THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF THE SELF CHAPTER 31 Self, Subjectivity, and the Instituted Social Imaginary Lorraine Code

On ne nat pas femme: on le devient. One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. (Beauvoir 1989: 267; 1949: i. 285)

While the Anglo-American (liberal) tradition tends to speak about the self, the French tradition tends to speak about the subject...The concept of self is close ly tied to the notion of property. I speak of my'self. In the English tradition, the notions of self and property are inseparable from the notion of rights....The French tradition, derived most importantly from Descartes's I think, therefore I am, centers on the importance of reason or thought as the foundation of (human) being. Where the self, as property, resembles a thing, the subject, as reason, resembles a grammatical function....in the sentence I think, therefore I am, what is posited is that it is thinking that gives the subject being. (Johnson 1993: 3) end p.715 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved I How a female infant becomes a woman, a self; how she enacts her subjectivity, is no simple matter of growing freely and unfettered into adult womanhood, but rather of learning her placeand continuing throughout her life to find, define, and occupy a placein and within, or on the fringes and in defiance of, a social imaginary where the very possibilities of being and becoming are enshrined. Starting from the quotations I have cited, and reading Johnson's reference to Descartes through a reconstructed Cartesianism, where thinking and grammaticality expand to encompass discursive practices, actions, and relationships constitutive of becoming,1 I will examine some effects of the tension between self and subjectivity in feminist philosophy in the early twenty-first century. Johnson observes: while Descartes saw a coincidence of human

thinking with human being, Lacan sees a disjunction...an illusion of the stable self [that] motivates a lifelong attempt to catch up to the image. In a Foucauldian disciplinary society, she notes, this subject becomes a function of what a given society defines as thinkable (1993: 6). Here I will approach the self-subjectivity tension as productive, not aporetic. The subjectthe knowing subject, the moral-political subjecthas often, and indeed variably along the lines Johnson draws been invisible in philosophy, as the unaddressed and unspecified presence behind or within analyses of knowing, being, and acting. Yet theories of knowledge, ethical theories, political theories all (if tacitly) work from and are constituted in their background assumptions and their substance by sedimented, often merely taken for granted, conceptions of subjectivity that inform their descriptive and normative substance. Thus theories of knowledge for which the knower is merely a vehicle through which information passes on the way to becoming public knowledge work with a thin conception of infinitely replicable knowers who could be anyone or no one; it matters neither way to the substance of the theory or the knowledge produced. Indeed, the worry is that if subjectivity or individuated selves were allowed to matter, objectivity would be compromised. Analogously, ethical theories for which it matters not who the moral agent is, for she or he is a mere placeholder in the formal structure of the moral judgement, work with a thin conception of human selves as interchangeable in the sense that their particularity, their specificity, is of no account. It should be kept out of the picture if moral principles are to be impartially enacted, moral agency is to be impartially performed, and good is to be done. In this chapter, I contest these assumptions, and interrogate the social imaginary that holds them in place. end p.716 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved I propose that a viable feminist analysis has to start from a recognition that selves/subjects are always embodied and situatedalways gendered, raced, and otherwise multiply identified and details of their specificity and positioning are germane to understanding how they are, as human selves/subjects, thrown together and thrown into a complex, rich, challenging, often intractable world, both human and other-than-human. Taking subjectivity into account is crucial for making viable epistemological and moral-political theories and acting according to their principles. 2 It would oversimplify the issue to propose that conceptions of the self in feminist philosophy, whether at the beginning of the second wave or now, in the early twentyfirst century, fall neatly into one of the conceptual frames Barbara Johnson designates: the Anglo-American self or Francophone-derived subjectivity. It would be implausible

to suggest that they, together or separately, offer the only available options or that they have ever been so neatly compartmentalized. But Johnson's division, read with and against Beauvoir's famous dictum, opens a way into reading and evaluating the implications of feminist interpretations of the self in English-language philosophy: it suggests some paths to follow, some threads to trace. The liberal conception of the unified selfideally self-sufficient, self-making, secure in its self-ownership and transparent to itself, striving for individual rational autonomy and defending its rightsfunctioned as a human ideal for many white affluent AngloAmerican feminists of the early second wave. This implicitly male self, derived in large measure from post-Kantian and liberal ethical-political theory, stood as an exemplar of the rights and possibilities feminists who argued for equality sought to achieve. In these strivings, the symmetrical structure of equality tended to disappear from view in arguments for women's equality with men, which they would realize by emulating that very autonomous liberal self and participating in its achievements. That goal has continued, albeit with variations, to play a regulative part in liberal feminist theory into the twenty-first century, and its achievements are not to be discounted. But recognition that such putatively autonomous self-realization has in practice been available only to a very specific class of men in white affluent societies initially took second place to its idealization as a universal human achievement which feminists must strive to realize. Its limited scope notwithstanding, this conception has exerted descriptive and normative force in upholding a (descriptive) exemplar of what human beings can be, and conveying strong (normative) directives as to what they should be. This same liberal political-moral ideal has played a constitutive part in mainstream theories of knowledge, setting standards for how knowing subjects ought to be and how they can and end p.717 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved should know, and enshrining a regulative conception of objectivity, cleansed of situational and subjective specificity. Some version of this idealized masculine self shaped early versions of feminist epistemology, confirming that received conceptions of self-or-subjectivity and ethics, epistemology, political philosophy are reciprocally constitutive and need to be analysed and understood accordingly. Their reciprocal influence is apparent in how the epistemic injunctions a theory of knowledge instantiates attest to deeply sedimented, if often merely tacit, beliefs about the nature and capacities of knowing subjects, as ethical-political injunctions attest to analogous assumptions about human capacities for realizing the oughts that comprise their substance. Despite his invisibility in epistemological and moral-political normative principles, this abstract moral-political-epistemic agent with his capacity for

