For
discussion purposes only. This paper should not be cited or distributed
without permission from the author.
At the core of every
inquiry into political and ethical theory lies the question of the political
and ethical agent, that is the question of the subject and of the process
of how one comes to be what one is and can be. How do individuals as individuals
come about? How does one become a person? A moral agent? These questions
rest on the fundamental issue of how one becomes oneself,
how one comes to have a concept of oneself and, even more precisely, of
oneself as a subject. Attempting to address
a small part of this question, I would like to trace in a very brief first
step Judith Butlerís theory of subject formation, which understands the
subject as being constantly subjected and emerging. Following that I would
like toóextremely brieflyómake some remarks on the problem of Butlerís
account for the possibility of agency with regard to the notion of intentionality
because the non-identical subject seems to be necessarily unable to remember
who it was and unable to imagine who it will be. That this problem can
be successfully countered by recasting subject formation in terms of emplotment
will be the main contention presented here. I would like to inquire into
Paul Ricoeurís theory of emplotment, understanding it as ìnarrative performativity,î
a narrative reflexivity that brings about the subject as understanding
itself as extended over time. Casting this understanding as the capability
of imaginative remembering, I would like to close with a few suggestions
on how subject formation can integrate the dimension of the narrative emergence
of the subject as self. 1.
The Emergence of the SubjectóJudith Butlerís Theory of Subject Formation If, as Judith Butler
has argued, a theory of the subject and subjectivity has to concern itself
with explaining how subject and subjectivity are formed and emerge, then
it is impossible to understand subject and subjectivity as something that
one is and always already possesses as transcendentals of oneís existence.
The lasting elusiveness and preliminarity of becoming a subject must have
an epistemological impact on our theories of the subject and subjectivity.
In other words, we must acknowledge being a subject as a continuous process
of becoming a subject, and thus a theory of the subject has to be cast
as a theory of subject formation.
Subject formation and hence also the incessantly emerging subject have
to be historical, which means that they have to be extended over time and
contingent in their being. In the self-reflexive movement that brings about
the subject, this turn has to bring forth this subject as having an awareness
of itself as having a history of its own. This movement is initiated and
repetitively sustained by the economy of passionate attachment to life
in general that is a will and desire to be. The key notion in Butlerís
investigations into this process is her understanding of this process as
subjectivation. For Butler, the process of becoming a subject is a process
of becoming subordinated by power with power and of this subjection being
the necessary condition for the existence of the subject. Butler understands
power not only ìas forming
the subject,î but also ìas providing the very condition of its existence
and the trajectory of its desireî (PL
2).[1]
The form of this power is the ìturning back upon oneself or even a turning
on oneselfî (PL
3); this dynamic is a passionate and violent turn that brings about the
subject. In Butlerian terms, this movement reveals the paradox of referentiality
in subjection because of the necessity to refer to that which does not
yet exist, namely the subject. Subjectivation thus carries connotations
both of being rendered a subject and being subjected. Because the subjectivating
force is power and because power is understood as the multiplicity and
interconnectedness of power vectors in the social arena, subjectivation
is a process that always must and can only take place in the social. The
subjects as individual persons that exist only due to subjectivation are
then fragile and discursive, but also always already exceed the description
and the norms that produce them. The subject as the product of subjectivation
emerges as a site of contestation, as ìthe linguistic occasion for the
individual to achieve and reproduce intelligibility, the linguistic condition
of its existence and agencyî (PL
11).[2] To argue that persons
as subjects are discursively constituted does not mean that there are no
real bodies, pains, pleasures, and desires, but it does mean that the reality
of these bodies, pains, pleasures, and desires is dependent on their being
experienced as such. Experiencing something as something always necessarily
depends on a hermeneutic paradigm of that experience that makes it available
as experience. Yet this paradigm is not simply a closed world-view in itself
within which one is immersed and to which one is unalterably confined.
Rather one always already experiences the limits and breakage points of
oneís hermeneutic framework and while the limits and breakage points are
experienced, they resist total sublation into reflective knowledge. This
resistance depends on the fact that every paradigm works according to a
certain foreclosure that occasions the preservation and return of that
which cannot be signified within the given order of being. Experience as
interpretation is thus a practice that depends on the code of intelligibility.
Therefore, to become and be a person, one constantly and repeatedly has
to practice oneself and form oneself and ìis practicedî and formed through,
within, and with regard to the norms of intelligibility. These norms and
codes, however, are not fixed, ahistorical, and static, but in being reproduced
they are productive themselves, and, furthermore, in depending on citation,
they are always subject to slippage and reappropriations, because, as Butler
argues with great fervor, ìrepetition ... is never merely mechanical. As
the appearance of power shifts from the condition of the subject to its
effects, the conditions of power (prior and external) assume a present
and futural formî (PL 16).
