Masters of Subjection

The following is a reaction to reading Judith Butler's Psychic Life of Power:

Power exists prior to the subject, and power is also the “willed effect of the subject” (Butler, 14). We all enter a world that is completely symbolized, structured, ordered, and arranged before us. We step onto a cultural, political, and social stage as somewhat unwitting participants who have to adapt, to figure out the rules of the game in order to figure out what it means to be a part of that stage. We have to learn the rules of the game in order to exist as parts of the social body, and in order to be individuals within this pre-given system. This is the process of subjection. As Butler writes, “the subject emerges both as the effect of a prior power and as the condition of possibility for a radically conditioned form or agency” (14-15). We become individuals after being subjected to a powerful system in which we learn what it is to be named—resistance becomes possible only when one is named, ordered, and shaped by the social system that they are born into.

This process seems to be viciously circular—but Butler argues that power is never complete, never absolute (17). For me, this is where Butler provides a useful blend of Foucault and Lacan that moves beyond the arguments that Copjec provided a few weeks back. For Butler this incompleteness is the Lacanian real—that which the social order can never fully envelope. Identity is flexible, instable, and in flux because social identities can never fully account for the full being that any single person is. Agency, it seems, stems from the gaps, from the incompleteness of power. Agency, Butler writes, “is the assumption of a purpose unintended by power, one that could not have been derived logically or historically, that operates in a relation of contingency and reversal to the power that makes it possible, to which it nevertheless belongs” (15). Agency—or resistance—is an unexpected deviance or anomaly that takes place within a bounded system, but which stems from that very system. Humans resist violence and oppression with new forms of social organization, with weapons, and with the very language and sets of social symbols that were used to create oppression and violence in the first place. We write protest signs in the very language that represses; we march in places that are designated for free speech.

Moving beyond Foucault (or maybe taking him along for the ride), Butler argues that power not only subjects social bodies—it also shapes the formation of the psyche. If norms are internalized, she argues, then power is what creates the distinction between “interior and exterior life” (19). She writes, “Just as the subject is derived from conditions of power that precede it, so the psychic operation of the norm is derived, though not mechanically or predictably, from prior social operations” (21). Reflexivity is when the subject turns itself into an object of reflection (22), in which the Freudian drive and the Lacanian desire are in a constant tension with the desire for subjection itself (22). In order to become a working part of the social order everyone loses their unique inner drives or desires—or when they submit to dominant social and psychic order they suppress those original desires. In order to achieve the categorical status of a social individual every subject undergoes a dramatic loss.

The idea that complete subjection requires “mastery” is fascinating. Butler writes, “The more a practice is mastered, the more fully subjection is achieved…Though one might expect submission to consists in yielding to an externally imposed dominant order and to be marked by a loss of control and mastery, paradoxically, it is itself marked by mastery” (116). Here I think Butler pushes the argument beyond one of pure oppression to something that is even more ironic and insidious at the same time. By learning social codes, by learning from a young age who it is that holds power, when to cross the street, how to talk to authority, and the “proper” modes of interaction, every subject slowly masters his/her own subordination. A piano player can be seen as either a genius or a rigid slave to a particular set of routines. The same goes for a graduate student who, after years of reading the right books, parroting the right phrases and discourses, and turning in the proper papers at the proper time, finally masters the system and obtains a PhD. However, what have they become at that point? What is lost?

Final point. Butler writes, “Psychoanalysis insists that the opacity of the unconscious sets limits to the exteriorization of the psyche. It also argues—rightly, I think—that what is exteriorized or performed can only be understood by reference to what is barred from performance, what cannot or will not be performed” (144-45). When it comes to subjection, socialization, and power, what is it that cannot be performed? How is power something that sets the stage—even for resistance—and bans certain ways of acting and thinking from the “acceptable” social order? To continue using graduate school as an example, what forms of behavior are restricted in this particular setting? Are students expressing resistance when they form on-campus clubs to discuss political action, or are they confined to a relatively safe place that cannot effectively infect the rest of the social order?* What forms of thought, which ways of thinking, are mastered in higher education? Are we all learning how to think differently, or are we all learning how to think and act within a certain prescribed social system that allows for long-winded discussions of agency and resistance within convenient time slots? Deep exploration and discussion about “what cannot or will not be performed” is encouraged, as long as, in the end, we all think within certain boundaries and turn in the right papers at the right time.

