logocentric – Page 103

thiem mattering bodies

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

Understanding the self as produced around the body in relation to social norms and becoming the principle of the body’s subjection challenges moral philosophy to reconsider the notions of the self or self-concept.

Instead of seeking in the self a narrative, an integrated truth of a person, it becomes possible to draw on the notion of the self to understand how stories and histories produce the self through and in relation to the formation of the body.

The self reconsidered as an effect of the bodily effects of subjection to social norms is not, then, a repository of a person’s authenticity or an authentic self-expression of one’s body.

Rather, the self comes to join social norms in bringing about the body as a certain kind of body, and the self becomes the very mediation and agent of normalization.

This does not mean that narratives are inherently oppressive or nothing but perfidious instruments of social regulation, yet they are also not radically other than social norms and cannot offer an authenticity of the self as recourse to oppose social norms. (33).

… one intricacy of Butler’s account of subject formation lies in its critique of accounts that attempt to secure a prediscursive reality for the bodily subject. Butler’s critique brings together Derrida’s arguments on signification and materiality and Foucault’s analytics of power relations and discourses.

This juxtaposition allows her to offer an account of the political and social relevance of thinking materiality as not independent of signification. Matter comes to matter not prior to social norms and relations of power but as social practices and institutions render matter intelligible. Drawing on Foucault’s analytics of power, Butler offers these “social conditions” as mechanisms of normalization.

The challenge that her accounts poses regarding the bodily subject is that bodies, bodily reality, or “facticity” cannot be invoked as providing some sort of more original freedom, a point of departure prior to social norms to launch a critique of social normalization (36-37).

thiem foucault assujetissement

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

This kind of Foucaultian assujetissement is not merely a subjection in the sense of domination; it is not merely an exertion of power on a preexisting body that shapes the substance that has existence outside and prior to the workings of power and social norms. There is no “raw” body or materiality prior to and outside of power; power itself, in return, is for Foucault not an immaterial form but exists and works in the form of political and social practices and institutions. Assujetissement thus is a bringing of the bodily subject into existence, since “there is no body outside of power, for the materiality of the body —indeed, materiality itself— is produced by and in direct relation to the investment of power” (Butler Psychic 91)

thiem materiality

Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

There is usually not merely one single framework that renders experiences intelligible; instead, there are various frameworks that compete with and among each other. Some are culturally prevalent and dominant; others are relegated to the margins. Yet such frameworks, as ways of making sense of the world, others, and oneself, are not unchangeably closed, fully consistent worldviews in themselves within which one is immersed and to which one is unalterably confined.

Consequently, experiences of pain or pleasure can bring the prevailing modes and frameworks of intelligibility into crisis and open them up for critical questioning and reworking. One runs in many ways up against and thus in a way experiences the limits of one’s hermeneutical framework which is one’s epistemological field. Since one operates from within that field, however, one is not in a position to look upon the field as a whole and so have reflective access to the field’s topography.

🙂 She loses me here: The limits are experienced, but they resist total sublation into reflective knowledge. This resistance depends on the fact that every paradigm works according to a certain foreclosure that occasions the preservation and return of that which cannot be signified within the given order of being. (25) 🙂 We experience the limits but these limits resist “sublation” into something she calls ‘reflective knowledge’

thiem butler subjectivity

Them, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.

Poststructuralist critiques have demonstrated that we can no longer retrieve an individual, a person, or a self in a way that could ground theory and practice cross history and cultures, because this ground is itself a product of a particular culture and history.

… there is no longer a subject outside of subject FORMATION to which moral philosophy could have recourse. The accounts that Butler offers are not developmental accounts of the subject in the sense of outlining a series of events that we all undergo and from which in the end we emerge maturely, finally, as subjects.

Instead, the subject emerges as a question and problem for moral philosophy insofar as it does not have a secure status or position. “The subject,” therefore, is better rendered as an ongoing process, an ongoing formation in relation to norms as well as in relation to others. In The Psychic Life of Power, this process of subject formation is termed assujetissement (subjectivation) to describe this emergence of the subject through subjection.

The process of becoming a subject is for Butler a process of becoming subordinated by norms through which power relations work, and to exist socially as well as self-consciously requires not only relating to norms but also to become subjected to them.

In Giving Account of Oneself, Butler explains that we do not encounter norms and power on their own, but they become knowable through encounters with others (11).

