actions and resistance at both places

Benjamin argues, “Today organized labour is, and apart from the state probably the only legal subject entitled to exercise violence.” (Benjamin, 239) As Walter Benjamin claims that violence cannot be practiced individually, all violence is structural and institutional. For the same reason, we may say that all resistance needs to contain some type of collective acts. Similarly, Lugones argues our “life is spatially mapped by power.” (Lugones, 8) It seems like to break down the asymmetric power relations between oppressors and oppressed, we need to act collectively, too. Even though sometimes the system uses the puppet leaders to make us blame and responsible for the oppression, the legitimate power and institutional violence are not practiced individually. Lugones continues her argument by saying “There is no “you” there except a person spatially and thus relationally conceived through your functionality in terms of power.” (Lugones, 9) It seems like we internalize the concept of individualism even as being oppressed. For people who live in the society and affected by the ideologies together, in the prison of Ideological State Apparatuses, the illusion of individual mind and act are a kind of abstraction of our existence and power. I reach to this conclusion by the help of these authors, but at the same time, one side of my mind still resists to keep the possibility of my own individual and intellectual authenticity.

At some point, even though as a person who prefer to think and act against the system individually without being an individualistic, I agree with Lugones. To shake the system from its roots, we need to accept that the society do not think and act individually, because all of our worlds are shaped by ideologies and there is not safe zone that we can escape from ideologies in our lives. I am struggling between the ideas of individual standpoints and collective resistance, but probably to avoid being a docile body and eliminate the conditions of having bad faith, we always need to come and go between individual and collective positions to not take one side for granted. By this dynamic existence, we may keep both positions of our existence fresh. As Lugones argues: “Noticing the tension from within logic of resistance enables one to acquire a multiple sensing, a multiple perceiving, and a multiple sociality.” (Lugones, 11) In other places, she claims that “When resistance is reduced to reaction, it is understood in the physical model and thus as contained in action. But resistance is not reaction but response-thoughtful, often complex, devious, insightful response, insightful into the very intricacies of the structure of what is being resisted.” (Lugones, 29) In my opinion, to get rid of the problem of reaction we may use my suggestion of negotiation of our existence between individual and collective positions. Both of these positions can be trigger for reactions to the social situations and if we balance our existence between both of the situations, each of them can be an antidote against reducing our resistance to reaction.

Sometimes, acting and rioting with a group or society as a subgroup of oppressed people can only produce reactions to the oppression. On the other hand, individual answers to the problem of collective, institutional repressions can be limited as only reactions, too. For these reasons, I argue that mediation of individual and collective acts can be our solution to produce more powerful resistance against systemic oppression.  It is hard to convince the reader to this argument, but as Althusser argues: “The essential point is that on condition that we interpret the imaginary transposition and inversion of ideology we arrive at the conclusion that in the ideology men represent their real conditions of existence to themselves in an imaginary form.” (Althusser, 318) In my opinion, these imaginary forms are neither only individual nor only collective forms. For this reason, switching our situations and producing actions and resistance at both places are necessary.