subjectivity – Page 23

butler move from hegel

We are not mere dyads on our own, since our exchange is conditioned and mediated by language, by conventions, by a sedimentation of norms that are social in character and that exceed the perspective of those involved in the exchange (28)

Post-Hegelians like Adriana Cavarero ask “who are you” and thus try to suggest that Hegel’s dialectic of recognition gets it wrong when it envelopes the other within the “I.” Although as Butler points out, Hegel reveals the shortcomings of the Master and Slave dyad of recognition, requiring a further incorporation under the sphere of ethics or sittlich.., Butler is drawing parallels between Hegel’s ethical sphere and structure of normativity that underscores the ability for one to recognize an other.

Whereas The Phenomenology of Spirit moves from the scenario of the dyad toward a social theory of recognition, for Caverero it is necessary to ground the social in the dyadic encounter. She writes: “The “you” comes before the we, before the plural you and before the they.

Susceptibility to others that is unwilled, unchosen, that is a condition of our responsiveness to others, even a condition of our responsibility for them. It means, among other things, that this susceptibility designates a nonfreedom and, paradoxically, it is on the basis of this susceptibility over which we have no choice that we become responsible for others (87-88).

butler laplanche

Jean Laplanche contends that the limit to full articulation arrives, not because of a Lacanian “bar” that forecloses the return to a primary jouissance, but because of the overwhelming and enigmatic impressions made by the adult world in its specificity on the child. For Laplanche, there is no Other in some symbolic sense, just the various others who constiutute the caregiving adults in a child’s world. Indeed, for Laplanche there is no reason to assume that these caregivers must be oedipally organized as “father” and “mother.”

Note 19, page 142: Fletcher makes clear that Laplanche’s recourse to the “adult world” as the source of sexual messages is a significant departure from psychoanalytic accounts that assume that an Oedipal scene with Mother and Father structures desire at a primary level. … Fletcher notes that Laplanche’s theory of the “enigmatic signifier” emerges as a clear alternative to the Lacanian symbolic.

This counters the paternal law, linked to the structuralist account of the exchange of women and the universalist premises of “culture,” with a conception of the enigmatic signifier, which assumes not only that primary unconscious and sexual messages are impressed upon the child (constituting the meaning and efficacy of “primary seduction”) but that the primary others who make those impressions are themselves in teh grip of similar messages, which can never be fully decoded or recovered.

Fletcher asserts that Laplanche has clearly inaugurated a psychoanalytic possibility for explaining “those psychic trajectories that swerve from or attempt to rework the normalizing function of the paternal Law and its Oedipal polarities (e.g., various female and male homosexualities).” Although Fletcher does not show us precisely how this might work, he holds out this possibility as following from the displacement of the paternal law by the enigmatic signifier.

Second, he (Fletcher) points to a future project, namely, how to account for gender in the wake of the Oedipus’s displacement from primacy: “What Laplanche’s reworking of the drives in the context of primary seduction now leaves unclear or untheorised, is how the psychic constitution and inscription of a sexually and genitally differentiated body image (the repression and symbolization of what enigmatic signifiers?), the ground or at least terrain from the formation of gendered identities, is now to be rethought”

butler desire recognition

The norms by which I seek to make myself recognizable are not fully mine (35).

To revise recognition as an ethical project, we will need to see it as, in principle, unsatisfiable (43).

🙂 Butler maintains that going back to some of her earliest debates over the perils of seeking to come establish common principles on the identity of political subjects in order to engage in political action. At that time Butler discouraged attempts to discipline the feminist subject around a core set of features. But the debate has matured greatly since those early days. Now the political salience of fluid identities has been displaced by Butler who rejects the ontological moorings that would even lay claim to any claim of an ‘identity’ as an ontology of ‘identity’ is rejected. For Butler, it isn’t that identities are bad, or not useful, of course we have identities to a certain degree to function every day, however, in the realm of politics, of being addressed, of having to give an account in various state and other social institutional frames, immigration hearing, marriage ceremony, citizenship hearing, child adoption, job application, and other social arrangements and institutional settings that require one to give an account and stand in judgement of that account. Butler’s ethico-political project is to overturn and open up the the normative frames within which these institution function. The formation of the subject relies on a social ontology and for Butler this means that she underscores the importance of relations that humans depend upon in order for a human life to flourish. Relations with primary caregivers at the start of life, relations with other sentient life forms and the environment, all figure in to Butler’s project of a non-anthropocentric conception of the human

even a non-anthropocentric philosophical anthropology. The other way of saying this is that wherever the human is, it is always outside of itself in the non-human, or it is always distributed among beings, among human and non-human beings, chiasmically related through the idea of precarious life. So we can neither lodge the human in the self, nor ground the self in the human, but find instead the relations of exposure and responsibility that constitute the “being” of the human in a sociality outside itself, even outside its human-ness. (interview in 2009 Theory and Event)