Thus “the body” cannot function as backdrop against “normalized” consciousness or as a reality that we can be certain of independent of social norms. In other words, Butler refutes a strand of phenomenologically informed arguments that seek to establish the facticity of the body’s materiality as independent from social constructions.

These positions hold that even though we cannot have any positive, substantive knowledge about the materiality of the body outside of discursive constructs and social understandings, we can nevertheless know THAT there is a material existence of the body; this existence, then, is a kind of pure or presocial “facticity” of bodily materiality.

Butler argues that even the understanding of the body as material is neither prediscursive nor presocial, but the possibility of a bodily referent is always bound to the efficacy of social norms and the ways in which social norms regulate and construct bodies (24).

constitutive outside

Ziarek, Ewa Ponowska. “From Euthanasia to the Other of Reason: Performativity and the Deconstruction of Sexual Difference” in Derrida and Feminism. eds. Feder, Ellen K. et al. New York: Routledge. 1997, 115-140.

🙂 This is a great note but it stops short with 8 pages to go. I need to track down the article and find Z’s conclusion!

On the Derridian Ethical

Ungraspable in positive terms, and yet irreducible to epistemological contradiction, the signification of alterity confronts us, once again, with the limit, or the outside to the symbolic order. This limit differs, however, from both the psychoanalytic concept of the Real and Butler’s notion of the “constitutive outside.” Unlike the radical non-coincidence, both temporal and spatial, that the signification of the other generates, Copjec’s and Žižek’s discussion of the Real emphasizes the immediate coincidence of opposites. For Butler, the abject —designating the excluded possibilities of signification threatening the purity of the law— functions as the constitutive outside to the symbolic order. The exclusion of the abject is thus an act of violence that ensures heterosexual hegemony. The task of critical intervention, then, is to question the seeming neutrality of this exclusion, and to recover the foreclosed possibilities of signification, even though this recovery will produce different exclusions in its wake.

For Derrida however, the persistence of alterity as a certain beyond or excess of the social and conceptual totality is not a sign of violent exclusion, but the condition of the very possibility of ethics. The other does not belong to the order of the “production” of the constitutive outside —as radically other, the signification of alterity exceeds both the notion of production and constitution.

(131-132).

constitutive outside

In Butler’s interpretation, what is thus foreclosed from the symbolic is not the prediscursive “empty” kernel but those possibilities of signification that threaten the purity and permanence of the law instituting sexual difference.

With such a concept of the outside, Butler articulates the main task of her inquiry in a very different way from Žižek’s. She does not intend ot affirm the exclusion of the Real as a guarantee of social contingency but questions the stability and ahistorical character of this exclusion: “How might those ostensibly constitutive exclusions be rendered less permanent, more dynamic? How might the excluded return, not as psychosis or the figure of the psychotic within politics, but as that which has been rendered mute, foreclosed from the domain of political signification.” (Butler Bodies 189) (130)

By rethinking the historicity and contingency of the law as the sedimentation of subjective approximations through time, Butler can argue that the mechanisms of exclusion are also, “however inevitable — still and always the historical workings of specific modalities of discourse and power” (Butler Bodies 205) (130).

constitutive outside

If Butler draws on the Derridian theory of performativity in order to underscore the historicity and impurity of the law, she also supplements this theory in order to stress the compulsory character of heterosexuality. According to Butler, the normative power of heterosexuality requires not only the force effecting subjective identifications with its norms but also the force of dis-identifications, the force of exclusions, in particular, the exclusion of homosexuality: “the normative force of performativity — its power to establish what qualifies as ‘being’ — works not only through reiteration, but through exclusion as well.” (Butler Bodies 188) Thus, the compulsory force of “spectral” figures of abject homosexuality: “the feminized fag and the phallicized dyke” (Butler Bodies, 96) (129)

It is precisely because iterability fails to perpetuate the identical and pure from of the law that any identity claims have to be reinforced by exclusions — they require“a constitutive outside.” In other words, Butler, like Žižek, concedes that the normativity of the law works by producing a certain outside to the symbolic universe. Yet, to avoid the ahistorical production of the REAL, Butler proposes to rethink the “constitutive outside” as a social abject, the exclusion of which secures the domain of social intelligibility.

