whoa – Page 9 – objet (a)

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.

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 Interview 2000

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 2003. pp. 325-356.

Question: In The Psychic Life of Power, you try to open a space for agency that avoids the liberal humanist concept of self and that finds in subordination and subjection the very conditions for agency. Would you explain this apparent paradox for readers not yet familiar with your work?

Butler: […] When Lacan came along, for instance, and said that the subject is produced on the condition of a foreclosure, he meant, quite clearly, that there would always be a lack of self-understanding for any subject; that there would be no way to recover one’s origins or to understand oneself fully; that one would be, to the extent that one is a subject, always at a distance from oneself, from one’s origin, from one’s history; that some part of that origin, some part of that history, some part of that sexuality would always be at a radical distance. And it would have to be, because the foreclosure of the past, and the foreclosure of whatever we’re talking about when we talk about what is prior to foreclosure, is the condition of the formation of the subject itself. So, I come into being on the condition that I am radically unknowing about my origins, and that unknowingness is the condition of my coming into being—and it afflicts me. And if I seek to undo that, I also lose myself as a subject; I become undone, and I become psychotic as a result.

A formulation like that surely limits our sense of self-knowing, and it also means that when we do things or when we act intentionally, we are always in some sense motivated by an unconscious that is not fully available to us. I can say, “I will this; I do this; I want this,” but it may be that the effects of my doing are quite different from what I intend, and it’s at that moment that I realize that I am also driven by something that is prior to and separate from this conscious and intentional “I.”

In some ways, that was great for a lot of people because they thought, “Oh, look, we no longer have the mastery of the ego; we no longer believe that the self is supreme or sovereign. The self is in its origin split. The self is always to some extent unknowing. Its action is always governed by aims that exceed its intentions.” So there seemed to be an important limiting of the notion of the ego, the notion of individualism, the notion of a subject who was master of his—usually his—destiny. And instead we started to see that the subject might be subject to things other than itself: to drives, to an unconscious, to effects of a language. The latter was very important to Lacan: the subject is born into a network of language and uses language but is also used by it; it speaks language,but language speaks it. Lacanian thought involved a kind of humility and de-centering of the subject that many people prized because it seemed also to release the subject from the hold of its own mastery and to give it over to a world of desire and language that was bigger than itself. It gets connected to others in a very profound way through that de-centering.

Of course, the critique of this notion emerged on political grounds, and it questioned whether we haven’t undone agency altogether. Can I ever say that I will do X and Y and truly do them and keep my word and be effective in the world and have my signature attached to my deed? I think that I have always been a little bit caught between an American political context and a French intellectual one, and I’ve sought to negotiate the relation between them.

I would oppose the notion that my agency is nothing but a mockery of agency. I don’t go that far. And I also don’t think that the foreclosures that produce the subject are fixed in time in the way that most Lacanians do. They really understand foreclosure as a kind of founding moment. My sense is that it is always the case that the subject is produced through certain kinds of foreclosure-certain things become impossible for it; certain things become irrecoverable-and that this makes for the possibility of a temporarily coherent subject who can act. But I also want to say that its action can very often take up the foreclosure itself; it can renew the meaning and the effect of foreclosure.

For instance, many people are inaugurated as subjects through the foreclosure of homosexuality; when homosexuality returns as a possibility, it returns precisely as the possibility of the unraveling of the subject itself: “I would not be I if I were a homosexual. I don’t know who I would be. I would be undone by that possibility. Therefore, I cannot come in close proximity to that which threatens to undo me fundamentally.” Miscegenation is another moment-it’s when you suddenly realize that a white subject assumes that its whiteness is absolutely essential to its capacity to be a subject at all: “If I must be in this kind of proximity to a person of color, I will become undone in some radical way.” We see forms of segregation and phobic forms of organizing social reality that keep the fiction of those subjects intact. Now, I think it’s possible sometimes to undergo an undoing, to submit to an undoing by virtue of what spectrally threatens the subject, in order to reinstate the subject on a new and different ground.

