Judith Butler in Conversation

Analyzing the Texts and Talk of Everyday Life

Bronwyn Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135910990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

How has Judith Butler's writing contributed to thought in the Social Sciences and the Humanities? The participants in this project draw on various aspects of Butler's conceptual work and they question how it has opened up the possibilities of thought in areas of study as diverse as theatre studies, education and narrative therapy.

In a format that demands careful listening and response, the scholars in this book interact with Butler, her writing, and each other. Within this dynamic space they take up Butler's body of work and carry it in new and exciting directions. Their conversations and writing are, in turn, funny, exciting, surprising and moving.

Chapter 1

“An Account of Oneself”

JUDITH BUTLER

University of California–Berkeley

In a less well-known set of lectures on morality, Theodor Adorno offers the modest claim that there can be no morality without an “I,” a first-person perspective through which one poses the question, “What ought I to do?” or, indeed, “what have I done?”. He writes, for instance, that “it will be obvious to you that all ideas of morality or ethical behavior must relate to an ‘I’ that acts” (Adorno 1997, 28). And yet, it is equally clear to him that there is no “I” who can fully stand apart from the social conditions of his or her emergence, no “I” that is not implicated in a set of conditioning moral norms that, as norms, have a social character that exceeds a purely individual meaning.

The question of morality presupposes that I stand before a set of norms and decide among them, but Adorno cautions us against taking this scene as a description of ontology. The situation is misleading, since the “I” does not stand apart from the prevailing matrix of ethical norms and conflicting moral frameworks. In an important sense, this matrix is also the condition for the emergence of the “I”, even as the “I” is not causally induced by those norms, even though we cannot conclude that the “I” is simply the effect or the instrument of some prior ethos or some field of conflicting or discontinuous norms. When the “I” seeks to give an account of itself, it can try to start with its own singular past and origins, but it will find that this self, both as a narrating vehicle and as a subject to be narrated, is already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration; indeed, when the “I” seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, I want to suggest, become a social theorist.

The reason is that the “I” has no story of its own that is not at once the story of how the “I” is conditioned and produced within a matrix of conventions and norms governing the formation of the subject. And though many contemporary critics worry that this means there is no concept of the subject that can serve as the ground for moral agency and moral accountability, this conclusion, in my view, does not follow. The “I” is always to some extent dispossessed by the social conditions of its emergence. This dispossession does not mean that we have lost the subjective ground for ethics. On the contrary, this dispossession may well be the condition for moral inquiry, the condition under which morality itself emerges. If the “I” is not at one with the moral norms it negotiates, this means only that the subject must deliberate upon these norms, and that part of deliberation will entail a critical understanding of their social genesis and meaning. In this sense, ethical deliberation is bound up with the operation of critique. And critique finds that it cannot go forward without a consideration of how the deliberating subject comes into being and how a deliberating subject might actually live or appropriate a set of norms. Not only does ethics find itself embroiled in the task of social theory, but social theory, if it is to yield nonviolent results, must find a living place for this “I.”

There are a variety of ways to account for the emergence of the “I” from the matrix of social institutions, ways of contextualizing morality in its social conditions. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche underscored the violence of “bad conscience,” which brings the “I” into being as a consequence of potentially annihilating cruelty. The “I” turns against itself, unleashing its morally condemning aggression against itself, and reflexivity is inaugurated as a result. This is, at least, the Nietzschean view of bad conscience. I would suggest that Adorno (1997) alludes to such a negative view of bad conscience when he maintains that an ethics that cannot be appropriated in “a living way” by individuals under socially existing conditions “is the bad conscience of conscience” (Nietzsche 1969, 15).

We have to ask here, however, whether the “I” who must appropriate moral norms in a living way is not itself conditioned by norms—norms that establish the viability of the subject. It is one thing to say that a subject must be able to appropriate norms, but it is another to say that there must be norms that prepare a place within the ontological field for a subject. In the first instance, norms are there, at an exterior distance, and the task is to find a way of appropriating them, taking them on, establishing a living relation to them. The epistemological frame is presupposed in this encounter, one in which a subject encounters moral norms and must find his way with them. But did Adorno consider that norms also decide in advance who will and will not become a subject? Did he consider the operation of norms in the very constitution of the subject, in the stylization of its ontology, and in the establishing of a legitimate site within the realm of social ontology?

