On Shifting Ground by Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone

Author:Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone [Nouraie-Simone, Fereshteh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558618565
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

DOCILITY AND AGENCY

In order to elaborate my theoretical approach, let me begin by examining the arguments of Judith Butler, who remains, for many, the preeminent theorist of poststructuralist feminist thought, and whose arguments have been essential to my own work. Central to Butler’s analysis are two insights drawn from Michel Foucault, both quite well known by now. Power, according to Foucault, cannot be understood solely on the model of domination, as something possessed and deployed by individuals or sovereign agents over others, with a singular intentionality, structure, or location that presides over its rationality and execution. Rather, power is to be understood as a strategic relation of force that permeates life and produces new forms of desires, objects, relations, and discourses.34 Second, the subject, argues Foucault, does not precede power relations, in the form of an individuated consciousness, but is produced through these relations, which form the necessary conditions of its possibility. Central to his formulation is what Foucault calls the paradox of subjectivation: the very processes and conditions that secure a subject’s subordination are also the means by which she becomes a self-conscious identity and agent.35 Stated otherwise, one may argue that the set of capacities inhering in a subject—that is, the abilities that define her modes of agency—are not the residue of an undominated self that existed prior to the operations of power but are themselves the products of those operations.36 Such an understanding of power and subject formation encourages us to conceptualize agency not simply as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that specific relations of subordination create and enable.

Drawing on Foucault’s insights, Butler asks a key question: “If power works not merely to dominate or oppress existing subjects, but also forms subjects, what is this formation?”37 By questioning the prediscursive status of the concept of subject and inquiring instead into the relations of power that produce it, Butler breaks with feminist analysts who formulated the issue of personhood in terms of the relative autonomy of the individual from the social. Thus the issue for Butler is not how the social enacts the individual (as it was for generations of feminists) but what the discursive conditions are that sustain the entire metaphysical edifice of contemporary individuality.

Given Butler’s theory of the subject, it is not surprising that her analysis of performativity also informs her conceptualization of agency; indeed, as she says, “the iterability of performativity is a theory of agency.”38 To the degree that the stability of social norms is a function of their repeated enactment, agency for Butler is grounded in the essential openness of each iteration and the possibility that it may fail or be reappropriated or resignified for purposes other than the consolidation of norms. Since all social formations are reproduced through a reenactment of norms, this makes these formations vulnerable because each restatement/reenactment can fail. Thus the condition of possibility of each social formation is also “the possibility of its undoing.”39

There are several points on which Butler departs from the notions of agency and resistance that I criticized earlier.

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