Category: psyche

butler gender regulation

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.

But for gender to be regulated is not simply for gender to come under the exterior force of a regulation. If gender were to exist prior to its regulation, we could then take gender as our theme and proceed to enumerate the various kinds of regulations to which it is subjected and the ways in which that subjection takes place. The problem, however, for us is more acute. After all, is there a gender that preexists its regulation, or is it the case that, in being subject to regulation, the gendered subject emerges, produced in and through that particular form of subjection? (41)

It is important to remember at least two caveats on subjection and regulation derived from Foucaultian scholarship:

1. regulatory power not only acts upon a preexisting subject but also shapes and forms that subject; moreover, every juridical form of power has its productive effect;

2. to become subject to a regulation is also to become subjectivated by it, that is, to be brought into being as a subject precisely through being regulated

The second point follows from the first in that the regulatory discourses which form the subject of gender are precisely those that require and induce the subject in question.

To assume that gender always and exclusively means the matrix of the “masculine” and “feminine” is precisely to miss the critical point that the production of that coherent binary is contingent, that it comes at a cost, and that those permutations of gender which do not fit the binary are as much a part of gender as its most normative instance. To conflate the definition of gender with its normative expression is inadvertently to reconsolidate the power of the norm to constrain the definition of gender … Whether one refers to “gender trouble” or “gender blending,” “transgender” or “cross-gender,” one is already suggesting that gender has a way of moving beyond that naturalized binary.

The conflation of gender with masculine/feminine, man/woman, male/female, thus performs the very naturalization that the notion of gender is meant to forestall (42-43). Thus, a restrictive discourse on gender that insists on the binary of man and woman as the exclusive way to understand the gender field performs a regulatory operation of power that naturalizes the hegemonic instance and forecloses the thinkability of its disruption.

… the distinction between symbolic and social law cannot finally hold, that the symbolic itself is the sedimentation of social practices, and that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist suppositions of psychoanalysis, moving us, as it were, toward a queer poststructuralism of the psyche (44).

How does a shift from thinking of gender as regulated by symbolic laws to a conception of gender as regulated by social norms contest this indifference of the law to what it regulates? And how does such a shift open up the possiblity of a more radical contestation of the law itself (48).

butler on the historical frame Žižek

Tada: Here JB. is making the point that Žižek’s discussion of 2 levels of EL’s theory of hegemony. One level is at the level of the battle over content, over establishing a universal out of particularized contents, which one will emerge and so on. But then there is also the level of the very frame within which that content appears. And this Z. insists is what is taken for granted. So JB. says:

And yet, if hegemony consists in part in challenging the frame to permit intelligible political formations previously foreclosed, and if its futural promise depends precisely on the revisability of that frame, then it makes no sense to safeguard that frame from the realm of the historical. Moreover, if we construe the historical in terms of the contingent and political formations in question, then we restrict the very meaning of the historical to a form of positivism. That the frame of intelligibility has its own historicity requires not only that we rethink the frame as historical, but that we rethink the meaning of history beyond both positivism and teleology, and towards a notion of a politically salient and shifting set of epistemes (138).

Tada: Z. argues that this very frame is CAPITALISM! Damn you Žižek! Butler rejects the Lacanian category of lack. As she states here about Žižek’s use of the term:

Butler states:

His resistance to what he calls ‘historicism’ consists in refusing any account given by social construction that might render this fundamental lack as an effect of certain social conditions, an effect which is misnamed through metalepsis by those who would understand it as the cause or ground of any and all sociality. So it would also refuse any sort of critical view which maintains that the lack which a certain kind of psychoanalysis understands as ‘fundamental’ to the subject is, in fact, rendered fundamental and constitutive as a way of obscuring its historically contingent origins (140).

As I hope to make clear, I agree with the notion that every subject emerges on the condition of foreclosure, but do not share the conviction that these foreclosures are prior to the social, or explicable through recourse to anachronistic structuralist accounts of kinship. Whereas I believe that the Lacanian view and my own would agree on the point that such foreclosures can be considered ‘internal’ to the social as its founding moment of exclusion or preemption, the disagreement would emerge over whether either castration or the incest taboo can or ought to operate as the name that designates these various operations (140).

Tada: JB. construes this particular Žižekian intervention as one of ‘levels of analysis’, a topography which she says makes no sense, ‘falls apart’.

(140-141) Žižek proposes that we distinguish between levels of analysis, claiming that one level — one that appears to be closer to the surface, if not superficial — finds contingency and substitutability within a certain historical horizon (here, importantly, history carries at least two meanings: contingency and the enabling horizon within which it appears). …

The other level — which, he claims is ‘more fundamental’ — is an ‘exclusion/foreclosure’ that grounds this very horizon (SZ 108). He warns both L and me against conflating two levels,

1. the endless political struggle of/for inclusions/exclusions WITHIN a given field

2. a more fundamental exclusion which sustains this very field (Z 108).

Tada: But this ‘levels of analysis falls apart, JB argues that the distinctions do not hold up:

On the one hand, it is clear that this second level, the more fundamental one is tied to the first by being both its ground and its limit. Thus, the second level is not exactly exterior to the first, which means that they cannot, strictly speaking, be conceived as separable ‘levels’ at all, for the historical horizon surely ‘is’ its ground, whether or not that ground appears within the horizon that it occasions and ‘sustains’ (141).

Elsewhere he cautions against understanding this fundamental level, the level at which the subject’s lack is operative, as external to social reality: ‘the Lacanian Real is strictly internal to the Symbolic’ (Z 120).

Antigone ch. 2 Lacan kinship

Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim. 2000 (Wellek lectures given in 1998). New York: Columbia University Press.

