- In the introduction, we are informed that the project of this text is to think a theory of the psyche in conjunction with a theory of power.
- In thinking the 'reflexive subject' turning in on itself in relation to power, what we see whited over or invisibilized is the determinacy of the subject's perception. In other words, in what form did the subject encounter power which prompted this turning in on itself? This, when glossed over is a silencing of narrative.
: There seems to be a way in which Judith Butler recognizes the construction of a self's preferences to be built upon a fundamental foreclosure, such as the infant's resistance to parents, siblings, etc. who may have been his or her earliest objects of love. For the 'I' to have autonomous preference almost rests on that foreclosure as it were, a condition.
This also creates a psychic circuit, predicated upon the reappearance of this impossible or foreclosed love, via some mechanism of transference which seems to be the only outlet for the individual's subject formation, perhaps sublimated, sexualized, among other possible, productive engagements.
Yet, the 'I' is also conditioned by the specter of the reappearance of the impossible love, a development which it will take every measure to resist.
"If the subject is produced through foreclosure, then the subject is produced by a condition from which it is, by definition, separated and differentiated." - Would that which is foreclosed then persist as a memory, perhaps embodied in an artifact such as a document or photograph, or would its repression congeal into some sort of trauma, the subject compulsively doesn't think about?
The relation, or rather the dependence of the self, on power is one way to think of subjection, yet Butler insists that the 'I" emerges upon the condition that it deny its formation in dependency. It is with disruption by such a denial. A materialist metaphysics if there ever was one, but without a featured incident or biography... or is it that the place of narrative is implicated by the subjection of the self? Is this what the author is getting at?
A sense of subjection is entailed in our conception for who does one speak for. In other words - who do we recognize to be the addressee of a call. This question is materialized as it were, when we begin to consider, as structuralism did, the possibility of not identifying the subject with an individual or entity, but with 'a linguistic category, place holder, or structure in formation'. A prominent example of this kind of thought of course being Althusser's turn from any determinism in the dictum 'History is a process without a subject.'
Such a consideration opens up a new dimension in the subject, where we may notice that instead of being simply a positive or negative entity with certain qualities, attributes or their absences, it becomes a site of contestation for these qualities, attributes and their negation. This of course would raise the issue of the product of attributes in conjunction; and what kind of extensionality may account for this.
In introducing her book, 'The Psychic Life Of Power', Judith Butler appears to grasp the paradox of a subject trying to narrate its own genesis. "...The subject can refer to its own genesis only by taking a third-person perspective in the act of narrating its genesis. On the other hand, the narration of how the subject is constituted presupposes that the constitution has already taken place, and thus arrives after the fact.'
This does seem to spell out the problem of narration quite nicely, yet a preliminary clause may be placed particularly given that we are dealing with an explicitly philosophical work.
- Instead of presupposing the subject for which an account is offered, would not a narrative in order for it to be convincing have to account for, or rather posit the presuppositions which allow for such a recollection? The categories utilized here would hence be a productive synthesis of the subject's reflection, unlike perhaps a circular presupposing of the subject itself. This constitution of the subject as it were, is readily apparent, for those of you with the inclination, in the first few chapters of Hegel's Phenomenology.
Yet, it is to the credit of the author to lay bare the problem in lay terms, which an introduction is meant for.
The focus of the text however remains the relations of the subject to power, which is the mechanism identified by Butler via which the subject secures its own constitution via subordination, in other words, the dependency of the subject on power, a decidedly Foucauldian register. However, there is a way in which this same story may easily be written as one of debt and an acknowledgement of it. This, for some reason is resited by the subject in question. When Butler writes for example that - "Any effort to oppose that subordination will necessarily presuppose and re-invoke it", we see how the subject, notwithstanding the erasure of its own position in narrating its genesis, has yet to acknowledge that genesis to re-iterate that constitutive subordination which it seeks to resist. In carrying on, however, the subject of the book is made clear, as we are pointed to the difference between power as a condition of the subject, and power as what the subject wields.
Here, it is helpful to place my own reservations over the construction of such a category, seemingly without predication itself, beyond its utility either in constituting the subject or as utilized by the subject - in instrumentalist account in either turn.
There is an acknowledgment that the power that initiates a subject, fails to remain contiguous with the power that is the subject's agency. It seems what actually seems to be referred to here is the difference between an appointing authority or one which is involved in the entrusting of a charge, and the manner in which the latter may be utilized by a subject themselves.
What we really seem to be getting at here is a difference, not so much regarding the means via which a subject wields their agency, or was a product of a subordination to it, as between constitutive and constituted power, an important demarcation which among others Fredric Jameson does make.
"...Power is a subordination, a set of conditions that precede the subject, effecting and subordinating the subject from outside...this formulation falters however when we consider that there is no subject prior to this effect." Earlier we did notice however a certain split which the subject effectuates in themselves, in the act of their narration, a bearing witness to a certain genesis as it were. In offering an account, of its genesis, the position from which a subject speaks from seems to be one such, inasmuch as it can recollect an other and offer an account of this as a memory for example. Yet if in their constitution we were to follow Butler in acknowledging a subordination upon which the subject is, or becomes contingent on - the constitution of the subject may be narrated as an account of this subjection. The question that I would like to place here, is one regarding the subject and not of power. The subject who can freely account of its own constitution, or subjection if you prefer, may in the transparency of such an act, pass from the position of a subject who was a product of power as subordination, externally determined. This third position of the subject as it were, not of a subordinated power, not as a subject of subordination - but one who can account for such a process, perhaps in the form of a narrative is of interest to us.
