Human Being and Vulnerability

The Subject is dead, long live the subject

Butler is careful to avoid any active individualistic agency: one is not free to “choose” or “perform” one’s identity. As this point is sometimes ignored in the reception of Butler,34 she is keen to correct such misunderstandings. She writes that “performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.”35 For Butler, the volitional and independent Subject is dead and in its place enters “the subject,” constituted in dependence on discourse and grammar. How identity is formed is instead explained by something called interpellation.

To begin with, and this is the flaw for example in Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist theory,36 the problem is that a “doer” is assumed by de Beauvoir, and many other feminists, according to Butler.37 Such an agent is impossible for Butler because, in her words, “there is no recourse to a ‘person,’ a ‘sex,’ or a ‘sexuality’ that escapes the matrix of power and discursive relations that effectively produces and regulates the intelligibility of these concepts for us.”38 This means that, and Butler quotes from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals here, that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.”39 In other words, the deeds of a willing agent cannot constitute an identity since those deeds are the product of a discourse. The willing subject only exists as subordinate to the power of performativity and discourse in Butler. Choice “comes late” in the process of subjectivation.40

The becoming of a subject is the act of subjectivation, a term Butler borrows from Foucault. It is originally the term assujettissement in French, which is directly translated as subjugation but is variously translated as subjectivation, subjectification or subjection. Butler understands assujettissement in Foucault as a paradox in that, in Butler’s words, it “denotes both the becoming of the subject and the process of subjection – one inhabits the figure of autonomy only by becoming subjected to power, a subjection which implies a radical dependency.”41 For Butler, in subjectivation, the subject is created in his/her resistance to or, alternatively, acceptance of, the subjugating powers in the society and juridical law.42 Butler questions a willing agent since there is no longer anyone making any choices in the formation of the subject in subjectivation. Rather, power constructs the subject,43 which becomes the site in which identity can be formed.44 She also asks the question of how power structures not only subjectivate us but also “individuate” us, make us individuals.45 It is thus a very relevant question from Butler’s perspective whether or not the school is one institution whose subjugating powers form the identity and autonomy of the subject.

Importantly for Butler “the individual,” “the subject” and “identity” are not identical. Rather, the subject is seen as a “site.” This “site of the subject” is the result of the process of interpellation, a notion that Butler borrows from the philosopher Louis Althusser. Interpellation establishes the “site” where identity can be formed.46 This site is relational in that it comes into existence through relations and by being “called” into it.47 To form an identity, one needs to become a subject through interpellation.

It is this calling and interpellation that makes Butler focus on language rather than on volitional action in subjectivation. She argues for the “I” as a grammatical placeholder, where “I” is linguistically presumed before any “real” “I” has been established.48 Here what grammar does is that it “governs the availability of persons in language.”49 This means that, in Butler’s thinking, “I am not outside of the language that structures me, but neither am I determined by the language that makes this ‘I’ possible.”50 In other words, the “I” cannot be extracted from grammar as some property independent from language. But this does not make Butler into a linguistic idealist,51 for what it does mean is that there is, as Butler puts it, a “difficulty of the ‘I’ to express itself through the language that is available to it.”52 The primacy of the “I,” or the self, is put under suspicion by Butler’s line of argument, and what is challenged in particular is the thought of a self with an internal origin that moves outward to the external world.53

The “I” is not outside language since the only tool to express the “I” as intelligible is language. However, the “I” is never fully determined by language since norms that constitute the identity of “I”54 can never be fully materialized and never completely expressed by language.55

More recently, Butler has challenged her own priority of the grammatical by what she calls a social ontology. She writes that the grammatical “I” that I am “is already social” and that “[t]he dependency that constitutes what I am prior to the emergence of any pronoun underscores the fact that I depend on the ones whose definition of me gives me form.”56 More on this social ontology will be said later, but it emphasizes what Butler terms dispossession of our self so that we are other to ourselves. There is always a failure of comprehension and a lack of completion in Butler.57

Consequently, the “I,” rather than being constituted by the actions of its own choosing, as in de Beauvoir, is constituted by actions not of its own choosing.58 Herein lies an essential difference between Butler and much second-wave feminism.59

But if the “I” is no longer constituted by his or her own choices, how can it come to being? Has Butler answered that question by stating, with Foucault, that the subject is a product of “historically specific discursive conditions and power relations?”60 Butler is not fully content with that and that is why she takes support from Althusser’s idea of interpellation.