Does Antigone’s death signal a necessary lesson about the limits of cultural intelligibility, the limits of intelligible kinship, one that restores us to our proper sense of limit and constraint? Does Antigone’s death signal the supersession of kinship by the state, the necessary subordination of the former to the latter? Or is her death precisely a limit that requires to be read as that operation of political power that forecloses what forms of kinship will be intelligible, what kinds of lives can be countenanced as living?

In Lacan, kinship, as a function of the symbolic, becomes rigorously dissociated from the sphere of the social, and yet it constitutes the structural field of intelligibility within which the social emerges. My reading of Antigone, in brief, will attempt to compel these distinctions into productive crisis.

Antigone represents neither kinship nor its radical outside but becomes the occasion for a reading of a structurally constrained notion of kinship in terms of its social iterability, the aberrant temporality of the norm (Butler, Antigone: 29).

kinship as symbolic

To recast positions of kinship as “symbolic” is precisely to posit them as preconditions of linguistic communicability and to suggest that these “positions” bear an intractability that does not apply to contingent social norms. It is, however, not enough to trace the effects of social norms on the thinking of kinship, a move that would return the discourse on kinship to a sociologism devoid of psychic significance. Norms do not unilaterally act upon the psyche; rather, they become condensed as the figure of the law to which the psyche returns.

The psychic relation to social norms can, under certain conditions, posit those norms as intractable, punitive, and eternal, but that figuration of norms already takes place within what Freud called “the culture of the death drive.”

In other words, the very description of the symbolic as intractable law takes place within a fantasy of law as insurpassable authority. In my view, Lacan at once analyzes and symptomizes this fantasy. I hope to suggest that the notion of the symbolic is limited by the description of its own transcendentalizing function, that it can acknowledge the contingency of its own structure only by disavowing the possibility of any substantial alteration in its field of operation. My suggestion will be that the relation between symbolic position and social norm needs to be rethought, and in my final chapter, I hope to show how one might reapproach the kinship-founding function of the incest taboo within psychoanalysis with a conception of a contingent social norm at work (Butler Antigone: 30).

Here I am less interested in what the taboo constrains than the forms of kinship to which it gives rise and how their legitimacy is established precisely as the normalized solutions to the oedipal crisis.

The point, then, is not to unleash incest from its constraints but to ask what forms of normative kinship are understood to proceed as structural necessities from that taboo.

sub specie aeternitatis: In its essential or universal form or nature

prounce it like this

melancholy

(Salih 2002. p 131-3).
Like Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, and Excitable Speech, The Psychic Life of Power argues that prohibition and repression are constitutive of identity, and Butler specifies that what is being repressed is not just desire in general but homosexual desire (or homosexual cathexis) in particular. As in Gender Trouble, Butler asserts that gender is not a given but a process, masculinity and femininity are ‘accomplishments’, while heterosexuality is an ‘achievement’ (PLP: 132, 135). Now Butler asks how these processes, accomplishments and achievements come about, at what cost to the subject and to other subjects who may be oppressed and negated in the process.

In order to achieve a coherent heterosexual identity something has to be given up and, as before, what is relinquished is the primary homosexual cathexis that characterizes the pre-oedipal id (see Chapter 2, pp. 54– 6). Prohibition, repudiation and loss form the basis of heterosexual ego formation, and both heterosexuals and homosexuals live in a heterosexual culture of gender melancholy where the loss of primary homosexual attachments may not be grieved (PLP: 139). Grief is not just a metaphor in Psychic and Butler draws out the parallels between Freud’s descriptions of psychic loss in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ and a contemporary heterosexual culture in which lost homosexual attachments may only be mourned with difficulty (PLP: 138). Butler regards this cultural inability as symptomatic of the lack of a public forum and language with which to mourn ‘the seemingly endless number of deaths’ from ‘the ravages of AIDS’ (PLP: 138). Although this is a poignant argument, the elision of metaphorical and real mourning might be taken to imply that the heterosexual subject is aware of what she or he has ‘lost’ but is unable or unwilling to acknowledge and declare it. All the same, Butler is developing one of Gender Trouble’s most powerful contentions – that heterosexuality emerges from a repudiated homosexuality that is preserved in the very structure of that repudiation. Abjected homosexual cathexes do not simply disappear, and both Excitable Speech and earlier chapters of The Psychic Life of Power have prepared the ground for Butler’s assertion that repudiation and prohibition actually require homosexuality in order to constitute themselves. Far from obliterating homosexuality, it is sustained by the very structures that prohibit it. ‘[H]omosexuality is not abolished but preserved, though preserved precisely in the prohibition on homosexuality’, Butler insists (PLP: 142). [R]enunciation requires the very homosexuality that it condemns, not as its external object, but as its own most treasured source of sustenance. The act of renouncing homosexuality thus paradoxically strengthens homosexuality, but it strengthens homosexuality precisely as the power of renunciation. (PLP: 143) Butler’s situating of homosexuality at the heart of a homophobic and ‘homosexually panicked’ culture is of obvious political significance, as what is considered abject and unacceptable is posited as the source of heterosexual identity (although of course Butler does not formulate the idea in terms of ‘sources’). Gender identity is ‘acquired’ through the repudiation of homosexual attachments, and the abjected same-sex object of desire is installed in the ego as a melancholic identification, so that I can only be a woman to the extent that I have desired a woman, and I can only be a man to the extent that I have desired a man. Because heterosexual identity is founded on prohibited desire for members of the same sex, to desire a member of the same sex as an adult is to ‘panic’ gender or, in other words, to place an apparently coherent and stable heterosexual identity at risk by revealing that it is in fact far from stable or coherent (PLP: 136). The heterosexual subject’s homosexual desire is sublimated rather than destroyed, while disavowal and repudiation structure the ‘performance’ of gender. Performative gender was discussed in Chapter 3, and in Psychic Butler seems to conflate performativity, performance and psychotherapy as she argues that what is ‘acted out’ in these ‘gender performances’ is the unresolved grief of repudiated homosexuality (PLP: 146). As in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Butler focuses on ‘cross-gendered identification’, or drag, as a paradigm for thinking about homosexuality, since drag is an allegory of heterosexual melancholy in which the (male) drag performer takes on the feminine gender he has repudiated as a possible object of love. Extending this paradigm to gender identity in general, Butler asserts that ‘the “truest” lesbian melancholic is the strictly straight woman, and the “truest” gay male melancholic is the strictly straight man’ (PLP: 146– 7). In other words, heightened or exaggerated ‘straight’ identity is symptomatic of repudiated homosexual desire in a culture of heterosexual melancholy, where repudiated desires ‘return’ as what Butler calls ‘hyperbolic identifications’ (PLP: 147). The homosexual melancholic may be characterized by a different kind of loss, this time not a psychic one, but the real loss of people who have died from Aids and who remain ungrieved in a heterosexist, anti-gay culture that does not permit the mourning of these deaths. Homosexual identities may also be founded on a refused heterosexual cathexis that resembles heterosexual melancholia, but, although Butler asserts the political promise of what she calls ‘gay melancholia’ (PLP: 147), she also argues that refused heterosexual cathexis may leave heterosexuality intact by missing the opportunity to expose its weaknesses and fissures (PLP: 148). Butler accordingly affirms the political potential of acknowledging melancholy and loss by giving up all claims to ontological coherence and embracing, rather than repudiating, sexed and gendered ‘alterity’

