To this end she concentrates on Foucault’s neglect to explain how power comes to inhabit the subject’s interiority, rendering him docile. Foucault makes reference to the subject’s interiority in his description of the Panopticon, a prison whose architectural arrangement incorporates such observational efficiency that it allows the prisoner no privacy. But ‘no privacy’ is a misleading description in this instance, because the prisoner[s secret life, his inner dreams and desires, are not so much thwarted by his imprisonment as they are constituted and affirmed. In other words, his personal interiority is so effectively inculcated with disciplinary expectation that he is the psychic instrument of his own compliance — ‘he becomes the principle of his own subjection’ (Foucault 1982, 203). Foucault eschews psychological explanations of this process and elides its actual operation by focusing on the totality of its outcome, using the word ‘soul’ to evoke power’s effectiveness in seizing the very core of the subject’s being.
Butler believes that a psychoanalytic elaboration of subject formation represents a much les totalizing and deterministic view of the subject because it demarcates the normative demands of the Symbolic order from the deregularizing eccentricity of the individual’s psyche, or unconscious. In other words, because the unconscious exceeds power’s normative conventions its operations are inherently resistant to power’s demands. Thus, instead of Foucault’s rather disheartening suggestion that the interiority of the body is the unilateral effect of disciplinary power, Butler will argue that the psyche’s internal dissonance and resistance represents a space whose transvaluations might help us conceive ‘a radically conditioned form of agency’ (Butler Psychic Life of P 1997, 15) (Kirby 2006: 116)
The body is not a site on which a construction takes place; it is a destruction on the occasion of which a subject is formed. The formation of this subject is at once the framing, subordination, and regulation of the body, and the mode in which that destruction is preserved (in the sense of sustained and embalmed) in normalization (Butler, Psychic Life of P. 92, cited in Kirby 118).
If the soul is the normalizing ideal through which the subject assumes coherence as an embodied subject, in a body whose identity is specularized and discursively regularized into social legibility (an ideal, an imago), then Butler surmises that the body that enables this process continues to endure in some way, even though it is sublimated within the process of normalization. Happily then, things are not frozen into place, as if normalization is a straightforward process that can be finessed once and for all.
Sublimation must constantly be reinstated and maintained, and this means that the subject is always in the process of coming into being with the shifting valencies of social reinscription (Kirby 119).
As Butler explains it, because the sign’s original intention is perverted and changed when read through a different context, meaning and truth are always provisional, unstable and in need of repair to re-establish their standing, their authority. If this structural stutter in power’s operation is truly intrinsic to subjectivation, then the subject’s mandatory subordination to power is never a process of docile compliance (Kirby 2006, 119).
Butler makes an interesting observation between psychoanalysis and Foucault: the former, the subject (of the Symbolic) is differentiated from the psyche (the interiority of the individual that exceeds social regulation), and in the latter the subject, or soul, emerges from a body that enables subjectivation while somehow preceding and exceeding its injunctions. Butler muses that perhaps the Foucaultian body and the psychoanalytic psyche have interchangeable functions, but how might this blurring of terms prove suggestive for a more radical appreciation of identity and agency?
If power is haunted by the ghostly residue of the body, something it can’t shake off, then the psychic life of power incorporates an internal disjunction that does two things at once: on the one hand, it incites a performative iteration of norms in order to reinstate their authority and, on the other, this very repetition derails the possibility of power’s unilateral efficacy as a purely dominating force. In other words, there will always be a ‘misfit’, some sort of interruption between the demand to conform and the individual’s capacity to faithfully comply. And this rewriting, or rerouting, marks the ambivalence and perversion that is the psychic life of power (Kirby, 2006: 119).