… desire sets the limits and the conditions for the operation of recognition itself. Indeed, a certain desire to persist, we might say, following Spinoza, underwrites recognition, so that forms of recognition or, indeed, forms of judgment that seek to relinquish or destroy the desire to persist, the desire for life itself, undercut the very preconditions of recognition (44).

This failure to narrate fully may well indicate the way in which we are, from the start, ethically implicated in the lives of others. Although some would say that to be a split subject, or a subject whose access to itself is forever opaque, incapable of self-grounding, is precisely not to have the grounds for agency and the conditions for accountability, the way in which we are, from the start, interrupted by alterity may render us incapable of offering narrative closure for our lives. The purpose here is not to celebrate a certain notion of incoherence, but only to point out that our “incoherence” establishes the way in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustaind by a social world that is beyond us and before us (64).

butler post-hegelian

Butler, Judith. Giving An Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Print.

On Recognition: Hegel says I see you, you see me, we’re the same, you and me, looking at each other. For Hegel, the other is at first outside itself, before the subject realizes that “hey, this other is actually alot like me.” In fact this other is constitutive of the subject. Some say this makes Hegel into an imperialist, going around appropriating the other as part of the subject itself. However, others, like Butler, see in Hegel, a more ecstatic subject:

the “I” repeatedly finds itself outside itself, and that nothing can put an end to the repeated upsurge of this exteriority that is, paradoxically, my own. I am, as it were, always other to myself, and there is no final moment in which my return to myself takes place. In fact, if we are to follow The Phenomenology of Spirit, I am invariably transformed by the encounters I undergo; recognition becomes the process by which I become other than what I was and so cease to be able to return to what I was. There is, then, a constitutive loss in the process of recognition, since the “I” is transformed through the act of recognition. Not all of its past is gathered and known in the act of recognition; the act alters the organization of that past and its meaning at the same time that it transforms the present of the one who receives recognition. Recognition is an act in which the “return to self” becomes impossible for another reason as well. An encounter with an other effects a transformation of the self from which there is no return. What is recognized about a self in the course of the exchange is that the self is the sort of being for whom staying inside itself proves impossible. One is compelled and comported outside oneself; one finds that the only way to know oneself is through a mediation that takes place outside of oneself, exterior to oneself, by virtue of a convention or a norm that one did not make, in which one cannot discern oneself as an author or an agent of one’s own making. In this sense, then, the Hegelian subject of recognition is one for whom a vacillation between loss and ecstasy is inevitable. The possibility of the “I,” of speaking and knowing the “I,” resides in a perspective that dislocates the first-person perspective it conditions (27-28).

rothenberg butler foreclosure

Again Rothenberg casts Butler’s theory as promoting a subject that is intentional, volitional and when this subject speaks, is transparent, perhaps even self-identical. In other words, R. is criticizing Butler that in Butler’s haste to show how agency happens, especially the agency of the excluded, the marginalized, she theorizes a liberal rational actor.

… arguing that the political act of appropriating the “unspeakable” can lead to the political inclusion of dispossessed or marginalized people. Here she explicitly proposes that the subject can access the realm excluded by foreclosure by “speaking impossibly” or by “redrawing the distinction” … From her perspective, the politically motivated subject has to take the “risk” of accessing this realm, even at the cost of being seen as something other than a subject (109).

Butler’s argument is nothing less than the claim that the subject can transform the very conditions of (its own and others’) subject formation through special speech acts that control their own reception. What has been excluded can be included …(109)

rothenberg butler abject

Having accepted the reasonable proposition that subjects are formed through language, she makes her theoretical missteps when she tries to figure out how to confer power on marginalized subjects by imagining that they can control the surplus attending all utterances … relying continually on a belief that somehow, the excess attending signification can be eradicated. In this persistent gesture, Butler reveals that she does not understand the subject as itself a site of excess (107).