(Salih 2002. p 133-4)
AFFIRMATIVE MELANCHOLIA

Previous chapters have emphasized the importance of melancholia to Butler’s theories, and the idea is similarly central to Psychic, where it is argued that melancholia initiates representation as well as constituting a means of representation in itself. Without loss and the resulting melancholia there would be no need for the metaphorical description of the ego in psychoanalytic theory, since it is melancholia that both necessitates and facilitates that description. Moreover, melancholia and, for that matter, the ego, are tropes that are rendered in topographical terms – in other words, the metaphors used by psychoanalysts to represent the ego and melancholia are spatial. The most prominent among these tropes is that of the the ego turning against itself, and Butler argues that the turn precipitated by loss and the ensuing melancholia are constitutive of an an ego that does not exist prior to the turn (PLP: 171).

It is loss that necessitates the description of the psychic ‘landscape’, since, if the ego were not ‘impaired’ in this way, there would be no need for psychoanalytic theory and its metaphorical renditions of psychic life.

Melancholia initiates psychic life and, by exceeding the power structures in which subjects are formed, it presents the possibility for subversion and agency. At least part of this ‘excess’ is ontological, since the melancholic subject is neither self-identical nor singular. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ the ego takes itself as an object and directs its violent anger against itself, an action that has characterized the accounts of the ego Butler has discussed. Now Butler argues that melancholia is cultivated by the state and internalized by citizens who are not aware of their relationship to an authority that conceals itself. And yet, even though it would seem that melancholia is an effect of power, there are ways of deploying the subject’s self-violence and constitutive melancholia to subversive ends.

‘Bhabha argues that melancholia is not a form of passivity, but a form of revolt that takes place through repetition and metonymy’, Butler states, referring to the postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha. Following Bhabha’s insight she asserts that aggressive melancholia can be ‘marshalled’ in the service of mourning and of life by killing off the critical agency or superego and turning the ego’s ‘turned back’ aggression outwards (PLP: 190– 1). There are forms of melancholia that do not involve the violent self-beratement described by Hegel, Nietzsche and so on, and Butler argues that acknowledging the trace of loss that inaugurates the subject’s emergence will lead to its psychic survival.

Following Derrida, Butler insists that recognizing one’s constitutive melancholia will involve accepting one’s Otherness, since melancholia is a process in which the other is installed as an identification in the ego (PLP: 195– 6). The notion of ontological autonomy must therefore be given up as a fiction. ‘To claim life . . . is to contest the righteous psyche, not by an act of will, but by submission to a sociality and linguistic life that makes such acts possible, one that exceeds the bounds of the ego and its “autonomy”’, writes Butler; ‘to persist in one’s being means to be given over from the start to social terms that are never fully one’s own’ (PLP: 197).

This echoes Butler’s contention in Excitable Speech that the subject is constituted by interpellatives it did not choose, and in the concluding pages of Psychic Butler reiterates her point that interpellation works by failing, since it never fully constitutes the subject it ‘hails’. All the same, the subject’s relationship to interpellation and power remains ambivalent, since the ‘call’ of the law brings the subject into being by subjecting it. The ambivalent Self marked by loss is tenuous at best, but agency lies in giving up any claim to coherence or self-identity by submitting to interpellation and subversively misrecognizing the terms by which we are hailed. Such refusals and misrecognitions take place within the power structures that subject and control us, and this might lead us to question how far submission is a means of agency and whether it is possible to recognize it as such. Butler has returned to these questions in recent discussions of mourning, melancholia and the ontological risks of self-incoherence in her two lectures, ‘What Is Critique?’ and Antigone’s Claim, along with the co-authored book Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.

