Judith Butler
July 6, 2009
This post continues the critical pedagogy thread with a brief discussion of political subjectivity in Judith Butler’s work. There is an – admittedly superficial – attempt to link this work to emancipation and the internet.
The Psychic Life of Power (1997), represents Judith Butler´s attempt to explain the specific mechanisms of how the subject is formed through submission to power, as well as the mental form that power takes. Her theorisation is based on insights from psychoanalysis, as well as her own performative theory of gender identity in which gender, as a social artifice, is produced from a productive reiteration of hegemonic norms (Butler, 1993). In order to describe how Butler’s work can be used for understanding emancipation in digital environments, it is first necessary to explain her use of the concepts of passionate attachment, foreclosure and interpellation.
Butler (1997, p.7) argues that “no subject emerges without a ‘passionate attachment’ to those on whom he or she is fundamentally dependent (even if that passion is ‘negative’ in the psychoanalytic sense)’’. It is the formation of this unconscious attachment through dependency that leaves the subject open to ‘subordination’ and ‘exploitation’ and which supports the order of power. Important for Butler is the notion of foreclosure, which differs from repression in that “a repressed desire may have once lived apart from its prohibition…foreclosed desire is rigorously barred, constituting the subject through a certain kind of preemptive loss.” (Butler, 1997, p.23). In Lacan’s theory this foreclosure represents a psychic exclusion that is unrepresentable within the subject’s symbolic economy (Campbell, 2001). Foreclosure is important for Butler in that it structures the passionate attachment through regulation of the objects to which the subject may or may not create such attachments.
Butler shares with Lacan, therefore, the notion of social existence as a forced choice. While in Lacan, in order to exist at all the subject must accept the fundamental alienation that comes with being inscribed into the socio-symbolic field or risk psychotic exclusion, so too in Butler, the subject only emerges through a passionate attachment to the very agency that subordinates it, and is only able to affirm an identity in the space of the socio-symbolic order through foreclosures that determine which passionate attachments are and are not possible.
Butler argues, however, that this socio-symbolic network is only sustained and reproduced through repeated performative gestures as subjects recognise themselves and affirm their places in it (see Butler, 1993). The subject’s dependency on the iterability of performative acts for its existence opens up a space for resistance and transformation, as identical resignification is impossible.Resistance and resignification is therefore part and parcel of the ‘self-subverting’ mechanism of power itself (Butler, 1997, p.93).
Butler’s theory is compelling, therefore, for theorists of critical education and the internet as it provides theoretical support for the claims of those cyberoptimists who argue that the internet provides a forum for resistance where subjects can reconfigure and displace the symbolic coordinates of their socio-symbolic existence through ‘resignification’ and ‘performative displacements’.
Butler also makes extensive use of Althusser’s notion of interpellation. This occurs as when in Althusser’s classic example an officer of the law hails a subject and the subject turns around and accepts the terms by which s/he was hailed. The individual is thus recognised as a social subject and is subjugated to the law. In this way subjects are constituted by ideological state apparatuses (ISA) such as the family, schools and the media. Butler argues that a subject interpellated by injurious terms, including racist abuse, will ‘embrace’ these terms as they are what constitute the subject socially. However, paradoxically, it is only by being occupied by this term that ultimately the subject can resist and oppose it:
In this way, a certain place for psychoanalysis is secured in that any mobilization against subjection will take subjection as its resource, and that attachment to an injurious interpellation will, by way of a necessary alienated narcissism, become the condition under which resignifying that interpellation becomes possible […] the possibilities of resignification will rework and unsettle the passionate attachment to subjection without which subject formation – and re-formation – cannot succeed. (Butler, 1997, p.104-105)
Butler therefore differs from social theorists who claim that injurious terms fix the subject into a fixed space and are therefore necessarily debilitating. Making use of Butler’s theories, Eichhorn (2001, p.297) argues that:
[...] to be interpellated, even in an ill-fitting manner, might enable subjects to contest the grounds upon which they have been called into being, and potentially to reclaim the labels that have historically worked to entrench their subordinate status. The reclamation of queer in the context of some lesbian and gay communities stands as one example of how a derogatory label has been invested with a new meaning, in this case serving as a mobilizing slogan through its repeated use in liberatory contexts. (Eichhorn, 2001, p.297 italics in original)
Eichhorn argues that the speed and disorientation of the internet as well as the fact that virtual environments allow a wide circulation of hate speech means that it is especially favourable for a widespread repetition and recontextualisation of hate speech which can be invested with different meanings. The internet would offer heightened opportunities for countering hate speech that may not be possible in other environments due to the fact that the effects of speech is arguable less predictable online. Furthermore, subjects have a greater opportunity to talk back on the internet as the opportunity and authority to speak is less likely to be ruled out on the basis of identity (Eichhorn, 2001). Reflection on these characteristics of computer mediated communication would be an integral part of any critical digital literacy program with the aim of empowering subjects to resist interpellation.
References:
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter. London: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Campbell, K. (2001). The Plague of the Subject: Psychoanalysis and Judith Butler’s ‘Psychic Life of Power’. International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies , 6:1/2, 35-48.
Eichhorn, K. (2001). Re-in/citing linguistic injuries: speech acts, cyberhate, and the spatial and temporal character of networked environments. Computers and Composition , 18:3, 293-304.
It was interesting to read about Butlers idea of power being self subverting, does she mean that power contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction..? What I don’t get about Butler is her gender as performance idea . Gender is so entrenched,it is such a real and robust social phenomenon, it is ok to parody and play around with it, but to resist it is somehow impossible and futile.
I think you would both be interested in Robert Connell’s work on Gender if you haven’t already come across it. What he throws into the mix questions about solidarity and collective action in response to the pyshco-social workings of gender. It’s that particular issue that has always troubled me about Butler’s work. Plausible and fascinating as some of her theories are, there is almost a kind of individualism there – more in her early rather than late theorising – which renders collective action, resistance, etc futile, just as it appears to underestimate what you talk of, Else, the immense power of collective socialisation.
Here’s a link to a talk but there are a number of interesting books too.
http://www.havenscenter.org/audio/by/title/men_masculinities_and_gender_justice_in_global_context