8 Subjectivity

Dr. Vipin K Kadavath

Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary field of enquiry that raises questions pertaining to the social, economic and political production of everyday experience of an individual or a collectivity. ‘Culture’, in this sense may potentially include any aspect of social phenomena. Cultural Studies, therefore, refers to a cross-sectional approach unlike the traditional academic division of subjects within social sciences and humanities with their clearly demarcated methodological imperatives. This means that Cultural Studies makes use of different methodological approaches available in different disciplines, but more importantly, also redefines the very object of analysis which is no more reducible to the purview of any single discipline.

The question of the subject and subjectivity is of crucial importance to any enquiry that approach culture in this sense. But what is the subject? (or, should we say, who is the subject?

–what exactly is the difference you can think of between the two?) What is the relation between the subject and the object? – or, between the subjective and the objective? Is there something substantive that we refer to by the word subjectivity, like a physical mass with its definable properties? For example, the personal pronoun that each of us uses to refer to our own self is “I”. We use it to refer to something, i.e. our own self that is unique and individual. But this word is used by anyone who wishes to talk about themselves which renders it a little confusing. Though all of us use it to refer to our individual selves, the word itself has nothing unique. Could this mean that our reference also could be something empty and insubstantial? This module will pursue some of these questions and try to understand how they are addressed in philosophical discourse.

I. Introduction

The notion of the subject is closely linked to our sense of ‘self’, the formation and sustenance of personal or collective identities, and the construction and perpetuation of any reality that is coterminous with such identities. It is quite likely that we all have wondered at some point as to what the meaning and purpose of our true self is. Religious discourse would employ terms such as soul or atman to refer to the true inner self that is beyond the reach of material world. For example, atman is considered to be the first principle that is identical to the Brahman and therefore is beyond any identification with phenomenal world, i.e. the world of sensuous experience. It is indestructible and manifests itself through the different life-forms. The notion of the subject as it developed in modern western thought is radically different from this religious understanding of the self because subject is rooted within the material world of experiences, practices and thought. Often, when we say someone is ‘subjective’ in expressing an opinion about something, for instance, we mean that he or she is biased and such opinions are not supported by facts, whereas to be objective is to recognize and accept reality as it is.

Though this understanding of the subjective as prejudice or bias is narrow and inadequate to grasp the notion of the subject, it demonstrates some problems that one may have to consider in beginning to think about subjectivity:

• A context where the perceiving self and the perceived reality are separable from and independent of each other,
• The attempt of the self to arrive at an undistorted perception of the reality outside of it.

The notion of the subjective as prejudice is inadequate precisely because the possibility of an undistorted perception of reality by suppressing the subjective dimension as a whole is impossible to achieve – or, in other words, any reality as we know it is possible only within the experiential locus of a mode of subjectivity.

(Subjectivity is linked to how we understand our ‘reality’)

Further, this understanding of subjective as being prejudiced assumes that the self that experiences or perceives the reality that is outside of it is an independent and unified entity. Recent discussions have moved away from this notion of the self (i.e. the ‘self’ as a singular and autonomous person, and a free and self-sustaining consciousness) to that of subjectivity which is more complex and ambiguous making it tricky to think about the relationship between the subject that experiences and the objective reality of the world that acts as the stimulus for such experience. This notion of the independent and unified self is also understood to be the cause and agent of action. Subject on the other hand incorporates both the senses of agency and passivity. The grammatical subject in the sentence ‘He ate an apple’ shows active side of the subject, whereas the phrase ‘Queen’s subjects’ would point to the particular form of subjection under monarchic power. This indicates that the process of becoming a subject is one closely linked to power or, as recent theorists would call, power relations. To be a subject in this sense is to find oneself a place within a naturalized social order.