In Althusser, interpellation occurs when a representative of the law calls, or “hails,” an individual. In the response to that hailing the individual is constituted as a subject. Althusser writes:

I shall then suggest that ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’61

Essential in this is the distinction made between the “subject,” on the one hand, and the “individual,” on the other.62 But one problem is obvious from the outset since “the individual” is prior to “the subject” in interpellation. Althusser’s response is to state that, “an individual is always-already a subject,” since even before someone is born they will be destined to have a name, and thus interpellated into a subject.63 For Butler this will not do and she argues instead that

the subject, rather than be identified strictly with the individual, ought to be designated as a linguistic category, a placeholder, a structure in formation. Individuals come to occupy the site of the subject (the subject simultaneously emerges as a “site”), and they enjoy intelligibility only to the extent that they are, as it were, first established in language.64

Here Butler radicalizes Althusser’s view of the individual-as-already-a-subject by stating that the individual is a consequence of the subjectivization through language.65 The individual is necessary only as a grammatical category rather than as an ontological one and emerges as a “placeholder” from the establishment of the subject. Therefore, for Butler, “[t]he grammar of the subject emerges only as a consequence of the process we are trying to describe.”66

Annika Thiem points out here that, important in Butler, “is the claim that there is no individual subject that precedes its formation through subjection. But even though there is no existence apart from discourse and power, this does not mean that norms and discourses arbitrarily and randomly give birth to subjects.”67 But not all are convinced that Butler solves the dilemma Althusser provides her with. Noela Davis makes the point that Butler, with the act of interpellation, fails to explain the constitution of the subject and states that it is “an enigmatic process, and it appears that no explanation we could devise would be adequate to explain it.”68 But here it should be pointed out that it is not that “the subject,” “the individual,” or “the body” does not exist for Butler;69 it is simply that they are unknowable in any other sense than as a linkage to the subject-to-be which occurs through interpellation.70 In some sense, Butler is simply quiet about that for which there is no language.

Importantly then, to be human, for Butler, one needs to be knowable.71 Human identity, for Butler, is the intelligibility of the subject, but the subject needs to be “an other” to “the other” and even other to itself to be knowable.72 This is achieved by reflexivity and self-reflexivity. Much in line with psychoanalytic thought, Butler concurs that in the awareness of the prohibition of one’s will there is a necessity for the subject to become an object to him- or herself to be intelligible.73 This is why interpellation is so important to Butler because self-reflexivity is enabled in the response to the call. Not only is the subject constituted by the hailing of an other as a social agent,74 the subject also becomes aware of him- or herself as a subject. Human identity must consequently be seen as a socially and relationally constituted concept for Butler. She writes:

[c]alled by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially.75

To summarize, the way performativity constitutes human subjecthood, for Butler, is through the act of interpellation, which is that process through which language constructs a social position for the subject established by recognition by the other. The calling is part of a repetitive practice of a materialization of norms that shapes the subject. It needs to be repetitive since in the recognition of a subject there is always also a failure embedded in that recognition, what Butler calls misrecogntion. In an extreme misrecognition, the human being is not a subject at all, but an abject.76 Despite the risk of abjection, human life can only be recognized by means of performativity and interpellation, at least early on in Butler’s thinking.

Relationality and the constitution of humanity

After the death of the autonomous Subject, the notion of a subject is resurrected, or interpellated, as a social and relational concept by Butler. This whole process from interpellation of a subject to the constitution of a self is expressed well when Butler writes,

[i]f I am first addressed and then my address emerges as a consequence, animated by a primary address and bearing the enigma of that address, then I speak to you, but you are also what is opaque in the act of my speaking. Whoever you are, you constitute me fundamentally and become the name for a primary impressionability, for the uncertain boundary between an impression from outside that I register and some consequent sense of “me” that is the site of that registering. Within this founding scene, the very grammar of the self has not yet taken hold. And so one might say, reflectively, and with a certain sense of humility, that in the beginning I am my relation to you, ambiguously addressed and addressing, given over to a “you” without whom I cannot be and upon whom I depend to survive.77

Interestingly and importantly, “the caller” in this instance is not a representative of the law or not necessarily so at least. Rather, the quote opens up for a more interpersonal understanding of who that interpellating other can be. The other can here be another subject, or as in Butler’s later writing, a person.78 But for now, since Butler dismisses voluntarist and essentialist views of the self, the self is established by a complex network of factors that relate to each other in such a way that a self is formed by them. At the same time, Butler maintains that “[i]t does not suffice to say that I am promoting a relational view of the self over an autonomous one, or trying to redescribe autonomy in terms of relationality. The term ‘relationality’ sutures the rupture in the relation we seek to describe, a rupture that is constitutive of identity itself.”79 In the light of what has been said about interpellation and reflexivity how is one to make sense of the latter statement?

