tactical power and resistance

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The previous post briefly mentioned that the Chinese Jasmine Revolution (CJR) was initiated through a post at <Boxun.com>. Here, I will look at how the ‘CJR-initiators’, the group of people responsible for both this post and for some future pro-CJR posts, functions as a form of technosocial resistance to China’s governance. In this case, I use the term technosocial resistance as a way to emphasize the relations between technologies and their produsage in acts/forms of resistance to power, where produsage is a term created by Axel Bruns to refer to the simultaneous production and usage/’consumption’ that underpins many present-day media. Examples would include user interaction with sites like Boxun, Facebook, Weibo, Tumblr, Wikipedia, Google, Grindr, and any ‘blogs’ or ‘social networking sites’: any site that enables each user to make things and distribute them to others is a site for produsage. It is these same sites that I will sometimes refer to as media produsage platforms (MPPs), which brings me back to technosocial resistance: as the CJR-initiators and other CJR-supporters have shown, MPPs like Boxun and Facebook enable certain kinds of technosocial resistance (while excluding countless others) with specific effects.     So who are these CJR-initiators? Based on reports from the final days of April, they are comprised of about 25 members scattered around the world and within China, including the1989 Tienanmen Square protester Feng Congde. With the exception of Feng, group participants have taken anonymity as a top priority through the joint use of pseudonyms, Linux operating systems, Apple devices, and other tactics and tools intended to ward off hackers and computer viruses. As such, it is currently impossible to locate any information about most of the participants; their Internet-reliant basis for unity appears to rest on nothing more than a commitment to the Chinese people and the CJR. What is clear is that the initial Boxun post was made as a joint effort by two of these CJR-initiators, and that one of these participants continues to maintain a blog dedicated to the CJR. (As an aside, I will note that this article (unsurprisingly) points to the existence of multiple CJR-initiator groups, and notes that the members of one group call themselves "The Initiators and Organisers of the Chinese Jasmine Revolution".)     This leads to another question: why does this particular instance of technosocial resistance matter? While it is true that the CJR has not (yet) blossomed into a weekly nationwide protest, and has ‘failed’ with respect to that goal, there are a few points to consider.

First, the CJR-initiators have themselves made it clear that the weekly ‘non-protests’ produced by police action are not likely to incite immediate participation (or change, for that matter); rather, they are intended to increase awareness among the Chinese people, to indicate the extent to which freedom of speech and human rights are violently denied, and to gradually motivate people to formulate tactics for peaceful revolution. Although it is unclear what kind of ‘democracy’ is sought by the CJR-initiators and how this new political form would look like, they are by all means opposed to the current one-party government system. In any case, it seems presumptuous to say that the CJR has simply ‘failed’ when the project was- and is- not meant to incite the kind of immediate participation and change that many have expected from it. At this point, and from the perspective put forth by the CJR-initiators, the success of the CJR rests in whether or not it effectively encourages China’s people to perceive themselves as subjects of governmental violence and manipulation that have the right to a different, ‘better’, and ‘more democratic’ form of governance.

Second, the CJR is not something which can be dismissed simply because it ‘failed’, regardless of what goals it is perceived to have. Moreover, it should not be immediately dismissed as politically ineffective without taking into account its various effects, and not just those effects that relate to sweeping changes in governance. The last post pointed to some of these effects, including the ‘non-event’ spectacles put on by the Chinese police every Sunday since February 20 and the rapid series of government actions taken against those it perceives as ‘political dissidents’: from mid-February to May 31, the Chinese government

...criminally detained a total of 26 individuals, disappeared more than 30, and put more than 200 under soft detention. [From this site.]

In addition to these effects, there have been several others: the arresting of those few people who actually protested at the CJR sites by shouting slogans or, in one case, merely holding a white flower; the police beating and interrogation of transnational reporters who attempted to garner video footage of the first set of CJR ‘non-events’, and the government banning of these same reporters from proposed CJR events; and the loosely connected formation of transnational campaigns demanding the release of Ai Weiwei and the other activists arrested in relation to the CJR. In some cases, this demand is accompanied by another, namely, the displacement of the one-party government of China with a ‘more democratic’ one that allows for greater freedom of speech. As for the police-government actions, they have been complimented by a production of logics, ethics, and morals both by the government institutions and by those resisting China’s governance within and outside of China. (I will return to this matter in one of my upcoming posts as it warrants a lengthy discussion in and of itself.) As a whole, this multitude of effects is firmly tied to the CJR and will need to be dealt with regardless of whether it was ‘successful’ or not.

