In This Paper I Would Like to Reflect Upon the Connection Between the Public and Critical

Judith Butler and corporeal vulnerability :

A new perspective on the public dimension of education

Joris Vlieghe

Centrum voor wijsgerige pedagogiek

K.U. Leuven

In this paper I would like to reflect upon the connection between the public and critical dimension of education on the one hand and our condition as corporeal and vulnerable beings on the other hand. In particular I will explore this issue within the framework that Judith Butler offers in her most recent writings[1]. This is of great importance to this year’s conference theme as it might help to elucidate why social problems can be interpreted (and therefore institutionalized) as social problems. This question presupposes that there is some dimension within education that is social, relational and public. So the problem remains how to conceptualise this public dimension. Therefore it seems interesting to deal in the following with Judith Butler’s statement that “the body has its invariably public dimension” (PL 26). How are we to understand the specific meaning of this body and why is it precisely our bodily incarnation that obligates us to take responsibility for others and for the community we belong to?

Before turning to Butler’s position I will first discuss shortly why it’s nowadays not evident to speak about the public or critical possibilities of education. This will help to understand the importance and originality of Butler’s contribution in thinking about critical pedagogy. She argues that the experience of not being able to ground ourselves as autonomous, self-transparent and rational beings is an experience that grants the possibility to assume critical responsibility. This experience is inextricable bound to the corporeal condition of susceptibility, so she argues. Consequently critique towards the existing (pedagogical, societal, political) order should have to do more with an attitude that refers to an experience of radical finitude than with the typical modern (Kantian, Habermasian) definition and positioning of the self as autonomous transcendental subjectivity.

I think I should mention here that my interest shall mainly go to Butler’s most recent writings, especially Giving an Account of Oneself and Precarious Life. This is rather exceptional. When one considers the bulk of articles in the field of educational theory and philosophy which are inspired by Butler, one will find only scarcely references to these texts.

Butler has of course become one of the major referents when dealing with problems of social emancipation and more specifically with gender-related issues and the possibility of minorities to resist/revolt against institutionalized practices and discourse. So it is generally accepted to refer to her important studies of the 90’s, such as Gender Trouble, Bodies that Matter and Excitable Speech[2]. Time and again one invokes Butler’s interpretation of the key notions “performativity” (Austin) and ”iterability” (Derrida). Butler is mainly appreciated for her argument that subjectivity is dependent upon linguistic categories which are not of our own making: they define who we are and fix our identities, because it concerns expressions with performative qualities. We really are nothing else than the social categories we verify in our daily life. Butler’s point at issue is a double one: (1) we have to perform what we are in a culturally prescribed way in order to exist socially, but (2) in a sense it is pointless to speak here about a “we”, because there exists no subjectivity prior to the formative power of the pre-existing discourse. The dependency upon a given order of meaning constitutes singular subjectivities in the first place. So Butler shows that it is pointless to invoke an immaculate core of subjectivity that would exist independent of the given identities which are mandatory under a specific social and political regime. Consequentially political resistance that pretends to act on behalf of such repressed essence of mankind is doomed from the start, as it will assume a fiction that only serves the existing order of things. Fixing man’s essence, even when trying to find a ground for resistance, is always an act of reinstalling an arbitrary order of significations that exercises power and forms our very subjectivity.

Nevertheless Butler also argues that societal and political order only exists by repeating consolidated meanings. Performativity is dependent upon ritual rehearsal, which in its endlessness is undeterminable. So precisely here, in this process of “citation”, in re-enacting given identities, a possibility is disclosed to contestate the existing regime. In the current discourse’s dependency on individuals who still have to perform some prescribed identity lies at the same time the very possibility of refusal. This line of thought has unmistakingly been fruitful within the field of pedagogy and particularly in thinking a “no nonsense approach” towards criticality, resistance and genuine social change.

Now, my approach departs in a double way from this current appreciation of Judith Butler: firstly I will concentrate on her more recent writings, which I think have as yet not met the attention they deserve. In these texts one can find a conception of corporeality which exceeds the Austinian and Derridian framework that is dominant in Butler’s writings of the 90’s. Secondly I will try to broaden the critical perspective she offers in the direction of a more general consideration with the possibility of critique and resistance, particularly in reference to corporeal vulnerability.

But let me first offer a sketch of the issue I think this latest work of Butler might help to elucidate.

Why is the critical dimension of education a problem today?

For a long time pedagogy has been formulating as its central aim the education of (young) people to become critical and enlightened citizens. This classic ideal of Bildung (edification, cultivation) came down to the idea that the main objective of education is the critical inquiry of the existing social order[3]. Students were expected to become initiated in a cultural heritage and to acquire the competencies needed to become bearers of social and political progress. So one looked at the gebildeter Mensch as an autonomous citizen, who develops her internal potentialities as far as possible so that she is willing to take the responsibility for the optimal functioning of society, for the continual strive for a better, more equal and harmonious community[4]. This continuous striving for an ideal society ascribed a prominent critical role to the gebildeter Mensch: she, more than anyone else, was expected to assume a critical position[5]. Crucial to this ambition is the very possibility of (and willingness to) changing oneself.

