Post by jjnickell on Mar 9, 2016 0:05:10 GMT
I really enjoyed Olson and Worsham’s interview with Butler. For somebody who has up to this point read very little Butler (I recognize that this delay is a crime on my part, given the degree to which my work and research interests are focused on gender), this paper helped me understand her intellectual position on a variety of issues. However, I am a bit confused as to one particular stance of hers. It is clear in reading her work thus far that much of Butler’s thinking is in line with Foucault’s writings – indeed, she claims this several times. Despite this apparent alignment though, Butler seems to have a significantly different view of the relationships between discourse, power, and the subject. As we discussed in our second session in the independent study, Foucault views discourse as a process that produces power. Butler, on the other hand, seems very concerned with the capacity of discourse to repress power. She states: “My sense is that it is always the case that the subject is produced through certain kinds of foreclosure – certain things become impossible for it; certain things become irrecoverable – and that this makes for the possibility of a temporarily coherent subject who can act. But I also want to say that its action can very often take up the foreclosure itself; it can renew the meaning and the effect of foreclosure” (pp. 738-739). For one who might argue that her discussion of the ability of the subject to “act” at the end of this quotation is an example as to how power is produced and agency claimed, we can turn to Butler’s elaboration a little later in this particular response: “…I am clearly born into a world in which certain limitations become the possibility of my subjecthood, but those limitations are not there as structurally static features of my self. They are subject to a renewal, and I perform (mainly unconsciously or implicitly) that renewal in the repeated acts of my person. Even though my agency is conditioned by those limitations, my agency can also thematize and alter those imitations to some degree. This doesn’t mean that I will get over limitation – there is always a limitation; there is always going to be a foreclosure of some kind or another – but I think that the whole scene has to be understood as more dynamic than it generally is” (pp. 739-740). Perhaps my confusion is just that – a failure to understand the scene as dynamic – but, even in her discussion of the subject’s agency, Butler is still preoccupied with the repression of power. How does this interact with Foucault’s view of an affective system of power?