Bearing Society in Mind: Theories and Politics of the Social Formation
240
Bearing Society in Mind: Theories and Politics of the Social Formation
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Overview
The theory of social formation demonstrates how the fabric of society is made up of threads that are simultaneously economic, political, and cultural. Drawing on the work of theorists including Marx, Althusser, Butler, Žižek and Rancière, Bearing Society in Mindmakes the strongest case possible for the theoretical importance and political necessity of this concept. It simultaneously demonstrates that the social formation proves to be a very particular and peculiar type of “concept”—it is not a reflection or model of the world, but is definitively and concretely bound up with and constitutive of the world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783480241 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/02/2014 |
| Series: | Disruptions , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 379 KB |
About the Author
samuelachambers.com
Read an Excerpt
Bearing Society in Mind
Theories and Politics of the Social Formation
By Samuel A. Chambers
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2014 Samuel A. ChambersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-024-1
CHAPTER 1
Subjectivation, the Social, and a (Missing) Account of the Social Formation
Cornel West has recently called Judith Butler "the leading social theorist of our generation" (West 2011: 92), and while I agree completely with the spirit of West's claim, I must, at the risk of sounding pedantic, dissent from the specific content of his laudatory description. Doubtless Butler takes her place today as one of the foremost theorists and public intellectuals; her work is widely recognised as helping to reshape a number of fields across the humanities; and she speaks with a powerful voice to a variety of national and international political contexts. Nonetheless, I contend that precisely a social theory — or better, a richer account of the social formation — is lacking in Butler's work. In order to defend this claim and to show why it matters, the core of this chapter examines the location in Butler's corpus where, I argue, she expunges a conception of the social formation from her very own sources, thereby calling more conspicuous attention to its absence in her own work. I also articulate the significance of this move in relation to her broader intellectual trajectory, particularly in terms of her post-2001 writings. I read Butler with the working hypothesis that her putative turn to ethics has little to do with the questions of moral philosophy per se. Rather, while something is missing in Butler's early work, that something is not ethics, but rather an account of the social formation.
Butler's early fascination (indeed, at times, a fixation) with the problem of subject formation produces, within The Psychic Life of Power, a series of blindspots concerning the larger question of society, of the social whole. Butler's intense focus on producing a "theory of subjection" leads her to purge a viable account of the social formation from the very texts she draws from. This subtraction of the social formation in Butler's reading helps to explain her explicit efforts in recent works to offer an account of "the social" — an account, I argue, that merely falls back on a liberal, aggregative model (one that Butler would otherwise eschew).
This chapter focuses on a close engagement with Butler's self-named "theory of subjection." Butler derives that theory from her readings of Freud, Foucault, Lacan, and Althusser, but here I center my analysis specifically on Butler's readings of Hegel and Althusser. I demonstrate that Butler's appropriation of Hegel frames and limits her encounter with Althusser: ultimately Butler gives us what we might call a "Hegelianised Althusser," one stripped of the rich understanding of the social formation that Althusser himself was trying to delineate — the one that I will explore in various ways over the four chapters that follow this one. Butler's focus on desire and the theory of subject gives her no way to grasp or make sense of the social formation that provides the conditions of possibility for all subjects. I close by suggesting that Butler's ontology of vulnerability and finitude, as it emerges in her most recent writings, serves the purpose of standing in for a more rigorous account of the social formation. And this substitution, I suggest, proves to be a poor one, since it reduces Butler's work to the terms of liberal political philosophy.
OUTWORK: THE TURN TO PHILOSOPHY
Each of Butler's first three books begins with a preface. Compared to proper introductions (which may or may not follow the preface, when the book contains one), prefaces tend to provide more indirect or oblique entries into the body of a text; they often avoid offering anything like a comprehensive overview of the text, and they frequently eschew any effort to sum up the main arguments or synthesise its lines of logic. Prefaces almost always prove to be shorter than introductions, and unlike the latter, prefaces almost never conclude by offering the reader summaries of the chapters to come. Finally, perhaps most important for my purpose here, prefaces are more situated, and more personal, than introductions. If ever one were to spot the personality or identity of the author, if ever one were to discern the real stakes of the text for that author, such revelations would be found in the preface. Many of these elements emerge clearly in the preface to Butler's first major book, Gender Trouble, a work that opens with a very precise specification of the location and stakes of the argument. Butler does not hide the site and target of her arguments: she names them with the first three words of the book, "contemporary feminist debates" (Butler 1999 [1990]: xxix). Something similar can be said for Bodies That Matter, Butler's follow-up to Gender Trouble, a text that begins in the first person — "I began writing this book" — and continues with a clear articulation of the issue at stake, "the materiality of the body" (Butler 1993: viii). Indeed, this opening paragraph has a very personal timbre, as Butler describes the tone that critics have taken with her in their questions and challenges to her work in Gender Trouble. Butler repeats this type of gesture in numerous other prefaces across her wide body of work (see Butler 1999; Butler 2004a).
