Author: logocentric

rothenberg butler foreclosure

Again Rothenberg casts Butler’s theory as promoting a subject that is intentional, volitional and when this subject speaks, is transparent, perhaps even self-identical.  In other words, R. is criticizing Butler that in Butler’s haste to show how agency happens, especially the agency of the excluded, the marginalized, she theorizes a liberal rational actor.

… arguing that the political act of appropriating the “unspeakable” can lead to the political inclusion of dispossessed or marginalized people. Here she explicitly proposes that the subject can access the realm excluded by foreclosure by “speaking impossibly” or by “redrawing the distinction” … From her perspective, the politically motivated subject has to take the “risk” of accessing this realm, even at the cost of being seen as something other than a subject (109).

Butler’s argument is nothing less than the claim that the subject can transform the very conditions of (its own and others’) subject formation through special speech acts that control their own reception.  What has been excluded can be included …(109)

rothenberg butler abject

Having accepted the reasonable proposition that subjects are formed through language, she makes her theoretical missteps when she tries to figure out how to confer power on marginalized subjects by imagining that they can control the surplus attending all utterances … relying continually on a belief that somehow, the excess attending signification can be eradicated.  In this persistent gesture, Butler reveals that she does not understand the subject as itself a site of excess (107).

🙂 R.’s argument is thus: Butler like Foucault, claims that power is productive and produces resistance, but Butler is aware that Foucault theory of power doesn’t leave enough for the subject, that it is too productive in fact, that discourse only produces positivity and hence no room for contingency, as R. quotes Butler, “any effort of discursive interpellation or constitution is subject to failure, haunted by contingency, to the extent that discourse invariably fails to totalize the social field (Bodies That Matter 191-192)” (108).  Rothenberg likes this last quote very much.   For a brief shining moment, both seem to be on the same page.  That is until …

Butler uses psychoanalysis to pry open Foucaultian immanence.  As R. points out, for Butler, psychoanalysis is too ahistorical, “a charge she bases on her belief that psychoanalysis presents castration as a universal form of lack (Bodies That Matter 202 quoted in R).  So, in order to benefit from the psychoanalytic model of subjectification, she proposes in Excitable Speech that subjects are formed by the installation of a lack that can be historicized.  … She conceives of this lack …. in terms of exclusion, an exclusion that produces a realm of “unspeakability” as the condition of the emergence and sustenance of the subject proper, but the “contents” of which are determined historically” (108).  Oh oh.

🙂 Rothenberg pounces on this last gesture by Butler.  Remember, the title of R’s book is The Excessive Subject.  My point being that R. doesn’t have much time for a theory that presents subject formation in terms of lack.

rothenberg excess psychoanalysis

Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2010.  Print.

The theorizing of an excess that sticks to and flows from all signification (whether in speech or in bodily gesture) is the hallmark of a psychoanalytic approach. The excess is inescapable, irremediable, and unsymbolizable: in Lacanian parlance it subsists in the register of the Real (106).

🙂 Rothenberg continually hammers Butler over the fact that Butler totally misunderstands the nature of this excess.  Butler’s excess is taken up in a bodily way and read off transparently, as if meaning was transparent.  For R. this excess is irresolvibly non-transparent, beguiling even.  “(Butler) uses the trappings and terminology of psychoanalysis but spectacularly fails to appreciate precisely what distinguishes psychoanalysis from Foucaultianism — the theorization of the dimension of excess inherent in every speech act.  This failure inflects her version of subject formation: in disavowing the extimate cause, Butler leaves herself with no way to theorize the subject as a site of excess, as a Möbius subject” (107).

rothenberg why speech acts exceed speaker’s intentions

Rothenberg speaks:

… speech acts exceed the intentions of the speaker because other people interpret them according to their own lights in ways that are not predictable or governable in advance (106).

