Joel Olson-1967-2012

     You can find a number of eulogies for Joel already up. (Here are a number of them.)  I never met Joel personally, but his work had a strong influence on me.  I read the paper he edited, The Blast, as a young radical and have followed his work since then.  He published significant work with Race Traitor, an anti-racist collective, and produced some of the most significant work analyzing the collapse of the Love and Rage collective.  He then went onto help form the recently defunct Bring The Ruckus, which tried to produce a revolutionary politics that was neither defined by the top-down organizing style of conventional Marxism-Leninism or the loose assemblages of contemporary anarchism.  He also remained a committed anti-racist activist, continuing the critique of whiteness began by W.E.B. DuBois,and the Black radical tradition, and popularized by David Roediger amongst others.  He also attempted to do something that is remarkably difficult to do, remain active in radical politics, while attempting to navigate the strange and labyrinthine terrain of academic advancement.  Perhaps, more significantly, he attempted to use the critical lenses of theory in order to communicate and mobilize a radical politics on the ground. I put up a different version of this talk a number of months ago.  (You can find it here.)  It's interesting to see Joel engaging with a substantially different group of folks, namely the Arizona Democratic Party.  Additionally, I'm including a talk that he gave on "The Politics of Protestant Violence: Abolitionists and Anti-Abortionists."  It's all worth your time.  I feel like I should say something else, but I don't know what to say.  I'll leave it here. 

The Rise of Science Fiction as a Respected Genre

     I just came across this early attempt to formulate my intellectual project for the dissertation.  I cut out most of the absolute nonsense to get at some of the early efforts to formulate a relationship between literary form and historical period.

      To turn explicitly to the question of post-war academics within the context of these transformations, it’s notable that the creation of an entire series of academic formations parallels the rise of the mass society, putting the ideological detritus into the center of the analysis of modern structures of power.  This includes the rise of film studies, comics, advertising etc.  (Barthes work comes to mind, but so does the work of the Cahiers du Cinema group or even the work of Delany come to mind.)  Science fiction itself begins to transform in stature during this period.  It moves from primarily being published in pulp format as cheap periodicals to the novel format, both in paperback and hardcover format.  At the same time, the begins to rise a series of critical works on science fiction as a genre moving from the fan circles to respected academic circles.

            Science fiction then operates as one of those commodities produced within that society, but it also needs to be understood as a critical discourse of that society, particularly about the linkage between domesticity and consumption that was constructed in the post war period.  Science fiction had its roots in the traditions of ethnography, travel literature, and the utopia, all of which focus on questions of social reproduction and the social symbolic by posing questions about the customs of a society, its norms, its rituals, the ways that children are raised, and marriage compacts are arranged.  It posed questions on how societies perpetuated themselves, and perhaps more significantly, it posed these questions about the other in order to critique or denaturalize the assumptions of the societies that they lived in.  (Anderson points to this in his Imagined Communities, another place to look is in the material produced by Clifford in his analysis of ethnography and surrealism)  Science fiction contributes to these frameworks a sense of futurity, posing alternative futures, pointing to the contingency of the present, and at times, explicitly critiquing it.

            Science fiction moves from the margins of the society to much more respected position in the literary world, and at the same time, it begins to be re-evaluated as a genre, by both its practitioners as well as its critics.  Its status as both a product of mass production and as a discourse centered on the questions of reproduction put it in a unique position to critically examine the society it exists within.  Furthermore, its emphasis on contingency allows for the critique and re-imagination of a set of practices perceived as both natural and trans-historical, and allows for a critique of capitalism precisely at the moment in which McCarthyism has taken away many of the tools to make these critiques.  In addition, the feminist nature of these works allows for the exploration of the importance of the newly constructed space of the domestic in the reproduction of capital, both in its role of creating norms and expectations and in its role of assuring the market for a variety of mass produced items that insured the stability of Fordist capitalism.

            The intention of this project is to explore the way that feminist science fiction allows for first a critique of contemporary capitalism, and a series of imagined world systems that no longer operate within the logic of the commodity through a series of critical utopias, however in order to be able to map these resistances, one first needs to understand the relations of power in existence in order to establish this structure.  Women’s magazines become a unique space to map out these transformations, as they bring together a set of disparate discourses from the 19^th and 20^th centuries together to produce a sense of the domestic, far more coherent and homogenous than earlier formation, one that could only exist at a point of the level of social equality introduced at the end of the Second world war.

.  The literature on women’s magazines in the period of the war and the post war period has operated within the analytical structure of repression and agency, Betty Friedan making the argument that the post war period is far more repressive than the imagery of the war and beforehand, defending her readings through a set of stories contained in these magazines (which magazines?) whereas the work of Joanne Meyerowitz and Eva Moskowitz argue against this interpretation, focusing on both the ways that those magazines don’t fall into the trap of the Feminine Mystique, as well as the ways that there is a greater continuity between the work of the 1930’s and the 1940’s.  (My suspicion is that Meyerowitz’ interpretation may be shifted through Horowitz’ critical biography, that looks at the Popular Front influence on Friedan/Goldstein.  In addition, I have some minor methodological issues with Meyerowitz, particularly with her connection of magazines, such as AFL’s monthly magazine to women’s literature).  This repression/agency argument also doesn’t offer as full an argument as the linkages that Friedan’s work has with other critical works of the post war period, such as C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, and Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man.

            To return to the subject at hand, my intension is to offer a different analytical framework than is offered by the one implicit in that dyad, one that follows Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis, and insists on the productivity of power.  In some sense, I am following the model of continuity between the period of the war and the post war period, but I am focusing on something else, the way that these magazines were linked up to the war effort, more specifically the effort for women to support this effort, pushing their energy towards a war that took up incredible amounts of resources of the country, which was the primary contribution to the war effort.  (Aka the United States was transformed into a giant factory)

            I don’t want to read this engagement in an uncontradictory fashion. Contained within this effort towards total war are two projects, one directed broadly towards a social democratic project, the other directed towards the re-entrenchment and intensification of capitalism, that is to say, we find a project that continues and expands the Keynesian politics of the new deal, that is Roosevelt’s attempt to ‘save capitalism from itself’ vs. the imaginary of the people’s war.  I have no intention to argue that these imaginaries are autonomous from each other, certainly the party’s refusal to support strikes after the entrance of the USSR into the war and its support of the Japanese internment camps puts it into a profoundly ambiguous situation.  But this precise ambiguity is to be expected, precisely by the entanglement of power and resistance that Foucault writes about in his analysis of modern structures of power.

            As a side note, the contradictions of the popular front project are significant to its collapse.  I have already noted that the Communist Party compromised itself through the support of detention camps, and the refusal to support the labor struggles during the war (along with the disgraceful support of the Nazi-Soviet pact.)  Similar contradictions compromised the unions tied into the popular front project through the tension between the desire to protect the jobs of men who went to war and the jobs of the women who had entered into the war effort.  Alongside real narratives of repression of the left, we also have to remember the sense of betrayal that activists such as Betty Friedan and the sense of betrayal that African American members of the Communist Party felt as the party responded to McCarthyism by narrowing its vision of social justice.

