butler – Page 35 – objet (a)

Giving Account JB again

The dyadic exchange refers to a set of norms that exceed the perspectives of those engaged in the struggle for recognition (29).

The possibility of an ethical response to the face thus requires normativity of the visual field: there is already not only an epistemological frame within which the face appears but an operation of power as well, since only by virtue of certain kinds of anthropocentric positions and cultural frames will a given face seem to be a human face to any of us. After all, under what conditions do some individuals acquire a face, a legible and visible face, and other do not? There is a language that frames the encounter, and embedded in that language is a set of norms concerning what will and will not constitute recognizability (29-30).

My account of myself is partial, haunted by that for which I can devise no definitive story. I cannot explain exactly why I have emerged this way, and my efforts at narrative reconstruction are always undergoing revision. There is that in me and of me for which I can give no account. But does this mean that I am not, in the moral sense, accountable for who I am and for what I do? If I find that, despite my best efforts, a certain opacity persists and I cannot make myself fully accountable to you, is this ethical failure? Or is it a failure that gives rise to another ethical disposition in the place of a full and satisfying notion of narrative accountability? Is there in this affirmation of partial transparency a possibility for acknowledging a relationality that binds me more deeply to language and to you than I previously knew? And is the relationality that conditions and blinds this “self” not, precisely, an indispensable resource for ethics (40).

Giving an Account

JB. Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham UP. 2005 This book is a collection of lectures given in 2002.

The context is not exterior to the question; it conditions the form that the question will take. In this sense, the questions that characterize moral inquiry are formulated or stylized by the historical conditions that prompt them (6).

Yet there is no “I” that can fully stand apart from the social conditions of its emergence, no “I” that is not implicated in a set of conditioning moral norms, which, being norms, have a social character that exceeds a purely personal or idiosyncratic meaning.

The “I” does not stand apart from the prevailing matrix of ethical norms and conflicting moral frameworks. In an important sense, this matrix is also the condition for the emergence of the “I,” even though the “I” is not causally induced by those norms. We cannot conclude that the “I” is simply the effect of the instrument of some prior ethos of some field of conflicting or discontinuous norms. When the “I” seeks to give an account of itself, it can start with itself, but it will find that this self is already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration; indeed, when the “I” seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist (7).

The reason for this is that the “I” has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation —or set of relations— to a set of norms. Although many contemporary critics worry that this means there is no concept of the subject that can serve as the ground for moral agency and moral accountability, that conclusion does not follow. The “I” is always to some extent dispossessed by the social conditions of its emergence. This dispossession does not mean that we have lost the subjective ground for ethics. On the contrary, it may well be the condition of moral inquiry, the condition under which morality itself emerges. If the “I” is not at one with moral norms, this means only that the subject must deliberate upon these norms and that part of deliberation will entail a critical understanding of their social genesis and meaning. In this sense, ethical deliberation is bound up with the operation of critique. And critique finds that it cannot go forward without a consideration of how the deliberating subject comes into being and how a deliberating subject might actually live or appropriate a set of norms. (8)

[…] norms also decide in advance who will and will not become a subject … Did he consider the operation of norms in the very constitution of the subject, in the stylization of its ontology and in the establishing of a legitimate site with the realm of social ontology (9).

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 most negotiate in a living and reflective way (10).

JB on Nietzsche: The institution of law compels an originally aggressive human to turn that aggression “inward,” to craft an inner world composed of a guilty conscience and to vent that aggression against oneself in the name of morality. 14

JB distancing herself from what she said in The Psychic Life of Power on page 15

JB’s Foucautian take on 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 (17).

Butler politics what makes a life livable

What moves me politically, and that for which I want to make room is the moment in which a subject — a person, a collective — asserts a right or entitlement to a livable life when no such prior authorization exists, when no clearly enabling convention is in place. (Undoing Gender 2004, (2002) 224).

