Author: logocentric

butler psychic life foucault

J. Butler. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford UP. 1997 This is JB on page 99.

Resistance as an effect of power

Foucault formulates resistance as an effect of the very power that it is said to oppose. This insistence on the dual possiblity of being both constituted by the law and an effect of resistance to the law marks a departure from the Lacanian framework.

For Foucault, the symbolic produces the possibility of its own subversions, and these subversions are unanticipated effects of symbolic interpellations.

The notion of “the symbolic” does not address the multiplicity of power vectors upon which Foucault insists, for power in Foucault not only consists in the reiterated elaboration of norms or interpellating demands, but is formative or productive, malleable, multiple, proliferative, and conflictual. … disciplinary discourse does not unilaterally constitute a subject in Foucault, or rather if it does, it simultaneously constitutes the condition for the subject’s de-constitution.

Indeed, I would add, a subject only remains a subject through a reiteration or rearticulation of itself as a subject, and this dependency of the subject on repetition for coherence may constitute that subject’s incoherence, its incomplete character. This repetition or, better, iterability thus becomes the non-place of subversion, the possibility of a re-embodying of the subjectivating norm that can redirect its normativity (99).

butler psychic life Hegel

disavowal of the body because it represents the terror of death.  Through the imposition of ethical norms,

subject is then subordinated to norms, and the norms are subjectivating, that is, they give an ethical shape to the reflexivity of this emerging subject. The subjection that takes place under the sign of the ethical is a flight from fear, and so is constituted as a kind of flight and denial, a fearful flight from fear … (43)

flight from fear, is a flight from the body … vacating the body and “clinging to what appears to be most disembodied: thought”

Sadism towards the other directed back upon itself

conscience Nietzsche foreclose

Freud and Nietzsche offer differing accounts of subject formation that rely on the productivity of the norm. Both account for the fabrication of conscience as the effect of an internalized prohibition (thereby establishing “prohibition” as not only privative but productive).

In Freud and Nietzsche, a prohibition on action or expression is said to turn “the drive” back on itself, fabricating an internal sphere, the condition for self-inspection and reflexivity.  The drive turning back on itself becomes the precipitating condition of subject formation, a primary longing in recoil that is traced in Hegel’s view of the unhappy consciousness as well.  Whether the doubling back upon itself is performed by primary longings, desire, or derives, it produces in each instance a psychic habit of self-beratement, one that is consolidated over time as conscience.

Conscience is the means by which a subject becomes an object for itself, reflecting on itself, establishing itself as reflective and reflexive.  The “I” is not simply one who thinks about him- or herself; it is defined by this capacity for reflective self-relation or reflexivity.  For Nietzsche reflexivity is a consequence of conscience; self-knowing follows from self-punishment. (Thus one never “knows” oneself prior to the recoil of desire in question.)

In order to curb desire, one makes of oneself an object for reflection; in the course of producing one’s own alterity, one becomes established as a reflexive being, one who can take oneself as an object.  Reflexivity becomes the means by which desire is regularly transmuted into the circuit of self-reflection. The doubling back of desire that culminates in reflexivity produces, however, another order of desire: the desire for that very circuit, for reflexivity and, ultimately, for subjection. 22

Foreclosed Desire

The foreclosure of homosexuality appears to be foundational to a certain heterosexual version of the subject. 23

Freud distinguishes between repression and foreclosure, suggesting that a repressed desire might once have lived apart from its prohibition, but that foreclosed desire is rigorously barred, constituting the subject through a certain kind of preemptive loss.  Elsewhere I have suggested [See chap. 5 of Psychic Life] that the foreclosure of homosexuality appears to be foundational to a certain heterosexual version of the subject.  The formula “I have never loved” someone of similar gender and “I have never lost” any such person predicates the “I” on the “never-never” of that love and loss. Indeed, the ontological accomplishment of heterosexual “being” is traced to this double negation, which forms its constitutive melancholia, an emphatic and irreversible loss that forms the tenuous basis of that “being.”

Significantly Freud identifies heightened conscience and self-beratement as one sign of melancholia, the condition of uncompleted grief. 23

The foreclosure of certain forms of love suggests that the melancholia that grounds the subject (and hence always threatens to unsettle and disrupt that ground) signals an incomplete and irresolvable grief.  Unowned and incomplete, melancholia is the limit to the subject’s sense of pouvoir, its sense of what it can accomplish and, in that sense, its power.  Melancholia rifts the subject, marking a limit to what it can accommodate.  Because the subject does not, cannot, reflect on that loss, that loss marks the limit of reflexivity, that which exceeds ( and conditions) its circuitry.  Understood as foreclosure, that loss inaugurates the subject and threatens it with dissolution (23).

psychic operation of the norm

A redescription of the domain of psychic subjection is needed to make clear how social power produces modes of reflexivity at the same time as it limits forms of sociality.  In other words, to the extent that norms operate as psychic phenomena, restricting and producing desire, they also govern the formation of the subject and circumscribe the domain of a livable sociality.

