The link between James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) and current conditions

The current post concerns an American Anthropologist (2005) article by Carol J. Greenhouse regarding James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990).

Aerial view looking east along Lake Shore Blvd West from near Long Branch Loop, Ontario Archives Acc 16215, ES1-814, Northway Gestalt Collection. The original Colonel Samuel Smith house (a log cabin to which extensions and siding were added over the years) is visible at the centre of the photo. Click on photo to enlarge it.

This post also features James Scott’s comments responding, in turn, to the article by Carol Greenhouse.

My interest in this discussion stems from my past involvement in volunteer efforts related to land use planning in Toronto. I think of the many things I have learned, first-hand. My aim as a volunteer when living in Toronto, was to contribute to ongoing efforts to ensure the interests of local residents would be closely taken into account, when land use decisions affecting local neighbourhoods were being made.

Among projects I was involved with was a successful, community-wide letter writing effort, in 2011, to keep Parkview School, in Long Branch, now named l’École élémentaire Micheline-Saint-Cyr, in public hands. This effort involved decisions made by levels of government whose use of language was straightforward and direct; we were dealing in this case with the language that power speaks on occasions where the language usage is the same as the language of everyday life.

Power sometimes also uses language in another way entirely, however. That is what I also learned as a volunteer. What dawned on me in those years, as it has dawned on many fellow residents, in observing large numbers of land use hearings and meetings in Toronto was that, sometime, the language related to the concept of “minor variances,” in relation to Toronto’s Official Plan, had minimal connection to the decisions that were being made.

Sometimes, that is, power uses language in a way that is the opposite of how language is used in everyday life. In the language that power sometimes speaks, up is down, in is out, and big is small. As George Orwell and Carol Off among other observers have observed, such a form of language usage may be on display when consequential decisions are made, affecting large numbers of people.

Detail from July 21, 1905 survey prepared for Eastwood Brothers showing Eastwood Farm in Long Branch where Colonel Samuel Smith log cabin was located; cabin is in view alongside roadway at centre-right of survey.

As a volunteer, I’ve arrived at valuable insights about how language sometimes works. My subsequent study – in this case, in connection with a series of American Anthropologist (2005) articles about the work of James Scott – has added nuance to my initial understanding.

Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990)

A review by Daniel Little of Colgate University of Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) notes that the book “is about the experience of domination and indignity that power relations impose on the powerless.” Little adds that the book features “a careful analysis of the symbolic politics of resistance.”

Scott’s central innovation in this work, according to Little, is a distinction between public transcripts – “the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate” and “hidden transcripts” – “discourse that takes place ‘offstage,’ beyond direct observation by powerholders.”

In their discussion, Carol Greenhouse and James Scott address issues related to power and language; the exchange of views takes place in a series of articles focused on the work of James Scott:

American Anthropologist: Volume 107, Issue 3, September 2005

The article by Carol Greenhouse is entitled: “Hegemony and Hidden Transcripts: The Discursive Arts of Neoliberal Legitimation.”

Back view (facing south) of Colonel Samuel Smith farmstead house, located at what are now the school grounds of the former Parkview School in Long Branch. Originally a log cabin, built in 1797, the house had siding and extensions added to it over the years. Photo © Betty Farenick and family

The abstract reads:

In this article, I offer a reading of James Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990) from an inverted standpoint: Whereas Scott’s focus is on resistance from below, mine is on resistance from above. My case study involves some of the more prominent legal and political responses to the attacks of September 11, 2001 – notably the President’s Military Order of November 13, 2001, establishing military tribunals for noncitizen detainees charged with terrorism. My analysis supports Scott’s thesis regarding the discursivity of resistance while challenging some of his conclusions regarding the form and content of hegemony, as read in the current neoliberal milieu. With respect to the military tribunals, I argue that their establishment represents an extension of executive power rehearsed prior to the attacks, and that the politicization of security in the United States involves institutions and issues that have long antecedents in partisan political terms.

