Reconsidering the Life of Power

Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy

James Garrison

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781438482101, 9781438482118
• eBook ISBN: 9781438482125
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Offers a compelling intercultural perspective on body, art, self, and society.

Reconsidering the Life of Power examines Chinese perspectives on bodily self-cultivation and explores how these can be resources for working past the ritual scripts of everyday life. In recent decades, European and American thinkers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have called attention to the way that people live out ritual scripts in order to be recognized by other people such that they might survive. Philosophers in China, however, have a long history of considering ritual not just in terms of confining power structures but also in terms of empowering artistic self-cultivation. Out of this convergence, a response to Butler's The Psychic Life of Power becomes possible, along with fascinating implications for improving real-world experience.

James Garrison looks at art and aesthetics as a way of responding positively to the vicissitudes of everyday life. This means reframing ritual practice in domains like meditation, yoga, tai chi chuan, dance, calisthenics, fashion, and beyond as a kind of work that delves into and unearths society's long-accruing unconscious habits in a way that makes conscious one's everyday speech, comportment, countenance, and presence. The everyday body thus becomes an artwork, speaking in novel ways to the everyday self by revealing an alternative to the programmed ritual scripts through which most of us tend to survive. Reconsidering the Life of Power offers a compelling contemporary intercultural perspective on body, art, self, and society that bridges theory and practice by providing an actionable yet deeply philosophical approach to enhancing life.

Chapter 1

Subjectivation/Subjection

However, “hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably foreboding relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? … When we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, we basically use knowledge that others already have of us. We judge ourselves with the means other people have [and] have given us to judge us. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Though I speak about myself, the judgment of others always [is there] in between. This means that if my relations are bad, I put myself in the total dependence of others. And then indeed I am in hell. And there are a number of people in the world who are in hell because they depend too much upon the judgment of others. But this does not at all mean that we cannot have other relationships with others. It simply marks the capital importance of all others for each of us.1

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Preliminary Remarks: Butler on Subjectivation/Subjection

It is nice to talk about self and society as if these are two wholly separate things, as if there is a pure kernel of rational personality that exists prior to bodily life and social entanglement. However convenient this fiction may be, this way of thinking obscures the nature of the self as a subject within society. Personhood is deeply and thoroughly relational. It accrues and accumulates through experience. People are not gods. The Abrahamic religions hold that humans are made in God’s image, but there is a limit to this—simply put, we are.2 We are not the proverbial “I AM THAT I AM.”3 We are not singular, certainly not in that deep sense. We are, and this precedes any particular “I.” We are plural. We are familial, social, and political, and it is these spheres that found the self, not vice versa. We, as other people, are more than just hell, since we constitute each other and our mutual constitution forms the basis of Sartre’s quasi-religious, heaven-on-earth-like vision of the day when the human race attains completion in defining itself, not as the sum of the globe’s many isolated inhabitants, but in terms of “infinite unity of their reciprocity.”4

While some of this may sound appealing at first, further consideration of the present state of affairs and the dominance the former, damning definition of humanity shows this idea of relationality ultimately to verge on not only being excessively postmodern, but also rather gloomy. While we are in fact more than hell, for many, any greater possibility remains far from being realized. For the time being and for the most part, we other people are still that—hell.

And so, if “I” am deeply and completely relational, then my sense of self, my identity would not be “mine” per se, but would rather owe to forces beyond myself. Without an eternally self-same soul underneath it all, then it would seem that “I” stand as a fiction dictated from without. So understood, “I” do not come on to the scene as an already coherent entity, but rather “I” am made to cohere, always doing so on somebody else’s terms. If that is so, then “I” truly am a subject, in that “I” am subject to the powers that set the terms through which “I” understand myself. Then it seems that “I” perpetually lose myself. Self-understanding may take the form of ego, but “I” can never have full possession of self, because that individuality has and will always be contingent on maintaining a certain place, posture, and pose in society. And so a subtle, if persistent, melancholy sets in, becoming the order of the day.

