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1 Response Author(s): Judith Butler Source: British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 27, No. 4, Troubling Identities: Reflections on Judith Butler's Philosophy for the Sociology of Education (Sep., 2006), pp Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: Accessed: 24/04/ :29 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to British Journal of Sociology of Education.

2 British Journal of Sociology of Education Vol. 27, No. 4, September 2006, pp e Routledge Taylor& Francis Group Response First, I would like to thank these contributors for their close and provocative engagement with my writing. It is for me a gift and perpetual surprise to find that my work is taken up in ways that I myself could not have done and, indeed, could not have anticipated. These essays, taken together, constitute an important development in the theory of subject constitution, focusing on the problem of gender as it is formed and re-formed in the spatial and temporal context of school and schooling. Specifically, what is at stake are the activities through which gender is instituted and, then, stands a chance of being de-instituted or instituted differently. The ethnographic dimension of these studies do not merely focus on those performative dimensions of becoming schooled, but ethnographic writing performatively constitutes the scene itself, demarcating what will count as subject-formation, what its contours will be, what its temporality will become. I am interested in the several conversations with children and young adults recorded in these pages, those that take place between children as well as between children and adults. It seems important in regard to these conversations to pay attention to two different dimensions of this speech: the one has to do with what is being said, with what is expressed or communicated about the formative period of gender and sexual relationality; the other has to do with what is being shown or signaled through what is being said. Perhaps in this regard it is possible to distinguish between saying as communicating and saying as displaying. In this latter sense, speech also has to be understood as a mode of address and, hence, as a way of constituting a relationship with another. These speech acts are at once ways of appealing to another, entering into social discourse and presenting what one has to say. But they are also ways of appearing to another, and so language has to be understood in these instances as ways of taking on a social shape or form subject to an aural and visual interpretation. Of course, for children and young adults in primary and secondary schools, the issue of 'taking form' as a subject is overdetermined from the start. The body not only changes, but changes in ways that others see, and both desire and dread emerge in the course of that transformation that is, after all, a social one. It may be, then, that this is precisely an occasion in which it will not do to speak of 'subject formation' with ease. If we pause for a moment in the face of such an emergent 'form'-the child's body, the adolescent's body-we can see that this form is at once a morphology. As such, it is the site where a biological development assumes specific social and ISSN (print)/issn (online)/06/ c 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: /

3 530 J. Butler interlocutary dimensions, and where the emergent body appears as signifying against or with the verbal utterance that is offered. What speaks, after all, is the body-and there is no speaking without the body. But the way the body signifies may not be the same as the 'meaning' proffered by any given verbal utterance. Is there then a way of reading what the body says as the subject speaks? Do we need to know gesture, gait, look and tone of voice if we are to understand the social and embodied context for the words that are said and transcribed within enthographic practice? How would such an approach change our what of understanding what is said about 'bullying', for instance; to see that 'bullying' is at once a kind of speech and a threatening comportment of the body? Is there always in 'bullying' a potential for physical contact that perhaps belies the desire for contact as well as a recoil, if not a repudiation, of contact? Where is the prospect of touch in the verbal utterance of the bully and in the response, whether spoken or no? Can we read bullying as a way of both foreclosing upon touch and of making it happen? Similarly, how would we understand the talk about relationships; in particular, who has 'dumped' whom, how many times and why? If a boy says that he is 'always dumped' then is he also constituting himself through that utterance? And if the utterance itself is repeated, in what way is he forming a subject position through that reiteration? Is he presenting himself as rejected as inexplicably and repeatedly injured and abandoned? And is that showing a bid for solidarity or alliance, an appeal for sympathy, an effort at restitution, a publicized complaint, a bid for justice? So there is the question of whether self-display can produce another meaning than the one explicitly communicated as the 'content' of the verbal utterance: it can augment the verbal utterance, undercut it, or produce another meaning alongside it, to name a few. And sometimes what is signified bodily can flatly contradict the manifest content of the verbal utterance, when a girl who prides herself on dumping a boy manifests anxiety in her gesture and hyperbolic expression about being dumped herself. Speaking is, after all, a way of being on display and it takes place within a context in which social possibilities are being interrogated, negotiated and avoided: after all, these possible forms for one's emergent self are potentially exciting, frightening, even abjecting. When one young man refers to the films of gay relationships he was shown in school, he remarks that he was coerced into watching them: 'we had to sit there and watch it.' He would clearly have his interlocutors know that watching was neither his pleasure nor his choice. His remarks are thus performed in front of, and for, his peers, and they are meant to establish that 'who' he is is someone who would never willingly watch that representation of gay male life. In the end, the attribution of coercion is a way of positioning himself as a subject of desire (although we know nothing about that desire itself). All we are given to know about this desire is what it could not and would not want; namely, to see two or more men who apparently want each other. As a result, that negation of any visual interest in gay couples becomes the signature of this social positioning, of the form he crafts for himself within a vexed social field. Interesting in this respect is the charge leveled against the progressive classroom that it is 'coercive', and what that seems to mean is that the classroom, by showing the