Now here R. tells us that because Butler does not understand the concept of “excess” she doesn’t have in her theory of meaning, space for discussion of the social dimension.  Here is how R. explains it:

In essence, by failing to recognize the true status of the “excess” in signification, Butler elides the very dimension of meaning which any theory with political ambitions must engage —the social dimension.  That is, in her efforts to eliminate excess, Butler throws out any conception of the social field as a product of signification and responsiveness to the Möbius condition of the subject.  In effect, she leaves herself with no theory of the social whatsoever (106).

Butler employs iterability to acknowledge the limits to intentionality, but she mislocates these limits, finding them not in the audience’s reception but rather in the body, which she misdescribes as being capable of its own sovereign speech … In this way, she can use iterability to argue for the re-appropriation of a speech act, as we have seen, in a  “repetition that forces change,” as though the person appropriating the speech —thanks to iterability— has the capacity to close off her auditor’s ability to make that speech meaningful according to his own lights and as though the audience can somehow be prevented from making use of iterability …

In order for the repetition to force change, that is, in order for iterability to cease to operate, speaker and auditor must either have the same mind already, or the one must be capable of dominanting the other’s mental processes in some mysterious way.  (Butler) covertly relies on this invariance between the speaker’s intentions and the audience’s construals for the performative force she needs in her account of political agency. The perfect match between intender and auditor disposes of any excess and with it the social dimension of language.

rothenberg butler embodied performative

The embodied political performative

R. argues that Butler is giving intentionality to the body, that is, the body knows what it is the speaker intends, while the speaker herself may be unawares.  Butler thus according to R. “reinstates intentionality at the level of the body” (104).

There is a tug of war over Shoshana Felman’s psychoanalytical interpretation of the body and intentionality.  R. fully endorses this idea that “speech is not fully governed by intentions,” but R. remains vexed that Butler reads in Felman support for her idea of “the picture of the body as expressing its own intentions in a readily available way” (104).

“… the body (for Butler) ceases to stand for the exceeding or disrupting of intentionalized meaning, as Felman theorizes, to serve instead (for Butler) as the vehicle and guarantor of intentionality.”

Just as importantly, Butler’s “excess” is not Felman’s. For Felman (and psychoanalysts), every signification (whether in articulated speech, written text, or bodily gesture) produces and leans on an excess inherent to signification itself, an excess that makes it impossible for the subject’s intentions to govern the reader’s interpretation. Yet for Butler, the failure of intentionalized meaning only applies to spoken articulations, while the body escapes that stricture.  If in her model the body is outside or “excessive” to speech, still its intentionalized meanings have no excessive dimension, for they are readable and recoverable. In Felman, excess is irreducible; in Butler, it is not (105).

rothenberg on butler iterablity linguistic performative

Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2010.  Print.

The theretical import of iterability precludes precisely the type of politics for which Butler has become famous. (100)

R. runs Judith Butler up against Joan Copjec.  R argues that Butler has slid back to a Foucaultian “immanentist position on the reduction of subjects to their determinants.” (94)  Butler adds a Althusserian interpellative twist to the proceedings, and by interpellation R. understands the subject qua subject to be product of “internalized discourse.”

She argues that Butler’s theory of subject formation revolves around the censorship of speech, that the subject comes to be through “implict and explicit norms” that govern the speech of a subject.

But R. points out, this notion directly contradicts Foucault’s concerns about the repressive hypothesis, “which abjures such a notion of the constitutive role of repression.

So, even as she (Butler) is invoking Foucault in her reference to his model of power and to his notion of the discursive constitution of subjects, she is importing a non-Foucaultian — and equally non-psychoanalytic element — into her theory, that is, the constitution of subjects by way of exclusion. (94)

R. lauds the fact that Butler recognizes the theoretical importance of the “disjuncture between utterance and meaning.”  But the crucial dig occurs when R. argues that Butler correctly identifies the fantasy working in the belief that the speaker’s intention can be realized “univocally in the effect on the addressee.  This relies on a phantasy of sovereign action … one that immediately does what it says”.  But even having made this criticism about a sovereign speaker, “Butler goes on to garner support for this very “phantasy” in her own theory of subject formation (97).

