Noisy Matrixial Borderspaces: Recognition Vulnerability Survival

Reflecting on chapter two of Giving an Account of Oneself, Marie and Tim, via Ettinger, Serres, and Hoogstad, have offered a few ways of thinking about how to resist ethical violence. Both Marie and Tim engage in a discussion regarding those cultural signs and symbols that fall outside of language and parallel Butler’s meditations on opacity and ethical failures. For Marie, aesthetic encounters and for Tim, musical encounters both demonstrate ways of thinking about Butler’s ethics (where, as Marie suggested citing Serres, we can productively acknowledge and work with the ‘noise’ which surrounds us). For this reflection, I am most interested in the relationship between recognition, vulnerability, and survival.

For Butler ethical violence “demands that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same” (42). Here, recognition plays an instrumental role. Butler argues that our self-opacity establishes an ethical capacity to level a ‘certain kind’ of recognition unto others (based on our mutually shared partial blindnesses). She writes: “it follows that one can give and take recognition only on the condition that one becomes disoriented from oneself by something which is not oneself, that one undergoes a de-centering and ‘fails’ to achieve self-identity” (42). Butler suggests that if we are to understand recognition as an ethical project then we must re-position it [recognition] as unsatisfiable (43). Much like Ettinger’s fragility, Butler suggests a certain level of vulnerability in this de-centering process.

Marie and Tim both highlight the opacity present in their (aesthetic/musical) event-encounters. Marie suggests that art has the capacity to recollect that which narrative fails to render. To some extent, it seems Tim makes a similar argument (his example: Arabic music). Both suggest that these pre/non-linguistic tactile signs that are non-narrativizable, indeed, open themselves up to deliberative (Butler)/transport (Ettinger) space. It seems to me that Marie and Tim are implicitly pointing to this problem of recognition as cited above. For instance, if Ettinger is correct, and art facilitates a potential ‘transport-space’ for trauma, then, it seems to me that Ettinger’s matrixial borderspaces and Butler’s deliberative spaces are indeed the noisiest and thus, the most productive spaces of them all. Recognition in both Marie and Tim’s examples level ‘a certain kind’ of recognition either upon the subject in the encounter or upon the encounter itself by the subject. Are Butler’s ethics enacted when one breaks through the noise and renders ‘a certain kind´ of recognition, where ‘a certain kind´ demands disorientation, de-centering, and ethical failure? Is it a breaking-through noise? A working-with noise? A translation-of noise?

Beyond recognition, I am left wondering how the vulnerability inherent to unsatisfiable recognition processes and the fragility within the matrixial borderspace play out in Marie and Tim’s examples. Responding to Marie, Tim argues that, for him, Ettinger does not move past the linguistic symbolic order enough because her work is confined within “our own narrow spectrum of cultural language we deploy and receive through the moniker ‘art.’” First, I’m not so sure ‘art’ is actually confined to such narrow fields of intelligibility. Second, it seems to me that musical encounters function much in the same way aesthetic encounters do in the sense that both may be genre-ized in advance but still lend themselves to unique and different-every-time encounters. Third, Ettinger’s theoretical/psychoanalytic work convinces me that she does move past the trouble of language enough. Never have I encountered a ‘noisier’ article that problematizes subject-formation and relationality at every artistic/linguistic turn. Fourth, and back to this problem of vulnerability, Ettinger cites the fragility which occurs in opaque situations (matrixial borderspaces). Fragility, or vulnerability, directly implicates an interruption of the self and as Butler argues, it is precisely in those interruptions where the ‘truth’ may well become more clear in “stoppage, open-endedness—in enigmatic articulations that cannot easily be translated into narrative form” (64). Thus, even if Ettinger’s work is confined to the museum (which is also suspect), any event-encounter with her work will foster a level of productive interruption, even if the question is merely “why oil and mixed media on canvas, again”?

In the blog discussions prompted by Christopher’s earlier questions regarding ‘pathologized subjects’, we noted the importance of Foucault’s notion of de-subjugation for Butler’s meditations on giving an account of oneself. For me, vulnerability plays itself out precisely in those desubjugated moments. Butler writes,

In the language that articulates opposition to a non-narrativizable beginning resides the fear that the absence of narrative will spell a certain threat, a threat to life, and will pose the risk, if not the certainty, of a certain kind of death, the death of a subject who cannot, who can never, fully recuperate the conditions of its own emergence. But this death, if it is a death, is only the death of a certain kind of subject, one that was never possible to begin with, the death of a fantasy of impossible mastery, and so a loss of what one never had. In other words, it is a necessary grief (65).

