frames – objet (a)

Geneva University Switzerland

What is coalition? Reflections on the conditions of alliance formation with Judith Butler’s work

In her groundbreaking book, Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler inaugurates and develops her critique of foundational reasoning – of identity categories such as (biological) sex, or of a transcendental subject such as “the woman” or even “women” (in the plural) – as a critique of identity politics in general, and of a women’s identity-based feminism in particular.

For this reason, her antifoundationalism appears as a critical practice that seeks not only to rethink the political – along with genders, bodies, subjects and agency – in terms of performativity rather than of representation, but also, and most importantly, to theorize alternatives to identity politics in terms of coalition building. Since then, we can consider that Butler has insistently returned to the action-oriented question of “what is coalition?” and further elaborated on the conditions of possibility of alliance formation – at least, as much as on the conditions of subversion – in order to move effectively toward what she calls a “progressive” or “radical democratic politics.”

This concern has become increasingly explicit in her responses to the 9/11 events – from Precarious Life (2004) and Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) to Frames of War (2010) in which she suggests that the Left consider shared human precarity as “an existing and promising site for coalition exchange” and for rights-claiming. Interestingly, this proposal centered on the yet existing inequalities in the distribution and recognition of precarity – and vulnerability – brings into new critical focus major political themes that have been running throughout her entire work, such as the relations between power, desire, norms for subject formation, and a non-naturalized conception of agency (e.g. Subjects of Desire, 1987; The Psychic Life of Power, 1997), or the question of violence, in particular state violence and public injury, as well as the issue of grieving in relation to the State, the law, war, to sovereignty and kinship arrangements (e.g. Excitable Speech, 1997; Antigone’s Claim, 2002).

Indeed, and according to Butler, a precarity-oriented politics involves not only a new ontology and social theory of the body-in-society in terms of radical interdependency (a claim that extends her discussion in Bodies that Matter, 1993), but also strong normative commitments:

first, to a politics of equality, responsibility, sustainability, and protection (to name just a few), so that individual and collective subjects can come into full existence, and live a livable and grievable life (Frames of War; Precarious Life);
second, to an epistemology of relative self-unknowability (Giving An Account of Oneself); hence,
third, to a critical ethics of naturalized norms and their supporting exclusions, i.e. to (self-)critique as ethics (Giving an Account of Oneself).

This one-day conference aims to reflect – historically, sociologically, philosophically – on the conditions of possibility, on the objects, means and purposes of alliance formation – between minorities, with the State, political parties, and other public actors, or between disciplines, or even across species (e.g. animal-human), etc. –, of political transformation, and thus of a collective agency, in both domestic and international contexts, through the concrete and generic question of “What is coalition?” – with special interest for the ways in which critical perspectives inspired from feminist and queer theory can be made into productive tools to theorize the political at various levels, at different times and locations, but also to intervene and do better democratic work.

We encourage submissions from all research fields that present original material and engage, with creativity and precision, with both the theoretical and practical dimensions of the conference question with insights from – rather than directly on – Butler’s “political theory.

conclusion to asad and mahmood 4/4

Asad, Talal. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. California: The Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California Berkeley, 2009.

So it is quite understandable that there might be a strong group of sexual progressives who maintain that freedom of expression is essential to the movement, that the lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, intersex movement is not possible without freedom of expression and without recourse to freedom itself as a guiding value and norm. Of course, to posit such a principle of freedom does not answer the questions of whether and how that norm is to be reconciled with other norms, nor does it tell us precisely what is meant by “freedom.”

We have to be clear about what we mean by freedom, since from the beginning freedom has been, not the same as the liberty that belongs to the individual, but something socially conditioned and socially shared. No one person is free when others are not, since freedom is achieved as a consequence of a certain social and political organization of life. The queer movement, conceived transnationally, has also sought to fight homophobia, misogyny, and racism, and it has operated as part of an alliance with struggles against discrimination and hatreds of all kinds. The emergence of a queer politics was meant to confirm the importance of battling homophobia no matter what your identity was. But it was also a signal of the importance of alliance; an attunement to minoritization in its various forms; a struggle against precarious conditions, regardless of “identity”; and a battle against racism and social exclusion.

Of course there is also a now-entrenched tension between identity-based and alliance-based sexual minority politics, and my affiliation with “queer” is meant to affirm the politics of alliance across difference. Broadly put, a strong alliance on the left requires, minimally, a commitment to combating both racism and homophobia, combating both anti-immigrant politics and various forms of misogyny and induced poverty. Why would any of us be willing to participate in an alliance that does not keep all of these forms of discrimination clearly in mind, and that does not also attend to the matters of economic justice that afflict sexual minorities, women, and racial and religious minorities as well?

So let us consider more carefully, then, how the politics of speech enters into this situation and how we might try to think about hate speech in light of a commitment to a left alliance that refuses to sacrifice one minority for another (which does not mean there may not be some serious antagonisms that remain essential to the articulation of this alliance). It is perhaps important to remember the importance of the critique of state coercion and state violence for a robust left political movement, even as we recognize that transnational economic institutions are responsible for differential poverty levels. Can we even think, though, about a politics of the speech act without noting how the state speaks, and what force it exercises when it speaks? Why is there a righteous defense of the political right to insult Muslim minorities at the same time that insults to the Dutch government, any critique of state coercion, constitutes an unacceptable assault on civilization, modernity, or reason itself? When this kind of split thinking happens, freedom of speech not only depends on protection by the state but empowers that state; this, in turn, leads to the situation in which speech against the state is effectively or implicitly censored. Hence, the freedom we think belongs to the individual is actually conferred by the state, so we misunderstand its origin and its meaning.