The psychic operation of the norm offers a more insidious route for regulatory power than explicit coercion, one whose success allows its tacit operation within the social.  And yet being psychic, the norm does not merely reinstate social power, it becomes formative and vulnerable in highly specific ways. The social categorizations that establish the vulnerability of the subject to language are themselves vulnerable to both psychic and historical change. 21

This view counters an understanding of a psychic or linguistic normativity (as in some versions of the Symbolic) that is prior to the social or sets constraints on the social. Just as the subject is derived from conditions of power that precede it, so the psychic operation of the norm is derived, though not mechanically or predictably, from prior social operations (21).

subjection exploits desire for existence

JB. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford UP. 1997. pp. 20-21

If one is to oppose the abuses of power (which is not the same as opposing power itself), it seems wise to consider in what our vulnerability to that abuse consists. That subjects are constituted in primary vulnerability does not exonerate the abuses they suffer; on the contrary, it makes all the more clear how fundamental the vulnerability can be.

How is it that the subject is the kind of being who can be exploited, who is, by virtue of its own formation, vulnerable to subjugation? Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection the price of existence is subordination. Precisely at the moment in which choice is impossible, the subject pursues subordination as the promise of existence. This pursuit is not choice, but neither it is necessity.

Subjection exploits the desire for existence, where existence is always conferred from elsewhere; it marks a primary vulnerability to the Other in order to be (20-21).

prior desire for social existence

JB. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford UP. 1997 pp. 18-19

If power works not merely to dominate or oppress existing subjects, but also to form subjects, what is this formation?

… and account of subjection, it seems, must be traced in the turns of psychic life … in the peculiar turning of a subject against itself that takes place in acts of self-reproach, conscience, and melancholia that work in tandem with processes of social regulation 18-19

🙂 Remember! The formation of the subject takes place through the incorporation of norms.

How does the subjection of desire require and institute the desire for subjection? … how are we to account for the desire for the norm and for subjection more generally in terms of a prior desire for social existence, a desire exploited by regulatory power?

a) the formation of the subject involves the regulatory formation of the psyche, including how might we rejoin the discourse of power with the discourse of psychoanalysis: and

b) make such a conception of the subject work as a notion of political agency in postliberatory times.

Incorporation? page 19, she says:

And yet, if we refuse the ontological dualism that posits the separation of the political and the psychic, it seems crucial to offer a critical account of psychic subjection in terms of the regulatory and productive effects of power. If forms of regulatory power are sustained in part through the formation of a subject, and if that formation takes place according to the requirements of power, specifically, as the incorporation of norms, then a theory of subject formation must give an account of this process of incorporation, and the notion of incorporation must be interrogated to ascertain the psychic topography it assumes. How does the subjection of desire require and institute the desire for subjection?

In claiming that social norms are internalized, we have not yet explained what incorporation or, more generally, internalization is, what it means for a norm to become internalized or what happens to the norm in the process of internalization (19).

The prior desire for social existence

Where social categories guarantee a recognizable and enduring social existence, the embrace of such categories, even as they work in the service of subjection, is often preferred to no social existence at all (20).

But if the very production of the subject and the ofrmation of that wil are the consequences of a primary subordination, then the vulnerability of the subject to a power not of its own making is unavoidable. That vulnerability qualifies the subject as an exploitable kind of being.

power agency

Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Standford UP. 1997.

The power that initiates the subject fails to remain continuous with the power thatis teh subject`s agency. … How is it that the power upon which the subject depends for existence and which the subject is compelled to reiterate turns against itself in the course of that reiteration? How might we think resistance within the terms of reiteration. 12

According to the formulation of subjection as both the subordination and becoming of the subject, power is, as subordination, a set of conditions that precedes the subject, effecting and subordinating the subject from the outside.  This formulation falters, however, when we consider that there is no subject prior to this effect. Power not only acts on a subject but, in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being.  13

… the subject is itself a site of this ambivalence in which the subject emerges both as the effect of a prior power and as the condition of possibility for a radically conditioned form of agency. A theory of the subject should take into account the full ambivalence of the conditions of its operation (15).

Agency

Agency exceeds the power by which it is enabled. One might say that the purposes of power are not always the purposes of agency. To the extent that the latter diverge from the former, agency is the assumption of a purpose unintended by power, one that could not have been derived logically or historically, that operates in a relation of contingency and reversal to the power that makes it possible, to which it nevertheless belongs. This is, as it were, the ambivalent scene of agency, constrained by no teleological necessity (15).