It would seem that before we can ask about what a subject is to do, we have to understand how morality more generally functions as a forcible framework within which the subject is formed. For a subject produced by morality must nevertheless find her way with morality, and there is no willing away this paradoxical condition for moral deliberation and for the task of giving an account of oneself. Even if morality supplies a set of norms by which a subject is produced in her intelligibility, it also remains a set of norms and rules that a subject must negotiate in a living and reflective way.

In On the Genealogy of Morals (1969), Nietzsche offers a controversial account of how we become reflective at all about our actions and how we become positioned to give an account of what we have done. He remarks that we become conscious of ourselves only after certain injuries have been inflicted. Someone suffers as a consequence, and the suffering person—or, rather, someone acting as his advocate in a system of justice—seeks to find the cause of that suffering and asks us whether we might not be that cause. It is precisely in the interests of dealing a just punishment to the one responsible for an injurious action that the question is posed and that the subject in question comes to question himself. “Punishment,” Nietzsche tells us, is “the making of a memory” (1969, 80). The question posits the self as a causative force, and it also models a specific mode of responsibility. In asking whether we caused such suffering, we are being asked by an established authority not only to establish a causal link between our own actions and the suffering that follows but also to take responsibility for these actions and their effects. It is in this context that we find ourselves in the position of having to give an account of ourselves.

We start to give an account only because we are interpellated as beings who are accountable to a system of justice and punishment. This system is not there from the start, but becomes instituted over time and at a great cost to the human instincts. Nietzsche writes that, under these conditions, people “felt unable to cope with the simplest undertakings; in this new world they no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious, and infallible drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, coordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their ‘consciousness,’ their weakest and most fallible organ!” (1969, 84).

So I start to give an account, if Nietzsche is right, because someone has asked me to, and that someone has power delegated from an established system of justice. I have been addressed, even perhaps had an act attributed to me, and a certain threat of punishment backs up this interrogation. And so, in fearful response, I offer myself as an “I” and try to reconstruct my deeds, showing that the deed attributed to me was or was not, in fact, among them. I am either owning up to myself as the cause of such an action, qualifying my causative contribution, or defending myself against the attribution, perhaps locating the cause elsewhere. These are the parameters within which my account of myself takes place. For Nietzsche, accountability only follows upon an accusation or, minimally, an allegation, one made by someone in a position to deal a punishment if causality can be established. And we become reflective, accordingly, through fear and terror. Indeed, we become moral as a consequence of fear and terror.

Yet, let us consider that being addressed by another carries other valences besides fear. There may well be a desire to know and understand that is not fueled by the desire to punish, and a desire to explain and narrate that is not prompted by a terror of punishment. Nietzsche did well to understand that I only begin my story of myself in the face of a “you” who asks me to give an account. Only in the face of such a query or attribution from an “other”—“Was it you?”—do any of us start to narrate ourselves, or find that, for urgent reasons, we must become self-narrating beings. Of course, it is always possible to remain silent in the face of such a question, where the silence articulates a resistance to the question: “You have no right to ask such a question,” or, “I will not dignify this allegation with a response,” or, “Even if it was me, this is not for you to know.” Silence on these occasions either calls into question the legitimacy of the authority invoked by the question and the questioner or attempts to circumscribe a domain of autonomy that cannot or should not be intruded upon by the questioner. The refusal to narrate remains a relation to narrative and to the scene of address. As a narrative withheld, it either refuses the relation that the inquirer presupposes or changes that relation so that the one queried refuses the one who queries.

Telling a story about oneself is not the same as giving an account of oneself. And yet, we can see in the example above that the kind of narrative required of an account we give of ourselves is one that accepts the presumption that the self has a causal relation to the suffering of others (and eventually, through bad conscience, to oneself as well). Not all narrative takes this form, clearly, but the narrative that responds to allegation must, from the outset, accept the possibility that the self has causal agency, even if, in a given instance, the self may not have been the cause of the suffering in question.

