Under a rule of law, if a mode of recognition is held to be an inalienable constitutional right, is it possible to “carve out a narrow exception” to that mode of recognition by means of altering the constitution (codification) of that right by a majority vote? Are there any extraconstitutional or inherent limitations in the American legal conception of ‘equal protection’ (installed federally with the 14th Amendment, and applied slowly in parts to the states beginning with the Civil Rights Cases in the 1950s) which would precondition the attempt to deliberately thwart ‘equal protection’ for a suspect class of citizens (ie, the rigidly classified ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ citizens)?
Such were the questions answered for the state of California by the California Supreme Court last week in Strauss v Horton, the final installment of the state’s three marriage cases since 2004. In In Re Marriage Cases (Spring 2008) the Court held that both same-sex and opposite-sex couples enjoy the right to marriage under the state’s constitution, and that the denial of marriage--including the use of the moniker ‘Marriage’--violated constitutional rights found in both Due Process and Privacy. In November of 2008, California voters accepted (through a majority ballot) Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment adding a section to the state constitution whereby “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” Last week, the California Supreme Court in a 6-1 decision both accepted this amendment as valid and accepted the means by which it passed (that Proposition 8 qualified as an amendment and not a revision of the governmental framework and plan in California).
As a direct result, an estimated 18,000 same-sex couples (wed between May and November 2008) are in a legitimation limbo: their marriages are valid, since it was constitutional at the time to become legally coupled with that moniker, but no more same-sex marriages will be recognized until another constitutional amendment is passed to annul Proposition 8.
The time of this week’s Butler readings are particularly apt to discussing ‘gay marriage’ and the thorny issues of recognition and legitimation at play here. What is at stake in opening the symbolic allocation of marriage, and is it “preferable to altering the requirements of kinship”? In the turn to the state for legitimation of a version of kinship, do we eclipse the “proliferation of sexual practices outside of marriage and the obligations of kinship?” Where are the possibilities of resisting “the lexicon of legitimation” braided by the state, but required to advance same-sex marital recognition?
In one sense, the latest discussion on this Blog over the arrangement of ‘politics’ and ‘ethics’ (or politics/ethics - wait, why is ethics the bottom here :p ?) and the ‘fields’ and ‘domains’ in which they might be understood to ‘operate’ is perhaps precisely the catachresis to which Butler points (UG p107) here, and, turning, compels the reader to take stock of our critical functions and “to scrutinize the action of delimitation itself.” In another sense, the critical perspective needed to perform that scrutiny “that operates at the limit of the intelligible”, she suggests, “also risks being regarded as apolitical.”
But rather than sliding into the well-covered ‘debate’ over the State recognizing ‘gay marriage’, a debate which Butler has still left us in the paradox where “both the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ works in the services of circumscribing reality in precipitous ways” (UG p130), I want to further investigate the curious means by which California has framed the debate. Namely, individuals (ie, voters) have decided the latest word on the statuses of marital recognition in the state via majority rule. Rather than interpreting legislative, executive, or other juridical action, the Court questioned whether or not California voters have the ability to “carve out a narrow exception” to constitutional rights for certain classes of people. Proposition 8 did not deny the right for same-sex couples to be legally recognized or afforded rights as such, “only” that same-sex couples could not employ the term (or fall within the jurisdiction of the term) Marriage.
How might “we”, as political beings, reframe kinship against majoritarian legitimation? Equal Protection is allegedly “by its nature, inherently, countermajoritarian” according to Justice Moreno, who dissented in Strauss. How do we mobilize that generatively without further exclusions, creating more margins? Is it possible to disidentify with the state using social/coalitional means while simultaneously referencing or making use of its networks? I ask this question because I’m not prepared to advocate a wholesale rejection of the state apparatus; I fundamentally believe in the concept of social welfare (if nothing else), and I think the project to bring as many people and groups within that communal welfare is a valid political task. Proposition 8 has the opposite effect (an exclusion of a class from a certain aspect of the social welfare system), yet makes use of the same organizing principal behind direct democracy (that is, people themselves initiating and voting on issues) which makes things like ‘rights’ coherent in the first place.
Even the most brittle of postmodernist legal scholars, like Stanley Fish, are open to this operation of rights-exchanges in democracy. Fish writes in the New York Times, “Democracy is a form of government not attached to any pre-given political or ideological ends, but allows ends to be driven by majority vote of its free citizens...it is the only form of government that (theoretically) contemplates its own demise with equanimity.” But in the case of Propositon 8, or any other voter-driven referendum on social classes, how do we seek legitimation from our neighbors? And is that the same “lexicon of legitimation” employed when we petition the state to recognize certain rights, classes, or individuals?
Even the “radical” move (with which I sympathize) to remove Marriage (and all of the religious baggage accompanying it) from the state/civil sphere completely and sanctioning only ‘unions’ for all couples in the eyes of the law, still includes a tacit fortification of monogamy as well as foreclosing sexual practices and kinship practices currently unintelligible (à la Butler). If it’s an issue of incrementalism, to what degree are we still making the mistake of taking “the definitions of who we are, legally, to be adequate descriptions of what we are about” in the ‘radical’ move I advocate above? (PL p25, UG P20)
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Saturday, May 16, 2009
post summary
Hi all,
I've tried to change the layout settings so that we don't have full post view at first sight, but it seems not to be possible to change it by clicking here and there, you really need to change the whole html settings. I've found a notice of how to do it on the web, but it'll take some time. I'll do my best, but don't promiss to have this fixed.
have a nice week-end!
Marie
I've tried to change the layout settings so that we don't have full post view at first sight, but it seems not to be possible to change it by clicking here and there, you really need to change the whole html settings. I've found a notice of how to do it on the web, but it'll take some time. I'll do my best, but don't promiss to have this fixed.
have a nice week-end!
Marie
Thursday, May 14, 2009
The Autistic Subject and Social Norms
Hey everyone,
Here is my first attempt to theorize my project. This is a long post (7 pgs) that incorporates both Michaela and Marie's posts. I tried to make the post less cumbersum by trying to use the "hide/show" function for Blogs, but could not figure out the html. If anyone knows how to do this please show me so I can lessen the immediate size of this post. Anyways, I know it is long, so bear with me and when you have time please comment.
In response to both Michaela and Marie, I would also like to intervene with my own project and demonstrate how the pathologized subject further complicates these political/ethical intersections. In this post I argue that a simple return to abstract ethical thinking forecloses the possibilities of seeing how the subject, specifically the pathologized subject of autism, is formed through the political appropriations of our material State. As an example, I contend that the shared discourse between doctors and teachers creates/defines the limits for understanding the subject of autism. They perpetuate a social discourse of what autism “is” or “looks like” by outlining distinct, linear pathologies. These pathologies become fixed over time (usually through the DSM) and in turn create an abstract, fixed subjectivity that forecloses possibilities for seeing autism’s actual living differences. Although this medical discourse begins with an abstract ethical consideration that attempts to incorporate a static subject of mental illness through medical/political strategies of social incorporation, the actual speaking subject of autism is still overlooked in the process. The difference of the actual speaking “I” of autism is flattened and turned into an abstract concept of mental illness in the process of creating our social institutions and understandings of autism. In recent years, the discourse surrounding the public understanding of autism has come under criticism, because authors such as Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron (both subjects of autism) wrote books that outline a speaking, self-reflective “I” of autism that conflicts with classic medical understandings of autistic pathologies.