Power is never merely a condition external or prior to the subject, nor can it be exclusively identified with the subject. If conditions of power are to persist, they must be reiterated; the subject is precisely the site of such reiteration, a repetition that is never merely mechanical (16).

That agency is implicated in subordination is not the sign of a fatal self-contradiction at the core of the subject and, hence, further proof of its pernicious or obsolete character.  But neither does it restore a pristine notion of the subject, derived from some classical liberal-humanist formulation, whose agency is always and only opposed to power.  The first view characterizes politically sanctimonious forms of fatalism; the second, naive forms of political optimism. I hope to steer clear of both these alternatives. 17

The subject might yet be thought as deriving its agency from precisely the power it opposes, as awkward and embarrassing as such a formulation might be, especially for those who believe that complicity and ambivalence could be rooted out once and for all. If the subject is neither fully determined by power nor fully determining of power (but significantly and partially both), the subject exceeds the logic of noncontradiction, is an excrescence of logic, as it were. To claim that the subject exceeds either/or is not to claim that it lives in some free zone of its own making. Exceeding is not escaping, and the subject exceeds precisely that to which it is bound. In this sense, the subject cannot quell the ambivalence by which it is constituted (17-18).

Vicki Kirby writes (2006: 111):

In order to reconfigure the scene of political contestation and individual agency in more robust and effective ways, Butler will open the division between the psyche and the political to the same strategic revisions she brought to the nature/culture, material/representation distinction.

desire and formation of subject

Butler, J. The Psychic Life of Power Stanford UP. 1997.

🙂 SUBJECTION: to be subjected to a form of power external to oneself, this is familiar form that subjection takes. JB adds that the very formation of the subject is dependent on that power.  The power that subordinates also produces the subject.  So far, so good.

[Yes power subordinates, yes that’s a fair description] But if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence … Subjection consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency. (2)

Subjection signifies the process of becoming subordinated to power as well as the process of becoming a subject Foucault doesn’t theorize the psychic nature of this subordination to power.  What are the specific mechanisms of how the subject is formed in submission.  What is the psychic form that power takes?

Not only does the entire domain of the psyche remain largely unremarked in his theory, but power in this double valence of subordinating and producing remains unexplored.” (2)

Thinking the theory of power together with a theory of the psyche

… the question of subjection, of how the subject is formed in subordination, preoccupies the section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that traces the slave’s approach to freedom and his disappointing fall into the “unhappy consciousness.” The master, who at first appears to be “external” to the slave, reemerges as the slave’s own conscience. The unhappiness of the consciousness that emerges is its own self-beratement, the effect of the transmutation of the master into a psychic reality.

The self-mortifications that seek to redress the insistent corporeality of self-consciousness institute bad conscience.  This figure of consciousness turned back upon itself prefigures Nietzsche’s account, in On the Genealogy of Morals, not only of how repression and regulation form the overlapping phenomena of conscience and bad conscience, but also of how the latter become essential to the formation, persistence, and continuity of the subject.  In each case, power that at first appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity. (3)

:)This idea of an external power crushing down on us, ending up as our own conscience, a power external that is hits us bears down on us, but also is turned back on itself and forms our conscience, a self-beratement that makes sure we stay in line, adhere to the rules or else.  The unhappy consciousness was this ethical imperative of the slave fearing for its life, clinging to life at all costs, internalizing the prohibitions and dictates of the overbearing lord, that now becomes the conscience of the slave as it tries to take flight from its body.  Butler tries to say if Hegel were consistent he would have shown how every attempt, for example how he shows in stoicism and skepticism that both reinforce that which it tries to negate.  Except when the priest enters the scene then all it lost.

Turning Back: tropological inauguration of the subject

We cannot presume a subject who performs an internalization if the formation of the subject is in need of explanation . The figure to which we refer has not yeet acquired existence and is not part fo a verifiable explanation, yet our reference continues to make a certain kind of sense.  The paradox of subjection implies a paradox of referentiality: namely, that we must refer to what does not yet exist. 4

Althusser’s ISA and Interpellation

Althusser’s essay ISA, poses interpellation, as a discursive construction of the subject. An example of interpellation is the hailing of a person by a cop. Butler asks why does the guy turn around when the cop says “hey you!”.

Is this a guilty subject and, if so, how did it become guilty? Might the theory of interpellation require a theory of conscience?

The interpellation of the subject through the inaugurative address of state authority presupposes not only that the inculcation of conscience already has taken place, but that conscience, understood as the psychic operation of a regulatory norm, constitutes a specifically psychic and social working of power on which interpellation depends but for which it can give no account.  (5)

Passionate Attachments

:)Here we go in. This may sound rather bizarre as I try to scope out the key ingredients of Butler’s argument.

– The subject is effect of power that turns back on itself, power in recoil.

