Lois McNay

Self as Enterprise Dilemmas of Control and Resistance in Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics

This article considers Foucault’s analysis of ordoliberal and neoliberal governmental reason and its reorganization of social relations around a notion of enterprise. I focus on the particular idea that the generalization of the enterprise form to social relations was conceptualized in such exhaustive terms that it encompassed subjectivity itself. Self as enterprise highlights, inter alia, dynamics of control in neoliberal regimes which operate through the organized proliferation of individual difference in an economized matrix. It also throws into question conceptions of individual autonomy that underpin much political thought and upon which ideas about political resistance are based. Self as enterprise also problematizes the viability of Foucault’s later work on ethics of the self as a practice of resistance. I go on to argue that Foucault’s discussion of an unresolved clash in civil society between monarchical and governmental power, between law and norm, offers an elliptical but more promising account of opposition to normalizing bio-power.

Subject, Psyche and Agency The Work of Judith Butler

This article considers two themes in Butlers work: the dialectic of subject formation - that the autonomous subject is instituted through constraint - and the relation between the psyche and the social. With regard to the former, the introduction of a notion of historicity into a conception of the symbolic yields a concept of agency. Nonetheless, this concept of agency still lacks social specificity. By reconfiguring the psyche as an effect of the interiorization of social norms, Butler introduces the destabilizing force of the category of the unconscious into constructivist accounts of identity. This sociocentric reworking of the psyche-social relations provides a nuanced account of gender identity, but it results in a negative model of action as the displacement of constraining social norms. It is also important for a conception of agency to include an account of the creative dimensions of action where actors actively appropriate conflicting socio-cultural values to institute new collective forms of identity.

Agency, Anticipation and Indeterminacy in Feminist Theory

Much contemporary work on agency offers only a partial account because it remains within an essentially negative understanding of subject formation. This essay examines the work of Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell and argues that the negative paradigm needs to be supplemented by a more generative theoretical framework, if feminists are to develop a fuller account of agency. In the negative paradigm, the subject is understood in passive terms as an effect of discursive structures. This tends to overlook ideas of self-interpretation that introduce more active dimensions into understandings of subject formation and agency. Furthermore, an unqualified notion of indeterminacy does not unpick the imbrication of relations of time and power that overdetermine agency. Ultimately, structural accounts of subject formation need to be integrated more closely with hermeneutic perspectives of the self in order to understand better the complexities of agency in a post-traditional society.

Having it Both Ways The Incompatibility of Narrative Identity and Communicative Ethics in Feminist Thought

As an alternative to post-structural accounts of ‘performative’ agency (e.g. Judith Butler), Habermasian feminists (Seyla Benhabib and Maria Pia Lara) propose the idea of the narrative self. The concept of narrative is seen as a way of bridging the gap between the formalism of Habermas’s idea of communicative ethics and the dispersion that arises from the post-structural critique of the subject. The idea of the narrative self undoubtedly yields an active and creative account of agency. However, I argue that the attempt to reconcile a narrative concept of the self within a theory of communicative ethics results in a limited understanding of identity and agency in the context of the systemic reproduction of gender inequalities.

The Trouble with Recognition: Subjectivity, Suffering, and Agency*

This article focuses upon the disagreement between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth about how to characterize the relation between social suffering and recognition struggles. For Honneth, social and political conflicts have their source in the “moral” wounds that arise from the myriad ways in which the basic human need for recognition is disregarded in unequal societies. Fraser criticizes Honneth for the uncritical subjectivism of his account of social suffering that reduces social oppression to psychic harm. Fraser therefore redefines misrecognition not as a psychological injury but as “status subordination” understood as institutionalized patterns of discrimination and value inequality. My central argument is that while Frasers critique of Honneths subjectivist construal of recognition is largely justified, she falls into a counterveiling objectivism that prevents her from developing some of the central insights of her own paradigm. Her “non-identarian” rendering of recognition leads her to abandon an experiential or interpretative perspective that is associated with the idea of identity and, as a result, she cannot explain certain crucial aspects of political agency. Pierre Bourdieus notion of habitus is used to indicate a way beyond the naturalization of the cluster of emotions associated with social suffering that seems to be the inevitable consequence of Honneths “ontology” of recognition (McNay 2007). At the same time, the experiential emphasis of habitus mitigates the objectivism of Frasers dualist paradigm showing how some of its central insights can be taken further through a materialist redefinition of identity and agency.

