From: "Nathan Goralnik" <rhizome85-AT-home.com>
Subject: Some thoughts on political action
Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2001 17:51:28 -0700


Hi~

    Today as I was pondering gay rights in the context of the construction
of identity, I suddenly came to a new, more animated understanding of the
position of post-structuralism in the privacy/rights debate. All of the
fragmented understanding that I had previously had came together in a
rhetorically connected and animated "bigger picture understanding.
    Because of this, I now see why many are more optimistic about the
potential of performative political action than I have been in the past.
What is so crucial about post-structuralist understandings of political
agency is not so much that they provide us with an FYI on how subjectivity
works as it is that
these understandings operate like a new knowledge that produces new sites
for political agency.
    Here's what happened. I had always understood (separately!):

1) That disciplinary power extends into the "private" sphere;
2) That things like identity aren't predetermined;
3) That (roughly speaking) restive actions produce restive subjects;
4) That rights were deployed as resistance to monarchical tyranny;
5) That juridical understandings of power aren't satisfactory.

But I figured, "Ok, so disciplinary power extends into the 'private'
sphere," and privacy/rights can challenge that. What is the implication
here? I implicitly understood the implications of the performativity for
understandings of political agency, but I never consciously thought of them,
and never connected my understanding of these implications to the fact that
disciplinary power pervades the "private." I began to understand how the
explosion of the public/private distinction and the performativity of
identity come together to animate the statement "restive actions produce
restive subjects" when I connected these ideas and set them against the
liberal discourse of
"rights" (#4 on my list) in the context of the methodological conflict
between Foucauldian and juridical analyses of the operations of power. I
suddenly became actively aware of the big picture--the way the juridical
discourse of right draws potentially meaningless sociopolitical lines
between public and
private that are totally uninformed by an understanding of the operations of
disciplinary power. This tends to produce a juridical ideology of "civil
privatism" whose picture of political subjectivity is both over-inclusive
and under-inclusive. It is over-inclusive in that it assumes a degree of
autonomy over one's personal affairs that simply doesn't exist; it is
under-inclusive in that it assumes that potentials for individual political
action are co-extensive with (and thus limited by) the degree of formal
freedom that the government is willing to grant via "rights."

This is why the new understanding of subjectivity that the
post-structuralists offer is so crucial, because, in pointing out new sites
for political contest, it, as Kulynych says, "ensures resistability." A
performative understanding of political agency, (when coupled with a
Foucauldian understanding of power) politicizes the private, opening up new
spaces for political action. Individuals can thus engage strategies
disciplinary power at their capillary points and thus become restive NOT
because they "have" new rights, but because they are engaged in acts of
resistance. Only this understanding of power and agency provides any degree
of "liberation" (however small) of the private from the coercive effects of
disciplinary power that formal rights TOTALLY fail to engage.

Thoughts and citations on this topic would be MUCH appreciated :)

~Nate

--

"Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it
offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates,
unites, or re-unites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave.
Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must
be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm,
thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is
in itself an action--a perilous act."
           -Michel Foucault



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