            It’s important to remember that the victory of the war was met by massive strikes in the post war years.  I believe that this points to the power of the popular front imaginary and its continued commitment on the part of large numbers of ordinary Americans.  It is within this context that the project to destroy the political organization of the popular front.  It becomes a way to rescue the new deal from the more radical set of alliances that it made to succeed, that is to say, the radical trace contained in the effort to save capitalism, contained in the alliance between the communist party and the new deal democrats.  But the post war effort needed to continue to keep the economic engine in motion even as it as it neutralized the possibility of radical social transformation.  This need for continued mobilization can be linked to the commitment to Keynes economic theories that emphasized the need for economic demand and consumer spending to the continued health of the economy

            My interest is to begin to look at the space of the domestic as place in which grounds this new formation, linking the cultural, economic, social, etc., more specifically how Women’s magazines become a space to conceptualize and form this space creating intersection between capital, consumers, and later, the state.  But before that, perhaps it would be best to define the space of the domestic, and its importance.  Many commentators have already noted the reliance of the domestic space to stabilize the social order (bring up examples) At the same time, the definition of that domestic space was transforming.  As Nancy Walker notes, “By 1940 the domestic was commonly understood to mean work performed to sustain the daily needs of family members, which rarely included servants or livestock; professionals largely took care of the ill and the indigent, and while a housewife was expected occasionally to serve as hostess, the etiquette of calling cards was a thing of the past (Walker 55)  In addition, electricity was being introduced as a standard feature of housing.  This shift in expectations creates a far more homogenous domestic space through this narrowing of expectations.  Sally Stein makes the analogy of the techniques developed in the space of the domestic with the transformations in the workplace that were created by the new manufacturing techniques introduced by Henry Ford.

            The women’s magazine has an important role in the developing structure of the space of domesticity.  Although, it’s important to recognize that there are a number of significant texts dedicated to domestic advice, the women’s magazine were only begun in the 1870’s and 1880’s.  The connection to commerce was always fairly immediate.  Several magazines were initially started as catalogs, and publications put a great deal of explicit focus on consumption, as the space of the domestic was transformed from a space of production to one of consumption.  The magazines also began to cultivate a set of experts to offer commentary and direct the energies of the household.  (this needs to be spelled out a bit more.)  The United States government took an active role in the structure of those publications with the beginning of the Second World War with its propaganda department.

            While I read this shift in resistance that occurs within the period after the initial terror of McCarthyism as one that occurs under erasure, or as an effect of censorship.  But I want to read that concept of censorship within the framework that is provided by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams.  Freud sets up a set of terms crucial to his understanding of the psychic apparatus, condensation, etc.  In order to make these formations coherent and understandable to the reader, he brings in an analogy with political censorship.  He notes.

            The political writer who has unpleasant truths to tell to those in power finds himself in a similar position.  If he utters them openly the ruler will suppress his words—retrospectively if it is a question of words spoken, preventatively if they are to be made known in print.  The writer has the censorship to fear: and so he moderates and distorts the expression of his opinion.  According to the degree of severity and sensitivity of this censorship, he will find himself forced either to just hold back on certain forms of attack or to seek allusively instead of in plain statement, or he will have to conceal his objectionable views behind a harmless-seeming disguise—he may, for example, tell of incidents involving two mandarins of the Middle Kingdom, whereas he has the bureaucrats of the Fatherland in mind.  The stricter the censorship, the more far-reaching the disguise and often the cleverer the devices which nevertheless put the reader on the track of what is really meant.

            Freud begins by noting that censorship doesn’t only have a simple repressive impact on the work of the author, that is to say, while the destruction of words does occur, the imprisonment of writers, etc.  Freud is interested in another effect of censorship, the one that occurs at the moment that the author in some way internalizes these norms, whether out of fear or as an obstacle to be avoided.  It is precisely at this moment that the author transforms his or her discourse to escape the direct effects of censorship, in effect, censorship then transforms the terrain of the political conflict.  Freud sees this shift as a sort of semiotic game between author and reader, manipulating signs in order to complete circuit of communication.  But, this transformation doesn’t simply repeat the earlier statement.  In effect, censorship can no longer be understood purely within repressive terms, and must be understood as a sort of constitutive force, each new act of censorship leading to a new web of discourse in order to escape its effects, leading to an open ended production of language.

            McCarthyism and anti-communism produced such an effect in the post war era of the United States, closing off both the political forces of the Popular Front as well as the radical demands contained in that formation.  Within that situation, there was a desperate effort to create a new language, a language that would escape the censoring effects of anti-communism and produce a critique of the new modes of domination introduced by the new Keynsian paradigm.  The first model became a demand for inclusion into that system, which included the critiques of poverty offered by critics such as social democrat Michael Harrington that eventually informed the war on poverty, or the demands made by the early civil rights movement, which demanded access to the new wealth and political participation in the society.

            A second set of critiques came up at the same time, which posed the abundance of the society as a problem, rather than scarcity.  Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, the sociological work of C. Wright Mills, and later on, the formation of SDS were all examples of this formation, and feminism fit this model as well, especially when one looks at Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which allowed for the creation of a new women’s movement to come together.  Friedan had been involved in the popular front as both an activist and as a journalist, although she wound up in the suburbs after the collapse of that formation.  Friedan’s critique made the figure of the middle class (generally white) housewife as her central figure of analysis, a product of suburbanization, the increase in wealth, and the desire to produce a stable nuclear family.  This critique has been critiqued for who got left out of its analysis, women in poverty and women of color in particular, but if you think about the book as a critical analysis of a new class formation, one that included a large percentage of the entire society, rather than a work on women as a whole, it becomes a much more productive historical document.

A short second posting on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's biopolitics

     I wrote a fairly lengthy posting on the ways that Gilman's biopolitical reforms were negotiated through a set of particularly economic terms. One of the points that I felt was left undeveloped was the linkage between biological race and economic structure. While working on my dissertation, I came across a fairly curious quote within Gilman's first major sociological treatise, Women and Economics. Within those pages, Gilman attempts to argue that the lack of women's economic independence leads to a sort of pathological development in the evolution of the race. In effect, women become a sort of evolutionary drag on the race, constituting a sort of primitive remainder of early individualistic economic practices. However, she one of her argument is through her interpretation of the impact of years of anti-semitic oppression on the Jewish diaspora.

     “As one clear, world-known instance of the effect of economic conditions upon the human creature, note the marked race-modification of the Hebrew people under the enforced restrictions of the last two thousand years. Here is a people rising to national prominence, first as a pastoral, and then as an agricultural nation; only partially commercial through race affinity with the Phoenicians, the pioneer traders of the world. Under the social power of a united Christendom—united at least in this most unchristian deed—the Jew was forced to get his livelihood by commercial methods solely. Many effects can be traced in him to the fierce pressure of the social conditions to which he was subjected: the intense family devotion of a people who had no country, no king, no room for joy and pride except the family; the reduced size and tremendous vitality and endurance of the pitilessly selected survivors of the Ghetto; the repeated bursts of erratic genius from the human spirit so inhumanly restrained. But more patent still is the effect of the economic conditions,--the artificial development of a race of traders and dealers in money, from the lowest pawnbroker to the house of Rothschild; a special kind of people, bred of the economic environment in which they were compelled to live.” (Gilman 4)

      It's immediately clear that we are dealing with an explanation of the diaspora that partakes in some of the same forms of anti-semitism that the short paragraph is trying to diagnose. Like a lot of contemporary analysis, we have a sort of reductive interpretation of a broad set of experiences, erasing the intense multiplicity of forms of labor and sociability in the life of the diaspora.  Working-class life disappears, experiences working the land disappears, intellectual life disappears, and what remains is a set of stereotypical expectations around finance.  Still, this aspect of Gilman's analysis isn't what I want to focus on.  As anti-semitism goes at the time, this is fairly mild stuff, and its not really a substantial part of Gilman's legacy within a variety of feminist movements.  Far more interesting is the sort of racial Lamarckian interpretation of economic life.  The experiences of historical racism creates a sort of pathology within the economic life of the 'Hebrew people' stunting their growth, producing 'a race of traders and dealers in money, from the lowest pawnbroker to the house of Rothschild.' 
    
