Theories of Subjectivity: Butler vs Foucault - Essay Example

How does Butler respond to Foucaults work on ivity? Michel Foucault has been one of the most influential thinkers of the modern time time. Among his most controversial arguments which have significantly left a mark is that of power and its relationship with knowledge as well as discourse. It was in this light where his theory of subjectivity emerged. Particularly, in the book called, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, his concept of individuality underscore the theory of subjectivity which would, henceforth, affect the works of contemporary thinkers regarding issues not just on subjectivity but on discourse as well as politics, feminism and other contemporary social issues. Foucault rejected centuries-old assumptions concerning subjectivity. Rather than starting with the Enlightenment ideal of full self-knowledge and self-aware agency, Foucault shifts the critical focus onto “discourse,” a broad concept that he uses to refer to language and other forms of representation – indeed, all human mechanisms for the conveyance of meaning and value. (Hall 2004, p. 91) In an attempt to illustrate some analogies regarding Foucault’s concept of discourse, Tony Davies (1997) compared his notions with other theorists. According to him, discourse for Foucault is what the relations of productions are for Marx, the unconscious for Freud, the impersonal laws of language for Saussure, ideology for Althusser: the capillary structure of social cohesion and conformity. (p. 70) This paper is about Judith Butler’s response to Foucault’s theory of subjectivity. Particularly our discussion will revolve around the premise of gender identity, which is Butler’s own response to Foucault’s “body” as the main driver behind subjectivity. Butler used Foucault’s notions extensively, either as a basis for her own notions or to criticize its weak assumptions. Subjectivity and the Body Michel Foucault, is one with eminent philosophers such as Nietzsche and Freud in his insight that the body has a key role in determining subjectivity. For Foucault, a living body is a constellation of powerful and often conflicting urges and impulses that give rise to different forms of subjectivity according to the organism’s internal organization and the “disciplinary” effects of socially regulated practices and norms. (Atkins 2005, p. 3) Foucault regards the body as having a pivotal role in the structuring of our subjectivities, our perceptions and our understanding. And so, Foucault’s “subject” is neither entire autonomous nor enslaved, neither the originator of the discourses and practices that constitute its experiences nor determined by them. Butler’s take on this matter is both compatible and a little critical. To start with, Butler shares Foucault’s insistence that subjectivity, the experience of the “interior” self, is but an effect. We have Sonia Kruks (2001) insight to underscore the point: … for Butler, as for Foucault, there are only two possibilities: the subject is conceived either as fully constituting or as constituted tout court. And like Foucault – at least in his explicit pronouncements on this issue – Butler conceives the subject as entirely constituted . (p. 72) When Foucault (1979) concluded that “the soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body,” (p. 30) Butler did not object. She extensively analyzed this statement along with centuries-old arguments of Aristotle, particularly highlighting that the soul as described by Foucault, “is an instrument of power, forms and frames the body, stamps it, and in stamping it, brings it into being.” (p. 34) On the other hand, Butler faulted Foucault for elaborating an overly passive conception of the body as the surface of disciplinary action. She particularly argued that gender is produced through a series of acts that are always internally discontinuous, rather than knit closely together in the lived intentionality of a body-subject. (Kruks p. 72) However, Butler followed Foucault, in studying the subject as a contingent identity category where is continually being produced instead of a pre-defined or pre-existing object that is finally represented. On Feminism Foucault’s position contributed to most of Butler’s arguments on the issue. As with the other sectors in the issue of sexuality, feminism is addressed by Foucault using his desexualization approach. The objective of this strategy, according to Simons, is to detach people from their sexually defined identities, such as “hysterical” women. We quote: The validity of Faucault’s position for feminism rests on an argument that women in particular are constrained by oppressive sexual subjectivities. Effective desexualization requires an analysis of how sex and subjectifying power are linked. The strategy of desexualization for Faucault is thus not only a question of feminism, but of a wider resistance to our subjection primarily as sexual subjects. (p. 107) Here, we draw some parallel to Butler’s arguments, who for her part, refused to join most feminists adhering to the humanist theory calling for extra-political grounds of exposing the plight of women and advocating feminism. One of Butler’s main assumptions is that feminist genealogies