Preprint version of Theorizing the Subject

TO DO: LINKS TO ONLINE SITES; DE BEAUVOIR DISCUSSION; SUMMARY REDONE; RECHECK SUGGESTIONS FROM FIRST READER Theorizing the Subject Sidonie Smith Summary Ever since the Greek philosophers and fabulists pondered the question “What is Man?” inquiries into the concept of the subject have troubled humanists, eventuating in fierce debates and weighty tomes. In the wake of the Descartes’s cogito and Enlightenment thought, proposals for an ontology of the idealist subject’s rationality, autonomy, and individualism generated tenacious questions regarding the condition of pre-consciousness, the operation of feelings and intuitions, the subject-object relation, the origin of moral and ethical principles. Throughout the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Marx, and theorists he and Engels influenced, pursued the materialist bases of the subject, through analyses of economic determinism, self-alienation, and false consciousness. Through another lineage Freud and theorists of psychic structures pursued explanations of the incoherence of a split subject, its multipartite psychodynamics, and its relationship to signifying systems. By the latter Twentieth Century, theorizations of becoming gendered woman by Beauvoir, of disciplining power and ideological interpellation by Foucault and Althusser, and of structuralist dynamics of the symbolic realm expounded by Lacan energized a succession of poststructuralist, postmodern, feminist, queer, and new materialist theorists to advance one critique after another of the inherited concept of the liberal subject as individualist, disembodied (Western) Man. Doing so, they elaborated conditions through which subjects are gendered and racialized, and offered explanatory frameworks for understanding subjectivity as an effect of positionality within larger formations of patriarchy, slavery, conquest, colonialism, and global neoliberalism. By the early decades of the Twenty-first Century, posthumanist theorists dislodged the subject as the center of agentic action and distributed its processual unfolding across trans-species companionship, transcorporeality, algorithmic networks, and conjunctions of forcefields. Persistently, theorists of the subject referred to an entangled set of related but distinct terms, such as the human, person, self, ego, interiority, personal identity. And across diverse humanities disciplines, they struggled to define and refine constitutive features of subject formation, most prominently relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment. Since the Greek philosophers and fabulists have pondered the question “What is Man?” the literature of inquiry into the concept subject has been vast and weighty with tomes, especially in the wake of the Descartes’s cogito and Enlightenment thought. The ontology of the idealist subject’s rational consciousness, autonomy, and individualism, once elaborated through the framework not of God’s beneficence but by means of increasingly secular scientific principles, only multiplied tenacious questions regarding the condition of pre-consciousness, the operation of feelings and intuitions, the subject-object relation, the origin of moral and ethical principles. Throughout the next two centuries Marx and theorists he and Engels influenced pursued the political issues of economic determinism, self-alienation, and false consciousness. Through another lineage Freud and theorists of psychic structures pursued explanations of the incoherence of a split subject, its multipartite psychodynamics, and its relationship to signifying systems. By the latter Twentieth Century the theorizations of disciplining power and ideological interpellation by Foucault and Althusser and the structuralist reframing of the entry into language of the split subject expounded by Lacan energized poststructuralist, postmodern, feminist, queer, and materialist theorists to carry forward the critique of the inherited concept of the liberal subject as the individualist (Western) self and to expose the bases upon new theoretical frameworks failed to elaborate ways in which, for instance, subjects are gendered and racialized, or relatively visible and invisible. On one hand, contemporary theorists differentiate among different kinds of subjects and their differential positions within larger histories of patriarchy, slavery, conquest, colonialism, and global neoliberalism. On the other hand, they persist in the larger project of conceptualizing a subject. By the early decades of the Twenty-first Century, posthumanist theorists dislodge the subject as the center of agentic action and distribute its processual unfolding across trans-species companionship, transcorporeality, algorithmic networks, and conjunctions of forcefields. The subject appears in certain related concepts as self and ego, interiority and human. The subject disappears as a unified, agentic self. It returns as an effect rather than a substance, of psychodynamic processes and regulatory norms. It disperses into distinct subjects of inquiry in different academic disciplines. Across the disciplines it attracts retheorization to account for its relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment. It trails metaphors in its wake. This inquiry pursues the concept of subject by means of three distinct but complimentary moves. It teases out the uses of definitional terms invoked in disciplinary and everyday engagements with the term subject. It maps out a history of theories of the subject in the West, beginning with the last half of the Eighteenth Century. It elaborates four constitutive components invoked in contemporary theorizing of subject and subjectivity: relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment. Keywords: subject, human, person, interiority, personal identity, ego, self, subjectivity, subjection, relationality, agency, identity, embodiment, What am I referring to when I say ‘I’? . . . . This concern with the self, with our subjectivity, is now our main point of reference in Western societies. How has it come to be so important, and what are the different ways in which we can approach an understanding of the self? Nick Mansfield Nick Mansfield, Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (New York: New York University Press, 2000), back cover. The drive to comprehend defining features of “subject” and “subjectivity” and advance large claims about its ontology, or lack of an ontological basis, or its capture in the nets of discipline, or the nature of its boundedness and psychodynamic processes, or its historical specificity, seems insatiable. Scholars in philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, political theory, sociology, history, and many humanities disciplines proffer heterogeneous, competing, and contentious definitions in pursuit of a, if not the, “truth” of the subject, delivered through theoretical dazzle and dense prose. Every theory of the subject spurs vigorous critique of its inadequacies in accounting for certain conditions, of the subject’s emergence, its bodily habitation, its fantasmatic proportions, its relations in and with the world external to it. Or it prompts critique for of a universalizing tendencies frameworks and therefore a failurethat fails to differentiate between particular kinds of subjects , a failureand to question what kind of subject and whose subjectivity a theoryit encompasses. Each theory of the subject captures certain aspects of the human condition; and each remains unsatisfactory at best or flawed in its exclusivity at worst, depending on its explanatory power. Registrants of dissatisfaction then attach adjectives to the word subject or spin suggestive metaphors for subjectivity with the aim of stimulating alternative ways of thinking the subject. An encyclopedia essay cannot do justice to the vast array of understandings of the human subject in heterogeneous cultures around the globe; nor can it encompass the long historiesy of this robust array of theories and the thorny issues involved in debates about the subject. In the West alone, tThe history of systematic contemplation of the question “What is man?” extends as far back as to the classical Greek philosophers. in the West;F but for the purposes ofT this essay discussioninquiry pursues the concept of subject by means of three distinct but complimentary moves., the critical steps of inquiry involve the sketch of that history begins last half of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, with the age of revolution, the turn toward secularism, the investment in scientific method, the consolidation of colonialism, and expansion of global capitalism, is the pivotal moment in which debates intensified in their contesting points and counterpoints about what constitutes human subjectivity. This essay references, is only sketchily, debates about the subject since the late Eighteenth Century. It is important begins by teases inging out the uses of definitional terms distinctions that bear oninvoked in disciplinary and everyday engagements with the term subject. and the set of related terms clustering around itIt ;. It then turns tosketchingmaps out a concise brief historiographyhistory of theories of the subject in the West, beginning with the last half of the Eighteenth Century. and Nineteenth Centuries, with the age of revolution, the turn toward secularism, the investment in scientific method, the consolidation of colonialism, and expansion of global capitalism, is the pivotal moment in which debates intensified in their contesting points and counterpoints about what constitutes human subjectivity. ; and It elaborates , followed by attention to four constitutive components concepts that are entangledinvoked in contemporary theorizing of subject and subjectivity in the last four decades: with theories of the subject and subjectivity: relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment. Discerning