I will show that it is precisely this gesture of returning to the abstract ethical subject formations of medical science that perpetuates misunderstandings and produces programs that unintentionally foreclose possibilities and avenues of social development for people with autism. When society (Western society) attempts to be ethical towards an opaque and dependant subject of autism, it usually begins with flattening the subject by creating an abstract concept of fixed pathologies that doesn’t anticipate difference. Therefore, it will always be necessary to engage the amalgamation of the ethical/political divide that exposes both the weakness in our medical appropriations of autism with the actual living difference of the autistic life. I will begin with outlining Marie’s and Michaela’s positions on the ethical/political divide and then introduce my object: the autistic subject in relation to social constructions of mental health and its questions of what, relationally speaking, constitutes ethical subject formation. I argue that if we are truly to be ethical towards the autistic subject, we must also be political; we must constantly challenge what autism “is” and what we think it will be; we must routinely engage the ambiguity of the ethical/political intersection and be open to a changing subject of (anti) pathological life.
Marie’s response to Michaela indicates that we should rather think politics and ethics as separate formations, where the political is external to the subject and acts violently upon the subject through misrecognition of a normalizing power such as the State. She suggests via her example of the embassy that recognition and sovereignty for the subject are always, already in conflict because the subject is formed at particular political intersections where the State assumes a universalizing ethics that forecloses individual difference. I understand this through Marie’s statement, “For isn’t it the nation state’s responsibility to worry that its political program echoes the millions of individual subjects who constitute the nation state as a whole?” Marie seems to be suggesting a theoretical practice that emphasizes a return to the ethical, where we will be able to clearly expose the weaknesses of our political projects, or as she puts it, to think “…of politics and ethics separately as [is] precisely necessary so that we are able to distinguish where our responsibilities lie.”
Michaela theorizes this strategic intersection somewhat differently in her theoretical framework towards “Queer Hospitality.” Michaela claims that these two concepts should be seen as an ever-changing amalgamation: a desired amalgamation that is necessary for the two concepts to implicate each other in their theoretical practices. In her view, Queer Hospitality enacts a constant process of queer politics; a politics/ethics that emanates from a risky, ever-changing hospitality. Michaela is suggesting that Queer Hospitality is an ethical discourse that anticipates the risks of a political practice that assumes an unstable/changing subject of “queer” life. In Michaela’s theoretical model, when one enters the female bathhouse a form of exclusion is paradoxically at work even in counter-public spaces that are created to include those who are marginalized by social norms. In Michaela’s example of a Lesbian/Trans bathhouse door policy, a queer identified person may still be excluded by the normalizing power of a particular lesbian/feminist ideology enacted within the space. Thus, the door policy at Lesbian/Trans folk bathhouses is an example of Queer Hospitality already at work by implicating the ethics of those who are already excluded by social norms while simultaneously attempting to create a politics for the bathhouse organizers who determine who will be recognized as actually being female, trans, queer, etc. Therefore, it is not simply a matter of seeing the ethical/political as separate, but rather seeing them in a knot; where each instance of practicing Queer Hospitality will always garner an ever-changing queer politics that regulates who can enter “queer spaces”- or an impossible task of providing unconditional hospitality.
The difference Marie seems to be suggesting is that while the ethical and the political are imbricated in each other, it is rather a return to the ethical that should be considered if we are to understand how the political is operating. For Michaela, however, this return is perhaps just one aspect of her argument: namely, how does a queer community provide an ethical hospitality that doesn’t foreclose the possibilities of an ever-changing politics. I understand that a return to the ethical will not simply undo the political, though such a gesture undoubtedly raises questions about the political and creates avenues for further recognition and agency. However, it seems to me, if we only consider the ethics of inclusion and recognition, we thusly risk creating abstract subjects that can only be considered to be trapped within the political and thus we only theorize about subjects and their lack of political agency. In returning to the abstract ethical (as the case with medical science demonstrates), we foreclose the possibility of political situations that can arise and change how we think about the ethical as such. In so doing we overlook how the individual is a byproduct of conflicting ethical and political subject formations. This means, if we only focus on theorizing the ethical, we overlook how we come to embody the political in our ethical thinking.
I would like to consider the political/ethical divide should always been seen in tandem with each other, always an amalgamation, where the reduction of the one side of the equation necessarily forecloses difference on the other. I am not arguing for a better theory, but rather I would like to show through the pathologized subject of autism that a simple return to the ethical will not foster a self-reflexive and appropriate politics. I would therefore like to turn towards this challenging subject that resists, complicates and further demonstrates why a return to the ethical cannot be thought without the political and vise-versa. For the remainder of this post, I would like to continue to use the strategical value of Marie’s division of the ethical and the political. As Butler states, such a position can demonstrate that “theoretical positions are always appropriated and deployed in political contexts that expose something of the strategic value of such theories.” (ES pg. 20) I will therefore continue with a definition of the ethical as an appropriation of the abstract consideration of self-reflexivity in relation to social norms and the political as the embodiment of these social norms in material or concrete institutions that shape ethical thinking: i.e. State laws, schools, doctors, and teachers that all define what is a recognizable subject of value and ethics.
In 2005, Dr. Temple Grandin and Sean Barron coauthored a book entitled The Unwritten Rules of Social Relations (UWRSR) or how to understand the immergence of social norms through the unique perspective of autism. Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron have decided to become Butlerian social theorists by demonstrating a larger “political/ethical” project that shows how interactions of everyday people, teachers and doctors (whom they refer to as “neurotypicals”) with people who have autism creates a conflict of misconception about what, in actuality, autistic children need/want for their social development. In creating delicately constructed oeuvres, Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron demonstrate how the subject of autism emerges as a conflict with the political/ethical of the “neurotypically” constructed social sphere. Although their book is written in a narrative form that is not theoretical, their book could be read as an ethical/political deconstruction that, when outlined in academic terms, demonstrates to its readers a return to an abstract ethical encounter. Through descriptions of their personal accounts of growing up with autism, Dr. Grandin and Barron locate a form of misconception that has developed by doctors, teachers and parents who assume and treat only the social effects of autism, or a public consciousness that only sees awkward, “bad” behavior. Their book explicitly demonstrates how children with autism learn how to interact with social norms and continually point-out that simply seeing the autistic child as an effect of a strict pathology further forecloses the emergence of seeing an actual thinking “I” of Being. I would like to add that Sean Barron’s first book was entitled There’s a Boy in There, where his title indicates how society sees autism as a lack or a mask that must be uncovered to reveal a coherent thinking “I” and his book shows how the autistic thinking “I” communicates and produces a coherent subject of value.
Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron show that there is no clearly defined, linear subject of autism, but rather a set of pathologies that change and develop over time (indeed, autism is not a fixed subjectivity). Dr. Grandin and Barron reconfigure the autistic child (subject) into two metaphorical categories that describe “paths,” or two schematics of autistic personalities that emerge from the medical definition of “classic autism.” Path A children, demonstrate high mental functioning and “their sense of connection to the world, their happiness may always stem from a logical, analytic place of being…”(emphasis mine, UWRSR introduction pg.xii). Path A children are usually non-verbal in their adolescence and pull away from social interactions because they are caught in loops of analytical thought where words have therefore abandoned them. Dr. Grandin tells how she would take comfort in looking at sand falling between her fingers for hours without words to express her obsession. Her behavior was seen as inherently anti-social and since Temple was non-verbal in her childhood she was therefore considered to be a subject that was deprived of a coherent thinking “I” of being. Ethical and medical norms dictated that she be “left alone,” allowing her to retreat from interacting with social norms and unable to express an external ego. It wouldn’t be until her later teens, when she would come into contact with highly analytical academic discourses, that she would develop the language to describe her inner thoughts as a child. Since Temple was seen as being inherently anti-social and uncommunicative, high-functioning analytic thinking and language were denied to her until she latter acquired the language of “neurotypicals” to actually see and express herself as a literal, scientific thinker.
