Butler makes the claim that the problem with violence is twofold; it is a violence which devastates the lives of humans, and it is a violence which is often not recognized as such because of pre-existing conceptions of who is a human. Her solution is thus also twofold; we need to recognize more bodies as human and we need to redefine the norm, ie we need to redefine 'human' to be inclusive of more permutations of it.
Butler's systematic operates under an assumption of ethics which she defines as the question of not, 'what makes my own life more bearable, but when we ask, from a position of power and from the point of view of distributive justice, what makes or ought to make, the lives of others bearable (27)."
The reason we should be concerned with this kind of ethics is that we are each already constituted by being socially situated. "...we are from the start, and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own (21)." So we are each concerned with one another because we must be, because our body places us in relation to one another so that we become partially an expression of that relation.
It is the body that both makes it necessary to be in contact with one another and makes us vulnerable to one another. "In a sense, to be a body is to be given over to others even as a body is emphatically 'one's own", that over which we must claim rights of autonomy (20)"
This essential tension between myself and others is echoed in the discourses of power and truth which define relations of self and other through conceptions of humanness which are centered on the body. These discourses make violence either inaccessible to change by creating invisibility of bodies or create the visibility of a subject who can be depicted as oppressed. 'To be oppressed you must first become intelligible (30)." furthermore, "if there are no norms of recognition by which we are recognizable, then it is not possible to persist in one's own being (31)."
Therefore, we need to reconceive the standards of measurement for who counts so that the wrongs done against all can be redressed. 'if we consider that human bodies are not experienced without recourse to some ideality some frame of experience itself...and if we accept that that ideality and frame are socially articulated, we can see how it is that embodiment is not thinkable without a relation to a norm, or a set of norms (28)."
Butler then posits her strategy by continuing, saying "possibilities beyond the norm or, indeed, a different future for the norm itself." thus, "The embodied relation to the norm exercises a transformative potential." Here's how we can actualize that potential:
1) embodiment- 'where the body is not understood as a static...fact but as...a mode of becoming that, in becoming otherwise, exceeds the norm, reworks the norm (29)"
2) establishing non-nromative sexualities as already present and constituting of sociality which in turn constitutes each of us, as a “defining feature of the social world in its very intelligibility (29).”
3) “Expand notions of kinship beyond heterosexual frame (26)”
4) "to make grief a resource for politics...to allow oneself to extrapolate from this experience of vulnerability to the vulnerability that others suffer (23)."
One other element of this article is a pre-emptive defense against "reductive relativism" which argues that "generalizations themselves do violence to the specificity of the meanings in question (37)." Th defense calls for a "critical democratic project (37)." In other words, Butler reiterates classic liberal arguments for using rights discourse as a liberatory strategy.
1) I cannot exist or survive outside of society- 'I cannot be who I am without drawing upon the sociality of norms that precede and exceed me. in this sense, I am outside myself from the outset, and must be in order to survive, and in order to enter into the realm of the possible (32).'
2) I must constitute myself to be legible within society, "to be conceived as persons (32)."
3) I must appeal to society because "we are also dependent on the protection of public and private spaces, on legal sanctions that protect us from violence, on safeguards o various institutional kinds (33)."
4) "to live suggests that life itself requires a set of sheltering norms, and that to be outside it, to live outside it, is to court death (34)."
The essential question then-
How can an advocation for the re-articulation of normativity within a paradigm of universalistic legibility of individuals as parts of the total of humanity be compatible with a conception of singularity and difference?
Or in a less biased and more affirmative manner-
How can the notion of recognition, of subjectivity as partially constituted by relationality, be conceived as fluid?
and
How important is recognition to an ontology of change?
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6 comments:
kra asks: "How can the notion of recognition, of subjectivity as partially constituted by relationality, be conceived as fluid?"
I think Butler gives at least a partial answer to this at the end of the chapter when she talks about translation and tension. She writes, "It may be that what is right and what is good consist in staying open to the tensions that beset the most fundamental categories we require, in knowing unknowingness at the core of what we know, and what we need, and in recognizing the sign of life in what we undergo without certainty about what will come." (39) In other words, accepting subjectivity as an uncertainty, as unknown, as a tension at the core is part of what we should aim for in order to accept more people as human. So the recognition of someone as human should not rest on that human's relation to a gender norm.