When we ask what makes a life livable, we are asking about certain normative conditions that must be fulfilled for life to become life. And so there are at least two senses of life, the one, which refers to the minimum biological form of living, and another, which intervenes at the start, which establishes the minimum conditions for a livable life with regard to human life. And this does not imply that we can disregard the merely living in favor of the “livable life,” but that we must ask, as we asked about gender violence, what humans require in order to maintain and reproduce the conditions of their own livability. And what are our politics such that we are in whatever way possible, both conceptualizing the possiblity of the livable life and arranging for its institutional support. There will always be disagreement about what this means, and those who claim that a single political direction is necessitated by virtue of this commitment will be mistaken. But this is only because to live it to live a life politically, in relation to power, in relation to others, in the act of assuming responsibility for a collective future … Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so (226).

One could say that for her (Anzaldua), the subject is “multiple” rather than unitary, and that would be to get the point in a way. But I think her point is more radical. She is asking us to stay at the edge of what we know, to put our own epistemological certainties into question, and through that risk and openness to another way of knowing and of living in the world to expand our capacity to imagine the human. She is asking us to be able to work in coalitions across differences that will make a more inclusive movement. What she is arguing, then, is that it is only through existing in the mode of translation, constant translation, that we stand a chance of producing a multicultural understanding of women or, indeed, of society. The unitary subject is the one who knows already what it is, who enters the conversation the same way as it exits, who fails to put its own epistemological certainties at risk in the encounter with the other, and so stays in place, guards its place, and becomes an emblem for property and territory, refusing self-transformation, ironically, in the name of the subject (228).

There is the possibility of appearing impermeable, of repudiating vulnerability itself. There is the possibility of becoming violent. But perhaps there is some other way to live in such a way that one is neither fearing death, becoming socially dead from fear of being killed, or becoming violent, and killing others, or subjecting them to live a life of social death predicated upon the fear of literal death. Perhaps this other way to live requires a world in which collective means are found to protect bodily vulnerability without precisely eradicating it. Surely some norms will be useful for building such a world, but they will be norms that no one will own, norms that will have to work not through normalization or racial and ethnic assimilation, but through becoming collective sites of continuous political labor (231).

Gender Foucault

In Foucault’s view, the critic thus has a double task: to show how knowledge and power work to consitute a more or less systematic way of ordering the world with its own “conditions of acceptability of a system,” and “to follow the breaking points which indicate its emergence.” So it will not be enough to isolate and identify the peculiar nexus of power and knowledge that gives rise to the field of intelligible things. Rather, it is necessary to track the way in which that field meets its breaking point, the moments of its discontinuities, and the sites where it fails to constitute the intelligibility it promises. What this means is that one looks for the conditions by which the object field is constituted as well as the limits of those conditions, the moment where they point up their contingency and their transformability (215-16).
[…] What this means for gender then is that it is important not only to understand how the terms of gender are instituted, naturalized, and established as presuppositional but to trace the moments where the binary system of gender is disputed and challenged, where the coherence of the categories are put into question, and where the very social life of gender turns out to be malleable and transformable.
216

gender drag power

“The Question of Social Transformation” in Undoing Gender. Routledge. 2004. pp. 204-231. First appeared in Spanish Mujeres y transormaciones sociales, with Lidia Puigvert and Elizabeth Beck Gernsheim. 2002.

sex-biology-natural, gender – social this debate passed on to the debate on category of “woman” and whether it possessed an “essential” meaning.
Woman” is a site of permanent openness and resignfiability.

When gender norms operate as violations, they function as an interpellation that one refuses only by agreeing to pay the consequences: losing one’s job, home, the prospects for desire, or for life. There is also a set of laws, criminal and psychiatric codes for which, still, imprisonment and incarceration are possible consequences. Gender dysphoria can be used in many countries still to deny employment or to take away one’s child. […] we continue to live in a world in which one can risk serious disenfranchisement and physical violence for the pleasure one seeks, the fantasy one embodies, the gender one performs.