autonomous, self-sufficient being, doing and knowing is the presumptive self whose intellectual and practical potential is taken for granted in theories and practices where he occupies the subject position. Such theories are tailor-made to fit the presumed scope and limits of his imagined subjectivity. There are numerous points of entry into considering how this self has come to be. Revisiting Johnson's reference to the importance of reason or thought as the foundation of (human) being, I begin by rereading Genevieve Lloyd's landmark text The Man of Reason3 to show how the character ideals she traces from the ancient Greeks through to Simone de Beauvoir were formative in establishing the regulative conceptions of self, subjectivity, and rational agency that have, often tacitly, informed and shaped philosophical thought in the European intellectual tradition. Here I am reading Lloyd's text as a nuanced diagnostic-genealogical investigation whose achievement is less to chart historically evolving necessary and sufficient conditions for thought and/or knowledge in general than to unmask, expose hitherto unthought conditions that have held certain instituted social-epistemic imaginaries in place, with their emblematic figures and governing ideals of subjectivity, objectivity, and agency, even as they have suppressed, discredited, or silenced other contenders. From his emblematic figurations as Lloyd portrays them, there can be no doubt that the man of reasonthe book and the man himselfcount among the pre-eminent enabling conditions for illuminating the intricate interconnections between and among the ideals and enactments of subjectivity, rationality, and hegemonic epistemic character ideals in Western philosophy. Lloyd's approach, charting the reciprocally constitutive effects of theories of knowledge, rationality, morality, and character ideals against one another (within the historically specific then-going imaginary, so to speak), opens the way to exploring a range of issues about the self with which feminists continue to work. end p.718 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved So familiar are feminist and other philosophers, now, with The Man of Reasonthe book and the characterthat it is easy to underestimate one of its most striking innovations. From its title and through its readings of the history of philosophy, the text introduces the thinker, the reasoner, the man who neither figures as an invisible yet interchangeable place-holder in a formula for articulating the claims of reason, nor as just any philosopher who happens to advance ideas that were already there for the taking, for everyone else. Often, translated into today's language, the text opens ways of recognizing him as the knowing subject: indeed as a situated knower4 who, in his thinking and knowing, embedded within the gender-inflected sociality, materiality, values, prohibitions, and possibilities of his time and place, becomes an exemplar for

how reason and knowledge are figured in their inclusions and exclusions; how their regulative principles are produced and reproduced in the reasoning of specific knowers; how it was for a thinker, a reasoning self, to live and know well, then and there, rationally, capably, creatively, responsibly or otherwise. Thus Lloyd highlights the salience of posing a hitherto unthought question: asking who rather than what a thinker is, where asking what preserves mere place-holder status, while asking who catches more of that self, that knowing subject, in a sense I owe to Adriana Cavarero, who wryly observes: Philosophers themselvesservants of the universalare the ones who teach us that the knowledge of Man requires that the particularity of each one, the uniqueness of human existence, be unknowable...What Man is can be known and defined, as Aristotle assures us; who Socrates is, instead, eludes the parameters of knowledge as science, it eludes the truth of the episteme. (2000: 9) I am suggesting that a sometimes tacit, but always insistent who? question animates Lloyd's encounters with the men (and occasional women) of reason whose works frame her inquiry. Her readings engage with the particularities, the uniqueness, and the commonalities of human selves and subjectivities in and for their time and place, in ways that are crucial to feminist and other post-colonial projects, even as they resist and seek to counter an implausible individualism that has been the hallmark of postCartesian, post-Kantian philosophy. These readings can be enlisted, also, to infuse moments of recognition that afford standpoint and other situated knowledge projects a point of entry.5 As Lloyd shows, the symbolisms and metaphorics that hold the man of reason in place accomplish their inclusions and exclusions in repudiations of the feminine, tacitly hypostasized as a what, if indeed it is thought at all. To cite just two passages: The obstacles to female cultivation of Reason spring to a large extent from the fact that our ideals of Reason have historically incorporated an exclusion of the end p.719 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved feminine, and that femininity itself has been partly constituted through such processes of exclusion (p. xix); The metaphors do not merely express conceptual points about the relations between knowledge and its objects. They give a male content to what it is to be a good knower (p. 17). The point is as normative in its force as it is descriptive in its formulation. Woman cannot simply enter the domain of reason and expect to find a place there.

In thus underscoring the maleness of reason throughout historically evolving conceptions of masculinity and rationality, Lloyd anticipates her readings of Michle Le Duff's insistence that there is no intellectual activity that is not grounded in an imaginary (2003: p. xvi). The power of an instituted imaginary to legitimate or silence the workings of reason plays a central part in the diagnostic-genealogical investigations The Man of Reason initiates: effects which Lloyd pursues as an unthought6 in subsequent writings. She observes: features of the malefemale distinction as it operated in their cultural context became part and parcel of understanding what it is to be rational. Those assumptions about relations between the sexes were thus an unthought element in the philosophical imaginary that can now be unmasked (Lloyd 2000b: 42; emphasis original). Here I am rereading The Man of Reason alongside figurations of the repudiated feminine in Le Duff's The Sex of Knowing, to emphasize how femininity, female subjectivity, becoming woman, in its various modalities has been constituted, historically, in processes of exclusion. The issue (recalling Cavarero) is not about what Woman is in her epistemic elusiveness, but about who the women were/are who have sought, in the particularity of their circumstances and relationshipsas situated would-be thinking and acting subjectsto negotiate possibilities of intellectual subjectivity and agency within an imaginary that rendered them universal Man's complement: the second sex. Women's uneasy positioning in the hegemonic imaginary, their need to conduct themselves defiantly (Le Duff cites the virago and bluestocking), or with a compromised docility despite their intellectual prowess, confirms the imaginary in its tenacity. Discoveries of forgotten intellectual women, or add women and stir techniques without systemic, structural analysis, can do no more than introduce token women into an instituted imaginary amply equipped to downgrade the feminine as merely complementary...to male norms of human excellence (L loyd 1994: 104), or to absorb them into masculine models of viable selfhood/subjectivity. But reading such figures, as Lloyd and Le Duff variously do, within lived implications of the social imaginary where gendered ideals of reason prevail, exposes lacunae in its putative seamlessness, reveals its structural flaws and its contingency, shows how a society living under its sway is incongruous with itself, with scant reason for self-satisfaction. Such readings prepare the way for what Cornelius Castoriadis (1994) end p.720 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved calls an instituting social imaginary: a vehicle of radical social critique which, albeit gradually, slowly, can begin to unsettle the hegemony of the old. (Recall Michel Foucault, Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary: 1977: 139.)