For Butler, non-narrativizability spells out a death of something that never was. That loss and grief, is necessary and here, I relate this passage back to interruptions of the self, vulnerability, fragility, and de-subjugation. When we realize we cannot fully articulate ourselves, these moments of interruption may prove to be the most fruitful enigmatic encounters that allow us to approach the other and ourselves ethically. The loss of something that never was highlights that which never was and illuminates the blind-spot that is transparency.

Butler argues that in order to survive, we must constantly harness the desire for recognition. As discussed above, that desire will always be unsatisfiable. Part unsatisfiable, part the longing for survivability, the desire for recognition necessitates vulnerability—one that is shared. I imagine this issue of vulnerability and grieving will become more important in next session’s discussion of Precarious Life but, for now, I wonder how vulnerabilities productively add to this idea of possibility and co-creativity (both in Ettinger and Butler). For Ettinger matrixial borderspace is a mutating copoietic net where co-creativity might occur (705). Again, when Ettinger writes ‘might’ she argues that these deliberative processes (in the Butlerian sense) cannot be delimited in advance and furthermore, may result in trauma. This trauma necessitates ethical attention and that attention may thus also be fragile. Because both Butler and Ettinger underpin vulnerability in these ‘account matrices’, I am trying to think of concrete examples where shared vulnerabilities unfold productively (for survival, recognition). Marie’s political artworks example begins to make this question more tangible for me, though I’m wondering if anyone else has any thoughts?

Rethinking the Aesthetical Encounter-Event

[Hoi hoi! Apologies for the lack of posts so far for me - I’m just going to jump in on this blog, though, and throw some thoughts out there. Part one of this post replies to the discussion Marie just updated about Bracha Ettinger, and part two is my thoughts on musical narratives.]


I.

I made my song a coat
covered with embroideries
out of old mythologies
from heel to throat;

But the fools caught it,
wore it in the world’s eyes
as though they’d wrought it.

Song, let them take it,
for there’s more enterprise
in walking naked.

A Coat, Yeats, 1916.

Marie’s investigation into Bracha Ettinger’s art and ‘art-working’ provides a great springboard for discussion of how we might creatively manifest Butler’s theories concerning a narrative account of the self. Building upon the opacity of ourselves to ourselves as well as facets of opacity amongst ourselves and others, Marie’s incorporation of Serres’s concept of noise is incredibly fruitful when it comes to handling questions of narrative expression possibly bypassing the bottleneck of language.
The problem of language, as discussed in class, was installed by Nietzsche when he posited that words can only correspond to words, and thus the philosophers, artists, scientists or sages are all agents of the same (recycled) symbolic order. When we consider Serres contribution, we broaden our conception of communication to include all that swirls around the words vocalized: resonant signs, symbols, gestures and rhythms which may not be coherent or rhetorical at all, but which certainly furnish the moment of address and narrative. To put it more abstractly, humans cannot see gamma rays, hear x-rays, smell dark matter or feel solar wind, but all of these---all of the ‘noise’ of invisible sonic and visual frequencies---absolutely posture the account we give ourselves and the way by which that account may reveal itself in unanticipated ways.

Jan Hein (Hoogstad) makes a similar argument with noise and the overcoming of language (although not invoking Serres but Kittler instead) when discussing the rap artist Ol’ Dirty Bastard (“Oh Baby, I Like It Raw: Engineering Truth,” published in 'Sonic Mediations: Body, Sound, Technology', 2008). He writes that on the track ‘Shimmy Shimmy Ya’, “ODB’s insane rhymes foreclose all forms of interpretation, including those that do not try to testify to an absent intra- or extra-textual referent” (p99). For my purpose here, however, Hoogstad’s later claim that “the discovery of noise as the constitutive other of information opens up a prelinguistic realm that was not accessible before” is more intriguing (p104-5).