     Perhaps to put a bit more bluntly, Gilman is positing that collective economic activity produces biological race.  Or perhaps more specifically, economic activity defines the racial potential of a group, its relation to modernity, its commitment to a variety of discourses around civilization.  The tragedy of the Jewish people from Gilman's perspective is their homogenous experience, defined by the limited horizons above.  She implies that the Jewish is defined by the oikos, the realm of the family, the realm of economic production, to the exclusion of the political sphere, a sphere defined by nations, kings, and the ability to express pride in something other than the family.  In a curious sense, this links up with the limitations of (white) women who are kept in the even more confining space of the household.  The difference is that (white) women are biologically linked to (white) men, creating a heterogeneity that both is the tragedy of their situation, but also their possible salvation. 

An Interview with Edward Said

     Throughout the late 1990's cultural studies scholar, Sut Jhally was involved in the production of  a series of videos engaging with significant figures in the field, most notably Edward Said and Stuart Hall.  I don't know much about Jhally's own work, but his attempt to make some of the most significant ideas in the field of cultural studies available to a broad swath of the public, at least those who would take an introductory women's studies or critical theory course is extraordinarily valuable.  I think I will always associate Jhally with the short introduction to these videos, which manage to capture compex theoretical engagements in a matter of minutes, giving new audiences a valuable road-map to the complexities that would follow.  It's a skill that is often taken for granted, but one that is central to any critical pedagogy.  

      However, it would be a mistake to give Jhally exclusive credit for the thoughtful accessibility.  Edward Said himself shows why he played such a central role in understanding the question of Palestine through his political and theoretical work.  He easily translates the complex questions of representation and power contained in discourses of Orientalism into a language that is both personal and links to the culture and politics of the politics.  We can simultaneously see the kind of self-reflexivity contained in Said's memoir, Out of Place, and his ability to speak to a broad popular audience.  I don't think that we can measure the profound loss that the solidarity struggles against the occupation of Palestine suffered with the loss of Said.  His powerful political interventions from the 1970's until his death in 2003 significantly contributed to the shift from what Norman Finkelstein calls the 'Exodus narrative' of the rise of the Israeli state to one that understands its rise as a form of settler colonialism, drawing on and expanding his analysis of Orientalism.  At the same time, Said's critical lens continually refuses any easy nationalist narrative, moving from his call for a two state solution in the 1970's to his increasing suspicion of the actually existing so-called peace talks of the 1990's.  Said brought together the ethical call for action and the critical lens that continually called into question the 'common sense' categories of the present, taking on the role of the popular or organic intellectual par excellence.  I remember going to the bookstore weekly to buy the U.S. edition of Al-Ahram for his occasional columns (those are now on line here.)

     At this point, I'm beginning to bore myself with my own official memorial to the man, but before I finish these brief thoughts and turn you to the video, I'd like to recognize Said's influence on myself.  I first became acquainted with Said's work as I was trying to understand what was exactly going on in the occupied territories.  I found myself in Mayday Books, a local Minneapolis radical bookstore, looking in the Middle East section, and I came to the conclusion that this Edward Said guy seemed to have written a lot about the subject.  On that somewhat dubious conclusion, I picked up a collection of his essays, The Politics of Dispossession: The Politics of Palestinian Self-Determination: 1969-1994.  That book was a transformative experience for me, causing me to reflect on the violence and domination of colonialism for the first time.  Years later, I found myself in a class with subaltern studies scholar Ajay Skaria, a class that introduced me to Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and the notion of critical theory itself, on the strength of Edward Said's name alone.  In a strange sense, my intellectual trajectory as an anti-humanist post-structural marxist scholar was launched through my engagement with Said.  Despite the fact that Said would probably find most of my theoretical positions distasteful, I still feel a deep political and theoretical allegiance with his work.  Here's the interview. 

A short comment on Agamben's Homo Sacer

     This is a move away from the more immediate recent writings, focusing on the current political situation. I recently came across this engagement with Agamben and thought I would put it up. Don't worry, I'll probably return to questions of the contemporary Occupy movement, and will probably spend some time discussing the protests that will be occurring in a couple weeks on the various campuses of California colleges and universities.

      The first section of Agamben’s book tries to ask the question of what is the structure that defines sovereignty. We find this formulated in the following manner in the introduction.

     Today, now the great State structures have entered into a process of dissolution and the emergency has, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, become the rule, the time is ripe to place the problem of the originary structure and limits of the form of the State in new perspective. The weakness of anarchist and Marxian critiques of the State was precisely to have not caught sight of this structure and thus to have quickly left the arcanum imperii aside, as if it had no substance outside of the simulacra and the ideologies invoked to justify it. But one ends up identifying with an enemy whose structure one does not understand, and the theory of the State (and particular of the state of exception, which is to say, of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the transitional phase leading to the stateless society) is the reef on which the revolutions of our century have been shipwrecked. (12)

      We find that Agamben is interested in engaging in a certain critical intervention within the understandings of sovereignty that have been produced by its traditional enemies. Agamben is clearly engaged in the same project that the two movements, marxism and anarchism are engaged in, the destruction of the state. But Agamben argues that these movements have missed something crucial in the construction of the state. He finds that this structure is tied to the state of exception, and the creation of the state as the moment of indistinction. Perhaps if we use Bataille’s terminology rather than Badiou’s, we could define the State and the homogenous as being produced out of the heterogeneous. We find this logic being presented in Bataille’s understanding of fascist movements in “The Psychological Structure of Fascism.”

       In any case, the remainder of the book seems to be a genealogical study of the structures of law and sovereignty that Agamben sets out and the beginning of the book. In a certain sense, one can read the entire book as an attempt to accomplish Walter Benjamin’s imperative to understand history. “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized….” (Benjamin 255)

      This genealogy begins with the figure of the ‘sacred man’ in Roman history, who can be “killed, but cannot be sacrificed.” He moves through discussions of the king’s two bodies, and also a discussion of the figure of the werewolf and its linkage to the figure of the bandit, but the most significant section seems to be the one dealing with the figure of the camp, which Agamben sees as the nomos of the age. In order to understand this structure of exclusion he spends a considerable amount of time discussing the death camps. It seems that Agamben is interested in making a connection between this camp and the various crises that came up through the 1990’s, primarily the situation in the disintegrating Yugoslavia, and the crisis in Rwanda. He links these crises with the “Life that does not deserve to live.”

      Furthermore he links up the production of the state of exception of the camp with the democratic tradition that is ostensibly in opposition to it. In this sense, he is also following Benjamin, who also makes such a linkage. He links it with the 1789 document on the rights of man, as well as connecting it to a whole series of acts that limited who could be considered a citizen throughout Europe. There is an obvious linkage that can be made with the discussion of the production of the race, which Foucault discusses in Society Must Be Defended. After all, this disallowing life to the point of death is directed to the production of a stronger ‘people’, a stronger ‘race’.