What spaces, then, do the temporally-historically specific analyses Lloyd develops open for rethinking how selves/subjectivities have participated in the making of objectivity? How have the figures who hover in the shadows, unthought behind their thought which passes untouched through their minds, configured philosophical projects? How does thinking with them, in their circumstances, reconfigure such projects, where the who? may also be fictional, as in Lloyd's (2000 a: 11617) reading of the character Pat Barker models on Siegfried Sassoon or of Virginia Woolf's Katherine Hilbery with her secret, unfeminine, passion for mathematics (Lloyd 1994: 74)? In Lloyd's work, the thinking, the struggles of historical and fictional figures are quite particularly theirs and of their time and place; yet she shows, with consummate subtlety, how their ways of responding to, embracing, railing against, stoically accepting, or drawing scarcely perceptible resources from their situations contribute to engaging thoughtfully with female subjectivity in our time, and to opening space for deconstructing the grammatical structures of which the man of reason is the uncontested subject. That said, it is crucial to recall that reason as it has infused conceptions of self and subjectivity in Western philosophy and culture has not instantiated a generic masculinity, any more than it has excluded a generic femininity. Feminists and other Others have amply demonstrated the derivation of that idealized masculine self from the circumstances of an elite race, class, and otherwise privileged group of Western men who were free to act and judge as they did. Although the feminine/masculine division Lloyd traces through the history of Western philosophy unifies femininity and masculinity along lines other post-colonial theorists would contest, and rightly so, this homogeneity is a consequence of her chosen domain: the texts that comprise the Western philosophical canon. Hence her analysis attests, also, to the local character of hegemonic Reason and to its connections with specific conceptions of self, subjectivity, and practical-political circumstances. It is an exemplary instance of local inquiry, peculiar to the symbolic events that have shaped Western philosophy and to their trickle-down social-political effects.7 Yet her analyses of the gendered unthought open spaces for revisiting other erasures and exclusions integral to orthodox ethics and epistemology: prohibitions that block a range of genealogical routes toward understanding situated gendered, raced, class, and other specificity-informed constructions of self, subjectivity, knowledge, and imagination. end p.721 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Reason, then, is discursively constructed in symbols and metaphors that shape and are shaped by historically, culturally dominant ideals of masculinity. Its association with ideal masculinity stakes out a rational domain inaccessible, or accessible only uneasily,

to those whose positionings have not fostered the characteristics of ideal masculinity. Well into the late twentieth century, and for many white Western philosophers still in the twenty-first century, the abstract autonomous rational agent has stood as the social ideal of mature, effective human selfhood and citizenship, just as he has stood as the hero of philosophical moral, political, and epistemological discourse: the personmore accurately, the manwhose conduct and attributes are exemplary, descriptively and normatively, for establishing standards of epistemic, moral, social, and political conduct and agency. He is the invisible subject whose presumptively generic modes of being give content to dominant conceptions of subjectivity and self: of the individual, self-sufficient abstract masculinity enacted by homo economicus together with the universal rationality that has informed the epistemologies of mastery that have grounded the rise of scientific supremacy, the nation-state, and the liberal individual who is the principal character in all of their enactments. Hence it is not surprising that feminists of both the first and the second waves, perceiving his successes, should extol and seek to emulate these seemingly quintessential human achievements from which they had systematically, systemically, and conceptually been excluded. From Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Harriet Taylor through to the initially path-breaking work of Carol Gilligan and others in the early years of secondwave feminism, variations on the eighteenth-century liberal conception of the autonomous self prevailed as the model of self-realization many white Anglo-American feminists sought likewise to achieve. Gilligan's research stands as a pivotal moment in thinking about feminism and the self in the USA. Although it was less influential in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the French tradition, in the 1980s and 1990s its effects were path -breaking for white liberal North American feminists' rethinking of autonomy's veneration as a mark of rational, moral maturity and hence as an overarching ideal of human subjectivity. A psychologist working with Lawrence Kohlberg's scale for measuring developmental stages toward moral maturity, Gilligan was puzzled to find that female subjects, both children and young adults, tended to score consistently lower than male subjects. Hence her principal contribution to the deconstruction of autonomous subjectivity was to intervene at the level of what philosophers of science would see as the context of discovery. Contesting the universal validity and gender-neutrality of the scale itself and thence also the evidence-filtering assumptions that informed it, she reread the scores to demonstrate the contingency of deeply entrenched psychological and more widespread social convictions that achieved, detached autonomy is the natural telos of generic human maturation. From her research, the regulative function of autonomycentred moral decisions emerges as a product of an instituted social end p.722

