hi all,
I've just found out why the label cloud was gone: we were using double quotation marks in the names of label, which intervenes with the coding of the cloud. So, if we label our posts without double quotation marks (i.e. "..."), the label coud will just grow by itself!
that's all for now.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Butler's Ethics & a Non-Reflective I/Subject
Hey everyone,
I would like to consider how we could read Butler's theorization of the speaking "I" and address particularly how she appropriates, and requires, a self-reflective "I" before any account of oneself can begin. As we had discussed in class, if we are to give an "account" of ourselves we must become social theorists. We must not only give an account of ourselves in relation to the social powers that act on us, but also recognize the opacity to ourselves that derives, as an effect, from a powerful social matrix whose origin is not transparent and necessarily exceeds us. As she states in the first chapter of Giving an Account of Oneself:
If this is true, then the intersection of ethics and the subject can only come about if the speaking “I” can recognize/reflect on his/her own opacity. This is also to insist that one’s own “opacity” is at once not opaque, but paradoxically transparent to oneself. One’s opacity can be recognized or reduced from the seamless appearance of the mind’s eye (consciousness). Second, the collective ethos, or the Foucaultian “norms” Butler presupposes, must also demonstrate a reflective nature that can recognize how it dispossesses its subjects through the production of its morals. In short, Butler requires us to concede that, either ‘we must know that we don’t know ourselves’ or ‘we must also know that we can’t completely know ourselves'-culturally, personally, socially. I do not wish to reduce Butler’s treatment of the subject to a “pure opacity” or that we cannot ever know ourselves at all, but rather, there is a part of ourselves that is formed outside the self. And it is this “part” that is necessarily unrecoverable because it was shaped and conditioned by the cultural norms that dispossess us from our birth.
Therefore, the condition of the speaking “I” that Butler puts forth is still contingent on a metaleptical interpolation where subjects, self-reflectively, recognize the other’s opacity to each other and themselves. This of course would be the grounds for the recognition of a Butlerian ethics. In her ethical model, if this does not happen then a questioning of ethics cannot progress or reformulate itself through time. How, then, could we read Butler for conditions of a speaking “I” that cannot give a linear account of themselves nor can recognize their own opacity to themselves nor recognize their interpollation through an ethos? In short, what of those who are foreclosed upon as subjects in advance because their subjecthood has been defined and pathologized in advance w/o concent? I am thinking of those who are deemed psychologically abnormal, the others to our others. Or, how, exactly, does an ethos (cultural norms) recognize it’s agency in dispossessing subjects, whose conditions, in turn, are not opaque to itself ? What would an ethics for the conditions of a speaking “I” be that can recognize its "power" to dispossess in advanced ? Can we be ethical and expect an address of ethics that anticipates the foreclosed life that cannot give an account nor be self-reflective?
I would like to consider how we could read Butler's theorization of the speaking "I" and address particularly how she appropriates, and requires, a self-reflective "I" before any account of oneself can begin. As we had discussed in class, if we are to give an "account" of ourselves we must become social theorists. We must not only give an account of ourselves in relation to the social powers that act on us, but also recognize the opacity to ourselves that derives, as an effect, from a powerful social matrix whose origin is not transparent and necessarily exceeds us. As she states in the first chapter of Giving an Account of Oneself:
The reason for this is that the “I” has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation-or set of relations-to a set of norms. Although 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, that conclusion 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, it may well be the condition for moral inquiry, the condition under which morality itself emerges. Pg.8
If this is true, then the intersection of ethics and the subject can only come about if the speaking “I” can recognize/reflect on his/her own opacity. This is also to insist that one’s own “opacity” is at once not opaque, but paradoxically transparent to oneself. One’s opacity can be recognized or reduced from the seamless appearance of the mind’s eye (consciousness). Second, the collective ethos, or the Foucaultian “norms” Butler presupposes, must also demonstrate a reflective nature that can recognize how it dispossesses its subjects through the production of its morals. In short, Butler requires us to concede that, either ‘we must know that we don’t know ourselves’ or ‘we must also know that we can’t completely know ourselves'-culturally, personally, socially. I do not wish to reduce Butler’s treatment of the subject to a “pure opacity” or that we cannot ever know ourselves at all, but rather, there is a part of ourselves that is formed outside the self. And it is this “part” that is necessarily unrecoverable because it was shaped and conditioned by the cultural norms that dispossess us from our birth.