     There seem to be a number of potential problems. The first that comes to mind is the absence of resistance within Agamben’s model. The camp may become a way of creating a state of exception, but the residents of the camp have never really been totally compliant in this situation. Even in the most extreme example of the Nazi death camps, one can find modes of resistance. There are moments when one feels that Agamben may be a bit ensorcelled by the model of power that he has found in the particular genealogy. The other note that I would want to make concerns the lack of discussion around colonialism. I find this peculiar given the importance that it has for one of his sources, Hannah Arendt, in her understanding of the rise of fascist power.

      On the other hand, I think that it does begin to chart the course of a particular response of capitalist sovereignty in response to the crisis that exists in its structure. In a sense, it dovetails with the project of Antonio Negri who is interested in following the trajectory of resistance within the current structures. But unlike Negri, Agamben seems to lack an understanding of the living labor that supports the system.

Sovereignty, Ontology, and Ethics in the Work of Judith Butler

While looking through my papers for some of my older lists, I came across this paper, written a number of years ago for my advisor's class focused on critiques of sovereignty.  I thought I would put it up here.  

The beginning impetus of this project was to begin to make a critical assessment of the attempt of a segment of critical theorists to use their writing to make a political impact.  I was going to look at a number of works that operated in this vein including Susan Buck Morss, Edward Said, Paul Gilroy, and others.  Some of the writers I was looking at had been working in this vein for some time, namely Edward Said, whereas others had not.  The specific common ground that I found in these writers was a focus on the notion of the human, and more often than not, a return to humanism.  I wanted to examine how the notion of the human and structures of sovereignty circulated in their various critiques of the Bush administration.  In essence, I wanted to examine how these attempts to engage in the current political environment led these thinkers to accept notions of the human and of sovereignty that were defined by the common sense of the contemporary political situation.

  
          However, my attempts to engage in this material were by in large failures.  My work was more polemical than critical, criticizing the political tactics of the antiwar movement rather than looking critically at their structural underpinnings.  Perhaps at this point we are still too close to or even still in the era that I sought to examine.  The critique that I wanted to make was strongly influenced by the work of Wendy Brown.  In her book Politics Out of History Brown argues for a certain distance between criticism and political practice.  She makes this argument by examining a comment that Michel Foucault my in regards to his book The Uses of Pleasure.  On being asked if the book was written for the liberation, he responded, “not for, but in terms of.”  Brown then argues, “The difference between “for” and “in terms of” is critical: it indicates whether intellectual life will be submitted to existing political discourses and the formulation of immediate political needs those discourses articulate, or will be allowed the air of independence that it must have in order to be of value as intellectual work for political life.”[1]  This comment offers a fairly compelling critique of the tendency that a number of intellectuals have in an attempt to be engaged through their intellectual work.  The production of a work that operates in the realm of “in terms of” offers an assessment of the horizons of a movement, and perhaps points to ways that those horizons can be challenged.  At best, the act of speaking for produces another representation of those limitations, and usually not that.  In effect, my initial attempts just reproduced what they were trying to critique.

            I decided to think of a different approach to engage with this question, one that would avoid the pitfalls of my earlier approach. I came to the conclusion that I could accomplish this by looking at how Judith Butler succeeds in writing to a broader audience in her book, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, while keeping a commitment to a critical examination of the terms that used within the current political debate.  This commitment can be seen very early within the book, and in language that is by in large in solidarity with the broader left anti-war movement.

            If national sovereignty is challenged, that does not mean it must be shored up at all costs, if that results in suspending political dissent.  Rather, the dislocation from First World privilege, however temporary, offers a chance to start to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized, in which an inevitable interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community.  I confess to not knowing how to theorize that interdependency.  I would suggest, however, that both our political and ethical responsibilities are rooted in the recognition that radical forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty are, by definition, disrupted by the larger global processes of which they are a part, that no final control can be secured, and that final control is not, cannot be, an ultimate value.[2]

            As I said before, we see a commitment to both to a defense of civil liberties within the country as well as finding non-violent solutions to the crisis in the structures in world governance.  At the same time, there is already the commitment to rethinking the two topics that I am interested in discussing, the ways that sovereignty is involved in structures of world governance and the way that modes of interdependence can be transformed within that structure.  Those two themes along with the question of the human are the ideas that I want to examine in Judith Butler’s work.  These themes, particularly the questions surrounding the notion of the human have been an interest throughout Butler’s work.  I am limiting my examination to the work that was produced from the time of the late Clinton administration to the present situation.

           The discussion will open on the broader topic of sovereignty in response to both the military humanism of the Clinton administration to the current situation labeled rather broadly under the umbrella of the ‘war on terror.’  This will primarily be a reading of the essay “Indefinite Detention” but will draw from other works as well.  From there, the essay will move into a discussion of the notion of the human.  This theme is strongly interrelated to the first, as that sovereignty frequently operates through mechanisms of exclusion from this category.  This should take up the bulk of the essay moving from the response to Martha Nussbaum calling for a universal cosmopolitanism to her latest work Undoing Gender.  The discussion will end with an exploration into her recent discussion of ethics. This should bring the two earlier topics together in an even more explicit manner, and perhaps point to the possibility of an ethico-political project tied to the work.

            The question of sovereignty became a serious question in the 1990’s with the end of the cold war and the restructuring of the world system that occurred because of that and decolonization.  Early investigations took on triumphalist narratives such as Francis Fukymura’s the end of history or responses to the question of postmodernity such as the works by Frederic Jameson and David Harvey.  But this shifted with the Chiapas uprising and a whole host of other mobilizations against the phenomenon that was being labeled globalization.  This produced a great deal of literature in response, the most notable being Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire.  At the same time, Giorgio Agamben was responding to another crisis that can be defined by the various intra-state ethnic conflicts, and the occasional interventions by various inter-state bodies and the United States that has been defined as military humanism.  The intervention that Butler makes is on the same terrain as Agamben’s and in response to it.  Both are engaged in a rereading of Foucault in light of the current reinsurgence in a certain sort of sovereignty and both are interested in the mechanisms of exclusion in production of the human.

     This examination of the reinsurgence of sovereignty primarily occurs in the essay “Indefinite Detention” but the topic gets touched on in a number of the essays of the rest of the book.  This essay is in response to the acts of the Bush administration; in particular the detention camp at Guantannamo and the Patriot act, but one can now add the atrocities of Abu Graib and rendition.  She makes this effort primarily through a rereading of Foucault’s comments on governmentality.  She gives the stakes of the argument in the introduction.

     Whereas Foucault argued that sovereignty and governmentality can and do coexist, the particular form of that coexistence in the contemporary war prison has yet to be charted.  Governmentality designates a model for conceptualizing power in its diffuse and multivalent operations, focusing on the management of populations, and operating through state and non-state institutions and discourses.  In the current war prison, officials of governmentality wield sovereign power, understood here as a lawless and unaccountable operation of power, once its legal rule is effectively suspended and military codes take its place.  Once again, a lost or injured sovereignty becomes reanimated through rules that allocate final decisions about life and death to the executive branch or to officials with no elected status and bound by no constitutional constraints.[3]

            As Butler points out, a common reading of Foucault’s comments on governmentality saw Foucault’s argument as the ending of the functioning of a sovereign power.  Butler, like both Wendy Brown and Giorgio Agamben, argues against that reading.  She shows that he didn’t make this argument himself.  But what does that mean for the notion of governmentality, and what is its relationship to this new form of sovereignty?  Butler sets up an interesting relationship between sovereignty and governmentality, in effect, linking the two in opposition to a more liberal notion of the law.  It also seems that despite the fact that Butler agrees with the elements Agamben’s reading of biopower and governmentality that rejects stagist or evolutionary interpretation of their transition, she doesn’t quite reproduce the argument that he makes in regards to their relation.