would demonstrate how women are constituted as gendered subjects subordinate to men. (1990, p. 2-7) For her, the radical and preferred approach for feminism in order to improve the welfare and condition of women in the society is to attack and address the problematic issue on women’s identity. She supported Foucault’s demonstration that sex and gender are created by culture which Butler, for her part, referred to as the heterosexual matrix. Here, there is no aspect of identity that is extra-political despite the fact that in Butler’s heterosexual matrix sex is a natural fact because the concepts of subjectivity are always gendered and is dependent on the harmonious relationship between sex, gender and sexuality. (Butler p. 45-48) One should be reminded that Foucault’s arguments fits in this scenario when the harmony or coherence is disrupted, which as a result, binds women to subjectivities that become necessarily subordinate to men. Finally, we underscore the notion that Foucault put forward, stating that in order to address issues on sexuality like feminism, individuals must be desexualized. Butler, for her part, encouraged that women should not be categorized in contrast to the humanistic argument that feminism is organized around an allegedly common structure of oppression. Butler is one with the idea that there are women that do not fit the stereotype – women with different class, culture, and identities. As a matter of fact, Butler argues that “feminist politics without a feminist subject is possible and desirable. In Butler’s framework ‘feminist subject’ refers to a fixed, stable and essentialist identity constituting the ground and reference point of feminist theory and practice.” (Moss 1998, p. 98) It is Butlers contention that identities are self-representations – that is ‘fictions’ that are neither fixed nor stable and so, the subject is not a thing, a substantive entity, but instead, it is akin to a process of signification within what Jeremy Moss called “an open system of discursive possibilities.” (p. 98) Power Jon Simons recounted that Foucault regarded power as one of three possible domains for genealogy in his discussion of the theory of subjectivity, the two being truth and ethics: Power is the most amorphous field, as it includes political structures, systems of rules and norms, technique and apparatuses of government, dividing practices, and strategic relations between subjects who act upon each other. (p. 30) Foucault also thought that power is a creative phenomenon and that he disputes that it is negative and emergent from the state. This latter he brands as misconception because society mistake power to that of repression through its laws which regulates individual behavior. Essentially, what Foucault tried to emphasize was that the legal theory alters our understanding of power for the reason that it prioritizes the centrality of the law. For Foucault, writes Lee Hamilton and Joseph Sanders (2001), norms rather than the laws are critical; knowledge and science, rather the state, are the source of power and that it does not act on human subjects, on the other hand it gives rise to them. (p. 315) Foucault goes in collision with the feminist legal scholarship here as the perspective of the legal theory reifies male dominance because it places the primary fount of male power in the law. As was previously stated, power for Foucult comes from different sources and hence, for him, the legal theory and the feminist slant of legal scholarship obscure the multiple, fragmented, and productive sources of gender inequality. Meanwhile, we go back to Butler’s criticism on Foucault’s assumptions on Foucauldian subjection, which as was stated deemed a productive process by the philosopher. Here the process was some kind of restriction in production without which, according to Foucault, subject-formation cannot take place. Butler insisted that it is impossible to describe subjection and subjectivation, which are important factors in the discussion of power, without drawing from psychoanalytical theory, since without the psyche there is no possibility of resistance. (Salih 2002, p. 126) Moreover, Butler stressed that even Foucault’s formulations of power as dispersed and polyvalent are dialectical because power still exists in relation to something, making Foucault, in Butler’s opinion, ‘a tenuous dialectician’ whose dialectic has neither subject nor teleology. (Salih, p. 39) Finally, we quote Judith Butlers critic on Foucault’s argument that the juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent. However, Butler argued that the subjects regulated by such structures are by virtue of being subjected to them, formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures: If this analysis is right, then the juridical formation of language and politics that represents women as “the subject” of feminism is itself a discursive formation and effect of a given version of representational politics. And the feminist subject turns out to be discursively constituted by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its emancipation. (1990, p. 4) For Butler this becomes problematic politically when the system could be shown to produce gendered subjects along a differential axis of