Scales of subversion

Abstract

What does it mean to subvert a system? The subversive often entails a sense of the insurgent; to subvert is to attempt to overthrow. But, unlike the actions of the belligerent, the subversive acts from within the system. Legal regimes have been attuned to this distinction between subversion and belligerence, labeling the former as a betrayal and the latter as an act of war. While subversion is not war (though it can be war on the cheap), it doesn’t mean that leniency is afforded to the subversive. Among the forms of punishment for engaging in subversive acts in various US criminal statutes is the denial of a burial in a national cemetery (38CFR § 3.903). The specter of subversion has been critical in the development of national security states and forms of criminalization and illegalization, as well as moral panics. In the anthropology of the state, the subversive, when it appears, emerges primarily as a discourse about discourse, about the ways in which “subversive actors” and “acts of subversion” serve to legitimize forms of state violence and its projects of illegalization (Caldeira 2000; Andersson 2014).Within this same literature there exists a counterarchive of subversion. Here, the subversive is attached to modes of “insurgent citizenship” or an “art of not being governed” (Holston 2007; Scott 2010). Subversion is one of the “weapons of the weak” in the arsenal of the marginal, a modality through which subaltern citizens resist the state. The story of the subversive, then, is a story of these two scales, the view from the state ormodes of resistance and rejection from below.