II. The Subject within Enlightenment Thought

It was with Enlightenment thought that the question of the subject became an important philosophical concern. The modern era ushered in a new understanding of the universe and man’s place in it. It may not be true to say that personal identity or individuality was absent in the pre-modern world, but there was a certain sense of urgency and seriousness when modern man asked the question of his own existence. The scientific attitude and Enlightenment rationalism had questioned the certitude of a pre-existing world order guaranteed by religious faith, or an unquestionable social coherence maintained by political authority or rigid social institutions such as caste. The disintegration of these orders meant that the relationship between the individual and the collective had fundamentally changed. The modern subject emerges from this disintegration of the pre-modern world view. This shift is represented in the most dramatic way by Rene Descartes who emptied out all contents of his knowledge as none of them withstood the test of radical doubt. Everything could be questioned except the self that questions, or the introspective awareness of his own act of thinking which he encapsulated in the following phrase: “I think, therefore I am”. For Descartes, as Raymond Williams points out, it is from the operations of the subject that the independent existence of an objective world can be deduced and that subject works as the starting point for the analysis of the world. Descartes considered mind as a substance exactly like other material substances which do not require anything other than itself to exist. One further consequence of Descartes’ assumption is that the material body and immaterial mind were understood to be ontologically different with the possibility of interaction between them. Thus, the notion of the subject in Descartes’ rationalism underlines the following: before one can surmise the certainty of the world of material substances the certainty of the thinking mind has to be secured. It is the act of self-conscious thinking itself that grounds the certainty of the mind and proceeds to make sense of the outside world.

For Immanuel Kant, the prominent German Idealist thinker, the subject refers to a formal pre- condition of all thinking which is the ‘I’ that perceives or receives sensations. As all our experiences are connected to this I, we feel the continuity and stability of the self. But for Kant, a simple division between the subject that perceives and an objective world that lies outside itself is not enough, as the reality itself is divided into “noumenon” (that which exists prior to our perception) and “phenomenon” (the image from the world that we form in our minds). Kant argues that phenomenon is what we receive as the images of the world whereas noumenon is the primordial thing-in-itself that is not accessible to human mind. What Kant calls a transcendental subject is not a material entity or the empirical self, but the source of all experience and consciousness. The transcendental subject, in other words, is the space where the images of our sense perception and faculties of the mind can be organized and united into a continuous experience of the self. As Nick Mansfield argues, “Kant’s subject is not merely in the world, allowing its messages to cross back and forth across its senses. When it receives these messages, it is not merely passive. It grasps the outside world in a positive act of thought that not only connects it with things, but gives it a strong, unified and purposeful sense of selfhood.” (Mansfield 19) For Kant mind actively comprehends the world which is presented to it as sensations.

So far we have seen how the problem of the subject constituted a central question for modern philosophy which sought to arrive at a rational explanation of the world. We analyzed the common understanding of being subjective as prejudiced or biased and concluded that it is insufficient to understand the notion of subjectivity. We briefly looked at Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant as two key figures who provided some insights into the nature of modern subjectivity.

Subjectivity, besides being a philosophical concern, is also a political-legal issue as we saw earlier in the phrase “Queen’s subjects”, which refers to subjects as subjected to the power of the queen. In fact, most of the post-enlightenment thinkers would relate the question of subjectivity to social power and institutions. A case in point here, from the Enlightenment tradition, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who believed in the innate goodness and freedom of man and the social and political institutions that causes his unfreedom. He famously said: “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chain” which meant that within the state of nature human beings remain pure and good but the establishment of society becomes a moral corruption of humanity. Contemporary theorists of culture do not assume that there exists a human nature that is uncorrupted by society or culture. This means that contemporary theory moved away from the notion of the subject as autonomous and unified which exists apart from society. Terms such as ideology, hegemony, power relations, and performativity will take centre stage in unraveling the complex ways in which we inhabit our society as subjects. The following section will look at two most important contemporary trajectories of thought that have widened our understanding of subjectivity in modern societies.

III. Contemporary Theories of the Subject

Contemporary theories of the subject have questioned the unified notion of the subject that emerges from Enlightenment thought, especially Descartes. When Descartes proposed “I think, therefore I am” as the first principle for his philosophy and the solution for all epistemological incertitude, he was proposing the idea of a self-transparent and stable subject that reflectively recognizes its own existence. The existence of this thinking being is unquestionable for Descartes.

Recent theories of the subject raise questions about the self-transparency of the subject, drawing on thinkers such as Freidrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard who argued that the stable and universal subject that Descartes’s rationalism and Kant’s idealism proposed was only a myth, and try to understand it, as split, contradictory, and unstable. We may not really experience such instability of our own experience and thought on a regular basis, but that’s because social and cultural institutions and practices successfully conceal it and provide us with a stable sense of identity. This also puts into question the easy division of the subject and the object as they are not merely separate and independent from one another as we thought earlier, but mutually dependent. The following section will briefly outline the major problems and themes developed by different theoretical practices in bringing to light this aspect of the subject. We will look at two trajectories of thinking about the subject (i) within psychoanalysis as developed by Freud and expanded by Jacques Lacan and Louise Althusser and (ii) Writings by Michel Foucault who has introduced a new way of theorizing social and cultural issues.