Therefore, the condition of the speaking “I” that Butler puts forth is still contingent on a metaleptical interpolation where subjects, self-reflectively, recognize the other’s opacity to each other and themselves. This of course would be the grounds for the recognition of a Butlerian ethics. In her ethical model, if this does not happen then a questioning of ethics cannot progress or reformulate itself through time. How, then, could we read Butler for conditions of a speaking “I” that cannot give a linear account of themselves nor can recognize their own opacity to themselves nor recognize their interpollation through an ethos? In short, what of those who are foreclosed upon as subjects in advance because their subjecthood has been defined and pathologized in advance w/o concent? I am thinking of those who are deemed psychologically abnormal, the others to our others. Or, how, exactly, does an ethos (cultural norms) recognize it’s agency in dispossessing subjects, whose conditions, in turn, are not opaque to itself ? What would an ethics for the conditions of a speaking “I” be that can recognize its "power" to dispossess in advanced ? Can we be ethical and expect an address of ethics that anticipates the foreclosed life that cannot give an account nor be self-reflective?
Friday, 13th February 2009
This is the first part of my "Judith Butler Journal".
Please, feel free to give comments!
Please, feel free to give comments!
Marie Beauchamps. Judith Butler seminar. A “Journal”. Part 1.
Friday, 13th February 2009.
Entering Butler’s ideas and theory by the end is not the easiest task, but it also makes it a very ‘clear’ task in a way. (By clear I mean that it is hardly polluted by pre-conceptions or pre-ideas, which then leaves a blank page to write on so to speak). To speak in a metaphorical way, it feels as when entering a museum and knowing but very few about what is being exhibited there. In such an experience, the colour of the works represented, their texture, their form, maybe their sounds as well, are the things on which the visitor relates to. These are the elements out of which knowledge and meaning are constructed regarding the works displayed in the museum. Yet, meaning and knowledge are probably also attached, re-linked, and/or re-mediated to or through previous knowledge which the visitor may have accumulated in previous experiences.
As I already suggested, reading the first chapter of Giving an Account of Oneself was part of the same experience. Because my field of reading Butler was almost blank (the ‘almost’ is here necessary, for it remains the pre-condition of my participation in this seminar), the words I was reading while preparing the first session were all potential for a much bigger environment than I could possibly suspect. The point is that it is hardly possible to entertain such a potentiality within a text, as it would require dropping any other activity in order to collect enough time to go through it. So, one has to make choices in the points of focus within the text; one has to choose a focus of reading, making its own path throughout the text, relying on the structure, the language, and all the previous knowledge collected/ accumulated elsewhere.
In fact, it seems that there can be no reading from a purely blank page. For that would mean that the reader has to (consciously or not) eradicate any previous reading, any previous experience from his horizon of knowledge. This would presuppose the ability to free oneself from the language we are constituted of.
The metaphor of the blank page was triggered by our discussion on the impossibility of being transparent and ethical at the same time that arose during our first session. Here, the particular word “opacity” proved to contain a whole bunch of implications, connections and meanings, which asked that all of us revise our understanding of the text, reconsider our approach thereof, and rework our deductions. And now that I’m writing that, I’m wondering whether it is not precisely because of this opacity Butler talks about that we constantly need to revise our understanding and our reading of a text. For if there were such as thing as pure universality, we then should be able to understand somebody’s thought right away. And if we chose to have a seminar on Judith Butler, isn’t precisely because we had acknowledged the fact that our reading and our understanding of her ideas differed from one another? In this way, we indeed formed a group by acknowledging our differences, thereby also establishing the possibility for ethical relations between us.
To go one step further, the differences—which were in the first place necessary to form this group of people working on Butler’s idea—were differences we did not even know of. So, would it go too far to call them ‘content-less’ and thereby ‘substitutable’? I doubt so. For even this example may seem a trivial one, it still seems to me that such a seminar forms the environment of subjective relations which are the basis of any political discussion what so ever. In fact, aren’t we in the position of giving an account of ourselves in the act of reading Butler?
What I mean by that is that in each individual reading, one can recognise the background and preoccupation of each-other. Consciously or not, we constantly draw on what we already understood through other authors, other readings, and other moments of thoughts. Think here for instance of the way Christopher understood the sentence stating that “the notion of singularity is very often bound up with existential romanticism”. His reading clearly demonstrated his individual reading of the text based on previous knowledge, but did not necessarily make sense to the rest merely because we did not share that same background of information. Another example could be my own reading of an irrecoverable referent in the notion of an “I” through Deleuze’s idea of the statement, the latter sharing in my view the same idea of an irrecoverable referent by means of its constant evolution through repetition and transformation. Although I did not see that this reading of Butler may be prevented by the fact that Deleuze refutes the basis of a psycho-analytical formation of a subject (which is in fact a stable ground in Butler’s thinking), I still would like to motivate what made me draw this analogy. In the passage on the irrecoverable referent, Butler states that
the irrecoverability of an original referent does not destroy narrative; it produces it ‘in a fictional direction’, as Lacan would say. So, to be more precise, I would have to say that I can tell the story of my origin and I can even tell it again and again, in several ways. (p. 37)
What appears in the last sentence is that the story of origin can be repeated infinitely in several ways. So, it appears to me that the referent is irrecoverable precisely because of this possibility of repetition in transformation, which is really close to Deleuze’s idea of the possibility of repetition of a statement; for according to Deleuze, the statement appears to be repeatable at the moment it becomes a statement. And if it is repeatable, it is only possible under the condition of its transformation, which makes its origin necessarily irrecoverable. I do understand the main problem of using Deleuze in the analysis of Butler. Nonetheless, leaving Deleuze for being Deleuze, if we account for Butler’s fundament that the subject is formed through the process of a psycho-analytical formation, then it appears that its story of origin can only become repeatable at the moment it has been subjectified (as it needs language to produce the narrative of origin, and language follows or coalesces with the subjectification of the individual). Moreover, the story of origin is only repeatable in several ways, which thus draws on its constant transformation. So, besides the irrecoverability due to the impossibility of exceeding one’s regime of truth, there also seems to be a form of irrecoverability due to a constant process of transformation that is in turn triggered by a repetitive process.