Concepts: Human, Person, Interiority and Personal Identity, Self and Selfhood, and Ego Look for the word referent subject to in calls for its theorizatione about it and you come upon slippage in definitional slippage reference across a number of related terms: “human being,” “person,” “personal identity,” “interiority,” “self,” and “ego,” to name the most common. Sometimes they those terms seem to stand in as synonyms for subject; sometimes they seem to be used stand in as an adjacent concepts to that of subject; sometimes they are invokedappear in counter-distinction to the term subject. Everywhere discussions of the subject arise, a set of these cluster terms can be found, as in Tthe following example of a call for conference papers for a conference panelcaptures the cluster effect: “Personal identity is the focal point of any reflective process. The existence of subjectivity implies the demand for making sense of the self that projects meaning to the world.” “Identity and the Self: Personal Identity, Autonomy, and Belonging CFP,” IABA Europe, accessed September 17, 2018, http://iaba-europe.eu/news. Personal identity, subjectivity, self. Paradoxically, this the call seems to makes perfect sense and to projects confusion at once. This tendency to slippageslipperiness oif terms can sometimes be crazy-making, especially when one someone is charged with sayingasked to say what the subject is or does! Some discernments become necessary. The Human. In its simplest usage, “subject” is a common referent for a “human” as that form of life which feels, utters language, experiences, imagines, thinks, reflects, acts; that form of life which recognizes that it inhabits a world, that the world is material and imagined, that the materiality of the world is imbricated in its own mode of inhabiting the world. But “the human” has been a seminal category of scientific inquiry in modernity. In Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Alexander Weheliye observes that “the human as a secular entity of scientific and humanistic inquiry has functioned as a central topos of modernity since the Renaissance.” Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014), 8. In this sense, the human is a traditional theme (as in its place in the universe, its boundaries, its defining features, and its possible futures) and its theorization is framed through a secular (Western) view in which the human is already being thought beyond the framework of religious doctrine. The human also designates an abstract category of being that cannot be understood except in relation to other, derivative, abstract categories: the unhuman, the nonhuman, the inhuman, and now the posthuman. The name of the epitome of human is “Man.” Thus, the category of fully, most advanced form of the human is a placement, not individually but as a collectivity, upon a metaphorical schema of differentiation: the “great chain of being” (of early modernity) or the evolutionary “ladder” (of high modernity). Person. The everyday usage of “person” is a referent for a sole human subject, as in “that person over there.” In philosophy it is used as a referent to a human being with certain attributes, among them self-consciousness, intuition, an ethical relation to the social field; the nature of that “personhood” is a central concern of the Anglo-American tradition of analytical philosophy. Person also carries particular meanings in discourses of political theory and law. According to anthropologist Mary Douglas, John Locke conceptualized person as a forensic term: it referred to the figure of man in enterprise cultures prizing individual responsibility and offering great opportunity for upward mobility. Mary Douglas, “The Person in an Enterprise Culture,” in Understanding the Enterprise Culture: Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas, eds. Shaun Hargreaves Heap and Angus Ross (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 41-62. In this sense, person can be understood as a human being bearing political status before the law or custom through its access to “standing,” that which pertains to or is suitable for courts of law. Given standing before the law, a person is recognized, or recognizable, in social contracts, economic exchange, and systems of responsibility and rights. Interiority and Personal Identity. The concept of interiority isprojects a spatiallizing metaphor; the concept of personal identity is implicated in the question of temporal sameness. Tracking historical usage of the term “interiority” from the early Sixteenth Century to the present as evidenced in the Oxford English Dictionary, Eduardo Lerro observes that by 1890 the concept of interiority had shifted from an earlier feature of objects to a feature of humans, as in this OED entry taken from William James’s Principles of Psychology: “It is surely subjectivity and interiority, which are the notions latest acquired by the human mind.” William James, Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: H.H. Holt, 1890), II xvii-43. Lerro notes that for James, interiority designates “a single, qualitative, human trait applicable to the interior of both particular human beings and humans generally conceived.” Eduardo Lerro, “Some Dark Interiority: A Brief Conceptual History,” in Inventing Agency: Essays on the Literary and Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject, eds. Claudia Brodsky and Eloy LaBrada (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 30. In this understanding, interiority functions as a spatial metaphor for a self-identifying “internalized mirror image of the world.” Eduardo Lerro, “Some Dark Interiority,” 38. A different referent, personal identity has been taken up in philosophical discourse, from the ancients to John Locke in his ’s discussion of “Identity and Diversity” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, to the present. John Locke, “Chapter XXVII: Identity and Diversity,” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Roger Woolhouse (London: Penguin Classics, 1998), pages?. It In this philosophical discourse, concerns the question of the identity of a person as is understood as sameness over the lifetime;, what or what philosopher’s define as the question of (the diachronic) persistence through time of the (synchronic) constellation of memories, thought patterns, attributes, characteristics, and felt experiences that persons identify with “who they are.” See Eric T. Olson, “Personal Identity,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, Summer 2017), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/identity-personal/. The concept of personal identity is not the same as the concept of social identity. , which will return below. Ego. In the West, the center of gravity of the pre-Enlightenment period was a soul, a shared zone of exchange linking people to an omniscient God; the center of gravity of the human being in Enlightenment thought became the rational, self-conscious, agentic self. Marshall Brown observes of Descartes’s famous dictum: “The Cartesian heritage bequeathed to future generations the mystery of an ego—an identity—that preceded thinking syntactically, logically, and metaphysically.” Marshall Brown, “I Think, Therefore I Feel,” in Inventing Agency: Essays on the Literary and Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject, eds. Claudia Brodsky and Eloy LaBrada (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 18. The term ego is used here as a referent for a personal identity, a felt singularity marked by its distinct being in the world. But by the early Twentieth Century the term ego would take on another set of meanings as it was defined as the conscious actor in the world and distinguished from the unconscious (as a reservoir of memories, feelings, suppressed desires that remain latent outside conscious awareness) and the id (as the center of drives), to which Freud would add the superego (as the internalized ideals of parental and social strictures). Self and Selfhood. From one point of view, the term “self,” as in “me, myself, and I,” is an at-hand, everyday referent for the grammatical pronoun “I.” The word for self in the English and Germanic languages, after all, traces its etymology back to a Proto-Germanic reflexive referent for the one who speaks. But the term self also commonly references an individuality, and a truth of being that is only one’s own. Yet this seemingly universal referent is importantly a historically- and culturally-specific understanding of what it is that makes someone fully human. It is what Terry Eagleton describes as a meaning “elevated by social ideologies to a privileged position.” Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 131. In the Seventeenth Century in the West, the concept of an “individual” as a unique, indivisible, and individuated human began to engage scientists and political philosophers. Subsequently, that concept of the individual would be refined through 18th Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment thought, 19th Nineteenth-Century romanticism, expanding bourgeois capitalism, and Victorian optimism. Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Ccentury philosophers and political theorists posited a self breaking free from the constraints of eschatological explanation and ready-made religious dogma that drove interpretation and the meanings attached to the revealed Wwordld. The human being was no longer solely the seat of a “soul” and a repository of at-hand dogmatic interpretation; it was a self, the individual, the center of felt, cogitative being characterized by reflexive individualism and agentic action. Certain characteristics attached to the concept of individual self: a monadic core of individuality; rationality, autonomy, freedom to act, and freedom from encumbrances; well-defined, stable, and impermeable boundedness. The epitome of this achievement of modern selfhood was the “sovereign subject” of Western progress, democratic polity, and individualism. The term subject hasis thought alongside, or through, this set of related terms; but the subject is not the same as the human, the person, interiority, or personal identity, the ego, and not the same as the liberal humanist self, associated with rationality, individuality, autonomy, and agency. And that subject, Iin the academy, that subject is has long been always a subject topic of debate. Debating the Subject in the Wake of Man In the wake of Descartes’s cogito, British Empiricists, German Idealists, American Transcendentalists, and others pondered the origin and nature of self-consciousness. Their philosophical inquiries took up the origin of ideas and ideals; the role of perception, critique, and negation; the dynamic relays of sensing, thinking, imagining, feeling, and acting; the experiential and felt sense of self-unity; the mind/body relationship; the relationship of the subject to objects external to it; the nature of the subject’s on-goingness through time and extension in space; and the conditions of autonomy and free will. Across the 19th Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuriesy, two major interventions in idealist theories of a universal human subject sparked re-conceptualizations of the concept phenomenon of consciousness. The firstOne challenge came from the emerging sciences of memory and new theories of the subject’s complex psychic structures. In Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Ian Hacking traces the ways in which by the end of the 19th Nineteenth Century, scientists were everywhere confronted by people unhinged and out-of-control, given over to: trancelike states, somnambulism, hysterical symptoms, split-personality. The drive to explanation spawned the scientific search for “the truth” of memory, and with it the “truths” of psychic structures, split personality, and trauma. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 142-170. Freudian psychoanalytical thought was one such science of memory, one through which the notion of a troubled, doubled self, riven by unconscious structures of repression and remembering, coalesced. The emergence and rise of psychological and psychoanalytical theory from Pierre Janet to Sigmund Freud and beyond to Freud’s students and interpreters, introduced, expanded on, and revised the multipartite structuring of psychodynamic processes processes noted above. In his radical reconceptualization of Freudian theory, Jacques Lacan introduced a set ofelaborated his theory of the subject and subjectivity through a linked set of linked concepts: terms into the theorization of subject and subjectivity: the “mirror stage,” the split subject, the privileged phallus, sexual difference, the function of the capital-O Other, and the symbolic realm of the Law of the Father. In the mirror stage the child comes to misrecognize its image in the presence of others as another: the image of the other reflects back to the child a figure of coherence and unity and in that misrecognition the split subject comes into being. The split in the subject cannot be sutured. Thus, the coherent, autonomous self remains a fictive construct, a fantasy of the fully present subject in language. The ego is thus an imaginary projection of an isolated, solitary figure, a fantasy of coherence and unity. Lacan’s recent early 21stTwenty-Ffirst- century interpreter, Lorenzo Chiesa, observes that, for Lacan, the ego “is a (false) unity consisting of an extensive macro-image in which various (ideal) images are overlaid and amalgamated, and which the child comes to confuse with (what turns into) ‘himself’; this self/ego has thus to be considered as a passive, mental object.” Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Boca Raton: The MIT Press, 2007), 16-17. For Lacan, the phallus is the transcendental signifier. He reframed the Freudian drama of castration by narrating how the phallus, signifier for the intervention of the father and his laws in the desire of the child, offers men a compensatory access to dominance in the symbolic realm. Entering the realm of the Law, the subject takes up a sexed position as either male or female. In this process “woman” becomes a reified cultural Other to the phallic masculine Subject. The idealist theory of the self as autonomous and unified has been displaced by a theory of an illusory ego construct (a fiction, a phantasm) and a new concept of the subject, always split, always in the process of constituting itself through its others. The secondAnother challenge to idealist theories of the universal subject followed from Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engel’s social theory of economic materialism and successive reorientations in materialist theories of consciousness and its relationship to larger forces of political economy. Marx’s elaboration of the conditions of alienated subjects, the effects of industrial capitalism’s commodity fetishism, and the mystification of social relations pertains to the phenomenon of false consciousness, a term introduced by Engels, whereby the working class concedes to forms of class domination and acts against its own interests. By the mid-Twentieth Century two other theorists had become influential in theorizing the social subject. In the wake of Marx, Louis Althusser shifted the focus to the social subject as a subject of ideology, not in the narrow sense of propaganda but in a sense of the pervasive cultural formations of the dominant class (what he termed “state apparati”). Althusser differentiated "Repressive State Apparatuses" (RSAs) from "Ideological State Apparatuses" (ISAs), the former, such as the police, more openly coercive, the later, such as educational institutions, less overtly coercive. Describing the process through which RSAs and ISAs "hail" or call the subject who enters them, Althusser speaks of the "interpellation" of individuals as certain kinds of subjects through the ideology that permeates and reproduces the institution. Individuals come to understand themselves as "naturally" self-produced precisely because the processes of interpellation are hidden in institutional practices. Fundamentally mystified by its production, the subject can begin to comprehend its social formation through ideological critique, though critique cannot undo it. On another tack, Michel Foucault disassociated the workings of power from specific forms of institutional repression. Unlike Althusser, Foucault approached power not as monolithic or centripetally concentrated in official and unofficial institutions; rather power (with a small p) is capillary, dispersed centrifugally, localized in disciplining practices. Everywhere and inescapable, it is "discursive," present in regimes of truth and knowledge in everyday life. Through "technologies of self," such as the generic terms of confession, subjects materialize through regulatory norms. Yet another major challenge Yet another major challenge came from Simone de Beauvoir’s explosive mid-Twentieth Century announcements in The Second Sex that “One is not born,, but rather becomes, , a woman..” Simone de Beauvoir, Of Woman Born and that Woman “is the Other” to Man who “is the Subject. . . the Absolute.” Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. Translated by C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 20100 [1949]), 283.., Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, In theher vigorous, magisterial critique of patriarchy, Beauvoir exposed the profound dynamics of andthe its mobilization of concepts of discourses of sexual difference to secure women’s subordinationposition as Other to Man, and did so , Beauvoir exposed the implications of this Otherness through an existential and phenomenological prism grounded in woman’s lived experiences in and as embodiment: the systematic, structural subordination of woman within patriarchy, with its unrelentingly masculinist ideology; woman’s ascribed status as non-subject; the cultural projections of her “natural” inferiority and lack of agency; the social construction of her femininity; and the ambiguities of her potential to recognize the conditions of her subordination and pursue the freedom to dismantle patriarchal structures and systems of thought. ObservingMarking the profound import of thisthesethis announcements and itstheirits elaborationcritical legacy for feminist theorists at the , Judith Butler detailed end of the Twentieth Century, Judith Butler reviewedexplored how Beauvoir confoundedteased out the relation of sexed bodies and gender; unfixed the ontological basis of gender identity; refused an originary moment and linear progression to this existential process; reinterpreted “the existential doctrine of choice whereby 'choosing' a gender is understood as the embodiment of possibilities within a network of deeply entrenched cultural norms” Judith Butler, “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex” Yale French Studies 72, Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century (1986), 37.; refused an originary moment and linear progression to this existential process; recalibrated Hegel’s master-slave dialectic; and challenged the persistent specter of Cartesian disembodiment in a mascuinlinist philosophical tradition. Judith Butler, “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex” Yale French Studies , No. 72, Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century (1986): , pp.35-49Butler, “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex.”