R. cites as an example Butler’s argument for the resignificatory possibilities of the term “queer.”  But R. isn’t buying this, and catches B. in a bind.  “… Butler treats this “resignification” as though it can have predictable effects, re-describing the contingent contextual appropriation of the spech act as if it had all the intentionalist force of an illocutionary act, a move which is strictly precluded by the theory of iterability.”

“… iterability ceases to operate in the special case of performers who intend to appropriate the speech act for subversive purposes.  Significantly, Butler reserves the power of such insurrectionary speech for those who have been the objects of injurious speech, the marginalized or abjected …”

“What Butler fails to respect in these formulations is that all signification is iterable, working by simultaneously and unpredictably repeating and breaking with prior contexts. Iterability (as she sometimes acknowledges in her more tempered moments) does not confer on the speaker the sovereign power of opening or closing contexts, legitimating or de-legitimating meanings” (99).

And finally, R. cites Butler’s use of the ‘agency’ of Rosa Parks.  “For all her temperate reasoning about the impossibility of governing speech, then, Butler repeatedly returns to the more politically useful, if less theoretically valid, formulation of special performative agency.” (99)

OK enough, R. makes a strong case for viewing Butler’s appropriation of Austin-Derridean iterability as caught in contradictions.

rothenberg the relation of nonrelation

Excess has dual role:

– make it possible for the subject to become meaninful to others, for all meaning depends upon the opening of a space of signification from the “realtight” by way of the extimate cause.

However the price to be paid for becoming this excessive dimension prevents any final determination of the subject, fating it to remain uncertain of its place among others.

The excess sticking to subjects is like a handle by which subjects can “grasp” each other but it is also a barrier preventing them from knowing what it is that they are grasping.  What makes it possible for subjects to recognize each other as subjects is precisely what keeps them apart.  … “the only social relation is the relation of nonrelation.” (44)

rothenberg subject* is not about lack but excess

Rothenberg’s subject of excess is about EXCESS, “We are accustomed to hearing a great deal about the “subject of lack” in contemporary theory, yet the argument I have been exploring suggests that the subject of lack should be understood as a subject of excess, that is, as a subject to which excess ineradicably adheres.

The fact that one has become meaningful to others —i.e. been registered in the Symbolic— does not mean that one actually knows what one means to others (43).

You have only two choices: either subjectivity with loss of immediacy, or non-subjecthood.  Again, the loss of immediacy does not result in a lack: it generates an excess, an excess of meaningfulness that is not in the control of the subject (44).

rothenberg subject of excess

Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2010. Print.

On page 42 R. starts to define subject of excess in terms of excessive in symbolic.  It is the fact that we can’t control our meanings that we release in the symbolic, and also that we can’t control what we mean to others.  “The fact that one has become meaningful to others — i.e. been registered in the Symbolic — does not mean that one actually knows what one means to others.

On the contrary, to enter the Symbolic register is to fall under the regime of signification as a signifier, that is, as capable of transmitting meaning, but not capable of coinciding precisely with one’s meaning.  A gap remains between the subject who is referred to in the utterance at the level of enunciated (“I am a woman”) and the subject who is making the utterance at the level of enunciation.  This gap marks the locus of the minimal difference that keeps the subject from coinciding with itself.

It is as though one were constantly uttering, simply by virtue of being a subject, “Here I am,” without, however, knowing what others make of that message.