The point to emphasize here is not that drag is subversive of gender norms, but that we live, more or less implicitly, with received notions of reality, implicit accounts of ontology, which determine what kinds of bodies and sexualities will be considered real and true, and which kind will not (214).

If gender is performative, then it follows that the reality of gender is itself produced as an effect of the performance. Although there are norms that govern what will and will not be real, and what will and will not be intelligible, they are called into question and reiterated at the moment in which performativity begins its citational practice. One surely cites norms that already exist, but these norms can be significantly deterritorialized through the citation. They can also be exposed as nonnatural and nonnecessary when they take place in a context and through a form of embodying that defies normative expectation. What this means is that through the practice of gender performativity, we not only see how the norms that govern reality are cited but grasp one of the mechanisms by which reality is reproduced and altered in the course of that reproduction (218).

The point about drag is not simply to produce a pleasurable and subversive spectacle but to allegorize the spectacular and consequential ways in which reality is both reproduced and contested (218).

sexual difference braidotti

French oriented “sexual difference” theories versus American based “gender theories”.

Gender theorists understand the construction of masculinity and femininity as more determined by cultural and social processes

Sexual difference theorists also understand it as determined by unconscious processes such as identification and internalization.

The sexual difference approach … dislodges the belief in the “natural” foundations of socially coded and enforced differences and of the systems of values and representation which they support. Moreover this approach emphasizes the need to historicize the notions and concepts it analyzes, first and foremost among them the notion of difference. This emphasis on the historical embeddedness of concepts however, also means that the thinker needs some humility before the multilayered and complex structure of language.

[…] In the poststucturalist framework, language is not to be understood as a tool of communication, following the humanistic tradition. It is rather defined as the site or location where subject positions are constructed. In order to get access to language at all, however, one has to take up a position on either side of the great masculine/feminine divide. The subject is sexed or s/he is not at all.

Against the tendency of Freudian psychoanalysis to fix psychic structures through biological references, Irigaray … problematizes the question of the connection of morphological men and women to culturally coded roles of masculinity and femininity. Morphology replaces biological deterministic readings of the body with a psychosexual version of social constructivism. Morphologies refer to enfleshed, experiential understandings of the bodily self. As Elizabeth Grosz points out (1989), these experiences are mediated through discursive practices (biological, psychological, psychoanalytic discourses) which construct social representations. Embodied subjects are expected to adhere to these representations by internalizing them. Thus, although language is posited as a structure that is prior to and constitutive of subjectivity, the sexed subject positions that structure identity (M/F) are neither stable nor essentialistic. A fundamental instabililty in the subject’s attachment to either masculine or feminine positions is proposed instead as the site of resistance to fixed or stable identities of any kind. The subject is both sexed and split, both resting on one of the poles of the sexual dichotomy and unfastened to it. The “linguistic turn” thus defined therefore provides sexual difference philosophy with a materially grounded historicized and yet ubiquitous structure on which to base its vision of subjectivity.

sexual difference symbolic or social

I take the point that the sociological concepts of gender, understood as women and men, cannot be reducible to sexual difference.

But I worry still, actively, about understanding sexual difference as operating as a symbolic order. What does it mean for such an order to be symbolic rather than social? … If it is symbolic is it changeable? I ask Lacanians this question, and they usually tell me that changes in the symbolic take a long, long time. I wonder how long I will have to wait (212).

Moreover I am compelled to ask, is it really true that sexual difference at the symbolic level is without semantic content? Can it ever be? And what if we have indeed done nothing more than abstracted the social meaning of sexual difference and exalted it as a symbolic and, hence, presocial structure? Is this a way of making sure that sexual difference is beyond social contestation? (JB in Undoing Gender 2004 (2002) pg. 212)

social transformation

In this essay JB writes less theoretically, and in a style that is almost chatty. JB states:

[…] we norms in order to live, and to live well, and to know in what direction to transform our social world, we are also constrained by norms in ways that sometimes do violence to us and which, for reasons of social justice, we oppose.

ohhh, this is good, here JB talks about the “double meaning” of normativity.