– The founding subordination is rigorously repressed, so this turning back is repressed, this repression means the subject emerges in tandem with the unconscious. Wow, does this mean the No! of the father counts as a founding subordination that is repressed? JB wouldn’t go for that.

– No subject emerges without developing a passionate attachment on those whom he is fundamentally dependent. Butler cites the example of child vulnerable,dependent and attached to its earliest caregivers.  She seems to be arguing here of an attachment to those with whom we have an engagement with in our subordination.

… there is no formation of the subject without a passionate attachment to those by whom she or he is subordinated, [therefore]  subordination proves central to the becoming of the subject.  As the condition of becoming a subject, subordination implies being in a mandatory submission. Moreover, the desire to survive, “to be,” is a pervasively exploitable desire.

“I would rather exist in subordination than not exist” is one formulation of this predicament (where the risk of death is also possible) (7).  This child must attach in order to persist in and as itself (8).

No subject can emerge without this attachment, formed in dependency, but no subject, in the course of its formation, can ever afford fully to “see” it.  This attachment in its primary forms must both come to be and be denied, its coming to be must consist in its partial denial, for the subject to emerge. 8

:)How does JB go from the ‘desire to survive’ to unchecked desire to survive will lead to dissolution of the subject?

:)This mandatory submission and passionate attachment in one’s primary years to early caregivers, that one has no choice in the matter, one is subordinated to their care as desire to survive trumps any possibility of rejecting their provisioning of an environment in which to grow and get nourished.  But this attachment is denied and repressed, what is repressed into the unconscious returns, through a neurotic repetition “the subject pursues its own dissolution.” How is this?  In a footnote to this, Butler mentions the “death drive” as a further description or label one can attach to this dynamic in which the subject wills its own destruction.

An unchecked desire will lead to dissolution of the subject. The subject therefore acts against its own desire, frustrating it, otherwise the vexation of desire will prove to be its own undoing. Thus, the subject seeks to contain this desire by seeking out its own subordination.

🙂Desire is going to kill you, so you have to turn against it, embrace prohibition, regulation, suppression to stifle desire, but these are forms of power that also lead to the subject’s subordination.

Desire will aim at unraveling the subject, but be thwarted by precisely the subject in whose name it operates.

… for the subject to persist, the subject must thwart its own desire. And for desire to triumph, the subject must be threatened with dissolution. A subject turned against itself (its desire) appears, on this model, to be a condition of the persistence of the subject (9).

“To desire the conditions of one’s own subordination is thus required to persist as oneself.” (9)

What does it mean to embrace the very form of power —regulation, prohibition, suppression —that threatens one with dissolution in an effort, precisely, to persist in one’s own existence?

It is not simply that one requires the recognition of the other and that a form of recognition is conferred through subordination, but rather that one is dependent on power for one’s very formation, that that formation is impossible without dependency, and that the posture of the adult subject consists precisely in the denial and reenactment of this dependency.  The “I” emerges upon the condition that it deny its formation in dependency, the conditions of its own possibility. The “I,” however, is threatened with disruption precisely by this denial, by its unconscious pursuit of its own dissolution through neurotic repetitions that restage the primary scenarios it not only refuses to see but cannot see, if it wishes to remain itself. This means, of course, that, predicated on what it refuses to know, it is separated from itself and can never quite become or remain itself. 9-10

Butler on Althusser

JB reads Althussers ISA article, which poses a police officer “hailing” a person on the street with a “hey you!”. Why do we turn around? What do we recognize in that call? JB comments as follows:

Is this founding submission a kind of yielding prior to any question of psychological motivation? How are we to understand the psychic disposition at work at the moment in which the pedestrian responds to the law? What conditions and informs the response? Why would the person on the street respond to “Hey you there!” by turning around? (Psychic Life of Power 1997: 112)

JB continues on page 118:

To become a “subject” is thus to have been presumed guilty, then tried and declared innocent. Because this declaration is not a single act but a status incesantly reproduced, to become a “subject” is to be continuously in the process of acquiting oneself of the accusation of guilt. It is to have become an emblem of lawfulness, a citizen in good standing, but one for whom that status is tenuous, indeed, one who has known — somehow, somewhere — what it is not to have that standing and hence to have been cast out as guilty. Yet because this guilt conditions the subject, it constitutes the prehistory of the subjection to the law by which the subject is produced.

Here one might usefully conjecture that the reason there are so few references to “bad subjects” in Althusser is that the term tends toward the oxymoronic. To be “bad” is not yet to be a subject, not yet to have acquitted oneself of the allegation of guilt.

Incest taboo reconfiguration

JB’s Gender Trouble 1990. page 72. JB states:

Can the prohibition against incest that proscribes and sanctions hierarchical and binary gendered positions be reconceived as a productive power that inadvertently generates several cultural configurations of gender? Is the incest taboo subject to the critique of the repressive hypothesis that Foucault provides?