Subject of Resistance: Conceptualizing "Culture" and "Resistance" in Social Theory

In this study I approach the contradictory, contentious, and competing notions of resistance as a conceptual problem, with empirical discursive realities, limiting social researchers’ ability to understand relations of power and culture. Using a grounded methodological, I conduct meta-analyses of theoretical, conceptual, and empirical literatures on and/or employing the concepts resistance, culture, and power. From this data, I present a series of emergent epistemic themes as epistemorphs, or knowledge forms, that order a “structure for knowing” characteristic of each term's constitution. I then develop a series of deconstructive analyses aimed at the external validity/reliability and intensional logics of each discursively identified conceptualization structure. I identify in these analyses a series problematics for the intensional logics ordering these concepts. In light of these findings and analyses, I introduce a number of new concepts as an alternative structure for knowing. I conceptualize power in terms of: power (an agent’s properties with capacities to apply force and accomplish things), fortepovon (the praxis of agentic powers), and efikepotenco (the efficacy of powers realized). I introduce a conceptual distinction between ‘the cultural’ (the Discursive mediation of culture) and ‘culture’ (a process of knowledge formation in which experience is made intelligible and comprehensible). In relation the distinction for culture, I introduce a dialectic elaboration of Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge: povonscio (powers in knowledge) and superfortiscio (power determinate knowledge). Returning to the conceptual questions concerning resistance, I articulate a dialectic conceptual formation for resistance and domination as dimensions of fortepovon, rather than being separate and independent phenomena. As an alternative, I propose conceptualizing the praxis of powers as either "oppressive" or "liberating.