VIII. Sovereign Or Subject?

In a work published in the volume Power/Knowledge as “Two Lectures,” Michel Foucault famously complained that power has come to be conceived primarily through the figure of sovereignty -– that is, through the figure of a central, unitary, overbearing sovereign will unilaterally translating intentions into effects in the world.

In later work, Foucault was to point out again and again how sovereign figures of power construed as a primarily repressive force manage to impoverish our sense of the ways in which power can produce rather than merely impose effects in the world. But in the “Two Lectures” his claim is the more straightforward historical point that there emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries new (and soon altogether dominant) modes of political organization “which can no longer be formulated in terms of sovereignty” at all.

In Judith Butler’s summary of the argument, “power is no longer constrained by models of sovereignty” but instead “emanates from any number of ‘centers.’” That is to say, “power is no longer constrained within the sovereign form of the state. Diffused throughout disparate and competing domains of the state apparatus, and through civil society in diffuse forms as well, power cannot be easily or definitively traced to a single subject who is its ‘speaker.’”

Butler’s articulation of Foucault’s argument through the conjuration of a scene of speech in particular here is key. This is because, for one thing, she will describe as the conspicuous instance of the sovereign imagination of agency the idealized figure of “the sovereign speech act,” defined as “a speech act with the power to do what it says…. A power of absolute and efficacious agency, performativity and transitivity at once (it does what it says and it does what it says it will do to the one addressed by the speech).” This ideally agentic scene of sovereign speech, bedeviled neither by failure nor misfire, is a kind of hyperinflation of the common or garden variety performative utterances that notoriously preoccupy J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things With Words, utterances which themselves already seem curiously often to issue from legal or otherwise constituted authorities, and through which battleships are christened into service, couples “pronounced” into marital compacts, and the like.

But the scene of speech is also important in the articulation of an altogether alternative conception of agency for Butler as well. Agency in its broadest construal is simply a matter of doing things, and making sense of things. “According to one view of agency,” writes Butler, “a subject is endowed with a will, a freedom, an intentionality which is then subsequently ‘expressed’ in language, in action, in the public domain.” On such a view, she continues, “‘freedom’ and ‘the will’ are treated as universal resources to which all humans qua humans have access. The self who is composed of such faculties or capacities is thus thwarted by relations of power which are considered external to the subject itself. And those who break through such external barriers of power are considered heroic or bearers of a universal capacity which has been subdued by oppressive circumstances.”

Against this view, Butler proposes instead that agency and freedom are not so much universally available, essentially human resources to be expressed in language, but contingent formations constituted in language in an ongoing way, forever subject to failure and to frustration, as well as to promising improvisatory reformations. “Language,” she writes, “sustains the body not by bringing it into being or feeding it in a literal way; rather, it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body becomes possible.” As one among many examples of the sort of relations Butler is proposing here, it is nicely evocative to contemplate the scene in which a “doctor who receives [a] child and pronounces –- 'It’s a girl' –- [and so] begins that long string of interpellations by which the girl is transitively girled: gender is ritualistically repeated, whereby the repetition occasions both the risk of failure and the congealed effect of sedimentation.”

In a nutshell, for Butler: “To become a subject means to be subjected to a set of implicit and explicit norms that govern the kind of speech that will be legible as the speech of a subject.”

To be a subject is always crucially to be intelligible as a subject. And this intelligibility is in turn crucially a matter of being (treated as) a competent speaker of the language of agency, competent in the intelligible citation of agency’s proper conventions. But just because a language is sufficiently stable as an object that one can usually reliably distinguish competent from incompetent speakers of that language, this does not foreclose the capacity of those very speakers, precisely because they are competent, to reform their language in speaking it, through figurative language or coinages, for example. Citation is almost never recitation, almost never a perfect repetition of some established norm. “To be constituted by language is to be produced within a given network of power/discourse which is open to resignification, redeployment, subversive citation from within, and interruption and inadvertent convergences with other such networks,” Butler goes on to say. And “’[a]gency’ is to be found precisely at such junctures where discourse is renewed.”

Language is competent to produce effects in the world (notice even in their most trivially “descriptive” registers languages risk the proposal of sufficient similarities among the play of differences in the environment on the basis of which one attends and acts decisively and then differentially succeeds or not in manipulating that environment and anticipating experience), and the competent speaker of language is thereby more or less efficacious for it. But a linguistic account of agency can never afford the consoling fantasy of omnipotent invulnerability. The interminable play of differences, among them the key instance of an ineradicable difference between world and word, provide the constant and conspicuous occasion for failure and frustration. Neither can a linguistic account of agency afford the consoling fantasy of omnipotent autonomy. Language confers intelligibility, and so its special measure of independent existence, only as a function of an ineliminable interdependence of speakers (recall Wittgenstein on the impossibility of private language ).

“Untethering the speech act from the sovereign subject,” writes Butler, “founds an alternative notion of agency and, ultimately, of responsibility, one that more fully acknowledges the way in which the subject is constituted in language, how what it creates is also what it derives from elsewhere.” She goes on to emphasize that “[w]hereas some critics mistake the critique of sovereignty for the demolition of agency, I propose that agency begins where sovereignty wanes.”

This is a stronger claim by far than that a linguistic account of agency affords adequate agency to satisfy our legitimate needs, despite, say, its registration of a disconcerting or unappealing vulnerability and radical dependency for the agent so construed. Hers is not necessarily a plea for a more modest accounting of agency. If efficacy is indeed importantly a function of intelligibility, then the radical inter-dependency of linguistic practice is a general condition for agency, even if it is frequently the occasion for its particular frustration as well. If freedom is indeed importantly a function of the open-ended character of linguistic practice, then the radical vulnerability of language to error, misinterpretation, and misunderstanding is a condition for agency as well, because it is the condition for the openness of language to improvisation, novelty, and poetry.

The disavowal of this dependency and vulnerability at the heart of the sovereign figuration of agency is not of course the same as the accomplishment of the autonomy and invulnerability it pines for, but on the contrary Butler suggests “weakens the sense of self, establish[ing] its ostensible autonomy on fragile grounds… requir[ing] a repeated and systematic repudiation of others in order to acquire and maintain the appearance of autonomy.” What is wanted instead, she proposes, are “fundamentally more capacious, generous, and ‘unthreatened’ bearings of the self in the midst of community” for which linguistic as opposed to sovereign accounts of agency have a more conspicuous affinity.

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