Yet the focus of the text, as the title suggests is not the subject, which may better be introduced in a text such as Badiou's 'Theory of the Subject'. The focus of the text under consideration is power, and here it posits a duality. Power as 'acting on' the subject and power as 'acted by' the subject. I quote ' there is no conceptual transition to be made in power here, what appears as a transition is a splitting (perhaps via subordination) and reversal of the subject itself, (perhaps analogous to the moment when the subject realizes its dependency on the subordination to exercise power.
To mitigate the instrumentality which characterizes the relation between power and the subject, a new site of agency is posited ' 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. However, would not such a characterization of agency which turns on power as it were, strip agency of its power to do so - its own power so to speak? The reversal which Butler remarks upon earlier seems to be minimized to a tokenistic critique. Tokenistic, because the object of its critique - power, perhaps of the constitutive kind, is not predicated in any way - the result, is a negation without determination.
Or to contemporise the situation with another American example from music - when DJ Snake and Lil Jon demand in their famous rap song 'Turn Down For What', they perhaps not unlike the subject of Judith Butler's characterization, demand to know not why a rejection was made, ie. why was I turned down, but rather what was picked instead. Why is this question important? Because the obfuscation of recognition, which forecloses the possibility of understanding utilizes tokenistic oppositions, oppositions without depth or substance to avoid confronting not its constitutive power, but its constitutive lack. Here, of course, I must preface, that we begin to start conceiving a Zizekian understanding of the subject.
There is however a sense in which I must place my own reservations regarding the conceptualization of the relation between the subject and power, reservations which are not exhausted by pointing out the sheer instrumentality involved. Why for instance is the subject seen to be deriving its agency 'from precisely the power that it apposes?' This seems to elevate, nay rather transcendentalize the category of power to some kind of divinity, in whose reflection we pursue our earthly endeavors, ie. make it into a version of the ineffable One, authority, signification, and extensionality; but beyond reproach, beyond even dialogue, for it is beyond predication. And perhaps, on a later date, we may return to this position to appraise a critique that is now decidedly Badiouian territory, even if cartoonists are killed, and painters exiled for their efforts at explication here.
What concerns Butler here, to not drift too far from the thread is of course, rather the regulation of the psyche. In a question "How does the subjection of desire, require and institute the desire for subjection?" This direction however is less glib than it sounds though as we see that the incorporation of norms, and the reason for this is demanded as an account of the subject in question. This I would encourage as a constructive endeavor. A more interesting question entailed here is 'how are we to account for the norm, and subjection more generally in terms of a prior desire for social existence'?
There are problematic positions brought forth, most noticeable '...within subjection, the price of existence is subordination'. This seems to conflate two entirely discrete matters, one semantic and the other existential - were we to find a novel ontology in the text, I would be willing to reassess my position.
This productivist dimension in desire, however, following Deleuze is what is of interest to us. Here, Butler does insist on the terms of self-reflexivity. There are markings of disciplinarian reflection here, in 'In order to curb desire, one makes of oneself an object of reflection.' This is offered as an account of producing one's own alterity.
There may even be traces here of a certain kind of melancholia that inaugurates the subject, which is posited as constitutive of the subject's pouvoir, yet here I will limit my Freudian predilections.
Loss, however, the metaphoric genus to the melancholic species is, in an act of crafting one's situation linguistically a formation of the subject as well, and indeed we do learn a lot about a subject in considering the place of loss in its formation. The far more interesting proposition in such hermeneutics would be 'the foreclosure which constitutes an unknowability without which the subject cannot endure.' The loss of the ability to love, for instance, predicates certain overdetermined relations.
Fascinating configurations do emerge here, such as guilt being a way in which a subject safeguards the object of love from violence which may be obliterating, such as in the work of Melanie Klein. Here guilt is posited as a protective screen which preserves the object from one's aggression. Indeed, this does seem knotted to the alluring proposition of the attempt to vanquish one's object of love.
Indeed we do well to remember here that object relations in the psyche, stand-in for the other, and a therapeutic reading often yields a knotted association between the desire to vanquish the 'dead' other, and a marking of that other as the threat of death. Associations which may require untangling.
A challenge acknowledged by the introduction of this text is, let us call it, a theoretical dilemma. If desire, as Spinoza states, is always the desire to persist in one's own being, how are we to understand the Lacanian position of desire always being the desire of the other? This is a question, we are informed - that will 'only be played out within the risky terms of social life'. Something that a political economist would do well to remember here is that our object relations, will in the end; define how our commerce is perceived, even if they are in the terms of the characterization of contractual relations. Of course, in most scenarios these presented propositions would have to be informalized. The delectable question we are left with is 'Is there a way to affirm complicity as the basis for political agency? (a direction I do not encourage), yet insist that political agency may do more than reiterate the conditions of subordination?
- Saturday, 23rd April, 2022.
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