The word “suture” is a good place to start. “Suture” means “to join,” “seal,” or “close” something. So what does Butler mean when she says that “relationality” joins, seals, or closes the rupture (breach/rift) that is constitutive of identity itself? And how should Butler’s view be understood then, if not as “promoting a relational view of the self over an autonomous one”? To understand this, it is necessary to look at Butler’s view of agency once more. After all, Butler writes that, “[i]f I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose.”80 One is “dispossessed” by the other.81 And this dispossession is a way of “being for another, or indeed, by virtue of another,” for Butler.82 The self, then, for Butler, must be seen as outside of our possession. In Butler’s words, that “we are impinged upon primarily and against our will is the sign of a vulnerability and a beholdenness that we cannot will away. We can defend against it only by prizing the asociality of the subject over and against a difficult and intractable, even sometimes unbearable relationality.”83 Clearly, Butler promotes a relational view of a kind, but what kind is it if she also rejects a relational view that sutures the rupture in identity that Butler wants to maintain?

If Butler offers a view of the relationality of the self, which it must be said that she does, it is a relationality in some sense located “outside” of the subject, and is one of vulnerability. What Butler rejects is use of the term “relationality” to mask or soften the unbearability of the social constitution of human life, which it could easily do in Butler’s view. The constitution of the self through relation is not neat, or safe; rather, one’s self is constituted by being dispossessed in an unbearable vulnerability. Only in an unbearable relationality and vulnerability does the corporeality of the subject emerge. Butler cannot promise any suture of the rupture that the other’s relation to me will cause. And the later we get in Butler’s writing the more she stresses how this is not merely a psychological effect. It is very much a bodily relationality too.84 This is also one of the most contested areas in Butler’s thinking: Butler and the body.

The problematic body

When writing about the body, Butler acknowledges that she “kept losing track of the subject” for she “could not fix bodies as simple objects of thought” since “bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves.”85 Anyone reading Butler’s early writings on the body is likely to share that sense of frustration.86 But this frustration is not necessarily due to a failure on Butler’s part, nor does it have to come down to the complexity of her language.87 Rather, in the context of Butler’s thinking, this frustration is a natural consequence of the elusiveness of the body because the “body” is situated in a particular discourse, always affected by norms.88 In Butler’s view, the body is constantly shifting the boundaries of how we can understand what it is and, as such, it is only natural that there is a sense of frustration if we want to pinpoint what the body is, since that does not allow itself to be done. Noteworthy is that while for Foucault discourse is closely related to genealogy, Butler makes discursive analyses political and ethical and not “archaeological” as in Foucault.

Butler argues that power relations in a discourse affect the formation of the body.89 She writes that “the body is not an independent materiality that is invested by power relations external to it, but it is that for which materialization and investiture are coextensive.”90 If norms and power relations constitute the body, then there is a sense that this constitution is neither solid nor unchangeable since norms and power relations always change and undermine themselves.91 But if that is the case is it possible to say what the body is for Butler?

The what of the body

For Butler, norms’ materializing power decides what can be counted as a real human body.92 The body is, in Butler’s terminology, the product of the naturalization of norms through reiteration in the process of performativity. Put differently, gender norms become concrete in the body, and norms therefore determine how we know the body. The more these norms are affirmed by our actions, the more “real” or “natural” that body will be perceived to be, even though the known body “in reality” is the product of the norms themselves. If that is the case, then it is plausible that it is the relationship between embodiment and normativity that should be our focal point for finding out about the body since the “what” of the body is to be found in the actual relation between norms and the body.