I’m pulling the discussion in this direction because I’m left somewhat unconvinced by Ettinger (scandal!) after reading her article Marie kindly linked. Mostly because I do not believe Ettinger moves past this issue of language/symbolic order enough. For me, my sense from her article is that her artwork functions pretty much like those psychoanalytic inkblots, designed to reveal the unconscious projections of the viewer/client (I’m looking specifically where she writes, “By aesthetical and ethical joining-in-differentiating and working-through, a spiritual knowledge of the Other and the Cosmos is born and revealed. Artworking and art-works
create such knowledge. It is reached by borderlinking one’s own soul-psyche to the breath of the psyche of the other and to the spirit of the Cosmos” at page 708, as well as her closing metaphor of art as the transport-station when she writes at page 711, “The transport is expected in this station, and it is possible, but the transport-station does not promise that passage of remnants of trauma will actually take place in it; it only supplies the space for this occasion”).
Saying that, I would argue that even if the ‘aesthetical encounter-event appears to achieve a dialectical re-encounter of what has been lost in language’, as Marie suggests, the medium of her work for myself is still ‘Oil and Mixed Media On Canvas’ and therefore is still/only mobilized through the language and symbolic ordering of culturally coherent ‘art’. We approach it as art, because we are already comfortable with the way she packages it: namely, the canvas frame, the oil paints with colors we already recognize, and especially the exclusive exhibition of her work in museums and galleries. Basically, my argument is that because we can already pre-place her expression as art, the possible psychic transformations and event-encounters resulting have already been curtailed by our own narrow spectrum of cultural language we deploy and receive through the moniker ‘art’. Even if the larger question I offer is completely off base, we should remember that these event-encounters are only open to the public within the privileged space of ‘artwork’ (museums, galleries), unless we knew her personally, and maybe caught sight of her artwork out of this linguistic context.

Would our generosity become less prolonged if Ettinger employed ketchup and jellybeans on postcards as the medium for her message? How would the affect of the aesthetical encounter-event be altered? And can we even imagine such a world, or should we?

II.
But let’s return to the possibility of prelinguistic realms through noise, à la Jan Hein. I want to suggest now that perhaps even with language we might approach this ‘aesthetical encounter-event’ if language can be, in certain contexts, only understood as noise (or purely aesthetics). I am thinking here of music and songs we encounter that are not in a spoken language we ourselves ‘understand,’ or that make use of tonal qualities with which we are not familiar or can appreciate hearing through the cultural matrix in which we are each situated. Often--nerdishly often, I admit--I find myself completely seized by a sound or phrase, which can trigger a multitude of memories, emotions, images or senses regardless of me hearing it ‘properly’.

For example, I have included the song طالعة من بيت أبوها by the band هاني متواسي for you to listen (.m4a, opens with iTunes, Quicktime and VLC). Although I recognize the language as Arabic, and I have a matrix of emotional associations with the melody because of the narrative I may give about how I came about acquiring it, I do not currently 'understand' the lyrics or the 'intended' message conveyed by the band. This is a song I include on most of my morning playlists, simply because it makes me happy. It's upbeat and makes me smile. I think about laughter and imagine a happy future every time I hear it. Perhaps its the singing crowd 'noise' in the background that charms me into imagining peaceful communities and people coming together, or, maybe the simple acoustic flourishes in each phrase relax my outlook; the sustained notes in which the singer oscillates pitches near the end even seem to ride over the beat like a surf board.

Still, the song remains opaque to me. My account of the song through my language necessarily falters because it only accepts the singing involved as a sequence of tones. Yet when I encounter the song overall, and hear the lyrics only as an aesthetic contribution to the music, there is still quite a bit of meaningful exchange for me. The reason for this is because I do not filter out the parts which are non-sensical to me. I recognize the opacity of the music as soon as I hear it, and, as a result, open up to its possibilities. I suspend my judgement because I recognize the impossibility of grasping the totality of the music.

In the case of this song, my ignorance of the literal linguistic meanings does not reduce its allure; in fact, in some ways it instigates an encounter-event with the recording wherein I bypass linguistic orders and open myself to all of the sound/noise involved. I might pay more attention to the timbre of the singer's voice and how it braids the downbeat, for example.

So to what extent can languge itself access prelinguistic realms in certain contexts? Where else might this hold true?

Aesthetic Practice and Ethical Encounter

My wander and investigations in what I’ve suggested to be a Butlerian “museum” (see my post on February, 13th) is getting on. In my reflections on the second chapter of Giving an Account of Oneself entitled “Against Ethical Violence”, I’d like to continue drawing on the relation between the act of giving an account of oneself and art, i.e. on the relation between ethical encounters and aesthetic practice.