The Chinese Jasmine Revolution (or CJR) has been going on for a few months now, having started in late February. A simple post at the social media produsage platform (SMPP) <Boxun.com> proposed a ‘Chinese Jasmine Revolution’ together with about a dozen protest sites throughout China and a slogan-chanting strategy that was to be put into action at these sites every Sunday. That same day, Boxun was effectively disabled via denial-of-service ‘cyber attacks’ (DoS attacks) and Chinese President Hu Jintao announced a need for “improved management of the ‘virtual society’ and a better guidance of public opinions on the Internet”. (The latter has no clear connection to the Boxun post, but does help contextualize it and also the DoS attacks.) At least until March 13, Boxun continued to be consistently subjected to DoS attacks that were almost certainly enacted by the government.

    The proposed Sunday protests have been perceived by much of the transnational and non-China-based mass media as unfulfilled possibilities: there have only been a handful of individuals who have marked themselves as protesters by chanting or through some other acts, so it is difficult to distinguish those who are there to protest from everybody else in the site areas. Yet although the proposed protests did not take the same form as was initially proposed and did not resemble the kind of protests that had recently taken place in Tunisia and Egypt (among other places in Western Asia and Northern Africa), they were still events with clear effects (and perhaps other effects that are not clear as of yet). After all, in addition to the DoS attacks on Boxun, the Chinese police has made a sustained, massive effort to discourage any potential protesters and to violently discipline any who are perceived to be protesters. For instance, the police have regularly swarmed the protest sites each Sunday with the dual intention of standing guard in case any attempt to protest and attempting to incite those people who are thinking of protesting to regulate themselves- that is, to exercise ‘self-control’ (in the sense of ‘controlling the self’) by acting like a ‘normal’ person traveling through a given protest site so as to avoid police discipline.

    The Chinese government-police has also been ‘disappearing’ and generally harassing those people deemed ‘prominent political dissidents’. People such as Ai Weiwei have been dragged away by police without clear explanation; in his specific case, he was picked up at an airport moments before boarding a flight with his friend (again without any concrete reason). In late May, almost two months after Ai’s arrest, he was accused of tax evasion by the police, though the length of time between this claim and Ai’s arrest indicates that this charge is simply an excuse to detain him for additional time. (In any case, it is clear that Ai was initially arrested because of his political resistance, not because of his taxes.) This is not the only tactic that has been used by the Chinese government-police, though- Ai himself was previously put under house arrest for his political work, and the police broke into a hotel room Ai had been staying at and proceeded to beat him, presumably to discourage Ai from testifying in defense of another perceived ‘political dissident’ at a trial taking place the next day.

Altogether, these various police actions effectively serve to discipline those who voice their issues with China’s governance and are part of a concerted effort to incite self-control and political docility among individual Chinese people. Of course, the government-police are not alone in this; every person in China who acts in ways that promote this kind of self-control participates in this production of power that governs and is enacted by virtually everyone. Even the threat of discipline for disobeying the command to self-control is decentralized: for example, mass media and Internet companies are compelled to develop strategies of self-control to ensure that all finalized work is free of ‘politically sensitive content’ under the threat of government shut-down. This is not to say that mass media and Internet companies never resist the Chinese government-police and their production of ‘politically sensitive content’ as part of a broader strategy of media control, but rather that any such resistance should be understood as constricted by this context. Moreover, although the imperative of 'self-control' and political docility are enacted by nearly everyone- for instance, through acts of 'self-censorship'- it is important to remember that their existence is mainly dependent on the disciplinary acts of the Chinese government; that is to say, the government and police institutions (and the people constituting them) bear the bulk of the responsibility for producing and sustaining these power mechanisms, and must change their practices if these repressive mechanisms are to be eliminated.

