Autonomy and tacit cruelties: Judith Butler’s politics of identification
Kate Kenny, University of Cambridge
This paper addresses Judith Butler’s vision for a future politics of identification by drawing the apparent efficacy of the discourse of the autonomous self in one UK workplace.
Judith Butler is a prominent poststructural philosopher whose contributions to the areas of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy and ethics are widely recognised (Lloyd, 1998; 2007). Throughout her writing, she argues for an awareness of the fluidity and multiplicity of identity categories. She holds that “the variable construction of identity” might someday be “a methodological and normative prerequisite, if not a political goal” (Butler, 1990: 9). These ideas have contributed to the development of a more overt politics of identification in her later work. This project is paralleled by her collaborations with other contemporary theorists who share her concerns for the development of such a politics (Butler et al., 2000; Butler, 2004). Butler’s politics of identification involves a future in which an awareness of the other is taken as a starting point for a less violent means of living. She does not, however, envisage a utopia in which exclusions do not occur, feeling that such an emancipatory ideal is finally impossible and moreover, that its pursuit is dangerous (Foucault, 1991b). Nor does she commit to a view of the subject that necessarily incorporates multiple identifications. Instead, Butler argues that instead of reifying our position on the social, we must: “stay at the edge of what we know, to put our own epistemological certainties into question and through that risk and openness to another way of knowing and of living in the world, to expand our capacity to imagine the human.” (Butler, 2004: 228). For Butler then, to imagine the human is to remain aware of the other’s continuously becoming and multiple nature (Butler, 2004).
However, for Butler, contemporary discourses of the self act to obstruct the development of such an awareness. Importantly, she views dominant modes of thinking about the self and identity as containing within them the potential for the exclusion of others, and indeed, for self-abasement. As did Foucault, Butler warns of the dangers inherent in any worldview that insists upon a conception of the self as coherent and static: “If that very subject produces its coherence at the cost of its own complexity, the crossings of identifications of which it is itself composed, then that subject forecloses the kinds of contestatory connection that might democratise the field of its own operation.” (1993: 115) Thus, Butler sees this norm, the production of the subject’s coherence, as obstructing an awareness of its own, and others’ “complexity”. Moreover, Butler highlights the cost of such discourses, describing in, for example, Bodies that Matter, “the kinds of tacit cruelties that sustain coherent identity; cruelties that include self-cruelty as well, the abasement through which coherence is fictively produced and sustained.” (1993: 115) Returning to her politics of identification therefore, Butler is concerned to overcome the kinds of rejection and exclusion of others that are performed in the name of a coherent and unitary sense of identity.
Butler’s observation of the efficacy of the normative discourse of the autonomous self is supported, in this paper, by data drawn from a recent ethnographic study of a UK workplace. At this organization, the primacy of the coherent self, as a way of knowing, is deeply embedded. This paper illustrates the way in which autonomy appears to go “all the way down” in a series of historically contingent illusions: the illusion of control promoted by the work methodologies that were drawn upon, the illusion of independence from powerful interests, and finally the illusions about autonomy of self in the language that is spoken. In this explication of the hegemony of autonomy in one workplace setting, contributions are made to current discussions regarding the efficacy of this discourse (Rose, 1999, Foucault, 1991b; Gergen, 1989). Drawing on these observations, the implications for Butler’s espoused vision of a future politics of identification, a future in which incoherence, unknowingness and constant translation takes primacy, are discussed.
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