🙂 R.’s argument is thus: Butler like Foucault, claims that power is productive and produces resistance, but Butler is aware that Foucault theory of power doesn’t leave enough for the subject, that it is too productive in fact, that discourse only produces positivity and hence no room for contingency, as R. quotes Butler, “any effort of discursive interpellation or constitution is subject to failure, haunted by contingency, to the extent that discourse invariably fails to totalize the social field (Bodies That Matter 191-192)” (108). Rothenberg likes this last quote very much. For a brief shining moment, both seem to be on the same page. That is until …

Butler uses psychoanalysis to pry open Foucaultian immanence. As R. points out, for Butler, psychoanalysis is too ahistorical, “a charge she bases on her belief that psychoanalysis presents castration as a universal form of lack (Bodies That Matter 202 quoted in R). So, in order to benefit from the psychoanalytic model of subjectification, she proposes in Excitable Speech that subjects are formed by the installation of a lack that can be historicized. … She conceives of this lack …. in terms of exclusion, an exclusion that produces a realm of “unspeakability” as the condition of the emergence and sustenance of the subject proper, but the “contents” of which are determined historically” (108). Oh oh.

🙂 Rothenberg pounces on this last gesture by Butler. Remember, the title of R’s book is The Excessive Subject. My point being that R. doesn’t have much time for a theory that presents subject formation in terms of lack.

rothenberg excess psychoanalysis

Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2010. Print.

The theorizing of an excess that sticks to and flows from all signification (whether in speech or in bodily gesture) is the hallmark of a psychoanalytic approach. The excess is inescapable, irremediable, and unsymbolizable: in Lacanian parlance it subsists in the register of the Real (106).

🙂 Rothenberg continually hammers Butler over the fact that Butler totally misunderstands the nature of this excess. Butler’s excess is taken up in a bodily way and read off transparently, as if meaning was transparent. For R. this excess is irresolvibly non-transparent, beguiling even. “(Butler) uses the trappings and terminology of psychoanalysis but spectacularly fails to appreciate precisely what distinguishes psychoanalysis from Foucaultianism — the theorization of the dimension of excess inherent in every speech act. This failure inflects her version of subject formation: in disavowing the extimate cause, Butler leaves herself with no way to theorize the subject as a site of excess, as a Möbius subject” (107).

rothenberg butler embodied performative

The embodied political performative

R. argues that Butler is giving intentionality to the body, that is, the body knows what it is the speaker intends, while the speaker herself may be unawares. Butler thus according to R. “reinstates intentionality at the level of the body” (104).

There is a tug of war over Shoshana Felman’s psychoanalytical interpretation of the body and intentionality. R. fully endorses this idea that “speech is not fully governed by intentions,” but R. remains vexed that Butler reads in Felman support for her idea of “the picture of the body as expressing its own intentions in a readily available way” (104).

“… the body (for Butler) ceases to stand for the exceeding or disrupting of intentionalized meaning, as Felman theorizes, to serve instead (for Butler) as the vehicle and guarantor of intentionality.”

Just as importantly, Butler’s “excess” is not Felman’s. For Felman (and psychoanalysts), every signification (whether in articulated speech, written text, or bodily gesture) produces and leans on an excess inherent to signification itself, an excess that makes it impossible for the subject’s intentions to govern the reader’s interpretation. Yet for Butler, the failure of intentionalized meaning only applies to spoken articulations, while the body escapes that stricture. If in her model the body is outside or “excessive” to speech, still its intentionalized meanings have no excessive dimension, for they are readable and recoverable. In Felman, excess is irreducible; in Butler, it is not (105).

rothenberg on butler iterablity linguistic performative

Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2010. Print.

The theretical import of iterability precludes precisely the type of politics for which Butler has become famous. (100)

R. runs Judith Butler up against Joan Copjec. R argues that Butler has slid back to a Foucaultian “immanentist position on the reduction of subjects to their determinants.” (94) Butler adds a Althusserian interpellative twist to the proceedings, and by interpellation R. understands the subject qua subject to be product of “internalized discourse.”

She argues that Butler’s theory of subject formation revolves around the censorship of speech, that the subject comes to be through “implict and explicit norms” that govern the speech of a subject.

But R. points out, this notion directly contradicts Foucault’s concerns about the repressive hypothesis, “which abjures such a notion of the constitutive role of repression.