These examples demonstrate that in our reading of a text, we effectively acknowledge the vocabulary and the norms with which we work, thereby giving an account of what has formed us up to that moment. Moreover, we entertain the structure of address in the act of discussing a text, thereby also accepting to be dispossessed of our thoughts through the act of sharing them and discussing them.
Friday, 13th February 2009.
Entering Butler’s ideas and theory by the end is not the easiest task, but it also makes it a very ‘clear’ task in a way. (By clear I mean that it is hardly polluted by pre-conceptions or pre-ideas, which then leaves a blank page to write on so to speak). To speak in a metaphorical way, it feels as when entering a museum and knowing but very few about what is being exhibited there. In such an experience, the colour of the works represented, their texture, their form, maybe their sounds as well, are the things on which the visitor relates to. These are the elements out of which knowledge and meaning are constructed regarding the works displayed in the museum. Yet, meaning and knowledge are probably also attached, re-linked, and/or re-mediated to or through previous knowledge which the visitor may have accumulated in previous experiences.
As I already suggested, reading the first chapter of Giving an Account of Oneself was part of the same experience. Because my field of reading Butler was almost blank (the ‘almost’ is here necessary, for it remains the pre-condition of my participation in this seminar), the words I was reading while preparing the first session were all potential for a much bigger environment than I could possibly suspect. The point is that it is hardly possible to entertain such a potentiality within a text, as it would require dropping any other activity in order to collect enough time to go through it. So, one has to make choices in the points of focus within the text; one has to choose a focus of reading, making its own path throughout the text, relying on the structure, the language, and all the previous knowledge collected/ accumulated elsewhere.
In fact, it seems that there can be no reading from a purely blank page. For that would mean that the reader has to (consciously or not) eradicate any previous reading, any previous experience from his horizon of knowledge. This would presuppose the ability to free oneself from the language we are constituted of.
The metaphor of the blank page was triggered by our discussion on the impossibility of being transparent and ethical at the same time that arose during our first session. Here, the particular word “opacity” proved to contain a whole bunch of implications, connections and meanings, which asked that all of us revise our understanding of the text, reconsider our approach thereof, and rework our deductions. And now that I’m writing that, I’m wondering whether it is not precisely because of this opacity Butler talks about that we constantly need to revise our understanding and our reading of a text. For if there were such as thing as pure universality, we then should be able to understand somebody’s thought right away. And if we chose to have a seminar on Judith Butler, isn’t precisely because we had acknowledged the fact that our reading and our understanding of her ideas differed from one another? In this way, we indeed formed a group by acknowledging our differences, thereby also establishing the possibility for ethical relations between us.
To go one step further, the differences—which were in the first place necessary to form this group of people working on Butler’s idea—were differences we did not even know of. So, would it go too far to call them ‘content-less’ and thereby ‘substitutable’? I doubt so. For even this example may seem a trivial one, it still seems to me that such a seminar forms the environment of subjective relations which are the basis of any political discussion what so ever. In fact, aren’t we in the position of giving an account of ourselves in the act of reading Butler?