Giving an account thus takes a narrative form, depending not only on the ability to relay a set of sequential events with plausible transitions but also drawing upon narrative voice and authority, and it is directed toward an audience with the aim of persuasion. The narrative must then establish that the self either was or was not the cause of that suffering, and so supply a persuasive medium through which to understand the causal agency of the self. The narrative does not emerge after the fact of causal agency, but constitutes the prerequisite condition for any account of moral agency we might give. In this sense, narrative capacity constitutes a precondition for giving an account of oneself and assuming responsibility for one’s actions through that means. Of course, one might simply nod or make use of another expressive gesture to acknowledge that one is indeed the one who authored the deed in question. The nod functions as an expressive precondition of acknowledgment. A similar kind of expressive power is at work when one remains silent in the face of the query, “Do you have anything to say for yourself?” In both examples, though, the gesture of acknowledgment makes sense only in relation to an implied story line: “Yes, I was the one who occupied the position of the causal agent in the sequence of the events to which you refer.”

Nietzsche’s view does not fully take into account the scene of address through which responsibility is queried and then either accepted or denied. He assumes that the query is made from within a legal framework in which punishment is threatened as an equivalent injury for the injury committed in the first place. But not all forms of address originate from this system and for this reason. The system of punishment he describes is based on revenge, even when it is valorized as “justice.” It does not recognize that life entails a certain amount of suffering and injury that cannot be fully accounted for through recourse to the subject as a causal agent. Indeed, for Nietzsche, aggression itself is coextensive with life, and if we sought to outlaw aggression, we would effectively be trying to outlaw life itself. He writes that “life operates essentially, that is in its basic functions, through injury, assault, exploitation, destruction and cannot be thought of at all without this character.” “Legal conditions,” he adds, “constitute a partial restriction on the will of life,” a will that is defined by struggle. The legal effort to obliterate struggle would be, in his words, “an attempt to assassinate the future of man …” (1969, 76).

At stake for Nietzsche is not simply the prevalence of a morality and legal order he opposes, but a coerced crafting of the “human” in opposition to life itself. His view of life, however, assumes that aggression is more primary than generosity and that concerns for justice emerge from a revenge ethic. The self as “cause” of an injurious action is always retroactively attributed—the doer is only belatedly attached to the deed. In fact, the doer only becomes the causal agent of the deed through a retrospective attribution that seeks to comply with a moral ontology stipulated by a legal system that establishes accountability and punishable offenses through locating a relevant self as a causal source of suffering. For Nietzsche, suffering exceeds any effect caused by one self or another, and though there are clearly instances when one vents aggression externally against another, causing injury or destruction, there is something “justifiable” about this suffering to the extent that it is part of life, and constitutes part of the “seduction” and “vitality” of life itself. There are many reasons to quarrel with this account, and I will make some of my own differences clear as I proceed.

What seems important to point out first, though, is that Nietzsche restricts his understanding of accountability to this juridically mediated and belated attribution, not understanding, it seems, the other interlocutory conditions in which one is asked to give an account of oneself. He focuses instead on an original aggression that is part of every human and, indeed, coextensive with life itself. Its prosecution under a system of punishment would, in his view, eradicate this truth about life itself. The institution of law compels an originally aggressive human to turn that aggression inward, to craft an inner world composed of a guilty conscience and to vent that aggression against oneself in the name of morality; he notes that “in this psychical cruelty there resides a madness of the will which is absolutely unexampled; the will of man to find himself guilty and reprehensible to a degree that can never be atoned for” (1969, 93). This aggression that Nietzsche regards as native to every human animal and to life itself is turned against the will and then assumes a second life, imploding inward to construct a conscience that yields reflexivity on the model of self-beratement. That reflexivity is the precipitate of the subject, understood as a reflexive being, one who can and does take him or herself as an object of reflection.

However, Nietzsche does not consider other linguistic dimensions of this situation. If I am held accountable through a framework of morality, that framework is first addressed to me—first starts to act upon me—through the address and query of another. Indeed, I come to know that framework through no other way. If I give an account of myself in response to such a query, I am implicated in a relation to the other before whom and to whom I speak. Thus, I come into being as a reflexive subject in the context of establishing a narrative account of myself when I am spoken to by someone and prompted to address myself to the one who addresses me.

In The Psychic Life of Power (Butler 1997a), I moved perhaps too quickly to accept this punitive scene of inauguration for the subject. According to that view, the institution of punishment ties me to my deed, and when I am punished for having done this or that deed, I emerge as a subject of conscience and, hence, a subject who reflects upon herself in some way. This view of subject formation depends upon an account of a subject who internalizes the law or, minimally, the causal tethering of the subject to the deed for which the institution of punishment seeks compensation.

