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.

Postmodern Identities II

The Modern and the Postmodern (Part 2)

Meet the Instructors