4 Response 531 film, threatens the social positioning of those who are asked to watch it. That the boy says 'no' to the film means that he refuses both what he perceives as pedagogical coercion and gay life. If 'we had to sit an watch it', then it would seem that to be uncorked, being free, would imply being able to stand and leave and not to see what there is to see. But what would drive the standing and leaving as well as the selfblinding? Is that freedom or fear? And is the 'right' to act on one's own fear what is meant by uncorked movement in this situation? The pedagogical possibilities of rife: what do we call coercion and why; and what do we understand by freedom, and why? The point, then, is not simply to show the film, but to engage the pedagogical questions of coercion and freedom that it produces as well as some of questions raised by the content itself. Of course, this problem comes up differently in the case of the television program that portrays lesbian mothers or gay families watched by children as young as four years old. Does the portrayal constitute an 'imposition' on that population of children or their primary caretakers? At what point, and under what conditions, does the very admissibility of an image into the public media constitution a coercive or damaging action? Is it political or politically correct to include the portrayal? And if the portrayal were omitted, would there then be no politics to the program? If this is a program that regularly portrays family or kinship relations of various kinds, but does not include any portrayal of gay family life, then do we read this 'omission' as political? If the omission is necessary to keep the program apolitical, and if the entry of the portrayal would make the program political, then the very decision to omit the portrayal is a political action meant to establish the appearance of a non-political program. In other words, there is no way to avoid the politics at issue here. Both visibility and invisibility are political precisely because the pervasive question regarding gay families is whether they can be admitted into the realm of appearance, of what is socially intelligible, if not normative? Thus, the representation of gay families cannot exist without that question being posed, either explicitly or implicitly. Here again, as with our earlier discussion of verbal utterances transcribed as part of ethnographic writing, the questions of what can be seen is linked with the question of what can be regarded as a possible and viable social organization of life. Such a representation may not be 'normative' to be thinkable or seeable. The visual representation is cast as 'coercive' or 'politically correct' only because the cultural norm of the family that lays claim to being a political-forecloses upon the representation (mandates that the gay family not be see-able or think-able). Thus, it is represent ability itself that is at stake, and what is being 'forced' is precisely the exposure of how the norm operates through a necessary omission. The norm frames a sense of 'ordinariness' about matters of sexuality and kinship that is disrupted by the visual entry of moments from lesbian and gay family life. If we consider that those four year olds may well come from families with more than one mother (whether lesbian or blended families of various sorts, or kinship organizations in which the maternal function is distributed among several persons), then it is all the more curious that the representations of such kinship forms could be construed to cause damage, trauma or premature politicization. Such a view

532 J. Butler discounts the possibility that the four year old already has such family structures in her life, and that the representations might reflect some dimensions of her own lived experience.

5 532 J. Butler discounts the possibility that the four year old already has such family structures in her life, and that the representations might reflect some dimensions of her own lived experience. For the child to live and see such structures, but also to live and see that such structures are not see-able within the public domain, is for the child to see that what she sees and lives is not legitimately see-able and live-able. In other words, what becomes communicated by the pervasive omission is the operation of regulatory power that circumscribes the domain of appearance precisely by requiring that certain socially existing forms of kinship do not appear as such. The mandate for such forms of life not to appear is thus an operation of power and, hence, a political operation, one that works by claiming that it is a political, uncontroversial, undamaging and non-normative. The other dimension of subject-constitution raised by these thoughtful essays pertains to the link between mastering skills and becoming subjugated. This paradoxical formulation, derived from Althusser, suggests that 'socialization' has to be thought in light of both subject formation and the subjugation to power. The student achieves precisely through mastering skills and this mundane practical appropriation of norms and rules culminates in 'excellent work' and fine marks that can be recognized publicly as such. The acts of skill acquisition are thus modes of subject formation, and this formation takes place within a set of norms that confer or withdraw recognition. Put more precisely, these norms operate through a demoralization of experience: the subject is constituted through the anticipation or fear of having recognition conferred or denied. The conferral of recognition, however, does not just happen once, if it happens at all, so a certain anxiety is built into the norm, since the student must repeat the good grade, and that repetition is not assured in advance. The norm is applied, but the norm is always about to happen again. This fact links grades and gender in an odd and necessary way. After all, adolescence is precisely a time in which the norms that govern gender regulation and sexual coherence are always already happening and about to happen again, producing an over determined scene in which fatality intermixes with anxiety-sometimes the two are lived simultaneously, sometimes they conflict, sometimes they follow in quick or vacillating succession. That ways emerge, such as hetero-friendship or the queering of identity, to escape heteronormativity is important to underscore. Since young adult practices and discourses can be an important site where we can take account of how heteronormativity takes hold, it is important to valorize the work done on this time of life in order to see how norms take hold, and what strategies emerge for escaping their strengthening grip. Do we, however, in concentrating on moments of 'escape', unwittingly create a framework in which only two options exist: submission or flight? Is there a way to suggest another approach, as we may well want to suggest to the young man who fears that his only options in relation to the film on gay life is to be coerced or to flee? What other options emerge between these two extremes? Is there a way to submit provisionally and critically to such norms, and to do so in ways that change the norms themselves? Is it possible to inhabit the norms in order to mobilize the rules differently? The writers in this volume of essays point to both escape and subversion

