Mills, Catherine. Review of Annika Thiem’s Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
Mills, C. ‘Contesting the Political: Foucault and Butler on Power and Resistance’. The Journal of Political Philosophy, 2003, 11(3): 253-272
December 2008.
“Accountability” refers to the capacity to give an account of or to reckon or count something, or indicates that someone can be called to give such an account or reckoning, that something is explicable and someone is answerable for that thing. “Responsibility” likewise suggests that someone is answerable to something or accountable for something; it also means being capable of fulfilling an obligation or trust. Clearly, the terms are closely related, but theories of responsibility that distinguish it from accountability — which is calculable in some way or another — emphasize the weight of the (incalculable) obligation to others indicated in responsibility that is not evident in accountability. Recent criticisms of theories of ethics as obligation for their juridicism notwithstanding,
responsibility thus seems to offer resources for thinking ethics beyond calculability and individual intentionality and will, and emphasizes instead the socially embedded, embodied and constitutively relational aspects of ethical subjectivity.
Power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations,transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly as the strategies in which they take effect whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. (Foucault cited in Mills Contesting 2003, 254)
Butler’s theory of performativity draws on J. L Austin’s coining of the term ‘‘performative’’ to describe a category of speech acts that do things, as opposed to constative utterances, which describe states of affairs. See J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (1962) and ‘‘Performative utterances’’, Philosophical Papers, (1979).
Austin also distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts; the former of these identifies the ‘‘performing of an act in saying something’’ (How to, 99–100) while the latter identifies speech acts that ‘‘produce certain consequential effects’’ . . . ‘‘by saying something’’ (101, 109).
Louis Althusser ‘‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes toward an investigation)’’, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971);
That the notion of linguistic practice designates more than speech is evident in Butler’s critique of Althusser’s mise-en-scene of interpellation on the basis that it presumes a more or less sovereign voice that hails the subject into being; (The Psychic 5–6, 106-31). Interestingly though, Butler also claims to want to privilege speech in order to ‘‘struggle free of a narrow version of textualism’’ (Butler in Bell, ‘‘Speech, Race and Melancholia’’, p. 169), by which she means the theoretical positing of the primacy of writing, by emphasizing the constitutive role of speech over that of writing. Thus, her argument in Excitable Speech is especially concerned with the borders of what speech is. While I will not develop this point here, this privileging of speech may engender a certain difficulty for Butler’s emphasis on resignification as a strategy of resistance to hate speech, since it is then difficult to imagine the scene of speaking back to anonymous graffiti, policy documents and other such discursive elements. In other words, as modalities of invective and hate, do speech and writing permit or necessitate the same response?