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved imaginaryof local cultural values, imagery, and ideologies which is specific to its time and place, and could have been otherwise. Gilligan found, in effect, that the girl children and young female adults in the groups she studied had been elaborately socialized toward more collaborative, dialogic, second person modes of cooperative interacti on and deliberation than their male counterparts; hence that detached, putatively autonomous, and monologic ways of dealing with complex dilemmas and situations were often not, for them, self-evidently right or indeed intelligible. Frequently, their styles of deliberation and judgement departed from both utilitarian and Kantian models of impartial, detached distancing to move toward a pattern akin to Aristotelian practical reasoning, where the concern is less with formal principles or consequences, and more with the implications and effects of certain exemplary conduct, ways of thinking, and motives, both for those to whom one is accountable and who are affected by or implicated in these actions, and for oneself. To discern these implications, a moral agent has to position her- or himself critically within a situation, in relation to as many of its aspects as he or she can discern, so as to take imaginative account of its multiple implications while neither erasing nor paralysing her capacity to act. Such stances attest to a conception of self and agency that diverges markedly from the detached deliberative self required of an orthodox Kantian or utilitarian. Although Gilligan does not take her analysis in this direction, such a stance may also, as Simone de Beauvoir suggests, allow feminists and others to acknowledge and work with an irreducible ambiguity...[that] characterizes human existence...which demands a response through concrete human actions...that can in no way dispel or diminish the ambiguity, but which allow us to live this ambiguity in meaningful ways'.8 It is my sense that a cultivated and constantly renewed capacity to live the ambiguities of human existence is integral to what Johnson calls the thinking that gives the subject being; nor need it reduce to pernicious relativism or to unprincipled, casual decision-making. But this thought anticipates a direction my discussion will take. Although Gilligan's analyses address moral deliberation and have thus been particularly relevant for feminist ethics and its attendant-constitutive conceptions of the self, they are analogously pertinent to issues of knowledge, epistemology, styles of reasoning as these have also, in the philosophical mainstream, worked with a conception (again often merely tacit, invisible) of an infinitely replicable self/knowing subject who could be everyone and no one, details of whose specificity are, can, and should be irrelevant to knowledge properly so called. Such an autonomous knower endeavours to transcend the specificities of situation, circumstance, and sociality to

arrive at purely objective, neutral, and detached knowledge claims verifiable or falsifable by anyone in the same (controlled) situation. Feminist end p.723 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved epistemology in its various modalities and to varying degrees aims to demonstrate that taking subjectivity and epistemic situation into account in making, evaluating, and circulating knowledge is integral to making available a wider range of conditions for the possibility of knowledge than the formalisms of the tradition allow, and exposing the structures of dominance and subjugation that tell for or against uptake in epistemic circumstances. In these endeavours, analogously to feminist ethics and political theory, it eschews the conception of the autonomous impersonal knower for a more complex analysis of the subjectivities at work in the construction and circulation of knowledge. Annette Baier's thinking of persons as second persons initiates a radical reconception of self and subjectivity in Anglo-American philosophy, consonant to some degree with Gilligan's view. Baier famously writes: A person, perhaps, is best seen as one who was long enough dependent upon other persons to acquire the essential arts of personhood. Persons essentially are second persons.9 Her claim is as significant for epistemic as for moral agency: indeed in knowing as in acting the good and hopeful aspects of our condition, as much as the evils, s tem from the fact of interdependence (1985: 231). For Baier, human selves/subjectivities are social all the way down: philosophical analyses that suppress, deny, and disdain interdependence in favour of an isolated, detached individualism rely on conceptions of the self so remote from how human beings are or can be that their capacity to foster intelligibility is seriously truncated. Yet it is also worth noting that second personhood, for Baier, is no saccharine, cloyingly good conception of dyadic hum an togetherness: hers is a realistic challenge to the overarching esteem accorded to abstract individualism in the Anglo-American tradition, together with a plea for recognition of how even the purest autonomous subjectivity and the most impure anti -social self is realized only in circumstances of human and circumstantial interdependence, whether benign or malign. Her second-person analysis opens the way toward conceptions of relational autonomy that have come to occupy a central place in feminist ethics.10 It paves the way, too, for work in social epistemology that acknowledges and reclaims the significance of testimony in much of what we come to know. 11 While both of these points may appear to be more descriptive than normative, their normative significance is far-reaching if theories of knowledge and action are to yield principles realizable by real knowers-doers in real circumstances. Admittedly, they sacrifice a level of ideality

that it has been philosophers' aim to articulate; but that loss is compensated by an enhanced capacity to address situation-specific issues that instantiate a more plausible end p.724 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved conception of epistemic agency than has been on offer from formal epistemology and ethics. In social epistemology, the bare fact of epistemic interdependence works to contest the disdain for testimony produced by the presumed self-reliance, self-sufficiency of the subject in classical empiricist-positivist theories of knowledge. Elizabeth Fricker aptly observes: one may question whether the supposed ideal figure of the autonomous knower, who refuses ever to trustingly accept another's testimony, a fortiori will never allow her own judgement to be corrected by another's, is really such an ideal after all (2006: 239). The question highlights the urgency of reconceiving the epistemic and ethical self/subject presupposed in Anglo-American philosophical analysis, particularly through the twentieth century, if epistemology is to address and adjudicate the concerns of real knowers. It pushes practices of taking subjectivity into account toward recognizing how the ideal self-protecting buffered self of modernity (to borrow Genevieve Lloyd's apt phrase12) has in fact blocked philosophical inquiry into the who who has eluded the truth of the episteme (recalling Cavarero) and in consequence has circumscribed the scope, the potential, of the episteme itself. Challenges to the orthodox conception of ethical subjectivity such as Gilligan and others propose, and to the epistemic subject such as feminist and anti-racist socialnaturalized epistemology propose, highlight the inadequacy of these attenuated conceptions of self to engage with the questions a viable philosophical analysis that starts from real-world situations has to address. Elizabeth Fricker's plea for testimony acknowledges as much. Returning, then, to Barbara Johnson's contrast, it is worth noting that Beauvoir, a philosopher in the French tradition whose influence in feminist thinking about self and subjectivity has been profound, works with interdependence as a given of human being in the world. In The Ethics of Ambiguity through The Second Sex and beyond she sustains the position that no existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. It appeals to the existence of others (1976: 67). The thought persists, with no assumption that such appeals are presumptively benign: the Othering that represents woman as the second sex results, also, from the existence of others as a freedom [that] defines my situation and is even the con dition of my own freedom (1976: 91). Beauvoir's account of the transition in her thought from individualism to a quintessentially social conception of self is illuminating for my argument here. In The