Response by James Scott to article by Carol Greenhouse: the concept of hegemony

In his response to Greenhouse, Scott refers to the concept of hegemony; an excerpt – I’ve added paragraph breaks – from his Afterword reads:

K. Sivaramakrishnan and Carol Greenhouse both address the issue of hegemony, although each in a quite different and original way. Here is perhaps the place for a moment of self-criticism and a belated apology to the ghost of Gramsci himself. Strictly speaking, the task Gramsci set himself in his discussion of hegemony was to account for the relative quiescence of the working class in a political landscape of parliamentary democracy, in which they had the right to vote.

The term hegemony, as opposed to domination, was applied explicitly and exclusively to such settings because the vote was a key element in legitimating a political order in which all the other political assets – the means of production, landed property, the Church, the media, the school system, and the law – were firmly in the hands of the bourgeoisie and its allies.

View of l’École élémentaire Micheline-Saint-Cyr (formerly Parkview School), photographed from top of Aquaview Condominiums, November 2012. Click on photo to enlarge it. Jaan Pill photo

The right to vote and parliamentary democracy were both working-class achievements with real consequences and, at the same time, institutions that suggested the complicity and participation of the working class in creating a political order that was manifestly unfair. As such, the term hegemony is, strictly speaking, inapplicable to most of the settings (e.g., slavery, serfdom, caste, dictatorships) described in Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) and is only marginally applicable to the peasantry of Sedaka, the subjects of Weapons of the Weak (1985).

I ought to have used the term domination in its place. Although the authors of systems of domination also attempt to justify their rule in terms of the well-being of their subjects (e.g., paternalism, superior knowledge, security), they lack any institutions of apparent consent that are the very center of Gramsci’s attention. At stake for me in my Malaysian village fieldwork and in writing Weapons of the Weak, was the task of examining closely the struggle over material appropriation and the struggle over the moral high ground (aka ideology) in one small place. As a card-carrying political scientist, my inspiration was nothing more and nothing less than what every anthropologist takes for granted: namely, that no abstract force, collectivity, or system ever arrives at the door of human experience, except as it is mediated by concrete, particular human “carriers.”

View of school grounds, looking north toward Lake Shore Blvd. West, at former Parkview School in Long Branch. The school, which was saved from demolition following a community-wide letter writing effort, was subsequently renamed as St. Josaphat Catholic School; its current name is l’École élémentaire Micheline-Saint-Cyr. Jaan Pill photo

Not the landed aristocracy in general, but a particular lord of the land, with his own family history, his own personality, in this particular place. Not capitalism, in general, but this moneylender, this trader, this factory boss, and this foreman, each with his or her own personality, ethnicity, and routines. One of the most impressive examples of how illuminating it can be to attach a historical process to its actual historical bearers is Hillel Levine’s 1991 work, Economic Origins of Antisemitism. He shows how anti-Semitism barred Polish Jews from a host of occupations and drove many into moneylending, cropbuying and production loans, retail trade, and the sale of alcohol.

View of new main entrance stairs, one of many new, recently constructed landscape features at École élémentaire Micheline-Saint-Cyr, 85 Forty First St. in Long Branch. Jaan Pill photo.

Thus, the Jew came, willy nilly, to occupy the last rung above the peasantry in a capitalist world of markets and credit. And, thus, it was in a capitalist slump that the Polish peasant often experienced the shocks in the form of an (also relatively powerless) Jewish shopkeeper, moneylender, and rent collector. And thus, finally, it was that rage at personal ruin originating in the financial centers of New York and London that took, in the Polish countryside, the form of anti-Semitism. Weapons of the Weak was an attempt to discuss class and ideology, leaving aside the abstractions of political science and sociology.

The archaeological remains of the Colonel Samuel Smith homestead are located on the school grounds of Parkview School at 85 Forty First Street. The Ontario government announced on August 25, 2011 that it would provide $5.2 million in funding to enable the school to stay in public hands. A new French elementary school is slated to open on the site in 2013. The sale of the school has turned out to be a ‘good news’ story thanks to the efforts of Etobicoke-Lakeshore MPP Laurel Broten (subsequently Minister of Education); Ward 3, Etobicoke-Lakeshore TDSB Trustee Pamela Gough; Toronto Lands Corporation officials; large numbers of people who wrote letters in support of keeping the school in public hands; and several key individuals who shared strategic advice. Peter Foley photo