I start by speaking about the nature of the preface, and Butler's use of it, in order to mark a contrast that might otherwise be hard to glimpse. The Psychic Life of Power (hereon PLP) lacks a preface or any other personalising apparatus. Its introduction begins with these words: "As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical" (Butler 1997b: 1). This sentence places readers of the book onto philosophical terrain. Butler's first two major books contained subtitles that situated them squarely within the terms of feminist politics and feminist debate, whereas PLP's subtitle is the broadly abstract "theories of subjection." It is not just that this book asks more sweeping questions than Butler's first two but that Butler herself seeks to shift the work of this book out of the fields (the confines?) of feminist theory and politics and onto the stage of the discipline of philosophy. This book specifically focuses on questions of theory; it draws from and directs itself toward philosophers. All of this matters to me because to see what is at stake in PLP, and to see it as a part of the development of Butler's thought, it helps very much to mark the genre (i.e., the discipline of philosophy) in which it is written. In PLP Butler retains a singular focus on questions about the philosophical category of the subject, about the process of subjection, and above all about the workings of power in relation to the subject. I frame my reading of this text in terms of this issue of genre, because the turn to a discourse of philosophy in PLP highlights the absence in Butler's work (in all her writings up to this point, but magnified in this particular text) of a richer account not just of "the social" as a virtual space of plurality, but of society, of the political order — of the social formation.
As I have already shown in my Introduction, the differences between an account of "the social" or a social theory, on the one hand, and a conception of the social formation, on the other, cannot be delineated by way of an abstract, analytic set of definitions of each entity. I aim to bring these distinctions into sharper relief by way of my reading of Butler's texts for their failure to account for the social formation, and I do not wish to preempt that discussion here by trying to define terms. Nevertheless, to elucidate the stakes of the argument, I can, by expanding on my 2nd hypothesis, offer a more polemical formulation of the gap between the two: the social formation is itself a political form, a politicised structure, whereas "the social" may well be a sphere separate from "the political" domain. We understand that "society" or "the social realm" (or Gesellschaft) can easily be seen as a virtual domain, a space in which individuals interact with one another. Hegel offers this sort of account of the social in terms of a dyadic relationship of recognition, and social contract theory depends on understanding "society" as formed by the consent of free and equal individuals. The social formation, on the other hand, points toward the always specific yet constantly shifting arrangement of practices; "social formation" names the simultaneously lateral and vertical arrangement of relationships between diverse activities. Butler has clearly maintained a constant concern with the signifying and resignifying of particular practices from within the realm of "the social." But an understanding of the social formation focuses on the way that such practices are structured from without, as part of an overall system.
While I do not attend in detail to Butler's most famous early texts, Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, I claim that like the later texts that I will discuss in more detail below, those early works contain no developed conception of the social formation. Butler's early writings do indeed use the word social quite frequently. Often the word functions simply as a modifier — for example, social context,social power, and social norms (Butler 1999: 20 and ff.). More frequently, social appears within a chain of terms such as cultural, istorical, or political, all of which function as contrasts to terms such as natural or prediscursive; here Butler makes her well-known arguments about how to understand the distinction between sex and gender as itself a product of historical discursive practices (Butler 1999; see Chambers 2007). Above all, Butler's earlier arguments always work against the idea of a "presocial" (Butler 1999: 38; Butler 1993: 202). As with her more recent books, and as I will discuss in my final section below, Butler's early works use the word social mainly as a descriptor to indicate relationality, to mark contextuality, and to suggest a basic sense of plurality. Overall, Butler has no interest in developing a social theory in these early books, much less in offering an account of the social formation.
