> One of the reasons the Psychic Life of Power interests me is that it
tries
> to link psychoanalysis and politics, which is something I've been
playing
> with on and off for about 20 years. Lately I've been thinking a lot
about
> why people believe and think the things they do, in ways that in
political
> terms often seem at odds with their self-interest. In the old days, we
> might have attributed this to false consciousness, but we're a lot less
> sure of what's true and what's false in these newer days, and besides,
it
> still wouldn't answer the question of why so many people should embrace
> falsity when they should know better, and with such apparent passion.
These are important questions, and I agree that Butler's book suggests some interesting ways to start answering them. Talking about how to answer these questions and actually rolling up your sleeves and answering them are two very different things, though. I think a book that delivered on the promises Psychic Life makes would look more like the classics of American sociology--the Lynds' Middletown or Zorbaugh's The Gold Coast and the Slum or Carolyn Ware's Greenwich Village or, more recently, Phillippe Bourgeois' In Search of Respect. These writers all asked exactly the questions you're asking--how identities are formed under capitalism, what bases people find for resistance, why and how they usually come to terms with the system instead--not in the abstract but using every available resource, from surveys to in-depth interviews to economic data to sensitive analyses of popular culture.
I think the readiness of people to dismiss Butler as just another
participant in a sterile academic debate has something to do with the
total absence of this kind of material from Psychic Life. If you want to
understand the
> thousands of little reinforcing incidents of subordination, at
> school, at work, in the line at the bank,
you'll have to study schools, workplaces and banks; close reading of Hegel
will take you only so far. If you ask me, someone like Ware, who certainly
would never have called herself a Marxist, is more in the tradition of
Marx as a student of social totalities than many declared Marxists are.
I realize Butler's goals are somewhat different--she seems to be aiming more at a general theory of how power forms subjects--but even so she needs to get her hands dirty. Freud may not have pored over census tract data, but he did write case studies.
Josh