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    Deconstruction is a Martial Art
    Paul Bowman Paul Bowman teaches cultural studies at Cardiff University. He is author of PostMarxism Versus Cultural Studies (Edinburgh UP, 2007), Deconstructing Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2008), and Theorizing Bruce Lee (Rodopi, 2009). He is also editor of Interrogating Cultural Studies (Pluto, 2003) and The Rey Chow Reader (Columbia UP, forthcoming) as well as co-editor of The Truth of Žižek (Continuum, 2007) and Reading Rancière (forthcoming). Chapter written for Sjef Houppermans, et al (Eds.), Enduring Resistance: Cultural Theory after Derrida / La Résistance persévère: la théorie de la culture (d’)après Derrida (Langages / langues : English and French), 2009.
    
    I am a monster of fidelity, the most perverse infidel. (Derrida 1987: 24) what is technique in this case? Is there a lever? Is there a better lever? (Derrida 1992: 205)
    
    I The Violence of Deconstruction With the words ‘I am a monster of fidelity, the most perverse infidel’, Jacques Derrida provided a very concise insight into the strategy and effects of deconstruction: namely, being so faithful to whatever one is engaged with that one effectively warps it. Despite the obvious violence of such transformation, deconstruction is still often mistaken (both by some practitioners and more widely) to be a peaceable and beatific activity. But as Derrida insisted: there is no escaping from relations of force and economies of violence (Protevi 2001). So, unless deconstruction is somehow exempt from the law it identifies, then its own strategies and operations must also be irreducibly violent.
    
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    In the face of the constitutive character of violence, perhaps the key saving grace of Derridean deconstruction is Derrida’s insistence that therefore there is an injunction to strive for ‘the lesser violence’ (Derrida 1978: note 21, 313). But this does not mean that deconstruction is a lesser violence. In fact, it doesn’t really mean anything – yet. Affirming the ‘quest’ for the lesser violence doesn’t tell us what ‘the lesser violence’ is, or how to find out, or how to institute it; just as claiming that one should try is not necessarily to try. And anyway (if we remember where we started), the point remains that the very effort to be ‘faithful’ will amount to a kind of monstrosity. Derrida was unequivocal on this. Yet, in the name or the aim of ‘the lesser violence’, he always maintained that his main efforts were simply to read texts, to try to follow them as faithfully as possible. Of course, as Gilbert and Pearson point out, this was ‘not simply an engagement with a handful of philosophical texts, but [rather an examination of] some of the terms according to which almost all thinking occurs’ (Gilbert and Pearson 1999: 57). So, although Derrida mainly read and wrote (monstrously faithfully) about supposedly ‘mere’ philosophical texts, these texts are to be understood as ‘indices of real history’, produced by and productive of particular biases: effects that have effects – particularly that of the Western philosophical preference for ‘presence’ and the skewing bias that this preference has exerted over theory and practices of all orders. This discursive bias ‘is thought by Derrida under the rubric of “force”’ (Protevi 2001: 20). Thus, Derridean deconstruction is a perversely faithful ‘reading’ which – in tracking the movements of arguments and the conceptual systems, values, legislations and institutions that underpin them – foregrounds what John Protevi calls the ‘interweaving of force and signification’, revealing that signification and meaning are constituted forcefully. Sense is made. There is no natural meaning. Sense is instituted, with serious effects. In other words, Derrida’s work foregrounds the sense in which Western rationality (as exemplified by Western philosophy) can be regarded as irreducibly violent. His own work was a response to this violence, itself doing a kind of reciprocal violence to the institutions of philosophy because of the ways that the philosophical fantasy of ‘reason allegedly free [from] force’ has been used to ‘justify hierarchical patterns of social forces’ (Protevi 2001: 63). For, on this reasoning, reason is not free from force; there are violent exclusions, privileges, hierarchies; and the fantasy of ‘reason’ has itself been used to ‘justify hierarchical patterns of social forces’. Thus, Derrida
    
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    reiterates and deepens Walter Benjamin’s point that ‘There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (Benjamin 1999: 248). Deconstruction, then, is animated by violence and is itself a violent operation. But strangely so; for, the ‘violence’ of deconstruction arises from a fidelity to reading – or, in other words, a fidelity to the other with which one is intimately engaging. Its ‘violence’ arises from an almost loving fidelity – an over-faithfulness; to use Slavoj Žižek’s term, a kind of ‘overidentification’ (Žižek 2000: 220); and, of course, its characteristic (putatively excessive) over-analysis, and over-interpretation (Derrida 1996: 85; 1998a: 29). But this is not the kind of violence arising from a blind or over-zealous lover’s fidelity – such as that of the lover who becomes jealous, obsessed or mad and perverts into a stalking, controlling monster. Nor is it that of interpreting fidelity to a text (or god or country or whatever) as demanding militancy, fundamentalism, millenarianism, separatism or genocide. It is (‘ideally’) not the violence of the jealous zealot, the fundamentalist, or stalker (who have their sacred objects); but merely that of asking – for instance – precisely how ‘rational’ supposedly Rational institutions are, how conclusive conclusions are, and why certain kinds of connections and steps are made in argumentative constructions. This is why deconstruction is, in Derrida’s words, both ‘very strong and very feeble’ (Derrida 1997: 42): it is weak, it has no power of its own; but it is strong, as it calls the other to task in its own terms. It is often a strategy of ‘literalisation’ – of simply looking for that which is claimed or assumed to be real, present, actual or true (such as the notions of presence, justice, responsibility, univocal truth, etc).1 In looking, it reveals that these are both undecidable and yet forcefully imposed, in contingent institutional forms. As Derrida spelt it out: ‘différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom. Which makes it obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a kingdom’ (Derrida 1982: 22). In this spirit, Derrida famously contended that ‘The best liberation from violence is a certain putting into question’ (Derrida 1978: 141). Although, in the same essay, Derrida claims that ‘the difference between the implicit and the explicit is the entirety of thought’ (142), the particular kind of ‘putting into question’ that he at least implicitly deemed to be the ‘best liberation from violence’ was deconstructive questioning. So, one thing should be clear: Deconstruction is all about violence – even proposing that violence is constitutive. Deconstruction proposes, at the same
    