This is also why, if we want to develop a critical conception of freedom of speech, it will have to be one that legitimates itself outside of state power, that is able to criticize state power as part of its free expression. We have to ask whether “relying on the state” leads to the “augmentation of state power.” If Islam is figured as the religion or the name of the population who will do violence to Dutch civilizational values, then that gives the Dutch state a certain license to do violence to what seems to threaten its own values. That also logically means that “doing violence” becomes a Dutch value. We see the intensification of anti-immigrant activities, the base ideological implementation of the Civic Integration exam, the overt celebration of hateful speech of the so-called autochthonic Dutch against religious minorities as a sign of freedom itself.

The question is not whether hateful speech is part of free speech, but rather, why has freedom in certain European contexts come to define itself as the freedom to hate? What does it mean when the notion of freedom has been twisted to ratify discrimination, xenophobia, racism, and nationalism? The Dutch Civic Integration Examination was one case in point. In 2006, immigrants were required to take an examination that included the mandatory viewing of images of two gay men kissing as a way to test their “tolerance” and, hence, capacity to assimilate to Dutch liberalism.23 Do I want this test administered in my name and for my benefit? Do I want the state to take up its defense of my sexual freedom in an effort to restrict immigration on racist grounds? What happens when seeking recourse to the protective actions of the state in turn augments and fortifies the state’s own power, including its power to articulate a racist national identity? And what happens when lesbian and gay freedoms are instrumentalized to harass religious minorities or to ensure that new immigrants can be denied entry on religious, ethnic, or racial grounds? Under these circumstances, sexual progressives must become “critical” of the state that appears so enthusiastically to be supporting our freedoms. What precisely is it doing with our freedoms? And are we willing to have our claims to freedom instrumentalized for the purposes of a racist reproduction of Dutch national identity through restrictive and coercive immigration policies?

Let me make the point even more precisely, if I can. It is one thing for the state to value freedom of expression and to protect expression, but it is quite another for the state to be the agent who decides whose freedom of expression will be protected and whose will not. Under what conditions does the state decide that a minority is threatened by certain kinds of aggressive speech, and under what other conditions does the state decide that a minority must tolerate being targeted by aggressive speech as a sign that we live in a democracy that savors freedom of speech? Perhaps this is the new meaning for Dutch tolerance: you must tolerate the pain and abuse we will deal you, and that is the proof that you can “integrate” and become part of Dutch citizenship. We have to ask why the state gives free reign to racist speech at the same time that it demands respect for sexual minorities. Is the latter being played against the former? And what would happen if sexual and religious minorities refused to be pitted against each other in this way? What would happen if both of them turned against the nationalist and racist strategies of the state as a joint strategy? If, following gay conservatives, we understand freedom as personal liberty and then base a politics on a libertarian notion of freedom, we sacrifice an important social dimension to the left understanding of freedom. If freedom belongs to the individual, then we can surely ask: which individuals are recognized as individuals?

In other words, what social forms of individuality establish the recognizability of some persons as individuals and others not? If such an individual liberty exists only to the extent that it is protected by the state, then the state exercises its prerogative to protect in some instances and to withdraw all protection in others. Let’s remember, then, that the libertarian notion of the individual corresponds to a certain version of state power and economic property, and, whereas in early versions of libertarianism the state is supposed to remain minimal (or privative) in order to maximize economic freedom, that is surely not the case in the present instance in which the state differentially protects rights depending on whether that protection suits its national aspirations, even its national self-understanding as “European,” against the new immigrant communities from North Africa, Turkey, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

In the context in which the state makes use of liberties in this way (differentially exercises its prerogative to protect or retract individual liberties, decides who will count as an individual whose rights are worth protecting, and who will not), we have a different situation. In such a case, “freedom of speech” presupposes that there will be no open public criticism of the state or its inconsistent and racist actions (after all, the state is the protector and the adjudicator in this scene). This means, implicitly, that only those modes of freedom of expression will be protected that in turn protect the state, unless also protected is the open criticism of the state’s racist speech. If the fortification of the state against established and new immigrant communities involves depriving them of freedom, questioning their own rights of assembly and expression, if it casts its own Muslim population as a threat to the value of freedom, then it protects one claim of freedom only through the intensification of unfreedom, through the augmentation of the state’s own coercive mechanisms. If independent filmmaking is to remain a critical practice, separate from and willing to criticize state power, then one has to analyze closely the situation in which film becomes the cultural means through which the state’s anti-immigrant practices are implemented and rationalized. The film industry then becomes the culture industry for the state, and it loses its standing as “independent” or, indeed, as “critical.” Under these conditions, we lose the independence from state authority implied in the term “independent film,” and that medium becomes a form of embedded reporting, taking on, even ratifying, the perspective of the state. As such, it becomes another visual instrument, like the cameras in Abu Ghraib, which stage and fortify the vicious embodied action of the civilizational mission, linking its propaganda against Islam with the torture and human rights violations in Iraq and Guantánamo. Of course, the right to insult and the right to produce provocative art become rights that the state defends, but when it defends those rights differentially and for specific policy purposes, those rights become suspect. If those rights are to have legitimacy, they cannot be justified through recourse to their utility in rationalizing a the deprivation of certain rights to religious practice and belief, in other words, certain rights of expression. There may be no legal way to “manage this risk,” but that is no reason why this instrumentalization should not become the focus of critical analysis and political opposition. To understand when and where the claim of free speech is robust, we have to ask, “If we point this out, and maintain a critical and public relation to this particular prerogative of state power, is our speech still protected?” If it is still protected, then free speech is an active part of democratic contestations and political struggles. If it is not, we must militate against its restriction, differential application, and instrumentalization for nondemocratic ends. If the prerequisites of a European polity (and this could be either the nation-state or the European Union) require either cultural homogeneity or a model of cultural pluralism, then, either way, the solution is figured as assimilation or integration into a set of cultural norms that are understood as internally already established, self-sufficient and self-standing. These norms are not considered changeable according to new demographic shifts, and they do not seek to respond to new populations and new claims to belonging. Indeed, if the core norms are already established, then one already knows what Dutch culture is, and one is closed to the idea that it may become something else, something different; indeed, one refuses the recognition that it already has become something different and that the change is, in fact, irreversible.