What I mean by that is that in each individual reading, one can recognise the background and preoccupation of each-other. Consciously or not, we constantly draw on what we already understood through other authors, other readings, and other moments of thoughts. Think here for instance of the way Christopher understood the sentence stating that “the notion of singularity is very often bound up with existential romanticism”. His reading clearly demonstrated his individual reading of the text based on previous knowledge, but did not necessarily make sense to the rest merely because we did not share that same background of information. Another example could be my own reading of an irrecoverable referent in the notion of an “I” through Deleuze’s idea of the statement, the latter sharing in my view the same idea of an irrecoverable referent by means of its constant evolution through repetition and transformation. Although I did not see that this reading of Butler may be prevented by the fact that Deleuze refutes the basis of a psycho-analytical formation of a subject (which is in fact a stable ground in Butler’s thinking), I still would like to motivate what made me draw this analogy. In the passage on the irrecoverable referent, Butler states that
the irrecoverability of an original referent does not destroy narrative; it produces it ‘in a fictional direction’, as Lacan would say. So, to be more precise, I would have to say that I can tell the story of my origin and I can even tell it again and again, in several ways. (p. 37)
What appears in the last sentence is that the story of origin can be repeated infinitely in several ways. So, it appears to me that the referent is irrecoverable precisely because of this possibility of repetition in transformation, which is really close to Deleuze’s idea of the possibility of repetition of a statement; for according to Deleuze, the statement appears to be repeatable at the moment it becomes a statement. And if it is repeatable, it is only possible under the condition of its transformation, which makes its origin necessarily irrecoverable. I do understand the main problem of using Deleuze in the analysis of Butler. Nonetheless, leaving Deleuze for being Deleuze, if we account for Butler’s fundament that the subject is formed through the process of a psycho-analytical formation, then it appears that its story of origin can only become repeatable at the moment it has been subjectified (as it needs language to produce the narrative of origin, and language follows or coalesces with the subjectification of the individual). Moreover, the story of origin is only repeatable in several ways, which thus draws on its constant transformation. So, besides the irrecoverability due to the impossibility of exceeding one’s regime of truth, there also seems to be a form of irrecoverability due to a constant process of transformation that is in turn triggered by a repetitive process.
These examples demonstrate that in our reading of a text, we effectively acknowledge the vocabulary and the norms with which we work, thereby giving an account of what has formed us up to that moment. Moreover, we entertain the structure of address in the act of discussing a text, thereby also accepting to be dispossessed of our thoughts through the act of sharing them and discussing them.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Test 1
Hey Breche,
Nice job on the Web page! I especially like the picture of Judy B. too. Everything looks great and I will post the first Blog tomorrow.
-Christopher
Nice job on the Web page! I especially like the picture of Judy B. too. Everything looks great and I will post the first Blog tomorrow.
-Christopher
Monday, February 16, 2009
Tag cloud
Hi All,
I even included a tag cloud now (check below archive). HTML is a lot of fun actually :)
I even included a tag cloud now (check below archive). HTML is a lot of fun actually :)
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Tags, quoting, links and comments
Tags
Please tag your messages thoroughly; tag every concept you discuss. In that way we can trace every sub discussion. Tags will accumulate that way but I think it will add to the content. In the end we could also create a 'cloud' of tags see wikipedia
Quotes
It would also be great if you would either include quotes you respond to by putting them in "blockquote". For example:
Linking
If you know how you can also link to other previous messages. You can do this by making the url of the post (if you click on it, it appears in a new window including the comments) into a hyperlink like this.
Comments
Another thing, I think it would be best to use comments for non important stuff (like Fleur did) and put every important comment in a new post?
Any questions, please ask
Brechje
Please tag your messages thoroughly; tag every concept you discuss. In that way we can trace every sub discussion. Tags will accumulate that way but I think it will add to the content. In the end we could also create a 'cloud' of tags see wikipedia
Quotes
It would also be great if you would either include quotes you respond to by putting them in "blockquote". For example:
Hi everyone,
You all can now post messages on this weblog. Pictures, films, texts, everything is possible. Browse through it (after logging in), or otherwise check the help section if things are unclear.
Brechje
Ps there's one thing that bothers me though: The name thing, will we put our names before our posts? or i'll try to get us all a different log in.
You'll have to make a google account (except for mireille, I made one for her)
I'm sorry for this but it will work much better
Linking
If you know how you can also link to other previous messages. You can do this by making the url of the post (if you click on it, it appears in a new window including the comments) into a hyperlink like this.
Comments
Another thing, I think it would be best to use comments for non important stuff (like Fleur did) and put every important comment in a new post?
Any questions, please ask
Brechje
Friday, February 13, 2009
The beginning of the beginning
Hi everyone,
You all can now post messages on this weblog. Pictures, films, texts, everything is possible. Browse through it (after logging in), or otherwise check the help section if things are unclear.
Brechje
Ps there's one thing that bothers me though: The name thing, will we put our names before our posts? or i'll try to get us all a different log in
You'll have to make a google account (except for mireille, I made one for her)
I'm sorry for this but it will work much better
You all can now post messages on this weblog. Pictures, films, texts, everything is possible. Browse through it (after logging in), or otherwise check the help section if things are unclear.
Brechje
Ps there's one thing that bothers me though: The name thing, will we put our names before our posts? or i'll try to get us all a different log in
You'll have to make a google account (except for mireille, I made one for her)
I'm sorry for this but it will work much better
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