In contrast, Path B children are described as “feeling emotional-relatedness right from the start…they ‘feel out’ their world through their sense of social-emotional connection and are deeply affected when they and their world are out of sync with each other.” (UWRSR, pg. xiii). In giving an account of themselves, both Dr. Grandin (Path A) and Sean Barron (Path B) use the language of the established medical discourse on autism to reconfigure the discursive limits of their own intelligibility and agency. In so doing, they recreate a language of autism that is at once part of their own making and simultaneously constructed through an external social world (or the political world) of “neurotypical” doctors and teachers. From this perspective, we can thusly see how Marie’s conception of returning to the abstract ethical creates a literary voice of autism that reveals how the political subject of autism is formed and how their voice of agency comes into contact with a world that is not their own. In order to do this both Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron require the political language of everyday “neurotypical” doctors and teachers that have defined and pathologized their social intelligibility in advance. Therefore, their book is only possible because Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron create an abstract ethical subject that is simultaneously dependant on a social/medical discourse that exceeds and precedes them. Their book is meant to demonstrate to the reader, if one is going to be ethical towards a subject of autism, one must not solely consider the medial discourse that establishes their intelligibility to the world. The reader must also assume an open, and unconditional “motherly” ethics, or an unstable politics, which will assume autism’s discontinuities and reformulations throughout social development and time.
In Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, he first introduces his theory of the subject (Butler’s theoretical starting point in Chapter 3 of Psychic Life of Power) as an effect of discourse. In this seminal work, Foucault shows that there is no linear ‘subject’ of madness throughout the genealogy of psychology, only discourses that treat and “cure” mental diseases through the creation of the pathologized patient. While much advancement has been made in Psychiatry and Neuro-chemistry, it is still true that the pathological subject is always an effect of discourse: one enters the clinic, learns of their pathological subjectivity and seeks therapy. In this sense, psychological treatment thus works on two levels of understanding: on the one level it is a psychological conditioning, where the patient self-reflexivity states, “Yes, I am sick/depressed/Bi-polar…” and on another level, the patient confirms/refutes the medical discourse of subjectivity by saying, “Yes, I feel better or No I don’t feel better because of this or that therapy.” Yet, the process for determining a ‘subject’ of psychological treatment and the correct medication requires a system of checks and balances (an economy of mental health) that underlines the ethical/political intersection.
In this sense, the analyst must determine pathology based not on the literal appearance of a “disease,” but rather paradoxically through a performance of an opaque speaking “I”. An analysand’s subjectivity (i.e. pathology) is then measured against a fixed understanding of mental illness and a medication is prescribed that may or may not work. Today, we can understand how psychiatry sees mental illness as a controllable “disease,” complete with the experimentation of a clinic, as trial and error, and the effects of an incomplete science that attempts to treat an ever-changing subject of Being. Thus, if mental illness is truly a “disease,” in the same sense as cancer, then a corresponding pill is all that is needed for all fixed and pathological illness. However, we also know this is not always the case, as mental illness may not have a single origin and is always bound to a complex material and psychic thinking “I” of Being—a being that grows, changes and is always in flux, never stable or completely pathological. All problems of the ethical/political intersection of mental health would be resolved if a wonder pill actually existed that “cured” all forms of autism, but sadly, no such pill actually exists. **(Please note, I am not arguing that there is no value to psychiatric medication;I am simply pointing to its inconsistencies, not the value of its successes or its failures)**
In this brief sketch of medical subject formation, I contend that the abstract ethical is already embraced in the practice of political medical science. The political/ethical intersection evolves in the clinic of mental health, where the patient learns and becomes a “subject” of the clinic. The clinic thusly becomes a space where a discourse of mental illness precedes the subject and in turn forms an abstract conception of the patient that seeks its theoretical treatment. If the subject is, as both Butler and Foucault maintain, an effect of discourse then it will be necessary to enact and question the ethical/political divide in each context of medical subject formation. I would now like to return to the subject of autism and focus solely on Dr. Grandin’s narrative as a non-verbal, highly gifted, autistic child (Path A). Dr. Grandin gives an account of herself as a child and lavishes much praise upon her mother for much of her success as a professional today.
Temple Grandin was born in the early 1950’s, at a time when psychotherapy and clinical psychology was in its “infancy” in America. This is a time when autism was not understood as it is today and was often treated by removing the child from the family, placing them in an institution and enforcing harsh behavior modification techniques (We all might share this “classic” image which has been depicted constantly throughout the arts). Dr. Grandin contributes much praise to her mother who refused to let her young and quite different/gifted Temple be sent to any institution. Temple’s mother was very critical of the doctor’s description and evaluations of her daughter’s autism, which determined that she would never develop social skills because she had a mental illness. The doctor’s evaluations, based on strict pathologies for autism, foresaw Temple as never being able to overcome her pathological “illness.” The abstract ethics of doctors and teachers in the 1950’s prescribed Temple to be put into an institution and removed from society altogether. This however was unacceptable for Temple’s mother, who insisted that her daughter could learn to become a functioning adult. Dr. Grandin reveals that through her mother’s persistent affection and care, she developed an open, “motherly” ethics that allowed her autistic, non-verbal daughter to grow into a professional PhD.
Dr. Grandin specifically credits her mother for creating a delicate system of discipline that would engage and incorporate her autism in innovative ways. She gives credit to her mother for her “…acute understanding of my boundaries and [knowing] when and how far she could push me.”(UWRSR, pg.5) Temple’s mother saw and engaged Temple’s autistic gifts of analytical thinking by catering and reinforcing the behaviors that already gave Temple pleasure. She would buy erector sets, complex puzzles, model airplanes and rockets that would feed Temple’s analytical gifts. She simultaneously refused that her child be left out of the classroom. She advised teachers and created reward programs that would force Temple into social interactions with other children. Her plan was successful because it functioned on two levels, first it allowed Temple’s gifts to blossom and become a source of inspiration and praise, while simultaneously putting Temple into “neurotypical” encounters where she could learn how other kids think and see themselves in relation to social norms. By refusing to adhere to the ethics of the doctors in the 1950’s, Temple’s mother created the social situations that Temple needed to be able to create a social personality for herself. These situations were also necessary, yet uneasy for Temple, but today she praises her mother for refusing to give-in and let her child fail as a social person.
In this sense, Dr. Grandin speaks of her mother as operating from a position similar to Michaela’s Queer Hospitality. Temple’s mother comprised an “ethics” that saw the need for a persistently open, ever-changing social discipline in relation to the subject of autism, where a new realm of hospitality could be possibilized by accepting her daughter’s changing autistic differences and by not foreclosing her social emergence by considering both her non-verbal social behaviors and her analytical thinking. Therefore, a “motherly” ethics/hospitality was constantly enacted for Temple, where her autism could find release in personal pursuits and take flight in learning from the necessary interactions of “neurotypical” life that included doctors, teachers and other children. Her mother became a bridge that could translate a world created by neurotypicals for neurotypicals, into controlled interactions that could support her throughout a world that would constantly misconstrue her autism and foreclose her social agency. It is precisely because her mother was positioned in between the discursive limits of a medical discourse that allowed her to see a new path for children with autism. While her plan for her daughter was not a public, “political agenda,” Temple’s mother demonstrates why just returning to the abstract ethical would have foreclosed possibilities for her child.
To simplify in three points: A) If Temple’s mother only accepted the abstract ethical reasoning of cognitive medical science in the 1950’s, she would only come to embody the abstract politics of medical science in her disciplinary thinking. Temple’s mother would only embody the ethics of an abstract conception of the medical subject as a strict patient and not see her daughter as a child with autistic difference. This is to say, if Temple’s mother only reasoned through an abstract medical discourse, she would have accepted her daughter’s non-verbal condition as fixed. She probably would have not let her child go to an institution, but she would have only “treated” her daughter’s anti-social behavior while overlooking her analytical gifts. B) Similarly, had Temple’s mother not questioned the social politics of autism at the time, she would not have been able keep her child in the classroom, a social space necessary for all children’s development. C) Underlining both A and B, and most importantly, if she was not also open to seeing Temple as thinking, changing and speaking subject of value, she would have not been able to praise her, love her and allow her to blossom. Strictly speaking, without her mother’s constant engagement and struggle with the ethical/political divide of powerful social norms, she would have continued to see and accept her daughter as a fixed, strictly pathologized, non-verbal subject that would never be able to become a functioning adult.
Her mother’s position was therefore constantly embracted in the ethical/political double bind, since it is also, paradoxically, this same abstract medical discourse of cognitive medical science that pointed out particular pathologies that Temple actually displayed. If her mother had never learned that her child was, indeed, autistic, she wouldn’t have created a special plan that catered to her special interests and needs. Therefore, the abstract ethical of medical science is always a necessary position to consider while simultaneously being open to a critical discursive political position. Without an amalgamation of the ethical/political discourses of Temple’s mother with the medical doctors and teachers, Temple would have never become Dr. Grandin. Temple’s mother had to straddle this ethical/political divide of social norms of the 1950’s and create an “ethics” that changed and allowed Temple to speak back, where she was able to interact with a speaking “I” of autism and form a self-reflexive plan that encouraged Temple’s social growth and praised her analytic being. Because her mother was positioned at this discursive limit between doctors, teachers and the limits of understanding her own daughter as autistic, she was able to deploy a strategic politics that could maneuver her child through an “unethical” medical and social world of neurotypicals.
Here is my first attempt to theorize my project. This is a long post (7 pgs) that incorporates both Michaela and Marie's posts. I tried to make the post less cumbersum by trying to use the "hide/show" function for Blogs, but could not figure out the html. If anyone knows how to do this please show me so I can lessen the immediate size of this post. Anyways, I know it is long, so bear with me and when you have time please comment.
In response to both Michaela and Marie, I would also like to intervene with my own project and demonstrate how the pathologized subject further complicates these political/ethical intersections. In this post I argue that a simple return to abstract ethical thinking forecloses the possibilities of seeing how the subject, specifically the pathologized subject of autism, is formed through the political appropriations of our material State. As an example, I contend that the shared discourse between doctors and teachers creates/defines the limits for understanding the subject of autism. They perpetuate a social discourse of what autism “is” or “looks like” by outlining distinct, linear pathologies. These pathologies become fixed over time (usually through the DSM) and in turn create an abstract, fixed subjectivity that forecloses possibilities for seeing autism’s actual living differences. Although this medical discourse begins with an abstract ethical consideration that attempts to incorporate a static subject of mental illness through medical/political strategies of social incorporation, the actual speaking subject of autism is still overlooked in the process. The difference of the actual speaking “I” of autism is flattened and turned into an abstract concept of mental illness in the process of creating our social institutions and understandings of autism. In recent years, the discourse surrounding the public understanding of autism has come under criticism, because authors such as Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron (both subjects of autism) wrote books that outline a speaking, self-reflective “I” of autism that conflicts with classic medical understandings of autistic pathologies.
I will show that it is precisely this gesture of returning to the abstract ethical subject formations of medical science that perpetuates misunderstandings and produces programs that unintentionally foreclose possibilities and avenues of social development for people with autism. When society (Western society) attempts to be ethical towards an opaque and dependant subject of autism, it usually begins with flattening the subject by creating an abstract concept of fixed pathologies that doesn’t anticipate difference. Therefore, it will always be necessary to engage the amalgamation of the ethical/political divide that exposes both the weakness in our medical appropriations of autism with the actual living difference of the autistic life. I will begin with outlining Marie’s and Michaela’s positions on the ethical/political divide and then introduce my object: the autistic subject in relation to social constructions of mental health and its questions of what, relationally speaking, constitutes ethical subject formation. I argue that if we are truly to be ethical towards the autistic subject, we must also be political; we must constantly challenge what autism “is” and what we think it will be; we must routinely engage the ambiguity of the ethical/political intersection and be open to a changing subject of (anti) pathological life.
Marie’s response to Michaela indicates that we should rather think politics and ethics as separate formations, where the political is external to the subject and acts violently upon the subject through misrecognition of a normalizing power such as the State. She suggests via her example of the embassy that recognition and sovereignty for the subject are always, already in conflict because the subject is formed at particular political intersections where the State assumes a universalizing ethics that forecloses individual difference. I understand this through Marie’s statement, “For isn’t it the nation state’s responsibility to worry that its political program echoes the millions of individual subjects who constitute the nation state as a whole?” Marie seems to be suggesting a theoretical practice that emphasizes a return to the ethical, where we will be able to clearly expose the weaknesses of our political projects, or as she puts it, to think “…of politics and ethics separately as [is] precisely necessary so that we are able to distinguish where our responsibilities lie.”
Michaela theorizes this strategic intersection somewhat differently in her theoretical framework towards “Queer Hospitality.” Michaela claims that these two concepts should be seen as an ever-changing amalgamation: a desired amalgamation that is necessary for the two concepts to implicate each other in their theoretical practices. In her view, Queer Hospitality enacts a constant process of queer politics; a politics/ethics that emanates from a risky, ever-changing hospitality. Michaela is suggesting that Queer Hospitality is an ethical discourse that anticipates the risks of a political practice that assumes an unstable/changing subject of “queer” life. In Michaela’s theoretical model, when one enters the female bathhouse a form of exclusion is paradoxically at work even in counter-public spaces that are created to include those who are marginalized by social norms. In Michaela’s example of a Lesbian/Trans bathhouse door policy, a queer identified person may still be excluded by the normalizing power of a particular lesbian/feminist ideology enacted within the space. Thus, the door policy at Lesbian/Trans folk bathhouses is an example of Queer Hospitality already at work by implicating the ethics of those who are already excluded by social norms while simultaneously attempting to create a politics for the bathhouse organizers who determine who will be recognized as actually being female, trans, queer, etc. Therefore, it is not simply a matter of seeing the ethical/political as separate, but rather seeing them in a knot; where each instance of practicing Queer Hospitality will always garner an ever-changing queer politics that regulates who can enter “queer spaces”- or an impossible task of providing unconditional hospitality.
The difference Marie seems to be suggesting is that while the ethical and the political are imbricated in each other, it is rather a return to the ethical that should be considered if we are to understand how the political is operating. For Michaela, however, this return is perhaps just one aspect of her argument: namely, how does a queer community provide an ethical hospitality that doesn’t foreclose the possibilities of an ever-changing politics. I understand that a return to the ethical will not simply undo the political, though such a gesture undoubtedly raises questions about the political and creates avenues for further recognition and agency. However, it seems to me, if we only consider the ethics of inclusion and recognition, we thusly risk creating abstract subjects that can only be considered to be trapped within the political and thus we only theorize about subjects and their lack of political agency. In returning to the abstract ethical (as the case with medical science demonstrates), we foreclose the possibility of political situations that can arise and change how we think about the ethical as such. In so doing we overlook how the individual is a byproduct of conflicting ethical and political subject formations. This means, if we only focus on theorizing the ethical, we overlook how we come to embody the political in our ethical thinking.