Butler calls for the realization of the role of the body, embodiment, self and identity limits in a language of relational differentiality. We have a social vulnerability constituted by bodies how we depend and relate to one another. Butler clarifies, “Lets face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.” This dependability combined with the nuances of societal connection between knowledge, power and democracy lead non hetero-normative genders and sexualities to present their identities as limited and bodies as bounding the definition of our beings (of course, this is the language hetero-normative genders and sexualities are presented in, its just less on fire politically – not less political). The result of these presentations as well as the motivating factor (chicken or egg? Both at the same time?) is the need to feel autonomous as an individual; rejecting the underlying dependence of humans, bodies. Butler’s answer is the self is actually the multiplicity of relationships. Irigaray, Kristeva and Cixous all took issue with singularity. Butler unveils autonomy as singular and relationality as multiple, differential and fluid.
To add on to Becky's comment, Butler, like Irigaray, focuses on touch as a means to deconstruct the notion of the singular autonomous individual: "Despite one's best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel" (Butler, 19). Butler doesn't reference the visual as a sense that would aid in this process of undoing, so as to imply, like Irigaray, that seeing doesn't have a deconstructive effect.
I think a "subjectivity partially constituted by relationally" can be conceived of as fluid in terms of the openness of our relations to others and the ways these relations both create and undo us; “one does not always stay in tact”. Her discussion of the word ec-static includes its less popular definition which includes being “beside yourself” with grief or rage. In fact, Butler seems to say that we are constituted by being “beside ourselves” or, in other words, outside of ourselves, and thus permeable and fluid and not the “presumptive center”.
“We are in the thrall of our relation to others”- such that when a relation to another is severed, “we loose our composure in some fundamental sense”p19.
Butler advocates “yielding our most fundamental categories, that is, seeing how and why they break up”. The idea of giving up that which is fundamental also seems to relate to her discussion of grief- In the same way we must be able to “sit with our grief”, we must be able to “sit with this loss” (the loss of our fundamental categories). She wants us to bring our “grids of intelligibility” into question and “live in the anxiety of that challenge”. This idea of being able to “sit” with discomfort, loss, grief or disorientation is very similar to one of the most important practices in yoga and in meditation called “learning how to stay”- People have a really low tolerance for discomfort of any kind and tend to rush to alleviate alleviate alleviate alleviate, but we must learn how to “hold our seat”, how to tell ourselves to “stay” in the place of discomfort. To sit with the anxiety of being without the fundamental catagories that make our reality intelligible- to be able to accept that things are not yet determined is the only way to allow for new visions of what humanity is and should be. She discusses the violence committed against people who blur gender lines as a desperate attempt to restore social order and a refusal to see gender as something other than “natural and necessary”. If it is a fear of being without fixed categories that motivates these desperate, violent attempts to conserve the social order, than to change the order will require a willingness to sit with the discomfort of “yielding what is most fundamental” and disorientation it will cause.
Her notion of cultural translation also invokes a sense of fluidity and relationality- the two languages do not stay enclosed, distinct, unified, but “translation will compel each language to change in order to apprehend the other”,
Also, I thought it was really crafty how she used the example of 9/11 to show that we could either try to erect bigger and bigger walls around ourselves, or use it as a way to realize our own corporeal vulnerability and extrapolate to a sense of others’ vulnerability.
She seems almost to ask us to meditate on the idea of corporeal vulnerability “stay with the idea”, she says, and by doing that, by meditating on grief and vulnerability, to come back to a notion of our “collective responsibility for the lives of one another”.
As I have in the two previous responses will take this opportunity to lend a critical posture towards Butler's writing. In this piece she writes: "Through recourse to norms, the sphere of the humanly intelligible is circumscribed, and this circumscription is consequential for any ethics and any conception of social transformation"(36). Like Butler I am also very interested in poststructural tendency in philosophy and the question of ethics in society. However I feel that in passages like the one I have quoted Butler quietly indicates a conception of society, control, and change that I find unacceptable. Similar to her investment in universality, the circumscriptive normalization of a consequently interiorized social group strikes me as entirely unnecessary. I would suggest that we may need to fight against any attempts to complete the inscription of that circle around 'us'. I fear the transcendent social organism that seems to be Butler's vehicle to change.
I guess there is something pragmatic about this preoccupation with norms, that is, there are groups more common than other groups, as long as you like to affirm the ackowledgement of the groupness of groups, despite the violence inherent: if a man is a man, then he can be said to be simulating manness, etc. Alfred Korzybski said "the map is not the territory"; I would say that even if you take a norm to mean a maleable group, it has an ideal center, a vanishing point, that brands every subject with its nonideality and horizontic ontology. There is no outside a norm, there are only distances from it, and everything has to be somewhere in measure to it.
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