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    time, a similarly constitutive status for the relation to alterity; and hence an ethical obligation to strive for the lesser violence. The ‘best’ way to do this, Derrida argues, is through interminable, vigilant ‘reading’. But this strategy itself cannot somehow simply be free from violence. On the contrary, it is irreducibly violent, strategic, and conflictual. For, deconstruction takes what is declared and returns it as a question; thereby ‘entering into’ the other’s space and dynamics, and levering it against itself, in its own declared terms and values. In this way it is a ‘faithful’ reading: (ideally) only taking and using what is presented. It proceeds by what Kristeva refers to as ‘listening’: that is, tracking, tracing; discerning and going with the direction and lines of force, the moves and movements, of the other; not opposing head on but rather yielding and moving with the moves; revealing the biases and fault-lines, opening up, unravelling, inverting, displacing.
    
    The Analogy of Orientation Whether this is definitively ‘the lesser violence’ is debatable. What is clear is that it sees itself as a counter-movement to violence. As such, it would seem to be best regarded as at least akin to a martial art. Is this to draw an analogy? Even if it is, as Derrida observed: ‘It is starting from this analogy that the difference lets itself be thought’ (Derrida 1997: 16). But I regard it as more than a mere analogy. For the corpus of Derridean deconstruction is absolutely saturated in – indeed constituted by way of – tropes and concept-metaphors of force, play, leverage, conflict, resistance, sensitivity, fidelity, inversion, displacement, derailing, and so on; with deconstruction itself construed as responding to the challenges, intimately attentive, listening, sticking, yielding, inverting and displacing; always patient, calm, and adaptive. In Derrida’s words: if there is polemos, and irreducible polemos, this cannot, in the final analysis, be accounted for by a taste for war, and still less for polemics. There is polemos when a field is determined as a field of battle because there is no metalanguage, no locus of truth outside the field, no absolute and ahistorical overhang; and this absence of overhang – in other words, the radical historicity of the field – makes the field necessarily subject to multiplicity and heterogeneity. As a result, those who are inscribed in this field are necessarily inscribed in a polemos, even if they have no
    
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    special taste for war. There is a strategic destiny, destined to stratagem by the question raised over the truth of the field. (Derrida 2003: 12) So, deconstruction ‘is’ a martial art. Is there an ‘actual’ martial art that operates in the same way? Indeed there is. There are a couple. Or – more precisely – the martial principles evinced by deconstruction are available to any martial art at any time (just as ‘deconstruction’ per se can be said to happen in (m)any contexts outside of the writings of Derrida). But the best example to be found is the often misrecognised martial art of t’ai chi ch’üan (aka: taijiquan or, more casually, simply ‘t’ai chi’). This is because the literal and explicit principles of t’ai chi, as elaborated in the various texts of the T’ai Chi Classics, and encapsulated in tai chi’s ‘Five Word Secret’ are: listen, stick, yield, neutralise, attack. (Sometimes ‘attack’ is rendered as ‘control’ or ‘issue force’).2 The fact that both t’ai chi and deconstruction are so often regarded as ‘not really combative’, ‘not really practical’, or ‘not really applied’ – because deconstruction is apparently ‘only wordy’ and t’ai chi is apparently ‘only’ slow, esoteric, formal gestures – only makes this comparison all the more provocative. For, as Damon Smith explains: Many people find it hard to relate to Tai Chi Ch’üan as a martial art. This is perhaps due partly to the slow and gentle nature of most of the Form practice and partly to the fact that the majority of teachers teach from a ‘health orientated’ perspective. [However] What makes Tai Chi Ch’üan unique as a martial art is its strategy. Most ‘external’ martial arts rely on such things as speed, power, specialised techniques and trying to outwit the opponent. While Tai Chi Ch’üan may well use speed and power and certainly has its fair share of technique, the strategy is to follow the opponent, yield to the opponent, stick to the opponent and by doing so neutralise the opponent. Once neutralised it is easy to overcome the opponent by whatever means necessary. The key to this is sensitivity... (Smith 2006) Like t’ai chi, deconstructive practice is widely misrecognised (as philosophical, isolated, inward-looking ‘navel-gazing’: as not really real). Both deconstruction and t’ai chi are often represented either as entirely theoretical or as gentle exercise, or as not realistic, pointless, playful, gentle, over-intellectualised games: ‘isolated’
    
