Category: ethics

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).

Thrown Subjects pt.2 Subject of Enjoyment

Practices of identity reproduction and new acts of identification also presuppose a subject of enjoyment that is structured around certain fantasies.  Fantasy is a narrative that covers-over or conceals the subject’s lack by providing an image of fullness, wholeness, or harmony, on the one hand, while conjuring up threats and obstacles to its realization on the other.  When successfully installed, a fantasmatic narrative hooks the subject ”via the enjoyment it procures” to a given practice or order, or a promised future practice or order, thus confering identity … the categories of enjoyment and fantasy are relevant for thinking about issues of ideology and ethics. (130)

difference between ethics and normative

Nevertheless, it is important in this regard to distinguish between our concept of ethics and our grounds for normative evaluation.  It will be recalled that for us ethics entails acknowledging the radical contingency of social existence and responding to its demands.  It is thus directly connected to the fundamental ontological commitments of our overall approach. By contrast, questions of normativity are directed at the concrete sets of social relations within which subjects find themselves, requiring the analyst to characterize those relations that are preceived to be oppressive or unfair in the name of alternative values or principles.  It is important here to stress that we concede a lexical priority to the ethical as against the normative … This has important implications because it means that our normative stances are always relative to the ultimate contingency of social relations and practices.  In other words, the norms and ideals that we project into our objects of study are intrinsically contingent, contestable and revisable.  Contingency necessarily penetrates the realm of the normative, which in turn indicates the need to develop a suitable ethos for conducting research.

closure of subjective identification

What might be termed our ethical critique of social practices thus focuses on the closure of subjective identification, which for us is just another name for the ideological.  Ideology it will be recalled is related to those practices and forms of identity which conceal or deny the inherent radical contingency of practices … ideology’s very function is to fantasmatically conceal such relations and structures of domination by keeping radical contingency at bay.  From this point of view, ethical critique demands detailed analyses of the kinds of fantasies underpinning social and political practices, as well as the exploration of ways such fantasies can be destabilized or modulated. (198)

dislocation normative ethical aspects

…the experience of dislocation, in which the inherent contingency of social relations becomes visible, is an important condition for the possibility of political practices.  The latter involves the public contestation of norms in the name of something new.  Significantly, the centrality we accord to the political dimension of practices already implies a normative point of view, which regards certain norms or social logics as worthy of public contestation.  Reactivating the political dimension thus presupposes the intrinsic contingency and unevenness of power underlying any decision from the point of view of an alternative vision, however implicit this might be.  The ethical aspect of our critical explanation is also linked to radical contingency, though this time in a more direct fashion because it concerns the way in which a subject confronts it in its various ontical manifestations, whether political or social. We examine the normative and ethical aspects of critique in turn.(192)

subordination domination oppression

Jason Glynos, David Howarth. “Interpretations, Mechanisms, and Logics” paper presented at 1st IDA World Conference Roskilde University, Denmark. Sept 8-10, 2008. pp.37.

Relations of Subordination

Those practices which appear not to invite or need public contestation of social norms, either by the subjects engaged in the practice, or by the theorist who is interpreting the practice.  In the absence of dislocations, existing social relations are reproduced in this mode without public contestation.  Here we might include everyday activities such as working, going on holiday, playing sport … All these activities may in fact involve and rely upon relations o subordination, but they are not experienced as oppressive, nor are they regarded as unjust by the analyst.

Relations of Oppression

Point to the features of a practice, or a regime of practices, that are challenged by subjects in the name of a principle or ideal allegedly denied or violated by the social practice itself.  Here the experiences of dislocation are symbolized in terms of a questioning of norms, which may be accompanied by political challenges to the practices or regime of practices examined.  But equally they may be met with renewed efforts to offset challenges and maintain the existing social relations.  Here the political dimension comes to the fore.

Relations of Domination

Point to the way subjects are judged by the theorist to be dominated or unjustly treated, whether or not the norms so judged are explicitly challenged by those engaged in the practice.  Here interpretation may focus on those practices which appear to actively prevent the public contestation of social norms from arising in the first place. In this case, social relations are understood to be reproduced without public contestation, either because dislocatory experiences are processed privately or informally, or because they do not arise at all.  They may take the form of ‘off the record’ complaints … made by employees amongst themselves, or even toward their managers, who then elicit, deflect, or satisfy requests … On the other hand, the concealing of dislocation will be accomplished most completely and effectively if subjects are rendered ideologically complicit in the practices they partake.  More generally, then, in the context of a set of dislocatory experiences, these ‘pre-emptive’ aspects of a practice seek to maintain existing social structures by muffling or guiding the process by which grievances are articulated, so that the existing social structure remains unthreatened.  An important part of contemporary labour process theory, organization theory, and critical management studies literature deals with precisely these aspects of social practices.  Moreover, since such activities are geared toward keeping public contestation at bay, they tend to be unofficial in character, in the sense that they operate in the interstices of official institutional practices.