Foucault & Agency: Seek answers not you should

So, after dutifully performing my expected role as a responsible grad student and reading through a whole book about discipline and power (ironies noted), I went to seminar class to talk about Mr Foucault and his ideas in Discipline and Punish. One issue that came up (and which always seems to come up with Foucault) is agency. Does Foucault allow for agency? Is the guy too structural? Is he a determinist? Are we all doomed to live in a world in which the nebulous forces of power completely shape our minds, bodies, and futures through every imaginable means? I mean, they put CAMERAS in stop lights! We're being watched! The question comes up a lot with Foucault. I have read several pieces that tear Foucault to shreds in search of little scraps of resistance. The question also came up in seminar. So where's the resistance?

My answer: I don't really care if Foucault left room for agency, and if he didn't leave room for resistance I'm not going to lose any sleep. I'm not looking to join the Church of Foucault and using this as a chance to evaluate his program and ideas about life. Besides, I think Foucault makes it pretty clear that he's providing an analytical framework rather than a socio-political theory to live by (he pretty much spells this out in the History of Sexuality).

I'm not reading Discipline and Punish to find specific socio-political answers, but instead to look at how Foucault explores issues (and, of course, because certain agents of power have assigned this book). I mean, if there are answers or recipes for change in a book, great. But I don't really see the point in lamenting aspects of a book that don't exist. If it isn't about agency, then look elsewhere--or find ways to force it into the framework. To me, these aren't texts to be memorized and directly applied to daily life (at least not usually). Each text is a piece of a larger process of learning. It's not about being converted to one way of thought or another, but about taking a lot of ideas and information and evaluating them in conjunction--and then applying those ideas/info to specific questions.

But, that's pure opinion. As usual, I reserve the right to change my position on this matter if new evidence capsizes my whole perspective. Anyway, next week the Foucault train continues. Expect more thoughts about power as they relate to grad student life. If, of course, the deterministic and panoptic powers that be do not hinder my freedom and agency to express myself via the wonders of the internet.

You never know.

The Subject(s) of Anthropology

What is anthropology? What does anthropology tell us about the world that we live in? What claims to truth does this “anthropology” have, and how can those claims be challenged, evaluated, and measured against other forms of knowledge? Anthropology is not as monolithic and unified as it may seem to a first year undergraduate who is forced to sit through her/his first class on the subject—despite the cohesive narratives that many introductory textbooks present. Still, certain ideals about anthropology—as promulgated by particular institutions, organizations, and individuals—do exist. Anthropologists have their particular characterizations of what it is that they actually do: they study humans. But not just any humans; historically speaking, anthropologists have made the non-western Others their intellectual stock and trade. This academic and methodological focus is what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls the “Savage slot,” and it needs some dramatic rethinking if anthropology is to remain a viable mode of inquiry.

The anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn once wrote, “Seen from the outside, anthropological activities look, at best, harmlessly amusing, at worst, pretty idiotic” (Kluckhohn 1961: 13). A few pages later he also wrote, “Studying primitives enables us to see ourselves better” (Kluckhohn 1961: 16). This was in his famous text Mirror for Man, which was, according to the 1961 Preface, meant as a book “for the layman, not for the carping professional”. According to Kluckhohn, anthropology is perfectly suited to discover the common ground that exists between “human beings of all tribes and nations” (1961: 9). Why, of all disciplines from sociology to political science, is anthropology so well suited for this project? It seems that we, the audience of anthropology, are simply expected to accept this narrative as a matter of course.

In the preface to the 1949 edition of Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead wrote, “I had decided to become an anthropologist—in May, 1923—because Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict had presented the tasks of anthropology as more urgent than any other task which lay ready to the choice of a student of human behavior” (Mead 1960: ix). What was this calling that Mead felt so compelled to join? It was the discipline that was charged with documenting and analyzing “the cultures of people” that was “perishing rapidly” (1960: ix). For Mead (and other Boasians), anthropology was all about traveling to the margins of the western world, in order to salvage the remnants of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot might call the west’s imagined other half. Still, many questions remain unanswered, despite the hegemonic clarity of purpose that the American Anthropological Association exhibits. How did anthropology become the discipline that specializes in a world of Others? How did anthropology become the academic savior that the west sent out into the world to capture the essence of the “rest”?

According to Trouillot, “anthropology belongs to a discursive field that is an inherent part of the West’s geography of imagination. The internal tropes of anthropology matter much less than this larger discursive field within which it operates and upon whose existence it is premised” (Trouillot 2003: 8). While many anthropologists—past and present—define the field in what sounds like an objective, detached manner (as if anthropology suddenly and naturally arose specifically to bring the non-western world into focus), Trouillot argues instead that anthropology is a distinct part of the very system, or field of knowledge, that it claims to analyze, challenge, and illuminate. Anthropology, according to Trouillot, does not exist outside of either the west or the west’s Other; anthropology is the west, and the “other” is little more than a creative exercise in western self-reflection. The job of the anthropologists, then, is to hold up the mirror (as Kluckhohn’s title fittingly suggests).

