Rhetorical Maneuvers: Subjectivity, Power, and Resistance

Abstract

A sense of subjectivity as fluid, dynamic, and multiple has become almost or thodox throughout the humanities. The widespread influence of poststructural thought has seemingly routed earlier Enlightenment notions of a unified, tran scendent subject and opened the door for critical approaches to the numerous and changing manifestations of human subjectivity. The fluidity of the human subject, however, is not without its bounds or constraints. Indeed, the same line of poststructural thinking that served to de-center the Enlightenment subject, especially the work of Michel Foucault, also stipulated that the subject was positioned by larger formations of discourse over which they had limited if any control. These two sides of poststructural subjectivity?its fluidity and its positioning?establish not so much two divergent approaches, but the two poles between which the human subject can be thought to operate. In turn the two poles of the apparent fixity of the subject position and the seeming fluidity of the subjectivity manifested within that position suggest the kind of productive ten sion through which we are simultaneously limited and enabled by the discourse formations within which we operate and against which we, at times, resist. This productive tension between the multiplicity of the subject and the singularity of the subject position has, of course, been the focus of numerous inquiries. In his later work, Foucault attended to the processes by which the subject makes itself an object upon which work might be done and urged a more aesthetic approach to the continuous crafting of the self.1 Along similar lines, Judith Butler has conceived of the subject in terms of its performativity and the ways that the I is crafted through numerous and fluid citations of existing power relations. Conceived in this way, the notion of the self is a constantly changing object crafted and re-crafted out of the points of identification provided in the exterior fields of power and knowledge. These points of identification, in turn, provide symbolic anchors by which a subject is moored, at least temporar ily, into a particular subject position within which they become identifiable and intelligible in terms of the broader formation of discourse.