  
          Before we get into a discussion of the differences in approaching Foucault’s work, perhaps we should spend a brief period of time working through what Foucault meant by governmentality.  Foucault’s article on that subject works through a whole series of political thinkers who are responding to Machiavelli’s ideas around the defense of the principality.  Foucault argues that these arguments represent a major transition in the manner of governance, shifting from an emphasis on protection of territory to the maintenance and sustenance of a population.  This term of population is the crucial term in the production of this concept of governmentality. “From the moment when, on the contrary, population appears absolutely irreducible to the family, the latter becomes of secondary importance compared to population as an element internal to population, no longer a model but a segment.”[4]  He traces out the transition of this thought following various usages of the analogy of the family to the formulation of the term “population.”

            As Butler points out, this leads to substantially different approach to structures of governance.  “Governmentality is broadly understood as a mode of power concerned with the maintenance and control of bodies and persons, the production and regulation of persons and populations, and the circulation of goods insofar as they maintain and restrict the life of the population.  Governmentality operates through policies and departments, through managerial and bureaucratic institutions, through law, when law is understood as “a set of tactics,” and through forms of state power, although not exclusively….  Marked by a diffuse set of strategies and tactics, governmentality gains its meaning and purpose from no single source, no unified sovereign subject.  Rather, the tactics characteristic of governmentality operate diffusely, to dispose and order populations, and to produce and reproduce subjects, their practices and beliefs, in relation to specific policy aims.”[5]

            There is a curious contrast with Agamben’s work, which seems to be interested in similar questions.  Where Butler works through Foucault’s work on the population, Agamben looks explicitly at the work on biopolitics, focusing on the production of the ‘docile body’ and models of individuation.  If one were to make a gross generalization of Agamben’s work, it by in large focuses on the production of sovereignty through acts of individualization and exclusion.  One feels that there is more relation to Hannah Arendt’s Totalitarianism than Foucault.  He goes on to make the curious comment, “It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.  In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception.”[6]  This logic can be produced through the fact that Agamben’s notion of biopolitics seems to repeatedly slip back into Foucault’s notion of an older model of sovereignty, one based on the taking of life, rather than on based on the disciplinary norms that can be found in any number of institutions.

            At the same time, there seems to be something vital in Agamben’s work that links up with the current situation.  The modes of control of the population are increasingly defined by this power of exclusion.  I have already indicated its linkage with the conflicts of the 1990’s as well as the acts of the Bush administration.  If anything, the structures of governmentality have strengthened the ability of the sovereign to kill and exclude.  His works have given a fairly compelling history of this ability.[7]   The current archipelago of prison camps set up by that administration show the urgency of the question of the camp even if one doesn’t accept Agamben’s misreading of Foucault.

           Butler’s work implicitly recognizes this fact by placing the sovereign act of exclusion within the terms of anachronism.  “Sovereignty in this sense no longer operates to support or vitalize the state, but this does not foreclose the possibility that it might emerge as a reanimated anachronism within the political field unmoored from its traditional anchors.”[8]  Butler doesn’t make the same mistake that Agamben makes in linking the notion of biopower to the ability to create the state of exception and take life.  Butler sees that governmentality creates the possibility of opening up this form of “anachronistic” power that operates in the contemporary situation.

  
          And it is important that Butler places this form squarely within the structures of bureaucracy that engages in the structures of maintaining the population that is the focus of Foucault’s work.  She describes the system in the following terms.  “Petty sovereigns abound, reigning in the midst of bureaucratic army institutions mobilized by aims and tactics of power they do not inaugurate or fully control.  And yet such figures are delegated with the power to render unilateral decisions, accountable to no law and without legitimate authority….  It is rather, a lawless and prerogatory power, a “rogue” power par excellence.”[9] 

           And yet this power comes out of the bureaucratic structures of governmentality, and more significantly, it operates through them.  The Guantanamo prisons are a complex operation depending on the techniques of the prison.  The level of monitoring of the ‘detainees’ is incredible, from the food that they consume to the amount of toilet paper they use.  This operation is dependent on an incredible level of expertise, bringing in experts from a number of different fields.  The whole apparatus of the panopticon has been placed at the service of producing subjects that will produce the right kind of information for the United States to continue and legitimize the war on terror.

            At the same time, Butler wants to link the two notions, governmentality and sovereignty in a more substantial level, in opposition to a more substantial notion of the law.  She argues that both “are equally irreducible to law.  Neither is necessarily grounded in law, and neither deploys legal tactics exclusively in the field of their respective operations.  The suspension of the rule of law allows for the convergence of governmentality and sovereignty….  The state is neither identified with the acts of sovereignty nor with the field of governmentality, and yet both act in the name of the state.”[10]  She links the two on the notion of technique.  One can perhaps go as far as to argue that the acts of suspension that are defined as sovereignty become one of many techniques for controlling a population within the field of governmentality, particularly at moments of crisis.

            I want to make another link in this connection of concepts.  I think that there is another concept buried within this linkage that makes it work.  The linkage operates on a crucial term, one that doesn’t find any particular currency within the work of Foucault, but can be found in other modes of critique.  That concept is that of instrumentality, or instrumental reason.  We can find this term at the crossroads between the term of sovereignty and the term of governmentality within Butler’s work.  Governmentality is the condition of this new exercise of sovereignty in the sense that it first establishes law as a “tactic,” something of instrumental value, and not “binding” by the virtue of its status as law.  In a sense, the self-annulment of law under the condition of a state of emergency revitalizes the anachronistic “sovereign” as the newly invigorated subjects of managerial power.[11]

            It is important to note that the notion of “instrumentality” plays no particularly significant role with Foucault’s essay.  After all, he is showing a transition from a Machiavellian understanding of the principality to a population model.  This hardly a transition to a mode of instrumentality to one that was non-instrumental.  Rather, I would argue that the currency of this discussion comes out of the concept of instrumental reason that is developed by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their work in response to the Third Reich such as the Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as Horkheimer’s essays around that same period of time. 

   
         Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno wrote a whole series of essays trying to understand the phenomenon of the Third Reich.  The question could be phrased simply, how could one of the most advanced capitalist-bureaucratic states, a state with one of the largest labor movements in the world, produce such a popular and reactionary movement?  How could it engage in the systematic murder of entire populations?  The question is a lot less vexing within the current moment, but there were still residual traces of the belief in progress that lasted the First World War.  What was unusual about Horkheimer and Adorno’s effort to explain this phenomenon is that they sought to look into the terms of the Enlightenment itself to show a genealogy that pointed to the current moment.

    
        When one looks at it, both the acts of the Blitzkrieg, and the Endlosung itself were dependent on the same structure of techniques that were developed in the assembly line.   Both are dependent on a whole series of techniques of compartmentalization and efficiency.  Max Horkheimer points to this connection in his essay, “The End of Reason.”