The subjection by power that conditions subject formation through its dependence
on reiteration is temporalized, active and productive. Here we can now
see how the Butlerian concept of ìperformativity,î which is the compulsory
reiteration of norms (see
BTM
94-95),[3]
works in subject formation. The performatively emerging subject is the
product of the repetition of the social signifying norms that confer intelligibility.[4]
This repetition of norms is ìwhat enables a subject and constitutes the
temporal condition for the subjectî (BTM
95). Subject formation hence is the sedimentative or materializing effect
of repeated acts over time. 2.1
The Problem of Agency The fact that the ìagency-issueî
remains unresolved is a criticism often leveled against Butlerís contentions.[5]
Butler states that her project is not to determine ìwhether certain kinds
of
significations are good or bad, warranted or unwarrantedî (ìFor a Careful
Readingî 138),[6]
but she wishes to argue for ìa sense of agency ... which is able to renew
the resources of the past in the direction of a future distinctly different.î[7]
It is not necessary for her project that she delineates a theory of how
we decide which practices are to be condemned and which to be condoned,
since this goes beyond the scope of a theory of subject formation. It is
necessary, however, to explain how the subjects become capable of deliberation
and intention. Intentional action
is produced in relation to a self-concept; this entails a dimension of
projection on the one hand, i.e., openness for the future and anticipation
and imagination of oneself in the future. It also entails a dimension of
retrospection on the other hand, i.e., the capacity to craft a past and
the necessity of carrying around a past, of being formed by past attachments,
but also the conscious forming of those attachments. An account for the
creative capacity is necessary as well as an account of how it is intertwined
with the regulating forces, with the subjectivation that works, in Butlerian
terms, as an economy of passionate attachments. 2.2.
Enacted EmplotmentóTracing Paul Ricoeurís Theory of Emplotment As Butler pointed out
in a recent essay, in Foucaultís later writings the ìselfî emerges as a
notion of a ìreflexive interiorityî,[8]and
he contends that selfhood is a creative process that has to be understood
as a ìwork of art.î The ìselfî is thus not a substance or primary immediacy,
but a process of formation and stylization. Departing somewhat from Butler
and Foucault we can now consider that this formation works through interior
reflection and at the same through ìintersubjective interaction,î and this
formative process with its two aspects always has a diachronic as well
as synchronic dimension, or, put it another way, the synchronic situation
is always a situation extended over time. Time as lived time or human time
is always fabricated. The aspect of lived time is constitutive for the
emerging as someone who has a concept of oneself as oneself. This formation
of a self-concept can be understood as emplotment. Emplotment is, in Aristotleís
Poetics, ìthe organization
of the eventsî that transforms individual occurrences into meaningful events
by working them into a larger context of a plot that is constantly emerging
as the events are being organized. The dialectic here is that neither is
the meaningful event preexistent to the plot nor is the plot as organizing
idea preexistent to the meaningful events, but both are formed through
the other. The self-concept as the story of oneís life that one narrates
as oneís own story is orchestrated
by the function of emplotment. Emplotment thus is a conferral of intelligibility,
rendering the contingent into a necessity and integrating it into a larger
whole. The function of emplotment
has been theorized and examined in the three volumes of Paul Ricoeurís
inquiry into the relation between time and narrative. He contends that
emplotment mediates ì[the] relationship between a lived experience where
discordance rends concordance and an eminently verbal experience where
concordance mends discordanceî (TN
1:31).[9]
Emplotment is the negotiation of the limits of concordance and thus the
reflection on the dialectic of concordance and discordance. The fabrication
of a concordance that is incessantly discordant is understood in terms
of producing a remainder that continuously disturbs the concordance. This
remainder escapes the totalization of absorption into reflection and hence
the creation of discordant concordanceóthat is the creation of oneís storyóis
never simply at oneís disposal. This crafting of a
self-concept is, for Ricoeur, the poetic activity of mimesis. Mimesis does
not mean that a copy of some original real-life event is fabricated in
terms of a ìrepresentationî or ìredoubling of presenceî (TN
1:45). Mimesis rather is a sort of ìcreative imitationî that constitutes
the rupture that opens space for figuration and refiguration.[10]
In the movement of narrative fabrication plot is inscribed into the story
and here the mediation between the singular occurrences and the story as
a whole as well as between the ìheterogeneous factorsî (TN
1: 65) of agents, goals, motives, interactions, results, etc., takes place
by rendering the individual incident more than an individual action through
ascription of significance for the whole of the story. We can thus say
that the connection between the events that infers coherence is the narration
that comes too late as it always comes after the incident; it is only in
the recounting that this coherence or concordance is possible at all. The intelligibility
of the events and their relation to the whole depends on the conferral
of a ìsense of an endingî that is plausible and thus acceptable. This exposes
the operation of emplotment as subject to norms and rules of intelligibility
that determine what counts as plausible and acceptable and what does not.