SUMMARY
In The Psychic Life of Power Butler deploys psychoanalytic, Foucauldian and Althusserian theoretical paradigms (among others) to discuss the subject’s relation to power. The subject is passionately attached to the law that both subjects and constitutes it, and it exists in an ambivalent relation to power structures that it desires rather than not desiring at all. Butler criticizes Foucault for leaving the psyche out of his accounts of power, the soul and the body, and she asserts that there is potential for subversive excess in a psyche that is never fully determined by the laws that subject it. Furthermore, the interpellative ‘calls’ of the law described by Althusser need not be sovereign or effective, and Butler discerns further potential for subversion in the failure of these performatives. If it is acknowledged, melancholia itself may be the occasion for affirmation and subversion and, although Butler once again characterizes sexed/gendered identities as arising from primary loss or foreclosure, she argues that acknowledging the trace of the Other is the only way the subject will become anything at all. Agency lies in giving up any claim to self coherence, while risking one’s ontological status may constitute a means of successful revolt (Salih 2002. p 135).

(Salih 2002. p 131-4).

Resistance psyche

This line of causation is important, since, if the subject were merely the effect of power, it would be hard to see how it could subvert existing power structures. Butler insists on the subject’s agency as ‘the assumption of a purpose unintended by power, one that could not have been derived logically or historically, that operates in a relation of contingency and reversal to the power that makes it possible, to which it nevertheless belongs’ (PLP: 15). The subject’s relationship to power is ambivalent: it depends on power for its existence, and yet it also wields power in unexpected, potentially subversive ways. We will return to ambivalence and agency in due course (Salih 2002. p 121).

The ‘possibility of resistance’ is crucial to Butler’s account of the subject, and she asks how Foucault can account for the psychic resistance to power if the psyche/soul as he formulates it is no more than an imprisoning effect. Conversely, by training a Foucauldian lens on psychoanalytic theory, Butler raises the question as to whether psychic resistance is an effect of power, a discursive production rather than a means of undermining power. Resistance takes place within discourse or the law, but what Butler calls a ‘psychic remainder’ – the element of the psyche that is ‘left over’, so to speak, when discursive operations have done their work – signifies the limits of normalization even while it is also clear that the unconscious does not escape the power relations by which it is structured. Butler also raises the question of what she calls ‘the problem of bodies in Foucault’. If the soul is the prison of the body as Foucault claims it is, then does this mean that a pre-existing body is acted upon by disciplinary structures? In her early article, ‘Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions’, Butler sets out the following ‘paradox’ in Foucault’s theorizations of bodies and discourses: although Foucault asserts that bodies are discursively constructed, his descriptions of the mechanisms of legal inscription seem to presuppose that they pre-exist the law (FPBI: 603). Departing from (or perhaps developing) this paradox in Psychic, Butler argues that body and soul are discursive formations that emerge simultaneously through the sublimation of body into soul. ‘Sublimation’ is a psychoanalytic term describing the transformation or diversion of sexual drives into ‘cultural’ or ‘moral’ activities, and Butler uses it to describe the process whereby the body is subordinated and partly destroyed as what she calls ‘the dissociated Self’ emerges. (This definition of sublimation is taken from Wright 1992: 416– 17.) However, Butler argues that the sublimation of body into soul or psyche leaves behind a ‘bodily remainder’, which exceeds the processes of normalization and survives as what Butler calls ‘a kind of constitutive loss’ (PLP: 92). ‘The body is not a site on which a construction takes place’, Butler argues; ‘it is a destruction on the occasion of which a subject is formed’ (PLP: 92). Once again we and ourselves in the realm of Butlerian paradox, but this is an elaboration of the paradox that is central to Psychic: the subject comes into being when her body is acted upon and destroyed (presumably by discourse?), which means that this is a productive destruction or, perhaps, a sublation or Aufhebung, since both the body and the psyche are simultaneously formed and destroyed within discursive structures. The contrast between psychoanalytic and Foucauldian formulations of the subject should be clear: whereas in the former the psyche and possibly also the body, are sites of excess and possible resistance, for Foucault all resistance takes place within the terms of the law – indeed, resistance is an effect of the law. ‘[R]esistance appears as the effect of power’, Butler writes, paraphrasing Foucault, ‘as a part of power, its self-subversion’ (PLP: 93). Even so, within the Foucauldian model of myriad and pervasive power structures, the law may be subversively reiterated and repeated in order to destabilize existing norms, and Butler asks how and in what direction it is possible to work the power relations by which subjects are worked (PLP: 100). Since the Foucauldian subject is always in the process of construction, these processes are vulnerable to repetition, and, by implication, subversion, yet Butler notes the risk of renormalization within this model of identity, and she wonders how resistance may be derived from discourse itself (PLP: 93, 94). Once again reading Foucauldian theory through a psychoanalytic lens, Butler argues that, whereas Foucault claims that psychoanalysis sees the law as separate from desire, there can be no desire without the law that produces and sustains it. We have returned to the Freudian notion of libidinally-invested law and a prohibition that is in itself a form of desire, so that, rather than claiming that the unconscious is located outside power structures, Butler argues that power itself possesses an unconscious that provides the conditions for radical reiteration. It is because the injurious terms of the law by which subjects are socially constituted are vulnerable to repetition and reiteration that subjects accept and occupy these terms. ‘Called by an injurious name, I come into social being and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially’, Butler asserts (PLP: 104). The operations of name-calling, or interpellation, and the passionate pursuit of the law complement Butler’s Foucauldian and psychoanalytic formulations, and they will be considered in the next section (Salih 2002. p 126-8).

whereas Butler argues that power simultaneously acts on and activates the subject by naming it. ‘To the extent that naming is an address, there is an addressee prior to the address’, Butler argues, ‘but given that the address is a name which creates what it names, there appears to be no “Peter” without the name “Peter” ’ (PLP: 111). Again, this might sound paradoxical, but in fact Butler’s formulation is structurally identical to her previous reversals of cause and effect in Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter and Excitable Speech where, as you will recall, there is no doer behind the deed but the ‘doing’ itself is everything. As in her previous discussions of interpellation, Butler casts doubt on who or what exactly is interpellated by a law that confers social identity in subjection, and she also questions the performative efficacy of the law. The call of the law is not a divine performative, since there are ways of turning around that indicate what Butler calls ‘a willingness not to be – a critical desubjectivation – in order to expose the law as less powerful than it seems’ (PLP: 130). Anticipating her essay, ‘What Is Critique?’,

which also insists on the subversive potential of giving up the claim to a coherent identity, Butler asks how it is possible to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire, and how laws exploit subjects that allow themselves to be subordinated in order to take up their positions in society. Rather than obediently responding to the terms by which one is interpellated, a more ethical and subversive mode of being is, paradoxically, failing to be by not recognizing oneself in the call of the law (PLP: 131).

