Reconceptualizing Resistance: Residuals of the State and Democratic Radical Pluralism

Abstract: Arguing that resistance to the state is too narrow a conceptualization of a political project that challenges neoliberalism, we posit that there are latent, residual apparatuses of the state which can be activated as part of a systematic progressive politics. We examine Massachusetts’“Dover amendment”, a legal framework which governs group home siting throughout the state. Dover offers a powerful tool with which to resist a neoliberal socio‐spatial agenda, though it has been underutilized toward enabling an alternative landscape. We analyze how and why Dover has often remained latent as a tool for socio‐spatial resistance, and consider a provocative case in Framingham, Massachusetts that suggests how residual state apparatuses may be leveraged in support of an explicitly resistive, progressive agenda.     

Documentary Evidence and the Medieval Pottery Industry

EARLY in my study of the medieval pottery industry it became clear to me that, contrary to general belief, a reasonable body of documentary evidence bearing on the industry had survived, but that it would take some years to assemble and interpret. There is no corpus of documents from which to begin, for surviving evidence is not only scattered in a very wide variety of documents, but is also dispersed geographically in a number of local record repositories. It might seem sensible to delay publication until a larger proportion of this evidence has been studied, or at least to avoid analysis and generalization at this stage; but pottery and potters are of interest to archaeologists here and now, and there is nothing written on the industry save assemblages of unrelated facts, often strung together from widely different periods. An effort has, therefore, been made to assemble the material so far available into a coherent pattern. Since this is the first time that this has been done, the result will probably require drastic modification in a few years' time. If the interim report here presented stimulates others to prove it wrong, this paper will have achieved at least one of its purposes.¹