The Death of the Subject: The Autopsy Report (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cultural Critique: "What Comes After the Subject?" (Spring 2017), 2017
The Introduction to this special issue examines the transformation of theoretical practices in the humanities between the late 1980s and the present. It maps the path leading from the titular question of the 1991 volume Who Comes After the Subject? to this issue’s question of what comes after the subject. While this essay focuses in particular on the biopolitical turn in the humanities, it also addresses the emergence of affect studies, the new materialisms, and posthumanism as different genres of thinking the whatness of subjectivity and its aftermath. Rather than reveling in life after the subject, this essay marks the ambivalence of this whatness, which, on the one hand, designates the insecurity of any “who,” the many violences through which selfhood can be crushed, and, on the other hand, the reinvention of politics through a tarrying with heterogeneous materialities, the production of new ways of being with others in the world.
Martin Heidegger pointed out that in every fear there is the recognition of our vulnerability, our mortality, and that anxiety, that feeling of finding ourselves cast adrift, nothing supporting us, nothing to hold on to, is a premonition of what dying will be: a being cast from existence into the void, into nothingness. This termination, he argued, is what gives us and our undertakings determinateness. We live in an environment of implements, paths, and objectives. To live is to see possibilities about us, some brought out by our own projects, others visibly outlined by other agents. But the very multiplicity of possibilities extending indefinitely before us produces inaction: what I can do others can do, have done, will do or might do. What, in the outlying field of possibilities that are possible for anyone, outlines the zone of possibilities that are possible for me is the
Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies (LLIDS), 2019
This paper argues that it is impossible to cleanly separate the category of the subject from a dimension simultaneously autonomous and non-autonomous. After starting with a brief introduction to the notion of the autonomous subject, this paper describes some crucial arguments that have validated the decentering of the subject-centered paradigm. Each section identifies the limits of both autonomous and non-autonomous paradigms, illustrating these paradigms with visual case studies. As this article will argue, critical contributions have narrowed down their perspectives to an overtly rigid antagonism between “vaporization” or “centralization,” considering non-autonomy and autonomy of the subject as two mutually exclusive realms. In doing so, critical studies have often been neglectful to notice that vaporization and centralization are in a dialectical tension; both co-participate in the formation of the subject.
Theorizing the Subject, 2020
Ever since the Greek philosophers and fabulists pondered the question "What is man?," inquiries into the concept of the subject have troubled humanists, eventuating in fierce debates and weighty tomes. In the wake of the Descartes's cogito and Enlightenment thought, proposals for an ontology of the idealist subject's rationality, autonomy, and individualism generated tenacious questions regarding the condition of pre-consciousness, the operation of feelings and intuitions, the subject-object relation, and the origin of moral and ethical principles. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Marx, and theorists he and Engels influenced, pursued the materialist bases of the subject, through analyses of economic determinism, self-alienation, and false consciousness. Through another lineage, Freud and theorists of psychic structures pursued explanations of the incoherence of a split subject, its multipartite psychodynamics, and its relationship to signifying systems. By the latter 20th century, theorizations of becoming a gendered woman by Beauvoir, of disciplining power and ideological interpellation by Foucault and Althusser, and of structuralist dynamics of the symbolic realm expounded by Lacan, energized a succession of poststructuralist, postmodern, feminist, queer, and new materialist theorists to advance one critique after another of the inherited concept of the liberal subject as individualist, disembodied (Western) Man. In doing so, they elaborated conditions through which subjects are gendered and racialized and offered explanatory frameworks for understanding subjectivity as an effect of positionality within larger formations of patriarchy, slavery, conquest, colonialism, and global neoliberalism. By the early decades of the 21st Formatted: Centered Deleted: Nineteenth Deleted: Twentieth Deleted: Twentieth Deleted: racialized, and Deleted: Twenty-first century, posthumanist theorists dislodged the subject as the center of agentic action and distributed its processual unfolding across trans-species companionship, trans-corporeality, algorithmic networks, and conjunctions of forcefields. Persistently, theorists of the subject referred to an entangled set of related but distinct terms, such as the human, person, self, ego, interiority, and personal identity. And across diverse humanities disciplines, they struggled to define and refine constitutive features of subject formation, most prominently relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment.
Dissertation Defense. An Arts of Existence in the Post-Media Era: A Theory of Subjectivation
Toward the end of their lives, both Michel Foucault and Félix Guattari sought to develop a mode of the production of subjectivity that unbinds itself from hegemonic norms thereby launching what Foucault called an arts of existence and Guattari called existential self-fashioning. This dissertation attempts to update this form of subjectivity curation and creation and bring it into the present-day by taking into account the way that subjectivity has become mediatized and interlinked with various gadgets, beings, and other-than-human entities. The analysis relies on the procedure of metamodeling, derived from schizoanlaysis, in order to construct traversally a system of reference that would slice open the normal sense and gloss that is intrinsic to normative semiologies. This methodology undergirds and guides the theoretical findings of this project, which argue that the now networked nature of being human calls for a neoanimist cosmology that not only decenters the anthropos from its privileged place in the most epistemologically shared sense of the word world, but, even stronger, horizontalizes its privilege on power, obviating its move to raise itself above other beings that it finds in the environment it inhabits. By undercutting the propositional nature of human exceptionalism, it follows that the production of subjectivity can be pushed into channels that are not caught in subjection, policing and homogenization, but into modes that induce processes of subjectivation, the creative self-fashioning of one’s life. Figures like the cosmopolitan idiot, the clown from the carnivalesque, and the performance artist are submitted as prototypical models that help subjectivity mold its being away from subjection and towards a reclaiming of beinghood in the contemporary, mediatized milieu. The way that these embodied tropes and existential scripts are arranged and ordered exposes an encrypted system of reference that deploys the same logic as emblems found in the aesthetic of the baroque. Subjectivity is, paradoxically, a kind of artifice that is more real than the predicates that would make it fake.
