CB
^^^^^
Butler's intro Doug Henwood :
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/1999/1999-January/000610.html
One of the reasions 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.
Butler wonders why we turn when Althusser's famous cop interpellates us. What forms the subject that answers the call of authority? A founding subordination - to our caregivers, language, the law. The position looks a little dangerous: "The insistence that a subject is passionately attached to his or her own subordination has been invoked cynically by those who seek to debunk the claims of the subordinated" (p. 6). Butler evades that by claiming that the attachment to subjection is to one of the workings of "power." It's not clear just what this "power" is, as in Foucault, and it's not clear how or how much it can be resisted. And it's not clear how our infantile subordination is carried over into political thought and action. But if there's any truth to this, and I think there is, then it imparts a conservatism to the subject that political radicals have to think about.
There is agency, which "exceeds the power by which it is enabled" (p. 15), but it is itself "implicated in subordination" (p. 17). We're firmly in the "postliberatory" world opened up by Foucault, where the predicament is "how to take an oppositional relation to power that is...implicated in the very power one opposes" (p. 17). Butler rejects the "fatalism" that this could imply; agency isn't fatally stricken. But it's hard to get enthusiastic about its prospects from this either.
(Chuck Grimes wondered if Butler and other theorists ever had kids. I guess he means to emphasize how kids resist and rebel, and that all this sujection is just a theorist's invention. But while kids rebel, do they always do it in successful ways? Don't people in their grownup lives have ways of reproducing patterns of their youth? Don't people repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot, hook up with other people who aren't good for them - not always, of course, but often enough to make you wonder.)
I want to say this is too pessimistic; that history is full of examples of resistance and revolution. But it's also full of failures to resist and rebel - why hasn't there been more resistance to the neoliberal crackdown over the last 20-25 years? There's a presumption among many on the left that misery breeds rebellion, but it doesn't do it very reliably. Those of us who dream of big picture revolution can't forget that daily life presents thousands of little reinforcing incidents of subordination, at school, at work, in the line at the bank. Maybe more optimistic participants can point to mechanisms of successful resistance/rebellion, either in Butler or against her.
I think this also bears on the exchange over nationalism. Does something like black nationalism - and I'm framing this as a question not out of coyness but out of real uncertainty - suffer from using the tools of the power one opposes? Does it reproduce the same tendencies to exclude and hierarchicalize? Of course, since it's a stance of resistance to oppressive power, it's not an identical reproduction, but does this affinity harm the project from the start? Can you say the same of the various "Third World" nationalisms that ended by reproducing many of the political and economic structures of the colonizers? Ditto the USSR, in reproducing the czar's secret police and Germany's trusts and class society? Certainly there were exogenous factors at work too, like the IMF and the Pentagon (or domestically, the FBI), but were there endogenous factors at work too?
Mentioning institutions of state and capital point to a lack in all of Butler's writing - an almost complete silence on issues of money and property (both of which grant privileged access to state power). Her approaches to real-world, big-picture politics come down to only a few specific instances - hate speech, gays in the military, the foreclosed mourning of those who die from AIDS - none of which are unimporant, but which constitute only one portion of social life. I think there's a way in which her analysis could be applied to, say, capital, which must continuously express itself in money and expand itself in contact with labor; at every stage, there's an act of submission that can potentially be refused - product boycotts, debt boycotts, strikes, sabotage. But the rarity of these ruptures suggests that there's a lot of inertia in the system. I think it's important to try to understand why.
This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com