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    pastimes rather than ‘really engaged’ practices. So, both are called ‘philosophical’, ‘theoretical’, ‘not practical’, ‘not direct’, ‘not real’, ‘not pragmatic’. In other words: in the discourses of self-appointed ‘realists’ and reality-fetishists bent on ‘practical directness’, ‘plain reality’ and ‘action’ – both in martial arts and in politicised academia – exactly the same conceptual and discursive troping is used to represent both deconstruction and t’ai chi. Within such discourses, the status of these two practices is overdetermined: Both are taken to exemplify the most monstrous digressions away from reality, truth, and direct, practical engagement. Such criticisms will be familiar. Any involved in deconstruction or t’ai chi will have heard them all before. But perhaps the best example does not come from the ranks of the reality-fetishists of academia (those who think that just because they resist complexity and dialectical sentences, and prefer to speak of ‘directness’ and to use expressions like ‘in reality’, they are therefore more able to ‘really deal effectively with reality’). Rather, it comes from none other than the late great Bruce Lee, who, in an exemplary polemic against the institutions of martial arts training in his day, wrote: Each man belongs to a style which claims to possess truth to the exclusion of all other styles. These styles become institutes with their explanations of the ‘Way’... Instead of facing combat in its suchness, then, most systems of martial art accumulate a ‘fancy mess’ that distorts and cramps their practitioners and distracts them from the actual reality of combat, which is simple and direct. Instead of going immediately to the heart of things, flowery forms (organized despair) and artificial techniques are ritualistically practiced to simulate actual combat. Thus, instead of ‘being’ in combat these practitioners are ‘doing’ something ‘about’ combat. (Lee 1975: 14) This argument is central to Bruce Lee’s own sustained critique of institutionalisation. It is extremely engaging.3 However, the exemplary and representative problem with Bruce Lee’s pragmatic, ostensibly anti-theoretical, anti-institutional stance here is precisely that: it is a stance; necessarily both an interpretation and a pose; both an ‘honest’ interpretation and an affectation. For, like all ‘anti-disciplinary’ projects, Lee evidently misrecognises the fact that his understanding of what he calls the ‘actual
    
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    reality of combat’ is precisely that – an understanding; and moreover, one which ‘stands under’ his complete identification with one particular theoretical paradigm – namely, the strategies and principles of Wing Chun kung fu. Thus, Lee takes ‘simple and direct’ to mean necessarily using short, quick, straight lines and economy of motion when fighting. However, like self-proclaimed ‘pragmatists’ and ‘realists’ of all orders, what Lee does here is to represent one theory as necessarily true, as ‘not theoretical’ but as ‘really practical’, really real, and to deem other orientations ‘flowery’ and ‘artificial’. Lee forgets that whatever ‘actual reality of combat’ there may ever be is always radically contextual. Even in Wing Chun’s own preferred creation myth, the legend has it that it was devised to cater for the needs of a smaller, weaker fighter (in the legend, the founder is a female Buddhist monk (Ng Mui) who teaches a modified and tailored Shaolin martial art to a woman (Yim Wing Chun), specifically to enable her to beat a stronger man). Moreover, there are many other different paradigms which interpret ‘the actual reality of combat’ and the notion of being ‘simple and direct’ very differently. For example, t’ai chi ch’üan and aikido see ‘simple and direct’ as requiring circularity (and not straight lines); and the truth and reality of combat as lying in the other’s motion (not one’s own). Then there are myriad styles of jiujutsu, chin-na and grappling that privilege forceful leverage; there are pugilistic styles each with different approaches to delivering strikes, from whirlwinds, to thrusts, spins and twists using momentum, to those of boxing’s Queensbury Rules; and from jumping/leaping styles to Dim Mak pressure point fighting. Different principles obtain if you are trying to kill, restrain, or escape; just as they do if there is oneversus-one, one-versus-several, several-versus-one, or many-versus-many; whether you or they are armed or unarmed; in a crowded pub or in a muddy field, and so on. The list of theories of what sort of directness or simplicity constitutes ‘actual reality’ and how this or that interpretation should be institutionalised is potentially endless.
    
    A Theory of Practice Given the constitutive character of contingency, perhaps the most important question to ask of any martial art is simply: does it work? When and where does it work? Why? When will it not work? So here we must ask: What is ‘our’ martial art of
    
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    deconstruction concerned with? What opponent is it designed for? In what context? To do what? For deconstruction, as for many other approaches, ‘the point is to change it’. Deconstructive efforts are aimed at constituting, effecting, making counter-movements or institutions of difference. This is surely a rather different thing than ‘doing’ something ‘about’ counter-movements, with different demands. As such, the question is, in Derrida’s words: ‘what is technique in this case?’ (Derrida 1992a: 205). The Derridean answer, I would suggest, is not dissimilar to that of t’ai chi’s ‘five word secret’; namely: listen, stick, yield, neutralise, attack/control; or here: read, analyse, use the other’s terms against them, to neutralise them, in and as an attack or counter-attack. This involves exploiting the weakness of the other’s position, animated by the ‘always unsatisfied appeal’ to ‘justice’ (Protevi 2001: 69). The ‘proper’ nature of its violence is not, strictly speaking, ‘self-defence’. Rather, as Protevi puts it, deconstruction seeks to ‘release … forces of rupture … in the name of justice’, finding its ‘force, its movement or its motivation’ in the ‘always unsatisfied appeal’ to ‘justice’ (Protevi 2001: 69). So, deconstruction engages a powerful, instituted/institutional ‘other’ in the name of subordinated, marginalised, or excluded others. Or, as Derrida put it (in addition to his many ‘contre-[contra-]’ formulations): ‘deconstruction is an institutional practice for which the concept of the institution remains a problem’ (Derrida 2002: 53). According to Wlad Godzich, deconstruction’s ‘target’ is institution (Godzich 1987: 162). For Protevi, it is ‘forceful temporal beginning’ (Protevi 2001: 65); as Derrida puts it: deconstruction is ‘a critique of institutions, but one that sets out not from a wild and spontaneous pre- or non-institution, but rather from counter-institutions’. And ‘an institution… is not merely a few walls or some outer structures surrounding, protecting, guaranteeing or restricting the freedom of our work; it is also and already the structure of our interpretation’ (Derrida 1992: 22-3). But as reality-fetishists and martial artists justifiably ask: that all sounds well and good in theory; but what about in practice; how does it work? Well, first: through listening. We all say we know what listening is. We all say we know that we don’t listen hard enough – or rather, sensitively enough. Deconstruction is t’ai chi-like as it listens by sticking to the other. This is very different to simply denouncing the other, haranguing the other, or charging in, all barrels blazing. As we saw, Derrida listened, stuck and yielded to the texts and institutions of philosophy, in order to invert and
    
