It is crucial to get the precise idea of what Butler is claiming here: her notion is that since ideological universality (the space of interpellation), in order to reproduce itself and retain its hold, has to rely on its repeated assumption by the subject, this repetition is not only the passive assuming of some mandate, but opens up the space of re-formation, resignification, displacement--it is possible to resignify/displace the 'symbolic substance' which predetermines my identity, but not totally to overhaul it, since a total would involve the psychotic loss of my symbolic identity. This resignification can work even in the extreme case of injurious interpellations: they determine me, I cannot get rid of them, they are the condition of my symbolic being/identity; rejecting them tout court would bring about psychosis; but what I can do is resignify/displace them, mockingly assume them: 'the possibilities of resignification will rework and unsettle the passionate attachment to subjection without which subject-formation--and re-formation--cannot succeed.
My aim is not to deny that such a practice of resignification can be very effective in the ideological struggle for hegemony--does not the success of The X Files provide an excellent illustration of this? What happens in this series is precisely that the standard formula of alien threat and invasion is 'resignified', reset in a different context. Not only does the content of this threat offer a quasi-encyclopedic 'multiculturalist' combination of all possible myths and folklores (from Eastern European vampires and werewolves to Navajo spectral monsters); what is even more crucial is the setting of these apparitions: derelict suburbs, half-abandoned country houses or lonely forests, most of them in a North of the USA (no doubt conditioned by the fact that, for economic reasons, most of the exteriors are shot in Canada)--the privileged sites of the threat are the outcasts of our society, from Native Americans and illegal Latino immigrants to the homeless and junkies in our cities. Furthermore, the government itself is systematically presented as an ominous network, penetrated by secret organizations which deny their existence, ambiguously collaborating with the aliens....
There is, however, a limit to this process of resignification, and the Lacanian name for this limit, of course, is precisely the Real. How does this Real operate in language? In 'Pretending', J.L. Austin evokes a neat example of how pretending to be vulgar can itself become vulgar: when I am with people who have rigid standards of behaviour, I pretend to be vulgar and, as part of a social joke, start to use obscene language or refer to obscene content. My pretending to be vulgar will in fact be vulgar--this collapse of the distinction between pretending and being is the unmistakable signal that my speech has touched some Real. That is to say: apropos of what kind of speech acts does the distance between pretending and being (or, rather, actually doing it) collapse? Apropos of speech acts which aim at the other in the Real of his or her being: hate speech, aggressive humiliation, and so on. In such cases, no amount of disguising it with the semblance of a joke or irony caan prevent it from having a hurtful effect--we touch the Real when the efficiency of such symbolic markers of distance is suspended.
And my point is that in so far as we conceive of the politico-ideological resignification in the terms of the struggle for hegemony, today's Real which sets a limit to resignification is Capital: the smooth functioning of Capital is that which remains the same, that which 'always returns to its place', in the unconstrained struggle for hegemony. Is this not demonstrated by the fact thaat Butler, as well as Laclau, in their criticism of the old 'essentialist' Marxism, none the less silently accept a set of premisses: they never question the fundamentals of the capitalist market economy and the liberal-democratic political regime; they never envisage the possibility of a completely different economico-political regime. In this way, they fully participate in the abandonment of these questions by the 'postmodern' Left: all the changes they propose are changes within this economico-political regime.
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