Bersih 3.0 and resisting power
Alwyn Lau, New Mandala
How is Power resisted? What is the relation between the Law and Transgression? To what extent is rebellion against authority determined or influenced by authority itself? And how does Bersih 3.0 match up?
Michel Foucault, who popularised the idea that Power generates its own resistance, had no clear answer to how, then, Power could be challenged. If resistance is the constitutive result of that which it seeks to resist, if Bersih (clean/acronym of the movement for free and fair elections) is simply the subversive child of ‘Kotor’ (dirty), then no matter how many protests are held, it’s still part of the system. To the extent that some of Bersih’s leaders did (secretly or not) have violence in mind, Foucault’s premonition would be true: we would only be replacing one rotten door with another one. If violence can be engineered then later denied as part of a peaceful facade, then Malaysia would be going in a merry go round of one and the same political injustice. The next time Bersih happens, there will be a need to curb the event’s excesses which threaten to undo the good it stands for. Bersih’s very success should not breed its own unravelling.
Foucault’s key weakness lay in the impossibility of subjects effectively challenging and subverting the system, given how their protests are part and parcel of the very political constellation they want to overturn. Whilst Foucault’s talk about the ‘care of the self’ (essentially subjects being wary of having their selves shaped by power) has some potential for political emancipation, theoretically it’s inconsistent and unpersuasive given the weight he put on Power.
Judith Butler (more of a gender theory specialist) threw a further spanner into the works by showing not only that power generates its own transgression but that the way power disciplines resistance is itself ‘eroticised’. This is to say that if at first protesters ‘enjoyed’ violating public rules, now even the form of punishment feels fun, which in turn becomes a form of ‘transgression’ too. In Bersih terms, this is like the masses utilising the tear-gas attacks as a media event, staging carnivalesque ‘water-cannon festivals’ or wearing barbed-wire for fashion. The means of repression have become a means of reverie and thus of rebellion. Resistance, then, is about performance and re-performance. Power needs resistance for its own perpetuation. Therefore, resistance can throw stumbling blocks in power’s way by producing socio-political performances which contradict and confound the performances Power expects of those under it.
For Butlerians (and inconsistent Foucauldians), there is a level of self-deliberation and planning involved in resistance. However, with Alain Badiou, predictability, control and planning are rendered secondary. What matters is theTruth-Event.
The Badiouian event is a completely unexpected moment of liberation which shatters the hegemony of the existing system and re-creates subjects in its own image. This is to say that one ‘becomes’ a subject by recognising one’s self in the event. The event is ‘bigger’ than you yet it’s also nothing but you, your participation and your belief that it’s world-transforming. Badiou’s truth-events are what results in new social orders because existing orders could not design nor predict nor produce nor contain them. Largely ‘ex nihilo’, truth-events become events via a retroactive process of recognition by the people who comprise them. In a word, Bersih 3.0 was for those who believed in it. It wasn’t an abstract intellectual exercise of pros’ and cons, but a catalyst for creating a political identity. To even suggest there is ‘more than one side’ to Bersih implies one has not been ‘caught’ by its wind, aroused by its flames. The truth of Bersih is the truth of desire and action, not something that fits a neat theoretical grid.