First of all, “Against Ethical Violence” strongly reminds the reader of the genuine and necessary ethical implication of human communication. The blog discussions of the last few weeks pose the questions of how to address subjects who are deprived of language (the discussion was especially about subjects who are bodily or mentally diseased), and to what extend are these subjects in state of giving an account of themselves if they’re lacking language? In fact, it appeared that the act of giving an account of oneself was only possible within a scene of address, during which the question “Who are you?” is being asked again and again. This question (“Who are you?”) is simultaneously sustaining the real impossibility to fully satisfy its answer—at least as long as one accepts to acknowledge one’s shared opacity—due to the absence of narratives capable of answering it fully.
In fact, although it remains a genuine problem to give an account of oneself for those who are deprived of language, Butler also reminds us that the problem of understanding or of being understood has in turn to be placed right at the centre of language. In fact, our daily life appears to be ruled by various kinds of communications, many of them using language as main means of expression. Yet, language also fails to truly communicate. Fist of all, there can be noises interrupting the narrative, making it blurry, sometimes even making it completely un-understandable. But this is not all. Departing from the linguistic terms installed by Lacan (the latter suggests that the unconscious is constructed as a language, which generates the complete impossibility of a subjectified reality outside of language), Butler suggests that there might well be something outside of language, and not the least the way people relate to each-other. This is partly to be read in the following quote:

I would suggest that the structure of address is not a feature of narrative, one of its many and variable attributes, and an interruption of narrative. The moment the story is addressed to someone, it assumes a rhetorical dimension that is not reducible to a narrative function. It presumes that someone, and it seeks to recruit and act upon that someone. Something is being done with language when the account that I give begins: it is invariably interlocutory, ghosted, laden, persuasive, and tactical. It may well seek to communicate a truth, but it can do this, if it can, only by exercising a relational dimension of language. (GAAO 63)

The truth it seeks to communicate is rooted in the moment in which the subject is considered still being out of the realm of language. Butler suggests that at this stadium, the infant registers information not through language, but through tactile signs: “my infantile body has not only been touched, moved, and arranged, but those impingements operated as “tactile signs” that registered in my formation. These signs communicate to me in ways that are not reducible to vocalization” (GAAO 70). So, these moments that have constituted the infant in a very low age, that have make the subject emerge as an “I”, do not belong to the realm of language, and yet still must be part of the answer to the question “Who are you?”.

Let me take a step back here, and look more in depth at this possibility of non-linguistic message, making a movement back and forth between Butler’s text and Michel Serres’ concept of noise, as I think they greatly complement each-other.
It appears that in Serres’ view, noise is not only that which is indiscernible, blurring and disturbing, but also that which contains an infinite range of information and possibilities. It is that which is at the source of the relation between chaos and form, being the foreground of chaos ready to be put into form and yet escaping any definite categorization. As Serres says:

The intermediate states of Proteus are the roar of the ocean being made. The beautiful noiseuse is agitated. She must be recognised amidst the swelling, splashing, breaking of forms and tones, in the unchaining of the element divided against itself […] Portbus and Poussin didn’t see the beautiful noiseuse and they treat the old man who sees her like a mad man. […] How many sailors have seen nothing in the noise of the sea, how many have only felt nauseated, organisms invaded by sounds and furies, like moving gray shadows, [..] how many have never seen the beautiful noiseuse, Aphrodite, naked, shimmering with beauty, emerging anew, renewed from the troubled waters […], simple as a new-born babe, from the chaotic canvas of the dying old master. (51-52)

So, noise is that which at first sight has no meaning at all, but still appears to be at the source of meaning. Those who see it this way are often treated as mad, because they seem to refer to nonsense at first hand. However, according to Serres, noise may be precisely the hidden and undefined message in all what we are not able to grasp, which eventually appears to be the core of what we want to communicate. For as Serres also says, noise is “at the heart of being” (51). Noise then also becomes the hidden beauty we are prevented to see when we refuse to acknowledge our opacity, as it seems to be precisely that which resides before any narrative can be formed, and before any judgement can be formed. Thereby, noise must be at the heart of an ethical encounter with one another, as it is within noise that we may genuinely feel and experience our shared opacity. Butler appears to echo this idea when she states that “the failure to narrate fully may well indicate the way in which we are, from the start, ethically implicated in the lives of others” (GAAO 64).

