Response to William E. Connolly's review of Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen

Extract

William E. Connolly's review of Peripheral Visions is what any author should want, a thoughtful, appreciative account of the book's merits and an invitation to push aspects of the argument further than the book currently does. One point of clarification: I did not mean to suggest that Foucault's work should be read only in terms of its emphasis on coherence and control, or that my own is intended as a blanket critique of his. My understanding of political power and resistance is beholden to Foucault's insofar as he shows how power depends on multiple points of resistance. He thus describes how existing mechanisms of social control get reproduced and yet are also vulnerable to creativity, innovation, and surprise. My point was to challenge Foucault-inspired scholars of colonialism, in particular, who tend to exaggerate the capacities of colonial administrations and to neglect not only outright challenges to colonial rule, but also the ways in which colonial rule could, at times, be irrelevant to inhabitants' political experience. The goal was to distinguish between the stated claims of colonial rulers and colonialism's actual effects. At stake is not simply a reading of Foucault, of course, but a sense of what matters politically—whether scholars emphasize the reproductive power of institutions and ideas or whether they focus on how reproduction places those very ideas and institutions at risk. I want to chart a middle course here, neither exaggerating coherence nor romanticizing resistance.