Prime of Life, reflecting on the position she had taken in Pyrrhus and Cinas, she writes: end p.725 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved I do not disapprove of my anxiety to provide existentialist morals with a material content; the annoying thing was to be enmeshed with individualism still, at the very moment I thought I had escaped it. An individual, I thought, only receives a human dimension by recognizing the existence of others. Yet, in my essay, coexistence appears as a sort of accident that each individual should somehow surmount; he should begin by hammering out his project in a solitary state, and only then ask the mass of mankind to endorse its validity. In truth, society has been all about me from the day of my birth; it is in the bosom of that society...that all my personal decisions must be formed. (1962: 54950) This acknowledgement of the ineluctable sociality of human lives (which need not, I think, be read as question-begging) exposes the implausibility of autonomous subjectivity as an overriding ideal or an achievement. II In her Introduction. to The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1992 from which I quote at the beginning of this essay, Barbara Johnson writes that contributors to the Freedom and Interpretation lecture series were invited to consider the consequences of the deconstruction of the self for the liberal tradition, to think about whether the self as construed by the liberal tradition still exist[s], and if it does not, whose human rights are we [ = we Amnesty activists] defending? (1993: 2). They were to address an apparent conflict, then, between the defence of human rights at the core of Amnesty International's mandate, and postmodern and other deconstructions of humanistic subjectivity which contest the very idea of the unified, autonomous, self-reliant rightsbearing self whom rights talk commonly presupposes, and thus of a moral -political agent responsible for respecting or entitled to claim those rights, or positioned to make reparation for violating them. Because, as I have noted, the self of the liberalEnlightenment moral-political tradition is the self-same self who is the taken-forgranted knowing subject in orthodox Anglo-American theories of knowledge; and because fulfilling its own mandate requires Amnesty to know, responsibly and well, the persons for whom and the situations in which it intervenes, these issues are as epistemologically significant as they are morally and politically urgent. They pose a range of equally complex questions about the intricacies of situated epistemic subjectivity: of subjects knowing and subjects known, whose epistemological implications I explore more fully in Ecological Thinking (2006a). In revisiting them my

intention is to underscore the importance of recognizing that, continuous with the liberal self-conceptions that inform her research, a tacit assumption persists in Gilligan's work that the selves whose moral decision-making she studies are situated in reasonably normal, end p.726 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved polite circumstances and lives. The Amnesty question stands as a reminder that this assumption, which circumscribes the reach of her conception of self, is open to interrogation. As influential as Gilligan's In a Different Voice was for white liberal feminists of the 1980s who were working with conceptions of the self as construed by the liberal tradition was Jean Baker Miller's Toward a New Psychology of Women (1976) in which, contributors to a 2008 symposium on her work contend, Miller sought to challenge the emphasis that developmental models of psychology placed on separateness, power, and hierarchy, replacing them with a model that emphasized mutual respect and the building of community. 13 Contributors to the symposium show that Miller's contribution to feminist theories of the self is at once path-breaking and contentious: I am reading it as forming a bridge between fixed assumptions about the liberal self and the implications of its putative deconstruction. Although Miller's analysis remains firmly within the liberal tradition, she begins to contest the implicit individualism of its focus on the patriarchal construction of women's identities, opening that analysis out to connect i dentity to women's work orientations, as Ada Hurtado (2008: 344) notes. Despite stark personal and academic differences from Miller, especially with respect to her failure to take class, race, or sexual orientation into account, Hurtado commends Miller's courage in breaking away from an established model of female subjectivity to open space for a method of relational dovetailing in intellectual production that bypasses the destructive effects of adversarial knowledge production (ibid. 342). Even in dissociating her own stance from the white liberal middle-class position that informs Miller's work, Hurtado evinces respect for its riskiness in its time and place in concentrating on women's work orientations, through which, as she reads it, it foreshadows the work of African American feminists who urge us to adopt multiple epistemologies to fully grasp the experiences of African American women in particular and of women in general...to expand our definitions of desirable subjectivities and our ways of relating to others (ibid. 344). Other contributors to the symposium are less kindly disposed. To cite a second example by way of moving further toward the deconstruction of the self, Catriona Macleod (2008: 348) deplores Miller's narrow model of the self which leads to a narrow politics based on the heterosexual relationship with the nuclear family as

backdrop, and her naivety around the temporary nature of some inequalities. This self is, if implicitly, a white middle-class North American woman for whom gender inequities are the principal social disparities with which she struggles, and most of whose struggles take the form of self-directed or therapy-assisted striving for individual self-realization in a social world where such a possibility has been open only to men, also presumptively white, and middle-class. Macleod is critical of a end p.727 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved conception of self that sees gender differences as the fundamental human differences, given that it homogenizes women and thus fails, as South African and other not-white, not-American feminists must, to see the multiplicity of gender relations (ibid. 350), while separating the self from the activities in which the person engages (ibid. 351), which, by implication, are constitutive of self and subjectivity. Feminist conceptions of self that emerge out of women's engagement in national liberation struggles (ibid. 355) require an analysis sensitive to a complex history of social circumstances which are by no means captured byor indeed visible inthe polite pictures of liberal democratic society within which Miller's women strive to achieve authentic selves and to fulfill their needs. Miller's work does not simply echo Gilligan's, but in the exclusions it effects, it tacitly poses the very question Amnesty poses, if from a different direction. Both in what it includes that was absent from previously dominant North American conceptions of the self, and in what it excludes, it shows that theories of the liberal self are, in effect, self-defeating. I base this claim, in part, on the aggregation, the reification effected by the conception of subjectivity they enact: a conception which can adequately be addressed only piecemeal and in medias res, by appealing to who and not merely what such a subject is, and to how it is in its relationships and actions. I base it also, in part, on how this self-contained human subject appears to be devoid of feeling, affect perhaps owing to its origins, as Lloyd depicts them, in a conceptual frame for which feeling was so particular, and indeed also so irrational, as to elude philosophical analysis. Hence one must ask what, then, becomes of the self as vulnerable, the self as multiple, the self as rejoicing or suffering, the self as affiliative, the self as ecological? These are only some of the modalities missing from liberal conceptions of the self as property: as mine alone. The self in the liberal theories I have discussed is depicted with a certain quotidian integrity, in bland, affectless circumstances which are rarely specified. It is as if this self movesand can readily movethrough its life as a self-contained whole, untouched in its salient ontological and ethical-epistemological aspects by experiences and