What then is to be done with this thoroughly relational mode of personhood? What is to be done with this melancholic subject? Raging at circumstance may be one answer. Flinging back the terms of subjection offers comfort, cold and temporary though it may be; but this falls well short of relief. Turning the chains that bind the subject into weapons against social powers might sound appealing. However, this answer is shortsighted and likely to yield neither freedom nor redemption for the subject, let alone contentment or happiness. Defining oneself as a lion in opposition to social power still cedes the basic terms of discourse to that power, leading to profound resentment. Even if outright redemption seems unlikely here, there remains the task of finding resources that can at least help to rehabilitate this notion of the relational subject and perhaps avoid some of its more dour conclusions.

Such a resource may exist in comparative philosophy, in exploring traditions that emphasize relationality, rather than individuality, as the basis of self. Unfortunately, while comparative philosophy is thriving, not all of its possibilities are being adequately explored. Such is the case of conversations between Chinese philosophy and the European continental tradition. It is perhaps understandable why there is not a great deal of interface between these traditions. After all, the standard (and somewhat unthinking) view goes that the former tends to emphasize tradition, family, and the like, while the latter tends toward postmodern, post-structuralist, cosmopolitan orientations. Furthermore, where there has been contact, much of it has tended to be conducted in the constrictive terms of doctrinaire Marxism (though this is starting to change). In any case, comparative work bridging these two fields has unfortunately tended to have a narrow focus, with a great deal of disparity in terms of directional emphasis, much as Wimmer’s figure of polylog variants from the previous section depicts.

What is lamentable here is that these two traditions have much to say to each other, despite common assumptions that they talk past each other. In particular, Confucian philosophers, both classical and contemporary, and the thinkers drawn together by leading American philosopher Judith Butler in her book The Psychic Life of Power have profound connections with each other. While Butler, a longtime University of California, Berkeley, professor, and the European tradition she represents may not be as sunny about the matter as Confucians, they all nonetheless share particular insight into how the relational self arises discursively through naming, ritual, and performance.

With a career spanning back to the 1980s and with renown for her 1990s books Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, Butler also spends a great deal of her time addressing the subject more generally in a way that overlaps with her more specific work on gender, although by her own admission these broader efforts are “less known—and less popular—dimensions of [her] philosophical work.”5 This part of Butler’s work examines in broad terms how external power forms and regulates its psychic life, with many forms of alterity animating and constraining the subject, not just sexual difference, which Butler specifically casts as “not the primary difference from which all other kinds of social differences are derivable.”6 While gender and sex have profound implications for the subject, Butler does not make these the major focus in this less popular strand of her thinking. In this context the term “subject” refers to that which characterizes being human in the world, namely, a self-reflexive, self-examining, self-critical, socially impelled, embodied agency. Here, the figure of the subject more generally represents a turning-on-self initiated by pressure from without, from what is other (with gender still nonetheless being a crucial dimension of that alterity, especially with the precariat disproportionately affected by poverty and exposure being women, transgender, and queer people).7

Judith Butler elucidates this idea her work The Psychic Life of Power, which draws upon notions like Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, Nietzsche’s bad conscience, Freud’s melancholic ego, and Foucault’s subjectivation model. Since her work deals with so many major figures at great length, comparative philosophical inquiry based on Butler’s work can have wider implications, which in this project means connecting up a host of continental sources to strands in Confucian thought. At the outset, though, it may seem counterintuitive to turn to a psychoanalytic, post-structuralist gender theorist as a resource for comparative Confucian scholarship, but provided one can get past the labels and the “-isms,” there are intriguing similarities as well as informative divergences.

While the connection may not be readily apparent, Butler’s thinking shares many features in common with Confucianism. Though Butler looks at power with a disdain largely absent in Confucianism’s strong endorsement of hierarchy, there exists a common view that power is discursive and propagates through naming, performance, and ritual. However, Confucianism has one distinct advantage—it pays distinct attention to the aesthetic dimensions of the development of the subject and to related issues that are underexplored in Butler’s account. More to the point, the aesthetic dimension of discourse, particularly the Confucian idea of ritual, not only has an affinity with Butler’s paradigm, but it provides a way out of its more pessimistic findings—namely, that the enduring condition of the subject is one of melancholia or rage. The argument here breaks down into two parts.

