In this paper I want to consider the problem of resistance and agency and to look again at how we understand the challenge of social movements and the impact they have on governmental regimes

Bradley, Q

English

Leeds Beckett Repository 

In this paper I want to consider the problem of resistance and agency and to 
look again at how we understand the challenge of social movements and the 
impact they have on governmental regimes.   
 
1. 
I would like to start with a little art appreciation. The Soviet artist El Lissitzky’s 
1919 poster ‘Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge’ is a powerful metaphor for 
the Russian Civil War and for the class struggle expressed in the Bolshevik 
revolution. Two forces face each other in combat; the reds progressive, the 
whites reactionary. The red wedge drives forward; it is the dynamic of history, 
a movement for progress. 
 
2. 
These two opposing blocks appear again in the Italian Marxist, Antonio 
Gramsci’s  ‘war of position’  fought in the trenches and fortifications of civil 
society where both sides seek to establish themselves as hegemonic powers. 
The dominant bloc is counterpoised by a force outside itself; hegemony faces 
counter-hegemony across the barbed wire of the frontline. The state and 
capitalist society may present itself as the general will of the people and cast 
a spell over civil society to secure its consent but the working class movement 
is unaffected by this charm and fights on for liberty undaunted. 
 
3. 
This conflict model appears again in the rise of the so-called new social 
movements in the late 1960s. Social movements are imagined as the free 
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mobilisation of the forces of progress, opposing the weight of conformity, 
prejudice and injustice.  Movements wage campaigns of collective action, 
recruiting supporters by spreading the word about the justice of their cause, 
and they batter away at the forces of reaction. And no matter how many 
campaigns and causes are fought, the French social movement theorist, Alain 
Touraine (1981) believed there were only two social movements, the 
dominators and the liberators; face to face, the opposing forces of history. 
 
4. 
The concept of social movements conveyed by the image ‘Beat the whites 
with the red wedge’ has been criticised by theorists working in the shadow of 
Foucault’s theory of governmentality.  The idea that resistance can exist 
outside of power, that the red wedge can face the dominance of the whites 
across a no man’s land contradicts Foucault’s maxim that power is ‘always 
already there’.  Barbara Cruikshank (1999) addressed this fallacy in the ‘Will 
to Empower’, a message dedicated to those on the left who organise 
community struggles and hope to empower the oppressed to fight their 
enslavement. Mitchell Dean (1999) has lambasted the liberatory pretensions 
of social movements, and the belief in progress and history they present as 
‘the meta-histories of promise’. 
 
5. 
The Spanish painter Miro may never have intended his work to serve as a 
new pictorial metaphor for social movements, but it seems to provide a useful 
illustration through which to reinterpret the red wedge as a force inside the 
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dominant white block – now less a block and more a disparate cloud.  The red 
wedge is now encompassed by the hegemony of the whites; it is part of that 
power relation, and unable to escape it; it owes its existence to the domination 
that has given it birth.  In this image, social movements cannot escape the 
corrosive effects of power relations and, for that reason, they cannot be 
conceived as progressive or liberatory.  
 
Yet if the red social movement is constituted as regulated subject by the white 
power that surrounds it, it is still able to resist: it is still red.  The red circle is 
repudiated and abject; it is buried deep within the white hegemony; yet it is 
threatening in its very exclusion. How do we understand this resistance?  In 
‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Margaret Atwood says; “I believe in the resistance as I 
believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless 
there is also light.” Yet when Foucauldian scholars try to theorise resistance 
they either appear to deny it any possibility or they return to a type of 
voluntarism. Nikolas Rose locates resistance in the conflicting effects of 
overlapping identifications enabling subjects to negotiate their own identity. 
Yet we see clearly that dominant discourses can reinforce each other, that 
discourses around gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class construct a regime 
of regulation that attains near universal status. 
 
6. 
To theorise resistance within this highly regulated matrix, I want to turn to the 
feminist philosopher Judith Butler.  Butler resists the lure of voluntarism and 
she has a particular concern for what she calls ‘domesticated’ social 
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movements. In the gay movement’s demand for same-sex marriage, and in 
the pro-censorship campaigns of anti-pornography feminists, she sees the 
tensions inherent in social movements that are situated inside power, whose 
members are conditioned by the weight of dominant power relations and are 
deprived of all but the most expedient agency by the regulatory matrix that 
surrounds them.  Butler’s concern stems from an optimism grounded in a 
specific theory of resistance from within power. It is those themes of agency 
and resistance within domestication that I want to explore in the case study of 
the UK tenants movement. 
 
7. 
Tenants’ organisations first emerged in the UK as campaigning bodies in the 
1860s and a history of militant collective action, often erupting into bitter rent 
strikes, shapes a narrative of a social movement that campaigned for public 
housing in the demand for the social wage. A momentous tide of militant 
tenant action immediately prior to, and during the First World War culminated 
in the Glasgow rent strike of 1915 and the imposition of rent controls on the 
private rented sector (Melling 1983, Castells 1983, Damer 1997/1992), and 
has been persuasively portrayed as laying the foundations for the 
development of council housing (Damer 2000: 94). 
 