[…] On the one hand it refers to the aims and aspirations that guide us, the precepts by which we are compelled to act or speak to one another, the commonly held presuppositions by which we are oriented, and which give direction to our actions.

On the other hand, normativity refers to the process of normalization, the way that certain norms, ideas and ideals hold sway over embodied life, provide coercive criteria for normal “men” and “women”. And in this second sense, we see that norms are what govern “intelligble” life, “real” men and “real” women. And that when we defy these norms, it is unclear whether we are still living, or ought to be, whether our lives are valuable, or can be made to be, whether our genders are real, or ever can be regarded as such.

butler althusser 1997

“Burning Acts, Injurious Speech” Excitable Speech 1977

J.L Austin

Constative utterance: actions performed by virtue of words

Performative utterance: you have words, and then you have ‘actions’ as a consequence of using ‘words’

For Nietzsche the subject appears only as a consequence of a demand for accountability; a set of painful effects is taken up by a moral framework that seeks to isolate the “cause” of those effects in a singular and intentional agent, a moral framework that operates through a certain economy of paranoid fabrication and efficiency.

The question, then, of who is accountable for a given injury precedes and initiates the subject, and the subject itself is formed through being nominated to inhabit that grammatical and juridical site. 216

In a sense for Nietzsche, the subject comes to be only within the requirements of a moral discourse of accountability. The requirements of blame figure the subject as the “cause” of an act. In this sense, there can be no subject without a blameworthy act, and there can be no “act” apart from a discourse of accountability and, according to Nietzsche, without an institution of punishment. 216

from page 219 JB Reader “The doctor who receives the child and pronounces —It’s a girl— begins that long string of interpellations by which the girl is transitively girled: gender is ritualistically repeated, whereby the repetition occasions both the risk of failure and the congealed effect of sedimentation.

censorship

The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2:2 (1990) pp. 105-25

Federal funds prohibited from being used to:

-promote, disseminate or produce obscene OR INDECENT materials, including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts

– or that denigrates, debases or reviles a person, group or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age or national origin representation and action

————

fantasy constitutes a PSYCHIC ACTION, fantasy doesn’t directly transmute into ACTION
For Butler fantasy is the very scene that SUSPENDS action Dworkin establishes a direct causal relationship between: Fantasy-Representation-Action huh?
Pictures injure, you see a picture you will get hurt by looking at it. wounded passive, injured stance of viewer, passive recipients of this visual assault.
There is no INTERPRETIVE leeway between the representation and its meanings, and its effects. Butler’s view:
pornography is a textualized fantasy of dissimulated and unstable identifications “A question to raise here would be, is it even possible to do the kind of reading that Dworkin does, that involves a retelling and repetition of the pornographic scene without making use of precisely the variable identifications that the pornographic fantasy itself occasions? From what source does Dworkin’s reading draw its own strength and mastery if not through an identification and redeployment of the very representation of aggression that she abhors? In other words, does the identificatory process that her own reading requires effectively refute the theory of identification that she explicitly holds? (194 JB Reader)

Excitable Speech

Butler, J. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge. 1997.

Censorship is a productive form of power: it is not merely privative, but formative as well. I propose that censorship seeks to produce subjects according to explicit and implicit norms, and that the production of the subject has everything to do with the regulation of speech. The subject’s production takes place not only through the regulation of that subject’s speech, but through the regulation of the social domain of speakable discourse. The question is not what it is I will be able to say, but what will constitute the domain of the sayable within which I begin to speak at all. To become a subject means to be subjected to a set of implicit and explicit norms that govern the kind of speech that will be legible as the speech of a subject (133).