The subject cannot ‘be’ in any coherent sense anyway, since we know from Butler’s previous accounts that it is haunted by its abjected and socially unacceptable desires. Indeed, like Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Psychic continues to insist on the melancholia of gendered and sexed identities that will always and inevitably exceed the terms by which they are socially constituted (Salih 2002. p 130).

Foucault power psyche

To this end she concentrates on Foucault’s neglect to explain how power comes to inhabit the subject’s interiority, rendering him docile. Foucault makes reference to the subject’s interiority in his description of the Panopticon, a prison whose architectural arrangement incorporates such observational efficiency that it allows the prisoner no privacy. But ‘no privacy’ is a misleading description in this instance, because the prisoner[s secret life, his inner dreams and desires, are not so much thwarted by his imprisonment as they are constituted and affirmed. In other words, his personal interiority is so effectively inculcated with disciplinary expectation that he is the psychic instrument of his own compliance — ‘he becomes the principle of his own subjection’ (Foucault 1982, 203). Foucault eschews psychological explanations of this process and elides its actual operation by focusing on the totality of its outcome, using the word ‘soul’ to evoke power’s effectiveness in seizing the very core of the subject’s being.

Butler believes that a psychoanalytic elaboration of subject formation represents a much les totalizing and deterministic view of the subject because it demarcates the normative demands of the Symbolic order from the deregularizing eccentricity of the individual’s psyche, or unconscious. In other words, because the unconscious exceeds power’s normative conventions its operations are inherently resistant to power’s demands. Thus, instead of Foucault’s rather disheartening suggestion that the interiority of the body is the unilateral effect of disciplinary power, Butler will argue that the psyche’s internal dissonance and resistance represents a space whose transvaluations might help us conceive ‘a radically conditioned form of agency’ (Butler Psychic Life of P 1997, 15) (Kirby 2006: 116)

The body is not a site on which a construction takes place; it is a destruction on the occasion of which a subject is formed. The formation of this subject is at once the framing, subordination, and regulation of the body, and the mode in which that destruction is preserved (in the sense of sustained and embalmed) in normalization (Butler, Psychic Life of P. 92, cited in Kirby 118).

If the soul is the normalizing ideal through which the subject assumes coherence as an embodied subject, in a body whose identity is specularized and discursively regularized into social legibility (an ideal, an imago), then Butler surmises that the body that enables this process continues to endure in some way, even though it is sublimated within the process of normalization. Happily then, things are not frozen into place, as if normalization is a straightforward process that can be finessed once and for all.

Sublimation must constantly be reinstated and maintained, and this means that the subject is always in the process of coming into being with the shifting valencies of social reinscription (Kirby 119).

As Butler explains it, because the sign’s original intention is perverted and changed when read through a different context, meaning and truth are always provisional, unstable and in need of repair to re-establish their standing, their authority. If this structural stutter in power’s operation is truly intrinsic to subjectivation, then the subject’s mandatory subordination to power is never a process of docile compliance (Kirby 2006, 119).

Butler makes an interesting observation between psychoanalysis and Foucault: the former, the subject (of the Symbolic) is differentiated from the psyche (the interiority of the individual that exceeds social regulation), and in the latter the subject, or soul, emerges from a body that enables subjectivation while somehow preceding and exceeding its injunctions. Butler muses that perhaps the Foucaultian body and the psychoanalytic psyche have interchangeable functions, but how might this blurring of terms prove suggestive for a more radical appreciation of identity and agency?

If power is haunted by the ghostly residue of the body, something it can’t shake off, then the psychic life of power incorporates an internal disjunction that does two things at once: on the one hand, it incites a performative iteration of norms in order to reinstate their authority and, on the other, this very repetition derails the possibility of power’s unilateral efficacy as a purely dominating force. In other words, there will always be a ‘misfit’, some sort of interruption between the demand to conform and the individual’s capacity to faithfully comply. And this rewriting, or rerouting, marks the ambivalence and perversion that is the psychic life of power (Kirby, 2006: 119).

Melancholia part 1 of 2

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 53

In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ Freud distinguishes between mourning, which is the reaction to a real loss, usually the death of a loved one, and melancholia. Since the melancholic does not always know what he or she has lost and is in fact sometimes unaware of having ‘lost’ anything at all, Freud regards it as a pathological condition resembling depression. He argues that, instead of ‘getting over’ and accepting the loss, the melancholic response is to take the lost object into the ego by identifying with it.

Identification is a concept that is central to Freud’s theories of the structuring of the mind into ego, superego and id and, as you might expect, denotes the process and effects of identifying with others, often as a response to loss.

Introjection is the process whereby the subject takes objects from the outside world into itself and preserves them in the ego, and is closely related to identification. In fact, identification takes place through introjection as an object is metaphorically ‘installed’ in the ego, and Butler will argue that introjection is not the only way in which identification takes place.

