32 The psychic in Butler circulates in zones of un-intelligibility, is
surplus to the requirements for subject-hood and is disruptive to it. This is a pretty familiar
psychoanalytic account of resistance. For example, in Rose,
33
the disruptive potential of the
psyche is read through the Lacanian lens of an ‛alienating destiny‛ wherein the subject is
rendered permanently unstable through the constitutive loss of (the possibility of) selfidentification.
Elena: if this means what I understand it’s very important and beautifully put. That is what I’ve been saying about cults for so long: that members are “rendered permanently unstable through the constitutive loss of (the possiblitily of) selfidentification.”_______________
In Jefferson,
34
the ambivalence of Mike Tyson’s selfhood (as convicted rapist, as
superstar boxer, as hypermasculine superstud, as ‛juvenile delinquent,‛ and as ‛little fairy
boy‛) is understood through the Kleinian notion of an anxiety-reducing, psychical defencemechanism. Tie invokes the Freudian motif of ‛the uncanny‛ as a ‛special shade of anxiety‛
35
which arises from ‛a return of unresolved psychic dilemmas‛
36
– such as the realisation that
what had seemed familiar (a sense of self, for example) turns out to be disturbingly and,
perhaps, pleasurably strange. Similarly, Butler has applied Freud’s concept of melancholia to
understand the trauma of the impossibility of coherent subject formation; as she puts it, ‛the
melancholia that grounds the subject (and hence always threatens to unsettle and disrupt that
ground) signals an incomplete and irresolvable grief.‛
Elena: For me, there is no such a thing as an “irresolvable grief”. All grief can be mitigated. I should know!________________
37
In each account, subjects’ resistance is located in an affective dimension of psychic life –
alienation, anxiety, uncanniness and melancholia. As such, it is not clear how these various
psychic (or emotional) states reformulate or subvert the conditions of subjection, or redirect the
discursive and material effects of power, so much as remain in a state of permanent powerlessness at the margins of subject formation. And what are we to make of a psychic life that is
31 Slavoj Žižek, The Mestases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 56-57, cited
in Tie, 162, Emphasis added.
32
Butler, 86.
33
Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1987).
34 Tony Jefferson, ‚From ‘Little Fairy Boy’ to the ‘Compleat Destroyer’: Subjectivity and Transformation in the
Biography of Mike Tyson,‛ in Mairtin Mac An Ghaill (ed.), Understanding Masculinities (Buckingham: Open
University Press, 1996), and Tony Jefferson, ‚The Tyson Rape Trial: The Law, Feminism and Emotional
‘Truth,’‛ Social and Legal Studies, 6, 2 (1997), 281-301.
35 Anneleen Masschelein, ‚The Concept as Ghost: Conceptualization of the Uncanny in Late Twentieth Century
Theory,‛ Mosaic, 35, 1 (2002), 54 cited in Tie, 170.
36 Tie, 170.
37 Butler, 23.Campbell: The Emotional Life
42
energised by such a limited repertoire of emotions? ‛Good humours‛ such as delight,
excitement, satisfaction and optimism do not feature in a psychoanalytic register of affects;
Elena: It seems very strange that they’ve not dealt with positive emotions. Delight, excitement, satisfaction and optimism I would not even consider positive emotions but there can be delight, satisfaction and optimism as a result of experiencing them but not excitement. They do not excite but give tranquility, peace. __________
yet
there are no grounds to suppose that any emotional state – apart from apathy, perhaps – cannot
be experienced as excess.
Elena: I can’t agree either, apathy is in fact the chief emotion that most people have become used to experiencing because it is only through apathy that they can avoid experiencing the suffering from the state of affairs in which they and most other people live. Apathy is the negative emotion that buffers the suffering.__________
Citing de Beauvoir,
38 McNay notes, ‛the language of psychoanalysis
suggests that the drama of the individual unfolds only within the self and this obscures the
extent to which the individual’s life and actions involve primarily a ‛relation to the world.‛‛
Elena: Bravo de Beauvoir! But not so true either. The drama unfolds within the individual and the deeper the individual can go within him and her self the more they can bring from other dimensions within to their “present” outer world. Then the dialogue between objective realities can begin. _________
39
There is clearly merit in drawing attention to the libidinal, kinetic energy of psychic life as a
destabilising force, but without an account of intersubjective relations, in which power is always
implicated, it induces/incites neither complicity nor resistance within processes of subjectivation.