But let’s come back to what I first suggested, namely the relation between the ethical encounter and the aesthetic practice, considering that Michel Serres relates his concept of noise to the notion of masterpiece. As he says, “the [art]work is made of forms, the masterpiece is the unformed fount of forms; the work is made of time, the masterpiece is the source of time; the work is in tune, the masterwork shakes with noises” (53). This is to suggest that the masterpiece is a place where noise—i.e. what lies beyond the power of categorization, knowledge, and thus also what lies beyond narrative—still resides in abundance.
So, isn’t it that art is precisely that which attempts to recollect that moment which narrative fails to render? In other words, isn’t art precisely that which forces us to come together in the acknowledgment of our differences, in the acknowledgment of our opacity? And thereby, isn’t art precisely that which yearns for genuine ethical encounters between human beings?

These questions are echoed by the work and thoughts of Bracha L. Ettinger, artist, psychoanalyst and feminist theorist. In her article “Co-poiesis”, she stresses to what extend artistic practice is deeply connected to what she calls an “ethics-in-action”. Let me first quote her shortly:

Fascinance might turn into what Lacan describes as fascinum when castration, separation, weaning, split or rejection abruptly intervene. Working through traces of the Other in me is also an aesthetical gesture where compassionate hospitality and generosity meets with fascinance. Co-poietic differentiation-in-coemergence is possible only with-in compassionate hospitality and with fascinance. Artworking, like psychoanalytical healing of long duration, is a compassionate encounter-event of prolonged generosity. The artist who is working through the cross-inscribed traces and is worked through by virtual, phantasmatic or traumatic real strings practices her art—art that is aesthetic-in-action—as a healing, healing that is an ethics-in-action. Such is the co-response-ability of artworking and of healing in copoiesis. (708)

Echoing Judith Butler, Bracha Ettinger refers here to the encounter-event as a central point in both the artistic practice and ethics-in-action. I would suggest that a narrow parallel can be drawn between what Ettinger refers to as ‘prolonged generosity’ in the passionate encounter within the artwork and the way Butler describes the encounter of subjects in the act of giving an account of oneself. In fact, as it has been noted earlier, giving an account of oneself necessarily occurs within a structure of address, in which an “I” tries to narrate his/her own identity to a “you”.
Several things happen at that point: first of all, the narrative account fails, partially barred by a (shared) opacity. Secondly, the “I” is somehow dispossessed from his narrative, caught up in the exchange of the scene of address. These two points result in what could be seen as an ethical failure, since the “I” fails to achieve self-identity and to be recognised as such. Yet, according to Butler, it is precisely in this ethical failure that a true ethical encounter may take place, resulting from the acknowledgement of the very the limits of knowing (GAAO 42). Moreover, the experience of these limits of knowing can “constitute a disposition of humility and generosity alike: I will need to be forgiven for what I cannot have fully known, and I will be under a similar obligation to offer forgiveness to others, who are also constituted in partial opacity to themselves” (Ibid.). Isn’t the “prolonged generosity” which Ettinger refers to the genuine recognition of one another’s narrative failure in the act of giving an account of oneself? So, the “prolonged generosity” would be both the recognition of one’s failure to achieve self-identity, and one’s own dispossession within the scene of address. In fact, it also appears to be the result of both ‘fascinance’ (i.e. a moment of brutal separation or rejection) and compassionate hospitality.

Following Ettinger, Serres, and Butler, I would like to suggest that the aesthetical encounter-event achieves a dialectical re-encounter of what has been lost in language (i.e. what dwells beyond the limits of knowing) and what is still at one’s disposal through narrative. So, the practice of aesthetic is a tool to re-experience our shared opacity, which is, according to Butler, the pre-condition for meeting the other in a genuine ethical manner.


Additional note:
There are many practical attempts to artistically heal the wounds of war and hatred through artistic processes. Think here for example of the Israelo-Palestinian project to unify in their artistic practice, thereby attempting to bring ethical recognition back in both communities. Think also of Merlijn Twaalfhoven’s attempt to build a children orchestra in the Middle East with the hope to bring them a feeling of ethical values. And I’m sure there are many other examples.

Bracha L. Ettinger

Hey everyone,

I've been searching the web for Bracha Ettinger, and found this article written by her, available on the following link:

http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/5-X/5-Xettinger.pdf

it looks very interesting and very Butlerian indeed!