Scott’s additional comment regarding article by Greenhouse: repackaging of genuine resentments of subalterns

Scott adds, in his Afterword in the special forum, published in 2005, in American Anthropologist:

Greenhouse’s article takes my ideas of the “official” and the “hidden” transcript into wholly new territory. In the process, she sees possibilities and subtleties to the analysis that, although I wish they were mine, are actually her own quite original inventions. To gloss what seems to me a powerful insight, she sees the key hegemonic move as the way in which the genuine resentments of subalterns-citizens are repackaged in a fashion that contributes to the political capital and projects of rule. Scapegoating minorities, draconian anticrime laws, and saber-rattling nationalism might fall in that category.

What is new, I think, is that it points to the link between the genuine fears of subalterns and the play of official discourse, much as Fredric Jameson (1981) shows in The Political Unconscious how advertising depends on popular hopes and utopias for its effect. Where virtually all my attention was devoted to the “hidden transcript” of subordinate groups, Greenhouse proposes a novel scheme for uncovering the deeper game behind official public acts.

Her brief but utterly convincing tracing of what she calls the “discursive trails” behind President Bush’s Military Order of November 13, 2001, which established military tribunals for noncitizen detainees, shows the promise of this line of inquiry. Her investigation of the lineages of this order makes it evident that it was also a tactical move in a larger strategic plan to assert executive branch power over Congress and the courts, and to curtail due process protections. The best and deepest investigative reporting, in the tradition of I. F. Stone, has always followed Greenhouse’s model. What is so valuable here is that she has theorized the practice so well as to make it clear how high the stakes are in discursive analysis of this kind. If it were up to me, I would make her analysis required reading for the handful of reporters who take their jobs seriously.

During May 6, 2012 Jane’s Walk in Long Branch (Toronto), Mike James speaks at Parkview School at site of Colonel Samuel Smith’s cabin, built in 1797. Jaan Pill photo

Changes in world media ecosystem since 9/11

Scott’s reference in his article, published in 2005, to investigative reporting brings to mind the multitudes of studies available which underline how drastically the media ecosystem has changed with advent of the internet and social media.

In this context, sources I have found of value in my current reading, about such a drastic and dramatic change in the world’s media ecosystem, include “The Flooded Zone: How We Became More Vulnerable to Disinformation in the Digital Era” – Chapter 3, by Paul Starr, from The Disinformation Age (2020). This is an Open Access document from Cambridge University Press.

An excerpt reads:

Compared to the patterns in the mid-twentieth century, the news media and their audiences have been reconfigured along political lines. Americans used to receive news and opinion from national media – broadcast networks, wire services, and newsmagazines – that stayed close to the center and generally marginalized radical views on both the right and the left. Now the old gatekeepers have lost that power to regulate and exclude, and news audiences have split. By opening up the public sphere to a broader variety of perspectives, including once-shunned radical positions, the new environment should have advanced democratic interests. But the forms of communication have aggravated polarization and mutual hostility and the spread of disinformation.

While the mass-media gatekeepers no longer have as much power as they once had to interdict falsehood, the digital revolution has given rise to new forms of organization that could perform that function. The most important of these are the corporations that control the platforms on which news and debate travel. That has put the platforms and the people who own and run them at the center of the political conflict over disinformation.

British empire had strong influence on history of the Middle East

Scott’s discussion concerning the genesis of antisemitism in Poland brings to mind discourses related to the history of the Middle East as for example in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020) by Rashid Khalidi.

With regard to the latter study of history, I was interested to come across a Dec. 16, 2023 Politico article entitled: “Masha Gessen Kicks the Hornet’s Nest on Israel and the Holocaust: In a new Q&A, the Russian-American journalist discusses why a prestigious award ceremony for them got called off.” An excerpt from the article reads:

In Gessen’s view, Germany’s rigid definition of antisemitism, however well-intentioned, has had the effect of stifling valid debate, particularly about Israel. And it has implications for the current debate in the United States over what constitutes antisemitism, and what speech or language is acceptable.

Masha Gessen’s work is also highlighted at a previous post about totalitarianism.