Here the question is not whether certain kinds of speech uttered by a subject are censored, but how a certain operation of censorship determines who will be a subject depending on whether the speech of such a candidate for subjecthood obeys certain norms governing what is speakable and what is not. To move outside of the domain of speakability is to risk one’s status as a subject. To embody the norms that govern speakability in one’s speech is to consummate one’s status as a subject of speech. “Impossible speech” would be precisely the ramblings of the asocial, the rantings of the “psychotic” that the rules that govern the domain of speakability produce, and by which they are continually haunted.

what is critique

JB. “What is Critique” The Raymond Williams Lecture at Cambridge University, May 2000. published in The Judith Butler Reader 2003. Sara Salih editor.
online version

For the question, “what are we to do?” presupposes that the “we” has been formed and that it is known, that its action is possible, and the field in which it might act is delimited. But if those very formations and delimitations have normative consequences, then it will be necessary to ask after the values that set the stage for action, and this will be an important dimension of any critical inquiry into normative matters.

One does not drive to the limits for a thrill experience, or because limits are dangerous and sexy, or because it brings us into a titillating proximity with evil. One asks about the limits of ways of knowing because one has already run up against a crisis within the epistemological field in which one lives. The categories by which social life are ordered produce a certain incoherence or entire realms of unspeakability. And it is from this condition, the tear in the fabric of our epistemological web, that the practice of critique emerges, with the awareness that no discourse is adequate here or that our reigning discourses have produced an impasse.

To be critical of an authority that poses as absolute requires a critical practice that has self-transformation at its core.

In Foucault’s view, following Kant in an attenuated sense, the act of consent is a reflexive movement by which validity is attributed to or withdrawn from authority. But this reflexivity does not take place internal to a subject. For Foucault, this is an act which poses some risk, for the point will not only be to object to this or that governmental demand, but to ask about the order in which such a demand becomes legible and possible. And if what one objects to are the epistemological orderings that have established the rules of governmental validity, then saying “no” to the demand will require departing from the established grounds of its validity, marking the limit of that validity, which is something different and far more risky than finding a given demand invalid. In this difference, we might say, one begins to enter a critical relation to such orderings and the ethical precepts to which they give rise. The problem with those grounds that Foucault calls “illegitimate” is not that they are partial or self-contradictory or that they lead to hypocritical moral stands. The problem is precisely that they seek to foreclose the critical relation, that is, to extend their own power to order the entire field of moral and political judgment. They orchestrate and exhaust the field of certainty itself. How does one call into question the exhaustive hold that such rules of ordering have upon certainty without risking uncertainty, without inhabiting that place of wavering which exposes one to the charge of immorality, evil, aestheticism. The critical attitude is not moral according to the rules whose limits that very critical relation seeks to interrogate. But how else can critique do its job without risking the denunciations of those who naturalize and render hegemonic the very moral terms put into question by critique itself?

“Critique,” he writes, “will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability [l’indocilité réfléchie].” If it is an “art” in his sense, then critique will not be a single act, nor will it belong exclusively to a subjective domain, for it will be the stylized relation to the demand upon it. And the style will be critical to the extent that, as style, it is not fully determined in advance, it incorporates a contingency over time that marks the limits to the ordering capacity of the field in question. So the stylization of this “will” will produce a subject who is not readily knowable under the established rubric of truth. More radically, Foucault pronounces:

“Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation [désassujetiisement] of the subject in the context [le jeu] of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth.” (32, 39)

The politics of truth pertains to those relations of power that circumscribe in advance what will and will not count as truth, which order the world in certain regular and regulatable ways, and which we come to accept as the given field of knowledge. We can understand the salience of this point when we begin to ask: What counts as a person? What counts as a coherent gender? What qualifies as a citizen? Whose world is legitimated as real? Subjectively, we ask: Who can I become in such a world where the meanings and limits of the subject are set out in advance for me? By what norms am I constrained as I begin to ask what I may become? And what happens when I begin to become that for which there is no place within the given regime of truth? Is this not precisely what is meant by “the desubjugation of the subject in the play of…the politics of truth”(my translation)?