What are gender rights, and why take the time to discuss a definition? First of all, gender rights are dependent on context precisely because gender itself is context-dependent; both take place not only within a particular time and place, but amidst the power dynamics of that time and place. The languages and knowledges people use and the social practices by which they use them determine the concept of gender as a meaningful, coherent, and seemingly stable and obvious way of viewing themselves and others. Thus, gender rights are just as dependent on these acts as gender itself.

For example, consider the ongoing US medical practice of cutting off part of the clitoris of some intersex infants, a practice which is performed under the assumption that the child will need a ‘normal-sized’ clitoris if ze is to ‘fit into society’ as a female and be perceived as sexually appealing by males later in hirs life. (Ze/hir/hirs/hirself are gender-neutral pronouns corresponding to she/her/hers/herself.) How is the concept of gender put to use here?

This instance of medical discourse portrays individual normalization as a necessary aspect of medical practice; individuals must be altered so that they better approximate ‘the average person’, which is to say, that symbolic figure that is constructed from the physical reality of individual bodies but is nevertheless imaginary in itself: ‘the average person’ is a collection of symbols composed of and tied together with language, not an entity which can be physically grasped. This is not to say that there are no people who are precisely ‘average’ (hence ‘normal’)  in the statistical sense in some respects, but that the idea of an ‘average person’ is a constructed way of viewing the world; the ‘average person’ only makes sense as a concept because of the human-made knowledge of ‘statistical average’, which in turn relies on human-made tools of measurement. Neither of these human-made devices are simply discoveries of some fundamental truth about the world; they are arbitrary ways of making sense of our experiences.

Measurements do more than simply measure: they assert that there is some isolated aspect of reality worth measuring, and claim that individual experiences can be linked together in a specific way- for instance, through reference to ‘length’. This is not to say that measurements have no use or are meaningless, but that we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we can accumulate these ‘secrets of nature’ as a way to ‘explain’ (i.e., exercise linguistic control over) all experiences. In the case of ‘statistical averages’, then, we must disconnect the link that is made between what is ‘average’ according to measurements, on the one hand, and what is ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ (i.e., in need of normalization), on the other.

This demand for normalization is not limited to gender and sex, of course, but the urgency with which it is pursued in these cases is exceptional if not exclusive. People must ‘fit in’ when it comes to gender and sex; hence, they must be sexually ‘desirable’ (with respect to the dominant tools that produce this concept of ‘desirability’ and measure it accordingly); and these two necessities must be ensured by scientific practices. Rather than asking ‘why’ in the hope of some final answer that will lay all doubt to rest, I will simply note that this logic has been ingrained in present-day medical discourse and practice, and has been firmly in place for (at least) decades in the US. And while there has been effort made to change this reality both from within the medical institutions (see Milton Diamond’s activism) and outside them (see intersex activists like Cheryl Chase), there is much change that still needs to happen and many infants who will be violently harmed for the sake of ‘normality’: when it comes to sex and gender, medical science too often puts norms ahead of health and happiness. (To be clear, I am not saying that all of medical science and everyone who participates in it abides by this logic; I am saying that this logic is nevertheless dominant, and that this is an aspect of medical science that cannot be brushed aside simply because ‘not everyone does it’.)

    Drawing on this example, I take gender rights to include individual people’s freedom from the tyranny of normalized bodies and embodiments: the mere creation of averages, of average sizes and characteristics, does not justify violence against people; nor does the dominance of a two-gender discourse excuse disciplinary acts against those who challenge this discourse through their refusal to normalize themselves. This should not be interpreted as saying that both averages and genders need to be annihilated or that normalized genders are inferior to marginalized ones, but rather as a denouncement of the way the dominant discourses on averages and genders are used as a basis for exercising control over people. We must resist the idea that ‘normality’ is something that must be pursued for its own sake and at the expense of every person’s equal right to happiness.

As the above example shows, this is not a trivial matter, but one which has hurt countless infants; in the case of many people, including transmen like Brandon Teena and non-hypermasculine gay men like Matthew Shepard, it was taken as legitimate grounds for killing them. It is not ‘their fault’ for resisting the despotic rule of ‘gender normality’ that was forced onto them, but the fault of those who enacted violence against them. Yet this violence is not merely done by ‘bad individuals’ who are the exception rather than the rule: these people, these subjects of power living within and constrained by particular contexts, are acting on the dominant rules and knowledges that institutions craft out of language.