When freedom of expression comes to mean “the freedom to express an unwillingness to undergo change in light of contact with cultural difference,” then freedom of expression becomes the means through which a dogmatic and inflexible concept of culture becomes the precondition of citizenship itself. The state to which we appeal to protect the freedom of expression is the state that will close its doors to whomever it does not want to hear, whose speech is unwelcome within its borders. Within this framework, the freedom of personal expression, broadly construed, relies upon the suppression of a mobile and contestatory understanding of cultural difference. Such suppression makes clear how state violence invests in cultural homogeneity as it applies its exclusionary policies to rationalize coercive and discriminatory state policies toward Muslim immigrants. When the acts of one member of a group or some small number of members of a group are taken to be the defining actions and beliefs of the group itself, then that is not only an unjustified generalization but also racism, and it must also be opposed. Surely, there is an ongoing clash or antagonism between those who feel that their values of sexual freedom or freedom of expression are threatened by some minority religious beliefs and ways of life, but these are differences to be worked out through cohabitation and struggle, through participation in public discourse, through cultural and educational projects, allowing modes of separateness to coincide with modes of belonging (and not trying to close the fissure between the two). These are surely better strategies than appealing to a state that makes use of the defense of “freedom” to reassert its national purity—its racist conception of culture—as the precondition of reason, modernity, and civilization, and to halt all public criticism of the way it polices its borders and patrols its minority populations. A racist discourse can recast itself as the necessary groundwork of morality, reformulating its own hatred as moral virtue. Some crucial part of freedom of speech involves “speaking out,” which means, invariably, speaking out within specific scenes of address: speaking with and from and to one another. This implicit sociality in all address demands the recognition of freedom as a condition of social life, one that depends upon equality for its actualization. At stake is a rethinking of the processes of minoritization under new global conditions, asking what alliances are possible between religious, racial, and sexual minorities (when these “positions” are less identities than modes of living in relation to others and to guiding ideals). Then perhaps we can find constellations where the opposition to racism, to discrimination, to precarity, and to state violence remain the clear goals of political mobilization.

response to mahmood 3/4

she points out that within Islam, the religious subject’s relation to the representation of Muhammad constitutes a relation that is indissociable from one’s own sense of self.

The “self” at issue is not a discrete and bounded individual, but a relation to an animated image; the self has to be understood as a set of embodied and affective practices that are fundamentally bound up with certain images, icons, and imaginaries.

In Mahmood’s terms, “the power of an icon lies in its capacity to allow an individual (or a community) to find oneself in a structure that influences how one conducts oneself in this world… a form of relationality that binds the subject to an object or imaginary.” Now one might conclude that Mahmood is suggesting that blasphemy against the image of Muhammad is thus an injury to Muslim personhood, and that the law that seeks to distinguish between injurious conduct and incendiary expression misunderstands not only the ontology of personhood but also the character of the injury. The twin conceits of state neutrality with respect to religion are that (a) religion ought to be protected as a private issue and that (b) no religious beliefs should drive public law or policy. And yet, if religion becomes inextricably bound up with personhood, and injurious conduct against persons is legally proscribed, could not this new conception of the ontology of personhood mandate a change in legal reasoning and judgment? 🙂 This I think would be Butler’s preferred way forward.

Interestingly enough, Mahmood does not take this tack, but counsels against the domain of juridical redress as an appropriate and effective venue for taking up the challenge of the Danish cartoons. Instead, she uses the language of “moral injury” to distinguish the issue from the ways in which it is conceived by reigning legal vernaculars. Indeed, she is quite explicit about the policy implications of her analysis:

“[T]he future of the Muslim minority in Europe depends not so much on how the law might be expanded to accommodate their concerns as on a larger transformation of the cultural and ethical sensibilities of the majority Judeo-Christian population that undergird the law.” 🙂 Butler now is shaking her head. Get ready, she’s comin atcha!

Moreover, this turn to the cultural and ethical domain is conditioned by an argument that the law is so pervasively secular that any effort to seek redress for injury through the law would strengthen the very instrument through which secularism asserts its hegemony and defines the proper domain of religion.

If the task is to change sensibilities, we need to know how that can be done. Of course, Mahmood is right to point out that the terms of existing law ought not to constrain our understanding of the cultural and ethical dimensions of this issue. On the other hand, is it right to understand law as radically distinct from questions of sensibility?

After all, does law (civil rights law, for instance) not function on certain historical occasions to change sensibilities, to foster new parameters for equality and justice, including new sentiments, or are we being asked to understand “sensibilities” as definitionally extrajuridical? Are there not legal sensibilities at issue here?

