Refusing What We Are: Communicating Counter-Identities and Prefiguring Social Change in New Social Movements

In an interview, Michel Foucault (1983: 336) said that the target today perhaps “is not to
discover what we are but to refuse what we are… to promote new forms of subjectivity”.
Protest actions by a range of new social movements have been studied extensively, but few
studies have focused on the communicative practices and mediated actions in which new
identities and forms of subjectivity are discursively produced, contingently achieved and
made visible in situ. This paper investigates what Foucault called ‘counter-conducts’,
practices in which alternative modes of subjectivation and of being governed are performed.
Counter-conducts are intriguing to study because by questioning the conduct of their conduct,
participants simultaneously question the relationship of the self to itself, playing with and
risking identity in the process.
The analysis of the United Nathans Weapons Inspections protest event draws upon Foucault’s
later work, Mitchell Dean’s (2010) analytics of government and Nikolas Rose’s (1999)
proposal for a genealogy of social movements in terms of the ethos of their alternative
political imaginations. A first step in an analytics of protest is to uncover how fields of
visibility, forms of knowledge, and subjectivities and identities are negotiated and
collaboratively accomplished by the protestors and the people they encounter. Using
ethnomethodological conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis (EMCA),
I examine how ‘counter-identities’ are achieved and made accountable in the interactional
practices of prefigurative demonstrations and protest events. CA helps us document the ways
in which fields of visibility and modes of rationality are sequentially organised, while MCA
provides analytical tools to uncover the categorial work by which subjectivities and identities
are morally accomplished in social interaction.