, we suggest that we make such conversations available to the reader, which would, we are aware, run the risk of reducing the authority with which we make our claims to knowledge. Considering that there is a preponderance of studies that engage empirically with those who are seen as resisting, we particularly suggest engagement in conversations with ‘the compliant’. We also want to 2) continue to analyse, discuss and resist the orders that govern us at the university. This in terms of how we are governed both financially, where critical research tends to draw the short straw, and academically, where hierarchies are constructed in sub-fields and governing exercised through publication strategies. The result of such an analysis and such resistance would hopefully be that the way our desires play out, and our knowledge is produced, is less a result of the government of us as scholars and more of our creative use of the multiplicity of methodological experience and guidance available to us. It should open up for ambiguity in our writing without undermining the validity of our results. Moreover, we want to 3) deepen the conversation between stringent theoretical work and dense empirical analyses. This involves bringing academic knowledge production closer to the world about which we make claims and hijacking our theoretical perspectives, allowing for a conversation on more equal terms, between theoretical work based on limited empirical material and well-grounded empirical investigations. Empirical work, as well as the objects of our studies, should to a larger extent be allowed to engage in deliberation with our theories, thus decentring the latter as well as opening up new spaces for political action.

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Notes on contributors

Stina Hansson

Stina Hansson is a researcher at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. Her research focus is governance, local service provision and accessibility, especially in relation to processes of differentiation and community building

Sofie Hellberg

Sofie Hellberg is an associate professor in Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. Her research interests center around environmental issues and (bio)politics, especially relating to water, climate change and education for sustainable development as well as research methodology.

Notes

1. Evans and Reid (2014) for example, call for a reimagining of the political subject in relation to their analysis of resilience as a central idea in contemporary neoliberal governance.

2. Recently, governmentality scholarship has turned its attention to studying governmental power in practice, highlighting its smooth functioning as well as acts of resistance that constitute ‘sand in the machinery’ (Knutsson 2014; see also Gabay 2011) and the field has further developed within anthropology (Olivier de Sardan 2008, Blundo and Le Meur 2008, Gupta 2012). Moreover, the concept of ‘counter-conduct’ has been applied in order to rethink and study the complex relationships between ‘power and dissent’ (Death 2011).

3. Resistance Studies, as understood here, span many disciplines, embracing a broad spectrum in terms of studying and defining resistance. Current research in Resistance Studies has placed focus on the creation of alternatives to existing ways of lives, institutions and practices, and it has labelled this specific form of resistance as ‘constructive’ resistance (Baaz et al. 2017).

4. de Certeau, for example, has argued that practices of resistance take shape within power relations (de Certeau 1984), and Lilja has highlighted that actors are both subjects and objects of power (2008). In fact, a key way for resistance to be possible is through ‘reiteration, rearticulation or repetition of the dominant discourse with a slightly different meaning’ (Lilja and Vinthagen 2018, building on Butler 1995).