To defend my claim that PLP lacks an account or understanding of the social formation puts me in something like the position of trying to prove the negative. However, I must make clear here that my aim is not to fault Butler for not having a "theory of ..." anything, not even the social formation. The form of critical theory that I subscribe to, and to which I think Butler subscribes as well, does not require a thinker to have a "theory of" every concept that they discuss, nor does the failure to have a "theory of X" indicate, on its own, anything at all about their work. Indeed, important critical work today proceeds by eschewing the very notion of producing more "theories of ..." (Rancière 2009; Chambers 2013). Thus, my charge against Butler is distinctly different. Unlike much of Butler's work, especially her early work, in PLP Butler attempts to develop just such a "theory of"; in this case, as the book's subtitle makes clear, a "theory of subjection." And in order to create her own theory of subjection, Butler erases elements, concepts, and articulations of the social formation that are present in the authors she herself is reading. Put differently, just because Althusser has a concept of the social formation does not mean that Butler must do so as well, but in her reading of Althusser she expunges his account of the social formation — and it is this erasure that has significant implications for Butler's work, and for any effort to understand politics and history. I focus on PLP here because in that text the absence of a concept of the social formation becomes palpably visible, and has meaningful effects. Hence, in the remainder of this section I offer a broad overview of the main argument in Butler's book, and then, in the section that follows, I work closely through two of the key interpretive/philosophical readings that she uses to support this argument.
Butler's central (philosophical) claim in PLP can be delineated both with and without the proper (philosophical) names. Starting with Foucault, Butler moves toward Freud, with particular readings of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Althusser designed to help her on the journey. To start with Foucault means to begin with the claim that the process of subject formation always proves double: to form a subject capable of exercising power (the capacity of agency itself) is always simultaneously to subject to power. "Subjection" connotes both "becoming-subject" and "being subordinated to or dominated by." Thus, we see subject formation as a vexed and complex process of turning: the subject turns in response to power, but the subject only comes to be through the turning, and power only really flows through the turning. We might think of this process as a very odd sort of dance between power (the music) and the subject (the dancer); hence, the (solo) dancer only comes into being by responding to the music (there is no dancer prior to the music), operating to some extent autonomously yet still somehow always subject to the terms of the music, while the music itself only plays when the dancer dances (there is no music without the dancer). Now, to move toward Freud, for Butler, means insisting on something much more than a contingent connection between the subject and power; it is to indicate the "passionate attachment" of the subject to the very power that forms him/her/it. And for Butler this means an attachment not only to the agency made possible by subjection but also to the subordination at the heart of subjection (Butler 1997b: 6). The psyche (or the psychic) is one name for this stubborn tie that binds the subject to the power of domination.
Thus Butler wants to go beyond — or better, to somehow go inside — the dance, so as to find out what links the dancer to the music, not just as a mutual condition of possibility (neither exists without the other) but as a fundamental and unbreakable link that somehow transcends any particular dance. What persists before or after the music? What makes the dance possible? Butler offers various responses to this question (e.g., guilt, or the Spinozan conatus), but the general answer always remains the same — namely, the psyche. In just her second paragraph Butler poses the central and overriding question of the book: "What is the psychic form that power takes?" (Butler 1997b: 2). But the question proves to be loaded, since to ask what psychic form power takes is to presume that power does indeed take psychic shape. It is to presume that a full account of the process of subject formation cannot be given without the psyche. Butler's formulation of this point is pregnant with particular meaning and significant implications for her overall project: "an account of subjection, it seems, must be traced in terms of psychic life" (Butler 1997b: 18). Given this framing logic, Butler "naturally" (my quotation marks) devotes this book to tracing that psychic form, to showing within particular readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers how power might "take psychic form." In each case it will be a matter of showing how there is something more to the relationship between power and the subject, something sticky that makes power and the subject whirl around one another and get the twofold process of subjection underway.
My primary interest lies less with this general argument that Butler positions "between Freud and Foucault," and more with the movement away from Foucault (clearly Butler's starting point) and with the important use of Hegel and Althusser in helping Butler to carry out this shift. While "between Freud and Foucault" points to the general location of Butler's "theory of subjection," it can be shown that the reading of these other thinkers does the bulk of the work. And it is in Butler's apparent engagement with Althusser, as framed by her interpretation of Hegel, that we can start to feel the presence of the absence of the social formation. That is, in order to trace the psychic form of power, Butler must simultaneously read out of Althusser (and Nietzsche) the very account of the social formation that otherwise proves so central to his project. In the following sections I will track the movement that Butler takes away from Foucault as she works through Althusser, while also making my own case for the palpable absence of an account of social order in Butler's reading — and all of this despite the clear presence of those accounts in the actual texts of Althusser (and Nietzsche as well).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bearing Society in Mind by Samuel A. Chambers. Copyright © 2014 Samuel A. Chambers. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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