Marie

P.S. and the following link gives you her bibliography:
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/brachaettinger.html

The I Who Speaks (an)Other Language/ Down Syndrom

Hey Everyone,

Both Michaela's and Marie's postings are both great starting points for the posts and I am very excited to have this forum. Once again, I feel this tutorial is getting started on a great foot and I am very exctied to be participating with all of you! I just wanted to share those thoughs before I began my next post and keep them coming !!

In returning to both of the postings Michaela and Marie posted, I would like to reply to both responces with a specific subject and consider how we could move forward from there. I would like to first respond to Marie's post and then follow with a counter example to Michi's post on David and the Trans-sexual subject. Marie's reading of my post raised a divergent path that I did not consider at first and I feel is a good lead into my posting for today. First, in regards to Marie's reading of my post: I did not mean to suggest, in my first post, that the subject is blocked or barred in advance from self-reflexivity. I wanted simply to point to Butler's crucial lynchpin in her theory, where self-reflexivity is not only crucial to ethics, but also to the formation of the subject, espicially if the subject is an effect of discourse. However, Marie is correct to point out that this problem most certianly happens and is part of the disspossession that takes place, perhaps, most frequently in the "Doctor's Office." And it is here, in this space and with this scene of address, that I would like to consider a different subject than has been previously discussed.

In the Doctor's Office (or for Europeans, the clinic) there is a whole network of relations and discourses that are always, already, outside of the subject. If there is to be any reflexive moments for the subject within the medical domain of intelligibility, then one must first learn the language and meaning of a scientific discourse that produces a medical subject. Here, one is not barred (prevented), per se, but is certainly restrained by a particular 'distance' from those who speak the 'truth' of medical science and those who are conjured as subjects by a medical discourse. A quick example of this would be the medical chart: the collection of medical observations that is kept and written down by doctors, in their language, who then do not share what is written or stored on those files; espicially (and I know from expierence) in the psychoanalysist's office. In America, pyschological records are not property of the subject but of the annalist and this poses problems when a subject cannot respond or reflect on what has been written about him or her in relation to their mental health and the law. Here, one is not completely barred from external knowledge about the self, but the distance between doctor, subject and knowledge creates a barrier or layer of opacity to the subject. This, however, as Butler assures us, can be overcome through reflection, shared language and expierence that critques ethics as a form of valid subject formation.

Here I would like to pose my difference: I am, perhaps, concerned with the same scene of address and the same relations of power, but rather I would like to pose a challenge to a Butlerian model of ethics. In the case of Brenda/David, that Michaela so seemlessly and clearly outlined for us, the subject in this case was able to understand himself in relation to the powers of both the psychological and medical establishments that preceeded him and his subject formation. Only after Brenda/David is able to become an interlocutionary subject with doctors and their 'medical gaze' upon his body, was he able to critique the modes and opperations of power that were barring him from his "own" subject formation. This, as Michaela pointed-out, can only occur through a common language: a "shared" language, a shared logic, a shared understanding, a clear ability to communicate an internal desire to the external world which all follows the underpinnings of our conception of intelligibility and the subject.

But now, what if we switch the subject to that of the child with Down Syndrom? Here we have a subject, that by defenition, is defind in advance, through a medical discourse that places a divergence and "abnormality" at the molecular level of understanding. Indeed, the child with Down Syndrom is first understood by their pathologized genetic difference as an (un)intelligible human subject from birth. We are told through medical science that they are our "genetic others." How do we rethink ethics for the subject such as a child with Down Syndrom that is seen as deriving, inherently, as a divergent subject formation? Or, for pyshoanalysis, a subject that for so long has been seen 'outside' the realm of intelligible lives because people who have Down Syndrom are believed to not be able to reflect on their subject formation. We know that many children with Down Syndrom cannot give a clear account of themsleves in relation to the sturctures of power that reside over them, yet they speak our langauge and live in our culture. They do not, however, share our logic or our reason.

But this, too, is perhaps contrived. Perhaps, the child with Down Syndrom does understand themselves in realtion to our power structures, but does not posses the language (perhaps, no language exsists outside of logic) that she can find to articulate herself. But the problem of addressing the ethics of the subject with Down Syndrom is not simply reducible to a lack of language or reason. Therefore, simple education and reflection will not suffice. How, then, do we understand the subject of Down Syndrom if they hold the key to understanding their internal logic as a valid subject? Here, a formulation of Butler's ethics hits an impasse, a (anti) discurive corner that it cannot reason itself out of: If a subject is disspossessed by an internal "essence" (i.e. Autism, Down Syndrom, ect.) that prevents the subject from understanding themselves and who's internal logic (i.e. actual, communicable understanding of what it is like to have Down Syndrom in our world) is necessarily outside of communication and language; how do we address the other that cannot give an account of themselves and remain ethical to them? And keeping in line with Marie's ending question: "And what consequences does it have on our social and political system to fully embrace the opaque subject? (Could we still build on an institutionalized society for instance?)"