This final call to change does not tell us in what way change might or should happen, which leads me to wonder whether we are being asked to take the foregoing analysis as precisely the kind of cultural and ethical intervention that is needed. If that is the case, several questions still emerge: do we understand the “cultural and ethical domain” to be radically distinct from law? and on what basis do ethics and culture constitute an alternative and separable domain or set of domains? Mahmood calls for “comparative dialogue” as well as a kind of “thinking” that happens in “unaccustomed ways,” but what would be the institutional venues for these activities? Though these practices are considered distinct from “political action,” are they for that reason not political strategies.

Mahmood specifies that we have to cleave judgment from description in the context of discussing religious fanaticism, presumably because our judgments tend to overwhelm our descriptions. And yet, how would we then return to the question of judgment after having made that initial separation? What form would some more fully informed judgment take? To enter into political action surely requires some kind of judgment about what is the case, and what should be the case. We have to consider whether politics is being allied with “law” or legal solution in this discussion, and what a politics might look like that did not model itself on juridical decision and action.

When Mahmood makes the decision to turn away from law and politics, does she not inadvertently overlook the possibility of a politics, including a political judgment, that might not be constrained by legal norms or practice?

Does “ethics” distinguish itself from politics as part of the effort to find an alternative to legal solutions in this matter? And does her argument now invest with neutrality the sphere of culture and ethics that has been wrested from law? Is this finally an apologia for anthropology itself? The final line invokes “the academy” as one of the few places where such tensions can be explored. Are we left, then, with academic exploration, comparative work, and dialogue as the cultural, if not culturalist, alternative to law and politics? This is a strange conclusion given how engaged with thepolitics of law the essay is, but perhaps we are meant to be persuaded that this is a domain from which we should all finally retreat. This final set of moves strikes me as curious, given that Mahmood has offered quite a few strong and well-argued political judgments throughout the essay: the pervasive secularism of European law; the misunderstanding of racialization; the widespreadignorance and hatred of Islam; the necessity to expose the secular production and deformation of religious practice. These are strong political positions. Even exposing the contradictions of secular law is clearly a strong critical move that seeks to combat a sustained and consequential hegemony within the law. Is Mahmood really operating to the side of politics and judgment?

Can she give an account of the place of politics and judgment in her own analysis, indeed, in the argument she gives about why we should work to the side of both politics and judgment?

In a final coda, Mahmood raises the question of whether “critique” can take account of its own “disciplines of subjectivity, affective attachments, and subject-object relationality.”

At this point, it seems clear that the model for thinking about the Muslim relation to the image of Muhammad sustains certain analogies with the practice of critique itself. Both seem to be embodied and affective practices, modes of subjectivity that are bound up with their objects and, hence, relational. Is this a generalized account of subjectivity or one that pertains to specific kinds of practices of the self? This is not precisely a point pursued by Mahmood, but it does raise a question about the status of critique.

In the end, she holds out for a notion of critique that relies on the suspension of the kind of closure characteristic of political action. So critique appears to be neither judgment nor action, but a certain invested, affected, way of thinking and living that is bound up with objects or, indeed, an imaginary, and this way of thinking—and what it thinks about—is not usual, not customary. Inasmuch as secularism has established the domain of the usual and customary, there can be a critique of secularism that calls that taken-for-grantedness into question. I take it that this would be part of what Mahmood would accept as “critique.”

response to asad and mahmood 2/4

Blasphemy is viewed in secular liberal society as a constraint on free speech, but why is it contextualized exclusively in this way? Is it that the normative question of whether or not we will censor drives from the start the way in which we conceptualize the phenomenon? If we were to conceptualize the phenomenon differently, would different kinds of normative issues come to the fore?

Is there an idea of the human implied by prohibitions and protections related to speech, and if so, how does this idea serve to distinguish between what is called the religious and what is called the secular?

… free speech is produced precisely through the circumscription of the public domain and its protections and, most importantly, it is presumed to belong to a subject who exercises free speech as a right.

This subject owns itself and its free speech, and it exercises speech freely as a “property” of its own personhood. As self-owning, the subject possesses its own personhood and exercises that personhood freely; free speech is a paradigmatic example of this self-owning subject.

In this way, the claims to free speech are embedded in a certain ontology of the subject, and it is this ontology that is challenged by theological claims that assert the subject or self’s dependence on or participation in a transcendent power. The theological claim seems, on the surface, to contest the secular ontology of the subject.

And whereas Islam, according to Asad, offers no punishment for disbelief and in no way mandates belief, it opposes any efforts to coerce belief or disbelief. Belief itself is not a cognitive act, not even the “property” of a person, but part of an ongoing and embodied relation to God. So any attempt to coerce someone away from his or her belief is an effort to break a relation to a transcendence by which one is sustained. It is not, in these terms, a quarrel between beliefs or an attack on an idea, but an effort to coerce the break of a bond without which life is untenable. As Asad puts it,

“what matters, finally, is belonging to a particular way of life in which the person does not own himself.” The outrage against the cartoons articulates an objection to “something that disrupts a living relationship.”

