Micro-Strategies of Resistance (1). (Discussion Papers/Documents De Travail)

Micro-strategies of are particular confrontations with and resistances to local impositions of dominating power. These incremental moves are not assembled from direct confrontations but rather operate as discrete traces within a plurality of resistances. Through a feminist critique this paper explores implications that such an approach to practices may hold for a feminist project terms of intersections of power relations and spatial practice. Les micro-strategies de constituent une forme de confrontation et de bien particuliere vis-a-vis des impositions locales du pouvoir dominant. Ces actions ne decoulent pas de confrontations directes, mais operent plutot comme tracees discretes l'interieur d'une pluralite de resistances. A travers une critique feministe, cet article sonde les implications d'une telle approche aux pratiques de a vis-a-vis d'un projet feministe, surtout en ce qui a trait a l'intersection de rapports de pouvoir et la configuration de l'espace. Micro-strategies: space and architecture The practice of all architects is to some extent an interpretation of context which they are located, whether this interpretation takes form of tacit or explicit representation. This theoretical paper has evolved from research which explores work of various architects and groups who, early 1980s, questioned political and/or professional orthodoxies architecture around them. The scope of that larger study stretches wide, geographically and politically, including a number of countries political transition such as South Africa, Russia, Romania and East Germany. The groups studied include Paper Architects, Utopica, Form-Trans-Inform and Matrix. (2) The enterprises of kind I have explored tend to be politically motivated since they respond to social and/or cultural condition within which they are situated, even if material itself cannot, by definition, be strictly political. As Fredric Jameson writes, No work of art or culture can set out to be political once and for all...for there can never be any guarantee it will be used way it demands. (3) In other words, even though a political reading can be made of work, work of art is in itself inert. (4) In fact, all cases I have studied it is less architecture or art form which is deemed to be ongoing location of protest than actual act of creating them. My search for these hidden practices was governed by a desire to study response to an obliteration of opportunity either actual building processes or wider forms of expression. Such a search can prove arduous. Those practices which do not fit stereotypes understood by mainstream culture tend never to make it into media where their message might be disseminated, and can therefore be destined to obscurity. Through this research it became apparent that nature of is not always radical but sometimes needs to be indirect: as said before, composed of subtle slippages and subversions. It is exactly these slippages and subversions that Steve Pile describes Geographies of Resistance as tiny micro-movements of resistance (Pile, p. 29), assembled from materials and practices of everyday life, that so strongly resonate with views of Michel Foucault. In Power/Knowledge Foucault comments, Power is employed and exercised through a netlike organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target they are always elements of its articulation. (5) Hence, for Foucault power is never wholly expressed on a global scale, only at local innumerable points as 'micro-powers' an endless network of power relations. (6) Foucault explains that the overthrow of these micropowers does not obey law of all or nothing. …

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