First, power, as described by Judith Butler (following Michel Foucault), is the purposive macro-level social force that animates individual persons. Power does not simply occur in psychological/moral terms, but thrives in cultural productions, artistic expression, iconographic depiction, and so on. Power thus has an aesthetic life akin to the “psychic life” that Butler identifies, and these parallel lives both reside in the sort of unhappy consciousness that Hegel describes. This means that serious, mainstream social practice and the capricious, arbitrary artworld of postmodernity mutually alienate each other, like Hegel’s stoic and skeptic. This is what is examined in this first chapter on subjectivation and in the second chapter on autonomy and the artworld.

Second, power, with its basis in ritualized social norms and the establishment of “correct” discourse, can fruitfully be understood in Confucian terms, namely, the intertwined notions of ritual bearing (lǐ 礼) and the right use of names (zhèngmíng 正名). In Confucianism, both of these terms are simultaneously moral and aesthetic in nature, and this provides the basis for latter-day Marx-influenced theorists to investigate the artistic, productive forces behind social formation. Hence, an account of Chinese philosophy old and new can provide a broader account of power, address the aesthetic dimension of ritual, and point the way to attaining freedom through self-cultivation. This is what the remaining major chapters on the topics of ritual lǐ 礼, subjectality, technique in appearance, and somaesthetics aim to provide. This all will serve as the basis for a brief concluding section.

As for where this first major chapter will ultimately lead in terms of this larger project, Butler holds that subjects who regulate themselves on society’s terms must be dealt with on society’s terms—and negotiating this bind through art and artful ritual practice is the main topic here in this work. Why is this a bind though? For Butler herself, one’s “own” body or soul is not in any way pregiven as any kind of shelter or source of prior meaning, since, for her, the embodied soul is constantly emerging through recognition and how it matters to others. This reflects Butler’s more succinct view that what “matters about an object is its matter.”8 For Butler, bodies matter and subjects persist by virtue of the ritualized forms of recognition that suffuse social discourse, the result being that only rage and resignification of that discourse remain as options. However, this way of thinking perhaps does not give sufficient attention to art’s complex relationship to the deterministic discursive structure that Butler identifies. This in turn problematically cuts off the possibility explored here of bodily practice itself becoming artistic and a source of freedom.

Getting back to the current topic of subjectivation, Butler proceeds from the view that a subject’s identity arises from external normativity, which initiates and takes up residence within and thus initiates the inner sphere of self-consciousness.9 Butler starts with the leading figure of nineteenth-century German idealism, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who sees what he terms “unhappy consciousness” as the internalization of two desires toward freedom and negation, which themselves follow from the split between what he takes to be the representative figures of what he identifies as the immediately prior mode of consciousness, that of the master and the slave.10 For Hegel, the struggle between master and slave is motivated by the fact that self-consciousness exists only in and for itself through recognition—recognition, which in Butler’s particular reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology serves as the only means for fulfilling the desire to persist in one’s being.11 Reflection requires a mirror for self-consciousness in the form of another self-consciousness to recognize it.

Here, the notion of recognition drives self-consciousness and it appears in terms of the two extremes of the slave’s self-negating recognition of the master, on the one hand, and the freedom that the master acquires by being so recognized, on the other.12 However, as Butler notes in her follow-up to The Psychic Life of Power, Giving an Account of Oneself, “I can never offer recognition in the Hegelian sense as a pure offering, since I am receiving it, at least potentially and structurally, in the moment and in the act of giving. We might ask, as Levinas surely has of the Hegelian position, what kind of gift this is that returns to me so quickly, that never really leaves my hands.”13 The relationship between maste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Work: A Statement on Method
• Chapter 1 Subjectivation/Subjection
• Chapter 2 Autonomy and Appearance in Artful Ritual Practice
• Chapter 3 Confucianism and Lĭ 禮/礼: Ritual Propriety, Music, and the Arts
• Chapter 4 Subjectality
• Chapter 5 Technique in Appearance
• Chapter 6 Somaesthetics
• Final Thoughts
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover