From Opacity to Legibility

Re-reading the first posts of this blog pushes me to draw a metaphorical bridge between the beginning and the end of our reading of Judith Butler’s thoughts and theories. In fact, I believe that the bridge is begging to be written down, being in the end but a very logical step in Butler’s theoretical approach.

We started with the notions of opacity and transparency, subject formation and dispossession, with the notion of the necessity to recognize the unacknowledged and un-acknowledgeable side both of the self and of the other. We ended our seminar with notions of intelligibility, eligibility and recognition.

Intelligibility, eligibility and recognition are again three notions demanding that we look very closely and attentively at what is being precisely meant. To sum up it short, it can be said that in order to be eligible, one must be recognized and intelligible. Recognition goes back to the scene of address, in which someone gives an account of oneself to an addressee. It is the moment when someone is being recognized as existing in all his/her differences and shared qualities. It is thus the moment when opacity is put at play, at least if the encounter succeeds in performing some ethical rules; for as Butler expresses it in Undoing Gender, “recognition implies that we see the Other as separate, but as structured psychically in ways that are shared” (UG 132). These “ways that are shared” refer to the state of shared vulnerability that becomes central within ethical encounters.
Intelligibility is that which gives a subject the possibility to be understood in the realm of language. It is that which gives the subject a place in a system/frame that is being (theoretically/intellectually) thought. Legibility is that which enables a subject to claim rights, i.e. to politically claim his/her recognizability and intelligibility.[1] In order to be legible, one must thus acknowledge a certain identity—be it provisionally. The complex and two fold aspect of such an acknowledgement is to be read in the following excerpt of Undoing Gender:

I want to maintain that legitimation is double-edged: it is crucial that, politically, we lay claim to intelligibility and recognizability; and it is crucial, politically, that we maintain a critical and transformative relation to the norms that govern what will and will not count as an intelligible and recognizable alliance and kinship. (UG 117)

Note that Butler insists on the “critical and transformative relation to the norms”. The importance of this transformative factor echoes the temporality of interpellation, i.e. the temporality of the effects of norms that produce a subject. A subject’s identity is thus something that is constantly transforming, being redefined again and again due to an infinite process of iteration and transformation (see Excitable Speech). Identity is thus an effect of the re-iteration process through history. This takes us back to the beginning of our discussion again, where we discussed the irrecoverability of the subject’s origin; for the process of infinite reiteration in performative identity forming disables any ontological quest all the same.

In my first post, I discussed the irrecoverability fo origin in relation to the Deleuzian notions of difference and repetition. These Deleuzian notions are echoed in “Imitation and Gender in Subordination”, as Butler appears to have chosen to quote Deleuze as heading to her essay. The quote goes as follows:

Beyond physical repetition and the psychical or metaphysical repetition, is there an ontological repetition?... This ultimate repetition, this ultimate theater, gathers everything in a certain way; and in another way, it destroys everything; and in yet another way, it selects from everything. (IGS 120)

The quote reminds us of the intrinsic complexity of subject formation. In fact, it is precisely this complexity that calls for an acknowledgment of opacity in our relation with others; for if the origin is indeed irrecoverable due to a process of repetition and difference, it means that not only the origin is irrecoverable, but also that only a partial part of the subject can be knowable. Therefore, identity will always remain provisional—and strategic (IGS 123). For be it in the context of gender activism, in the context of terrorism or in the context of injurious speech or excitable speech, it appears that we never can account for a subject’s identity without doing him/her some violence. Yet again, this identity remains sometimes necessary in order to maintain the subject’s legibility, i.e. the subject’s possibility to actively resist certain systems of powers.
This idea of a necessary error of identity had already been raised by Michaela in her comment to my post “Who is the Opaque Subject?” (March, 2nd), where we discussed the problematic of the opaque subject vs. the transparent subject in the frame of (medical) institutions. The problem that was then encountered was that identity appeared to be imposed on subjects who had been defined as pathologized in advance, thereby also preventing them to give an account of themselves as opaque subjects, the discourse accompanying these medical institutions being in fact utterly dominant and restrictive. The difference that can be observed between those discursive “victims” of medical institutions and people who consciously endorse a certain identity for political purposes is that the latter can be done strategically, whereas the former is usually viciously imposed on people who have been identified as having the so-called Down Syndrome—or other pathological syndromes.
Can it be suggested that in both cases, the subject is being dispossessed of himself/herself? In fact, in both cases, the subject appears to endorse an identity that submits him/her to certain norms of recognition.
Yes, perhaps; for it still seems important to distinguish between imposed identity and “self-chosen” identity. In fact, can an imposed identity also be accounted as a strategic endorsement in order to have some claim to legal and political rights? Isn’t it rather a case of radical dispossession, in which the subject is being threatened by ethical violence? It seems in fact that such an imposed identity leaves but very little room for resistance from an opaque point of view.

