{"id":2801,"date":"2009-04-07T14:58:57","date_gmt":"2009-04-07T19:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=2801"},"modified":"2009-04-09T12:30:41","modified_gmt":"2009-04-09T17:30:41","slug":"stephen-white-interpellation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2009\/04\/07\/stephen-white-interpellation\/","title":{"rendered":"stephen white interpellation"},"content":{"rendered":"

White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory<\/span>. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000.<\/p>\n

Don’t just think in terms of isolated scenes. Imagine rther a lifetime of being hailed into discourse, beginning with the doctor who announces: “It’s a girl!” Keeping in mind the earlier analysis of gender as performative, Butler would have us reconstrue this familiar speech act as the beginning of a lifelong chain of “girling” utterances that enact certain scripts as normal and others as abnormal. With this expansion of the temporal horizon and application of the notion of performativity, the relatively sovereign subjectivity of the passerby begins to dissolve. It is replaced by the image of a subjectiviy produced or constituted by the insistent, interpellating “demand” of “discursive power”. (82)<\/p>\n

The policeman who hails the person in the street is enabled to make that call through the force of reiterated convention.\u00a0 This is one of the speech acts that police perform, and the temporality of the act exceeds the time of the utterance in question. In a sense, the police cite the convention of hailing, participate in an utterance that is indifferent to the one who speaks it. The act “works” in part because of the citational dimension of the speech act, the historicity of convention that exceeds and enables the moment of its enunciation. (Butler Excite 33 cited in White 82)<\/p>\n

Thus it is the reiterating function of language that is primarily carrying and reproducing dominant norms and crating the effect of sovereign, disengaged subjects by the continual process of calling them into social existence. We are, in short,“interpellated kinds of beings” <\/strong>continually being called into linguistic life, being “given over to social terms that are never fully [our] own.”<\/p>\n

Butler’s ontology is one in which the basic “things” are persistent forces or processes. We must be careful not to imagine these as having qualities of subjectivy. Thus, power is not an anonymous subject<\/em> that initiates discrete acts<\/em> of constitution or construction. There is rather only “a process of reiteration by which both ‘subjects’ and ‘acts’ come to appear at all. There is no power that acts, only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence. (83)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But none of this … implies a notion that subjexts are dopes of discursive power. Reiterating is always potentially open to resignifying in ways that may contest the smooth reproduction of the dominant terms of discourse. Butler has described this subversive potential as “power’s own possibility of being reworked.”<\/p>\n

What is not yet clear in Butler’s account is why <\/em>or how<\/em> this imperfection mightever be taken advantage of intentionally by an actor (83).<\/p>\n

Thinking power together with a theory of the psyche<\/span><\/p>\n

Why does the passerby turn to answer the policeman?\u00a0 Power “hails,” but why does one submit to its call?<\/p>\n

The violence of the prohibition, the frustrated desire, self-beratement, self-denial, desire turns back upon itself in the form of a will in the service of the regulating regime, that is of terms not one’s own.\u00a0 There is an investment of erotic libidinal energy in this turning back, in this prohibitive activity of the emergent entity of conscience.\u00a0 The conscience can never be an adequate site for thinking critical agency, since it is, in its very constitution, in complicity with the violent appropriation of desire by power.<\/strong>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000. Don’t just think in terms of isolated scenes. Imagine rther a lifetime of being hailed into discourse, beginning with the doctor who announces: “It’s a girl!” Keeping in mind the earlier analysis of gender as performative, Butler … Continue reading “stephen white interpellation”<\/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":[78,80,111,8,86,102,81,85,55,82,97,98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-citationality","category-desire","category-discourse","category-gender","category-iterability","category-materiality","category-melancholia","category-normative","category-performativity","category-psyche","category-resignify"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2801","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=2801"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2810,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2801\/revisions\/2810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}