In The Ego and the Id Freud no longer regards melancholia as a pathology or mental illness, but he now describes all ego formation as a melancholic structure. Freud claims that in the process of ego-formation a child’s primary object-cathexes are transformed into an identification, a formulation that is not as complicated as it might sound once you have deciphered the Freudian terminology. Initially the infant desires one or other of its parents (these are its primary object-cathexes), but the taboo against incest means that these desires have to be given up. Like the melancholic who takes the lost object into heror himself and thereby preserves it, the ego introjects the lost object (the desired parent) and preserves it as an identification. ‘[A]n object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego – that is . . . an object-cathexis has been replaced by an identification’, Freud writes (1923: 367). The ego is therefore a repository of all the desires it has had to give up, or as Freud puts it, ‘the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and . . . it contains the history of those object-choices’ (1923: 368).

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2002. p 53.

Mourning: the response to a real loss.

Melancholia: the response to an imagined loss. Object-cathexis: the desire for an object; in this case, one’s mother or father.

Identification: the process by which one comes to identify with someone or something; in this context, the object that has been lost. Identifications take place through introjection or incorporation.

Introjection: the process whereby objects from the outside world are taken into and preserved in the ego.

Incorporation: Dispositions: the process whereby objects are preserved on the surface of the body (Freud does not discuss incorporation in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ or The Ego and the Id). whether, from birth onwards, you desire members of the same or the opposite sex.

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.Routledge, 2002. p 54.

If your primary desire is for your mother, you will introject the figure of your mother and establish an identification with her; conversely, if your primary desire is for your father, you will substitute your impermissible object-cathexis for an identification with him. Freud is not sure what determines the primary object-cathexis – i.e. why the infant desires one parent rather than the other – but he gets around this problem by attributing the direction of the infant’s desire to what he calls dispositions.

By ‘disposition’ he appears to mean the infant’s innate desire for a member of the opposite or the same sex, but Freud expresses some hesitation on this subject in his description of the development of the ‘little girl’. Freud writes that, after relinquishing her father as a primary love-object, the girl ‘will bring her masculinity into prominence and identify with her father (that is, with the object that has been lost) instead of with her mother. This will clearly depend on whether the masculinity in her disposition – whatever that may consist in – is strong enough [i.e. to identify with her father]’ (1923: 372). It would seem that object-cathexes are the result of primary dispositions, i.e. whether one is innately ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ to start with, and, as you might expect by now, Butler refutes Freud’s somewhat tentative postulation of innate sexual ‘dispositions’.

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2002. p 54.

Melancholic Heterosexuality

Now let us look at what Butler does with Freud. Butler is interested in the ‘dispositions’ Freud glosses over somewhat hastily, but, rather than accepting that they are innate, she wants to know how ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ dispositions can be traced to an identification, and where those identifications take place. In fact, Butler asserts that dispositions are the effects of identifications with the parent of the same/ opposite sex rather than the causes of those identifications; in other words, desire does not come first. ‘What are these primary dispositions on which Freud himself apparently founders?’ she asks, noting the ‘hyphenated doubt’ (‘– whatever that may consist in –’) with which he interrupts his assertion (GT: 60). While Freud describes ego formation as a melancholic structure because the infant is forced to give up its desire for its parents in response to the taboo against incest, Butler argues that the taboo against incest is preceded by the taboo against homosexuality (although curiously, she does not specify her source here) (GT: 63). This seems to imply that the child’s primary desire is always for the parent of the same sex – after all, why do you need a taboo if there is nothing to prohibit? – and although Butler argues that the law produces the desire it subsequently prohibits, she is still unspecific as to why one desire is produced and repressed before another. ‘Although Freud does not explicitly argue in its favour, it would appear that the taboo against homosexuality must precede the heterosexual incest taboo’, writes Butler (GT: 64) and, although she reiterates this assertion several times in this section, the qualifiers she introduces here (‘Although Freud’, ‘it would appear’) resemble the ‘hyphenated doubt’ that she notes in Freud’s description of dispositions. All the same, the assertion that the taboo against homosexuality precedes the incest taboo is crucial to Butler’s argument that gender and sex identities are formed in response to prohibition. Rather than regarding gender or sex as innate, Butler asserts that ‘gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity’ (GT: 63). Since the ‘prohibition’ to which Butler refers is the taboo against homosexuality, it is clear that for Butler all gender identity is founded on a primary, forbidden homosexual cathexis or desire. If melancholia is the response to real or imagined loss, and if heterosexual gender identity is formed on the basis of the primary loss of the same-sexed object of desire, it follows that heterosexual gender identity is melancholic. Butler’s Foucauldian appropriation of Freud’s theories of mourning, melancholia and ego formation and her argument that heterosexuality is founded on primary homosexual desire constitute one of Gender Trouble’s most important achievements and, since the theory of melancholic gender identities and identifications underscores so much of her subsequent work, I will quote Butler at length here by way of summary:

If feminine and masculine dispositions are the result of the effective internalization of [the taboo against homosexuality], and if the melancholic answer to the loss of the same-sexed object is to incorporate and, indeed, to become that object through the construction of the ego-ideal, then gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity.

Further, this identity is constructed and maintained by the consistent application of this taboo, not only in the stylization of the body in compliance with discrete categories of sex but in the production and ‘disposition’ of sexual desire . . . dispositions are not the primary sexual facts of the psyche, but produced effects of a law imposed by culture and by the complicitous and transvaluating acts of the ego ideal (Judith Butler. Gender Trouble 63-4, cited in Salih, 56).

gender

Sara Salih. Judith ButlerRoutledge 2002.

What Butler means is that gender is an act or a sequence of acts that is always and inevitably occurring, since it is impossible to exist as a social agent outside the terms of gender (GT: 5 cited in Salih 47).