8. 
The depiction of a militant UK tenants’ movement in the 1960s and 1970s has 
been related to the development of the so-called ‘new’ social movements that 
were characterised in Britain by campaigns of service users against the 
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bureaucracy of the welfare state (Mouffe 1988). Community and social work 
professionals inspired by a Marxist theorisation of the welfare state sought to 
direct and encourage these movements.   
 9. 
Chantal Mouffe (1988), however, warns against seeing social movements as 
being necessarily a progressive force and argues that the opposition of these 
groups to the welfare state was easily articulated to the newly emerging 
discourses of neo-liberalism and that these movements could be assimilated 
into the new hegemonic project of the Right (Hall 1988). The discontent of 
welfare state service users was articulated to the cause of neo-liberal 
hegemony and tenants achieved recognition as consumers, while entering 
into the discourse of participation that increased their subjection. 
 
10. 
The wide reaching social policy of participation, or user involvement, emerged 
from this discourse around the failure of the welfare state and became an 
essential strategy in the restructuring of welfare services along market lines. 
In the field of housing, the rise of a discourse of participation allowed the 
demands of tenants for decision-making power over their housing service to 
be articulated to a ‘new social settlement’ (Malpass 2005: 167).  Today a wide 
menu of participation opportunities is offered social housing tenants through 
the resident involvement strategies of their housing providers. Tenants can 
take places on the management board of social housing companies; take over 
the management of their estates; lobby independently through associations 
and federations as well as take part in a familiar menu of voice options 
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through focus groups, panels, and satisfaction surveys.  For some tenants, 
participation has meant the opportunity to select repair contractors, design the 
delivery of services, make public spending decisions, plan their future 
accommodation, manage budgets and staff, and take social housing into 
community ownership (Clapham & Kintrea 2000; Cm 6630 2005). 
 
11. 
Alongside the development of this ‘participation culture’ (Housing Corporation 
2007), the social housing sector has been intentionally residualised through 
the effects of housing policy that has turned it into a stigmatised and 
unpopular tenure, abandoned by those with resources to buy, and means 
tested to provide a welfare safety net for the poorest and most vulnerable 
people in society (Kemeny 1995; Malpass 2005). While tenants’ organisations 
pursued the vision of participatory democracy in the new models of housing 
governance, they gave their support to a welfare settlement that radically 
reduced the size and status of the social housing sector, increased its 
exposure to market forces, reduced democratic accountability and centralised 
budgetary decisions (Pierson 1994, Cooper & Hawtin 1997, Malpass 2005).  
Participation itself became a hegemonic concept that secured universal 
support, but as a dominant discourse it was stripped of its assertions of direct 
democracy, and of its endorsement of lived, practical experience against 
professional knowledge or bureaucratic process. Participation was foreclosed 
as a hegemonic discourse to a consumer relation between landlords and 
tenants over service standards. 
 
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12. 
The existence of something that can be called a tenants movement today is a 
result of its constitution through the performance of participation within the 
constraints of a particular relationship of power. It is only the formal 
recognition by government and registered housing providers of a national, 
regional and local structure of tenants’ organisations that permits the phrase 
‘tenants’ movement’ to be used. We know of a network of more than 10,000 
neighbourhood, city, borough-wide and landlord-wide tenants organisations 
but those are only the ones that meet landlord recognition criteria and that 
landlords have authorised as legitimate organisations (Bines et al 1993; Cole 
at al 2000; Aldbourne Associates 2001).   
 
13. 
Tenant organisations may appear to have their own agency but they are given 
voice by the structures of tenant participation and that recognition is 
contingent on the continued performance of a regulated identity.  We can only 
understand the contemporary tenants’ movement as a regulated subject that 
has been constituted by the dominant discourse of participation. The 
argument I advance is that tenant participation is an identificatory process. 
Participation is ‘done’, there are constrained ways of doing it, and by doing it 
tenants are constructed as regulated subjects.  Yet paradoxically, by doing 
participation, the tenants movement can turn power against itself, and recover 
agency and resistance. I want to go on to explore that assertion through 
Judith Butler’s theory of the performative.   
 
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14. 
Participation is the process through which the tenants’ movement is granted a 
prescriptive agency that enables it to take part in a market relationship with 
social landlords and housing agencies. Enacting participation through 
repeated negotiations, focus groups, consultations, and board meetings 
bolsters the identificatory project that constitutes the tenants’ movement as a 
regulated subject. By citing the regulations of participation in everyday 
practice tenants reproduce and renew their identity and their subjection 
through what Butler called ‘a regularised and constrained repetition of norms’ 
(1993: 95).  But identity must be constantly renewed and performed in daily 
life, and the outcome cannot be completely determined in advance. The 
iteration of an identity may not produce an exact copy each time and has the 
potential to cite the possibilities that were excluded in its construction. 
Participation depends on tenant agency to maintain its identifications but it 
must incur the possibility that, in the application of that agency, different 
meanings and excluded identities might make an unexpected return.   
 