At stake here is the relation between the limits of ontology and epistemology, the link between the limits of what I might become and the limits of what I might risk knowing. Deriving a sense of critique from Kant, Foucault poses the question that is the question of critique itself: “Do you know up to what point you can know?” “Our liberty is at stake.” Thus, liberty emerges at the limits of what one can know, at the very moment in which the desubjugation of the subject within the politics of truth takes place, the moment where a certain questioning practice begins that takes the following form: “‘What, therefore, am I’, I who belong to this humanity, perhaps to this piece of it, at this point in time, at this instant of humanity which is subjected to the power of truth in general and truths in particular?”(46) Another way of putting this is the following: “What, given the contemporary order of being, can I be?” If, in posing this question, liberty is at stake, it may be that staking liberty has something to do with what Foucault calls virtue, with a certain risk that is put into play through thought and, indeed, through language where the contemporary ordering of being is brought to its limit.

The critic thus has a double task, to show how knowledge and power work to constitute a more or less systematic way of ordering the world with its own “conditions of acceptability of a system,” but also “to follow the breaking points which indicate its emergence.” So not only is it necessary to isolate and identify the peculiar nexus of power and knowledge that gives rise to the field of intelligible things, but also to track the way in which that field meets its breaking point, the moments of its discontinuities, the sites where it fails to constitute the intelligibility for which it stands. What this means is that one looks both for the conditions by which the object field is constituted, but also for the limits of those conditions, the moments where they point up their contingency and their transformability. In Foucault’s terms, “schematically speaking, we have perpetual mobility, essential fragility or rather the complex interplay between what replicates the same process and what transforms it.” (58)

Indeed, another way to talk about this dynamic within critique is to say that rationalization meets its limits in desubjugation. If the desubjugation of the subject emerges at the moment in which the episteme constituted through rationalization exposes its limit, then desubjugation marks precisely the fragility and transformability of the epistemics of power.

How would this particular use of fiction relate to Foucault’s notion of critique? Consider that Foucault is trying to understand the possibility of desubjugation within rationalization without assuming that there is a source for resistance that is housed in the subject or maintained in some foundational mode. Where does resistance come from? Can it be said to be the upsurge of some human freedom shackled by the powers of rationalization? If he speaks, as he does, of a will not to be governed, how are we to understand the status of that will?

[…] he has shown us that there can be no ethics, and no politics, without recourse to this singular sense of poiesis. The subject who is formed by the principles furnished by the discourse of truth is not yet the subject who endeavors to form itself. Engaged in “arts of existence,” this subject is both crafted and crafting, and the line between how it is formed, and how it becomes a kind of forming, is not easily, if ever drawn. For it is not the case that a subject is formed and then turns around and begins suddenly to form itself. On the contrary, the formation of the subject is the institution of the very reflexivity that indistinguishably assumes the burden of formation. The “indistinguishability” of this line is precisely the juncture where social norms intersect with ethical demands, and where both are produced in the context of a self-making which is never fully self-inaugurated.

We have moved quietly from the discursive notion of the subject to a more psychologically resonant notion of “self,” and it may be that for Foucault the latter term carries more agency than the former. The self forms itself, but it forms itself within a set of formative practices that are characterized as modes of subjectivations. That the range of its possible forms is delimited in advance by such modes of subjectivation does not mean that the self fails to form itself, that the self is fully formed. On the contrary, it is compelled to form itself, but to form itself within forms that are already more or less in operation and underway. Or, one might say, it is compelled to form itself within practices that are more or less in place. But if that self-forming is done in disobedience to the principles by which one is formed, then virtue becomes the practice by which the self forms itself in desubjugation, which is to say that it risks its deformation as a subject, occupying that ontologically insecure position which poses the question anew: who will be a subject here, and what will count as a life, a moment of ethical questioning which requires that we break the habits of judgment in favor of a riskier practice that seeks to yield artistry from constraint.