Authority and the Capacity to Resist: Beyond the Power/knowledge Nexus

This contribution develops a theoretical account of the ambiguities and complexities generated by the intersection between the production of (epistemic) authority and the production of resistance in the context of contemporary knowledge infrastructures. It starts from the observation that the power/knowledge nexus (as theorised by Foucault, 1980) is operationalised differently depending on the site of production – whether we are talking about state power (the power of the sovereign), research institutions, or universities. This leads to a paradoxical position where academics are likely to constitute themselves as subjects with highly constrained agency (Bacevic, 2019), subjected to but rarely subjects of disciplinary power. This, in turn, produces a transfer of resistance, where agency becomes ‘outsourced’ or passed on to ‘new’ generations, I in a reproductive mode explicitly criticised by theorists such as Edelman (2004), Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003), and Berlant (2011); this both commits students to specific forms of resistance, and protects existing disciplinary positions and relations within the academia. This is evident in recent student movements (e.g. campus mobilisations around Palestine in the US and the UK, the student movement in Serbia), but also speaks to a broader fracture in the constitution of resistance as collective practice. It also presents a systematic ‘blind spot’ in the work on resistance, one that most accounts prefer not to engage with. Drawing on later perspectives on Foucault (e.g. Butler 2005), as well as approaches to authority such as Jacques Rancière’s or bell hooks’, I ask whether it is possible to reconceptualise the relationship between knowledge, authority, and power in a way that does not produce these blind spots, and what the implications for the future of scholarship would be.