circumstances that would, in other conceptual frameworks, be recognized as constitutive of the very possibility of the episteme and of the who who achieves selfhood/subjectivity within its purview. Because situations make different aspects of subjectivity possible while thwarting others, the partiality of presumptively unfettered, benignly rational selfhood has to be contested in situations and analyses where none of these settled assumptions can be assumed to hold fast. Selves are never not situated, nor are they presumptively impervious to the vagaries of situation and circumstance, whose effects both benign and malign are constitutive of the scope and limits of self-realization, subjectivity, and agency. Recall Johnson's observation that for Foucault, the subject becomes a function of what a given society defines as thinkable (1993: 6). Examples come readily to mind: the unthinkability of a woman voting, attending university, gaining a Ph.D., counting as a reliable witness; of a black man or woman being elected president of the USA, end p.728 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved claiming professional status, gaining a Ph.D., also counting as a reliable witness. Patricia Williams observes: I could not but wonder...what it would take to make my experience verifiable. The testimony of an independent white bystander?14 And Charles Mills notes: During slavery, blacks were generally denied the right to testify against whites, because they were not seen as credible witnesses (2007: 32). These are just some of the modalities of subjectivity certain given modern societies have defined as unthinkable. The examples recall Miranda Fricker's observation, in Epistemic Injustice, to the effect that in acts of testimonial injustice, where a putative knower's testimony is discounted, contradicted, or discredited because of who he or she is, that person is harmed in her/his very sense of self; is treated as less than a full epistemic subject (2007: 145). The capacity of systemic events of this kind to destabilize a person's sense of self in ways that liberal conceptions of unfettered autonomy and injunctions about pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps fail to address in their full ontologicalas well as moral and politicalimplications is well known, and cannot justifiedly be dismissed. Fricker notes, when the driving prejudicial stereotype involves the idea that the social type in question is humanly lesser [as a woman, a black, a member of a marginalized class or group]...the dimension of degradation qua human being is not simply symbolic; rather it is a literal part of the core epistemic insult (ibid. 45). Testimonial injustice, Fricker concludes, denies one access to what originally furnishes status as a knower...[it] can carry a symbolic weight to the effect that the speaker is less than a full epistemic subject (ibid. 145). These are some of the ontological implications of going against the grain of what a given society defines as thinkable.

Even in theories about the self as property, in the English tradition, the body figures (implausibly) as a standardized, generic body; and the Cartesian thinking thing maintains a principled distance from physicality and, a fortiori, from emotion and feeling. Thus it is as incongruous and as politically immobilizing, I suggest, to conceive of the self as property as it is to represent thinking as the practice that gives the subject being. By contrast, the ecological subject, who is the central protagonist in Ecological Thinking, is both more and other than a rights-bearing thinker, even though it is both of these as well. It is, as Annette Baier (1995: 316), following Montaigne, puts it, marvellously corporeal, ineluctably embodied: its spatially and temporally situated corporeality are as constitutive of the modalities of its being as are its thinking, feeling, knowing, and other inner processes. Barbara Johnson's question about whether the self of the liberal tradition (the morally and epistemically autonomous bearer of rights, the rational self-conscious agent, and thence the orthodox empiricist knower) still exists is question-begging in its assumption that he has ever been more than a fictive creature and an end p.729 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved implausible fiction at that. Thus Elizabeth Fricker wonders in the remark I cite earlier whether the supposedly ideal figure of the autonomous knower is a worthy ideal after all, epistemologically, ontologically, or morally. In my view, he has existed only in narrowly conceived theoretical places, abstracted and isolated from the exigencies, vulnerabilities, and multiple vagaries of human lives. In philosophical-political theory, he has been presumptively male, white, privileged, able-bodied, articulate, and educated, buffered against the inconvenient practical implications of corporeality, and insulated against having to participate in events that obtrude insistently in everyday matters of vulnerability and trust, and/or in trauma and crisis. The deconstruction of the self in postmodern thought is matched if not exceeded by ordinary and extraordinary contestations of the very possibility of integrated subjectivity and self-ownership, occurring routinely below the polite surface of the liberal tradition, for which autonomous man is emblematic of everything humanly admirable, and personal-social-material-ecological circumstances are uniformly so benign as to require no mention in analyses of rights-enabling or thwarting projects. In short, Amnesty's question confines the knowings it problematizes to deconstructions and fragmentations of selves more abstractly theoretical, less experientially basic than the climate of oppression, torture, abuse, and rape its mandate requires it to address, where victims/survivors and others who attempt to know them and their circumstances well must deal with systemic assaults on the self