1. Psychoanalysis: Repression and the Unconscious

Psychoanalysis is a clinical and therapeutic practice developed by Sigmund Freud. Freud traces the particular constitution of a mind to the developmental process of a person from childhood to adulthood. In psychoanalytic discourse this process involves different stages such as oedipal complex and castration complex in which the child develops his sense of identity through a complex process of negotiations and adjustments with the other members of the family, especially mother and father. According to Freud the Oedipal Complex and the Castration Complex are so central in contributing to the sexual identity of the person. Oedipus complex, an idea that Freud derives from Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, refers to the uninterrupted immediacy and unity that a child experiences towards its mother. The presence of the father and a simultaneous awakening of its curiosity about the genitals cause an interruption to this experience. In fact, the child considers the presence of the father as frustrating this idyllic unity. This situation offers the child two alternatives (identifying with the father and thereby taking an active-masculine subject position or identifying with mother with a passive-feminine subject position) both of which involve the castration complex.

Freud’s most original contribution was to posit an ineradicable split between a conscious and unconscious side of a subject and a subtle and irreducible influence of the unconscious over the conscious life of a person. What Freud fundamentally questioned was the confidence of the Enlightenment thinkers in a notion of the self that is capable of controlling and regulating itself in its relation with the world. Freud proposed that excess is the hall mark of the subject and explained the unconscious as “the repository of the excesses that is inexorably and necessarily excluded from what is deemed “normal” adult social existence. (Hall, 60) Though the unconscious is inaccessible in our conscious life, dreams, slips of the tongue, neurotic symptoms etc bring some of its dimensions to our experience that could be either pleasurable or disturbing. It is this chaotic and meaningless material of the dreams that Freud analyses in his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1904) in an attempt to make sense of the underlying logic of the unconscious and possible relevance of such dreams to the everyday life of an individual. Freud, however, was very close to the Enlightenment legacy in that he understood the aim of psychoanalytic clinical practice as a way of analyzing the neurotic symptoms within the particular trajectory of a person’s development and to renormalize him or her as a socially acceptable member. The excessive reliance on the particular model of bourgeois family and use of sexual and anatomic references, especially the presence or absence of penis, as always fateful to the formation of subjectivity have also been criticized by later thinkers.

Jacques Lacan radically revises Freud by introducing the dimension of language as the primary locus of subjectivity. Lacan fully realizes the Freudian assumption that a person can confront the truth of his unconscious only when he/she can freely talk about it to the analyst. Lacan sees it as a way of symbolizing what in the unconscious state cannot be symbolized. If Freud believed that the unconscious, a subterranean space within every individual mind that is not directly accessible to him/herself, Lacan thought that the truth of a subject lies outside

–in language. For understanding Lacan’s point, our understanding of the relation between human subjects and language will have to be reversed. We generally think of human beings using language as a tool of communication where the subject comes into existence first and then instrumentally appropriates language for communicating with others. The reversed sequence would be where language already exists before anybody is born and she/he will have to locate within language for occupying a meaningful position in this world.

Lacan also proposes, as does Freud, different phases of subjective development which he calls the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. The imaginary corresponds to the mirror-stage in which the child starts to see its own image from outside – as if looking at a mirror that produces for the child a coherent and continuous image its body. This sense of coherence and unity provided by the image of self is not permanent as the subject understands that its source is from outside, not the subject itself. By symbolic Lacan means the wider field of language and culture that provide the subject with a stable location for identification within a world of order and hierarchy. In other words, Lacan understands the emergence of the subject as a process of symbolization in imaginary and symbolic phases and exists within these two coordinates. The real, according to Lacan, is what resists such symbolization. One may, for example, consider the body with its manifold sensations and experiences that cannot however be adequately symbolized in language as the Lacanian Real.

Louis Althusser, the French Marxist theoretician, would appropriate these Lacanian insights into workout a theory of ideology which would explain the production of subjectivities within capitalism. According to Althusser, ideology represents “the imaginary relationships of the individuals to their real conditions of existence”. It is through the operations ideology that the working class submits to a capitalist mode of production despite the fact that it exploits and deprives it of its freedom. For Althusser, this involves a form of ‘hailing’ (as in when a policeman calls you by a “hey you!” and you automatically turns to him) in which individuals are constituted as subjects.