I would like to consider the political/ethical divide should always been seen in tandem with each other, always an amalgamation, where the reduction of the one side of the equation necessarily forecloses difference on the other. I am not arguing for a better theory, but rather I would like to show through the pathologized subject of autism that a simple return to the ethical will not foster a self-reflexive and appropriate politics. I would therefore like to turn towards this challenging subject that resists, complicates and further demonstrates why a return to the ethical cannot be thought without the political and vise-versa. For the remainder of this post, I would like to continue to use the strategical value of Marie’s division of the ethical and the political. As Butler states, such a position can demonstrate that “theoretical positions are always appropriated and deployed in political contexts that expose something of the strategic value of such theories.” (ES pg. 20) I will therefore continue with a definition of the ethical as an appropriation of the abstract consideration of self-reflexivity in relation to social norms and the political as the embodiment of these social norms in material or concrete institutions that shape ethical thinking: i.e. State laws, schools, doctors, and teachers that all define what is a recognizable subject of value and ethics.
In 2005, Dr. Temple Grandin and Sean Barron coauthored a book entitled The Unwritten Rules of Social Relations (UWRSR) or how to understand the immergence of social norms through the unique perspective of autism. Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron have decided to become Butlerian social theorists by demonstrating a larger “political/ethical” project that shows how interactions of everyday people, teachers and doctors (whom they refer to as “neurotypicals”) with people who have autism creates a conflict of misconception about what, in actuality, autistic children need/want for their social development. In creating delicately constructed oeuvres, Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron demonstrate how the subject of autism emerges as a conflict with the political/ethical of the “neurotypically” constructed social sphere. Although their book is written in a narrative form that is not theoretical, their book could be read as an ethical/political deconstruction that, when outlined in academic terms, demonstrates to its readers a return to an abstract ethical encounter. Through descriptions of their personal accounts of growing up with autism, Dr. Grandin and Barron locate a form of misconception that has developed by doctors, teachers and parents who assume and treat only the social effects of autism, or a public consciousness that only sees awkward, “bad” behavior. Their book explicitly demonstrates how children with autism learn how to interact with social norms and continually point-out that simply seeing the autistic child as an effect of a strict pathology further forecloses the emergence of seeing an actual thinking “I” of Being. I would like to add that Sean Barron’s first book was entitled There’s a Boy in There, where his title indicates how society sees autism as a lack or a mask that must be uncovered to reveal a coherent thinking “I” and his book shows how the autistic thinking “I” communicates and produces a coherent subject of value.
Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron show that there is no clearly defined, linear subject of autism, but rather a set of pathologies that change and develop over time (indeed, autism is not a fixed subjectivity). Dr. Grandin and Barron reconfigure the autistic child (subject) into two metaphorical categories that describe “paths,” or two schematics of autistic personalities that emerge from the medical definition of “classic autism.” Path A children, demonstrate high mental functioning and “their sense of connection to the world, their happiness may always stem from a logical, analytic place of being…”(emphasis mine, UWRSR introduction pg.xii). Path A children are usually non-verbal in their adolescence and pull away from social interactions because they are caught in loops of analytical thought where words have therefore abandoned them. Dr. Grandin tells how she would take comfort in looking at sand falling between her fingers for hours without words to express her obsession. Her behavior was seen as inherently anti-social and since Temple was non-verbal in her childhood she was therefore considered to be a subject that was deprived of a coherent thinking “I” of being. Ethical and medical norms dictated that she be “left alone,” allowing her to retreat from interacting with social norms and unable to express an external ego. It wouldn’t be until her later teens, when she would come into contact with highly analytical academic discourses, that she would develop the language to describe her inner thoughts as a child. Since Temple was seen as being inherently anti-social and uncommunicative, high-functioning analytic thinking and language were denied to her until she latter acquired the language of “neurotypicals” to actually see and express herself as a literal, scientific thinker.
In contrast, Path B children are described as “feeling emotional-relatedness right from the start…they ‘feel out’ their world through their sense of social-emotional connection and are deeply affected when they and their world are out of sync with each other.” (UWRSR, pg. xiii). In giving an account of themselves, both Dr. Grandin (Path A) and Sean Barron (Path B) use the language of the established medical discourse on autism to reconfigure the discursive limits of their own intelligibility and agency. In so doing, they recreate a language of autism that is at once part of their own making and simultaneously constructed through an external social world (or the political world) of “neurotypical” doctors and teachers. From this perspective, we can thusly see how Marie’s conception of returning to the abstract ethical creates a literary voice of autism that reveals how the political subject of autism is formed and how their voice of agency comes into contact with a world that is not their own. In order to do this both Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron require the political language of everyday “neurotypical” doctors and teachers that have defined and pathologized their social intelligibility in advance. Therefore, their book is only possible because Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron create an abstract ethical subject that is simultaneously dependant on a social/medical discourse that exceeds and precedes them. Their book is meant to demonstrate to the reader, if one is going to be ethical towards a subject of autism, one must not solely consider the medial discourse that establishes their intelligibility to the world. The reader must also assume an open, and unconditional “motherly” ethics, or an unstable politics, which will assume autism’s discontinuities and reformulations throughout social development and time.
In Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, he first introduces his theory of the subject (Butler’s theoretical starting point in Chapter 3 of Psychic Life of Power) as an effect of discourse. In this seminal work, Foucault shows that there is no linear ‘subject’ of madness throughout the genealogy of psychology, only discourses that treat and “cure” mental diseases through the creation of the pathologized patient. While much advancement has been made in Psychiatry and Neuro-chemistry, it is still true that the pathological subject is always an effect of discourse: one enters the clinic, learns of their pathological subjectivity and seeks therapy. In this sense, psychological treatment thus works on two levels of understanding: on the one level it is a psychological conditioning, where the patient self-reflexivity states, “Yes, I am sick/depressed/Bi-polar…” and on another level, the patient confirms/refutes the medical discourse of subjectivity by saying, “Yes, I feel better or No I don’t feel better because of this or that therapy.” Yet, the process for determining a ‘subject’ of psychological treatment and the correct medication requires a system of checks and balances (an economy of mental health) that underlines the ethical/political intersection.
In this sense, the analyst must determine pathology based not on the literal appearance of a “disease,” but rather paradoxically through a performance of an opaque speaking “I”. An analysand’s subjectivity (i.e. pathology) is then measured against a fixed understanding of mental illness and a medication is prescribed that may or may not work. Today, we can understand how psychiatry sees mental illness as a controllable “disease,” complete with the experimentation of a clinic, as trial and error, and the effects of an incomplete science that attempts to treat an ever-changing subject of Being. Thus, if mental illness is truly a “disease,” in the same sense as cancer, then a corresponding pill is all that is needed for all fixed and pathological illness. However, we also know this is not always the case, as mental illness may not have a single origin and is always bound to a complex material and psychic thinking “I” of Being—a being that grows, changes and is always in flux, never stable or completely pathological. All problems of the ethical/political intersection of mental health would be resolved if a wonder pill actually existed that “cured” all forms of autism, but sadly, no such pill actually exists. **(Please note, I am not arguing that there is no value to psychiatric medication;I am simply pointing to its inconsistencies, not the value of its successes or its failures)**
In this brief sketch of medical subject formation, I contend that the abstract ethical is already embraced in the practice of political medical science. The political/ethical intersection evolves in the clinic of mental health, where the patient learns and becomes a “subject” of the clinic. The clinic thusly becomes a space where a discourse of mental illness precedes the subject and in turn forms an abstract conception of the patient that seeks its theoretical treatment. If the subject is, as both Butler and Foucault maintain, an effect of discourse then it will be necessary to enact and question the ethical/political divide in each context of medical subject formation. I would now like to return to the subject of autism and focus solely on Dr. Grandin’s narrative as a non-verbal, highly gifted, autistic child (Path A). Dr. Grandin gives an account of herself as a child and lavishes much praise upon her mother for much of her success as a professional today.