Reason in this sense is as indispensable in the modern technique of war as it has always been in the conduct of business.  Its features can be summarized as the optimum adaptation of means to ends, thinking as an energy-conserving operation.  It is a pragmatic instrument oriented to expediency, cold and sober.  The belief in cleverness rests on motives much more cogent than metaphysical propositions.  When the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks.  They were rational enough to build them.  Within the range of Fascism, to defy such reason is the cardinal crime.[12]

            The techniques that they describe, ‘thinking as an energy-conserving operation…. a pragmatic instrument oriented to expediency, cold and sober” can be placed under the term of instrumental reason.  This concept is one that they link to the project of the Enlightenment itself.  It produces a reason that “rests on motives much more cogent than metaphysical propositions.”  This logic can be linked to some form of utility in its broadest sense, and to return to the discussion that Butler brings up in regards to the law, produces a logic that subordinates the figure of the law to a tool that can work aid in this efficiency.

            This “utility” is devoted towards producing structures of domination based broadly on Decartes notion of mind body dualism.  Descartes advocates a concept of reason that is built upon the domination of the mind over the body.  Horkheimer and Adorno link this concept to the general economy of the modern industrial system in their work, Dialectic of Nature.

The concordance between the mind of man and the nature of things that he had in mind is patriarchal: the human mind, which overcomes superstition, is to hold sway over a disenchanted nature.  Knowledge, which is power, knows no obstacles: neither in the enslavement of men nor in compliance with the world’s rulers.  As with all the ends of the bourgeois economy in the factory and on the battlefield, origin is no bar to the dictates of the entrepreneurs: kings, no less directly than businessmen, control technology; it is as democratic as the economic system with which it is bound up.  Technology is the essence of this knowledge.  It does not work by concepts and images, by the fortunate insight, but refers to method, the exploitation of others’ work, and capital.  The “many things” which, according to Bacon, “are reserved,” are themselves no more than instrumental: the radio as sublimated printing press, the dive bomber as a more effective form of artillery, radio control as a more reliable compass.  What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to wholly dominate it and other men.  That is the only is the only aim.  Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness.[13]

            We are immediately introduced indirectly to Descartes form of logic, which is linked to a patriarchal form of power, as the dominated form of the body both takes the form of nature and that of women.  This methodology that is dedicated to a form of domination that is directed towards an economy of efficiency is intensified through methods tied to the expansion of technology.  This is linked to three main fields, propaganda, warfare, and navigation in order to point out that the innovations of the day were only continuations on themes that had run through the Enlightenment.  More significantly, they point out that these technologies have been shaped and formed by the domination that defines the system of economy.

    
        This can be pushed farther.  Instrumental reason provides the necessary logic behind the domination of human beings through its instrumentality.  This draws on the classical marxist analysis that show how workers become appendages to their machines and shows the possibility of this technique being brought into other facets of life.  More significantly, it shows the possibility of designating sections of the possibility of demarcating sections of the population as unproductive, and legitimating their removal.  It also gives the tools to make these mechanisms extremely efficient.  It enters human value within the same structure as objects, operating within the same logic of equivalence.    

            Essentially the separation that Horkheimer and Adorno make with an orthodox marxist understanding of the world is the same point of separation that Butler makes with Foucault.  Both are essentially arguing that modern disenchanted forms of power allow for a reinsurgence of older models of power, for Horkheimer and Adorno this gets placed under the aegis of ‘myth’ whereas for Butler it gets placed under ‘sovereignty.  They link the phenomenon of Nazism in the present.  “The horde which so assuredly appears in the organization of the Hitler Youth is not are return to barbarism but the triumph of repressive equality, the disclosure through peers of the parity of the right to injustice.”[14]  The argument makes the link on the basis of equivalence, and replaciblity.  Similarly, the reintroduction of sovereignty is a contemporary phenomenon that is linked to the contemporary situation.  In the moment of the crisis, the figure of myth, the horde or the sovereign are returned to as a resolution to that crisis.  They become “instrumentalized” and brought into the new apparatus.

  
          Perhaps the point where the analysis of Horkheimer and Adorno fails is when the notion of the human arrives.  Their section “Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment” is perhaps the least illuminating section of the book.  One neither gets an analysis of how instrumental reason function to separate the human from the non-human, nor how the separation is produced.  Whereas the earlier work on instrumental reason aided and expanded on Butler’s understanding of the relationship between governmentality and sovereignty, they will have to be abandoned to understand the mechanisms of exclusion that produce the human.

            This is the part of Butler’s work that has its closest ties with a certain element of Agamben’s work.  Agamben spent a great deal of time discussing the fact that the increase in the figure of the refugee, the stateless figure put a good deal of stress on the mechanisms of the human rights apparatus.  He points out quite accurately that most established notions of human rights going back to France’s Declaration of Rights is dependent on that subject being tied to a discrete territory.  This has become irrelevant for larger and larger groups of people, who leave their countries in order to flee from wars, repression, or simply to look for work.  The Bush administration has excused its behavior through the gaps within these structures, labeling its enemies, stateless “enemy combatants.”

This question has been part of Butler’s work, and her involvement in, and examination of the terms of a certain type of cosmopolitan human rights discourse.  This can already be seen in her engagement with the argument that Martha Nussbaum brings up in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism.

           If existing and accepted conventions of universality constrain the domain of the speakable, making a border of demarcation between the speakable and the unspeakable.

  
          The border that produces the speakable through the exclusion of certain forms of speech becomes an operation of censorship exercised through the very production of the universal.  Does every postulation of the universal as an existent, as a given, not codify the exclusions by which that postulation of the universal proceeds?  In this instance and through this strategy of relying on established conventions of universality, do we unwittingly stall the process of universalization within the bounds of established conventions, naturalizing its exclusions, and preempting the possibility of its radicalization?  The universal can be articulated only in response to a challenge from (its own) outside.  What constitutes the community that might qualify as a legitimate community that might debate and agree upon this universality?[15]

Butler’s primary critique of Nussbaum’s work is that it operates on the principle that there is a structure of universality in place.  She clearly points out that this logic produces a restrictive notion of universality that reestablishes the restrictions within the “established conventions of universality.”  We have already noted that international operates on a notion of a subject that is a state-bound subject, leaving out the increasing number of stateless refugees within the society.  But in her other work, Butler also points to the fact that there has been considerable debates about the relevance of gays and lesbians in human rights organization.  One can see the most explicit moment of this in the debates over the term “gender” within global forums on rights.  The term has become controversial because the Vatican along with other structures within those forums see the term as Trojan horse for legitimating homosexuality.

The structures of global governance that many liberals expect to use to combat the reinsurgence of sovereignty were the preconditions for that reinsurgence.  The question of the human is already in them.  This question is perhaps the most urgent throughout her work.  It is constantly rephrased in similar language in Antigone’s Claim, Undoing Gender, and Precarious Life.  She phrases this question within the essay “Indefinite Detention.”  “It is crucial to ask under what conditions some human lives cease to become eligible for basic, if not universal, human rights.  How does the U.S. government construe these conditions?  And to what extent is there a racial and ethnic frame through which these imprisoned lives are viewed and judged such that they are deemed less than human, or as having departed from the recognizable human community?”[16]

Her work constantly pairs this question of the historical ontological structures of the human with the political ramifications of those structures. Within the discussion of Precarious Life, she points out that the deaths that occur in relation to the violence of the United States and Israel are somehow less human than the deaths that occurred at the Twin Towers.  “But this is just a sign of another differential relation to life, since we seldom, if ever, hear the names of the thousands of Palestinians who have died by the Israeli military with United States support, or any number of Afghan people, children and adults.  Du they have names and faces, personal histories, family, favorite hobbies, slogans by which they live?…  To what extent have Arab peoples, predominantly practitioners of Islam, fallen outside the “human” as it is naturalized in its “Western” mold by the contemporary workings of humanism?”[17]

To push this question into the contemporary politics, one can see this very gap evident within the recent removal of Israeli settlers in Gaza.  An extraordinary effort was made to show the pain and the suffering of the settlers.  They were made human, individual.  Some of the people that were expelled had been living there had been there for weeks.  This contrasts strongly with the anonymity in which thousands of Palestinians have been removed from their houses in much more brutal circumstances and without remuneration.  We can’t limit our understanding to this phenomenon to limited concepts such as “bias” or some kind of nefarious influence from the AIPAC.  Instead, we need to look at the influence of the colony in the postcolony.  Despite the efforts of decolonization and anti-racism, the racist and orientalism of colonialism remains a profound influence on the current constructions of the human in human rights discourse.