far more radical than theoretical deconstruction, and people are more vulnerable than autonomous man ever seems to be. Everyday vulnerability and extraordinary experiences of trauma make owning one's capacities, emotions, and actions less matter-of-course than the liberal self-sufficient self-as-property assumes; yet, phenomenologically, such experiences are as central to human being as autonomy. Thus, for example, discussing Simone de Beauvoir's conflicted political engagement in the case of Djamila Boupacha, a young Muslim woman and rape victim of the Algerian war, Sonia Kruks aptly observes: In the face of her privileges, Beauvoir addresses questions about the responsibility and complicity of a situated self, a self that is not autonomous and that makes decisions while dwelling in a world not fully of its own making (2005: 195; see also Kruks 2001). The larger idea, consonant with Johnson's point about what a given society defines as thinkable, is that our selves are not really our own, and never so unequivocally of our own making as the liberal tradition supposes. Nor, I want to propose, are they enabled or confined only by conditions of what is thinkable, knowable, for again, on such an assumption, selves as feeling, as confident and vulnerable, as joyous or sorrowing, as loving or hating, are erased from the conceptual frame, where such experiences are not merely accretions to an underlying self-in-neutral, but are constitutive of who and how it is. Such would seem to be Sandra Bartky's worry when she expresses regrets that few theorists have examined closely enough the emotional dimension that is part of the search for better cognitions or the affective taste of the kinds of end p.730 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved intersubjectivity that can build political solidarities (1997: 180). Bartky reminds her readers, as does the idea that thinking gives the subject being, that so narrow an emphasis on rationality, on cognition, produces a reductive, diminished conception of human selves in its erasure of the affective repertoire as essential to intersubjective engagement as to the political activism that is at the core of feminist work. The goal, in her view, is not disengaged, abstract, epistemic self-reliance but rather a knowing that transforms the self who knows, a knowing that brings into being new sympathies, new affects as well as new cognitions and new forms of intersubjectivity. The demand, in a word, is for a knowing that has a particular affective taste (ibid. 179). Such a demand is consonant, I suggest, with Baier's claim that persons are essentially second persons even as it moves that idea into a phenomenological register where its lived potential is more fully apparent. Often, as for the Amnesty essayists, it is neither the self as one-time rights bearer nor the self as theoretically dispersed who pushes most urgently at the boundaries of received, objectivist knowledge, but the embodied, injured subject, struggling to

construct or reconstruct a liveable way of being out of systemic oppression, grief, trauma, or despair. Its dispersal puts the affective-imaginative self-certainties of would-be (humanistic) knowers into question just when those putatively more stable selves encounter urgent demands to maintain a constancy that can allow them to know well enough to act responsibly, intelligently, effectively. Suppose, then, inquiry into feminist conceptions of self and subjectivity were to start from the question: how would it be to enter theory and practice from a place where human subjects are imagined not as rational, self-sufficient agents, whose prototype is the Enlightenment man of reason, but as vulnerable creatures who can live their vulnerabilities well only in climates of recognition, mutual responsibility, and trust? How could vulnerability specific vulnerabilitiesclaim the attention that contortions around preserving an overblown autonomy ideal have claimed in the hegemonic social imaginary of the Western world, to the peril of the vulnerable: of all of us? Prompted, I believe, by just such questions, Debra Bergoffen in her article February 22, 2001: Toward a Politics of the Vulnerable Body,15 revisits the 2001 UN war crimes trial at The Hague, where three Bosnian soldiers were found guilty of crimes against humanity for raping and torturing Muslim women and girls. For Bergoffen The Hague decision is a landmark event whose pronouncements could generate the momentum to unsettle the social imaginary in which autonomous man, invulnerable, transparent, and infinitely replicable, has been the main player. She reads the court's judgment that women have a basic human right to sexual integrity as initiating a linguistic practice with the capacity to transform women's vulnerability from a symbol of men's power to a sign of our shared humanity...[as] inaugurating end p.731 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved a politics of the vulnerable body which challenges current understandings of evil, war crimes, and crimes against humanity (2006: 11). Whether or not these hopes are realizable, they extend beyond the extremity of separate or collective acts of rape, murder, and sexual violence to require theorists to engage at the level of the instituted social imaginary that holds them in place and often condones these acts by casting them as ordinary events in women's lives, to be evaluated according to what a woman has or has not asked for. The Hague decision, Bergoffen argues, shows that we cannot forget tha t human bodies are abused when their intentionalities, specifically the intentionalities of integrity, are violated (2003: 121). So dramatic a move away from equating self integrity with the integrity of the unmarked autonomous self (ibid. 127) points t oward a breakthrough that could denaturalize male violence against women, which is too

often naturalized as a dominant social -structural effect of inflated figurations of autonomy, derived from autonomous man's normative neutral body. (Recall Susan Brison's ironic reminder that the every -dayness of sexual violence...leads many to think that male violence against women is natural; even though they simultaneously manage to deny that it really exists: 1993: 7; my emphasis; also see Brison 2002.) It is here, if Bergoffen's idea is plausible, that complacent beliefs need to be dislodged from their illusory self-certainty: beliefs in the orderliness of a society so privileged as to enable (some of) its citizens to imagine violence and other unfortunate eventsas mere blemishes on an otherwise unsullied social surface. Such beliefs affirm the tenacity of the liberal model with the polite imaginings integral to its standard repertoire; and traumatic, albeit ordinary, events of sexual violence in women's lives count merely as extraordinary for an imaginary nourished to uphold such expectations, which relegate evidence of women's (and other Others') vulnerability to the aberrant, to places where a woman may have asked for it in failing to play by the rules. An ecology of incredulity maps standard responses to such episodes, sustaining a dream of andro-centred safety, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. It conceals a whole fabric of ignorance. The disruption The Hague court initiates works to interrogate a complex of moral, ontological, legal, and other social-structural significations, thereby unsettling Western philosophy's self-presentation as a neutral, universally applicable, yet detached and dislocated inquiry. Sonia Kruks observes: To exist is to be one's body; and this is to be a body -subject, or a sentient subject, and not the rational, autonomous consciousness so central to the Western tradition....consciousness and materiality, subjectivity and the world of things are coextensive and co-constitutive. Such a relationship may be experienced as supportive and affirming of the self, but also as threatening and negating. (Kruks 2007: 30) Kruks reminds us that structurally/phenomenologically a focus on vulnerability is always already there in the Lebenswelt: it would require no argument to accord it end p.732 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved recognition were it not for the overweening power of liberalism's autonomy obsession, also naturalized, which makes working toward a politics of the vulnerable body more onerous than it need be. Anglo-American philosophy's principled disdain for the material-corporeal specificities of human lives is an intransigent theoretical obstacle, consequent on and constantly reinforcing this excessive veneration of autonomy. In received social-political and legal discourse, that disdain is directed to experiential stories, anecdotal evidencederogatory labels reserved for testimonyand