In this formulation, the process of exclusion is never neutral but performs a normative and normalizing social function:

“the abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject… This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which —and by virtue of which— the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life.” (Butler Bodies 3) (129).

performativity

What is the nature of such performative identification? Performativity for Butler, as for Derrida, consist neither in voluntary decisions of the self nor in involuntary acts governed by the law that is external to them. To avoid impasses of social constructivism that sees the subject as merely an effect of social conditions, Butler stresses the fact that the reiteration of the norm (code) constitutes not only the subject but also the meaning of the symbolic law. Not a simple cause of the subject, the law itself is produced by the repetition of subjective approximations in time. Because it does not have a fixed form apart from its approximations through subjective acts, the law, despite its compulsory force, is marked by the “infelicities” and the infidelities characteristic of performative utterances. The repetition of acts understood as the citation of the law stabilizes the form of the law, and, at the same time, produces a “dissonance” and inconsistency within it. Indissociable from “irruptive violence,” reiteration sustains and undercuts both the permanence of the law and the identity of the subject: “the law is no longer given in a fixed form .. but is produced through citation as that which proceeds and exceeds the mortal approximations enacted by the subject.” (Butler Bodies, 14) For Butler, like for Derrida, the possibility of failure and impurity afflicting the repetition of sexual norms is not only an unfortunate predicament or “trauma”, but also a positive condition of possibility. By opening the possibility of intervention and redescription of sexual norms, reiteration not only stresses the historicity of the law but also open an “incalcuable” future, no longer submitted to its jurisdiction.

ziarek on Žižek real

Butler, in the process of deconstructing sexual difference, contests nothing less than the Real itself. … The Lacanian Real, central to Copjec’s and Žižek’s reading of sexual difference, is the realm of being that is radically unsymbolizable, that remains foreclosed from the symbolic order. In this formulation, the Real constitutes a necessary outside of any symbolization — a limit to the totalization of the social or discursive filed. Like Copjec, Žižek suggests that any attempt to define the Real leads to paradoxical formulations … the Real is the starting point, the “impossible kernel” of symbolization and, at the same time, an effect of the symbolic order, an excess, or left-over of symbolization (124)

At stake in the argument about the Real is, on the one hand, a renegotiation of the relations between contingency and compulsion in social and discursive formations, and, on the other, the status of the concept of the outside of history and symbolization.

On the basis of the conceptualization of the Real as the necessary outside of the symbolic order, Žižek condemns both the universalization of the symbolic and its obverse side, its “rapid historicization,” which treats the subject merely as the effect or the actualization of its historical conditions. Both of these gestures … ignore that which is foreclosed from historicization. In order to take into account the incompleteness and contingency of the historical process, the critical accounts of history, Žižek argues, have to presuppose an empty place, an non-historical kernel, that which cannot be symbolized and yet is produced by symbolization itself (Žižek Sublime 135) (Ziarek 125).

Butler’s argument with the Real neither disputes the contingency of social formations nor denies the constitutive outside to symbolization. On the contrary, through her reading of Laclau and Mouffe, she links such contingency and incompleteness to the promise of radical democracy: “The incompleteness of every ideological formulation is central to the radical democratic project’s notion of political futurity. The subjection of every ideological formation to REarticulation … constitutes the temporal order of democracy as an incalculable future, leaving open the production of new subject-positions, new political signifiers …” (Butler, Bodies 193)

What she does contest … is the fixity of the Real (or rather, to articulate it more cautiously, the invariable failure of its inscription) and the permanent structure of its exclusion.

Even though the foreclosure of the Real “guarantees” contingency and incompleteness of all social relations, the process of this foreclosure is not marked by the contingency or historicity, and therefore is not open to redescription. We are confronted here, Butler argues, with the unchangeable production of the outside, even though the ‘production’ in question is marked by the instability of cause and effect. As Butler points out, “if we concur that every discursive formation proceeds through constituting an ‘outside’, we are not thereby committed to the invariant production of that outside as the trauma of castration (nor to the generalization of castration as the model for all historical trauma) (Butler Bodies, 205) (125).

Campbell critique sexual d Ziarek Outside

Campbell, Kirsten. “The Plague of the Subject: Subjects, Politics, and the Power of Psychic Life” in Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. eds. Sönser Breen, Margaret and Warren J. Blumenfeld. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2005, (81-94).

Foreclosure: Freud never uses the term “foreclosure”, he used “repression” and “disavowal” to describe the ego’s refusal of an incompatible idea together with its affect. Instead she uses Lacan’s use of foreclosure as “A foundational psychic exclusion that cannot be represented within the subject’s symbolic economy”. This deployment of Lacan in the name of Freud allows Butler to evade certain theoretical difficulties posed by Lacanian theory to her conception of foreclosure.