Characterizing practices as fostering or reinforcing relations of domination immediately highlights the sociological and normative character of the approach we advocate.

After all, the very identification of a social norm as worthy of public contestation, as well as the claim that a norm is actively prevented from being contested, presupposes some view of social domination.  It implies that we already have some grasp of the practice, both sociologically and normatively.  And this is where social logics are particularly relevant, as they are crucial in making explicit the sociological and normative aspects of this process of characterization.   In this context, to highlight the political dimension of a practice entails pointing to those aspects of a practice which seek to generate, maintain, contain, or resolve the public contestation of social norms.  Put differently, the political aspects of a practice involve attempts to challenge and replace existing social structures, as well as attempts to neutralize such challenges in a transformist way (citing Gramsci Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 1971: 58-9)

Deconstructive Genealogy/Onto-ethical critique

What then does the task of incorporating a self-reflexive and self-critical ethos into the concrete problematization and explanation of social phenomena entail?  On the one hand, the ontological postulates of our approach concerning radical contingency have to inform the construction, investigation and explanation of social phenomenon (155).

We must develop a style of research that builds contingency into its very modus operandi, and which is open and attentive to possibilities disclosed by the research itself.

A Deconstructive Genealogy of a social practice or regime

The task here is to reactivate and make evident options that were foreclosed during the emergence of a practice – the clashes and forces which are repressed or defeated – in order to show how the present configuration of practices relies on exclusions that reveal the non-necessary character of the present social formation, and to explore the consequences and potential effects of such ‘repressions’.  On the other hand,

Onto-ethical critique

In the mode of what we could call an onto-ethical critique the task is to critically interrogate the conditions under which a particular social practice or regime grips its subjects despite its non-necessary character.  This mode of critique furnishes us with a means of critically interrogating the will to (fantasmatic) closure. 

However, both modes of critique are informed by an ethos of exercising a fidelity to contingency itself, by displaying other possibilities for political decision and identification as well as other modalities of identification.  Together they contribute to a practice of ethico-political interpretation. (155)

Ethics by Laclau

First, if the ethical has from the beginning a content necessarily attached to it, all other conceptions have to be rejected offhand as unethical.  It is not difficult to realize the authoritarian and ethnocentric consequences … from such an approach … But, second, … as the Habermasians do, not a dogmatism of the contents but of the procedures.  Have we advanced a single step with this new solution?  No, we are in the same place as before, because only somebody who has already accepted some substantial values will accept also the validity of those procedures.  It is only if a set of empty terms —’justice’, ‘truth’, ‘people’, etc. — become the names of the ethical, only if they are not necessarily attached to any content but are always given reversible contents through collectively elaborated radical investments, that something like a democratic society becomes possible.  This means an endless movement between the ethical and normative dimensions. 

… what kind of other link could exist between ethics and normativity?  My answer is: radical investment, a notion that requires clarification.

I have said the primary ethical experience is experience of a lack:  It is constituted by the distance between what is and what ought to be.  … the object bridging the distance does not have a content of its own.

… any positive moral evaluation consists in attributing to a particular content the role of bearer of one of the names of fullness.  If I say “socialism is just’ … I am identifying ‘justice’ as one of the  names of fullness with a content which cannot be locally derived from that name (because there is no inherent conceptual content associated to that name). … Here we have investment in an almost literal financial sense: the relevance of the terms is greatly increased by making it the embodiment of a fullness totally transcending it.  And this investment is radical because, justice being an empty term, nothing in it preannounced that socialism had to become the body incarnating it.  (Laclau in Laclau a Critical Reader, 2004: 291)

Radical investment, conceived in this sense, describes the way I see the basic structure of ethical action. 