. Furthermore, recognizing the importance of Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity to later theorizing of relationality, Francoise Lionnet emphasized how Beauvoir refused to reify the self-enclosed ego and disembodiment of thought persistent through the history of Western philosophy and proposed instead an ethics of nurturance, of intersubjectivity, of an acknowledged otherness that is not a projection of the self-contained ego but an exchange with other “existants.” This “nurturing,” Lionnet argued “is thus a relation that seeks, not to abolish difference or make all relation into self-relation, but to establish the difference of another, the nurtured one.” Francoise Lionnet, _ Across the last century, academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences established norms of inquiry and developed diverse methodologies, qualitative and quantitative, to produce knowledge about the subject in its social and psychic dimensions and to produce histories of the erosion of certainty in a theory of the subject as autonomous, free, and individual in favor of a theory of the subject as an effect of constitutive constraint, of ideology, power, discourse, and structural semiosis. The subject of liberal humanism is dead; hail the subject of subjection. After the 1970s, Aas more women and people of color entered universities in North America and Europe amidst the upheavals of civil rights, human rights, women’s rights, and worker’s rights activism, the fields of gender, and sexuality, and queer studies, ethnic studies, black studies, postcolonial studies, and disability studies and their offshoots emerged to theorize the condition of subjects within large formations: patriarchy, capitalist exploitation, colonialism, racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and ableism. Since the 1970s, WORK DE BEAUVOIR IN HERE SOMEPLACE For five decades advocates for and practitioners of feminist, postmodernist, psychoanalytical, postcolonial, and posthumanist thought have troubled notions of the humanist subject and theorized the subject and subjectivity otherwise. One encompassing project involveds exposing the ideological workings of liberal humanist thought and the subject it posits:. tThe Western Enlightenment concept of the “self,” as unitary and monadic;c and Western man as the most advanced achievement of the human. has been a bête noire of the philosophical foundations of Western humanism. Assaults have exposed its the exclusionary foundations and the violent effects of its holdthis ideology of the liberal subject. This “Uuniversal” Man was really a particular kind of man, the white, male, heterosexual man of property accorded democratic subjecthood. Fully agentic selfhood was gendered as masculine, racialized as white, and attached to men of property in the polity and in political theory. Theories of the human, of the legal standing of the person, of the ego a flourishing interiority and personal identity have comecame under scrutiny with the critique of thisthe concept of the individualist self. With respect to the notion of the human, “the The Other” to Man—Child, Woman, Racialized Other—by virtue of its Otherness makes the Man the universal human of Enlightenment thought; and the capital “o” Other is consigned to the category of less-than-fully human, closer to nature. . Only certain people are accorded fully agentic selfhood; only certain people are considered to be fully human, and not limited by circumstances of birth, racial categorization, or gender. Regarding the concept of person, As Judith Butler observes, such othering effects impact what Judith Butler describeds as the “relative and differential recognizability of lives” in experiences of everyday life Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 12.; and that is the case before the law as well. In other words, not all subjects are accorded the privileged status of person before the law, precisely because, as Weheliye observeds, “the law pugnaciously adjudicates who is deserving of personhood and who is not (habeas).” Judith Butler, Frames of War, 11. Critiques of the individualist self prompted Critiques of the individualist self promptedinvolved robust critiques of ; only certain people are recognized as persons before the law. Theories of the human, of the legal standing of the person, of a flourishing interiority and personal identity came have come under scrutiny with the dismantling critique of the this concept of the individualist self. Take, for instance, the category of the human.: The Other to Man—Child, Woman, Racialized Other—by virtue of its Otherness makes the Man the universal human of Enlightenment thought. A deleterious effect of , and is consigned to the category of less-than-fully human. Or the category of person. As Judith Butler observes, there is “relative and differential recognizability of lives” in experiences of everyday life Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010), 12.; and that is the case before the law as well. In other words, not all subjects are accorded the recognition nor accorded the privileged status of person before the law, precisely because, as Weheliye observes, “the law pugnaciously adjudicates who is deserving of personhood and who is not (habeas).” Judith Butler, Frames of War, 11. Only certain people are accorded fully agentic selfhood; only certain people are considered to be fully human, and not limited by circumstances of birth, racial categorization, or gender; only certain people are recognized as persons before the law. Or consider again the category of thereconsiderations of the concept of the ego as well. : Feminists in Europe and the United States, Rrecognizing the degree to which questions of gender and sexuality were remained undertheorized in materialist and psychoanalytical theories of the subject, feminists in Europe and the United States have rethought the working of power in materialist and psychodynamics processes. For instance, theoriststhey theories of the ego inchallenged theories of the ego in psychoanalysis and ego psychology, have beencritiquing challenged from within those fields and without for the ways the fields they accounted for difference in effects of the dynamic mechanisms for the boy child and girl child, and more recentlyin the early Twentieth Century for the intersex child. They have also exposed how theories of the ego were been challenged as insufficiently inattentive to the specificity of dynamics for those subjects abjected as undesirable others, as less-than-human and to the intersectionalcomplex interactions vectors of multiple forms of adjection and /oppression. A second project involveds developing in greater depth the analysis of subjection, the processes through which the subject is an effect of the structural dynamics of both large-P and small-p power: the social enforcement of regulatory norms à la Foucault, the ideological interpellation of subjects through state apparatuses à la Althusser, the double consciousness of W.E.B. Du Bois, the colonization of psychic processes à la Franz Fanon. A third move project involveds coining new modifiers for the term subject to differentiate kinds of subjects of specific historical, political, and socioeconomic conditions. These adjectival terms include: , such as hybrid, marginal, migratory, diasporic, minoritized, nomadic, mimic, and in the last decades more recently transnational, transcultural, stateless, even refugees without refuge. This third move also involveds ; and also spinning new metaphors for theorizing elaborating the complexities of subjectivity, primary among them terms such asthe term “intersectionality.” and “assemblage.” A fourth project has challenged various deconstructive frameworks for the way they theorized the death of the subject, or the dispersal of the subject into fragments or the disappearance of the subject in processes of becoming., because Theorists detailed how these frameworks the projectsthey failed to account for the ways in which certain subjects have beenare denied full humanity and thus full subject status, the critical ground for lodging claims of rights, justice, and reparation. As theorists have pursued these projects, whether in systematic or vignette-liketargeted forays, they have invoked a cluster of concepts through which to think the subject nowdifferently: relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment. The logic of this ensemble of terms is elegantly correlated to the defining features of the traditional idealist subject. The discussion of relationality pertains to the problematic of the isolato’s individudalist subject’s autonomy and boundedness. The discussion of agency is required to engage issues of the transformation of consciousness and the grounds of action. The discussion of identity is required to adequately theorize the impact on the subject of specific social relations and material conditions. The discussion of embodiment pertains to the dimensions of the body’s dynamic materiality, its very materialization through social relations, and its relations to other kinds of bodies. Subject, Other, Relationality The concept of subject cannot be disentangled from the concept of relationality; but relationality comes in many kinds. Relationality inheres in the very utterance of an “I,” the linguistic and rhetorical marker that projects a fantasy of presence for the singularity of somebody. To say “I” is to address an other. “In the light of a unique and unrepeatable identity—irremediably exposed and contingent,” Adriana Cavarero argueds, “the other is therefore a necessary presence.” Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (London: Routledge, 2000), 89. In the necessary presence of a “you,” whether a real or imagined interlocutor, the subject becomes what Cavarero termeds a “narratable self.” She goes went on to observe that the “unique existent” (her term) is “an identity which, from beginning to end, is intertwined with other lives—with reciprocal exposures and innumerable gazes—and needs the other’s tale.” Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 88. On a fundamental level, then, the subject is a subject of rhetorical relationality, desirous of the recognition of an Other.. Other theorists of this fundamental relationality invoked Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic subjectivity as explanatory concept: subjects become conscious through language; social groups have their social dialects through which subjects become conscious; yet language itself is heteroglossic and thereby riven with multiple , Other, meanings. In other words, otherness crosses the tongue or fingers whenever words are spoken, written, or signed, a kind of glottal relationality of heteroglossia since the very words the “I” says come to the subject spoken by others. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 292. A second strand of theorizing relationality came has comecame through psychoanalysis. In versions of Lacanian psychoanalytical theory of the subject, Other is multivalent: the other of the symbolic system – of what is sayable, of the very signifying system that slides across tongues or fingers; the Other of primary relations; the Other of the unconscious, that is, the other within. Beauvoir in mid-century and successive French feminists interventions intervened in Lacan’s tripartite psychic structure to delineated different versions of relationality: Julia Kristeva elaborated a pre-symbolic realm of infancy in the concept of the instinctual semiotic associated with the Mother; and she described the psychodynamic process of abjection through which the threatening unruliness and disturbances of order and orderliness are repressed for the Oedipal resolution of the boy’s entry into the symbolic to be achieved. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora and Alice Jardine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), and Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). In the Anglo-American field of ego psychology Nancy Chodorow elaborated a different relationality of the girl child to the boundedness that comes to define the impact of the boy child’s necessary separation from the Mother. Nancy J. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Updated Edition, With a New Preface (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 44. This was a gendered relationality of permeable ego boundaries. Theorists of all schools uncomfortable with “difference” feminism and those influenced by Foucault and Althusser, located relationality in the dynamics of the subject’s subjectivation. For Butler, “The ‘I’ who cannot come into being without a ‘you’ is also fundamentally dependent on a set of norms of recognition that originated neither with the ‘I’ nor with the ‘you.’” Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), 45. This form of psychic relationality is an effect of small p of power of Foucaultian subjection and interpellation in Althuser’s version of subject formation. In the former sense it is the relationality of regulatory norms that precede us. Elsewhere Butler writes wrote that gender and sexuality are “modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed by virtue of another.” Butler, Undoing Gender, 19. Norms inhabit subjects and impel them to certain conditions of performativity through which they secure the norms as their own; and sometimes expose the instability of the norm through their failures to conform. In the case of interpellation, relationality involves the dynamic through which the subject is positioned within naturalized social locations of institutions such as schools and bureaucracies, ideological agendas and geopolitical formations. In the last decade theorists have explored another dimension of the subject’s relationality in dynamic webs of assemblages of which human subjects are but one node. Relationality in this theorization is not just between subjects and the forces of subjection or between individual subjects and the addressee of their narratability; rather the force fields and networks of relationality buzz along flows and currents and a myriad of interactions that join subjects to environments, processes internal and external to them, forms of matter, other species. Stacy Alaimo proposeds an ecological relationality as trans-corporeality in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Elaborating how “the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world,” she argueds that this “thinking across bodies may catalyze the recognition that the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a resource for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions”; with this recognition, she insisteds, may come acknowledgment of “the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors.” Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2. This essay returns to such modes of relationality below in the discussion of subject and embodiment. A return to the relationality of the subject’s narrated life is apropos here. The rhetorical figures, narrative strategies, modes of address, and generic forms tapped in personal storytelling are all reservoirs of antecedent others, conduits of relationality of the “social world that is beyond us and before us,” as Butler observeds. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 64. In this way, the personal storytelling of subjects, rehearsing and exemplifying relationality, invites a response; and the nature of that response and responsibility opens onto questions of ethical relationality. Cavarero approacheds the question by calling for an ethics that does not privilege responses of empathy and identification, feeling for or feeling as another; for her, “an altruistic ethics of relation does not support empathy, identification, or confusions. Rather this ethic desires a you that is truly an other, in her uniqueness and distinction. No matter how much you are similar and consonant, says this ethics, your story is never my story.” Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 92. In other words, the ethics of relationality can be said to be an ethics that recognizes incommensurability. Butler approacheds the question of ethical relationality by invoking the subject’s primary vulnerability and the need to “vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a kind of possession”: to risk such evacuation requires a “willingness to become undone in relation to others” as “our chance of becoming human.” Judith Butler, Giving an Account, 136. The exercise of brute power and dehumanizing epistemological regimes means that some groups of people are differentially positioned vis-à-vis social norms of intelligibility, discursive regimes and material conditions of discovery, invasion, colonization, slavery, the civilizing mission. These formations comprise the historical conditions of the relationality of subordinated others. Constrained life scripts have been written of them and for them by others through slow and eruptive violence, with the result that the value of their storytelling, testimony, knowledge-making, and political claims goes unacknowledged or unrecognized and the uniqueness of their narratability unsolicited, their expectation of recognition forestalled. The othering effect of this kind of relationality becomes the experiential history of being spoken for, being represented as, a dehumanized, unmarked, less-than-human, unintelligible Other. Judith Butler, Precarious Life, 35. Coming at the question of relationality and ethics from the history of those experiencing radical dehumanization and violence for their “otherness,” Weheliye implicitly pointeds to an ethics of relational alterity. Relationalities of the present, he argueds, are “existent hierarchies”; to counter this dehumanizing relationality requires people to “design novel assemblages of relation” Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 13. from models of “alternative critical, political, and poetic assemblages.” Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 12. These reorientations of the dynamics of relationality resonate with Beauvoir’s concept of an ethics of ambiguity articulated in the mid-Twentieth-Century., as Françoise Lionnet obsereved. FurthermoreR, recognizinging the importance of Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity to later theorizing of relationality, Françoise Lionnet explored Francoise Lionnet emphasized how Beauvoir refused to reify the self-enclosed ego and disembodiment of thought persistent through the history of Western philosophy and proposed instead an ethics of nurturance, of intersubjectivity, of an acknowledged otherness that is not a projection of the self-contained ego but an exchange with other “existants.” This “nurturing,” Lionnet argued “is thus a relation that seeks, not to abolish difference or make all relation into self-relation, but to establish the difference of another, the nurtured one.” Françoise Lionnet. “Consciousness and Relationality: Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Beauvoir, and Glissant.” Yale French Studies 123, Rethinking Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) (2013): 100-117.116. Francoise Lionnet, _ Harks back to Beauvoir and The Ambiguities of Ethics. Put Lionnet here. Ultimately, there are different kinds of relationality connecting the subject to the social: of psychic otherness within and the pulsions of affective response to others coursing through bodies; of subjection to larger constellations of proxy others enforcing regulatory norms and reproducing othering processes that render certain subjects insignificant, hatefulthreatening, or unintelligible; of linguistic dialogism and narratability; of ethical response and responsibility; of interacting materiality, involving other species, technologies, and the agglomerations of assemblages. Relationality is multidimensional, transactional, at once self-locating and self-dispossessing. Through its mechanisms of connection, the subject is materialized and undone, possessed and dispossessed, comes to know itself and confront its own opacity, Judith Butler, Giving an Account, 39. again and again. Subject and Agency As