Don’t it ‘sprise you, de way dem kings carries on, Huck?
No,” I says, “it don’t … all kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Abstract
This article explores an insufficiently problematised aspect of conventional Dirty Hands (DH) analyses: the suggestion that such analyses are animated by a ‘heroic’ and ‘aristocratic’ flavour. In doing so, the article suggests that the problem of DH should not be merely seen as a lamentable, sparse privilege of the powerful—those who, in certain temporarily static situations, are compelled to act immorally on behalf of the democratic state, for the sake of realpolitik, the common good, or the dictates of justice. Rather, it argues that some manifestations of that phenomenon might also constitute a habitually powerful ‘weapon’ in the pharetra of the weak—the excluded, the marginalised or the dispossessed who are compelled to act immorally, systematically and covertly, against the democratic state, for the sake of resisting the injustices they encounter in their daily lives. By engaging with the philosophical literature on ‘everyday resistance’, and African–American social and political history—specifically, daily, evasive acts of subversion in the Jim Crow South—the article thus elaborates a novel account of DH-as-a-weapon-of-the-weak and offers a new perspective on scholarly debates about the ethics of resistance. Specifically, it enhances our understanding of the potentialities of resistance in the context of democratic politics without reproducing troubling myths of heroic agency: it illustrates how certain practices of everyday resistance gain their strength by virtue of their connection to the moral vices of subterfuge, and betrayal on the one hand, and their implication in forms of complicity on the other.
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Notes
To suggest that practices of everyday resistance often entail subterfuge, deception, hypocrisy, and forms of complicity, is not to say that everyday resistance as such ought to be reduced to the aforementioned moral vices (see Hollander and Einwohner 2004). The alternative account of DH-as-a-weapon-of-the-weak developed in the paper differs from Tommie Shelby’s (2015: 67) account of ‘impure hip hop dissent’, the content of which is ‘generally not covert, disguised or veiled’ but rather constitutes an ‘openly transgressive’, ‘in-your-face’ example of everyday resistance.
On this issue, see also Nick (2022).
Shklar’s (1998) insights on deep pluralism and conflict are not uncontroversial. Whilst offering a comprehensive defence of Shklar’s account is beyond the paper’s remit, it is worth noting that similar insights are echoed and elaborated by critics of deliberative democracy (see Johnson 1998; Sanders 1997), by those immersed in the tradition of realism in political thought (see Galston 2010; Hampshire 2000; Mouffe 2005; Vogler and Tillyris 2019), and by proponents of realism in political science (see Achen and Bartels 2016; Walsh 2012).
For a comprehensive consideration of resistance, see Hollander and Einwohner (2004).
As Scott (1990: 29) writes, the strategic performance of deference with which acts of everyday resistance are entwined ‘comprises not only of speech acts but conformity in facial expression and gesture as well as practical obedience to’ or tolerance of ‘commands that may be distasteful or humiliating’. Examples of such deference include slaves pretending to be idle, lazy, and inarticulate, and British working classes using the term ‘Sir’ in their exchanges with powerholders. Though often integral aspects of tactical disguise and everyday resistance, such outward performances of deference are purchased at the cost of contributing to the legitimation of the narrative of the dominant and formed a resource of oppression (Scott 1990: 34; Kelley 1990). For, they take ‘place on a stage on which roles have been largely scripted from above and on which the usual appearances, no matter how artful, must reinforce the appearances approved by the dominant’ (Scott 1990: 35).
In her recent study on civil disobedience during the Civil Rights Movement, Erin Pineda (2021) argues that the tendency to portray civil disobedience as the standard for acceptable forms of protest in liberal democratic cultures does merely fail to appreciate that injustice formed part of the fabric of liberal cultures, but it also delegitimizes other forms of resistance.
One might cast doubt on the immorality or dirt of such acts of everyday resistance. Acts of anonymous and coded resistance, the argument goes, constitute violations of civic duties – one’s obligations qua citizen –, as opposed to natural duties – one’s obligations qua moral person – and are, thereby, less morally problematic in conditions of domination and injustice. In such conditions, civic duties, unlike natural duties, are not binding (see Rawls 1971; Shelby 2007). In this sense, neither theft, sabotage, winging, the use subterfuge, and concealment inherent in protest music and DJ broadcasts, nor the veil of hypocrisy and deception which accompany such acts ought to be seen as dirty. This argument, however, is problematic. Firstly, as Rob Jubb (2019) argues, the distinction between the moral bindingness of natural and civic duties is predicated on a problematic, binary distinction between nearly just and unjust societies which distorts and oversimplifies the way we should think about the moral and political acceptability of different forms of resistance in different contexts. Secondly, even if we were to accept the distinction between natural and civic duties, acts of everyday resistance also constitute violations of the former: they compromise the unconditionally binding natural duties of mutual respect and justice which require us to respect others’ moral personhood, and protest or resist unjust institutions and arrangements. For, as noted, acts of everyday resistance constitute the ‘infrapolitical equivalent of open gestures of contempt’ (Scott 1990: 199), and, though important in undermining and resisting injustice, also contribute to its legitimation and reproduction and are intimately connected with forms of complicity.
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Tillyris, D. Dirty Hands as a ‘Weapon of the Weak’: ‘Heroism’, ‘Aristocratism’, and the Ambiguities of Everyday Resistance. J Ethics 27, 601–623 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09446-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09446-5