6 Response 533 as possible strategies in relation to dominant gender and sexual norms. Is there, then, a way to enter norms (norms that have already entered into our emergence prior to any will on our part), to find oneself within a matrix of rules that are not simply available for our volitional use, but which condition the possibility of becoming a subject at all? One could conclude that in learning skills of this kind-how to live the norm, how to abide by its rules of application-one is being subjected to power, and that what seems like an 'activity' is actually a passive inculcation. If that were our conclusion, then it would follow that only by going on strike against such norms, only by unlearning the rules and losing our 'expertise', do we have a chance of exposing the field of norms and their coercive effects. This might as well lead to a form of desubjugation as yet unimagined. But any such 'unlearning' would have to make room for an alternative agency, a creative deployment of power, and so a way of entering the matrix of rules that allows for an exposure of their porousness and malleability, their incompleteness, and their transformability. There are, after all, other things to do with rules than simply conforming to them. They can be displayed. They can be recrafted. Conformity itself may permit for a hyperbolic instantiation of the norm that exposes its fantastic character. In this sense, then, a certain errancy within expertise, a certain poeisis that shows what else a set of rules might yield offer us options that exceed the binary framework of coercion, on the one side, and escape, on the other. For young people, it would seem, when the world reduces to such optionssubmitting to coercion or fleeing-it follows that the dread of social exclusion or abjection would propel a young person into conformity. To be exposed to abjection without support is no alternative way of life, especially for a young person who depends on others fundamentally for shelter, food and schooling. The situation of extreme psychic and physical jeopardy must be avoided. So any radical pedagogy has to think its plans in light of that overriding need to provide a sustainable life for an emerging and dependent person. But the question of survival emerges from both directions: how does one stay in the matrix of rules enough to survive, and how does one bend and redirect those rules in order to breathe and live? If without the norms one cannot survive, it is also clear that with the norms survival is also imperiled. A form of social dying follows from radical inclusion and radical exclusion alike. The task of living takes places in the context of the paradox produced by these two prospects of dying, and of having to improvise the means for self-maintenance and selfflourishing within such a bind. Finally, then, it would seem that discourse, understood as performed, as emanating from, and referencing, a body, sometimes says more than what it says. And the omissions in discourse also 'say' something about what is and is not sayable within any given discourse. What a child or young adult says might well bring into visibility the predicament of inclusion and exclusion as well as the difficulty of living that predicament or paradox. To understand this, we have to listen carefully to what is said through verbal utterance, but also to what the body says and does (or does not say and does not do) as well as how the body appears (or fails to appear, sometimes seeking to cancel its own appearance). We can only understand the discursive scene of

7 534 J. Butler subject constitution in light of these problems of embodiment, social norms and visual signification, and within the temporal modalities of anticipation, desire, fear and the spatial modalities of constraint, support and incitement. What can be heard and what can be seen are, after all, primary lessons in any school. And once we understand that these domains of saying and showing are regulated and yet open to a number of interventions, then it would seem that, pedagogically, saying and showing are the first elements in any political education. Judith Butler University of California, Berkeley, USA

Deliberate taking: the author, agency and suicide

Deliberate taking: the author, agency and suicide Katrina Jaworski Abstract In the essay, What is an author?, Michel Foucault (1984, pp. 118 119) contended that the author does not precede the works. If