normative – Page 3

Giving Account JB again

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

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

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

Giving an Account

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even if morality supplies a set of norms that produce a subject in his or her intelligibility, it also remains a set of norms and rules that a subject most negotiate in a living and reflective way (10).

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

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

JB’s Foucautian take on things: There is no making of oneself (poiesis) outside of a mode of subjectivation (assujettisement) and, hence, no self-making outside of the norms that orchestrate the possible forms that a subject may take. The practice of critique then exposes the limits of the historical scheme of things, the epistemological and ontological horizon within which subjects come to be at all. To make oneself in such a way that one exposes those limits is precisely to engage in an aesthetics of the self that maintains a critical relation to existing norms (17).

Butler politics what makes a life livable

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

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

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

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

Gender Foucault

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

gender drag power

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

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

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

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

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

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

social transformation

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

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

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

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

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

butler althusser 1997

“Burning Acts, Injurious Speech” Excitable Speech 1977

J.L Austin

Constative utterance: actions performed by virtue of words

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

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

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

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

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

Excitable Speech

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

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

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

labuzi debate

Butler, Judith. “Competing Universalities” The Judith Butler Reader. 2003. page 263.

This essay is also in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality

In the Kantian vein, “transcendental” can mean: the condition without which nothing can appear. But it can also mean: the regulatory and constitutive conditions of the appearance of any given object. The latter sense is the one in which the condition is not external to the object it occasions, but is its constitutive condition and the principle of its development and appearance. The transcendental thus offers the criterial conditions that constrain the emergence of the thematizable. And if this transcendental field is not considered to have a historicity — that is, not considered to be a shifting episteme which might be altered and revised over time — it is unclear to me what place it can fruitfully have or an account of hegemony that seeks to sustain and promote a more radically democratic formulation of sex and sexual difference. 263

Psychoanalysis enters Foucauldian analysis precisely at the point where one wishes to understand the phantasmatic dimension of social norms. 264

Thus unconscious is also an ongoing psychic condition in which norms are registered in both normalizing and non-normalizing ways, the postulated site of their foritification, their undoing and their perversion, the

prior desire for social existence

JB. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford UP. 1997 pp. 18-19

If power works not merely to dominate or oppress existing subjects, but also to form subjects, what is this formation?

… and account of subjection, it seems, must be traced in the turns of psychic life … in the peculiar turning of a subject against itself that takes place in acts of self-reproach, conscience, and melancholia that work in tandem with processes of social regulation 18-19

🙂 Remember! The formation of the subject takes place through the incorporation of norms.

How does the subjection of desire require and institute the desire for subjection? … how are we to account for the desire for the norm and for subjection more generally in terms of a prior desire for social existence, a desire exploited by regulatory power?

a) the formation of the subject involves the regulatory formation of the psyche, including how might we rejoin the discourse of power with the discourse of psychoanalysis: and

b) make such a conception of the subject work as a notion of political agency in postliberatory times.

Incorporation? page 19, she says:

And yet, if we refuse the ontological dualism that posits the separation of the political and the psychic, it seems crucial to offer a critical account of psychic subjection in terms of the regulatory and productive effects of power. If forms of regulatory power are sustained in part through the formation of a subject, and if that formation takes place according to the requirements of power, specifically, as the incorporation of norms, then a theory of subject formation must give an account of this process of incorporation, and the notion of incorporation must be interrogated to ascertain the psychic topography it assumes. How does the subjection of desire require and institute the desire for subjection?

In claiming that social norms are internalized, we have not yet explained what incorporation or, more generally, internalization is, what it means for a norm to become internalized or what happens to the norm in the process of internalization (19).

The prior desire for social existence

Where social categories guarantee a recognizable and enduring social existence, the embrace of such categories, even as they work in the service of subjection, is often preferred to no social existence at all (20).

But if the very production of the subject and the ofrmation of that wil are the consequences of a primary subordination, then the vulnerability of the subject to a power not of its own making is unavoidable. That vulnerability qualifies the subject as an exploitable kind of being.

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.

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)