[lbo-talk] Berlant on Butler, subjection, and justice

Eric rayrena at realtime.net
Fri Jan 18 11:26:38 PST 2008


[Sorry for the length, but hopefully it's worth it to some, as it addresses some debates that have taken place on this list over the years. Plus I think it is achingly beautiful.]

Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta by Lauren Berlant

[...] However, my focus here is not on Butler's argument about empathic capacities as central to justice, but on the developmental aspect of the account, which argues that the experience of sovereignty is a reaction formation against infantile dependency. Claiming that "to desire the conditions of one's own subordination is . . . required to persist as oneself [such that we] embrace the very form of power - regulation, prohibition, suppression - that threatens one with dissolution in an effort, precisely, to persist in one's own existence," she enmeshes all sorts of unlike phenomena, conflating dependence with subordination, psychic self-dispossession with political injustice, and personal with political subjectivity. This enmeshment is not an accident or unconscious in Butler's work - it is an explicit project of explanation about how "this condition of my formation" is expressed in "the sphere of politics." More important for our purposes, the work equates infantile dependency with normative attachments and normative attachments with attachments to power and privilege. Is the infantile structure of dependency sublimated into love really the origin of all patience with injustice? Let me briefly open up some problems that such enmeshing generates for a concept of political subjectivity generally and particularly of post-Fordist affect from the perspective of the economic bottom. [...]

Neither Butler nor I are clinicians, so what matters here are arguments about how to understand passionate or irrational attachments to normative authority and normative worlds. To Butler, answering this means characterizing desires for autonomy as adult symptoms of a wounded narcissism of the dependent child. She insists that when adults imagine autonomy or sovereignty as synonymous with freedom, they are manifesting a humiliated reaction formation to having been duped, as an infant, into idealizing a love that was always self-dispossessing and never not disappointing. As a result, Butler argues, the adult repudiates interdependency and becomes deeply authoritarian. She deems ethno-racisms, homophobia, and misogyny to be expressions of this compensation. Nonetheless, she suggests that there is enough ambivalence in the subject's love of subjection that opportunities exist to choose to not reproduce attachments to subordination; the way to do this is to make ethical interventions into unconscious attachments, to produce a new vulnerability that will undo the humiliation of the original one. [...]

What we are talking about here is the hardest problem, of understanding the difficulty of unlearning attachments to regimes of injustice. Justice itself is a technology of deferral or patience that keeps people engrossed politically, when they are, in the ongoing drama of optimism and disappointment. Yet Butler's theoretical stance about "power" in relation to the law, normative authority, values normativity, and structural privilege underdescribes the number of internally contradictory promises (of acknowledgment, amelioration, protection, retribution, balancing, delegation, discipline, and enabling to thrive) that its activity represents. It also forgets what Rosetta and La Promesse show intricately, that recognition and reciprocity can take many forms, some of which mime equality as collaboration, some of which produce contexts of trust in interdependency, some of which are coerced or tactical, and all of which are deeply ambiguous, compromised, and unstable.

Indeed, one analysis of the crisis scripted by the Dardennes would focus on the increasingly impossible task of recognizing what counts as reciprocity at any scale of sociality. In the scene of economic, national, and transnational life that has provided this essay's case, love is only slightly less contingent than work. During the last twenty years of state shrinkage and temp culture both at work and in the institutions of intimacy, the work of (re)production has been shaped by the increasing demand for flexibility and the increasing expectation that, in love as at work, one might well be only a temporary employee, without affective or material benefits reliably in the present or the future. At moments like this, the fantasy of an unconflicted, normative lifeworld can provide the affective preexperience of a potential site of rest, even if one has known it only as, at best, a mirage of solidity and stability. This is why whatever account of attachment to normative fantasy we make needs a more complicated notion of object choice and of what it means to desire to have a cluster of feelings in lieu of having a world.

Comfort in proximity to a vague object or scene that promises to deliver some ballast in sociality is not the same as enjoying supremacist pleasure, just as, psychoanalytically speaking, misrecognizing is not the same as being mistaken. The hegemonic is, after all, not merely domination dressed more becomingly - it is a metastructure of consent. To see hegemony as domination and subordination is to disavow how much of dependable life relies on the sheerly optimistic formalism of attachment. As citizens of the promise of hegemonic sociability, we have consented to consent to a story about the potentialities of the good life around which people execute all sorts of collateral agreements. This is why the people who enforce the reality effect of this commitment to imminent generality are not just "the hegemons" like CEOs, heteros, Anglos, and U.S. Americans. Commitments to a society of the general will are enforced by people who have varying access to power, both economic and intimate. From this point of view, instead of embracing ethics as a kind of emotional orthopedics of the political, we might also attend to the convolutions of attachment that involve a desire to stay proximate, no matter what, to the potential openings marked out by fantasies of the good life, selfcontinuity, or unconflictedness.



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