If norms govern what the body is then it will not be possible to find any “essence” of the body, particularly since there is no access to its “thereness” except through language.93 But language, to complicate matters, is never a direct mediator to the body for Butler. Butler does not deny that the body exists,94 but due to the nature of language, it is impossible to know what it is.95 This is why she writes, “[i]s there a ‘physical’ body prior to the perceptually perceived body? An impossible question to decide.”96 Language and reality are stuck in something of a “chicken and the egg” situation. For Butler, language limits what we can think about ourselves and our reality. Language, however, masks this so that we perceive language as providing access to the body; but, as Butler sees it, what we meet when we meet the “thereness” of the body are different norms.97 Language’s ability to naturalize norms is a way of expressing how norms are materialized in actual bodies and actions in human society. Consequently, for Butler, it is never possible to experience bodies and actions in a direct way outside of norms.

To complicate things further, though, Butler includes more than norms as constitutive for the body. The “psychic” also plays an important part in terms of the forming of the body. So, not unlike the quotation by [epigraph from] Proust in the introduction, in Butler’s words, “psychic projection confers boundaries and, hence, unity on the body, so that the very contours of the body are sites that vacillate between the psychic and the material.”98

This is phrased a little differently from what I explained above. In term of the psychic, the body is now that which “vacillate[s] between the psychic and the material”; but, again, the boundaries of the body are in constant flux. Yet, rather than relating norms and materiality, Butler is here concerned with “the psychic” in relation to the body and the psychic is simultaneously a unifying and a dispersing factor in the formation of the body.

While Butler primarily relates to Freud here, Foucault’s notion of power as forming the subject is also important. In Butler’s symbiosis of Freud and Foucault, power is internalized so that “power that at first appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity.”99 In that way power provides “the very condition of its [the subject’s] existence.”100 The psychic is, for Butler, power that has become internalized as mental self-understanding in the subject.

In this way, Butler uses the concept of the psychic as a way to contrast the internal and self-reflecting side of the subject with the social and external world that constitutes the subject.101 Put differently, the psychic, for Butler, is the internalization of external and social norms into the subject’s self-reflection.102 The body is the “site” in which the norms are “read” or taken in.103 “Bodily contours and morphology are not merely implicated in an irreducible tension between the psychic and the material but are that tension,” as Butler writes in Bodies That Matter.104

For Butler, the body is the tension between the psychic and the material so that the psychic is the self-reflectivity of the body’s interaction with the world. The psychic is aware of how the body is constituted by that outside and how the body is vulnerable to, firstly, the world; secondly, to the materialized norms in society; and, thirdly, to the actions of the other. And it is the body that, due to its vulnerability, both contains the sense of a self while simultaneously leaving that self “dispossessed” of itself and open to the world.105 That is why bodily contours are the tension between the psychic and the material.

The body is open to the world, so much so that Butler hesitates to call one’s body “one’s own.”106 Butler’s vacillation about the body is evident. The body is at one and the same time the site for the psyche where a self-reflective subject is developed and open to the world to such an extent that the body is dispossessed of itself and vulnerable to the other.

The latter is developed by Butler into a “social ontology” of the body.107 The social in this is fundamental. She writes that “the life of the other, the life that is not our own, is also our life, since whatever sense ‘our’ life has is derived precisely from this sociality, this being already, and from the start, dependent on a world of others, constituted in and by a social world.”108 On a further note, the social ontology of our bodies motivates Butler to develop an absolute standpoint of (aggressive) nonviolence.109

In this (later) opening toward ontology Butler acknowledges a “what” of the body in somewhat clearer terms.110 But the body, as she writes, “has to be understood […] in terms of its supporting networks of relations.”111 When this social ontology is developed, the body and materiality can play a more essential part in Butler’s thinking than it did in her early writings. She writes that “if we accept that part of what a body is (and this is for the moment an ontological claim) is its dependency on other bodies and networks of support, then we are suggesting that it is not altogether right to conceive of individual bodies as completely distinct from one another.”112 Of particular importance is then the concept of vulnerability and interdependence.113 And after Frames of War Butler starts to explore vulnerability as an ontological assumption, even if the seeds of that thinking are present much earlier, as we will see. But Butler is not developing this ontology to explain the “what” of the body. That is still elusive. Instead, what Butler is most interested in is the “how,” how the body relates to the other and how it is constituted as a body through the other.114 There will be reason to come back to this, for this social ontology is conducive to the discussion that lies ahead, but the focus on the “how” relates to Butler’s view of actions.