Gender and narrative identity

Abstract This article focuses on the idea of the coherence of the self and the implications this has for an understanding of gender identity. It is in thinking through ways in which coherent notions of self‐hood are maintained that a substantive account of agency emerges. A re‐formulated account of agency is central to understanding how men and women negotiate the processes of gender restructuring that have been unleashed by the de‐traditionalising tendencies of late capitalist societies. Paul Ricoeurs conception of the narrative structure of the self goes some way towards suggesting a more active or creative substrate to agency than the post‐structuralist exclusionary paradigm of subjectification. The temporalised understanding of the self that the idea of narrative captures also goes some way to overcoming certain oppositions around which thought on identity tends to revolve, notably the dualism between essential versus constructed concepts of identity and that of authentic experience versus ideologica...

Michel de Certeau and the ambivalent everyday

Abstract This paper explores the potential convergence between the feminist concern with a revaluation of womens experiences through the category of the everyday and the work of Michel de Certeau on the practices of everyday life. The status of de Certeaus concept of the everyday is ambiguous. On the one hand, a ‘concrete’ conception of the everyday denotes mundane practices of the ‘ordinary’ subjects and the ways in which these practices resist incorporation into dominant norms. On the other hand, a ‘utopian’ conception of the everyday encapsulates a more general notion of the indeterminate nature of social life. A point of tension arises from the differing views of resistance and change that each concept yields. The concrete conception may result in a fetishisation of the contestatory nature of the everyday practices which rests on a simplified binary of domination and resistance. The Utopian conception points to a more complex notion of change as dislocation arising from the inherent instability of s...

Out of the orrery? Situating language

An influential strand in the study of ideology has been the psychoanalytic approach represented in the work of Slavoj Zizek. I argue, however, that his work is limited by a fundamentally ahistorical mode of analysis arising from his reliance on Lacans idea of the symbolic formation of subjectivity. In particular, Zizeks deployment of Lacans idea of language as an abstract system of signification results in an inadequate account of agency and change in social relations. I outline an alternative notion of language as a situated medium. Language is understood as situated in a two-fold sense; it is a mode of social interaction and, therefore, a type of agency, and it is system of symbolic power that interacts, in a variable fashion, with other distinct systems of power. I illustrate my points with reference to contemporary gender relations.

Suffering, Silence and Social Weightlessness: Honneth and Bourdieu on Embodiment and Power

On the face of it, Axel Honneth’s work on recognition and suffering appears to perpetuate a politics of victimhood that many post-identity thinkers have justifiably found troubling. I argue here, however, that criticisms of his work as a form of ‘suffer mongering’ are misplaced in so far as they fail to grasp the theoretical significance of the idea of ‘social suffering’ that Honneth borrows from the work of Bourdieu. The idea of social suffering is not intended as a subjectivist elevation of injury as an incontestable sign of injustice. Rather, it is a relational category that draws attention to the co-implication of body and power and, in particular, to the way in which certain types of oppression are rendered politically invisible by being internalised as corporeal dispositions. One of the effects of embodied domination, which I focus on here, is silence; that is, the ways in which individuals often find it difficult to put into words experiences of deprivation that are lived as feelings of shame, boredom, hopelessness and so on. More generally, the idea of social suffering draws attention to the issue of symbolic violence or the way in which the accommodation of oppression into embodied being undermines the capacity for agency in so far as individuals may feel unwilling or unable to act as agents of their own interests.

The politics of exemplarity: Ferrara on the disclosure of new political worlds

This paper focuses on the idea of exemplarity outlined by the Italian critical theorist Alessandro Ferrara that forms part of his general case for the centrality of disclosure to emancipatory political reasoning. Ferrara argues that “at its best” political thought should have the capacity to animate the democratic imagination by disclosing new political worlds and hence new possibilities for thought and action. I argue that Ferrara’s notion of exemplarity provides important conceptual resources for a re-grounding of critical theory in the type of experientially based disclosing critique that has, post Habermas, been marginalized. Ferrara’s work is significant in two respects. First, exemplary universalism provides a much-needed alternative to the assimilative paradigms of normative reasoning that dominate contemporary political theory. Exemplary normativity suggests a mode of reasoning from concrete particularity that is more inclusive than principle-based approaches of voices which, by virtue of their marginal or disempowered status, are often absent from democratic deliberation. Second, Ferrara shows us how, contra Habermas, far from being an unstable process of meaning creation, exemplary disclosure has a systematic internal rationale that renders it open to inter-subjective validation. I contend, however, that the critical promise of the idea of exemplarity is unfulfilled because of its grounding in the speculative construct of sensus communis defined as a set of trans-cultural intuitions about human flourishing. This socially deracinated abstraction blocks an adequate understanding of the asymmetrical relations of power around which social difference is always constructed. Ultimately, Ferrara is unable to demonstrate how exemplarity does in fact disclose new political worlds and new possibilities for thought so much as confirm established liberal norms. Drawing on critical race theory, I propose a re-politicized understanding of exemplarity that locates its disclosing force in the actual dynamics of struggles against oppression rather than in a socially weightless abstraction.