THE MODERN " TURN TO THE SUBJECT " : AN ONGOING STUDY
Western culture is still in the Enlightenment period (though many subsequent and interven-ing eras have been spawned in response). While, indeed, Western culture may have been in a postmodern trance for a time in response to the Enlightenment era and the subsequent eras it spawned, postmodernism failed to convincingly “occupy a standpoint (‘the view from no-where’) from which it [might] survey all possible standpoints and find them all ‘relative,’ while at the same time [claiming] that there is no such standpoint.” That is to say that, in spite of all the reactions it spawned, modern Western culture continues to wrestle with the same ques-tions of authority and revelation, and continues its “buy-in” to Kant’s call for a “release from…self-incurred tutelage”—only the rejection has been extended to any authority out-side of one’s own self. Seen in its proper light then, postmodernism can be considered to be modernism inched ever closer to its nihilistic extremes. The modern “turn to the subject” has shaped and continues to shape Western culture more than any other philosophical concept. It lurks in the decades just prior to the Reformation and behind the Reformation itself. It breathes in Descartes cogito ergo sum and is codified and canonized in Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Its offspring includes the so-called “social” gos-pel, liberation theology, and today’s American political and social correctness. It is the culprit in Charles Taylor’s (via Weber’s) disenchantment and in Taylor’s “great dis-embedding.” It lies at the heart of postmodernism and beyond to what Alan Kirby refers to as pseudo-modernism. The modern turn to the subject, in my estimation, has had tragic results. A quick look at Western narcissism proves that. Against Taylor, I am not optimistic that the trend can be overturned, at least not short of fresh divine revelation. Unfortunately, modernism ruled out that possibility.
Subjects, Identities, Bodies, and Selves
Some contemporary ecological fictions offer complex representations of their characters that can play an important part in developing a potentially less destructive form of human self-perception than the one dominant in the cultures in which these works are written. To understand those representations, I consider the four categories in my title in terms of a literary ecology grounded in the materiality of existence, showing how each one may be necessary but is insufficient to define an individual person. This analysis, ranging from postmodern theorists through genetic development systems theory and a variety of literary texts, leads to the conclusion that we are better served by the multiplicitous concept of being subject-identifiedbodily-selves rather than any singularity. ¤ Over the last few years and in the course of teaching a variety of environmental novels, I have had certain issues attract my attention that raise theoretical questions about the treatment of humans as agents and subjects in general, and
Rethinking Subjectivity in the Postmodern Era and Literature
The subject, the 'I' that experiences and interacts with the world is a central category of modern thought and it is constantly under question during postmodern period. Subjectivity has become a matter of conflict between competing theories and practices around which questions of ethics, politics and representation have continually voiced since Renaissance period. The contemporary critical theory taken up for discussions by postmodernism is the death of the subject itself, the end of bourgeois monad or ego or individual. The postmodernism has rejected the concept of the individual or subject as whole that has prevailed in Western thought for the last few centuries. For postmodernists, the subject is a fundamental
The subject as trope and its consequences
Is there a way to affirm complicity as the basis of political agency, yet insist that political agency may do more than reiterate the conditions of subordination?" (Butler 1997, p. 29, 30) " [T]he paradoxical logic of masculine domination and feminine submissiveness, which can, without contradiction, be described as both spontaneous and extorted, cannot be understood until one takes account of the durable effects that the social order exerts on women (and men), that is to say, the dispositions spontaneously attuned to that order which it imposes on them." (Bourdieu 2001, p. 37, 38) [With Foucault, the theory of power, domination, and subjection definitively took a turn towards power as it functions "through" the "complicit" agency of the subject, as well as "through" the fiction of the "deep inner self". This puts the theory of subjectivation in a paradoxical position: it must simultaneously reject the subject and the self as a fiction or "trope" (a mere function of power) and affirm it as the penultimate site and reality of power (as a thwarted function of subjectivity). Both Judith Butler"s "ethical" investigation of the relation between subject and power, and Bourdieu"s sociology of the subjective, can be understood as responses to that paradox. I argue that Butler"s conception of the subject as "tropological" in fact argues against her own "ethical" approach, which tries to revive an ethical "I" that has become problematic, and in favor of Bourdieu"s distanced sociology, which is agnostic about that "I", even if that sociology flattens some dimensions of subjectivation.]