This point of view is today no longer tenable. To understand what has happened, we can find support in Adorno’s thesis that in the modern world Bildung has become Halbbildung. Christiane Thompson comments on this idea as follows[6]: “the experience of Bildung or learning does not predominantly change the students and their points of view anymore. Rather, the prospective experiences are intended to enhance the students’ spectrum of assets. […] Bildung has been transformed into a measure of the individual’s capacity for adaptation. […] What is learned is ‘no longer significant for one’s own life but forms a knowledge that is helpful for our survival.”[7] We are no longer changed by the educational process. The only thing that happens to us is that our position gets confirmed and strengthened. We are never out of position, so to speak. This analysis is of course I line with many studies within the framework of governmentality-studies, which time and again show how under the current regime of quality and efficiency educational subjects come to identify themselves as “entrepreneurs of their own lives”, as investors who are obsessed by a will to strive for a strengthening of their own position.

This has important consequences for the critical dimension of education. There exists no longer a possibility to take a distance to present society and its demands[8]. Of course, one could respond that the acquirement of “critical competencies” was never before so important as today. More and more the cornerstone of a good educational project appears to be: giving to pupils and students capabilities that have to do with self-reflection and critical inquiry, instead of filling their heads with contents and erudition[9]. Yet these so called “critical attitudes” imply in no way distancing oneself from existing societal order. By developing these capabilities pupils and students only see themselves once more in terms of the will to strive for a more excellent position in our current information society. There exists a persistent will in all of us to be critical which makes us to define ourselves constantly as investors of our own lives. While exercising “critique” we therefore fail to distance ourselves from the current regime. So it is difficult to see how we could still be critical at all or what it could mean for education to have a “public” voice.

The question is therefore where to look for a critical alternative that has no reference to the reinforcing of our own position as so called critical subjects. Perhaps we should try to assume a critical attitude, as Foucault would suggest, rather than a position. This kind of attitude is granted by what he refers to as “limit-experience”, i.e. an experience in the most passive sense of this word[10]: being vulnerable, being prepared to be exposed to something that obliges us to change our lives. By invoking the register of experience Foucault tried to think about a form of criticality which eludes the pitfall of contributing to the existing regime. Only an experimental alternative counts as a real alternative. So the experience of one’s own limits, the vivid confrontation with the existing discourse one lives with but which is usually not put into question, grants the experiencing of distance towards the existing societal and political order. Therefore it all comes down to an existential move, rather than to the taking of a firm position.

Judith Butler on (corporeal) vulnerability

It’s precisely here that we can fall back on the thinking of Judith Butler, who (at least partly) claims to be loyal to this Foucaultian stance. What links Butler’s most recent writings to the aforementioned discussion is her critique to a prevailing line of thought in western philosophy concerning the possibility to assume critical responsibility towards one’s own life, the life of others and the life of community.

She states that traditionally criticality rests upon the assumption” to give a full account of oneself”. This is because traditionally critical distance is defined in terms of the autonomy of a critical and rational subject that seeks for an ultimate justification for her actions. Trying to legitimate our moral obligations towards others and the community, we tend to found these in a kind of positive essence of what it means being human or belonging to a community. One can think here of the Kantian or Habermasian definition of transcendental (inter)subjectivity that serves as the starting point to legitimize a critical position towards the existing social, political or educational order. Butler on the contrary argues that it is precisely the negative experience of our own radical lacking of such a ground that constitutes moral and communal bindings. Moral agency is granted by the experience that we never reach the ground of our own origins. Being dependent upon conditions that we cannot fully control constitutes us as moral and accountable beings. The fundamental “opacity” that results from our constitution as singular creatures turns us into responsible moral subjects[11]. “I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others.” (PL 46).

Consequently, without any reference to an anthropological essence or to a transcendental ground, it becomes possible to speak in an alternative way about moral obligations[12]. Through the limit-experience of our own finitude we are confronted with a world and with others that charge us with responsibility. Thus the awareness of non-transparency does not privatize us: the strangeness within us doesn’t make us prisoners of ourselves, but confronts us with a public dimension, namely that we cannot escape our relations with the other[13]. It should be noted that this is not a plea for a relational ontology (our essence = our relations to the others), but on the contrary the defence of a philosophy of radical finitude. Our “essence”, if it is still possible to use this terminology, should better be described as a void. Not in the Sartrian sense of the nothingness of absolute freedom, but as the exposure to a transcendence that forces us to relate to the other in a non gratuitous way[14].

In her essay Violence, Mourning and Politics Butler substantiates her argument by evoking some convincing examples. I will deal with two of these here[15]. The first case is the experience of losing someone whom one was attached to. This confronts us with the brute fact that we are but who we are, thanks to our dependency upon a particular other. What singularises us has to do with the uncontrollability of our social relations. The significance of mourning, a central theme in this essay, is that we become aware of something that escapes our own meaning-giving control. “[O]ne mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed possibly forever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance.” (PL 21). Such an experience could have important pedagogical consequences: we might learn to forsake what Adorno calls moral narcissism (GAO: 103). This narcissistic attitude presupposes that moral obligations should be founded in the loyalty to our own essence as rational and autonomous beings, as self-transparent and sovereign law-givers of ourselves, as Kantian or Habermasian transcendental subjects, as “entrepreneurs” who reposition ourselves, when acting ethically. Butler on the contrary thinks that the experience of loss and mourning reveals the possibility of an alternative moral responsibility and sense of community: we may find ourselves obliged to others because of the impossibility to give a full account of who we are, because of the impossibility to be our own ground. The striking point here is that Butler links this to the body: “grief contains within it the possibility of apprehending the fundamental sociality of embodied life, the ways in which we are from the start, and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own” (UG 22, italics supplied). Before analysing the reasons to link opacity, community and corporeality, I will first deal with the second example she attends to.