15. 
In the dominant model of participation the mobilisation of a social movement 
around the category of housing tenure has been legitimised. Collective action 
has been harnessed to the consumer relationship between landlords and 
tenants. This tenants’ movement is constituted in the identity of the 
‘responsible tenant’ and its mobilisation and organisational growth is achieved 
through the expansion of this identification. This repetition of a regulatory 
project strengthens the consumer status of tenants’ organisations and it 
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increases their ability and potential for effective collective action. In carrying 
out the regulated performance of participation, tenants cite excluded concepts 
of direct democracy, and harness their demands for voice to the traditions of a 
militant history. Participation allows them to champion their lived experience 
against the power of housing professionals and generates antagonism that 
reclaims the combative role of a social movement. The tenants’ movement as 
constituted by participation mobilises against the regime that normalises it, 
developing its potential to construct new identities and articulate excluded 
definitions of participation while it renews its own subjection (Butler 1997: 93).    
 
16. 
The development of a National Tenants Voice by the UK government in 2008 
provides a vivid illustration both of the domestication of the tenants’ 
movement and its ability to continue resistance from within power. The idea of 
a Tenants Voice was initiated by the National Consumer Council who called, 
in its submission to Martin Cave’s (2007) review of the regulation of social 
housing, for a new organisation that could act as a ‘voice’ for social housing 
tenants modelled on the consumer watchdog organisations established in the 
privatisation of British public industries (Chilton & Mayo 2007).  While the 
National Consumer Council advocated an extension of choice and 
competition in the social housing sector, tenants’ organisations who 
responded to the Cave Review argued for increased democratic 
accountability in public service provision. The model of a National Tenants 
Voice advocated by tenants was of a national trade union for tenants, 
democratically constituted with regional branches and elected officials, with 
 10 
the authority to intervene against landlords and resolve complaints (Bandy et 
al 2007).  
 
17. 
A National Tenants Voice Project Group was established by Communities and 
Local Government in February 2008 with representatives from national and 
regional tenants’ organisations, and the Tenant Participation Advisory Service 
(TPAS) sitting alongside the National Consumer Council, and with tenants 
taking the majority of places. By the time the Project Group issued a 
consultation paper on its proposals in July 2008, not only had the National 
Consumer Council been removed from the negotiations, but a shade of 
antagonism had crept into the imagery of a National Tenants Voice conceived 
by the group. In the project group’s proposals (NTV Project Group 2008a: 2) 
the National Tenants Voice was to be ‘rooted in the tenants’ movement, with 
close working links with representative tenants’ organisations’ and, while still 
imagined as a consumer watchdog with an advocacy and research remit, the 
new body would help build and strengthen tenants organisations and be 
guided by a belief ‘that tenants are citizens of equal worth’ (2008a: 3).  The 
National Tenants Voice was now to be an independent organisation rather 
than operating as part of an existing agency, and would have a governance 
structure that was accountable to tenants, led by tenants, with guaranteed 
places on its National Council for the national and regional tenants’ 
organisations. 
 
 
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18. 
The final report of the National Tenants Voice Project Group ‘Citizens of Equal 
Worth’ (2008b:14) made clear the subtle changes to the way a consumer 
watchdog role was to be envisaged. The core purpose of the new 
organisation was ‘to increase the opportunities for social tenants to have a 
strong collective influence over the policies that affect them’ although 
Communities and Local Government had initially insisted that the National 
Tenants Voice should not take any representational role (CLG 2007a).  The 
consumerist vision now reflected a strong collective component as its 
watchdog role served a ‘movement’, an imaginary of shared aims and 
interests that found its way into legislation when the proposal to establish the 
National Tenants Voice was included in the ‘Local Democracy, Economic 
Development and Construction Bill’, put before Parliament in December 2008.  
Clause 25 of the Bill defined the role of the new organisation as ‘representing 
or facilitating the representation of the views and interests of social housing 
tenants in England’.  
 
19. 
Tenant organisations appear to have substantially amended the direction of a 
National Tenants Voice to strengthen their influence as consumers while 
generating a strong collective base. The outline of a collective identity has 
now been embodied in legislation, and a new articulation of democratic values 
has been conjured from the consumer model of participation.  The 
development of the National Tenants Voice could then be seen as an 
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illustration of resistance through reiterative agency, of turning power against 
itself.   
 
A contentious tenants’ movement emerges from within the prescribed 
processes of tenant participation as power that is turned against itself. The 
agency and resistance of a tenants movement is therefore a dynamic relation 
of power within housing policy that cannot be completely contained, but 
neither can it emerge triumphant and liberating. The resistance of social 
movements, then, is what Butler called ‘the ideal of possibility’ (2000: 162).  It 
is the failure of hegemonic power to impose identity as a permanent injunction 
on the subject that allows power relations to be subverted and challenged 
(Butler 1993: 95).  Resistance offers the possibility of change; the possibility 
that a different sort of hegemonic regime may evolve. 


Heroes of their own story: agency and resistance in UK housing governance

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