The legal imaginary of liberal law, which protects free speech against blasphemy, makes the claim that the charge against the cartoons is blasphemy. This immediately makes the issue into one of whether or not free speech should be curtailed. On the other hand, to situate blasphemy —or in this case, isā’ah, insult, injury—in relation to way of life that is not based in self-ownership, but in an abiding and vital dispossession, changes the terms of the debate. It does not provide an immediate answer to how the question of prohibition or censorship should be legally decided, but shifts us into a mode of understanding that is not constrained by that juridical model. In other words,

to understand blasphemy as an injury to a sustaining relation is to understand that we are dealing with a different conception of subjectivity and belonging than the one implied by self-ownership. (I am tempted to say that this mode of subjectivity functions as a critique of self-ownership within secular hegemony.)

The public outcry against the cartoons is also a way of refusing and parochializing the specific property-driven ontology of the subject that has come to support the claim of free speech.

In this case, to change the framework within which we seek to understand blasphemy makes it possible to see that what is at stake is not so much a question of whether speech should be free or prohibited as a way of conceiving a mode of living outside of selfidentity and self-ownership. The cartoons are injurious not only because they fail to understand this way of life but also because they deploy the iconography of Muhammad to direct the viewer toward a repudiation of that way of life.

To claim that someone or anyone can “own” the image is to seek recourse to a framework of property that is implicitly criticized by the living relation to the icon.

So the critical question that emerges is whether ways of life that are based on dispossession in transcendence (and implicit critique of self-ownership) are legible and worthy of respect. It is then less a legal question than a broader question of the conditions of cohabitation for peoples whose fundamental conceptions of subjective life divide between those that accept established secular grounds and those at odds with secular presumptions of self-coincidence and property.

It would seem that we are being asked to understand this battle as one between, on the one hand, a presumptively secular framework tied to an ontology of the subject as self-owned and, on the other hand, a nonsecular framework that offers an ontology of the subject as dispossessed in transcendence. This explanation, however, asks us to assume that there is a certain generalized secular ontology of the subject, and that secularization has effectively succeeded in establishing that ontology within the parameters of law and politics. I have questions about whether the secular and secularization are as monolithic as this, but I will defer them in order to follow through with this argument. For if we accept that secularization is the way that religious traditions “live on” within postreligious domains, then we are not really talking about two different frameworks, secularism versus religion, but two forms of religious understanding, intertwined with one another in various modes of avowal and disavowal. Indeed, the binary framework crumbles further when we consider modes of secular criticism that take place in religious contexts (for example, the discourse ofthe current pope) as well as modes of religious reasoning that recur within secularism (for example, Protestant commitments to the distinction between public and private life that have become essential to modern liberalism).

response to asad and mahmood 1/4

The point is not simply to expand our capacities for description or to assert the plurality of frameworks, although it is doubtless a “good” to know the cultural range of moral discourses on such questions if we are to be thoughtful and knowledgeable about the world in which we live. Nor is the point to embrace a cultural relativism that would attribute equivalence to all moral claims and position oneself as an outsider to the normative issues at hand. Rather, it seems most important to ask,

what would judgment look like that took place not “within” one framework or another but which emerged at the very site of conflict, clash, divergence, overlapping?

It would seem a practice of cultural translation would be a condition of such judgment, and that what is being judged is not only the question of whether a given action is injurious but also whether, if it is, legal remedies are the best way to approach the issue, and what other ways of acknowledging and repairing injury are available.

In my view, the point is to achieve a complex and comparative understanding of various moral discourses, not only to see why we evaluate (and value) certain norms as we do, but also to evaluate those very modes of evaluation. We do not merely shift from an evaluative position to a descriptive one (though I can see why taking a descriptive tone might work to defuse polemics on all sides), but rather seek to show that every description is already committed to an evaluative framework, prior to the question of any explicit or posterior judgment. We may think that we first describe a phenomenon and then later subject it to judgment, but if the very phenomenon at issue only “exists” within certain evaluative frameworks, then norms precede description—as is surely the case when we think about the presumptive cultural and moral frameworks brought to bear on the discussions of blasphemy against Muhammad as well as those frameworks, mainly Muslim, that were not brought to bear. … secular terms should not have the power to define the meaning or effect of religious concepts. This is an important argument to make in order to combat a kind of structural injury, emblematized by events like the Danish cartoons, inflicted on religious and racial minorities (especially when religious minorities are racialized).

… the point is to try to clarify why so many Muslims were outraged, and why something other than an attack on free speech by religious populations was at issue.

… secular terms should not have the power to define the meaning or effect of religious concepts. This is an important argument to make in order to combat a kind of structural injury, emblematized by events like the Danish cartoons, inflicted on religious and racial minorities (especially when religious minorities are racialized). This last is a strong normative claim, and I want to suggest that it becomes possible to consider the injustice of this situation of hegemonic secularism only when we pass through a certain displacement of taken-for-granted modes of moral evaluation, including certain established juridical frameworks. A certain critical perspective emerges as a consequence of comparative work. An inquiry that understands that competing and converging moral discourses require a mode of cultural analysis, perhaps anthropological, affirms cultural difference as a constant point of reference in the effort to “parochialize” certain absolutist and monolithic conceptions of normativity that serve, implicitly or explicitly, forms of cultural ignorance, racism, conquest, and domination— or, as Asad puts it, the “European revulsion against Muslim immigrants and Islam.”
Asad effectively poses the question,

why is it that aggression in the name of God shocks secular liberal sensibilities, whereas the art of killing in the name of the secular nation, or democracy, does not?