Temple Grandin was born in the early 1950’s, at a time when psychotherapy and clinical psychology was in its “infancy” in America. This is a time when autism was not understood as it is today and was often treated by removing the child from the family, placing them in an institution and enforcing harsh behavior modification techniques (We all might share this “classic” image which has been depicted constantly throughout the arts). Dr. Grandin contributes much praise to her mother who refused to let her young and quite different/gifted Temple be sent to any institution. Temple’s mother was very critical of the doctor’s description and evaluations of her daughter’s autism, which determined that she would never develop social skills because she had a mental illness. The doctor’s evaluations, based on strict pathologies for autism, foresaw Temple as never being able to overcome her pathological “illness.” The abstract ethics of doctors and teachers in the 1950’s prescribed Temple to be put into an institution and removed from society altogether. This however was unacceptable for Temple’s mother, who insisted that her daughter could learn to become a functioning adult. Dr. Grandin reveals that through her mother’s persistent affection and care, she developed an open, “motherly” ethics that allowed her autistic, non-verbal daughter to grow into a professional PhD.
Dr. Grandin specifically credits her mother for creating a delicate system of discipline that would engage and incorporate her autism in innovative ways. She gives credit to her mother for her “…acute understanding of my boundaries and [knowing] when and how far she could push me.”(UWRSR, pg.5) Temple’s mother saw and engaged Temple’s autistic gifts of analytical thinking by catering and reinforcing the behaviors that already gave Temple pleasure. She would buy erector sets, complex puzzles, model airplanes and rockets that would feed Temple’s analytical gifts. She simultaneously refused that her child be left out of the classroom. She advised teachers and created reward programs that would force Temple into social interactions with other children. Her plan was successful because it functioned on two levels, first it allowed Temple’s gifts to blossom and become a source of inspiration and praise, while simultaneously putting Temple into “neurotypical” encounters where she could learn how other kids think and see themselves in relation to social norms. By refusing to adhere to the ethics of the doctors in the 1950’s, Temple’s mother created the social situations that Temple needed to be able to create a social personality for herself. These situations were also necessary, yet uneasy for Temple, but today she praises her mother for refusing to give-in and let her child fail as a social person.
In this sense, Dr. Grandin speaks of her mother as operating from a position similar to Michaela’s Queer Hospitality. Temple’s mother comprised an “ethics” that saw the need for a persistently open, ever-changing social discipline in relation to the subject of autism, where a new realm of hospitality could be possibilized by accepting her daughter’s changing autistic differences and by not foreclosing her social emergence by considering both her non-verbal social behaviors and her analytical thinking. Therefore, a “motherly” ethics/hospitality was constantly enacted for Temple, where her autism could find release in personal pursuits and take flight in learning from the necessary interactions of “neurotypical” life that included doctors, teachers and other children. Her mother became a bridge that could translate a world created by neurotypicals for neurotypicals, into controlled interactions that could support her throughout a world that would constantly misconstrue her autism and foreclose her social agency. It is precisely because her mother was positioned in between the discursive limits of a medical discourse that allowed her to see a new path for children with autism. While her plan for her daughter was not a public, “political agenda,” Temple’s mother demonstrates why just returning to the abstract ethical would have foreclosed possibilities for her child.
To simplify in three points: A) If Temple’s mother only accepted the abstract ethical reasoning of cognitive medical science in the 1950’s, she would only come to embody the abstract politics of medical science in her disciplinary thinking. Temple’s mother would only embody the ethics of an abstract conception of the medical subject as a strict patient and not see her daughter as a child with autistic difference. This is to say, if Temple’s mother only reasoned through an abstract medical discourse, she would have accepted her daughter’s non-verbal condition as fixed. She probably would have not let her child go to an institution, but she would have only “treated” her daughter’s anti-social behavior while overlooking her analytical gifts. B) Similarly, had Temple’s mother not questioned the social politics of autism at the time, she would not have been able keep her child in the classroom, a social space necessary for all children’s development. C) Underlining both A and B, and most importantly, if she was not also open to seeing Temple as thinking, changing and speaking subject of value, she would have not been able to praise her, love her and allow her to blossom. Strictly speaking, without her mother’s constant engagement and struggle with the ethical/political divide of powerful social norms, she would have continued to see and accept her daughter as a fixed, strictly pathologized, non-verbal subject that would never be able to become a functioning adult.
Her mother’s position was therefore constantly embracted in the ethical/political double bind, since it is also, paradoxically, this same abstract medical discourse of cognitive medical science that pointed out particular pathologies that Temple actually displayed. If her mother had never learned that her child was, indeed, autistic, she wouldn’t have created a special plan that catered to her special interests and needs. Therefore, the abstract ethical of medical science is always a necessary position to consider while simultaneously being open to a critical discursive political position. Without an amalgamation of the ethical/political discourses of Temple’s mother with the medical doctors and teachers, Temple would have never become Dr. Grandin. Temple’s mother had to straddle this ethical/political divide of social norms of the 1950’s and create an “ethics” that changed and allowed Temple to speak back, where she was able to interact with a speaking “I” of autism and form a self-reflexive plan that encouraged Temple’s social growth and praised her analytic being. Because her mother was positioned at this discursive limit between doctors, teachers and the limits of understanding her own daughter as autistic, she was able to deploy a strategic politics that could maneuver her child through an “unethical” medical and social world of neurotypicals.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Politics, Ethics and Responsibility; a Response to Michaela and Other Thoughts
In her last post, Michaela posed very interesting questions with regards to the relationship between politics, ethics, and responsibility. These questions pushed me to think more carefully about the link between the three elements in order to be able to formulate why, in my opinion, thinking of politics and ethics separately is precisely necessary so that we be able to distinguish where our responsibilities lie. As my own emerging thesis thoughts take me towards the concept of the embassy and the role it plays in the conception of nation state and hospitality, I will not go deep into the queer aspect of Michaela’s research, but stay within the notions of nation sates and sovereign powers.
First of all, rather than agreeing with the statement that Butler uses politics, ethics and responsibility interchangeably, I would argue that she demonstrates how the three themes are deeply interconnected, and yet not the same. To say it in a few words, I would suggest that in order to be ethical, politics needs to take responsibilities. According to Butler, these responsibilities lie in the initial human need of the scene of recognition, i.e. in the fact that a subject fundamentally needs the social encounter in order to exist. This is expressed in Precarious Life (PL) in the following passage:
When we recognize another, or when we ask for recognition for ourselves, we are not asking for an Other to see us as we are, as we already are, as we have always been, as we were constituted prior to the encounter itself. Instead, in the asking, in the petition, we have already become something new, since we are constituted by virtue of the address, a need and desire for the Other that takes place in language in the broadest sense, one without which we could not be. To ask for recognition, or to offer it, is precisely not to ask for recognition for what one already is. It is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other. (PL 44, italics mine)
If the subject can only be a subject through the scene of address, then we all have the responsibility to address our ‘neighbours’ and to participate in an ongoing scene of (mutual) recognition in order to let human beings both be subjects and become subjects. Yet, Butler also notices that “when we are speaking about the ‘subject’ we are not always speaking about an individual: we are speaking about a model for agency and intelligibility, one that is very often based on the notions of sovereign power” (PL 45). Here, Butler makes the link between the subject and politics, and thereby also the link between politics and responsibility. In fact, if the notion of sovereign power may be a subject, which is also a “model for agency and intelligibility” according to Butler, then a nation state has the duty to echo the scene of address—presupposing that its purposes is to serve the nation formed by individual subjects. For isn’t it the nation state’s responsibility to worry that its political programs echo the millions of individual subjects who constitute the nation state as a whole? In this responsibility lays also an ethical responsibility, not only towards citizens who are related to that particular sovereign power, but also towards humanity as a whole. So, in order to be truly ethical, one cannot only take into account those who are already part of a given system. The genuine ethical responsibility (and taking one leap forward I would like to suggest that this may be also one possible definition of hospitality) begins according to me in the recognition of those who do not belong to that given system, and who thus have difficulties accessing the “ritual” of the scene of address. Eventually, and following Butler’s thoughts, ethics begins with recognizing that, although the political, juridical and social system applies to a certain number of people who are pre-determined by their legal status, there still is no such thing as a system genuinely capable of uniting people, as we still preserve a degree of unknowingness both towards ourselves and towards the other; hence the difficulty to think a political system being indisputably ethical and open to perform the scene of recognition again and again.