Elena: Perhaps so and if so, then in processes in which not power but true love are involved then instead of ‘subjectivation’ there is ‘objectivation’. This is what is important about all this exploration: that we come to understand the solutions and put a stop to the causes creating the problem.______________
A significant route out of this impasse is found within the Deleuzian notion of ‛the fold.‛
Deleuze invents this metaphor to denote a ‛zone of subjectivation,‛
40
adding that ‛subjectivation
is created by folding.‛
‛The fold‛ does not presume a self with any essential interiority; nor is
it the effect of an exterior field of power relations; it is, rather ‛a threshold, a door, a becoming
between two multiplicities.‛
E: From now on for Elena: E: will be good enough and I’ll continue to end with a line________
This zone of subjectivation that Deleuze calls the fold could well be the description of the ‘becoming’ of ‘false personality’. I would define ‘false personality’ as the personality that develops ‘mechanically’ until individuals are able to question their own self and the world around them. Until they are able to ‘transform’ what they’ve been ‘conditioned’ to be for what they choose to become. The word false for me, is used only in as much as it doesn’t represent the person that the I within the individual consciously chooses to be but the I that external influences ‘naturally’ develop. As far as I am concerned, the word conditioned personality would be a much better choice than false because it is easy to judge the personality for being ‘false’ but it is not in fact false, it is simply conditioned and it is very real to the individual experiencing life through it.
42 The notion of ‛the fold,‛ then, not only rejects psychoanalytical
suppositions of an interiorised psyche, but also addresses (and overcomes) the paradox of Foucault’s constituted-constituting subject.
E: This would be good to explore deeper.__________
43 As far as Deleuze is concerned ‛self-realization‛ has
nothing to do with a psychic residue or unconscious excess, neither is it the effect of the limits
and exclusions of individualizing practices; he argues:
There never ‚remains‛ anything of the subject, since he (sic) is to be created on each
occasion, like a focal point of resistance, on the basis of the folds which subjectivize
knowledge and bend each power< The struggle for subjectivity presents itself, therefore,
as the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis.‛
Elena: of course I would need to read these authors extensively before I can disagree so much with them but from what is here I’ll still dare to disagree even if one of the problems is that I am not familiar with the language they are using, the meanings behind the words as they are conveying them.
In the first part of Deleuze here on self-realization, I would agree that there is nothing left of the subject when the subject ‘objectifies’ his or herself but this idea that the struggle for subjectivity presents itself as the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis is strange. There is no struggle for subjectivity until individuals begin to ‘objectify’ themselves through the struggle between what they’ve become and what they ‘will’ themselves to be. Perhaps that too is false for ‘deforming’ essence into what the outside world conditions the individual to become is certainly a struggle that involves tremendous suffering. But there is no right to difference and variation on the contrary, in this ‘phase’ of development, the pressure is precisely on repetition. Society tends to develop psychological “amoebas” willing to repeat and conform and were it not for the fact that the human spirit beats within every individual, nothing would ever change. Every generation questions and reforms, adds and also repeats, solves some of the obstacles and repeats those that it couldn’t overcome.__________
44
Deleuze’s thesis of enfolding has been taken up by a number of governmentality theorists, most
notably Dean, whose essay stands, perhaps, as the clearest exemplar of Deleuzian-Foucauldian
eclecticism on matters of government.
45 Dean undertakes what he refers to as a ‛critical
ontology of our selves‛ to explore how modes of ‛governmental authority,‛ and ‛rationalities of
rule‛ are doubled or enfolded into our ways of being, thinking and doing – ‛(i)n this sense,‛ he
38
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 80.
39 McNay, Gender and Agency, 129.
40 Gilles Deleuze, ‚Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation),‛ in Michael Kelly (ed.), Critique and
Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge: MIT, 1995), 337 Diagram.
41
Ibid., 323.
42 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Transl. by Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem & Helen R. Lane (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 29.
43
In ‚Afterword: The Subject and Power‛, Foucault talks of struggles against the ‘government of
individuation’ which ties an individual to ‘his own identity in a constraining way’
E: Yes, the constraint is powerful and de-structuring the conditioned personality is what has been traditionally called ‘esotericism’ ‘work on one’s self’. _____________
(Ibid., 212.) However, he
leaves us with no analytical tools to think through how, in these ‘moments of struggle,’ we can overcome the
submission of subjectivity.
Elena: We would need to ask if he ever undertook such a process. What is fascinating about Foucault is that even if he didn’t undertake such a process he seems to have understood society’s intricacies intuitively and managed to bring that intuition to a language that we could understand. I wonder to what extent his homosexuality helped because homosexuals already have to create an ‘other’ self to exist in a society that tends to reject them.
44
Deleuze, 325.
45 See, for example, Nikolas Rose, ‚Government, Authority and Expertise in Advanced Liberalism,‛ Economy
and Society, 22, 3 (1993), 283-299, and Nikolas Rose, ‚Authority and the Genealogy of Subjectivity,‛ in Paul
Heelas, Scott Lash & Paul Morris (eds.), De-Traditionalization: Authority and Self in an Age of Cultural Uncertainty
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995).Foucault Studies, No. 9, pp. 35-53.
43
writes, ‛one might speak of a folding of exterior relations of authority to sculpt a domain that
can act on and of itself but which, at the same time, is simply the inside marked out by that
folding.‛
Elena: In other posts, I’ve been using the word ‘sculpting’ to mean that folding.
Bye for now.______
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