The subject does not know what message it is sending, because the subject cannot eliminate the excessive dimension from its utterance.  The subject cannot make the subject of which it speaks (“I am a woman”) coincide with the subject which is speaking (“[Here I am saying that]…”).  That difference, that excess, is irreducible.  So, the inability to control the meaning of oneself for others, this consequence of the difference between the level of the enunciated and the level of enunciation, is the way in which the subject becomes aware of its own non-self-coincidence. It is the way that the subject experiences its excessiveness with respect to itself, its existence as subject*.   (43)

rothenberg subject of excess

We must be careful here, however. the “excess’ attending signification is not merely the fact that the signifying system never closes in on a signified, as Derrida would have it. Rather, Lacan is working out the consequences of the fact that every utterance has two parts.  One part consists of the content of what is said … the level of the enunciated. The other part consists of the fact that something is being said, level of the enunciation. 41

The gap between these two levels is where the subject as excess is located.

In other words, excess arises not because the signifier does not have a stable signified, nor because the signifier as materiality can be taken up and used (even nonsensically) in ever-changing contexts. Rather, the excess is located at the point where the subject is split between the level of enunciation and the level of the enunciated.

Where excess emerges in the utterance is also the point at which the speaking subject appears.

The excess in the utterance corresponds to the excess in the subject, that minimal self-difference that makes a subject (which, after all, is a meaningful object), emerge from the state of being (42).

rothenberg emergence of nondeterminate residue after double negation

  • So we have P, the negation of P is written ~P (not-P)
  • The negation of ~P or not not-P will be written as ~~P

Now in classical logic ~~P=P

But in paralogic, ~~P = P and some nondeterminate remainder. This remainder will be written as *.

~~P = P*

The operation of the double negation is homologous to the operation of the empty set: it “spontaneously generates” an excess.  In the action of the empty set upon the thing, it is as though the thing is doubly negated, once from the outside (the cut or hollowing that unglues the thing from being) and once from the inside (the minimal difference from itself) … we could say that an object is really an object*. … The object* — whether material object, linguistic object, or subject — is always more than one, but not quite two. 39

rothenberg extimate cause

The { } empty set persists after it is added to the thing to become the object, but there is a minimal difference that adheres to the object, otherwise without this “minimal self-difference” it would just be a being-object.

The minimal difference — the empty set — persists after the object is precipitated from the thing. It persists as the object’s minimal difference from itself … In effect, the object is generated from the conjunction of being and minimal difference or being and the addition of a negation. (35)

Ok, once the object “is precipitated from the thing” it contains this minimal difference, and this minimal difference can also be called the “addition of a negation” or as we’ve seen the empty set {}

Now in order to get our heads around extimate causality, we have to keep in mind these two important functions of the { } empty set: as a cut necessary “to bring an object into our world from sheer being” acts as the external cause and as the minimal difference “that makes an object non-self-coincident (and therefore not a sheer “being-thing”) adheres to the object as an internal cause. Taken together, (as they must be, because they are the same function), they form the extimate cause” (36)

I have to quote at length again here, because there’s just no way around this explanation that R provides: “The extimate cause functioning by way of the specific mechanism of the formal negation, engenders a structured field or system (with its concomitant objects, properties, and relationships) out of what would otherwise be a state of undifferentiation or monadic unrelatedness.”  This is back to her dimly lit garage example.  So the formal negation is responsible for engendering a system of objects out of sheer being.

“At the same time, it inevitably gives rise to an element of nondeterminacy, surplus, or excess. Speaking in terms of the social arena, we could put it this way: the operation that bestows identities, properties, and relationships also leaves a residue, so that every subject bears some excess. At every point in the social field, then, an irreducible excess attends social relations. In fact, although it seems paradoxical, this excess is what makes the social field itself possible and makes its structure potentially analyzable (36).

Is this what other poststructuralist thinkers allude to as the slippage of signified under signifier, that signifiers refer to other signifiers and not to some constant empirical object etc?  Does R. mean by this “excess” simply the poststructuralist “surplus” of meaning, or of Laclau’s surplus that allows for the hegemonic struggles, of the surplus that Butler alludes to in her work?  Interestingly in her most difficult chapters, R. addresses this issue head on, by locating in Butler and Laclau specifically, their notion of surplus and the ways in which they seek to tame it.