Before drawing further on this thought, let’s look carefully at the paragraph on p.46 (PL) quoted by Michaela, which appears to reflect on the difficulty to truly bind politics, ethics and responsibility together.
I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others. I am not fully known to myself, because part of what I am is the enigmatic traces of others. In this sense, I cannot know myself perfectly or know my ‘difference’ from others in an irreducible way. This unknowingness may seem, from a given perspective, a problem for ethics and politics. Don’t I need to know myself in order to act responsibly in social relations? Surely, to a certain extent, yes. But is there an ethical valence to my unknowingness? I am wounded, and I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. I cannot think the question of responsibility alone, in isolation from the Other; if I do, I have taken myself out of the relational bind that frames the problem of responsibility from the start. (PL 46)
The key sentence might well be the following:
“This unknowingness [which is the unknowingness of myself and of the other] may seem, from a given perspective, a problem for ethics and politics.”
The ‘unknowingness’ expressed here seems to anticipate what Butler has later on called ‘opacity’ in Giving an Account of Oneself. Our previous discussions around Giving an Account of Oneself already gave away the difficulty to fully embrace this notion of opacity within a political system—at least in a western countries. Yet again, the acknowledgement of one’s opacity and that of the other remains the necessary pre-requisite for a true ethical encounter to take place. So, because and thanks to this unknowingness or this opacity, we encounter each other in our differences (this is eminently expressed in Giving an Account of Oneself).
Yet, the question remains why it is a problem for ethics and politics? Probably because the western political frame of thoughts still appears to be embedded in an Enlightenment-like universalism prescribing that in order to be ethical and to conduct an operational political program, one must know each-other. This might be true to a certain extend, yet the degree of unknowingness must surely remain a respected and thoroughly integrated element within the ethico-political program. For if I claim to know the other thoroughly, where does the scene of recognition still be able to take place? Am I not already beforehand filling in the unknown space of the other by pre-conceived ideas which rather belong to myself than to the other? If this happens, then where can we still locate ‘recognition’?
Let me come back to Michaela’s question.
The danger to think politics and ethics separately lies perhaps in the possibility to do politics without thinking ethically at the same time. For it is also a political responsibility to integrate ethical elements within the political frame. Yet, the degree of ethical thinking in a political program may vary considerably from one country to the other; hence also the necessity not to conflate politics and ethics in order to do justice to ethics in a broader frame. Moreover, if we do conflate political and ethical thoughts, then we might fail acknowledging the existence of those who have no access to political systems. On the other hand, if we do not integrate politics and ethics in a systemic frame, we might fail to recognize the Other’s opacity as well as our own opacity within the frame of a sovereign power.
Moreover, I would like to suggest that the tension between politics and ethics is closely related to the tension present in excitable speech and in the acknowledgement thereof. Here, I join Michaela in her question regarding the political outreach and political embedded-ness of injurious speech.
The tension which is present in the concept of excitable speech lays in its ability to give somebody the freedom not to let his/her speech be performative, while at the same time being fully embedded within a complex of power, laws and narratives. So, it both enables the speaker to escape the power of a juridico-political systemic frame, while also incorporating the speaker within that same system. The first problem arising with the notion of excitable speech is again a problem of recognition. In fact, when does an utterance fall under excitable speech? Who does take the decision, and why? Is it because the law court has recognized the other in his/her differences, or because the court precisely failed in acknowledging the other’s differences, thereby immediately categorizing the speaker as a ‘non-reliable person’? Then, where does the strength lie of an utterance that is considered excitable?
I would like to suggest that the lack of performativity of an excitable speech may be precisely that which enables the speaker to create the gap that Butler claims to be necessary for countering injurious speech. The gap then can be seen as a temporal silence, or rather even as a temporal ‘noise’, which, if we think of M. Serres’ approach to noise, enables a infinite range of information and possibilities. In this optic, an excitable utterance might well have the potential to enable a gap in the re-iteration and historicity of words, thereby also enabling to counter or to resist the wounds of injurious speech. The question remains whether the gap and/or the counter speech are political, ethical and/or responsible. Perhaps is the gap in re-iteration that which enables the political frame to transform toward a greater openness to possibilities of differences within a systemic frame. So, the gap would be an element reminding us of our ethical responsibilities within the frame of juridico-political system. It would then also be an element reminding us of the need to de-centre the narrative “I” within the (international) political domain (PL 7). In this sense, I am tempted to agree with the idea that speech which has the potential to be injurious is already veiled in some sorts of politics, as it triggers a certain political response.
On a practical level, it seems however that such a gap only may affect the narrative of a political system if it is performed collectively. To take a concrete example, had the ‘sans-papiers’ in France succeeded in putting their case on the political agenda if they all had performed individually? Or does the lesbian woman in Michaela’s example have a chance to counter the utterance of the word “dyke” that to her sounds injurious? In other words, is there a chance of effectively countering-up injurious speech individually, or do we always need some sort of community? Perhaps that the answer does not lie in the notion of community, but rather in the notion of re-iteration and history. For as Butler has it,
If a performative provisionally succeeds …, then it is not because an intention successfully governs the action of speech, but only because that action echoes prior actions, and accumulates the force of authority through repetition or citation of a prior and authoritative set of practice. … What it means, then, is that a performative “works” to the extent that it draws on and covers the constitutive conventions by which it is mobilized. In this sense, no term or statement can function performatively without the accumulating and dissimulating historicity of force. (ES 51)
Although this paragraph refers to the performativity of injurious speech, it seems to me that this applies all the same to speech that strives to effectively counter up or resist the wounds of injurious speech. But can one human being alone perform by means of accumulation against other performative utterances? Isn’t the notion of community or collectivity still a pre-requisite to a powerful resistance against the violence of injurious speech? This might well be what Butler means when she states that “an international coalition of feminist activists and thinkers … will have to accept the array of sometimes incommensurable epistemological and political beliefs and modes and means of agency that brings us into activism” (PL 48), which yet does not means that each of the activist must conform to a certain and unique system.
To finish, isn’t it that this acceptance of founding a collectivity in order to have a performative effect is in its form the embodiment of a relationship between politics, ethics and responsibilities?