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    displace conceptual orders and foci. This was, in a sense, merely just a case of one philosopher reiterating the work of philosophers to philosophers. So, perhaps nowadays – viewed retrospectively – what Derrida did might look ‘easy’ (!), in the sense of internal to the discipline of philosophy. Of course, the effects, then and now, were massive (and mainly outside the discipline of philosophy in many ways). The question is: how and to what does one ‘stick’ – in the sense of ‘touch’, ‘connect’? How are we to stick to and connect with whatever we want to intervene into? How does one make contact and connect with that other, in order to interrupt or redirect? One possible deconstructive answer here is: to engage intimately with the production of the other discourse (Bowman 2007; 2008). This is not the same as a (say, Žižekian) strategy of polemicizing and demonising. For, if the question is one of how we as academics are most able to intervene, for example, ‘contra-capitalism’ or contra-neoliberal ideology or policy, the Žižekian answer is: by polemicizing. But the question remains of how a strategy of polemicizing or ‘being against’ could possibly intervene somehow contra-‘capitalism’ or its ideology. What seems more plausible is that academics might be able to intervene into the production and dissemination of economic and political theory and practice – by ‘listening’ to that, ‘sticking’ to that, by engaging with that. But this doesn’t sound very new. This just sounds like bog-standard ‘close readings’ of this or that discourse – which we can all already do. And such efforts arguably don’t make any difference to anything at all anyway. So the question is how to make listening and sticking make any difference. The deconstructive t’ai chi answer is: by yielding. In t’ai chi, to yield it is to go with the other, to move where their force is going. Translated into deconstructive institutional practice, this means, first and foremost, acknowledging what Derrida called the ‘monolingualism of the other’ (Derrida 1998). Thus, it means speaking the other’s language, in the other’s context. It does not mean shouting about how terrible other things are (say, capitalism or managerialism or bureaucracy or militarism or nanotechnology or genetics or legislation or government policy or patriarchy) solely in our own journals. It means, rather, engaging with the other in, for instance, their journals. My point here is not to
    
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    disparage disciplinary journals. It is simply to suggest that talking about something ‘here’ is not to make any difference to it, ‘there’. To call for change is not to make a change. To publish within one’s own well-institutionalised field is not to have ‘intervened’ into anything other than that field. One must stick and yield: move where ‘they’ move. As Judith Butler suggests (perhaps unintentionally):4 those who keep repeating ineffectual gestures may do so simply because they ‘do not want to think too hard about what it is they are doing, what kind of discourse they are using’ perhaps because they fear that ‘if they think too hard about’ it, they might no longer have a justification for continuing to do it (Butler 2000: 265). Similarly, surely Žižek has a point when he suggests that to change the ‘co-ordinates’ of a situation, to intervene, to ‘act’, requires ‘striking at one’s self’ – here, surely, one’s comfortable disciplinary identity. So, rather than living in disciplined repetition, my proposition would be that to intervene elsewhere requires yielding to the other, to the other discourse, the other protocols, the other language, the other scene. I am not suggesting ‘doing a Sokal’, by sneaking Trojan Horses into other disciplines in order to discredit them (although you could). Rather, I am proposing taking the notion of interdisciplinary dialogue seriously, rather than relying either on the enclave comfort of ‘our spaces’ or the easy alternative of holding onto some rather nebulous faith in the power of journalistic ‘public debate’. Hermetic, enclave isolation is not intervention. But neither – necessarily – is publication (whether courtesy of BlogSpot or the Oprah Winfrey show). On the contrary, what seems needed is a renewed emphasis on listening to the other, engaging with, sticking to the other, yielding to the other, in order to ‘deconstruct’ where it could count (or ‘hurt’). That is, to affect a real ‘counter-movement’ according to deconstructive t’ai chi, what seems required is – so to speak – alter-disciplinary interventions: interventions into the other scene, the other context (Bowman 2008a). Not more moaning in cultural studies journals about the deleterious consequences of, say, managerialism or audit-culture; but rather the serious engagement with the discursive production and legitimation of managerialism by intervening into the disciplinary contexts of that discourse’s production and legitimation.5 In arguing as much, I am of course thereby also resisting or
    
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    sidestepping the lures of the tropes of ‘resistance’. This in itself is a gesture that is likely to encounter some resistance.
    