Doesn’t that involve that anything goes, that there is no possibility of objective criteria to choose one rather than the other course of action?  … a sovereign chooser who, precisely because he is sovereign, does not have the ground for any choice. But ethical life is entirely different from that picture.  People are installed on both sides of the equation: they are, on the one hand, constructed as positions within a certain symbolic order; on the other hand, however, such an order is always a dislocated structure: it is destabilized by what … we could call the real of the structure.  These dislocations show themselves as the distance between the achievable fullness and what actually exists, and this distance is the source of the ethical experience conceived as the attempt to name the unnameable (which requires, as we have seen, a radical investment).  (Laclau in Laclau a Critical Reader, 2004: 287)

Enjoyment of closure

While political logics can be resolved into two main components — the logics of equivalence and difference — the logic of fantasy is defined solely by the function of closure.  Moreover, in concealing — suturing or closing off — the contingency of social relations, fantasy structures the subject’s mode of enjoyment in a particular way: let us call it an ‘enjoyment of closure’.  Thus, ethics is directly linked to the logic of fantasy because, whatever its ontical instantiation, the latter (fantasy) has closure as its principle of intelligibility, whereas ethics is related to the ‘traversal’ of fantasy in the name of an openness to contingency corresponding to an ‘enjoyment of openness’.  For us, then, fantasy and ethics pick out the subject as a subject of enjoyment. though social practices are capacious enough from our point of view to enable us to capture those aspects in which subjects are attentive to the radical contingency of social relations, it should be clear that fantasmatic logics are operative in social practices where the ideological dimension is foregrounded.  however, we have also seen that fantasmatic logics are equally operative in political practices.  But whereas political logics are used to explain the discursive shifts in the wake of a dislocatory moment, fantasmatic logics describe and account for the vector and modality of those discursive shifts, capturing the way in which the subject deals with the radical contingency of social relations as a subject of enjoyment (151-2).

Authentic versus Inauthentic

Here is the only slightly bewildering part of the whole book:

However it does not follow that the subject will engage with contingency in a more authentic way because of this confrontation (with contingency of social relations).  In using the term authenticity we simply aim to capture a subject’s generalized sensitivity or attentiveness to the always-already dislocated character of existing social relations, wherein creativity and surprise are accorded prominent roles.  But this implies that an inauthentic response to a dislocation is also possible.  We call the authentic response ethical, and the inauthentic response ideological… the radical contingency of social reality and identity can be acknowledged and tarried with, or it can be denied and concealed.  To what extent do subjects engage authentically with the radical contingency of social relations (where the ethical dimension is foregrounded)? 111

Dislocation serves as a device for articulating their fundamental ontological postulate — the radical contingency of social relations. And Dislocation allows GH to develop 2 dimensions ethical/ideological in which to characterize aspects of a practice or regime. 111

Modalities of subjectivity

Althusser’s model of ‘interpellation’, in which individuals are constituted or ‘hailed’ as subjects by recognizing certain signifiers and discourses as addressed to them, seems to presuppose an already constituted subject, which is able to ‘recognize’, ‘desire’, ‘know’, and so forth (cite Paul Hirst 1979) … After all, for Althusser, ‘individuals are always-already subjects’, whose ‘places’ in the existing social structures have been determined and fixed beforehand (cite Althusser 1971)

By contrast, … the category of the subject … is marked by a fundamental misrecognition that can never be transcended.  The subject is thus no more than a void in the symbolic order whose identity and character is determined only by its identifications and mode of enjoyment (cite Zizek 1989).

questions of ethics (and ideology) centre on the subject’s particular mode of enjoyment.  They address issues that arise from the different modalities of subjectivity in relation to the ultimate contingency of social existence.

How does a subject relate to the contingency of social life that is disclosed in dislocatory events?  How does it identify anew?  How does it translate its ‘radical investments’ into social and political practices?  How does a subject relate to its identifications and consequently to its own contingency?

It is perhaps worth emphasizing here that these modes of subjectivity should not be understood in cognitivist or intellectualist terms.  In other words, what we are trying to capture here with the categories of ideology and ethics has nothing whatsoever to do  with the idea that someone can apprehend and even consciously affirm a particular ontological schema rooted in the racial contingency of social relations.  This is because modes of subjectivity are also modes of enjoyment. and modes of enjoyment are always embodied in material practices, and thus not completely reducible to conscious apprehension.  It is with this in mind that one should approach the question of subjectivity and identification.  For example, does the mode of identification privilege the moment of closure and concealment (ideological dimension), or does it keep open the contingency of social relations (ethical dimension)?  (119-120).