He points out that this kind of discrepancy or schism may well constitute a “tension” at the heart of the modern subject. And this is a useful and persuasive argument, in my view. But clearly something more is at stake. We would not be alarmed by the kinds of comparisons made explicit in Asad’s questions if we did not ourselves undergo some moral horror or shock at the obvious inequalities demonstrated by the comparison. Asad’s questions derive their rhetorical force from a sense that it is unacceptable to respond with righteous outrage to deaths caused by those who wage war in the name of religion and with moral complacency to deaths caused by those who wage war in the name of the nation-state. There are many reasons why one might oppose various forms of death dealing, but it is only on the condition that we do, in fact, oppose violence and the differential ways it is justified that we can come to understand the normative importance of the comparative judgment that Asad’s work makes available to us.

Asad’s work not only provides new modes of description and understanding but also makes an intervention into evaluative frameworks and norms of evaluation themselves. By showing how normative dispositions (mainly secular and liberal) enter into stipulative claims (concerning objectionable violence and grievable death) that circumscribe the domain of “understanding” contemporary cultural and military conflict, Asad facilitates a critique of this parochial and consequential circumscription of operative evaluative frameworks.

Through a certain kind of comparative interrogation, one framework is interrupted by another, and thus opens up a new horizon for judgment. On the On the basis of this comparative and interruptive work, we can conclude that there is no reason to assume that justified violence, when it happens, is the sole prerogative of states, and that unjustified violence, when it happens, is the exercise of illegitimate states and insurgency movements. Such a conclusion not only has consequences for how we proceed normatively but also constitutes itself as a strong normative claim.

If Asad’s comparative questions upset us, as I think they do, that is because we become aware of the contingent conditions under which we feel shock, outrage, and moral revulsion. And since we can only make sense of why we would feel so much more horror in the face of one mode of death dealing than in the face of another through recourse to implicitly racist and civilizational schemes organizing and sustaining affect differentially, we end up feeling shocked and outraged by our lack of shock.

The posing of the comparative question, under the right conditions, induces new moral sentiments that are bound up with new moral judgments. We realize that we have already judged or evaluated the worth of certain lives over others, certain modes of death dealing over others, and that realization is at the same time a judgment, an evaluation, namely, that such differential judgments are unjustified and wrong.

For Benjamin, the principles of homogeneity, substitutability, and continuity that come to structure temporality and matter under conditions of capitalism have to be actively interrupted by the way in which the premodern erupts into the modern. Would this notion of critique not be useful to those who seek to show how the progressive conceits of secularization are confounded by animated anachronisms, fragments from the premodern that disrupt the claims of modernity, and prove central—and potentially fatal—to its operation?

As a mode of living and even a mode of subject constitution, critique is understood as a “practice” that incorporates norms into the very formation of the subject. The subject does not own itself, but is always dispossessed by the norms by which it is formed. Is this conception of no use to the critique of secular presumptions?

Even in Kant, it is important to note that critique is not precisely a judgment, but an inquiry into the conditions of possibility that make judgment possible. That inquiry is, and must be, separate from judgment itself. The Kantian position is that our ways of knowing are structured prior to the possibility of our judgment, and that these form conditions of possibility for any judgment. Kant, of course, sought to understand the universal and timeless features of cognition in his effort to articulate the preconditions of judgment, but it is surely possible to transpose a Kantian procedure onto a historical scheme, as Foucault sought to do. When that happens we can ask, how is our knowledge organized by specific historical schemes prior to any possibility of judgment, and how do our judgments rely upon those prior organizations of knowledge? If this is right, and if this constitutes a certain historical transposition of the Kantian project of “critique,” then

critique would be an inquiry into the ways that knowledge is organized prior to the specific acts of knowledge we perform, including the kinds of judgments we make. In this sense, following Kant, critique is prior to judgment and perhaps closer to Asad’s project than would at first appear.

When we ask what historically formed schemes of evaluation condition and inform our shock and outrage over suicide bombing and our righteous coldness in the face of statesponsored violence, it seems to me that we are trying to delimit the historical conditions of possibility for affective and evaluative response. Asad and Mahmood both have tried to show how secularism functions tacitly to structure and organize our moral responses within a dominant Euro-Atlantic context, and in so doing they seem to be asking us to call into question the taken-forgranted ways that such schemes inform and move us.

Comparative work, perhaps anthropology itself, seeks to displace us from that taken-for-granted set of presumptions, ones that assume a certain process of secularization as yielding universal truths, and that therefore parochialize a very specific, sometimes lethal, tradition within the West.

It seems to me that critique designates the process of trying to delimit knowledge, indicating not so much a completed or successful action as an ongoing task to fathom and describe the various ways of organizing knowledge that are tacitly operating as the preconditions of various “acts” of knowledge. This incomplete effort to delimit and name the conditions of possibility is not itself a judgment; it is an effort to fathom, collect, and identify that upon which we depend when we claim to know anything at all. The ways to do this are various:

through tracing internal contradictions, through comparing and contrasting alternative cultural lexicons for similar concepts, through offering a historical account of how a set of culturally specific assumptions became recast as universal and postcultural.

If this is one set of critical practices, how different is “critique” from Asad’s own critical procedure, finally?

butler immanence nietzsche foucault 3-25

After reading Molly Anne Rothenberg’s book and her critique of Foucault and Butler, I’m intrigued by this problematic of immanentism. It happens when relations take place entirely within, that is, without any causal agent developing from the outside, without being effected by an ‘outside.’

… a subject produced by morality must find his or her relation to morality. One cannot will away this paradoxical condition for moral deliberation and for the task of giving an account of oneself. Even if morality supplies a set of norms that produce a subject in his or her intelligibility, it also remains a set of norms and rules that a subject must negotiate in a living and reflective way (10).