    II Dreams of Resistance When I began, I asked myself why I have always dreamed of resistance. Derrida, ‘Resistances’, Resistances of Psychoanalysis. For, many dream of resistance. Even Derrida once confessed that he ‘always’ dreamed of resistance. But, in light of my argument, what is the status of ‘resistance’ in deconstruction? What is the status of deconstruction as (or in terms of) resistance? Is it a resistant force? If so, does ‘resistant’ necessarily amount to politically effective or transformative? In terms of the rather different inflections I have given to resistance (as a limitation) and yielding (as a ‘lever’), my argument runs rather counter to one of the most enduring metanarratives that has long organised cultural studies and cultural theory (and much more besides): namely ‘resistance’ as such. ‘If there is a metanarrative that continues to thrive in these times of metanarrative bashing, it is that of “resistance”’, observes Rey Chow: Seldom do we attend a conference or turn to an article in an academic journal of the humanities or the social sciences without encountering some call for ‘resistance’ to some such metanarrativized power as ‘global capitalism’, ‘Western imperialism’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, and so forth. (Chow 1998: 113) But, like Derrida, we might ask: Why dream of resistance? Or, like Žižek: Do we really dream of resistance? Or is this sort of claim just a kind of ‘secondary revision’, a neat and tidy alibi, arising afterwards, ex post facto, providing a retroactive justification for what we may enjoy doing or feel we should do but for which we cannot provide a more compelling justification? In a psychoanalytic register, Slavoj
    
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    Žižek argues that we flip very easily and all too often from desire to drive: this is the switch from a situation (of desire) in which we are really trying to do, get or change something once and for all, to a situation (of drive) in which we are mainly deriving pleasure from repeating certain gestures (Žižek 2005: 10). Žižek proposes that this switch from desire to drive is swift and barely perceptible, but a radical reorientation in our relation to activity. Hence, in a Žižekian reading, ‘politics’ and ‘resistance’ might be regarded as alibis covering a drive to repeat certain gestures (such as ‘politicizing’ or ‘seeking resistance’) rather than anything like an ‘authentic’ desire to make a change. Similarly (although in a different register), an equivalent criticism can be derived from a genealogy or historicization of the forces structuring the present epoch. One such genealogy is provided by Robert J. C. Young (1992), who argues that the valorization of politics and the political – the injunction to politicize – may be regarded as the contemporary ‘architectonic of knowledge’: the idea that ‘political truth’ is the ultimate truth currently has the status that was in earlier times held by the ideas of, first, ‘religious truth’ and then ‘culture’ (Young 1992: 111-112.). By extension, then, any contemporary work which does not adhere to the injunction to orientate itself according to political questions arguably ‘always already’ stands accused of irresponsibility within the current ethos. Reading Freud’s reading of resistance, Derrida notes that just as dreams can be interpreted, so can resistance: ‘Resistance must be interpreted; it has as much meaning as what it opposes; it is just as charged with meaning and thus just as interpretable ... : in truth, it has the same meaning, but dialectically or polemically adverse’ (Derrida 1998a: 13). In other words, even resistance organised by explicit appeal to the idea of (its own) freedom may not be free or self-determining, and may instead be entirely overdetermined, symptomatic – possibly even more an expression of the power that is ostensibly being resisted than something independently resistant or alter-native. There are many possible ways to take all of this. At one end of the spectrum, such positions as those of Baudrillard or Adorno in their most pessimistic moments would take the possibility of an intimate intertwining or wedlock between power and resistance to mean that oppositional resistance per se is ‘always already negated by the structure of the entity which it wishes to oppose’. Such readings might come to
    
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    the sad conclusion that therefore oppositional resistance amounts to ‘nothing more than an inoculation of sorts which allows the dominant political power in a social formation further to strengthen itself’ (Docherty 1993: 322). Here, resistance is figured as a kind of scaffolding surrounding, supporting and being supported by a power edifice in construction or reconstruction rather than deconstruction. At the other end of the spectrum, however, is the more Foucauldian argument that resisting power is always actually productive, inventive and generative of something new – new identities, new relations, new practices, new contexts, new pleasures, new conditions and new possibilities. As Ernesto Laclau adds, power here is to be regarded as that which constitutes and structures relations and interplays of forces, and so is to be regarded as the very condition of possibility for freedom (and indeed for all forms of action, activity, agency and ‘play’), and precisely not as something that opposes or precludes freedom. Freedom and agency are rather a function of power relations (Laclau 1996: 47-68). But the Laclauian formulation is not exactly or completely Foucault’s argument. There is more to Foucault’s argument than this. It is not a version of Hegel’s dialectic, in which power is a response to power, responded to by counter-power, in which agents and agencies are locked in identificatory battles, antitheses and syntheses. Of course, this also happens. But what is key in Foucault’s thinking about power, agency and resistance is a line of thought opened up by this crucial question: what is the status of the popular idea that power ‘oppresses’ us and demands ‘resistance’ anyway? Foucault called this the ‘repressive hypothesis’. And many dreams of resistance subscribe to a version of it. The repressive hypothesis is active in any view in which something – usually a practice, but often even an identity – ‘rather than being [conceived of as] the vehicle and effect of power ... is conceived of, romantically, as power’s victim and opposition’ (Chow 2006: 8). What Foucault emphasized was the significance of the productiveness of the repressive hypothesis. For, in it, ‘the conceptualization of what is repressive … is reinforced simultaneously by the incessant generation and proliferation of discourses about what is supposedly repressed’ (Chow 2007: 8). It is easy to move from here to a position such as that of Bourdieu and Wacquant, who once argued that the very idea of resistance – as it manifests itself in ‘fashionable’ academic disciplines like cultural studies, at least – is simply a fetish
    
