Dissent: Gaps in the Regime

At certain times in history, sometimes protracted events have occurred that demonstrated the power of dissent – that (as far as we know) uniquely human capacity to express strong disagreement with some or other aspect of the political, social, or cultural status quo, whether this is done peacefully or, in some cases, violently, in a manner that could (and sometimes did) result in revolutionary conflict. 

The term, ‘dissent’ is related to another, cognate term – dissensus – in the very specific philosophical sense employed by philosopher Jacques Rancière, who writes (in Dissensus – On Politics and Aesthetics, Continuum, New York, 2010, p. 38): 

The essence of politics is dissensus. Dissensus is not a confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself. Political demonstration makes visible that which had no reason to be seen; it places one world in another…

And further (p. 69):

A dissensus is not a conflict of interests, opinions or values; it is division inserted in ‘common sense:’ a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we see something as given…This is what I call a dissensus: the putting of two worlds in one and the same world…A political subject is a capacity for staging scenes of dissensus.

What should be noted above, in the first quotation, is the phrase, ‘gap in the sensible itself.’ If this seems opaque, consider that any ‘normalised’ political situation – such as that in the US today, which consists of a kind of forced ‘consensus’ brought about by the ruling party and its figureheads – structures the ‘sensible’ world of perception in such a manner that any deviation from ‘accepted’ (tacitly enforced) ways of acting meets with various degrees of disapproval and outrage. For example, dissenting views that people express about the desirability of having ex-President Donald Trump back in the White House routinely meet with howls of derision, implying that such opinions amount to lunacy. 

Dissensus, in this situation, constitutes ‘gap in the sensible itself,’ or inserts ‘one world within another,’ thus demonstrating that the sensible world’s organisation according to one set of exclusive political and cratological (power-related) criteria for action and speech (or writing) can never be exhaustive. Dissensus is therefore, for Rancière, the ‘essence of politics’ insofar as no extant political dispensation is ever saturated, devoid of other political possibilities, which is why he writes that a ‘political subject is a capacity for staging scenes of dissensus.’ 

Accordingly, in the present time, those among us who are aware of possessing this capacity for dissensus are called upon to stage its ‘scenes,’ whether in acts of writing (or speech) or of actions, aimed at creating ‘gaps’ in the totalising regime of the sensible, established by those who desire it to saturate the sphere of social space to the exclusion of other possibilities of being political subjects. 

This capacity to create a ‘gap’ in the established world of power through dissent (or dissensus) has been demonstrated throughout human history. Think of the slave revolt against the might of Rome, led by the slave gladiator Spartacus around 73-72 BCE – when he and his followers defied the might of Rome to the point where it took the force of virtually the entire Roman army to quell the gladiator uprising – or any number of rebellions and revolutions in the course of history, rooted in dissent, including the French Revolution that started with the storming of the notorious prison, the Bastille, in 1789, as well as, sometime before that, the American Revolution that erupted in 1775, having been triggered by the so-called Boston Tea Party in 1773.

Add to this the American Civil War of the middle 19th century, related to Northern dissent surrounding the practice of slavery. When, in the early 16th century, Martin Luther distanced himself from what he saw as malpractices within the Roman Catholic Church of his time, it was another case of dissent, which gave rise to a different kind of religion within Christian ranks. 

These are only a few instances, among the most visible ones (given the sustained, violent conflict involved), to which could be added many others if one scoured history for examples. Here in South Africa the protest and resistance against the practice of apartheid, which took many forms, from literary and philosophical dissent, to peaceful resistance, to guerrilla warfare against the apartheid authorities, were a further instantiation of dissent. 

When Frantz Fanon resisted the colonial authorities in Algeria, in word and deed, it was dissent. What one witnessed in Britain some time ago, in the shape of citizens protesting against Brexit, was also a sign of dissent. And when brave, astute citizens refused to accept modes of unjustifiable iatrocratic coercion imposed on them globally in recent times, supposedly in the name of ‘health,’ it also deserved the name of dissent. 