Molly Anne Rothenberg says if the subject is produced by a morality, in what sense can it develop a relation to that morality, how can it distance itself such that it can be properly reflective of its relationship with a morality? This is the problem of immanence and why Rothenberg moves to a version of extimate causality, with its emphasis on the non-coincident subject, but unlike Foucaultian immanentism, there is a space, an opening, in the subject’s ‘non-coincidence’ that allows it recognize it’s own relationship and defensive posturing with relationship to his/her own excess and yet instead of playing a game of ‘hot potato’ instead, absorb the excess via a identification with the sinthome. Thus becoming in Rothenberg’s words (I think), a sinthomic subject. That is, a subject that takes on the place of where jouissance formerly was, now the subject [Here I am] emerges.

Nietzsche

On page 10, Butler begins w/ Nietzsche because he offers an account of how we become reflective in the first place: “we become conscious of ourselves only after certain injuries have been inflicted.” In the interests of meting out a just punishment that the lawyer for the claimant asks the defendant, give an account of yourself, what were your actions? “And so, in fearful response, I offer myself as an “I” and try to reconstruct my deeds … For Nietzsche accountability follows only upon an accusation or, minimally, an allegation, one made by someone in a position to deal out punishment if causality can be established. And we become reflective upon ourselves, accordingly as a consequence of fear and terror. Indeed we become morally accountable as a consequence of fear and terror (11).

N. did well to understand that I begin my story of myself only in the face of a “you” who asks me to give an account. Only in the face of such a query or attribution from an other —”Was it you?”— do any of us start to narrate ourselves, or find that, for urgent reasons, we must become self-narrating beings (11).

In The Psychic Life of Power, I perhaps too quickly accepted this punitive scene of inauguration for the subject. According to that view, the institution of punishment ties me to my deed, and when I am punished for having done this or that deed, I emerge as a subject of conscience and, hence, a subject who reflects upon herself in some way. This view of subject formation depends upon an account of a subject who internalizes the law or, minimally, the causal tethering of the subject to the deed for which the institution of punishment seeks compensation (15).

Foucault

For N. the elaboration of a morality… is the sublimated … effect of this primary aggression turned against oneself, the idealized consequence of a turn against one’s own destructiveness and, for Nietzsche, one’s own life impulses … Foucault turns …. to codes of morality, understood as codes of conduct —and not primarily to codes of punishment —to consider how subjects are constituted in relation to such codes, which do not always rely on the violence of prohibition and its internalizing effects. … For Foucault, reflexivity emerges in the act of taking up a relation to moral codes, but it does not rely on an account of internalization or of psychic life more generally, certainly not a reduction of morality to bad conscience (16).

In the early 1980s Foucault’s interest shifts to a consideration of how, “certain historically established prescriptive codes compelled a certain kind of subject formation. Whereas in his earlier work, he treats the subject as an “effect” of discourse, in his later writings he nuances and refines his position as follows: The subject forms itsellf in relation to a set of codes, prescriptions, or norms … This work on the self … takes place within the context of a set of norms that precede and exceed the subject. … setting the limits to what will be considered to be an intelligible formatio nof the subject within a given historical scheme of things.

There is no making of oneself (poiesis) outside of a mode of subjectivation (assujettisement) and, hence, no self-making outside of the norms that orchestrate the possible forms that a subject may take. The practice of critique then exposes the limits of the historical scheme of things, the epistemological and ontological horizon within which subjects come to be at all. To make oneself in such a way that one exposes those limits is precisely to engage in an aesthetics of the self that maintains a critical relation to existing norms. (Quoting Foucault) “Critique would insure the desubjugation of the subject in the course of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth.” (17)

The Immanence Thing, Listen Up:

A practice of self-stylization in relation to norms … (means) neither conforming to the prescriptions entailed by a given code nor of internalizing a primary prohibition or interdiction (Hey Oedipal!)

However, the “I” engendered by morality is not conceived as a self-berating psychic agency. From the outset, what relation the self will take to itself, how it will craft itself in response to an injunction, how it will form itself, and what labor it will perform upon itself is a challenge, if not an open question (18).

the subject’s self-crafting … always takes place in relation to an imposed set of norms. the norm does not produce the subject as its necessary effect, nor is the subject fully free to disregard the norm that inaugurates its reflexivity; one invariably struggles with conditions of one’s own life that one could not have chosen. If there is an operation of agency or, indeed, freedom in this struggle, it takes place in the context of an enabling and limiting field of constraint. This ethical agency is neither fully determined nor radically free. It’s struggle or primary dilemma is to be produced by a world, even as one must produce oneself in some way. This struggle with the unchosen conditions of one’s life, a struggle —an agency— is also make possible, paradoxically, by the persistence of this primary condition of unfreedom (19).

Does the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding, that is, whose conditions of emergence can never fully be accounted for, undermine the possibility of responsibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself? (19)

I will argue otherwise by showing how a theory of subject formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can serve a conception of ethics and, indeed, responsibility.

[…] primary relations are formative in ways that produce a necessary opacity in our understanding of ourselves. An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing, and this other establishes the scene of address as a more primary ethical relation than a reflexive effort to give an account of oneself. Moreover, the very terms by which we give an account, by which we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others, are not of our making. They are social in character, and they establish social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our “singular” stories are told (21).

