So here I am again. Hopefully all went well and in accordance with what weâve planned previous to this conference. Now, let me start off by briefly summarizing what you should have heard by now.I shall first try to explore what these papers have in common and then return to the issues of power and resistance in contemporaty modernities.

Sofieâs account was about genderbending, about performative acts, that are socially and culturally constructed ÷ as opposed to biologically given. This primarily means that they are opening up the possibilities for change. Hers was a chronicle about resistance, compliance and empowerment. But these three notions were also central in the other papers. What Sofie particularly emphasized was that itâs not at all clear how people read such performative acts, let alone employ them. Obviously one of the keywords here was Îsituatednessâ.

Central in Aruns presentation about Goa ÷ well, for at least as far as Iâm concerned ÷ is that the construction of a nation as a place, or the construction of a national identity, is not at all as monolitic and far more ambivalent and inconsistent then most of us assume. His analysis of the question of national identity in the case of Goa, has exemplified that these things are shaped through distinctive discursive formations. It just doesânt make any sense to speak about Îthé nationâ in general.

Again, the keyword here is Îsituatednessâ, which implies focusing on the micro level, on a concrete local and historical specific context, and so on. One might call this a manner of Îembodied thinkingâ, meaning that when it comes to actors, these are not organisations or institutions, but always people. But what it surely doesânt mean, is that macro structures should be ignored. On the contrary, macro structures precisely reveal themself in the everyday things of the lifes of people.

From what both Jan and Nico brought forward at this conference, it is clear that they were particularly concerned with power relations within media systems. Production teams and participants alike seem to have their own motives and considerations to engage themself in that what eventually will be broadcasted. Their grounds are not simular at all. But nevertheless, out of this relationship comes what Foucault called a non-intentional Îoverall effectâ. This might be a compulsury heterosexuality, as in the case of Îlove-game showsâ, or a discourse on participation. This effect is also encountered in Sofieâs casus on genderbending ÷ people clearly recognize the categories of masculinity and femininity ÷ and in the example of Goa, were the actions of individuals result in a discourse about the nation state.

So the accent on an Îoverall effectâ, was another joined property of these presentations. With regard to this I should nonetheless mention that in our preparative discussions, one specific critique on Foucault was quite notable: namely, that he tends to neglect the fact, that beside this overall effect, there are still all kinds of side effects or small effects that cross and thwart the overall effect.

Now, lets elaborate a little more on the subject of resistance. What always striked me in Cultural Studies, was a certain tendency to idealize ... or rather glorify resistance. Here Iâm refering to some of the work that people like Stuart Hall, Ien Ang or John Fiske did in the seventies and eighties, although Stuart Hall later revised some of his views. Influenced by the Frankfurter Schule sholars in Cultural Studies have started to stress resistance instead of hegemonic culture. Although Cultural Studies always refused to think dichotomious, their emphasizes on resistance resulted nonetheless in a duality between dominance and resistance.

What we want to assert here is that these things are far more fragmented than that. In the case of genderbending, there is an academic reading regarding it as resistance against dominant gender roles, while at least some of the spectators actually read it as dominant masculinity and femininity.

With regard to Goa, one sees that on the one hand Goan intellectuals criticize tourisme industry and culture, while on the other hand they simply preserve a dominant heterosexual discourse. The same goes for the television shows that Jan and Nico analysed. Participants oppose against management, but at the same time reproduce, for example, a heterosexual norm or a discourse on participation.

So, itâs not all clear what exactly is an act of resistance and what exactly is an act dominance. As Stuart Hall suggested, resistance is a metaphore of cultural change. These metaphores provide us with images of the transformation of cultural classifications and enable us to question the relationship between the social and the symbolic.

Finally, I want to conclude with some remarks about the central issue of this session, namely power. No matter how easily and frequently political scientists, and others, use the concept of power, it remains quite elusive. There is no unit of power, so it cannot be qualified. We can speak of some having Îlessâ or Îmore powerâ, but these are assessments, even guesses. So studying power is therefore problematic. Most political scientists define power as the ability to be succesfull in a conflict. But this definition is biased, in the sense that their attention is fixed on a macro level. It also means that one percieves power as a possession, suggesting that it is non-discursive. But surely power has a discursive component. People do assign power to others, although these others might not possess the amount of power attributed to them. The effect of power can originates from a non-discursive as well as from a discursive component. In this session we prefered to concieve of power as a relation rather then as a possession or an ability, emphasizing the micro level instead. By doing so, it enabled us to view power as a situated and combinated play between cohesion, order and conflict. Here conflict is neither reduced to oppression, repression or contradiction. One should see conflicts as acts. To refer to Foucault one more time, power is neither an effect of subjective capacities nor of structural mechanisms, but rather a name for a complex strategic situation that constitutes social identity.

Thank you.