Category: agency

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.

Wittig

JB’s section on Wittig in Gender Trouble 1990. page 121

As in Lacan, the idealization of heterosexuality appears even within Wittig’s own formulation to exercise a control over the bodies of practicing heterosexuals that is finally impossible, indeed, that is bound to falter on its own impossibility. Wittig appears to believe that only the radical departure from heterosexual contexts — namely becoming lesbian or gay — can bring about the downfall of this heterosexual regime. But this political consequence follows only if one understands all “participation” in heterosexuality to be a repetition and consolidation of heterosexual oppression. The possibilities of resignifying heterosexuality itself are refused precisely because heterosexuality is understood as a total system that requires a thoroughgoing displacement. The political options that follow from such a totalizing view of heterosexist power are (a) radical conformity or (b) radical revolution.

JB continues …

My own conviction [JB’s] is that the radical disjunction posited by Wittig between heterosexuality and homosexuality is simply not true, that there are structures of psychic homosexuality within heterosexual relations, and structures of psychic heterosexuality within gay and lesbian sexuality and relationships. Further, there are other power/discourse centres that construct and structure both gay and straight sexuality; heterosexuality is not the only compulsory display of power that informs sexuality. The ideal of a coherent heterosexuality that Wittig describes as the norm and standard of the heterosexual contract is an impossible ideal, a “fetish,” as she herself points out. A psychoanalytic elaboration might contend that this impossibility is exposed in virtue of the complexity and resistance of an unconscious sexuality that is not always already heterosexual. In this sense, heterosexuality offers normative sexual positions that are intrinsically impossible to embody, and the persistent failure to identify fully and without incoherence with these positions reveals heterosexuality itself not only as a compulsory law, but as an inevitable comedy. Indeed, I would offer this insight into heterosexuality as both a compulsory system and an intrinsic comedy, a constant parody of itself, as an alternative gay/lesbian perspective.

Butler channelling Foucault

Here’s more JB from Gender Trouble 1990. Routledge page 93.

I want to suggest, however, that any theory that asserts that signification is predicated upon the denial or repression of a female principle ought to consider whether that femaleness is really external to the cultural norms by which it is repressed. In other words, on my reading, the repression of the feminine does not require that the agency of repression and the object of repression be ontologically distinct. Indeed, repression may be understood to produce the object that it comes to deny. That production may well be an elaboration of the agency of repression itself. As Foucault makes clear, the culturally contradictory enterprise of the mechanism of repression is prohibitive and generative at once and makes the problematic of “liberation” especially acute. The female body that is freed from the shackles of the paternal law may well prove to be yet another incarnation of that law, posing as subversive but operating in the service of that law’s self-amplification and proliferation. In order to avoid the emancipation of the oppressor in the name of the oppressed, it is necessary to take into account the full complexity and subtlety of the law and to cure ourselves of the illusion of a true body beyond the law. If subversion is possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its “natural” past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.

cite the law differently

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter p. 15

And though the symbolic appears to be a force that cannot be contravened without psychosis, the symbolic ought to be rethought as a series of normativizing injunctions that secure the borders of sex through the threat of psychosis, abjection, psychic unlivability. And further, that this “law” can only remain law to the extent that it compels the differentiated citations and approximations called “feminine” and “masculine.” The presumption that the symbolic law of sex enjoys a separable ontology prior and autonomous to its assumption is contravened by the notion that the citation of the law is the very mechanism of its production and articulation. What is “forced” by the symbolic, then, is a citation of its law that reiterates and consolidates the ruse of its own force.

What would it mean to “cite” the law to produce it differently, to “cite” the law in order to reiterate and coopt its power, to expose the heterosexual matrix and to displace the effect of its necessity?

The process of that sedimentation or what we might call materialization will be a kind of citationality, the acquisition of being throught the citing of power, a citing that establishes an originary complicity with power in the formation of the “I”.

In this sense, the agency denoted by the performativity of “sex” will be directly counter to any notion of a voluntarist subject who exists quite apart from the regulatory norms which she/he opposes. The paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement) is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms. Although this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as a reiterative or reaticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power.