So Butler here is striving to pull together a, a politics and a way of
thinking that is not limited by either a telos where we're all striving for one
specific goal, or by a foundation. but on, on, that's on the one hand.
On the other hand, she doesn't want a politics and a way of thinking that is
just completely open to anything. There has to be some definition, has to
be some definition of the political goals.
And here she talks about opening possibilities for living and loving, for
desiring. Sometimes she talks about it in, in terms
of reducing vulnerability, reducing vulnerability.
all of those things truth be told, could be seen as part of the enlightenment
project. we, we, we in the enlightenment have
talked about making the world more a home for human beings after all.
you could say, well, making the world more a home for human beings is to give
people the ability to breathe, to desire, to love, but Butler doesn't really want
to be just part of The Enlightenment Project, because she realizes that The
Enlightenment Project has also resulted in the, in the marginalization of, of, of
some, the oppression of some and the, degradation, of th-, of the of, of the
planet, of the the ecosystem. So she wants a politics that will create
these possibilities without falling into the dynamic of exclusion and
marginalization and domination, that has characterized the enlightenment.
She she is trying to do this balance. Between, the, notion of a subject who can
make the world a home and everybody's happy.
You know, radical home makeover. The planet is great for everybody.
She doesn't believe that's possible, because every time we try to make
something over, we have to exclude someone else.
She has written along with Fluco and others.
But on the other hand, she doesn't want to say that there is the only alternative
to the enlightenment is an anti enlightenment of politics.
that has no room for reasonable attention to either reducing vulnerability or
increasing the possibilities for desire and freedom.
She talks about this in the text that we've assigned on, on doing gender as the
limits of universalizability. This is from page eight.
What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives, she writes.
What is most liveable only for some and similarly, to refrain from proscribing
for all lives that is unlivable for some. The difference in position and desire set
the limits to universalizability as an ethical reflex.
And we'll come back to that. The critique of gender norms must be
guided by the question of what maximizes the posibilities for a livable life.
The critique of gender norms must be guided by the question of what maximizes
the possibilities for a livable life. now, notice that sentence.
The differences in position and desire set the limits to universalizability as
an ethical reflex. In my class I would turn now to the
students and say, okay, what is she evoking here?
Universalizability as an ethical reflex what is that hearken back to?
And the answer you are all probably thinking out there watching the video is
Kant right? The categorical imperative.
Act as if the maxim of your actions was in principal universalizable.
That is that the principle of your action could be applicable to all people.
That's the Kantian, Ethical Test called the, one version of the categorical
imperative. What Butler is saying is that the
differences in who we are and what we desire set the limits of
universalizability, you can't universalize everything without
homogenizing the differences among people, and that very homogenization of
the differences among people is anti-ethical, it is unethical, it is
oppressive. And so, she wants to have limits to
universalizability without giving up the project.
of a search for a reasonable basis, for, enhanced possibilities, for leaving
together. So she turns to, what I've called, the
powers and norms and how those powers and norms are related to, what it means for
us to be human. Page 13.
If there are norms of recognition by which the human is constituted, and these
norms encode operations of power, then it follows that the contest over the future
of the human will be a contest over the power that works in and through such
norms. She's interested in other words in how
the, the values that we use to legislate proper behavior actually are infused with
operations of power to make people become certain kinds of human beings.
And that we have to be able to pay attention to what look, that to what
looks like an ethical norm is really an operation of power.
What looks like a righteous thing to do, is really an operation of the dominant
class. what looks like a a liberatory act is
really a operation that increases the power of those who rule over others and
what Butler wants is not an absence of norms.
She doesn't I don't think we she believes that we could exist with an absence of
norms but she wants us to be able to pay attention to how norms when they operate
create patterns of exclusion and oppression that violate other norms that
we have. And if we pay it, learn to pay attention
to those things. We won't strive, then, for perfect
universalizability. We will strive in each instance to
increase the likelihood that our actions will preserve a possibility for people to
live with the desires, with the hopes, with the with the possibilities that they
say they want to have. In other words, to limit
universalizability by paying attention to difference, to paying a different
attention to the multitude of possibilities that different kinds of
people bring to their lives. This goes back in a way to the Butler's
talk about improvisation. You see this on, on page 15 in the text
that we have for this week. we, we, we don't always know what it
means to inhabit a certain subject position.
That is we don't always know what it means to, to behave like a man.
or to behave like a strong person. Or to behave like a heterosexual or
behave like a gay person. We don't know exactly what those terms
mean. But we are expected by our society today
to somehow conform to patterns of identity.
That have been set down for us. How can we acknowledge these patterns of
identity while still leaving room for improvisation?
>> We are, we're being informed through institutions.
We're being called names. We're being we're having norms imposed on
us. So who, who are we such that we.
We receive or we're, we're vulnerable to being called certain names.
>> Right. >> Or we're vulnerable to certain kinds
of social expectations or norms or whatever.
So you know, I felt like I actually needed to understand.
Mm, the domain of impressionability >> Mm-hm Or receptivity.
>> Right. >> To, to understand how it is we might
be at once socially constructed but also self-constituting.
>> Mm-hm So I had to link those two things Right Because they, you know,
there were some people who said, oh, Butler, it's all social construction or,
oh, Butler, it's all volunteerism. >> Right, right.
>> I thought, oh, I better I better put these things together.
>> This is the improvisation being a way of acting freely when you're when
you're not just going according to a script.
This is what Butler wants right. You know when you feel your life is just
moving according to a script there's a sense of constraint and control that can
be extraordinarily oppressive. And when you feel that you are operating
in relation to a script, where there's a margin for improvisation, for invention,
for self invention, for self fashioning others have called it, that gives you
sense of, of, freedom, and pleasure. On page fifteen she writes, there is
always a dimension of ourselves and our, relation to others that we cannot know
and this not knowing, this not knowing persists with us as a condition of
existence. And indeed, of survivability.
It's important. Butler doesn't want us to think that it's
all about absolute knowledge, that we have to get we have to grasp everything,
philosophically or scientifically. No.
this condition of not knowing, Freud called it the unconscious, is actually a
part of our survivability. We are, she goes on to say, we are to an
extent driven by what we do not know, and cannot know, and this drive, Freud called
it instinct or trieb, is precisely what is neither exclusively biological or
cultural. It's the sigh of their dense convergence.
In other words, we are impelled, we are pushed, we are driven to do things, we're
not sure exactly why. But what we're driving to do isn't just a
product of our of our biology, of our anatomy, it's a product of the dense
conversions of the biological and the culture.
and sexuality, she says on page 15, emerges precisely as an improvisational
possibility within this field of constraints.
I think it's very interesting. An improvisational possibility within a
field of constraints. That's important for Butler because she
acknowledges the constraints. And actually the constraints are
productive and she acknowledges possibility and that sexuality is a
possibility, not just a biology. This is so important because, we, we
don't want us to think that improvisation is just making stuff up without any
background. No.
The great improvisations, say in jazz, are often on the basis of what we call
standards, right? We call a, a great jazz song as standard.
And so when we improvise, when we improvise, what we are doing is that,
acknowledging the background. Acknowledging the standard, but using the
standard as a, as a, springboard for possibility.
And so when Brad Meldower I don't know, take your favorite.
Jazz pianist McCoy Tyner or whoever it is.
Tommy Flanagan when when they, they start playing a great standard.
But then that standard gives rise to the possibility of invention, and then coming
back to the standard and then going out again.
That that possibility is a kind of freedom and pleasure.
That butler wants to see more of in society.