Thus when Ricoeur asserts that ì[t]he productive imagination is not only
rule-governed, but it constitutes the generative matrix of rulesî (TN
1:68), in a Butlerian vein this expresses the dialectic of subjection that
is the condition for the emergence of the subject in which the subjectivating
norms and rules expose themselves as never merely curbing, subjecting,
and prohibiting, but also as productive and generative regarding both the
formation of the subject and the transformation and resignification of
the norms and rules. The freedom of signification is restrained by that
which has to remain unsignifiable, because those narratives that cannot
be crafted continue to be present in the form of the fragmentary trace
or remainder that disruptsóthe return of the repressed that tears the neatly
woven narrative network and constantly necessitates renegotiation. This renegotiation
and refiguration always means a reconfiguration of the praxis; as the notion
of ìnarrative performativityî implies, the meaning of the narrative constitutes
praxis and bears full weight only in its actualization in praxis. The direction
towards future action elucidates that emplotment as narrative self-constitution
cannot be captured as a function of a remembering that is merely retrospective.
Emplotment entails the imaginative power of anticipating; one emerges as
subject as one that has a concept of oneself with regard to future action
and not only as one that makes sense of and thus identifies with ìthe one
who I was in the past.î This identification is a phantasmatic staging of
coherence, because the position of ìthe one who I wasî as such is an imaginary
location.[11]
In this dimension of creative anticipation that relies on a restaging and
imaginative remembering we encounter the infinite lack of closure that
is the ineffaceable openness and indeterminacy of subject formation. 2.3
Imaginative Remembering in Subject Formation From a deconstructionist
position one could now fear that a theory of emplotment would reinstitute
the subject as the arelational master-subject that Butler, in following
Derrida, so insistently deconstructs. To show that such fears are needless,
it is necessary to consider the role of the unconscious, of forgetting,
and of the hermeneutic paradigms that are constituted by and operate through
the effectiveness of the signifying norms. The process of subject formation
in its dimension as narrative emergence produces and at the same time originates
from the relation of oneself with oneself and with others. Subject formation
in this regard is instituted by a triple-dialectic, the dialectic of the
trajectories of the intrasubjective and intersubjective intertwined with
the dialectic of the diachronic and synchronic and with the dialectic of
unconscious and conscious. The subject formed
and forming itself as itself as emplaced and extended over time is an enacted
narrative, but always exceeds that narrative. Others always ìread a storyî
into us, and the task is to mediate the story we come to tell about ourselves
and the story others come to tell about us. Even the story I come to tell
about myself exceeds me insofar as it is my coming to terms with the stories
about me that have been assigned to me, and it also exceeds me, since I
am subject to my experiences, my memories, passions, and desires as they
well up. Thus, the decision of what needs to be negotiated is beyond my
determination, precisely because that which is narrated and rendered coherent
is determined by that which cannot be narrated and has to remain unconscious
and beyond the scope of narratability as its constitutive outside. To maintain a workable
self-concept, the life-story must be retold again and again and, in fact,
retold anew every time. But this crafting of this story is never completely
arbitrary and free. The traces of memory restrict arbitrary signification
and resignification; they restrict the number of plots, the variety of
selves that can be invoked. This unstable self-concept is constantly disturbed
by that which needs to be excluded from remembering. Remembering at its
heart is forgetfulness;[12]
it is an attempt to grasp that which is out of and beyond reach. The subject,
rather than being in charge of its story, emerges in being subjected to
its story that enables the enunciation of the ìIî in which the subject
exceeds the occasion of its formation precisely through its limitation.
The mode of existence thus never is one of consolidating self-certainty
but one of attestation that accounts for the subjectís ìcoming too lateî
and ìremaining preliminaryî that casts the subject as one that is constantly
unbecoming in its becoming. The intention of this
paper was to inquire into the Butlerian theory of subject formation that
understands this process performatively and to attempt to come to terms
with the discontent regarding the question of intentional agency. The idea
presented in this paper is to establish imaginative remembering as a constitutive
concept in Judith Butlerís theory of subject formation so that the subjects
emerging can be understood as emerging as agents capable of deliberate
and intentional action while retaining the concept of performative subjectivation.
The process of being formed as and forming a reflective relation with oneself
through emplotment is governed by the triple-dialectic of intrasubjective
and intersubjective, of diachronic and synchronic as well as of unconscious
and conscious. Imaginative remembering then is captured as a differential
that constitutes human potentiality, rather than as a property inherent
to a subject. The form of this human potentiality is that of always already
being entangled in stories, but these stories are permanently only partially
unfolded, and how they unfold in a given situation is never predeterminable.
One inevitably is entangled in a plurality of stories in both directions
of past and future, and neither past nor future is ever brought to the
point of full closure.
2. Towards Narrative Performativity