Who Is the Opaque Subject? a response to Christopher

Christopher’s post Butler’s Ethics and Non-Reflective Subjects indeed raises very interesting questions which pushed me to think and re-think some Butlerian ideas and notions discussed in our first session.

First of all, I’ somewhat struggling with the idea of self-reflexivity brought about in Christopher’s post, since I’m wondering whether Butler doesn’t precisely suggest that the opaque subject is prevented from knowing oneself through self-reflection. In fact, it seems to me that if we do must recognize our opacity—in order to avoid any enlightenment-like universalistic aspirations—the act of self-reflection paradoxically appears to be turned more toward the other than toward the self in order to acknowledge the necessary differences between each subject. If it doesn’t, than the subject is indeed caught in a transparent self-knowledge, thereby in fact erasing any trace of opacity. So, it seems to me that ‘self-reflection’ is eventually not directed toward ourselves (in fact, our regime of truth constantly prevents us from thoroughly knowing ourselves) but toward our direct environment. This is confirmed by Butler when she states that the act of giving an account of oneself can only happen within scenes of address, in which the act of giving an account of oneself –which is to some extend also an act of self-reflection—must necessarily and forcefully be directed towards at least one addressee (GAAO 32-33).
So, it appears to me that subjects who have been defined as pathologized in advance are not necessarily prevented from recognizing their opacity, as the recognition of one’s opacity might well not entirely depend on self-reflexivity. In fact, it even seems to me that these subjects might be the ones par excellence being in state of acknowledging this opacity, probably feeling as no other how people must relate to each-other in their differences rather than in their identical qualities. So, the way we use to treat them and to look at them already gives away our difficulty to get rid of a transparent vision of subjecthood. And this makes me join Micheala’s suggestion that the subject who has been pre-defined as pathologized is not necessarily unable to give an account of himself/herself, but might rather be prohibited from giving an account of himself/herself through our pre-determined and somewhat transparent definitions of their state of being.
The remaining question is again directed to ourselves, namely: Are we really capable of getting rid of the idea of transparency left a.o. by Enlightenment and Romantic thinking? And what consequences does it have on our social and political system to fully embrace the opaque subject? (Could we still build on an institutionalized society for instance?)

The Pathologized Subject and Deferment

Christopher’s post Butler’s Ethics and Non-Reflective Subjects raises a number of interesting questions regarding ethical approaches toward the other (and the self) within the context of Butler’s “An Account of Oneself” chapter. For Christopher, the other which preoccupies his inquiry is one that is pathologized, and medically (or legally) defined as ‘abnormal’ in advance. He argues that ethical approaches toward subjectivity occur when the “I” can recognize and reflect upon both the opacity of the self and the opacity of the other simultaneously. This is where his title (self-reflexivity) comes into question as well as the subsequent issue of ‘abnormal pathologized subjects.’ It seems to me that Christopher is not suggesting that some subjects face some sort of primordial limitation wherein the subject simply cannot give an account of oneself (in Butler’s context). Rather, at what I think Christopher might be hinting are the myriad truth matrices which decide in advance the subject’s inability to give an account of oneself. It is not that the subject is necessarily unable to give an account of oneself, but rather that the subject is prohibited, perhaps, to give an account of oneself. How we perceive and work with those prohibitions might move us nearer to answering his initial inquiries. I understand Christopher’s question in this way because he employs words and phrases such as ‘foreclosed’, ‘defined and pathologized in advance’, and ‘without consent’ in situating the subject in question. I welcome his response to my reading of his question in the comments section of my post.