The immediate reaction to the attacks was phrased in the question, “Why do they hate us?”  One wonders at the sincerity of the question, but the response to the question outside of leftist circles certainly avoiding answering it in anyway that would be uncomfortable to readers.  Like a lot of the literature produced to explain the ethnic conflicts of the 1990’s, writers such as Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington tried to produce explanations that were somehow timeless, or at the very least, having ancient origins.  Instead of investigating the implications of colonialism and the violence of the attempts at decolonization, they produce a notion of an Arab society, and more relevant to us, subject that is somehow timeless.  Butler notes the relationship between the act of this pathological reading, and the current structures of indefinite detention.

I think, not only because, in a proto-Foucaultian vein, it explicitly models the prison on the mental institution, but also because it sets up an analogy between the suspected terrorist and the mentally ill.  When analogies are offered, they presuppose the separability of the terms that are compared.  But any analogy also assumes a common ground for comparability, and in this case the analogy functions to a certain degree by functioning metonymically.  The terrorists are like the mentally ill because their mind-set is unfathomable, because they are outside reason, because they are outside of “civilization,” if we understand that term to be the catchword of a self-defined Western perspective that considers itself bound to certain versions of rationality and the claims that arise from them.  Involuntary hospitalization is like involuntary incarceration only if we accept that certain suspected criminal activities are themselves signs of mental illness.  Indeed, one has to wonder whether it is not simply selected acts undertaken by Islamic extremists that are considered outside the bounds of rationality as established by a civilizational discourse of the West, but rather any and all beliefs and practices pertaining to Islam that become, effectively, tokens of mental illness to the extent that they depart from the hegemonic norms of Western rationality.[18]

This production of pathology allows for a couple significant processes to occur.  The first process that it excludes a reading of the events of 9-11 within a political context.  The very few initial attempts to engage in this reading were immediately dismissed under the rubric of either being 'Anti-American,’ excusing the terrorists, or both.  In effect, those critics who dared to express opinions deemed unspeakable were then themselves pathologized.  By doing this, it opened up the possibilities of military action and the detentions and the occupation that occurred.  It also allowed for an entire archipelago of detention camps to open around the world.  The individuals held within are then somehow manage to exist outside of the international conventions of what is human, through a number of loopholes in international law and the prestige and power that the United States holds within the world.  

She makes a similar analogy between the acts of exclusion that occur within the structures of the global war on terror and the normative structures of gender.  As a later text puts it, “The desire to kill someone, or killing someone, for not conforming to the gender norm by which a person is “supposed” to live suggests that life itself requires a set of sheltering norms, and to be outside it, to live outside it, is to court death….  This is not far removed from the threat of death, or the murder itself, of transsexuals in various countries, and of gay men who read as “feminine” or gay women who read as “masculine.”  These crimes are not always immediately recognized as criminal acts.  Sometimes they are denounced by governments and international agencies; sometimes they are not included as legible or real crimes against humanity by those very institutions.”[19]

As we can see, the mechanisms of exclusion are not the same.  There is a considerable difference in each of their construction, and Butler is in no sense trying to create some sort of unified field theory of exclusion.  But, these different mechanisms constitute the human with their limitations.  More significantly, she sees this discussion as one that needs go to go farther than one of mere inclusion into the category of human, but rather the examination of the regulatory norms of the concept itself.  She phrases this best in the discussion that occurs in the essay “Violence, Mourning, Politics.”

     
       I am referring not only to humans not regarded as humans, and thus to a restrictive conception of the human that is based upon their exclusion.  It is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real?  Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization.  What, then, is the relation between violence and those lives considered as “unreal”?  Does violence effect that unreality?  Does violence take place on that condition of that unreality?[20]

            What constitutes the human is by no means eternal; rather it is linked to the accretion of practices that become reified into a form of ontology.  The most significant factor of that production is the process of exclusion.  Butler links these modes of exclusion with violence, and asks the question of what relations exist between these structures of violence and the enforcement of the limits of what is considered the human.  She puts this best in her analysis of Antigone.  “The symbolic might be understood as a certain kind of tomb that does not precisely extinguish that which nevertheless remains living and trapped within its terms, a site where Antigone, already half-dead within the symbolic that captures Antigone, and although she commits suicide in that tomb, there remains a question whether or not she might signify in a way that exceeds the reach of the symbolic.”[21]

Butler links this zone of exclusion, this extinguishing force with the notion of the symbolic that Lacan in no small part borrows from structural anthropology.  She recognize this as a powerful force in understanding the human, but her notion of ontology is conflict with the notions of structure and form that are taken on by the structuralists and Lacanians.  Instead of accepting the forms of the symbolic as timeless, she places them within limits, and moreover she places the act of stating the law into the realm of performative desire.  We see this expressed in a response to her critics.

The ideal form is still a contingent norm, but one whose contingency has rendered necessary, a form of reification with stark consequences for gendered life.  Those who disagree with me tend to claim, with some exasperation, “But it is the law!”  But what is the status of such an utterance?  “It is the law!” becomes the utterance that performatively attributes the very force to the law that the law itself is said to exercise.  “It is the law” is thus a sign of allegiance to the law, a sign of the desire for the law to be the indisputable law, a theological impulse within the theory of psychoanalysis that seeks to put out of play any criticism of the symbolic father, the law of psychoanalysis itself.  Thus the status given to the law is precisely the status give to the phallus, the symbolic place of the father, the indisputable and incontestable.  The theory exposes its own tautological defense.[22]

            The statement “but it is the law” becomes a performative defense of the current structures of society.  It points to an underlying desire for those norms to remain static, and what’s more, to suppress any criticism of them.  Butler points to an underlying theological impulse within this logic, the desire for a transcendental basis for the human, a limit that cannot be crossed.  This exists in the form of the father, the phallus, etc.  But in order for that to exist there is a need for a sort of outside that must be excluded, and that always puts the norm in crisis.  This doesn’t in and of itself challenge the theory as it accepts this principle, but Butler goes further into the argument in her reading of Antigone, arguing,

     Antigone represents not kinship in its ideal form but its deformation and displacement into crisis and raises the question of what the conditions of intelligibility could have been that would have made her life possible, indeed, what sustaining web of relations makes our lives possible, those of us who confound kinship in the rearticulation of its terms?  What new schemes of intelligibility make our loves legitimate and recognizable, our losses true losses?  The question reopens the relation between kinship and reigning epistemes of cultural intelligibility and both of these to the possibility of social transformation.[23]

           

Antigone becomes the place of interest for Butler because she represents a moment of radical indecipherability, a moment where the familiar terrain becomes internally unfamiliar and contradictory.  The deformation and displacement of established modes of the human, whether that is gender, kinship, etc allows for a new form of politics, a new way for people to engage with each other under the sign of the human.  Crisis is a productive force, opening up new possibilities for the relationships that are put into crisis.