So, even as she (Butler) is invoking Foucault in her reference to his model of power and to his notion of the discursive constitution of subjects, she is importing a non-Foucaultian — and equally non-psychoanalytic element — into her theory, that is, the constitution of subjects by way of exclusion. (94)

R. lauds the fact that Butler recognizes the theoretical importance of the “disjuncture between utterance and meaning.” But the crucial dig occurs when R. argues that Butler correctly identifies the fantasy working in the belief that the speaker’s intention can be realized “univocally in the effect on the addressee. This relies on a phantasy of sovereign action … one that immediately does what it says”. But even having made this criticism about a sovereign speaker, “Butler goes on to garner support for this very “phantasy” in her own theory of subject formation (97).

R. cites as an example Butler’s argument for the resignificatory possibilities of the term “queer.” But R. isn’t buying this, and catches B. in a bind. “… Butler treats this “resignification” as though it can have predictable effects, re-describing the contingent contextual appropriation of the spech act as if it had all the intentionalist force of an illocutionary act, a move which is strictly precluded by the theory of iterability.”

“… iterability ceases to operate in the special case of performers who intend to appropriate the speech act for subversive purposes. Significantly, Butler reserves the power of such insurrectionary speech for those who have been the objects of injurious speech, the marginalized or abjected …”

“What Butler fails to respect in these formulations is that all signification is iterable, working by simultaneously and unpredictably repeating and breaking with prior contexts. Iterability (as she sometimes acknowledges in her more tempered moments) does not confer on the speaker the sovereign power of opening or closing contexts, legitimating or de-legitimating meanings” (99).

And finally, R. cites Butler’s use of the ‘agency’ of Rosa Parks. “For all her temperate reasoning about the impossibility of governing speech, then, Butler repeatedly returns to the more politically useful, if less theoretically valid, formulation of special performative agency.” (99)

OK enough, R. makes a strong case for viewing Butler’s appropriation of Austin-Derridean iterability as caught in contradictions.

rothenberg the relation of nonrelation

Excess has dual role:

– make it possible for the subject to become meaninful to others, for all meaning depends upon the opening of a space of signification from the “realtight” by way of the extimate cause.

However the price to be paid for becoming this excessive dimension prevents any final determination of the subject, fating it to remain uncertain of its place among others.

The excess sticking to subjects is like a handle by which subjects can “grasp” each other but it is also a barrier preventing them from knowing what it is that they are grasping. What makes it possible for subjects to recognize each other as subjects is precisely what keeps them apart. … “the only social relation is the relation of nonrelation.” (44)

rothenberg subject of excess

Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2010. Print.

On page 42 R. starts to define subject of excess in terms of excessive in symbolic. It is the fact that we can’t control our meanings that we release in the symbolic, and also that we can’t control what we mean to others. “The fact that one has become meaningful to others — i.e. been registered in the Symbolic — does not mean that one actually knows what one means to others.

On the contrary, to enter the Symbolic register is to fall under the regime of signification as a signifier, that is, as capable of transmitting meaning, but not capable of coinciding precisely with one’s meaning. A gap remains between the subject who is referred to in the utterance at the level of enunciated (“I am a woman”) and the subject who is making the utterance at the level of enunciation. This gap marks the locus of the minimal difference that keeps the subject from coinciding with itself.

It is as though one were constantly uttering, simply by virtue of being a subject, “Here I am,” without, however, knowing what others make of that message.

The subject does not know what message it is sending, because the subject cannot eliminate the excessive dimension from its utterance. The subject cannot make the subject of which it speaks (“I am a woman”) coincide with the subject which is speaking (“[Here I am saying that]…”). That difference, that excess, is irreducible. So, the inability to control the meaning of oneself for others, this consequence of the difference between the level of the enunciated and the level of enunciation, is the way in which the subject becomes aware of its own non-self-coincidence. It is the way that the subject experiences its excessiveness with respect to itself, its existence as subject*. (43)

rothenberg subject of excess

We must be careful here, however. the “excess’ attending signification is not merely the fact that the signifying system never closes in on a signified, as Derrida would have it. Rather, Lacan is working out the consequences of the fact that every utterance has two parts. One part consists of the content of what is said … the level of the enunciated. The other part consists of the fact that something is being said, level of the enunciation. 41

The gap between these two levels is where the subject as excess is located.

In other words, excess arises not because the signifier does not have a stable signified, nor because the signifier as materiality can be taken up and used (even nonsensically) in ever-changing contexts. Rather, the excess is located at the point where the subject is split between the level of enunciation and the level of the enunciated.

Where excess emerges in the utterance is also the point at which the speaking subject appears.

The excess in the utterance corresponds to the excess in the subject, that minimal self-difference that makes a subject (which, after all, is a meaningful object), emerge from the state of being (42).