Butler’s account implies that the prohibition against the homosexual object is pre-oedipal, because it is prior to the constitution of the subject. This prohibition, however, CANNOT be pre-oedipal. If it is pre-oedipal, then it must be prior to sexual difference. If the prohibition is prior to sexual difference, then the object that is prohibited cannot be a homosexual object, because a homosexual object is defined by sexual difference. The definition of a same-sex object relies upon a notion of sexual difference because such a concept would be meaningless without an already established distinction between the sexes. In order for Butler’s prohibition to operate against desire for same-sex objects, those objects must already be defined by sexual difference and, so, the prohibition described by Butler must be an oedipal prohibition in the register of sexual difference. The failure to address this problem of sexual difference entails that there is a lack of coherence in this theory of the formation of heterosexual identity (89).

In Butler’s interpretation, what is thus foreclosed from the symbolic is not the prediscursive “empty” kernel but those possibilities of signification that threaten the purity and permanence of the law instituting sexual difference. With such a concept of the outside, Butler articulates the main task of her inquiry iin a very diffferent way from Žižek’s. She does not intend to affirm the exclusion of the Real as a guarantee of social contingency but questions the stability and ahistorical character of this exclusion.

“How might those ostensibly constitutive exclusions be rendered less permanent, more dynamic? How might the excluded return, not as psychosis or the figure of the psychotic within politics, but as that which has been rendered mute, foreclosed from the domain of political signification?” (Butler Bodies 189).

By rethinking the historicity and contingency of the law as the sedimentation of subjective approximations through time, Butler can argue that the mechanisms of exclusion are also, … historical workings of specific modalities of discourse and power. … the “constitutive outside” is an inevitable effect of any identity claims, including the claims of queer identities, but the forms of these exclusions are neither invariant nor ahistorical. Undercutting the political neutrality and ahistorical permanence of “the constitutive outside,” Butler’s emphasis on the historicity of exclusion removes the threat of psychosis associated with it and opens the borders of intelligibility to political contestation (Ziarek 130).

campbell power subjection subjectivity

– operation of power and the formation of subjectivity

– a theory of subjection requires a theory of the psyche

– the psychic formation of subjectivity

Butler ties the psychoanalytic concept of foreclosure to ‘the Foucauldian notion of a regulatory ideal’, hence linking the psychoanalytic account of the psyche to Foucault’s theory of the regulatory workings of power (Psychic 25) (83).

– Heterosexual identity is thus constituted through a repudiation of homosexual desire and hence through the irresolvable loss o the homosexual object. That ‘ungrieved and ungrievable loss’ produces the melancholia of heterosexual identity (Psychic 138) (84).

– Because heterosexual identity disavows homosexual attachment, it cannot be acknowledged and hence cannot be named and so cannot be mourned.

– Instead of claiming that there is one repressive and normative ‘law’ as in psychoanalysis, Butler understands the normative constraints upon psychic production as an effect of networks of regulatory norms. These normative and regulating discourses produce the subject and generate desire (86).

Psychoanalysis provides a supplementary theory of the subject, which addresses a gap in Foucault’s work concerning a theory of the formation of subjectivity. Butler does not provide a psychoanalytic reading of Foucault that challenges, disrupts, or contests that theory. Rather, Butler seeks to address what she perceives as a ‘missing’ dimension to Foucault’s work — a theory of the constitution of the subject — by supplementing Foucault with a psychoanalytic theory of the subject (86).

kirby bodies materiality

Kirby, Vicki. ‘When All That Is Solid Melts Into Language” in Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies. eds. Sönser Breen, Margaret and Warren J. Blumenfeld. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2005, (41-56).

The complication, however, is that to concede the existence of certain bodily facts is also to concede a certain interpretation of those facts. … If we situate this debate within feminism, then those who claim to represent real women without recourse to inverted commas will assume they have access to the truth of (the) matter, as if the compelling facts of women’s lives simply present themselves. According to this veiw, signifiying practices are the mere vehicles of such truths, having no formative input of their own (42).

Butler must rupture the bar that cuts presence from absence (lack), and language from what is considered prior to, or not language, in order to open the possibility of a revaluation of different subjects. In other words, she must engage the mode of production of these determinations, the hidden indebtedness to ‘the feminine’ whose disavowal has rendered it bankrupt. Butler explores the metaphysics of presence that opposes identity to difference as presence to absence, with the aim of refiguring difference as a generative force within whose transformational energies the sense of a fixed identity (as presence to self) is radically destabilized (47).