The Asceticism of the Oppressed: On the Emancipatory Tradition of Discipline

• In Event: Anticolonial Worldmaking

Abstract

Asceticism has a bad reputation in political and social theory – insofar as it has any reputation at all. If it is not ignored entirely as a category of practice with real power-effects, it tends to be aligned with positions of social dominance and domination. Thus asceticism is often considered a special privilege of the aristocracy, which alone has the leisure to turn away from worldly affairs and cultivate the self as an aesthetic object. Meanwhile, since Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, the term "discipline" has been widely used as a means of describing and condemning modern social domination. Workers are disciplined in the factory; the children of workers are disciplined in the public schools. Thus if we say: “practices of the self,” it is far more likely that the listener thinks of Socrates and Marcus Aurelius than of Harriett Tubman or of all those “improbable aristocrats” of which James Baldwin spoke. If we say: “industrial discipline,” we think of the crushing grind of the factory instead of those countless labourers who playfully redeployed this same discipline in order to provide themselves a rigorous education—sometimes while at work. At its core, discipline simply refers to the organized use of training techniques; and asceticism is really the name for any technique of self-transformation. As such, discipline and ascesis belong to no one; they are tools for achieving various ethical and political goals. Studying cases of industrial workers who redeployed disciplinary training methods for their own self-empowerment and African American activists who produced an anti-colonial asceticism, we argue that, under certain conditions, discipline can be a practice of freedom. We therefore offer a new framework for theorizing how “personal” practices are directly political and recover a lost revolutionary tradition – the asceticism of the oppressed – in which discipline has been used to generate power for the powerless. In so doing, we explore divergences, tensions, and overlaps in the disciplinary tactics of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements.

Authors

• Dimitri M'Bama

• William Tilleczek, McGill University