After reading Christopher’s post, I immediately thought of Butler’s chapter “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality” in Undoing Gender. Although in this essay she writes more intensively on the issue of intelligibility, I find these meditations incredibly helpful in thinking about giving an account within the context of the ‘abnormal pathologized subject.’ The essay brings me back to thinking about the regulating and prohibiting discourses which circumscribe particular subjects. In “Doing Justice to Someone” she writes,

When we ask, what are the conditions of intelligibility by which the human emerges, by which the human is recognized . . . we are asking about conditions of intelligibility composed of norms, of practices, that have become presuppositional, without which we cannot think the human at all . . . And it is not just that there are laws that govern our intelligibility, but ways of knowing, modes of truth, that forcibly define intelligibility . . . What counts as a person? What counts as a coherent gender? What qualifies as a citizen? Whose world is legitimated as real? (57-58).

This last question, ‘Whose world is legitimated as real?’, in particular, reminds me why this essay supplements my response to Christopher’s question within the context of Giving an Account of Oneself. The level of ‘real-ness’ put into question relates back to the regimes of truth and the coded norms which both construct and exceed each subject’s account of oneself. Beyond these powerful regimes of truth, what becomes interesting for both Butler and, in this case, the ‘abnormal pathologized subject’, are the actual limits of normative codes of conduct, the limits of intelligibility. In “Doing Justice to Someone,” Butler poses this very question of limits; she cites Foucault and describes instances where there is no place for a given subject within the dominant regime of truth as a ‘desubjugation of the subject in the play of the politics of truth” (58).

Although this particular essay discusses gender norms within the context of the infamous “Joan/John” (Brenda/David) gender case, the idea of turning to legal/medical truths for some level of recognizably links itself directly to Christopher’s question. Butler traces two opposing ideologies which influenced the upbringing and transformation of David (gender essentialism and social constructivism). She argues, however, that there is something occurring beyond the tension between the two ideologies which sought to determine David’s gender. At this point, Butler asks how we can do justice to such a subject, and I am instantly reminded of this question of ethics explicit in Giving an Account of Oneself. She writes, “There was an apparatus of knowledge applied to the person and body of Brenda/David that is rarely, if ever, taken into account as part of what David is responding to when he reports on his feelings of true gender” (67). Butler suggests that there was a certain level of violence done unto the body/subject of David while he was under constant medical, legal, and psychological power. She concludes that to do justice to David is to take him at his word though (as always), she problematizes this approach as well. She writes,

But how are we to understand his word and his name? Is this the word he creates? Is this the word that he receives? Are these the words that circulate prior to his emergence as an “I” who might only gain a certain authorization to begin a self-description within the norms of this language? So what when one speaks, one speaks a language that is already speaking, even if one speaks it in a way that is nor precisely how it has been spoken before. So what and who is speaking here? (69).

Asking these questions, Butler comes to a point of decision; she concludes that justice, perhaps demands that we wait to decide and that justice implies “a certain deferral. . . [because] too many have rushed to judgment” (71). It seems that this deferral is an acknowledgment of the limits of intelligibility and offers a certain level of ethics/justice which questions how rigidly we might perceive those regimes of truth.

In the case of David, Butler argues that he neither becomes one with the norm nor does this foreclose his subjectivity (even if he risks a certain level of desubjugation first). She writes, “He is still someone, speaking, insisting, even referring to himself” (72). Here again, I can return to Christopher’s question. The passage Christopher cites from ‘An Account of Oneself’ omits the sentence which immediately follows in the text. It reads,

If the ‘I’ is not at one with moral norms 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 (8).

This ‘deliberation’ is precisely what occurs even within the myriad regimes of truth. David’s insistence, and the ‘abnormal pathologized subject’s’ exposure of the limits of intelligibility both foster some level of ‘critical understanding.’ In “Doing Justice to Someone” Butler writes,

And we cannot precisely give content to this person at the very moment that he speaks his worth, which means that it is precisely the ways in which he is not fully recognizable, fully disposable, fully categorizable, that his humanness emerges. And this is important because we might ask that he enter into intelligibility in order to speak and to be known, but what he does instead, through his speech, is to offer a critical perspective on the norms that confer intelligibility itself (73).

Therefore (and perhaps a leap), it seems that as long as the subject speaks within a certain regime of truth, those instances wherein the subject does not fit normative codes confer the limits of intelligibility in such a way that not only does justice to the subject, but also allows ‘the speaking “I”’ to speak in the first place. This speaking fosters deliberation, risks desubjugation and, perhaps, provides a subsequent ‘critical understanding.’ If the ‘abnormal pathologized subject’ is prohibited from speaking, or worse, only allowed to speak in one way, perhaps, then, we have another scenario where deferment was not enacted, and the regimes of truth were too quickly lured into judgment, yet again.