Mark,
There's Althusser in there, a little -- but i'd argue there's not as much a there seems. I think it's more that she goes *through* Althusser. Althusser is useful in Butler because he provides a starting point for thinking about language and discourse/cultural forms as a mode through which power may be mobilised. Althusser's also important as a starting-point for demolishing the voluntarist, "choosing" subject, and for replacing it with something more contingent and context/lived history dependant. Lacan provides further ways of thinking about language and culture as pre-existing the subject, subordinating the subject, and yet dependant on the subject for its continued existence.
However... i'd argue that both Althusser and Lacan are just starting points and sources of evocative language -- Butler's model of the *subject* that inhabits/is inhabited by this language/culture/power thing is very Foucauldian. "Performatives" might be read as being guided/dictated by an extremely complex cultural/discursive form of disciplinary technologies, and "agency" is the excess produced inadvertently by those technologies -- the unexpected recombinations and hybridisations of normalised discourses that may then serve functions counter to normalisation. The mechanism is the same, pretty much, it's just less straight-forwardly embodied.
About the Mills article: i've only had the chance to give it a *very* quick skim, but it looks like much of her argument rests on the fact that Butler is less concerned with instances of "the material operations of power" than Foucault? But doesn't this rather overstate how "material" Foucault was?
Sorry -- this may all be a bit of a jumble, as i'm in something of a rush...
amy.
On 24/03/2005, at 1:47 PM, Mark Kelly wrote:
There's Althusser in there, a little -- but i'd argue there's not as much a there seems. I think it's more that she goes *through* Althusser. Althusser is useful in Butler because he provides a starting point for thinking about language and discourse/cultural forms as a mode through which power may be mobilised. Althusser's also important as a starting-point for demolishing the voluntarist, "choosing" subject, and for replacing it with something more contingent and context/lived history dependant. Lacan provides further ways of thinking about language and culture as pre-existing the subject, subordinating the subject, and yet dependant on the subject for its continued existence.
However... i'd argue that both Althusser and Lacan are just starting points and sources of evocative language -- Butler's model of the *subject* that inhabits/is inhabited by this language/culture/power thing is very Foucauldian. "Performatives" might be read as being guided/dictated by an extremely complex cultural/discursive form of disciplinary technologies, and "agency" is the excess produced inadvertently by those technologies -- the unexpected recombinations and hybridisations of normalised discourses that may then serve functions counter to normalisation. The mechanism is the same, pretty much, it's just less straight-forwardly embodied.
About the Mills article: i've only had the chance to give it a *very* quick skim, but it looks like much of her argument rests on the fact that Butler is less concerned with instances of "the material operations of power" than Foucault? But doesn't this rather overstate how "material" Foucault was?
Sorry -- this may all be a bit of a jumble, as i'm in something of a rush...
amy.
On 24/03/2005, at 1:47 PM, Mark Kelly wrote:
Hi Amy
as I said in my subsequent post, I think that Butler basically reads
the subject as per Althusser's interpellation and that this is not
terribly Foucauldian. I could go on, but I think the best thing is to
refer again to Catherine Mills's article which deals with this issue
really well.
I am intrigued by this idea that Butler's 'agency' is Foucault's
'resistance', more or less - I'll have to go away and reconsider
Butler in light of this.
cheers
Mark