What have I done? Well, I’ve taken the psychoanalytic notion of foreclosure, and I’ve made it specifically social. Also, instead of seeing that notion as a founding act, I see it as a temporally renewable structure-and as temporally renewable, subject to a logic of iteration, which produces the possibility of its alteration. So, I both render social and temporalize the Lacanian doctrine of foreclosure in a way that most Lacanians don’t like —not all, but most. I am also trying to say that while we are constituted socially in limited ways and through certain kinds of limitations, exclusions and foreclosures, we are not constituted for all time in that way; it is possible to undergo an alteration of the subject that permits new possibilities that would have been thought psychotic or “too dangerous” in an earlier phase of life.

So, in answer to the question “How is it that subordination and subjection are the very conditions for agency?” the short answer is that

I am clearly born into a world in which certain limitations become the possibility of my subjecthood, but those limitations are not there as structurally static features of my self. They are subject to a renewal, and I perform (mainly unconsciously or implicitly) that renewal in the repeated acts of my person. Even though my agency is conditioned by those limitations, my agency can also thematize and alter those limitations to some degree. This doesn’t mean that I will get over limitation — there is always a limitation; there is always going to be a foreclosure of some kind or another — but I think that the whole scene has to be understood as more dynamic than it generally is.

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).

subjection exploits desire for existence

JB. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford UP. 1997. pp. 20-21

If one is to oppose the abuses of power (which is not the same as opposing power itself), it seems wise to consider in what our vulnerability to that abuse consists. That subjects are constituted in primary vulnerability does not exonerate the abuses they suffer; on the contrary, it makes all the more clear how fundamental the vulnerability can be.

How is it that the subject is the kind of being who can be exploited, who is, by virtue of its own formation, vulnerable to subjugation? Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection the price of existence is subordination. Precisely at the moment in which choice is impossible, the subject pursues subordination as the promise of existence. This pursuit is not choice, but neither it is necessity.

Subjection exploits the desire for existence, where existence is always conferred from elsewhere; it marks a primary vulnerability to the Other in order to be (20-21).

power agency

Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Standford UP. 1997.

The power that initiates the subject fails to remain continuous with the power thatis teh subject`s agency. … How is it that the power upon which the subject depends for existence and which the subject is compelled to reiterate turns against itself in the course of that reiteration? How might we think resistance within the terms of reiteration. 12

According to the formulation of subjection as both the subordination and becoming of the subject, power is, as subordination, a set of conditions that precedes the subject, effecting and subordinating the subject from the outside. This formulation falters, however, when we consider that there is no subject prior to this effect. Power not only acts on a subject but, in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being. 13

… the subject is itself a site of this ambivalence in which the subject emerges both as the effect of a prior power and as the condition of possibility for a radically conditioned form of agency. A theory of the subject should take into account the full ambivalence of the conditions of its operation (15).

Agency

Agency exceeds the power by which it is enabled. One might say that the purposes of power are not always the purposes of agency. To the extent that the latter diverge from the former, agency is 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. This is, as it were, the ambivalent scene of agency, constrained by no teleological necessity (15).

Power is never merely a condition external or prior to the subject, nor can it be exclusively identified with the subject. If conditions of power are to persist, they must be reiterated; the subject is precisely the site of such reiteration, a repetition that is never merely mechanical (16).

That agency is implicated in subordination is not the sign of a fatal self-contradiction at the core of the subject and, hence, further proof of its pernicious or obsolete character. But neither does it restore a pristine notion of the subject, derived from some classical liberal-humanist formulation, whose agency is always and only opposed to power. The first view characterizes politically sanctimonious forms of fatalism; the second, naive forms of political optimism. I hope to steer clear of both these alternatives. 17

The subject might yet be thought as deriving its agency from precisely the power it opposes, as awkward and embarrassing as such a formulation might be, especially for those who believe that complicity and ambivalence could be rooted out once and for all. If the subject is neither fully determined by power nor fully determining of power (but significantly and partially both), the subject exceeds the logic of noncontradiction, is an excrescence of logic, as it were. To claim that the subject exceeds either/or is not to claim that it lives in some free zone of its own making. Exceeding is not escaping, and the subject exceeds precisely that to which it is bound. In this sense, the subject cannot quell the ambivalence by which it is constituted (17-18).

