{"id":1487,"date":"2009-01-15T11:42:05","date_gmt":"2009-01-15T16:42:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/01\/15\/1487\/"},"modified":"2010-05-25T20:47:30","modified_gmt":"2010-05-26T00:47:30","slug":"1487","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/01\/15\/1487\/","title":{"rendered":"salih interview 2: conscience"},"content":{"rendered":"

From “Changing the Subject”, J. Butler interview that originally appeared in JAC 20:4 (2000), pp. 731-65, reprinted in The Judith Butler Reader<\/span> ed. Sara Salih. Blackwell 2004. pp. 325-356.<\/p>\n

Question: Extending Althusser\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n

‘Submission\u2019 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 \u2018subject\u2019 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 \u2018subject\u2019 is to be continuously in the process of acquitting oneself of the accusation of guilt.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 \u201cthe law of the father.\u201d Would you clarify why you think a theory of conscience is necessary to explain subject formation?<\/p>\n

Butler: The basic presupposition of the argument that you\u2019re citing\u2014there are other arguments that I have for this, too\u2014is 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?<\/strong> There\u2019s a certain regulation of the subject from the outset: you\u2019re born in a hospital (or somewhere else), you\u2019re given a name, you\u2019re ordered in that particular way; you\u2019re assigned a gender, and very often a race; you\u2019re inculcated quite quickly into a name and therefore a lineage (if you stay with the biological mother or both biological mother and father); you\u2019re immediately submitted to a calculative logic\u2014weight and height\u2014which 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.<\/p>\n

Very often\u2014at least in Judaism, which is my context\u2014you 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?<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s great, that\u2019s terrific, that\u2019s 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.<\/strong> 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\u2019s terrible to find that we have absolutely no choice but to love them and that the love is absolute. It\u2019s 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\u2019s not always in consultation with the external exemplification of the norm.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/strong> But what do I mean by the \u201cinternalization of the norm\u201d<\/strong>? 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\u2019re 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\u2019m 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/strong>. 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\u2019s 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, \u201cJudy, you\u2019ve got to get out of this.\u201d And it is<\/em> <\/strong>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

Q. Sounds like the voice of the Other within yourself.
\nA. Yes, which, of course, is and is not the Other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s notion of interpellation, you posit that conscience is central to subject formation, in that the hailed individual inevitably turns around to encounter the … Continue reading “salih interview 2: conscience”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,78,93,99,24,16,97,15],"tags":[134,109],"class_list":["post-1487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agency","category-butler","category-conscience","category-interpellation","category-lacan","category-ontology","category-psyche","category-subjectivity","tag-psychiclife","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1487"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5645,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487\/revisions\/5645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}