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    concept which demonstrates a profound misrecognition and delusion on the part of those who ‘buy into it’. As John Mowitt renders their argument, Bourdieu and Wacquant compare ‘the international appeal of this mythic discipline [cultural studies] to the appeal of jeans – both are marketed as reflections of a subversive or besieged opposition’ (Mowitt 2003: 178). In other words, in contexts characterised by what Žižek has called the ‘radical academic’ or ‘cultural studies chic’ (Žižek 2002: 171) of evoking resistance, these dreams of resistance are really only resistant dreams. Those involved in cultural theory may (claim to) dream of resistance, but that doesn’t mean that anything is actually being resisted. Claiming to resist is not necessarily to resist. Indeed, before presuming as much we should perhaps reflect on Bourdieu and Wacquant’s observation that the theme of ‘resistance’ is equally de rigueur in the marketing and advertising of brands of jeans. Thus, for Bourdieu and Wacquant, ‘contrary to the way its partisans see themselves, [cultural studies] actually functions to promulgate a global vulgate that is about nothing if not US economic and cultural hegemony’ (Mowitt 2003: 178). The discourses of cultural theory and cultural studies more widely do seem to be structured by keywords or (worse) buzzwords like ‘resistance’, ‘struggle’, ‘difference’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘multiculturalism’. But does this mean that such resistance actually attests to nothing more than the ‘popularization of an essentially US corporate doctrine’ (Mowitt 2003: 178)? It is well known that Žižek often entertains this view, and certainly regards the dominant tropes of cultural studies – as exemplified by talk of resistance – to be the cutting edge talk of the contemporary hegemonic ideology of neoliberalism. In a similar vein, the rationalist political pragmatists Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter have argued that ‘resistance’ is often an idea that derives from what they call ‘the countercultural critique’ – a position or belief they claim is shared by all who seek to resist ‘selling out’ or to resist being ‘co-opted’ by ‘the system’. This series of notions and equations, they argue, is based on an unfortunately widespread but ultimately untenable rationale, the consequences of which include the belief that activities like ‘culture jamming’, ‘ethical-shopping’ or ‘voluntary simplicity’ in lifestyle decisions amount to effective ‘cultural politics’. Au contraire, they argue: all of this, when not merely frivolous, amounts to the essence of capitalist consumer culture (Heath and Potter 2006). In such perspectives, it seems, resistance is useless
    
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    – resistance such as this, at least, if not resistance as such. But is it? Is resistance as such useless? Rather than writing it off, Rey Chow proposes that one of the key problems with the notion of resistance resides in its rhetorical construction. She argues that this rhetoric of resistance is itself implicitly organised and underwritten by a subjectobject divide in which ‘we’ speak against that which oppresses (capital, patriarchy, the West, etc.) and for (or ‘in the name of’) the oppressed other. Thus, ‘we’ rhetorically position ourselves as somehow ‘with’ the oppressed and ‘against’ the oppressors, even when ‘we’ are more often than not much more obviously at some distance from sites and scenes of oppression (Chow 1993: 11). Of course, the aim of ‘speaking out’ and publicising the plight of the oppressed may be regarded as responsibility itself. It is certainly the case that a dominant interpretation of what academic-political responsibility is boils down to this injunction: to be responsible we should speak out. It is nevertheless equally the case that, unless the distances, relations, aporias and irrelations are acknowledged and interrogated, there is a strong possibility that ‘our’ discourse will become what Chow calls another version of Maoism. She explains: Although the excessive admiration of the 1970s has since been replaced by an oftentimes equally excessive denigration of China, the Maoist is very much alive among us, and her significance goes far beyond the China and East Asian fields. Typically, the Maoist is a cultural critic who lives in a capitalist society but who is fed up with capitalism – a cultural critic, in other words, who wants a social order opposed to the one that is supporting her own undertaking. The Maoist is thus a supreme example of the way desire works: What she wants is always located in the other, resulting in an identification with and valorization of that which she is not/does not have. Since what is valorized is often the other’s deprivation – ‘having’ poverty or ‘having’ nothing – the Maoist’s strategy becomes in the main a rhetorical renunciation of the material power that enables her rhetoric. (Chow 1993: 10-11) In other words, such rhetoric claims a ‘position of powerlessness’ in order to claim a particular form of ‘moral power’ (11): a heady conceptual and rhetorical mix that can
    
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    be seen to underpin an awful lot of academic work today. Derrida regularly referred to this position as ‘clear-consciencism’: namely, the belief that speaking out, speaking for, speaking against, etc. equals Being Responsible. However, quite apart from tubthumping and mantra-reciting, Derrida believed in the promise of the ‘most classical of protocols’ of questioning and critical vigilance as ways to avoid the greater violence of essentialist fundamentalisms. Of course, Derrida’s work of drawing the question of how to interpret ‘responsibility’ and how to establish who ‘we’ are, in what relations ‘we’ exist, and what our responsibilities are into the crisis of undecidability was equally regularly regarded as an advocation of theoretical obscurantism and irresponsibility. This charge was – and remains – the most regular type of ‘resistance’ to deconstruction. Despite the clarity and urgency of Derrida’s reasons for subjecting all presumed certainties to the harrowing ordeal of undecidability, the resistance to deconstruction surely boils down to a distaste for the complexity of Derrida’s ensuing close readings/rewritings of texts.6 Such resistance to deconstruction is familiar. It is often couched as a resistance to theory made in the name of a resistance to ‘disengagement’; a resistance to ‘theory’ for the sake of ‘keeping it real’. Such a rationale for the rejection of deconstruction (and much ‘Theory’ as such) is widespread. But when ‘keeping it real’ relies upon a refusal to interrogate the ethical and political implications of one’s own rhetorical and conceptual coordinates – one’s own ‘key terms’ – the price is too high. Chow points to some of the ways and places that this high price is paid and reflects on the palpable consequences of it. For instance, in politicised contexts such as postcolonial cultural studies, there are times when ‘deconstruction’ and ‘theory’ are classified (reductively) as being ‘Western’, and therefore as being just another cog in the Western hegemonic (colonial, imperial) apparatus. As she puts it, in studies of nonwestern cultural others, organised by postcolonial anti-imperialism, all things putatively ‘Western’ easily become suspect. Thus, ‘the general criticism of Western imperialism’ can lead to the rejection of ‘Western’ approaches, at the same time as ‘the study of non-Western cultures easily assumes a kind of moral superiority, since such cultures are often also those that have been colonized and ideologically dominated by the West’ (Chow 1998: 8). In other words, ‘theory’ – ‘for all its fundamental questioning of Western logocentrism’ – is too hastily ‘lumped together
    