First of all, rather than agreeing with the statement that Butler uses politics, ethics and responsibility interchangeably, I would argue that she demonstrates how the three themes are deeply interconnected, and yet not the same. To say it in a few words, I would suggest that in order to be ethical, politics needs to take responsibilities. According to Butler, these responsibilities lie in the initial human need of the scene of recognition, i.e. in the fact that a subject fundamentally needs the social encounter in order to exist. This is expressed in Precarious Life (PL) in the following passage:
When we recognize another, or when we ask for recognition for ourselves, we are not asking for an Other to see us as we are, as we already are, as we have always been, as we were constituted prior to the encounter itself. Instead, in the asking, in the petition, we have already become something new, since we are constituted by virtue of the address, a need and desire for the Other that takes place in language in the broadest sense, one without which we could not be. To ask for recognition, or to offer it, is precisely not to ask for recognition for what one already is. It is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other. (PL 44, italics mine)
If the subject can only be a subject through the scene of address, then we all have the responsibility to address our ‘neighbours’ and to participate in an ongoing scene of (mutual) recognition in order to let human beings both be subjects and become subjects. Yet, Butler also notices that “when we are speaking about the ‘subject’ we are not always speaking about an individual: we are speaking about a model for agency and intelligibility, one that is very often based on the notions of sovereign power” (PL 45). Here, Butler makes the link between the subject and politics, and thereby also the link between politics and responsibility. In fact, if the notion of sovereign power may be a subject, which is also a “model for agency and intelligibility” according to Butler, then a nation state has the duty to echo the scene of address—presupposing that its purposes is to serve the nation formed by individual subjects. For isn’t it the nation state’s responsibility to worry that its political programs echo the millions of individual subjects who constitute the nation state as a whole? In this responsibility lays also an ethical responsibility, not only towards citizens who are related to that particular sovereign power, but also towards humanity as a whole. So, in order to be truly ethical, one cannot only take into account those who are already part of a given system. The genuine ethical responsibility (and taking one leap forward I would like to suggest that this may be also one possible definition of hospitality) begins according to me in the recognition of those who do not belong to that given system, and who thus have difficulties accessing the “ritual” of the scene of address. Eventually, and following Butler’s thoughts, ethics begins with recognizing that, although the political, juridical and social system applies to a certain number of people who are pre-determined by their legal status, there still is no such thing as a system genuinely capable of uniting people, as we still preserve a degree of unknowingness both towards ourselves and towards the other; hence the difficulty to think a political system being indisputably ethical and open to perform the scene of recognition again and again.
Before drawing further on this thought, let’s look carefully at the paragraph on p.46 (PL) quoted by Michaela, which appears to reflect on the difficulty to truly bind politics, ethics and responsibility together.
I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others. I am not fully known to myself, because part of what I am is the enigmatic traces of others. In this sense, I cannot know myself perfectly or know my ‘difference’ from others in an irreducible way. This unknowingness may seem, from a given perspective, a problem for ethics and politics. Don’t I need to know myself in order to act responsibly in social relations? Surely, to a certain extent, yes. But is there an ethical valence to my unknowingness? I am wounded, and I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. I cannot think the question of responsibility alone, in isolation from the Other; if I do, I have taken myself out of the relational bind that frames the problem of responsibility from the start. (PL 46)
The key sentence might well be the following:
“This unknowingness [which is the unknowingness of myself and of the other] may seem, from a given perspective, a problem for ethics and politics.”
The ‘unknowingness’ expressed here seems to anticipate what Butler has later on called ‘opacity’ in Giving an Account of Oneself. Our previous discussions around Giving an Account of Oneself already gave away the difficulty to fully embrace this notion of opacity within a political system—at least in a western countries. Yet again, the acknowledgement of one’s opacity and that of the other remains the necessary pre-requisite for a true ethical encounter to take place. So, because and thanks to this unknowingness or this opacity, we encounter each other in our differences (this is eminently expressed in Giving an Account of Oneself).
Yet, the question remains why it is a problem for ethics and politics? Probably because the western political frame of thoughts still appears to be embedded in an Enlightenment-like universalism prescribing that in order to be ethical and to conduct an operational political program, one must know each-other. This might be true to a certain extend, yet the degree of unknowingness must surely remain a respected and thoroughly integrated element within the ethico-political program. For if I claim to know the other thoroughly, where does the scene of recognition still be able to take place? Am I not already beforehand filling in the unknown space of the other by pre-conceived ideas which rather belong to myself than to the other? If this happens, then where can we still locate ‘recognition’?
Let me come back to Michaela’s question.
The danger to think politics and ethics separately lies perhaps in the possibility to do politics without thinking ethically at the same time. For it is also a political responsibility to integrate ethical elements within the political frame. Yet, the degree of ethical thinking in a political program may vary considerably from one country to the other; hence also the necessity not to conflate politics and ethics in order to do justice to ethics in a broader frame. Moreover, if we do conflate political and ethical thoughts, then we might fail acknowledging the existence of those who have no access to political systems. On the other hand, if we do not integrate politics and ethics in a systemic frame, we might fail to recognize the Other’s opacity as well as our own opacity within the frame of a sovereign power.
Moreover, I would like to suggest that the tension between politics and ethics is closely related to the tension present in excitable speech and in the acknowledgement thereof. Here, I join Michaela in her question regarding the political outreach and political embedded-ness of injurious speech.
The tension which is present in the concept of excitable speech lays in its ability to give somebody the freedom not to let his/her speech be performative, while at the same time being fully embedded within a complex of power, laws and narratives. So, it both enables the speaker to escape the power of a juridico-political systemic frame, while also incorporating the speaker within that same system. The first problem arising with the notion of excitable speech is again a problem of recognition. In fact, when does an utterance fall under excitable speech? Who does take the decision, and why? Is it because the law court has recognized the other in his/her differences, or because the court precisely failed in acknowledging the other’s differences, thereby immediately categorizing the speaker as a ‘non-reliable person’? Then, where does the strength lie of an utterance that is considered excitable?
I would like to suggest that the lack of performativity of an excitable speech may be precisely that which enables the speaker to create the gap that Butler claims to be necessary for countering injurious speech. The gap then can be seen as a temporal silence, or rather even as a temporal ‘noise’, which, if we think of M. Serres’ approach to noise, enables a infinite range of information and possibilities. In this optic, an excitable utterance might well have the potential to enable a gap in the re-iteration and historicity of words, thereby also enabling to counter or to resist the wounds of injurious speech. The question remains whether the gap and/or the counter speech are political, ethical and/or responsible. Perhaps is the gap in re-iteration that which enables the political frame to transform toward a greater openness to possibilities of differences within a systemic frame. So, the gap would be an element reminding us of our ethical responsibilities within the frame of juridico-political system. It would then also be an element reminding us of the need to de-centre the narrative “I” within the (international) political domain (PL 7). In this sense, I am tempted to agree with the idea that speech which has the potential to be injurious is already veiled in some sorts of politics, as it triggers a certain political response.
On a practical level, it seems however that such a gap only may affect the narrative of a political system if it is performed collectively. To take a concrete example, had the ‘sans-papiers’ in France succeeded in putting their case on the political agenda if they all had performed individually? Or does the lesbian woman in Michaela’s example have a chance to counter the utterance of the word “dyke” that to her sounds injurious? In other words, is there a chance of effectively countering-up injurious speech individually, or do we always need some sort of community? Perhaps that the answer does not lie in the notion of community, but rather in the notion of re-iteration and history. For as Butler has it,
If a performative provisionally succeeds …, then it is not because an intention successfully governs the action of speech, but only because that action echoes prior actions, and accumulates the force of authority through repetition or citation of a prior and authoritative set of practice. … What it means, then, is that a performative “works” to the extent that it draws on and covers the constitutive conventions by which it is mobilized. In this sense, no term or statement can function performatively without the accumulating and dissimulating historicity of force. (ES 51)
Although this paragraph refers to the performativity of injurious speech, it seems to me that this applies all the same to speech that strives to effectively counter up or resist the wounds of injurious speech. But can one human being alone perform by means of accumulation against other performative utterances? Isn’t the notion of community or collectivity still a pre-requisite to a powerful resistance against the violence of injurious speech? This might well be what Butler means when she states that “an international coalition of feminist activists and thinkers … will have to accept the array of sometimes incommensurable epistemological and political beliefs and modes and means of agency that brings us into activism” (PL 48), which yet does not means that each of the activist must conform to a certain and unique system.
To finish, isn’t it that this acceptance of founding a collectivity in order to have a performative effect is in its form the embodiment of a relationship between politics, ethics and responsibilities?
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