interpellating the psychic subjectification

From: Diane Hodges (dhodges@ceo.cudenver.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 08 1999 - 00:11:02 PST


xmca@weber.ucsd.edu writes:
>Diane,
>
>I must admit that I can only guess at what you mean here. Care to be more
>explicit? Also, what does "interpellelates a psychic subjectification"
>mean?

i can break it down as follows:

"psychic subjectification" - (from judith butler, 1997, "the psychic life
of power,")

- the question of subjection is about how it is that people are
oppressed/dominated, subjectified, subjected _to_ kinds of
power(foucauldian powers, here, in the forms of discourse practices,
embodied and, in butler's read, psychically re-troped [trope, from hadyn
white, a 'figure of speech' where the figure, here is both the body and
the trope], and spoken, here, both the coherence of identity and the
speech act that services this coherence - "i am a social scientist" as an
example, perhaps):

reading from Hegel's "Phenomenology of the Spirit," butler quotes hegel's
trace of the "slave's approach to freedom and his disappointing fall into
unhappy consciousness."

"the master, who at first appears to be 'external' to the slave, reemerges
as the slave's own conscience. The unhappiness of the consciousness that
emerges is its own self-beratement, the effect of the transmutation of the
master into a psychic reality... the power that at first appears as
external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into
subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject's
self-identity." (butler: 3)

this identification with power is "...bound to seek recognition of its own
existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own
making,[thus] the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside the
itself, in a discourse that s at once dominant and indifferent." (20)

i read these ideas in the context of "be/coming" an academic, the
transition from student to graduate, to doctoral candidate, to Doctor; i
also think of these in the oxymoronic contexts of the social sciences, as
a site of internalized perplexion: who takes the social scientist
seriously as a scientist?

the institution, here, the university, steeped in traditions of
subordinating, presents the subject (student) with
the discourses and signs with which she might re-identify, re-writing
psychic traumas into attainable goals of achievement, while simultaneously
providing the scripts of subjectification (write "this" way/obey "this"
genre/master "this" canon) -

_interpellation_

"Interpellation," butler writes (106-107), "...is not an event, but a
certain way of staging the call, where the call, as staged, ...is also
figured as a demand to align oneself with the law, ...an entrance into the
language of self-ascription -'Here i am' - through the appropriation of
guilt."

guilt, here, is written in the desire to appeal to the approvals of the
law (why do we choose to be academics?) -
to be interpellated is to be called into a subjected relation with these
desired approvals - pass your exams, write the MA thesis, and you are
called a Master. proceed to the doctoral process, and you are called a
"Doctor of philosophy" and with that, in the social sciences, the
assumptions of discourse and practices as
researcher-educator/professor-academic writer-conference presenter/ etc.

what interpellates (what calls in the contexts of appealing to guilt
within the laws) psychic subjectification? discourses - here, in my work,
academic genres/intellectual tropes-turns of writing as appeals to
dominance, and indifference to the dominance -
slaves become their own masters through the academic genres, speaking in
"tongues" of particular traditions;
"punish me" being a guilt-strategy written into discourses that are both
dominant and indifferent,
as the speaker is appealing to the dominance[normalzing discourse] in
genres of in/difference -

hope that helps.

**********************************************************************
                                        :point where everything listens.
and i slow down, learning how to
enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.

(Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
***********************************************************************

diane celia hodges

 university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
==================== ==================== =======================
 university of colorado, denver, school of education

Diane_Hodges@ceo.cudenver.edu



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