It is true, of course, that dissent need not appear in such publicly conspicuous ways; it manifests itself in households, virtually on a daily basis, for instance where subordinated women engage in dissent – sometimes silently, at other times vociferously – regarding the oppression or abuse they experience (sometimes literally) at the hands of their husbands or partners. 

As Foucault pointed out, before (some) women gained institutional power through emancipation, they always had the sexual power of their bodies to resist those who dominated them; that, too, is dissent. Today, in excessively patriarchal countries – such as Afghanistan – where the emancipation of women is but a distant, albeit beckoning, ideal, dissent assumes many guises, such as a woman perhaps openly driving a car in a courageous demonstration of independence.   

It should already be apparent from the above that dissent, although not always recognised as such, is ubiquitous, and everyone who reflects on this would probably be able to pinpoint a manifestation of it in their own lives. Personally, I recall several instances of dissent on the part of some members of the university faculty and senate in which I have served, for example, in the face of attempts by university management to reduce the benefits of staff members at the university in a surreptitious manner, without consideration of the negative effects this would have on the living conditions of the latter. 

In the work of one of the most (justly) celebrated novelists of the 20th century, who died not so long ago, John Fowles, one encounters the following thoughtful reflection on the seldom acknowledged value of dissent (A Maggot, Vintage 1996, Kindle edition, Epilogue, location 9209): 

Dissent is a universal human phenomenon, yet that of Northern Europe and America is, I suspect, our most precious legacy to the world. We associate it especially with religion, since all new religion begins in dissent, that is, in a refusal to believe what those in power would have us believe – what they would command and oblige us, in all ways from totalitarian tyranny and brutal force to media manipulation and cultural hegemony, to believe. But in essence it is an eternal biological or evolutionary mechanism, not something that was needed once, merely to meet the chance of an earlier society, when religious belief was the great metaphor, and would-be conforming matrix, for many things beside religion. It is needed always, and in our own age more than ever before. 

The novel from the epilogue of which this is taken – and which I cannot discuss at length here – is an astonishing hybrid: part quasi-historical, part science-fiction. The excerpt from the epilogue, above, makes sense against the backdrop of its subject matter as well as the era in which it is set, namely early 18th-century England.

The fictional narrative ends with an account of the birth of someone who was destined to become a historical person of note – Ann Lee, who was also known as Mother Ann, the leader of the so-called Shakers (so-called because of their ecstatic dance-shaking, which can be regarded as a kind of sublimation in Freudian terms), who dissented from orthodox religious conventions in the belief that these were misguided, and that a new, radically different religious practice was called for. 

Fowles’s marvellous historical reconstruction of socially stratified, oppressive 18th-century English society in A Maggot provides the context within which the phenomenon of Ann Lee – a female religious leader at a time when women were still regarded as naturally and constitutionally inferior to men – may be understood as the embodiment of dissent. The extremity of her dissent, and that of the Shakers, can be gauged from their rejection of sexual intercourse between men and women, including husband and wife (which is probably what led to their denunciation of marriage in the end).

It is as if Ann’s disgust with the extant world of 18th-century England found its expression in the refusal to support the reproduction of the human race in a world that she and her followers considered degraded, and hence unworthy of perpetuation. 

What I would like to stress here, however, is Fowles’s allusion (in the excerpt, above), on the basis of his reference to religious dissent of the kind encountered on the part of Ann Lee, to the very nature of dissent, namely: ‘…a refusal to believe what those in power would have us believe – what they would command and oblige us, in all ways from totalitarian tyranny and brutal force to media manipulation and cultural hegemony, to believe [my italics; B.O.].’ 

This allusion makes the relevance of A Maggot for the present era in which we live conspicuously significant, to say the least. Regarding mainstream media manipulation and disinformation, those people who do not avail themselves of alternative news and commentary sources face a constant barrage of distorted information often amounting to outright lies, and perhaps worse, algorithmically determined, complete silence on important events occurring in the world (which the manipulators see as something that would undermine their grip on media power).