Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
On of the key achievements of Butler’s theoretical interventions is that they take what might be assumed to be ontological questions and make them legible as ethical, political, and social problematics, because, as she demonstrates, ontologies are conditioned by histories of power embodied in social and cultural institutions (74).
Moreover her work importantly offers a language and conceptual framework for lucidly demonstrating how this exclusion of the abnormal is part of what guarantees the normal its status. Butler demonstrates how the stabilities of gendered and sexed identities are attained through repressing what calls them into question and what attests to the ambivalence of gender and sex, of bodies and desires and their potentials and vulnerability (76).
Against understanding subjectivity as an achievement of self-consciousness and autonomous agency, Butler’s work argues for thinking of subjectivity as an unending process of formation that never culminates in full independence or self-sufficiency. Instead becoming a subject means to be formed and undone in relations to others and norms in ways that one can never fully reflectively grasp (78).
Despite the important role that Butler attributes to social norms in subject formation, individuals are not the marionettes of those norms.
Rather, Butler accounts for subject formation in subjection to norms as being irreducible to either a deterministic or an arbitrary relation to these norms. One key concept of these debates as well as of Butler’s attempts to explain her account of subject formation has been the notion of performativity.(78)
… the key insight from Butler’s concept of performativity is that acts cannot simply be traced back to agents and the intentions that preceded them. There is no original or authentic self or individual that only later enters into relations with others and comes to act on a social scene. Rather, Butler’s account offers a rigorous way of considering how social norms, practices, and institutions need to be taken into account as co-constitutive of subjects as well as of their acts.
… norms and their repetition are at the heart of how we come to be conscious and deliberating subjects. To understand subject formation as orchestrated by norms, normalization, and subjection, … does not mean to argue that subjects are fully determined by these norms. … performativity is the reiteration of norms by which one becomes intelligible as a subject (see BTM 94-95).
The performatively emerging subject is the product of the repetition of the social norms that confer intelligibility. It would be to mistake the core idea of performativity to understand this subject as one of PERFORMING the repetition of norms, as if in a theatrical performance …
Instead, the repetition of norms is “what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject” (BTM 95), and this repetition occurs in a ritualized form, constituting the subject over time.
As Butler has repeatedly argued, this mode of subjection does not make subjects into puppets determined by norms; instead, subjection brings about unruly subjects because of the excess of indeterminacyof meaning, power, and agency as norms work by producing their own failures.
The points of resistances that these failures produce are not the conscious acts of subjects, but these gaps and breakages are the condition of possibility for directed action and transformation. (80)
Political action and concerted efforts to change our circumstances are not necessary outcomes of being at odds with the norms, as Butler indicates when she asks, “what are the possibilities of politicizing DISidentifiction, this experience of MISRECOGNITION, this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong?” (BTM 219) (84-85).