PERFORMING THE IMAGE

It is from this point of departure - the idea that the self is a continual, productive relationship with the image or other that informs the subject - that Butler approaches some of the unsettled questions left by Foucault. If the establishment of the subject is characterized by an unresolved tension between a symbolic discourse (the mirror) and an irreducible, individual psyche (the preconfigured self) that at once submits to and exceeds the disciplinary power that constitutes it as an object, then this ‘inauguration’ of subjectivity must persist within the subject as what Butler calls “a founding moment whose ontological status remains permanently uncertain."

However, if this is the case, what keeps the individual subordinate to those discursive structures that continually subjectify it? Why does what might be considered an 'unself-consciousness' appear to submit and recreate itself through a symbolic order imposed from the outside? For Butler, this is can only be explained by way of a narcissistic desire for recognition located in the unconscious that becomes internalized through an ‘introjection’ of the pre-discursive, appropriating self-object:

“In order to curb desire, one makes of oneself an object for reflection; in the course of producing one’s own alterity, one becomes established as a reflexive being, one who can take oneself as an object. Reflexivity becomes the means by which desire is regularly transmuted into the circuit of self-reflection. The doubling back of desire that culminates in reflexivity produces ... the desire for that very circuit, for reflexivity and, ultimately, for subjection.”

- Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power

Desire can be understood here as a survival mechanism, both mentally and physically. The subject becomes entangled in a sort of feedback loop that makes his or her own subjectification an object of passionate attachment, sought out for its ability to support processes of sense-making that establish the subject’s identity as legitimate. This process – which is dependent on a reworking of the mirror stage for coherence – has also been usefully described by Kathy Urwin's Changing the Subject as one in which the subject takes up a ‘discursive frame of reference.’ In Urwin’s work, this frame of reference can be multiple and dynamic, but remains essentially tied to the power relations expressed in the discursive relationship between parent and child. Rather than always being a literal mirror, the mediated expressions of care and all behavioral exchange between infant and adult serves as a ‘mirror’ that provides a point outside the self from which a subject develops a sense of bodily and discursive control that is deeply affiliated with the other. Because pre-existing symbolic discourses represent the only way for an individual to achieve social legibility, and this dependency is a priori linked to a primary and necessary passion shared with caregivers, Urwin the individual is always prefigured as having a ‘fundamental vulnerability’ to subjection. From Butler:

“... the desire to survive, ‘to be’, is a persuasively exploitable desire. The one who holds out the promise of continued existence plays to the desire to survive.”

and

“Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself.”

- Butler, The Psychic Life of Power

But as pointed out earlier, this existential dance is and will remain ‘permanently uncertain’ in the subject. How then do we explain the coherent sense of self that many people seem to display? In Butler’s view, this can be accounted for by the ‘non-mechanistic’ relationship of the individual psyche to the performative acts that establish it as a subject of discourse.

It’s important to remember that in these terms, the psyche is not equivalent with the subject. It's considered a precursor. What Butler refers to alternately as a “psychic" or “bodily remainder” (which roughly corresponds to a modified Freudian or Lacanian unconscious), is the "introjected" original object that is suppressed when an individual takes up a position within the symbolic. Its presence is continuously felt – as in Lacan’s model – as a constitutive loss deep within the self. This unknowable loss essentially enables the culturally ‘real’ subject to emerge from a fundamentally imaginative, psychically opaque position - but this unknown, this pre-symbolic image, serves as the foundation of identity. Imagination and the imaginary can be understood as functions of this original image.

Many of Escher's drawings present an aesthetic of the imaginary, the funhouse maze or mirrored labyrinth we find ourselves in.

The performance of identity is then unavoidably bound with an imaginative core in the psyche that contributes to the instability and unpredictability of the discursive appropriation of the subject:

“ ... the imaginary signifies the impossibility of the discursive ... constitution of identity. Identity can never be fully totalized by the symbolic, for what it fails to order will emerge within the imaginary as a disorder, a site where identity is contested.”

Therefore, the imagination must be central to our consideration of subjectivity. Rather than the "full siege and invasion" of the interior of the subject by disciplinary power described by Foucault, the experience of subjective power is an ambivalent one – the subject is never fully constituted in the process of subjectification. However, for this very reason, Foucault’s model of normative, subjective behavior again becomes informative to Butler's theory:

“What is brought into being by the performative … is much more than a ‘subject,’ for the ‘subject’ created is not for that reason fixed in place: it becomes the occasion for further making. Indeed ... a subject only remains a subject through reiteration or rearticulation of itself as a subject, and this dependency of the subject on repetition for coherence may constitute that subject’s ... incomplete character.”

- Butler, The Psychic Life of Power

In the face of a world built on pre-existing discourse, social rituals ensure the continuous impression of meaning onto the motions and gestures of the body and figures of the mind. This repetitive self-maintenance is what ensures the reformulation of the subject at any particular moment and enshrines that discursive frame as the agency of the individual. By 'performing' the role of self through normative behavior and mediated action, the subject “congeals over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” – that is to say, Butler believed an identity is experienced as legitimate through this process of self-affirming interaction with the symbolic other.

There is a profound cynicism in parts of Butler's writing, but the concept of performativity she proposes is not entirely a negative one. This sense of performance is not one of artifice, despite how much Foucault and Butler's particular voices lend themselves to this interpretation. The 'act' of perfomativity is not a false face worn for the camera or selective crowds. In fact there is no context-dependent performance of an individual that can meaningfully be described as 'fake', in the way the term is now used to describe reality television stars or the subjective ballet people dance between different social groups. The subject is always expressed through this technical and social web of representation, and does not exist without it.

But a true concept identity is more than the sum of symbolic, technical forces exerting their whims on the individual. Identity is intimately bound with the imaginary - that which comes before the subjectification of the psyche. It is the expression of that identity that must always be technically mediated.