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    with everything “Western” and facilely rejected as a non-necessity’ (8). Unfortunately, that is: In the name of studying the West’s ‘others’, then, the critique of cultural politics that is an inherent part of both poststructural theory and cultural studies is pushed aside, and ‘culture’ returns to a coherent, idealist essence that is outside language and outside mediation. Pursued in a morally complacent, antitheoretical mode, ‘culture’ now functions as a shield that hides the positivism, essentialism, and nativism – and with them the continual acts of hierarchization, subordination, and marginalization – that have persistently accompanied the pedagogical practices of area studies; ‘cultural studies’ now becomes a means of legitimizing continual conceptual and methodological irresponsibility in the name of cultural otherness. (Chow 1998: 9) What is at stake here is the surely significant fact that even the honest and principled or declared aim of studying others otherwise can actually amount to a positive working for the very forces one avowedly opposes or seeks to resist. Chow clarifies this in terms of considering the uncanny proximity but absolute difference between cultural studies and area studies. For, area studies is a disciplinary field which ‘has long been producing “specialists” who report to North American political and civil arenas about “other” civilizations, “other” regimes, “other” ways of life, and so forth’ (Chow 1998: 6). However, quite unlike cultural studies and postcolonial studies’ declared aims and affiliative interests in alterity and ‘other cultures’, within area studies ‘others’ (‘defined by way of particular geographical areas and nation states, such as South Asia, the Middle East, East Asia, Latin America, and countries of Africa’) are studied as if potential threats, challenges and – hence – ultimately ‘information target fields’ (6).7 Thus, says Chow, there is ‘a major difference’ between cultural studies and area studies – and indeed between cultural studies and ‘normal’ academic disciplines per se (Chow 1998: 6-7). This difference boils down to a paradigmatic decision – itself an act or effort of resistance. This is the resistance to ‘proper’ disciplinarity; the resistance to becoming ‘normal’ or ‘normalized’, wherever it might equal allowing power inequalities, untranslatables and heterogeneities to evaporate in the
    
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    production of universalistic ‘objective’ knowledge (see also Mowitt 1992; Bowman 2007). This is why Chow’s conclusion – which deserves to be quoted at length – is this: In the classroom, this means that students should not be told simply to reject ‘metadiscourses’ in the belief that by turning to the ‘other’ cultures – by turning to ‘culture’ as the ‘other’ of metadiscourses – they would be able to overturn existing boundaries of knowledge production that, in fact, continue to define and dictate their own discourses. Questions of authority, and with them hegemony, representation, and right, can be dealt with adequately only if we insist on the careful analyses of texts, on responsibly engaged rather than facilely dismissive judgments, and on deconstructing the ideological assumptions in discourses of ‘opposition’ and ‘resistance’ as well as in discourses of mainstream power. Most of all, as a form of exercise in ‘cultural literacy’, we need to continue to train our students to read – to read arguments on their own terms rather than discarding them perfunctorily and prematurely – not in order to find out about authors’ original intent but in order to ask, ‘Under what circumstances would such an argument – no matter how preposterous – make sense? With what assumptions does it produce meanings? In what ways and to what extent does it legitimize certain kinds of cultures while subordinating or outlawing others?’ Such are the questions of power and domination as they relate, ever asymmetrically, to the dissemination of knowledge. Old-fashioned questions of pedagogy as they are, they nonetheless demand frequent reiteration in order for cultural studies to retain its critical and political impetus in the current intellectual climate. (Chow 1995: 12-13) This is a reiteration of the enduring deconstructive model of resistance. Based on the strong ethical (un)grounding of certainty and habitual connections and conclusions and organised by a search for the lesser violence, deconstructive ‘resistance’ operates according to hospitality (whilst knowing hospitality to be uncannily wedded or welded to ‘hostility’ – Derrida’s ‘hostipitality’ (Derrida 2000)), insisting upon listening, sticking, and yielding. In so doing, this resistance without resistance neutralises and ‘attacks’ or issues force in the other’s own terms – the only terms that immediately and obviously count to that other.
    
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    References
    Benjamin, Walter (1999), Illuminations, London, Pimlico. Bowman, Paul (2007), Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bowman, Paul (2008), Deconstructing Popular Culture, London: Palgrave. Bowman, Paul (2008a), ‘Alterdisciplinarity’, Culture, Theory and Critique, 49:1, 93– 110. Butler, Judith (2000), Butler, Laclau, Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London: Verso. Chow, Rey (1993), Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, Indiana University Press: Bloomington, Indiana Chow, Rey (1998), Ethics After Idealism, Indiana University Press. Chow, Rey (2006), The Age of the World Target, Durham and London: Duke. Chow, Rey (2007), Sentimental Fabulations, NY: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1978), ‘Violence and Metaphysics: Essay on the Thought of Emanuel Lévinas’, Writing and Difference, London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1982), Margins of Philosophy, Brighton, Harvester. Derrida, Jacques (1987), The Truth in Painting, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1992), ‘Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties’, Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, in Richard Rand (ed.), Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 1-34. Derrida, Jacques (1992a), ‘Canons and Metonymies: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, Richard Rand, in Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, Jacques (1996), ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, Chantal Mouffe (ed.) Deconstruction and Pragmatism, London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1997), Politics of Friendship, London, Verso. Derrida, Jacques (1998), Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin, Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press.
    