In “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification” (PLP), Butler gives a reading of the subject formation through a dialogue between Foucault and Freud. Quoting Foucault in the following terms, Butler accounts for the necessity to constantly revise our interpretation of who we are:

Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political “double bind”, which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures. … We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries. (PLP 101)

Michaela already raised an anxious question with regards to this dis-identification practice suggested here (see Michaela’s post of June, 7th). Her fear was that such dis-identification would eventually lead to a loss of recognition and intelligibility on the part of the subject (a tension that Butler herself also raises in Undoing Gender). This might be true if the dis-identification is definitive, i.e. if the dis-identification becomes normative; for dis-identification would then lead the subject to accept a continuous state of exception that may foreclose him/her from any legibility due to a lack of intelligibility and recognition. To compare it with another Butlerian query, it may be the same impasse as postponing judgment indefinitely. For in fact, isn’t it that judging is one possible way to impose a certain identity on someone?
The anxiety of loss of recognition and intelligibility can perhaps be resolved through a reading of dis-identification that leans on Butler’s performativity theory exposed in Excitable Speech. What pushes me to this reading is the following paragraph found in The Psychic Life of Power:

… the signifiers of identity are not structurally determined in advance. If Foucault could argue that a sign could be taken up, used for purposes counter to those for which it was designed, then he understood that even the most noxious terms could be owned, that the most injurious interpellations could also be the site of radical reoccupation and resignification. (PLP 104)

What Butler suggests here is that we should look at identity in terms of signifiers, i.e. in terms of language—thereby also restating her strong anchor in the psychoanalytic tradition. What she states is that whatever signifiers of identity might have been imposed on the subject by a regime of power, there should always remain some room for the subject to take distance and re-appropriate those signifiers in a subversive way. Yet, what if the signifiers of identity keep being imposed on a subject again and again? Isn’t it that the room to maneuver becomes smaller and smaller? To a certain extend, yes. Yet, there should always remain some room in which the subject should be able to perform a subversive reversal, be it only due to his/her own impossibility of to know himself/herself totally.
Ideally, the subject would indeed always have the power to provisionally accept the rules of subjectification and the violence of a certain transparency through identity. The provisional aspect of such an identification would then preserve a dialogue between the self and the subject, thereby also safeguarding a certain degree of opacity, which is according to Butler—and I profoundly sympathize with this view!—the primary ground for any ethical encounter to take place. So, however profound and personal the notion of identity may be, its expression and its practice remain a matter of relationality, being thereby directed toward the others; for as Butler has it,

it is precisely by virtue of one’s relations to others that one is opaque to oneself, and if those relations to others are the venue for one’s ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject’s opacity to itself that it incurs and sustains some of its most important ethical bonds. (GAAO 20)


To conclude—which I can’t, what can I say more than to express a genuine wish to see one’s ethical responsibilities be taken in juridical-political institutions, expressing the recognition of a narrow bound between opacity and legibility. Hopefully we’ll come there. Hopefully.


[1] Note that ‘legible’ is defined as readable or decipherable in English dictionaries. Butler proves to use a slightly different meaning of the word by giving it a political content. Nonetheless, her usage of the word still directly refers to readability or decipherability due to its narrow connection with the notions of intelligibility and recognizability.