Acts of Resistance - Dipti, Grace, Mike, Yanna

Here are the responses to the questions discussed in today's seminar:

1. We would define an act of resistance as acting against or to deconstruct the canon, institution, norm, structure, etc.

2. An act of resistance does not depend on size or scale - it is relative to the resistance to which it speaks.

3. Awareness, being oblivious or intolerant of resistant action and/or meaning determines the visibility (invisibility) of the act of resistance to others. Distinguishing forms of such invisible acts from those which are more spectacular can be likened to a top down vs. bottom up approach - a top down or spectacular approach may appear through the form of media attention whereas we likened the bottom up approach to that of recycling to resist the environmental effects of pollution, etc.

4. We employ or could employ such acts of resistance in our daily life including the aforementioned act of recycling, buying locally or nationally to resist the imminent threat of a foreign takeover, boycotting and/or manipulating (exploit?) systemic elements of institutions, etc. such as York University. Often the timeline of these particular acts of resistance span greater than our own lives but may serve to ensure a possibly brighter future for our children's children.

5. A situation in our daily lives in which we have detourned an existing system is exemplified by emphasizing or building up a trait/characteristic/sign/system, which in doing so gives personal gain - an example of this would be a resume - exploiting the truth and recreating that which has a different resultant meaning.

6. We have observed in the everyday context resistance in fighting against 'isms' (racism, sexism, communism...) as well as depressions; those phenomenons which when are not resisted cause a downward spiral out of control. For example, an economic depression may be resisted by the individual spending money. The depressed person must constantly resist their depression by acting against it.

Another observation is how we attempt to resist the simplification of language which is becoming primitive. We liken the ideas of compression of language not unlike that of audio compression – ‘lossy’ and ‘lossless’ compression. The idea of compression of language can be seen in SMS (text messaging). The trend of this perverted language is that of ‘lossy ‘compression through ambiguous abbreviations and acronyms, where meaning is lost. A resistance of this sort of controlled system is the lossless compression which uses a set boundary (in this case 160 characters per message) and finds words which hold the meaning of what may take many words to explain. This operates within the limits of a system and resists the stagnation of language.

(For questions 7-10 we did not have sufficient time to discuss.)