At this point, it seems cogent to return to the comments that Wendy Brown made that opened up this discussion.  If the terms of the current discourse are implicated within the structures that a leftist political project is interested in opposing, then the attempt to use that language as it exists is going to be problematic at best.  Perhaps the urgency that has been evident in so much of the academic activist work has been generated because of the state of exception that was produced after the 9-11 attacks has led to the failure of those projects to make any real foothold.

         
       Judith Butler has an interesting discussion of the same topics in her essay “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue.”  The essay is both a reading of the Foucault essay entitled “What Is Critique?” and a general analysis of the practice of criticism.  She links this practice with searching for limits. 

“One does not drive to the limits for a thrill experience, or because limits are dangerous and sexy, or because it brings into a titillating proximity with evil.  One asks about the limits of ways of knowledge because one has already run up against a crisis within the epistemological field in which one lives.  The categories by which social life are ordered produce a certain incoherence or entire realms of unspeakability.  And it is from this condition, the tear in the fabric of our epistemological web, that the practice of critique emerges, with the awareness that no discourse is adequate here or that our reigning discourses have produced an impasse.  Indeed, the very debate in which strong normative view wars with critical theory may produce precisely that form of discursive impasse from which the necessity and urgency of critique emerges.[24]

            Butler argues for an understanding of both limit and transgression that takes them out of a realm of pure aestheticism, and places them into necessity.  One gets the sense that she is arguing against a popular reading of Bataille’s understanding of transgression, one that perhaps in not too of the mark at times.  Instead, she argues that the drive towards the limits of knowledge occurs because of “one has run up against a crisis within the epistemological field in which one lives.”  Butler points out that one area that this crisis occurring is between critical theory and normative views. This reference to normative views refers to Jurgen Habermas’ communications theory, but it also can refer to certain modes of political engagement.
      
     We can see precisely this impasse occurring within the current attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s action on a basis that is linked to the current structures of human rights governance.  It has shown that the structures that liberals are so invested in defending are full of loopholes, aporias, and contradictions. We already see this question appearing in the Wellek lectures.  The aporia that is found in the living death of Antigone poses a limit of legibility, but it is a horizon that points to other possibilities.  The attacks of 9/11 are placed within the same possibilities, by shaking ‘our’ first world privilege; there is the possibility of engaging with the world on different terms.  It is at the moment of this limit that Butler begins to think within the categories of the ethical.

Butler’s ethical turn has been in part a reading of Levinas.  Levinas, after all, offers us a discussion of the potentially murderous encounter with the other.  Levinas’ reading of this encounter provides the basis for a system of sovereignty that is based on mutual obligation.  This is significant, but it seems that Butler is taking a slightly different direction than Levinas.  For Levinas, the category of ethics becomes a way of creating a philosophical system that avoids an emphasis on ontology.  Moreover, this system is a rejection of Spinoza’s concept of the conatus.  The obligation of the other supersedes this concept.  Butler is not making either of those maneuvers.  

Instead, an ethical engagement is directly linked to the question of ontology, and the ambiguities and permutations of ontology.  Butler’s ethics are linked to an acceptance of a radical contingency within the notion of the human.  One could go as far as to say that it is dependent on a radical sense of productivity of the body, its ability to shift and transform in both its materiality, and its modes of representation.  It emphasizes accepting the alien in the present as well as the fact that the human will never be fully determined.  This is not based on a sense of sense of service to the other, but rather through a dearticulation that occurs through modes of democratic collectivity.  We can see this emphasis in her work.

I would suggest that in this last process, we can only articulate or resignify the basic categories of ontology, of being human, of being gendered, of being recognizably sexual, to the extent that we submit ourselves to a process of cultural translation.  The point is not to assimilate foreign or unfamiliar notions of gender or humanness into our own as if it is simply a matter of incorporation alienness into an established lexicon.  Cultural translation is a process of yielding our most fundamental categories, that is, seeing how and why they break up, require resignification when they encounter the limits of an available episteme: what is unknown or not yet known.  It is crucial to recognize that the human will only be built over time in and by the process of cultural translation, where it is not a translation between two languages that stay enclosed, distinct, unified.  But rather, translation will compel each language to change in order to apprehend the other, and this apprehension, at the limit of what is familiar, parochial, and already known, will be the occasion for an ethical and social transformation.[25]

She links her form of ethic processes of cultural translation that are never complete, and never lead to a formation that stays ‘enclosed, distinct, unified.’  This mode of translation calls for a process of “yielding our most fundamental categories, that is seeing how and why they break up, require resignification when they encounter the limit of an available episteme.”  This translation refuses both the violence of assimilation and incorporation.   But this is not an ethic of self-abnegation; instead it opens up possibilities of collective transformation.

The nonviolent response lives with its unknowingness about the Other in the face of the Other, since sustaining the bond that the question holds us in common, as if we already have all the resources we need to know what defines the human, what its future life might be.

That we cannot predict or control what permutations of the human might arise does not mean that we must value all possible permutations of the human; it does not mean that we cannot struggle for the realization of certain values, democratic and non-violent, international and antiracist.  The point is only that to struggle for those values is precisely to avow that one’s own position is not sufficient to elaborate the spectrum of the human, that one must enter into a collective work in which one’s own status as a subject must, for democratic reasons, become disoriented, exposed to what it does not know.[26]

She places this ethical engagement under the name of nonviolence, and places an emphasis on the life with the “unknowingness about the other.” But this recognition of the unpredictability of the human doesn’t return us to some form of amorphous relativism.  Instead, it creates the preconditions for a politics that places an emphasis on democratic collectivity.  It emphasizes that “one’s own position is not sufficient to elaborate the spectrum of the human.”  Butler emphasizes the collective engagement that is involved in democratic politics.  It is a collective politics, in which; “we’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”[27]  Any attempt to freeze the definition of the human begins to disallow this democratic engagement.  Within the current context, the term ‘crisis’ has been thrown out repeatedly, but what does this mean in regards to understanding the basic structures of trying to understand and engage with the world.  To ask those questions, are the basic preconditions for creating a new politic and new possibilities for radical politics.

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[1] Wendy Brown, Politics Out Of History, 43

[2] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso Books, 2004), xii-xiii.

[3]Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso Books, 2004),  XV.

[4] Michel Foucault, “Governmentality”

[5] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso Books, 2004), 52.

[6] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 6

[7] Although it is interesting that he never explicitly references colonialism as a laboratory for this despite the fact that the material that he is drawing from Hannah Arendt does just that.

[8] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso Books, 2004), 53.

[9] Ibid., 56.

[10] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso Books, 2004), 55.

[11] Ibid., 62

[12] Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason”,   28.

[13] Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

[14]MaxHorkheimer and Theodore Adorno, Dialectic of Enlighenment, 13.  

[15] Judith Butler, “Universality in Culture”, 48-49.

[16] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso Books, 2004), 57.

[17] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso Books, 2004), 32.

[18] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso Books, 2004), 72.

[19] Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge Press, 2004), 34. 

[20] Ibid., 33.

[21] Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 44.

[22]Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 21.

[23] Ibid., 24.

[24] Judith Butler, “What is Critique: An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”, 307-308.

[25] Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge Press, 2004), 38.

[26] Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge Press, 2004),35-36.

[27] Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge Press, 2004), 19.