Vicki Kirby writes (2006: 111):

In order to reconfigure the scene of political contestation and individual agency in more robust and effective ways, Butler will open the division between the psyche and the political to the same strategic revisions she brought to the nature/culture, material/representation distinction.

desire and formation of subject

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

Butler on Althusser

JB reads Althussers ISA article, which poses a police officer “hailing” a person on the street with a “hey you!”. Why do we turn around? What do we recognize in that call? JB comments as follows:

Is this founding submission a kind of yielding prior to any question of psychological motivation? How are we to understand the psychic disposition at work at the moment in which the pedestrian responds to the law? What conditions and informs the response? Why would the person on the street respond to “Hey you there!” by turning around? (Psychic Life of Power 1997: 112)

JB continues on page 118:

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 incesantly reproduced, to become a “subject” is to be continuously in the process of acquiting oneself of the accusation of guilt. It is to have become an emblem of lawfulness, a citizen in good standing, but one for whom that status is tenuous, indeed, one who has known — somehow, somewhere — what it is not to have that standing and hence to have been cast out as guilty. Yet because this guilt conditions the subject, it constitutes the prehistory of the subjection to the law by which the subject is produced.

Here one might usefully conjecture that the reason there are so few references to “bad subjects” in Althusser is that the term tends toward the oxymoronic. To be “bad” is not yet to be a subject, not yet to have acquitted oneself of the allegation of guilt.

Incest taboo reconfiguration

JB’s Gender Trouble 1990. page 72. JB states:

Can the prohibition against incest that proscribes and sanctions hierarchical and binary gendered positions be reconceived as a productive power that inadvertently generates several cultural configurations of gender? Is the incest taboo subject to the critique of the repressive hypothesis that Foucault provides?

melancholic heterosexuality

JB’s Gender Trouble page 71. JB states:

disavowed homosexuality at the base of melancholic heterosexuality reemerges as the self-evident anatomical facticity of sex, where “sex” designates the blurred unity of anatomy, “natural identity,” and “natural desire.” The loss is denied and incorporated, and the genealogy of that transmutation fully forgotten and repressed. The sexed surface of the body thus emerges as the necessary sign of a natural(ized) identity and desire. The loss of homosexuality is refused and the love sustained or encrypted in the parts of the body itself, literalized in the ostensible anatomical facticity of sex.

Here we see the general strategy of literalization as a form of forgetfulness, which, in the case of a literalized sexual anatomy, “forgets” the imaginary and, with it, an imaginable homosexuality.

In the case of the melancholic heterosexual male, he never loved another man, he is a man, and he can seek recourse to the empirical facts that will prove it. But the literalization of anatomy not only proves nothing, but is a literalizing restriction of pleasure in the very organ that is championed as the sign of masculine identity. The love of the father is stored in the penis, safeguarded through an impervious denial, and the desire which now centers on that penis has that continual denial as its structure and its task. Indeed, the woman-as-object must be the sign that he not only never felt homosexual desire, but never felt the grief over its loss. Indeed, the woman-as-sign must effectively displace and conceal that preheterosexual history in favor of one that consecrates a seamless heterosexuality.

sex/gender distinction

On page 7 of Gender Trouble 1990.

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.

It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. … At this juncture it is already clear that one way the internal stability and binary frame for sex is effectively secured is by casting the duality of sex in a prediscursive domain.

This production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender. How, then, does gender need to be reformulated to encompass the power relations that produce the effect of a prediscursive sex and so conceal that very operation of discursive production?