domination or to produce subjects who are presumed to be masculine. This discussion on power brings us to a related aspect of Foucault’s notions on sexuality. Subjectivity and Sexuality In the previous discussions must have been attributed to sexuality and gender. This is not surprising because we are using Butler’s perspective in illustrating Foucault’s theory of subjectivity. However, this was also equally important in Foucault’s view as evident in his numerous essays and references on the subject. I deemed it important to make a distinction between how feminism was discussed in relation to sexuality and gender with sexuality or gender per se, as they were major themes in Foucault’s work and Butler’s afterwards. Essentially, gender for Foucault is historically and culturally specific, subject to radical discontinuities over time and across space. (Barker, p. 290) This, however, does not mean that one can simply choose genders or that gender is a matter of random chance because Foucault stressed that we are gendered through the power of regulated and regulatory discourses. Foucault argued that sexuality was a focal point for the exercise of power and the production of subjectivity in western societies. Subjectivity is, for him, coterminous with sexuality since subjects are constituted through the production of sex and the control of the body. We quote: We, on the other hand, are in a society of ‘sex’, or rather a society ‘with a sexuality’; the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used. Through the themes of health, progeny, race, the future of the species, the vitality of the social body, power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality; the latter was not a mark or a symbol, it was an object or target. (Foucault 1979, p. 147) Butler’s arguments are in consonance with those of Foucault’s in the context of the "decentering" of the sexual subjects as securing its autonomy. Sexuality as a form of subjectivity in its own right, Foucault has in effect envisioned the erasure of subjective agency as the means of sex’s emancipation not unlike Butler’s notions on the subject. He was quoted extensively in Butler’s book called Gender Trouble, where Butler reinforced Foucault’s claim that sexuality “implicitly refutes the postulation of a subversive or emancipatory sexuality which could be free of the law… sexuality somehow escapes the prohibitions on sex. For Foucault, those prohibitions are invariably and inadvertently productive in the sense that “the subject” who is supposed to be founded and produced in and through those prohibitions does not have access to sexuality that is in some sense “outside,” “before,” or “after” power itself.” (p. 39) Butler underscored Foucault’s argument that power rather the law encompasses both the juridical and the productive functions of differential relations. Conclusion It has been established that in analyzing and referring to Foucault, Butler is operating with a paradigm of subjectivity as a process of signification within an open system of discursive possibilities as well as an effect of that process. It is a regulated, but not determined, set of practices that constrain by enabling much in the same way that Foucault’s productive power represses through production. Indeed, in her most recent work called The Psychic Life of Power, Butler (1997) has tackled her own theory of subjection in reaction to Foucault’s notions on subjectivity. Butler has accounted for our profound attachment to normative gender identifications, which entailed what she called possibilities for resisting them. It is in this light where we underscore, how Butler’s arguments now deviate from that of Foucault’s. For his part, Butler achieved a place not just among feminist thinkers but in the roster of distinguished contemporary philosophers with her unique and controversial arguments. Her contributions include the exploration on the limits of and the exclusions from subjectivity by considering the significance of psychic processes of the abjection and repudiation of desire in subject formation. (Arrington, Marshall and Muller, p. 613) Most importantly, Butler, following Foucault, demonstrated that subjectivity should not be in any way taken for granted while at the same time cannot be considered or applied as something that is universal. References Atkins, K. (2005) Self and Subjectivity. Blackwell Publishing. Barker, C. (2003) Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, Sage Publications. Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford University Press. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the discursive limits of "sex”, New York: Routledge Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish, Vintage Books Hall, D. (2004) Subjectivity, UK: Routledge. Hamilton, L. and Sanders, J. (2001) Handbook of Justice Research Law, Springer. Harrington, A., Marshall, B., and Muller, H.(2006) Encyclopedia of Social Theory, Routledge Kruks, S. (2001) Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics, Cornell University Press. Moss, J. (1998) The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy, Sage Publications. Salih, S. (2002) Judith Butler, Routledge Simons, J. (1995) Foucault and the Political. UK: Routledge Read More