One might expect that this Nietzschean account of punishment became crucial to Michel Foucault’s account of disciplinary power in the prison. It surely was, but Foucault differs explicitly from Nietzsche by refusing to generalize that scene of punishment to account for how a reflexive subject comes about; the turning against oneself that typifies the emergence of Nietzschean bad conscience does not account for the emergence of reflexivity in Foucault. In The Use of Pleasure, the second volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault turns to an examination of the conditions under which a self might take itself to be an object for reflection and cultivation, concentrating on premodern formations of the subject. Whereas ethics seemed derivable from a terrorizing scene of punishment for Nietzsche, Foucault moves with the final reflections of Nietzsche’s Genealogy to focus on the peculiar creativity that morality engages, and how it is, in particular, that bad conscience becomes the means for the manufacturing of values. For Nietzsche, morality emerges as the terrorized response to punishment. But this terror turns out to be strangely fecund; morality and its precepts (soul, conscience, bad conscience, consciousness, self-reflection, and instrumental reasoning) are all soaked in cruelty and aggression turned back upon itself. The elaboration of a morality—a set of rules and equivalences—is the sublimated (and inverted) effect of this primary aggression turned against oneself, the idealized consequence of a turn against one’s own destructiveness and, for Nietzsche, one’s own life impulses.

Indeed, whereas Nietzsche considers the force of punishment as instrumental to the internalization of rage and the consequent production of bad conscience (and other moral precepts), Foucault turns increasingly to codes of morality, understood as codes of conduct—and not primarily to codes of punishment—to consider how subjects are constituted in relation to such codes that do not always rely on the violence of prohibition and its internalizing effects. Nietzsche’s masterful account in On the Genealogy of Morals shows us how, for instance, rage and spontaneous will are internalized to produce the sphere of the “soul” as well as a sphere of morality. This process of internalization is to be understood as an inversion, a turning of primarily aggressive impulse back on itself, the signature action of bad conscience. For Foucault, reflexivity is elaborated in the taking up of a relation to moral codes, but it does not rely on an account of internalization or of psychic life more generally, and certainly not in a reduction of morality to bad conscience.

When one reads Nietzsche’s critique of morality, one might derive a fully cynical view of morality and conclude that human conduct that seeks to follow norms of prescriptive value is motivated less by any desire to do good than by a terrorized fear of punishment and its injurious effects. What seems important here, however, is to see how strongly Foucault wants to move away from this particular model and conclusion when, in the early 1980s, he decided to move away from Nietzsche’s position to rethink the sphere of ethics. His interest shifted to a consideration of how certain historically established prescriptive codes compelled a certain kind of subject formation. Whereas in his earlier work he treated the subject as an “effect” of discourse, in his later writings he nuances and refines his position so: The subject forms itself in relation to a set of codes, prescriptions, or norms, and does so in ways that not only (1) reveal self-constitution as a kind of poiesis, but (2) establish self-making as part of the broader operation of critique. As I’ve argued elsewhere, ethical self-making in Foucault is not a radical creation of the self ex nihilo, but a “delimit[ing] of that part of the self that will form the object of his moral practice” (1985, 28). This work on the self, this very act of delimiting, takes place within the context of a set of norms that precede and exceed the subject, and these are invested with power and recalcitrance, setting the limits to what will be considered an intelligible formation of the subject within a given historical scheme of things. There is no making of oneself (poiesis) outside of a mode of subjectivation (assujettissement) and, hence, no self-making outside of the norms that orchestrate the possible forms that a subject may take. The practice of critique will thus expose the limits of the historical scheme of things, the epistemological and ontological horizon within which subjects come to be at all. To make oneself, then, in such a way that one exposes those limits is precisely to engage an aesthetics of the self that maintains a critical relation to existing norms. In the 1978 lecture “What is Critique?” Foucault writes, “‘Critique would insure the desub...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Conversation with Judith Butler I
• Conversation with Judith Butler II
• Conversation with Judith Butler III
• Conversation with Judith Butler IV
• Conversation with Judith Butler V
• References
• Index