There IS something inherently political about occupying a space that wasn’t designed to include or welcome you.
Create a blog in your online portfolio and consider the following question.
What spaces could you occupy and it would be considered an act of resistance? Does this spark anything in your imagination in regard to your artwork?
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Ah, finally, the one I’ve been waiting for!!
This activity presents the perfect opportunity to inject Albert Camus’ philosophy – how everything is in fact the act of a rebel (resistance) between revolution and conservatism (Camus, cited in Rollins 2016), given all that is resists all that will be, and vice versa –
Authority. Three categories:
Religion
Religion is an entity, technology and political system in itself, permeating vociferously and profusely into the other two ‘categories’. In a world where religion controls lives, everyone is disabled – and the same applies to politics and family.
Religion was established and is maintained (though the religious are unaware of the fact) to try to protect people from the anxiety of living independently, physically and intellectually. Amazingly, to this day we describe others and ourselves using religious generalisations. I can only ask with Dawkins (2007): how can one person possibly match any of these religious words completely, especially those impossibly metaphysical terms bandied about by the professing (and the professingly professing)?
And yet, this process of naming and assigning based on family, ethnicity and demographic continues under the untouchable, “private” jurisdiction of religious people. There is nothing private about mass indoctrination and suppression of education by ignorant people in positions of authority. Resistance must start here, and level the whole, gargantuan tree of authority. The tree is dead – it is time to clear it out of the way and make room for a new growth (a metaphor) of self-reliant, penetrating, auto-didactic individuals.
Religion permeates (I use the present tense intentionally) the world as the various technologies – social, political and educational – constituting God’s chosen vessel of revealed truth.
Politics
Political systems comprise the network [web?] of control evidenced in group education, beginning with religion and solidifying in later life as trades and business beneficial to the maintenance of the state. It is not an overstatement to say that this kind of education is preventive to the spiritual growth of individuals through higher awareness and global faith (not religion). It is further preventive to a world that would emerge but for modern people’s obsession with law, order and division.
Yes, even you, dear educator, act not as a stimulus for my evolution – the evolution of the self – but as another device to control loyalty when you act firmly in accordance with your educational duty to the capitalist state. Individual realisation, therefore, becomes the mode of resistance at the political stratum of human suppression. The self does not need, and has never needed, any criterion other than the self.
Family
There is no religion apart from the family. Religion arose in step with an expanding notion of family: an expanding, yet ultimately exclusive in-group providing coherence and protection from outside to its members. (Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Hindus and others will have different things to say about this definition.) Politics depends on and inheres in the family model, too. Finally, considering the family itself, we observe that it can be summarised, as it effects in the world, as the reproductive vehicle not only of the patriarchal ideal but also the cultural complex that he represents and upholds.
In this system, the child (who will become the individual) is acted upon by one who enforces the standards and metaphysical ceiling of his ancestral domain. Indeed, the child has previously been considered as merely recompense for the parents’ growing old and dying – this is the story of reproduction from our purely (cultural) utilitarian noosphere (Wikipedia 2023). Here, resistance aimed at liberating children from obligation to familial systems manifests firstly with a new wave of conscious adults whether they be biological parents or friends in the community. Through the adults, the children themselves may begin to sever ties of dependence with the nuclear family and emerge as self-possessed individuals. Where this will lead the family unit as it exists in Western, developed, normative societies remains to be seen.
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The Act of Resistance
For my part, religion is the most accessible terrain to enact resistance: in the face of sectarian hierarchies to quash the psychological link between dogmatic authorities – bastions of terror – and their undeveloped dependents – also known as followers, often children and uneducated, undeveloped young people.
I want to act in the way of “passive (non-violent) resistance” as that promoted by Gandhi and supported by Quakers and similar societies <https://www.mkgandhi.org/momgandhi/chap33.htm>.
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References
Dawkins, R 2007, The God Delusion, Black Swan edition, Black Swan, Transworld Publishers, Great Britain.
Wikipedia 2023, Noosphere, Wikimedia, San Francisco, California, viewed 9 February 2023, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere>.
Rollins, P 2016, Peter Rollins – The Rebel and our Double Lives: Some Thoughts on Frustration and Social Change, YouTube video, viewed 9 February 2023, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQhWBASLM6o&t=905s>.