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    Derrida, Jacques (1998a), ‘Resistances’, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques (2000), ‘Hostipitality’, Angelaki, Volume 5, Number 3, 1 December 2000 , pp. 3-18. Derrida, Jacques (2002), Who's Afraid of Philosophy?: Right to Philosophy 1, Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press. Jacques Derrida (2003), ‘I Have a Taste for the Secret’, in Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, Cambridge: Polity. Docherty, Thomas (1993), Postmodernism: A Reader, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London. Gilbert, Jeremy and Ewan Pearson (1999), Discographies: Dance Music, Culture, and the Politics of Sound, London: Routledge. Heath, Joseph and Andrew Potter (2006), The Rebel Sell: How The Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, Chichester, Capstone. Godzich, Wlad (1987), 'Afterword: Religion, the State and Post(Al) Modernism', Institution and Interpretation, (ed.), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Laclau, Ernesto (1996a), ‘Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony’, in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, London: Routledge, pp. 47-68. Lee, Bruce (1975), The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Santa Clarita, Ca., Ohara Publications. Mowitt, John (2003), ‘Cultural Studies, In Theory’, in Paul Bowman (ed.), Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Practice and Politics, London: Pluto. Protevi, John (2001), Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic, London, Athlone. Smith, Damon (2006), ‘Tai Chi Ch’üan’, Yongquan Martial Arts (West Yorkshire), http://www.xingyi.org.uk/html/tai_chi_chuan.html. Young, Robert J. C. (1992), ‘The Idea of a Chrestomathic University’, Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties, in Richard Rand (ed.), Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 97-126. Žižek, Slavoj (2000), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Butler, J., Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek (ed.), London, Verso. Žižek, Slavoj (2002), Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from February to October 1917, London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj (2005), Interrogating the Real, London and New York: Continuum.
    
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    1
    
    Slavoj Žižek provides a gloss on two key dimensions of a deconstructive strategy. On
    
    the one hand, argues Žižek, ‘power can reproduce itself only through some form of self-distance, by relying on the obscene disavowed rules and practices that are in conflict with its public norms’. He calls this an ‘inherent transgression’ (Žižek 2000: 218) and claims that any discourse, any institution or power edifice must inherently transgress its own central claims in order to ‘work’. (Examples abound of situations in which this could be said to be the case, from the arguments and claims of western philosophy to those of the Catholic Church to the actions of Imperial powers past and present – and, in fact, across the board throughout any and every situation in which power shouts ‘Do as I say’ and mutters to itself ‘not as I do’.) Accordingly, deconstructive reading amounts to the revelation of the inherent transgression of texts and the institutions founded upon or supplemented by them. The second moment in Žižek’s account comes, as he puts it, with the possibility that ‘in so far as power relies on its “inherent transgression”, then – sometimes, at least – overidentifying with the explicit power discourse – ignoring this inherent obscene underside and simply taking the power discourse at its (public) word, acting as if it really means what it explicitly says (and promises) – can be the most effective way of disturbing its smooth functioning’ (Žižek 2000: 220).
    2
    
    This is a distillation of the principles for developing t’ai chi skill. The principles are
    
    trained and the skills can be developed specifically in ‘push-hands’ training – i.e., formal combat training exercises with a partner. This ‘Five Word Secret’ does not literally occur in this form in the T’ai Chi Classics, but it amounts to an accurate paraphrase. This Five Word Secret (listen, stick, yield, neutralise, attack) has been taught in this form by Master Lam Kam Chuen in the UK. Sometimes the last two words vary: Sifu Raymond Rand (who also uses this Five Word Secret), occasionally renders it slightly differently – for example: ‘(Listen [sensitivity], Yield, Stick, Neutralise, Control/Attack[Issue Force])’ (‘Push Hands’ by Raymond Rand, , accessed 18th July 2006).
    
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    3
    
    I have considered the significance of Bruce Lee vis-à-vis countercultural politics, postcolonialism, postmodernism and deconstruction in
    
    the historical movements towards interdisciplinarity and antidisciplinarity, as well as multiculturalism, Deconstructing Popular Culture (Bowman 2008) and – more fully – in Theorizing Bruce Lee (Rodopi, 2009, forthcoming).
    4
    
    I have deliberately wrenched this quote out of its original context, in which it is a
    
    critique of anti-theorists who refuse to theorise politics.
    5
    
    The biggest risk here is surely the recognisability of your submission for the
    
    Research Assessment Exercise or whatever other kind of ‘quality assessment’ managerial audit designed to discipline academic production. But if our ‘auditability’ is the biggest risk, then why not? What’s stopping us? If not to risky, challenging, dangerous alter-disciplinary intervention, what are we yielding to otherwise?
    6
    
    For, one might ask, what could be clearer to an academic or intellectual than the
    
    following act of ‘undeciding’: ‘whatever choice I might make, I cannot say with good conscience that I have made a good choice or that I have assumed my responsibilities. Every time that I hear someone say that ‘I have taken a decision’, or ‘I have assumed my responsibilities’, I am suspicious because if there is responsibility or decision one cannot determine them as such or have certainty or good conscience with regard to them. If I conduct myself particularly well with regard to someone, I know that it is to the detriment of an other; of one nation to the detriment of another nation, of one family to the detriment of another family, of my friends to the detriment of other friends or none friends, etc’. (Derrida 1996: 86).
    7
    
    For Chow’s elaboration of this notion of information target fields, see her The Age
    
    of The World Target (Chow 2006).

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