On Sat, 23 Jan 1999, William S. Lear wrote: > OK, so what is an example of "cultural models of reasoning"? Introspection; nostalgia; childhood memories; angst; affection; love, etc. All these things are ways of thinking, and not just of feeling. But they can't be subordinated to mechanical Laws of Nature. > She assumes that it (subjection) exists within the subject itself: > power --- as subjection --- is "what we harbor and preserve in the > beings that we are". At the same time she claims that it exists > outside the subject (power is "external to oneself" and "what we > oppose"). Butler's paradox arises when she simply assumes an identity > between these two forms; thus the "paradox" that subjection depends > upon subjection. The paradox is that of our own social reality, where people without power labor for those who do, and only the ones freed from labor have the free time, as a rule, to develop their subjectivities via education, art collections, etc. Butler is trying to trace out the dialectic or transmutation between these two things; she doesn't always succeed, but she does come surprisingly close at times. > Ok, a very good start. 1) What is "performativity"? 2) what does > "linked to" mean? Is this a causal relationship or mere coincidence? Performativity is a kind of politics in its own right. E.g. media activism, which involves not just getting stories on the air, but the politics of the performative -- the editorial process, who gets to be a pundit and who not, access to the news, the absorption of newspapers by gigantic media conglomerates, etc. > Which group of idiots assumes "subjects are immutable"? Why does > anybody pay any attention to them? Most economists do, with their neoclassical models and schemes of rationality. And the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, and every major multinational have vast stacks of files on their personnel, detailing their reliability, abilities, scope for advancement, etc. All that implies plannability and a fixation of the subject within certain (profitable/functional) bounds. If all that isn't a bid for an immutable subject, then I'm a quark-sniffing Qualanthus from Arcturus. -- Dennis