commonly discredited as special interest pleading. Thus, orthodox epistemology and moral-political theory work to conceal practices and processes such as rape and other egregious crimes against humanitycasting them as deviant episodic disturbances and thence discrediting their tellers as unreliable witnesses to the stories of their own lives. Because the autonomy-of-reason presumption sustains a politics of unknowing around events about which an affluent white Western public cannot bear too much truth, creating spaces where The Hague decision might animate reconfigurations of deliberation, democratic principles, and our lives is neither an easy nor a conflict-free endeavour. But general interest in these and other war crimes and harms against persons is relatively thin on the ground, deflected, paradoxically, by the very ordinariness and extraordinariness together in which violent acts in other places tend, for white Western folk, to be shrouded (ordinary because that is just how people in those places act; extraordinary because it is so outrageous that we cannot imagine anything of that order happening here, so we need not think about it). In her essay The Question of Social Transformation, Judith Butler declares that keeping our notion of the human open to a future articulation...[is] essential to the project of a critical international human rights discourse and politics'. She rereads her own Gender Trouble to address sexual difference in its ontological, political, ethical, and oppressive dimensions, cautioning her readers that taking entrenched modalities of human intelligibility for granted can result in failure to think criticallyand ethicallyabout the consequential ways that the human is being produced, reproduced, deproduced. She cannot imagine a responsible ethics or theory of social transformation operating without such critical inquiry (2004: 222). Questions about who and what counts as real, Butler reminds her readers, are questions about knowledge and power, for power dissimulates as ontology (ibid. 215). Issues of gender dysphoria prompt her analyses: questions of how, in regimes of heteronormativity, refusals of gender norms expose the refusers to losing their job, home, the prospects for desire, or for life (ibid. 214). In societies governed by such norms, ontological congruityindeed, recognition as realis achievable only through conformity: Hence, for example, the ways in which women are said to know or to be known are already orchestrated by power precisely at that moment in which the terms of acceptable categorization are instituted (ibi d. 215). end p.733 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved Butler's questions are not Bergoffen's; but their analyses are mutually illuminating. Butler takes some inspiration from Cavarero who, in work that also accords a central place to recognition, departs from a Kantian emphasis on an autonomous, rightsbearing I to focus instead on an Arendtian-derived politics of the who in o rder to

establish a relational politics...in which the exposure and vulnerability of the other makes a primary ethical claim upon me. For Cavarero, in Butler's reading, we are beings who are, of necessity, exposed to one another in our vulnerability and singularity....[O]ur political situation...consists in part in learning how best to handle and to honorthis constant and necessary exposure (Butler 2005: 312). Cavarero's emphasis on natality (drawn from Hannah Arendt) is a reminder to her readers that recognizing ourselves as beings who are exposed to one another is a reminder that we come as vulnerable creatures into a world where autonomy is held up as a character achievement realized in separating and dissociating itself from that vulnerability: an overcoming, perhaps something of a promise, that encourages and rewards denials of vulnerability. One way to pursue the thrown-ness metaphor, then, is to acknowledge that we come into the world as fragile creatures, given over into each other's keeping. Autonomy-driven lives are forever involved in not just overcoming this fragility which would indeed in some of its modalities be a worthy projectbut in denying it, attempting to avoid accommodating it within the other psychic and social structures that determine those lives: withdrawing from that primordial keeping and holding. Hence the pertinence of Cavarero's reminder of how every existent, from its birth, is exposed. None of this is simple. Butler's reference to exposure counts also as a reminder that bringing women's vulnerabilities into focus imports its own risks. Structurally, vulnerability acknowledged carries a certain shame: another ontological effect of an autonomy-veneration for which human subjects are dispassionate creatures, moved neither by vulnerabilities nor by pleasures and desires. Hence it runs the risk of pathologizing women's bodies and lives, opening the doors to a new paternalism. How could this danger be countered? For a start, engaging with these issues requires eschewing any sense that vulnerability is either essential (to women or other Others) or merely incidental. It is a variably distributed, structural effect of an adulation of autonomy which is ultimately oppressive; a pervasive mode of human complexity, integralif variouslyto living in a fragmented, multiply signifying world. We are remarkably alike, and radically different, in our vulnerabilities. But there are precedents. For feminists the discourse of care, despite its multiple shortcomings, offers a distant analogy: an outgrowth of Gilligan's developmental psychology that travelled into ontology, morality, ethics, politics, critical legal theory, and further. As that discourse has struggledwith partial successto affirm what was best in it, to defuse the subservient connotations that colour it, so vulnerability assumed (in Beauvoir's sense) requires strategies for defusing end p.734 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2011. All Rights Reserved

associations of shame, abjection, and other attendant pathologies. But it cannot develop them honourably without attending to a still greater risk: namely, that knowing the structural implications of (an)other(s) vulnerability can be as dangerous as it is affirming. No politics of the vulnerable body can effect social transformation(s) without bringing vulnerabilities in their specificity before the public eye neither papering them over nor otherwise concealing them if neither in sensationalism, nor merely anecdotally. Somehow, the process requires narrating vulnerability into being; paradoxically, making it no longer exceptional while exposing the outrageousness of its particularity. But the negotiations are delicate; not least because vulnerabilities exposedknowncan generate the ironic effect of making the vulnerable more vulnerable still, their weaknesses exposed, their soft spots available for damage. So the conundrum, which I have merely introduced, is how to think well within ecologies of vulnerability acknowledged, held in trust, with the responsibilities such practices must also assume: how to work toward a renewing social imaginary that pivots upon human vulnerability and hierarchies of intelligibility, while abandoning the (illusory) security promised by autonomy assumptions, and avoiding exposing vulnerabilities to greater abuse. References Baier, A. (1985). Postures of the Mind: Essays on Minds and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). (1995). Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Bartky, S. (1997). Sympathy and Solidarity: On a Tightrope with Scheler, in Di ana Meyers (ed.), Feminists Rethink the Self (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press), 17796.

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