Butler argues that sex and gender are discursively constructed and that there is no such position of implied freedom beyond discourse. Culturally constructed sexuality cannot be repudiated, so that the subject is left with the question of how to acknowledge and ‘do’ the construction it is already in (GT: 31). Gender Trouble will describe how genders and sexes are currently ‘done’ within the heterosexual matrix, while elaborating on how it is possible to ‘do’ those constructions differently (Salih, 48).

‘gender is not a noun[but it] proves to be performative, that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed’ (GT: 25 Salih, 50).

Reading structuralist and psychoanalytic accounts of gender, identity and the law through a Foucauldian lens Butler

  • gives what she calls ‘a discursive account of the cultural production of gender’; in other words, she works from the premise that gender is a discursive construct, something that is produced, and not a ‘natural fact’;
  • and characterizes the law as multiple, proliferating and potentially self-subverting as opposed to the singular, prohibitive and rigidly repressive law posited by other theorists (for example, Lacan) (Salih, Sara. Judith Butler: 51).

‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (GT: 25 cited in Salih 63).

‘That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’, she writes (GT: 136; my emphasis).

Once again we return to the notion that there is no doer behind the deed, no volitional agent that knowingly ‘does’ its gender, since the gendered body is inseparable from the acts that constitute it. All the same, in the account of parody and drag that follows this description it does at times sound as though there is an actor or a ‘doer’ behind the deed, and Butler later admits that in Gender Trouble she ‘waffled’ between describing gender in terms of linguistic performativity and characterizing it as straightforward theatre. Her theories are clarified in Bodies That Matter where Butler emphasizes the Derridean and Austinian underpinnings of performativity that are as yet only implicit in Gender Trouble (Salih. 2002. p 65).

Gender does not happen once and for all when we are born, but is a sequence of repeated acts that harden into the appearance of something that’s been there all along. If gender is ‘a regulated process of repetition’ taking place in language, then it will be possible to repeat one’s gender differently, as drag artists do (and you might also recall my wardrobe analogy – the ripped clothes and the sequins representing my attempts to ‘do’ my gender in subversive and unexpected ways). As I argued previously, you cannot go out and acquire a whole new gender wardrobe for yourself, since, as Butler puts it, ‘[t]here is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very “taking up” is enabled by the tool lying there’ (GT: 145). So you have to make do with the ‘tools’, or in my example, the ‘clothes’ that you already have, radically modifying them in ways which will reveal the ‘unnatural’ nature of gender. There are two problems with this formulation: one is that the manner of taking up the tool will be determined as well as enabled by the tool itself – in other words, subversion and agency are conditioned, if not determined, by discourses that cannot be evaded. This leads to the second problem, which is that, if subversion itself is conditioned and constrained by discourse, then how can we tell that it is subversion at all? What is the difference between subversive parody and the sort of ‘ordinary’ parody that Butler claims everyone is unwittingly engaged in anyway. All gender is parodic, but Butler warns that ‘[p]arody by itself is not subversive’ and she poses the important question as to which performances effect the various destabilizations of gender and sex she describes, and where those performances take place (GT: 139). There are some forms of drag that are definitely not subversive, but serve only to reinforce existing heterosexual power structures – in Bodies, Butler cites Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Tootsie as an example of what she calls ‘high het entertainment’ (see Chapter 3, this volume), and we might also add the more recent film Mrs Doubtfire in which Robin Williams gives a cross-dressed performance as a nanny. Neither of these drag performances are subversive, since they serve to reinforce existing distinctions between ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘gay’ and ‘straight’.

Butler’s claim on the penultimate page of Gender Trouble that ‘[t]he task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat, or, indeed to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself’ (GT: 148) presents a similar problem: she has already asserted that to describe identity as an effect is not to imply that identity is ‘fatally determined’ or ‘fully artificial and arbitrary’, and yet at times it sounds as though the subject she describes is in fact trapped within a discourse it has no power to evade or to alter. In which case, ‘how to repeat’ will already be determined in advance, and what looks like agency is merely yet another effect of the law disguised as something different. All the same, this is certainly not a view Butler expresses, and she seems optimistic about the possibilities of denaturalizing, proliferating and unfixing identities in order to reveal the constructed nature of heterosexuality. A proliferation of identities will reveal the ontological possibilities that are currently restricted by foundationalist models of identity (i.e. those theories which assume that identity is simply there and fixed and final). This is not, then, ‘the death of the subject’, or if it is, it is the theoretical death of an old, fixed subject, and the birth of a new, constructed one characterized by subversive possibility and agency. ‘Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency’, Butler affirms (GT: 147; see also CF: 15), and this leads her to refute another assumption popular among critics who are hostile to so-called ‘postmodern’ formulations of identity: ‘[t]he deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated’ (GT: 148) (Salih.2002. p 67).

Gender Trouble calls the category of the subject into question as Butler engages in a genealogical critique that analyzes the conditions of the subject’s emergence within discourse. Butler deploys psychoanalytic, Foucauldian and feminist theories in her discussions of homosexuality and heterosexuality and their mutual construction within the law. Heterosexual identities are constructed in relation to their abjected homosexual ‘Other’, but melancholic heterosexuals are haunted by the trace of this ‘Other’ which is never finally or fully abjected. This means that identities are by no means as straight, straightforward or singular as they appear and may be subversively worked against the grain in order to reveal the unstable, resignifiable nature of all gender identities. Some of these subversive practices are outlined in Gender Trouble and are analyzed further in her next book, Bodies That Matter (Salih 2002. p 71)

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.

salih interview 2: conscience

From “Changing the Subject”, J. Butler interview that originally appeared in JAC 20:4 (2000), pp. 731-65, reprinted in The Judith Butler Reader ed. Sara Salih. Blackwell 2004. pp. 325-356.