(The interpellative hailing that makes you a law abiding citizen)

Althusser suggests that ideology is different from force such as the army or police in that it becomes operational through various social institutions such as schools, family, political institutions etc. that reinforce capitalist values.

2. Foucault: Discourse and Power

Foucault’s model of subject questions the romantic notion of an individual who is suppressed by social rules and regulations without the possibility of complete self-expression. This is the figure we see, as we mentioned earlier, in the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau where the individual, autonomous and free, comes first and then is imprisoned by social and political power. Foucault reveres this model by arguing that the individual itself is only secondary, an effect of power.

The theoretical frameworks of both Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan question the idea of an autonomous and free subject. If Lacan traces the formation of the subject within the familial and linguistic contexts, Foucault’s primary concern was to see how subjects are formed within specific historical situations through the operations of social institutions, practices of inclusion and exclusion, forms of knowledge etc. His work, which has provided fresh grounds to think about the question of subjectivity, is in disagreement with the fundamental assertions of Marxism (the idea of class rule that produces the bourgeois and proletarian subjectivities) and Psychoanalysis (the idea of repression of excessive desires and internalization of cultural rules that is constitutive of subjectivity).One of the fundamental assertions of Foucault is that there are no hidden truths the way psychoanalysis will conceive in the form of an inaccessible unconscious or the Marxist understanding of ideology that conceals the real relations of production. For Althusser ideology produces an imaginary world view which successfully hides the true relations of exploitations and oppressions that capitalism produces. But the truth can be accessed and explained through a Marxist science, whereas for Foucault such underlying truths do not exists and any claim to truth is a construct involving power. For example, it is the medical discourse of the mentally ill, which is historically formed and therefore not universal truths about what mental illness is, that creates the subject positions of the normal and the abnormal. The same physical or mental characteristics of a person that medical discourse interprets as illness may have totally different explanations in different discursive epochs. The compulsion of the medical discourse to categorize people into normal and abnormal also creates forms of social practice where those who fall outside the definition of normality will be subjected to treatment, incarceration or reform. This form of power, according to Foucault, is more dispersed without any specific point of origin, but also productive in that it works on the individuals to produce themselves as subjects through mental and physical reform. Foucault discusses the architectural configuration of the Panopticon as the model of power that operates in modern societies applicable to as diverse institutions as schools, factories, hospitals etc. The panopticon is a prison structure where each subject is confined to his cell and is continuously observed by an invisible, all-seeing person. The presence or absence of the overseeing person can never be confirmed but this awareness that there could be an overseeing person necessitates some regulation of behavior on part of the inmates.

(the panopticon – you are under surveillance)

What Foucault suggests through the notion of panopticon is that modern societies invent a form of surveillance in which we are subjected not to the direct commands of a king but a form of continuous surveillant power that works through self-restrain, regulation and reform.

IV. Conclusion

This module tried to address the question of subjectivity that contemporary cultural studies is concerned with. The attempt was to trace the discussions on subjectivity looking at the Enlightenment tradition and two contemporary trajectories: the psychoanalytic and the Foucauldian. If the Enlightenment posits the subject as a self-present and self-reliant entity which encounters a world outside of it, recent theories try to think of subjectivity as an effect of its entangled existence in the world. The psychoanalytic tradition traces its origin within a family drama where repression leads to the formation of the subject. Foucault argues against this repressive hypothesis and characterizes the subject as caught within different modes of power relations. The are other theoretical developments that have had a substantial effect on how we think about subjectivity, such as structuralism/poststructuralism, theories of gender and performativity, race/caste and postcolonial experiences. Even as they critique the Enlightenment notion of an autonomous and agentive self, they also try to unmask the particular subjects (European/male/white/upper-caste etc) that masquerade as he universal. The question of subjectivity has therefore been at the centre of cultural analysis in contemporary period.

Reference

• Cavallero, D. (2007). Critical and Cultural Theory. New Jersy: The Athlone Press.
• Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault Reader. (P. Rabinow, Ed.) New York: Pantheon Books.
• Freud, S. (2006). The Penguin Freud Reader. London: Penguin.
• Hall, D. (2004). Subjectivity. New York: Routledge.
• Lacan, J. (2001). Ecrits: A Selection. New York: Routledge.
• Mansfield, N. (2000). Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Harraway. New York: New York Unoversity Press.