SI SI 47006065 COLEGIO DE EDUCACION

The overbearing power of culture and its central role in the reproduction of structures of domination in the work of Bourdieu, deals a heavy blow to any conceptualization of politics as an arena where the down-and-out always seem to be conjuring up values, identities and practices that keep outflanking the capitalist rear-guard. However, the main weakness of Bourdieu’s powerful conceptual strategy is to be found precisely in his overemphasis on power as a reproductive force and his insufficient attention to the

productive capacity of power. This latter point has been the key concern in the work of Michel Foucault for whom power is never merely repressive. Foucault approaches

power as “a productive network that runs through the whole social body” and works, or is “accepted” because it “produces things, induces pleasure, forms of knowledge,

produces discourse” (Foucault 1984: 61). Resistance, insofar as it occurs, does not stand in opposition to power but operates through and within existing systems of power and repression. Framing the argument in this way allows Foucault to treat modern power as a decentered conglomerate of affiliations, antagonisms and exchanges where the task of governing is reduced to carving out the space and defining the techniques of

intervention into what is already a more or less self-creating sphere (Burchell 1993: 267). In fact the very notion of a Centre of Power (government) is made redundant in favour of a field of interaction between the self-regulating practices of individuals and the rationality that informs the guiding hand of government. In Foucault’s words:

“… if one wants to analyze the genealogy of the subject in Western civilization … He has to take into account the points where the technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon himself. And conversely, he has to take into account the points where the techniques of the self are integrated into structures of coercion and domination. The contact point, where the individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we can call, I think, government” (in, Lemke 2002: 52-3).

Power, or the power to govern is reduced to the guidance of self-governing individuals; the carving out of the limits of possible action of subjects which is itself a process where subjects are active participants instead of passive recipients. This approach has been adopted by Aihwa Ong in her classic ethnography of spirit possessions in a Malaysian shoe factory where she explores the friction between encroaching global neoliberal regimes of power and local culture. Through this interplay of the global and

the local Ong seeks to challenge Marxist assumptions that relations of production have an over-determining effect on the identity of workers, and focus instead on the

“imaginative life [on] the factory floor” (Ong 1987: xiv). When looking at the lives of shop floor workers, Ong suggests that “cultural concepts are not the mere

epiphenomena of class power or cultural values but are constituting knowledge/power systems producing the ‘truths’ whereby we live our lives” (1987: 180).

A brief summary of her ethnographic argument will be made here in order to tease out some the themes that will inform this thesis.

As a response to growing social tensions over the distribution of power in Malaysian society in the seventies, the Malaysian government decided to implement various agricultural and industrialization programs that drew Malay men and women away from the traditional village compounds and into urban schools and foreign owned

manufacturing plants. Because they were perceived as cheap and easily controlled labour, within a decade almost fifty thousand mostly unmarried Malay women came to fill the ranks of assembly line workers. Once in the factories however, Malay women proved much more difficult to discipline than expected. Quiescent workers would burst into fits of rage and screaming caused by sudden spirit attacks, causing stoppages in production. For Ong, spirits represent transgressions of moral boundaries precisely because they are disembodied beings unbound by human rules (Ong 1988: 30). As such, they manifest themselves to those who venture into amoral spaces and attack people who “unknowingly step out of the Malay social order” (ibid: 31). Once removed from the traditional village environment, young women in factories often found themselves in spaces where the traditional moral boundaries that sustained personal integrity and regulated the interaction between men and women no longer applied.

Ong interprets the bouts of spirit possessions in factories as a protest against changing social relations brought about by the process of industrial capitalism as a result of which workers become “alienated from their bodies, the products of their work and their own culture” (ibid 38). They are a way of articulating what cannot be said publicly, that is, a call for the renegotiation of social relationships on the shop floor between management and workers in ways that are less dehumanizing for the latter. For Ong however, the resistance expressed by workers is not geared against capitalist accumulation as such, but is more an opposition to the loss of autonomy and local notions of personhood. The values that inform this opposition are extra-economic and furnish a moral critique of the violation of the “fundamental humanity” of Malay workers through the production process. It is this culturally informed moral critique of personal degradation that factory managers are forced to deal with to their inconvenience. Whatever empowerment workers possess does not seem to derive just from the economic but, as with Thompson and Scott, from the cultural. Yet Ong moves away from them in the crucial sense that she is not inclined to pair the value system of Malay women with any notion of class. Malay women have no “class consciousness” (ibid: 194) but that does not mean we should assume that they are “over-determined” by their insertion in the capitalist production process. At the imaginative level, they are still able to forge novel and often unexpected subjectivities. In other words, resistance is always played out within and throughout forms of power and domination rather than “outside” of them. This is

Foucault’s key contribution to the understanding of power brought to full fruition and to the dismay of the cultural studies approach that insists on maintaining the notion of class struggle as the centripetal force of social antagonism, for which the possibility of acting outside of the mediated forms of capital is a necessary corollary of political action.

Whereas Thompson does see the weak and the powerful as mutually constitutive, he sees them as such in terms of class, which is what he means when he says that classes always exist in their relation to other classes. For Thompson the social history of eighteenth century England can be seen as a series of moral and cultural confrontations between the “plebs” and the “gentry and clergy” through which class distinctions are historically crystallized. If he sees the immersion of the labouring poor into industrial capitalism as empowering, it is only in so in the sense of helping to foster a new “class consciousness”. Ong’s departure is subtle yet of great consequence. Resistance to capitalism may indeed occur and does occur among Malaysian workers. But one does not find there Thompson’s miners and railwaymen struggling for reform inspired by an imagined “totality of an egalitarian socialist society” (1978: 144). Resistance to

capitalism need not be about socialist reform led by class awareness, but about the negotiation of cultural values and social boundaries that constitute a particular experience of personhood as a moral force. Ong’s focus on socio-economic

transformation and the renegotiation of personhood within liminal moral zones is of particular importance for this thesis. As we shall see, many of the conflicts and debates emerging from the transformation of Macedonia’s social and economic landscape touch upon and unsettle the integrity of the moral self, which produces zones of friction where the refusal to internalize change is channeled within systems of power and domination rather than outside of them. For example, a key argument in this thesis is that workers, more often than not, seek to change the contours of hierarchy and inequality in ways that correspond to their moral economy and conceptions of personhood.