Only an unreasonable person would walk onto a tennis court having never held a racquet and expect to win a rally. Maybe they’d return serve once or twice – that’s possible – but most shots are going long or into the net. Most people are, as it turns out, bad at skills they don’t practice.
We don’t practice protesting. We don’t practice confrontation. We don’t practice resistance. Those are skills many of us may need in coming weeks and months. So how are we – white-collar Americans fluent in institutional norms and conditioned to obey unwritten, unenforced rules – going to practice? Who is going to coach us?
A French philosopher with a taste for leather and psychedelics. A German-Belgian conceptual artist with a PhD in agricultural science.
Michel Foucault’s basic point in Discipline and Punish – once you strip out the Eye of Sauron panoptopical architecture mishigas – is that visibility produces reflexivity which produces anticipatory compliance, which is internalized as character. We don’t just obey the laws being enforced, we obey the expectations of those doing the enforcement. This is doubly true for professionals and elites accustomed to being on the side of power (if not wielding it). Our behavior isn’t just about avoiding real consequences, it’s about avoiding entering the uncomfortable space between what is expected and what is enforceable. As it turns out, that space is really big – like… so big it encompasses most possible human behaviors.
Judith Butler had it right: “Norms operate not only to restrain behavior, but to produce the field of possible appearance.” Authority governs less by punishment than through expectations. Flouting expectations is the best way to practice the groundstrokes of resistance. If that sounds conceptually abstract, don’t worry. In practice it’s as simple as playing games.
Book of Games (“Spielebuch”) by Carsten Höller – the dude who installed metal slides in the Tate Modern – is compendium of activities outside of the bounds of normal human behavior that range from the slightly whimsical (“Scratch yourself in a public place so conspicuously that other people start to feel itchy”) to the deeply odd (“Appear in the guise of Jehovah’s Witnesses and babble complete nonsense”). A compendium of equipment-free activities, the book functions incredibly well as a set of drills for people who want to practice violating expectations without harming or humiliating others.
Consider this example: Raise your hand to attract attention like a child at school, with your index finger pointing upward. Look invitingly at the other person, inviting them to invite you to talk.
Do it to a cop or a security guard then ask for the time.
Consider this example: When a stranger looks you in the eye, wink at her. Wink so often that it might be either an intentional act of a nervous tic. Inconspicuously watch the stranger until she looks your way once more. Wink again.
Again: Cop. Security guard. Anyone in an enforcement role2.
Nothing here is mean-spirited much less illegal. These games – practices, really – are simply unexpected. Raise your hand or wink and you’ll feel the discomfort of violating expectations. Do it enough and you feel it less. Eventually, you start to get comfortable in that space. You learn where the lines are. You learn not only to serve, but to rally.
Then you start to learn about who and what is on the other side of the net. As Aussie cultural theorist Sara Ahmed puts it, “We learn about institutions from the wear and tear of coming up against them.” (Spoiler: Most cops laugh. Some don’t.)
The people who get really good cease to explain or justify. The space between expectation and enforcement becomes their home court. Abbie Hoffman was like this3. So was Bartleby the Scrivener. So was Henry David Thoreau, who not only wrote Civil Disobedience, but was one of the rudest men in Concord, Massachusetts circa 1849.
Not ready for all that? No problem. Start with an even simpler Höller game. “For a fixed period, do not utter the words ‘thank you.’ In order not to appear rude or badly brought up, convey your thanks through glances and gestures or use other ways of conveying gratitude.” Get off script. Stretch a bit.
Winking at cops isn’t about taunting authority. It isn’t even about cops, many of whom are perfectly lovely human beings. It’s about training yourself not to give away power to those who would take it from you. This is particularly difficult for educated, accomplished people who have spent the bulk of their lives benefiting from anticipatory compliance, often in the guise of professionalism. That’s why practices is required. A population that reflexively adheres to expectations is easy to subdue. Those kinds of people watch the ball bounce by.
By all means, reading about tennis. Read about the matches we’re seeing break out across the country. Just understand that reading about tennis won’t teach you to hit a ball, much less win a rally. You gotta practice.