With the help of Foucault’s self-criticism, it may be possible to show that the question of ethics emerges precisely at the limits of our schemes of intelligibility, the site where we ask ourselves what it might mean to continue in a dialogue where no common ground can be assumed. where one is, as it were, at the limits of what one knows yet still under the demand to offer and receive acknowledgment: to someone else who is there to be addressed and whose address is there to be received. (21-22).

Recognition

Thus if I question the regime of truth, I question, too, the regime through which being, and my own ontological status, is allocated. Critique is not merely of a given social practice or a certain horizon of intelligibility within which practices and institutions appear, it also implies that I come into question for myself. Self-questioning becomes an ethical consequence of critique for Foucault, as he makes clear in “What is Critique?” It also turns out that self-questioning of this sort involves putting oneself at risk, imperiling the very possibility of being recognized by others, since to question the norms of recognition that govern what I might be, to ask what they leave out, what they might be compelled to accommodate, is, in relation to the present regime, to risk unrecognizability as a subject or at least to become an occasion for posing the questions of who one is (or can be) and whether or not one is recognizable.

These questions imply at least two kinds of inquiry for an ethical philosophy.

First, what are the these norms, to which my very being is given over, which have the power to install me or, indeed, to disinstall me as a recognizable subject?
Second, where and who is this other, and can the notion of the other comprise the frame of reference and normative horizon that hold and confer my potential for becoming a recognizable subject? (23)

If we conclude that Foucault’s failure to think the other is decisive, we have perhaps overlooked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent, not just on the existence of the other in its singularity (as Levinas would have it), but also on the social dimension of normativity that governs the scene of recognition. The social dimension of normativity precedes and conditions any dyadic exchange, even though it seems that we make contact with that sphere of normativity precisely in the context of such proximate exchanges. (23-4)

The norms by which I recognize another or, indeed myself are not mine alone. They function to the extent that they are social, exceeding every dyadic exchange that they condition. Their sociality, however, can be understood neither as a structuralist totality nor as a transcendental or quasi-transcendental invariability. Some would doubtless argue that norms must already be in place for recognition to become possible, and there is surely truth in such a claim. It is also true that certain practices of recognition or, indeed, certain breakdowns in the practice of recognition mark a site of rupture within the horizon of normativity and implicitly call for the institution of new norms, putting into question the giveness of the prevailing normative horizon. The normative horizon within which I see the other or, indeed, within which the other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a a critical opening.

It will not do, then, to collapse the notion of the other into the sociality of norms and claim that the other is implicitly present in the norms by which recognition is conferred. Sometimes the very unrecognizability of the other brings about a crisis in the norms that govern recognition. If and when, in an effort to confer or to receive a recognition that fails again and again, I call into question the normative horizon within which recogntion takes place, this questioning is part of the desire for recognition, a desire that can find no satisfaction, and whose unsatisfiability establishes a critical point of departure for the interrogation of available norms (24).

In asking the ethical question “How ought I to treat another?” I am immediately caught up in a realm of social normativity, since the other only appears to me, only functions as an other for me, if there is a frame within which I can see and apprehend the other in her separateness and exteriority. So, though I might think of the ethical relation as dyadic or, indeed, as presocial, I am caught up not only in the sphere of normativity but in the problematic of power when I pose the ethical question in its directness and simplicity: “How ought I to treat you?” If the “I” and the “you” must first come into being, and if a normative frame is necessary for this emergence and encounter, then norms work not only to direct my conduct but to condition the possible emergence of an encounter between myself and the other (25).

butler frames of war

Judith Butler, Frames of War. New York: Verso, 2009.

The point, however will be to ask how such norms operate to produce certain subjects as “recognizable” persons and to make others decidedly more difficult to recognize. The problem is not merely how to include more people within existing norms, but to consider how existing norms allocate recognition differentially. What new norms are possible, and how are they wrought? What might be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizability? What might be done, in other words, to shift the very terms of recognizability in order to produce more radically democratic results? 6

Indeed, every normative instance is shadowed by its own failure, and very often that failure assumes a figural form. The figure lays claim to no certain ontological status, and though it can be apprehended as “living,” it is not always recognized as a life.

What one is pressing for, calling for, is not a sudden break with the entirety of a past in the name of a radically new future. The “break” is nothing other than a series of significant shifts that follow from the iterable structure of the norm. 169.

butler frames

Judith Butler, Frames of War. New York: Verso, 2009.

If the terms of multiculturalism and the politics of recognition require either the reduction of the subject to a single, defining attribute, or the construction of a multiply determined subject, then I am not sure we have yet faced the challenge to cultural metaphysics posed by new global networks that traverse and animate several dynamic determinations at once. 147

When such networks from the basis of political coalitions, they are bound together less by matters of “identity” or commonly accepted terms of recognition than by forms of political opposition to certain state and other regulatory politics that effect exclusions, abjections, partially or fully suspended citizenship, subordination, debasement, and the like. In this sense, “coalitions” are not necessarily based on subject positions; indeed, they can be based on provisionally overlapping aims and there can be — perhaps must be — active antagonisms over what these aims should be and how best to reach them. 147

They are animated fields of differences, in the sense that “to be effected by another” and “to effect another” are part of the very social ontology of the subject, at which point “the subject” is less a discrete substance than an active and transitive set of interrelations. 147

So when we speak about “frameworks” in this respect, we are not simply talking about theoretical perspectives that we bring to the analysis of politics, but about modes of intelligibility that further the workings of the state and, as such, are themselves exercises of power even as they exceed the specific domain of state power. 149