Butler, J. The Psychic Life of Power Stanford UP. 1997.
🙂 SUBJECTION: to be subjected to a form of power external to oneself, this is familiar form that subjection takes. JB adds that the very formation of the subject is dependent on that power. The power that subordinates also produces the subject. So far, so good.
[Yes power subordinates, yes that’s a fair description] But if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence … Subjection consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency. (2)
Subjection signifies the process of becoming subordinated to power as well as the process of becoming a subject Foucault doesn’t theorize the psychic nature of this subordination to power. What are the specific mechanisms of how the subject is formed in submission. What is the psychic form that power takes?
Not only does the entire domain of the psyche remain largely unremarked in his theory, but power in this double valence of subordinating and producing remains unexplored.” (2)
Thinking the theory of power together with a theory of the psyche
… the question of subjection, of how the subject is formed in subordination, preoccupies the section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that traces the slave’s approach to freedom and his disappointing fall into the “unhappy consciousness.” The master, who at first appears to be “external” to the slave, reemerges as the slave’s own conscience. The unhappiness of the consciousness that emerges is its own self-beratement, the effect of the transmutation of the master into a psychic reality.
The self-mortifications that seek to redress the insistent corporeality of self-consciousness institute bad conscience. This figure of consciousness turned back upon itself prefigures Nietzsche’s account, in On the Genealogy of Morals, not only of how repression and regulation form the overlapping phenomena of conscience and bad conscience, but also of how the latter become essential to the formation, persistence, and continuity of the subject. In each case, power that at first appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity. (3)
:)This idea of an external power crushing down on us, ending up as our own conscience, a power external that is hits us bears down on us, but also is turned back on itself and forms our conscience, a self-beratement that makes sure we stay in line, adhere to the rules or else. The unhappy consciousness was this ethical imperative of the slave fearing for its life, clinging to life at all costs, internalizing the prohibitions and dictates of the overbearing lord, that now becomes the conscience of the slave as it tries to take flight from its body. Butler tries to say if Hegel were consistent he would have shown how every attempt, for example how he shows in stoicism and skepticism that both reinforce that which it tries to negate. Except when the priest enters the scene then all it lost.
Turning Back: tropological inauguration of the subject
We cannot presume a subject who performs an internalization if the formation of the subject is in need of explanation . The figure to which we refer has not yeet acquired existence and is not part fo a verifiable explanation, yet our reference continues to make a certain kind of sense. The paradox of subjection implies a paradox of referentiality: namely, that we must refer to what does not yet exist. 4
Althusser’s ISA and Interpellation
Althusser’s essay ISA, poses interpellation, as a discursive construction of the subject. An example of interpellation is the hailing of a person by a cop. Butler asks why does the guy turn around when the cop says “hey you!”.
Is this a guilty subject and, if so, how did it become guilty? Might the theory of interpellation require a theory of conscience?
The interpellation of the subject through the inaugurative address of state authority presupposes not only that the inculcation of conscience already has taken place, but that conscience, understood as the psychic operation of a regulatory norm, constitutes a specifically psychic and social working of power on which interpellation depends but for which it can give no account. (5)
Passionate Attachments
:)Here we go in. This may sound rather bizarre as I try to scope out the key ingredients of Butler’s argument.
– The subject is effect of power that turns back on itself, power in recoil.
– The founding subordination is rigorously repressed, so this turning back is repressed, this repression means the subject emerges in tandem with the unconscious. Wow, does this mean the No! of the father counts as a founding subordination that is repressed? JB wouldn’t go for that.
– No subject emerges without developing a passionate attachment on those whom he is fundamentally dependent. Butler cites the example of child vulnerable,dependent and attached to its earliest caregivers. She seems to be arguing here of an attachment to those with whom we have an engagement with in our subordination.
… there is no formation of the subject without a passionate attachment to those by whom she or he is subordinated, [therefore] subordination proves central to the becoming of the subject. As the condition of becoming a subject, subordination implies being in a mandatory submission. Moreover, the desire to survive, “to be,” is a pervasively exploitable desire.
“I would rather exist in subordination than not exist” is one formulation of this predicament (where the risk of death is also possible) (7). This child must attach in order to persist in and as itself (8).
No subject can emerge without this attachment, formed in dependency, but no subject, in the course of its formation, can ever afford fully to “see” it. This attachment in its primary forms must both come to be and be denied, its coming to be must consist in its partial denial, for the subject to emerge. 8
:)How does JB go from the ‘desire to survive’ to unchecked desire to survive will lead to dissolution of the subject?
:)This mandatory submission and passionate attachment in one’s primary years to early caregivers, that one has no choice in the matter, one is subordinated to their care as desire to survive trumps any possibility of rejecting their provisioning of an environment in which to grow and get nourished. But this attachment is denied and repressed, what is repressed into the unconscious returns, through a neurotic repetition “the subject pursues its own dissolution.” How is this? In a footnote to this, Butler mentions the “death drive” as a further description or label one can attach to this dynamic in which the subject wills its own destruction.
An unchecked desire will lead to dissolution of the subject. The subject therefore acts against its own desire, frustrating it, otherwise the vexation of desire will prove to be its own undoing. Thus, the subject seeks to contain this desire by seeking out its own subordination.
🙂Desire is going to kill you, so you have to turn against it, embrace prohibition, regulation, suppression to stifle desire, but these are forms of power that also lead to the subject’s subordination.
Desire will aim at unraveling the subject, but be thwarted by precisely the subject in whose name it operates.
… for the subject to persist, the subject must thwart its own desire. And for desire to triumph, the subject must be threatened with dissolution. A subject turned against itself (its desire) appears, on this model, to be a condition of the persistence of the subject (9).
“To desire the conditions of one’s own subordination is thus required to persist as oneself.” (9)
What does it mean to embrace the very form of power —regulation, prohibition, suppression —that threatens one with dissolution in an effort, precisely, to persist in one’s own existence?
It is not simply that one requires the recognition of the other and that a form of recognition is conferred through subordination, but rather that one is dependent on power for one’s very formation, that that formation is impossible without dependency, and that the posture of the adult subject consists precisely in the denial and reenactment of this dependency. The “I” emerges upon the condition that it deny its formation in dependency, the conditions of its own possibility. The “I,” however, is threatened with disruption precisely by this denial, by its unconscious pursuit of its own dissolution through neurotic repetitions that restage the primary scenarios it not only refuses to see but cannot see, if it wishes to remain itself. This means, of course, that, predicated on what it refuses to know, it is separated from itself and can never quite become or remain itself. 9-10