This study of the Other, or the Savage slot, is not something that anthropology invented; instead, it is a practice that was once the domain travel accounts and literature (Trouillot 2003: 19). The west has been manufacturing its exotic Others for centuries, and it was only relatively recently that a particular specialized discipline arose to consolidate that effort. The problem, however, is that anthropologists accepted this role without questioning the overall philosophical project they became a part of. As Trouillot argues, anthropology “inherited a disciplinary monopoly over an object that it never bothered to theorize” (Trouillot 2003: 19). The foundations of anthropology relied upon a particular conception of the world that masks historical relationships while claiming to generate cross-cultural understanding and knowledge, all in the name of “humanity.”

The invention of anthropology was a part of the invention of the west itself. Anthropology and the west are co-constituted: “To historicize the West is to historicize anthropology and vice versa” (Trouillot 23). As Wolf writes, “We have been taught, inside the classroom and outside of it, that there exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as a society and civilization independent of and in opposition to other societies and civilizations” (Wolf 1982: 5). Part of the creation of the western world, then, was the conceptual creation of the non-western Other, whose very existence was seen as evidence of the apparent division between the west and the non-west. The “people without history” (Wolf 1982) provided the self-defined west with grounds for investigating the basic nature of humanity. As Wolf explains, “If social and cultural distinctiveness and mutual separation were a hallmark of humankind, one would expect to find it most easily among the so-called primitive people” (1982: 4). And this is exactly the role that anthropology took charge of. Anthropologists, starting in the nineteenth century, explored the edges of the western world first by assuming that there was a west in the first place, and then by accepting the long-held notion of the Savage Other.

This intellectual practice has resulted, as Spivak and others have argued, in a radical erasure of the voice of the subaltern other—this is what Spivak refers to as “epistemic violence,” or the strategically employed use of western knowledge systems as a means of subjugation (Spivak 1988: 280). “The clearest example of such epistemic violence,” writes Spivak, “is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other. This project is also the asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subject-ivity” (Spivak 1988: 280-81). In speaking for the unvoiced Others, anthropologists and other western academics have only created silence and reified difference.

By accepting and playing into the west-Other dichotomy, anthropology has furthered this process of differentiation, while discreetly casting its intentions in benevolent light. This study of the non-west was undertaken, after all, in the name of knowledge, understanding, and humanity. However, as Trouillot forcefully counters, “To be sure, anthropologists to this day keep telling both undergraduates and lay readers that their practice is useful to better understand ‘ourselves,’ but without ever spelling out exactly the specifics of this understanding, the utopias behind this curiosity turned profession” (Trouillot 18). This is what needs to be challenged, rethought, and re-imagined.

Ultimately, Trouillot argues that anthropologists have to radically rethink the basic assumptions about their approach to the world if they are to remain viable in any way. There is, according to Trouillot, no such thing as the “Savage slot,” and there never was (2003: 27). And if anthropology has built its foundations around exploring this territory, what is left for anthropologists to study? How can they continue? Trouillot, Wolf, and Spivak argue that western academics have to critically challenge the very categories and assumptions that they use as basic starting points, lest they continue to cast shadows of silence upon the subjects that they claim to understand or give voice to. What is left of anthropology when this “Savage slot” is removed? What can anthropologists aspire to accomplish? As Trouillot argues, “At the very least, anthropologists can show that the Other, here and elsewhere, is indeed a product—symbolic and material—of the same processes that created the West” (Trouillot 28). There is no separate trajectory for the “west” and its others.

Human history cannot be broken down into discreet, absolute parts—human societies are not simply “billiard balls” that exist in compartmentalized realities that occasionally collide (Wolf 1982: 6). A new conception of the discipline has to reflect the complexities, interconnections, differences, and commonalities of human history, while avoiding the faulty foundations of exoticism and reified difference that has plagued the western project for far too long. As Trouillot argues, “There is no Other, but multitudes of others who are all others for different reasons, in spite of totalizing narratives” (2003: 27). The anthropological task is to reflect upon those reasons, while radically challenging the foundations of certain 'totalizing' narratives.

References

Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1961. Mirror for Man. New York: McGraw Hill.

Mead, Margaret. 1960. Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: Mentor Books.

Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
---1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolf. 2003. Global Transformations.

Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

a useless division...

"theory without empirical research is empty, empirical research without theory is blind"

-Pierre Bourdieu (1988)