>CB: So, give us your summaries of the main ideas of Zizek, Balibar and
Butler, et al. rather than ending us off to read them.
>
no problem! we're just starting our list reading of butler's PLOP at pulp.
anyone want to join in, write to majordomo at infothecary.org s*ubscribe pulp-culture or s(*ubscribe pulp-culture-digest:
Here's the intro for Butler:
ken doll wrote:
>For those who missed it the first time. Despite the (justifiable)
grumbling, I
>think Butler has a lot to say and I think she's a good writer, with
tremendous
>clarity, and an excellent theorist.
she's extraordinarily repetitive, as if writing the same thought three times differently is enough to constitute one paragraph. if you want examples, i've marked them all...
anyway, i was typing to someone offlist about butler and realized i focused in on different things than you had, ken. i read it in november without ever sitting down to write about and you know--we've talked about this before--in order for it to hit home sometimes you really need to write it out. i argued earlier that i think this book is butler's very abstract intervention into the debates over feminist/queer politica/social theory which, for a long time, founded their theories on some version of a standpoint theory. [ a URL i sent dunk --http://carnap.umd.edu/social_dimensions_of_knowledge/Standpoint2.html -- might be helpful to fill folks in on the debates over standpoint epistemologies] the interpretive turn, the linguistic turn, the postmodern turn -- all destabilized the subject by attacking the notion that the subject was coherent, stable, that it had an essentialness or could be universalized in terms of a self-same identity [the critique of the metaphysics of presence, iow]
one of her concerns in the interview i forwarded in nov was that people took the notion that "gender is a performance" to mean that it was completely open for direction and control--that we could put on and take off gender identities at will. plop is a critique of this temptation because she wants to show how deeply our subjectivities are bound up with subjection.
after she wades through foucault's conception of power she maintains that we need to flesh this out -- she wants to do this via a journey through hegel, nietzsche, freud, foucault in order to locate points of convergence, though she insists that she's not positing equivalences.
i think for those reading along who are completely unfamiliar with this we need to highlight this: butler rejects the idea that we internalize norms.
this is the typical way we understand "socialization". we tend to imagine that there is an outside--'the social,' 'society,' 'the law,' parents, etc and that, somehow, the outside is incorporated into our pre-given psychic interior by force, by manipulation, by persuasion, by lure, by incentive. [hence all this talke of authoritative parenting v. authoritarian parenting v permissive parenting....]
butler though is working thru an intellectual tradition that completely rejcts the idea that "socialization" is the imposition of norms on a pre-given subject that then incorporates and identifies with social norms thru some mysterious process. [and it is mysterious in the lit. a concern raised often]. like foucault, butler insists that the very process of internalization creates the distinction between interior/exterior, the notion that we have an internal psychic space that exists in some relation to an exterior social space.
butler goes on to argue that, while we might accept that, theorists like foucault still haven't asked or considered that the process of internalization isn't simply a mechanical assumption of the norm/s as it/they are: "given that norms are not interlaized in mechanical or fully predictable ways, does the norm assume another character as a *psychic* phenomenon?" [19]. she's asking whether and, if so, how, norms take an a psychic life of their own. she asks this because she's arguing, following kleinian object relations theory, that the oedipus complex and the formation of the superego are processes that follow after a process that has already begun in the formation of the "ego ideal": "how are we to account for the desire of the norm and for subjection more generally in terms of *prior* desire for social existence, a desire exploited by regulatory power?" [19]
in other words, the process through which we identify with and internalize norms is *productive* of the very notion we have of ourselves as having interior/internal/autonomous selves that are seperate from a social outside. BUT, there isn't a nothingness there, there is desire, the desire for social existence, and that desire, she says, is "exploited by regulatory power"
that power though isn't simply assumed. it's not imposed on us like a stamp.
she asks how it is that power produces the capacity for self reflection and yet, at the same time, how does it limit social life or "forms of sociality"? so she intends this as a detour into the productive accounts of "self-relfective consciousness" espoused by nietzsche and freud in order to argue that melancholia is the primary way in which subjectivity manifests itself