Question: Extending Althusser’s notion of interpellation, you posit that conscience is central to subject formation, in that the hailed individual inevitably turns around to encounter the interpellating force. In The Psychic Life of Power, you write:

‘Submission’ to the rules of the dominant ideology might then be understood as a submission to the necessity to prove innocence in the face of accusation, a submission to the demand for proof, an execution of that proof, and acquisition of the status of subject in and through compliance with the terms of the interrogative law. To become a ‘subject’ is thus to have been presumed guilty, then tried and declared innocent. Because this declaration is not a single act, but a status incessantly reproduced, to become ‘subject’ is to be continuously in the process of acquitting oneself of the accusation of guilt.

Although you draw primarily on Freud and Nietzsche to construct this theory, it seems also to allude to Judeo-Christian notions of guilt, conscience, and “the law of the father.” Would you clarify why you think a theory of conscience is necessary to explain subject formation?

Butler: The basic presupposition of the argument that you’re citing—there are other arguments that I have for this, too—is that part of what it means to be a subject is to be born into a world in which norms are already acting on you from the very beginning. What are those norms? There’s a certain regulation of the subject from the outset: you’re born in a hospital (or somewhere else), you’re given a name, you’re ordered in that particular way; you’re assigned a gender, and very often a race; you’re inculcated quite quickly into a name and therefore a lineage (if you stay with the biological mother or both biological mother and father); you’re immediately submitted to a calculative logic—weight and height—which becomes the cause of trauma for the rest of your life. And there are a set of fantasies that are immediately imposed: what this will be if it is a boy, what it will be if it is a girl, what it will be, how it will relate to the family, how it will or will not be the same as others.

Very often—at least in Judaism, which is my context—you are given a name that recalls someone who is dead, so already you are the site of a mourning; and you cannot anticipate what the effects of that will be. And as the subject is reared, certain civilizing norms are imposed: how to eat; how to defecate; how to speak; how to do all these things correctly and in the right time and place; how distinctions between public and private are established; how sexuality is managed, controlled, structured, sequestered. There is a set of legitimating norms, and they all come with their punishments or their costs, so that as the child emerges into subjecthood, it emerges in relationship to a set of norms that give it its place, its legitimacy, its lovability, its promise of security; and it risks all of these things when it abdicates those norms. What is punishment for the child but the perceived withdrawal of love?

And that’s great, that’s terrific, that’s how it works. The child learns how to do that which will somehow bring forth love (or perhaps learns how to instigate the withdrawal of love for another reason); there is some negotiation with love at the level of learning norms, and this is inevitable to the extent that a child will, of necessity, despite its best judgment, be passionately attached to whoever is bringing it up. That is, of course, the humiliation of all humans: that we love these beings who happen to be our parents or who happen to be our caregivers, and it’s terrible to find that we have absolutely no choice but to love them and that the love is absolute. It’s a deep humiliation, I think, for any thinking human. This is not just the relationship of the child to an external norm or to a norm that is imposed by someone or to a relationship to an Other who comes to stand for normativity in some way. To the extent that the child develops the capacity to take itself as an object, to regulate itself, to think about itself, to make a decision for itself, it develops a reflexivity that has already taken that norm in in some way. So, it’s not always in consultation with the external exemplification of the norm.

So, how does the norm become internalized, and internalized as a feature of the self? I would suggest that to become a subject is precisely to be one who has internalized the regulatory principles and who regulates one’s self. There is no subject who does not have this capacity for reflexivity, and this reflexivity does not exist without the internalization of that norm. But what do I mean by the “internalization of the norm”? A lot of behavioral psychology assumes that norms are more or less mechanically internalized, but I think that they can in fact take all kinds of forms, that they enter into the fantasy life of an individual and, as part of fantasy, take on shapes and forms and meanings and intensities that are in no sense mimetically related to how they’re existing in the outside world. It would be a mistake, for example, to say that if there is a severe parent there will be a severe superego. I’m not sure that this is at all true; in fact, sometimes the most severe superegos are those that are formed in relationship to radically absent parents as a way of producing a proximity in compensation for what was in fact not there. So, I think there is, as it were, a psychic life of power which is not the same as a social life of power, but the two are radically implicated in one another.

When you ask why a theory of conscience is necessary to explain subject formation, let me say that conscience is the relation to oneself that is formed in a way as a substitute and as a transfiguration of primary relations to others, and it is the moment when reflexivity emerges as a structure of the subject that is relatively independent of its relation to concrete existing social others. Nietzsche says it more strongly. He says that I only begin to think about myself as an object when I am asked to be accountable for something I have done, that the question of accountability is actually what inaugurates reflexivity. It’s a very, very strong claim, and there are many people who totally disagree with him and with me. Object relations theorists take me aside and say, “Judy, you’ve got to get out of this.” And it is theological, and it probably comes from my own Judaism, but I do find it interesting that I become an object to myself at the moment in which I am accountable to an Other.

The relation to myself that takes place is psychic and is complicated and does not necessarily replicate my relation to the Other; the I who takes myself to task is not the same as the Other who takes me to task. I may do it more severely; I may do it in ways the Other never would. And that incommensurability is crucial, but there is no subject yet without the specificity of that reflexivity. You might even say that the subject becomes inaugurated at the moment when the social power that acts on it, that interpellates it, that brings it into being through these norms is successfully implanted within the subject itself and when the subject becomes the site of the reiteration of those norms, even through its own psychic apparatus. I suppose that this would be why conscience is essential to the inception of the subject.

Q. Sounds like the voice of the Other within yourself.
A. Yes, which, of course, is and is not the Other.

butler psychic life foucault

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

Resistance as an effect of power

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

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

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

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

psychic operation of the norm

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

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

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