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ABSTRACT
In this article, I offer a reading of James Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990) from an inverted standpoint: Whereas Scott's focus is on resistance from below, mine is on resistance from above. My case study involves some of the more prominent legal and political responses to the attacks of September 11, 2001-notably the President's Military Order of November 13, 2001, establishing military tribunals for noncitizen detainees charged with terrorism. My analysis supports Scott's thesis regarding the discursivity of resistance while challenging some of his conclusions regarding the form and content of hegemony, as read in the current neoliberal milieu. With respect to the military tribunals, I argue that their establishment represents an extension of executive power rehearsed prior to the attacks, and that the politicization of security in the United States involves institutions and issues that have long antecedents in partisan political terms. [Keywords: discourse, states, hegemony, neoliberalism, partisan politics]
"HIDDEN TRANSCRIPTS" IS ONE of those phrases-like its conceptual cousins, "collective conscience," "cultural relativity," "social structure," "imagined communities," and "thick description"-that entered fully and immediately into the anthropological lexicon destined for immortality. But with immortality comes a perpetual question of emphasis. Collective conscience or collective conscience? It makes a difference.1 It is as if history-our history, in this moment-cannot resist conflating concepts with references to their visibility, in effect making over these "quivering" (Boon 1999:25) aesthetic expressions of humane possibility into declarations of material and ideological fulfillment. This is the essence of one powerful hidden transcript of our times, by which politicians' claims to legitimacy leave their traces in cultural theory as problems of identity and interpretation.
James Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990) is about transcripts-encoding, reading, and interpreting the discourse of political struggle. The book is neither a revelation of secrets nor a general theory of resistance-although it has sometimes been read as such (see, e.g., Gutmann 1993; Levi 1999:91-92; cf. Kelley 1992:293). It is a book about the dilemmas of making and writing political history from below. In this article, I take my main theme from Scott's emphasis on "hidden transcripts" as a theoretical rejoinder to Gramscian formulations of hegemony, in order to suggest that hidden transcripts are also elements of...