contributors to the volume Inventing Agency argueds through its collection of essays on subjects, causalities, and judgment, the subject conceptualized by the philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment and Romantic periods was the subject as an embodiment and expression of “agency in action.” Claudia Brodsky and Eloy LaBrada, eds. Inventing Agency: Essays on the Literary and Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), back cover. Agency has commonly been thought of as the power of human beings to think, transform consciousness, make claims in and on the world, acts, and resist assaults on their sovereignty. This is the premier modality of what it means to be human and to be recognized as bearing the identity of universal Man, constituted by rationality, autonomy, self-possession, and free will as grounds for that action. Two major questions have motivated discussions of agency over the last four decades. Who achieves or is ascribed the status as of the agentic subject? And what exactly constitutes agency in the context of the subject’s subjection as constitutive constraint? As to the first question, for over the last three decades theorists have exposed how this figure of liberal humanist Man and its universalist foundation was, as noted earlier, an exclusionary one. Women were not included in the category of universal Man; nor were subjugated peoples around the world under conditions of slavery and colonization; nor were the mentally ill and severely disabled. All these categories of people were represented as not fully rational, autonomous, in control of their willpower, and therefore not fully-human as agentic subjects. In Habeas Viscus, Weheliye museds that “[i]f racialization is understood not as a biological or cultural descriptor but as a conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans, then blackness designates a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claims to full human status and which humans cannot.” Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 3. Constrained in the skeins of discipline, unable to lodge claims to knowledge-making power, subjected to slow and eruptive violence, those represented as less than human are stripped literally and figuratively of their agency. The question of urgency becomes how does one resist. As to the second question: As theorists of subjectivity have countered earlier theories of the subject, they have runran up against the problem of human agency. Theorists of liberal humanism insisted on the viability of agency in making claims for rights in the public sphere and before the law, whether in national venues or in the human rights arena. They explored such phenomena as oppositional resistance to coercive states and institutions, routes to self-empowerment, social visibility, transformation of consciousness and social location, activist tactics and strategies. Theis question of the very possibility of human agency in the context of implacable regulatory norms and interpellation has been especially urgent fFor feminists of color, poststructuralists, and postmodernists. , the dominance of theories of subjection, of the inescapable force of regulatory norms and interpellation, that question, of the very possibility of human agency, has been especially urgent. In the framework of materialist analysis, the issue is one of consciousness-raising; in the framework of postmodernist theorizing the issue is one of escaping the subject effect. Those who have worked within certain strands of psychoanalytic theories of the subject have explored the impact of the unconscious and pre-conscious on the subject as it interacts with others and the world. In their explorations of the subject’s fundamental incoherence and its fantasy of coherence, they have beenwere challenged to mark the illusion of autonomy and rationality so centrally linked to the liberal notion of agency and to make the argument that the unconscious itself generates creative intervention. It offers the creativity of what Teresa de Lauretis describeds as the psychic domain of disidentification within the constitutive constraint of the symbolic realm Teresa de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness,” Feminist Studies 16.1 (1990): 115-50. and what Butler describeds as the repository of repressed desires that regulatory norms enforce. This “abject” within, Butler positioneds as “a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility.” Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 2011), 3. Others have grounded theories of agency in creative rupture, of individuals and of communities, . That might be their own creativity or the creativity of community, what De Certeau termeds “transverse tactics” through which subjects individually or in groups manipulate spaces and systems of constraint, experiment with modes of re-use and reconfigurations of identities. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 29-30. It might involve play with the plasticity and profligacy of language, or the wit to play with what anthropologist Sheri B. Ortner termeds the rules of the game. Sherry B. Ortner, Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1997). It might be the performativity theorized by Butler; that is, the “reiteration of a norm or set of norms” that effectively “conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition” and thereby undermines their coherence. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, 12. It might be the queering of identity categories, or the confounding of identities and desires as found in Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw: Men, Women, and the Rest of Us: “My identity as a transsexual lesbian whose female lesbian lover transitioned to gay male is manifest in my fashion statement—both my identity and fashion are based on collage.” Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Routledge, 1994), 5. The central question thrust of Weheliye’s Habeas Viscous as well is was to pursue this question of creativity: “[W]hat different modalities of the human come to light if we do not take the liberal humanist figure of Man as the master-subject but focus on how humanity has been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain?” Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 8. These explanatory paradigms captured tactical ways in which forms of agentic action and impact are psychically glimpsed and historically-inflected. All these Ttheories of agency attempt to account for agentic potential as they account for the forces and factors that preclude, impede, or thwart the exercise of a subject’s agency, self-production, self-empowerment: the unconscious, affects, regulatory norms, social interpellations, disciplines of thought and knowledge production; and to account for agentic potential. Yet there are is always another question ways to propose a to ask with regard to the relation of the subject and to agency. From one point of view, we might recall what Butler, for instance, remindeds theorists that the relation of subject and agency may be more a model than a description of individuals in action: says of the conjunction of subject and agency: “[W]hen we are speaking about the ‘subject’ we are not always speaking about an individual: we are speaking about a model for agency and intelligibility, one that is very often based on notions of sovereign power.” Judith Butler, Precarious Life, 45. Others theorists whose inquiries taketook up issues of agentic action in cultures outside the West argued From another point of view, we might argue that the definition of agency at hand, the signs of agency commonly equated with autonomy, rationality, and free will, are not the only defining features of agentic actions, or that they are insufficiently attentive to the ways in which agency can be exercised and embodied differently. Exploring the potential of women in Egypt’s piety movement to transgress gender norms of femininity and pious womanhood, Saba Mahmood argueds that the body may have an agentic force in enabling religious women to negotiate “significatory systems of gender”: “From this perspective, transgressing gender norms may not be a matter of transforming ‘consciousness’ or effecting change in the significatory system of gender, but might well require the retraining of sensibilities, affect, desire, and sentiments—those registers of corporeality that often escape the logic of representation and symbolic articulation.” Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Mahmood challengeds the equation of free will and agency in Western moral philosophy, proposing instead that another theory of subject formation is required to account for the ethical practice of pious Muslim women, a practice of embodied relationship to the divine as empowerment. And more recentlyIn the early 21stTwenty-Ffirst Century, materialist theories of agency dislodged the human actor as the center of its operation as they responded to the question about whether agency is solely exercised by human beings. Agency is now relocated in assemblages, of humans, materials, systems of distribution, aspects of political economies, technological affordances, all nodes in an ever-shifting confluence of actors. This is was Jane Bennett’s argument about distributed agency in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. In this project, Bennett brings brought matter back from the deadness ascribed to it, reanimating matter to move beyond liberal theory of the human agency of intentionality and will, psychoanalytic theories of agency as an intersubjective phenomenon, and theories of agency within the constitutive constraints of discourse, discipline, and interpellation. As Bennett observeds of the assemblage: “Each member and proto-member of the assemblage has a certain vital force, but there is also an effectivity proper to the grouping as such: an agency of the assemblage. CHECK THE QUOTE And And Further, precisely because each member-actant maintains an energetic pulse slightly ‘off’ from that of the assemblage, an assemblage is never a stolid block but an open-ended collective, a ‘non-totalizing sum.’” Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2010), 24. And Pphysicist Karen Barad gives matter its agency as well. “Agency is not aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity,” she argues: “Nor does it merely entail resignification or other specific kinds of moves within a social geometry of antihumanism. Agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has.” Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs 28.3 (Spring 2003): 826-827 (801-831). In other words, explain.ADD FINAL SENTENCE Subject and Identity In his Marshal Brown’s essay on Descartes’s cogito, Marshal Brown presented the the word “identity” is was presented as a synonym of “ego.” Marshall Brown, “I Think,” 18. In Brown’s invocation of the term, identity designates that which is distinctively human, in its myriad of specificities; the life bearing center of capacities and characteristics that differentiate someone from all others. It is “who a person is,” as various dictionaries define it,. wWhatever “who,” in this instance, means! But, let’s thinking more precisely, or rather, more complexly about identity itself, as related to but distinct from person, self, interiority, and ego, prompteds theorists to ; and let’s reorient the relationship of identity to subject. The commonplace way of approaching the term identity is to conceptualize identities as attributes of persons. But, given that a subject is in continual, relational exchange with the world and others, identity is fundamentally a social phenomenon, an effect of sociality, an effect of the everyday discourses of sameness and difference across the social field. There have been many ways in which social identity is theorized and deployed methodologically across the last four decades. Historians approached it not as ontologically fixed and timeless but in need of historicization. Identities have histories; and they are contextually marked by culture and geographical location. That is, they are embedded within multiple temporalities (that arrive across different, overlapping, and disparate spans of time) and spatialities (that arise in their saliency in local, national, regional, and global arenas). Historians and literary and cultural critics variously theorized identity as a lived social and historical location (or positionality) on a sociocultural grid. For some, Theorists have invoked the term identity is invoked to explore the effects of material conditions and the collective consciousness of victimization (Angela Davis 190). Angela Y. Davis, “Rape, Race, and the Myth of the Black Racist,” in Women, Race, & Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 172–201. This placement in a collectivity involves a category of relative privilege or victimization, a social categorization of groups of people translated by means of ascribed difference into systemic operations of norms and large-scale formations such as slavery, slow and eruptive violence, and macro and micro distributions of dis/advantage. In the work of postcolonial, feminist, women-of-color, and queer theorists, identity is was understood as a praxis, in that it can be a potential site of opposition to dominant norms (see Cathy Cohen 438-9) Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3.4 (May 1997): 438-439 (437–65). ; a site from which to stage critique, or strategically speak truth to power, or make claims for recognition and reparation, or recover and memorialize the past, or form community and affiliation. In other words, identities sometimes function as sites from which to claim and exercise knowledge-making capacity amidst unequal power relations. A methodology emerged to give recognition to the experiential history of living in conditions of multiple, heterogeneous identities, of being gendered as “masculine” or “feminine,” say, and racialized as “black” or “white.” That approach employs the method of intersectional analysis as exemplified by Elizabeth Cole’s essay on intersectionality in psychology research. In the social sciences, as Cole exemplifieds, identity is deployed as a demographic variable; thus Cole talkeds of identity as “the occupation of a category” and one node in the “tripartite constellation of identity, difference, and disadvantage.” Elizabeth R. Cole, “Intersectionality and Research in Psychology,” The American Psychologist 64.3 (April 2009): 170–80. Three decades spent developing, modifying, and becoming frustrated withrejecting aspects of intersectional analysis has prompted recent theorists of identity to move in different directions. Given the multiplicity of identities people cycle through on a daily basis, how can the analytic of intersectionality encompass the lived complexity of the social identities of subjects, and do so without fixing categories. For, identities constitute the contingencies of the subject’s relationality;, and due to contingencies it is difficult to give an adequate accounting of the heterogeneity even within salient identity categories can remain elusive. Given such a thorny theoretical task in accounts of the subject, it is no wonder that in the early 21stTwenty-Ffirst Century, more recently, theorists have shifted the framework on identity as fixedness in the social field, tapping to tap metaphors that emphasize cohesion amidst flows of difference. For instance, identity is was theorized as a “temporary cohesion” or sticking or landing point in the play of difference in the posthumanist theorizing of Elizabeth Grosz: “Difference is the name we can give to any identity—min--minoritarian, majoritarian, pure or hybrid – for it is the force that underlies all temporary cohesions as well as the possibility of their dispersions.” Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2011), 94. Grosz’s retheorization of identity seeks sought to find some way out of the politics of subjectivation: “How,” she asked,s “can we transform the ways in which identity is conceived so that identities do not emerge and function only through the suppression and subordination of other social identities. ?” Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone, 89. And, in her critique of the common understanding of intersectionality as an analytic, Jasbir K. Puar observeds that “[n]o matter how intersectional our models of subjectivity, no matter how attuned to locational politics of space, place, and scale, these formulations – these fine tunings of intersectionality, as it were, that continue to be demanded – may still limit us if they presume the automatic primacy and singularity of the disciplinary subject and its identitarian interpellation.” Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007), 206. Puar shifteds metaphors to the assemblage and the theoretical framework to assemblage theory, and resituateds categories of identity as “events, actions, and encounters between bodies rather than simply entities and attributes of subjects.” Puar, “‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory,” PhiloSOPHIA 2.1 (October 2012): 58 (49–66). These modes of theorizing identity shift the frame on subjectivity. Identity is redefined as action rather than a feature of subjects; it is a cohesion in force fields, an entanglement and encounter, a doing and undoing rather than a being. Subject, Embodiment, Materiality The humanist concept of subject thinks the body as the material form of a singularity, an isolating carapace, a discrete, bounded fixity. It could be said that in this way the body speaks the presence of a subject, or manifests the form of the subject, establishing the material limit of the human singularity in its specific alignment and contours of surficial matter. But that would be to think body as other to mind or subjectivity, when the body is multivalent with regard to subjectivity, far more than form and surface, though it is that. It is a weighty organism of systems, of genetic material, neural networks, organs, senses, bones and sinew, all in continuous exchange with the external world. The body is thus a penetrable membrane, an interactive surface, and thereby a social body. It is a site of visibility and intelligibility, a provocateur of interpretation. It is political, a materialization of regulatory norms through which certain identities and life scripts are naturalized. As Butler argueds in Bodies That Matter, it is “power’s most productive effect.” Butler, Bodies that Matter, 2. The body is a diagnostic site of medicalization, and itself a historical memorial; it bears the marks of violent histories, the scars of the slave, the bruises of sexual violation, the fragments of tortured hands, the missing limbs of human degradation and oppression. It is a switching point for vibrant matter, biological inheritance, historical legacy, ecological imprint, and memorial reserves. For memory itself is in an effect of matter, its synapses and neural plasticity. In the last two decades theorists have elaborated further dimensions of the relationship of body and subject. The first set of dimensions comes from various strands of posthumanist thought. Assemblage theory informeds the “nomadic thought” of Rosi Braidotti who describeds the body as “an assemblage of forces, or flows, intensities and passions that solidify in space, and consolidate in time, within the singular configuration commonly known as an ‘individual’ self.’” Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology,” Theory, Culture & Society 23.7-8 (December 2006): 201 (197–208). The body’s fluxes of transformation migrate through different channels with the technological revolution to a networked and digital sociality of virtual and literal embodiments. Online lives are lived via the virtual embodiments of avatars and surrogate selves in gaming. Human bodies don robotic prosthetics joining silicon to carbon and algorithm in the body’s networks of materialization. Subjects and subjectivity migrate to digital ecologies in which software, fleshware, hardware, network, silicon, and carbon constitute being in the fluid movements across virtual worlds and real life, a transformation of subjectivity and embodiment in the time of computation Katherine Hayles exploreds in My Mother Was A Computer: “Encountering intelligent machines from this perspective enables me to see that they are neither objects to dominate nor subjects threatening to dominate me. Rather, they are embodied entities instantiating processes that interact with the processes that I instantiate as an embodied human subject. The experience of interacting with them changes me incrementally, so the person who emerges from the encounter is not exactly the same person who began it.” Katherine N. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 243. Finally, Donna Haraway’s forays into transspecies relationality directed affect outward from its human-centric circulation to shift the notion of relationality to companionate species, the touch of animal to animal: “Through their reaching into each other, through their ‘prehensions’ or graspings, beings constitute each other and themselves. Beings do not preexist their relating.” Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, ed. Matthew Begelke (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 6. A second dimension derivess from affect theory and understandings of the ways bodies are riven with and riveted by eruptive pulsions, often associated with emotions, that materialize in the body as feelings and bodily dispositions of positive, neutral, and negative response. Affects expose the feltness of lived experience; and are matrices of biological processes and social norms, operations of power, and the circulation of what Sarah Ahmed terms “the rippling effect of emotion” (44). Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2014), 44. In The Politics of Emotion, Ahmed elaborateds a theory of “affective economies” such as hate: “[M]y model of hate as an aeffective economy suggests that emotions do not positively inhabit anybody or anything, meaning that ‘the subject’ is simply one nodal point in the economy, rather than its origin and destination. This is extremely important: it suggests that the sideways and backwards movement of emotions such as hate is not contained within the contours of a subject. The unconscious is hence not the unconscious of a subject, but the failure of presence—or, the failure to be present—that constitutes the relationality of subject, objects, signs and others” (46). Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 46. Joining Marxist materialist and psychoanalytic frameworks, Ahmed shifteds the locus of affect from individuals to the conditions of encounters: “It is through affective encounters that objects and others are perceived as having attributes, which ‘gives’ the subject an identity that is apart from others” (Ahmed 52-3). Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 52-53. Economies of negative affects and emotions do the work of materializing the exclusion of some people from the category of the fully human, or their consignment to the category of less-than-human. A third dimension of the relationship of the subject and the body involves new engagements with normative able-bodiedness as theorized by scholars and activists in disability studies, often triangulated with queer theory. Truly exciting theorizing of subjects and bodies has come from this field of study. Here are two examples. Mel Chen critiqueds the “corporal exceptionalism” of the subject as he ponders the significance of toxins and toxicity in his queer body and its relationship to the racialization of lead toxicity in toys imported into the United States from Asia. Joining Object Oriented Ontology to disability and queer theory, Chen conceptualizeds a queer subject of human/object attachment. Living in a toxic environment in which the body is always under assault and through which he moves as a masked man, Chen finds found an affective relationship with his couch, a safe space, an intimate partner of respite from discomfort and pain, “The couch and I are interabsorbent, interporous, and not only because the couch is made of mammalian skin,” he writes (278). Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 278. And in Authoring Autism, Melanie Yergeau, a neuro-queer scholar of rhetoric, exposeds “the ways in which diagnosis of the non-rhetoricity of autism denies autistic people not only agency, but their very humanity.” Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 11. Yergeau at once develops developed the argument “that autistic people and their neuro-circuitry queer the lines of rhetoric, humanity, and agency” Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 26. and writes wrote as autistic subject. Confronting the “clinicalization of rhetoric,” she playeds with language, turning nouns into verbs to capture the motioning of the embodied rhetor as autistic subject and displaying the pleasures of repetition as communicative idiom. Authoring Autism is a neuro-queering of the discourse on autism and an autie-ethnography through which Yergeau speaks spoke the embodied “autistic experiential.” ConclusionThe Subject, a Metaphor, and Modest Definition Theoriesy converges, butts against, contests, refines other theories. Psychic processes become increasingly complex; forces of subjection increasingly intense; and the enumeration of regulatory norms multiplies. Attention to embodiment keeps returning; identity vectors proliferate; the problem of agency becomes almost intractable; the entangled filaments and filiations of relational dynamics extend temporally, socially, ecologically. The subject has become a universe in itself. What does this mean? A cosmological metaphor may offer a way to visualize the challenge of encompassing the scope of activity involved in reconceptualizing the subject, though in its inadequacy it may raise more questions than it is worth. Think of the individual subject as an “earth” with layers and layers of matter that matters inside its surface forms of embodiment. At the center is something that might be called a core or a molten roiling process. There are layers and networks of forces, systems, and sedimentaryl materials (such as those of memory, or of disidentifications) inside the surface of the body of this earth. Outside the earth are atmosphere, gravity, vacuum, and other bodies such as suns and invisible black holes and an expanding universe through which the long tails of the Big Bang trail and histories of large and small swerves register. From the earth extend technological affordances that expand the reach of earthliness, and touch or intersect with external bodies. The history of the universe flows through its atomic structure; in the debris and gasses and particles at hand for universe building. The forces of gravity hold it in place, but the earth is constantly in transformation within its gravitational forces. Now think of this earth as a sensing, feeling, thinking, acting entity, with the capacity to reflect on itself. But Iit developed in its early existence through relations of dependency and eventual ly dawning coaslesced as a subject singularity of experiential being through its entanglements with of language and symbolic systems. It is unconscious of its inner systems of embodiment, except in certain crises; it is riven by deep psychic mechanisms and the neurochemistry of the brain affecting sites and dynamics of remembering. The externalities to this world are metaphors of the external forces also constitutive of the subject, that are imbricated in the its very materiality, its psychic mechanisms, and its creative imagination. Of course, any metaphor, especially in this case one that attempts to be suggestive about such a difficult concept of the subject, breaks down the longer it is spun. So here’s an attempt at definition: The term subject signifies the living process enfolding and enfolded in unconscious psychic forces, rational thought, drives and affects, historical conditions of social formation, regulatory norms and ideological interpellation, genetic, neurally-networked, and quantum matter, entanglements of human, transspecies, and ecological relations, and assemblages of carbon and silicon, vibrant matter, and multi-nodal force fields. But then again, it may be that the concept of subject has become a fetish object, an addiction in theorizing, and that, as Jasbir Y. Puar insists, it may be time to move beyond the presumption of “the automatic primacy and singularity of the disciplinary subject and its identitarian interpellation.” Jasbir Puar, “I would rather,” 62. This essay began with the attempt to discern distinctions among a profusion of oft-invoked referents that circulate in proximity to the term subject. It now concludes with a profusion of definitions which relate to the social action registered through invocation of the term subject. Subject designates the bearer of unique human existence, a person, an individual. Subject locates a switching point between internal and external worlds. Subject confounds the distinction between the singularity and the social. Subject names the effect of subjectivation. Subject enacts becoming. Subject thrives onrequiresbecomes itself encounters. Subject functions as a figure. Subject provides a heuristic for answering philosophy’s most intractable questions. Subject generates metaphors. Subject, as fetish object of theorists, forecloses revisionary approaches to the human. Subject sparks an inexhaustible list supply of of questions, and quandaries, and ambiguities. Literature on the Subject and SubjectivityDiscussion of the Literature Since the late Seventeenth Century in the West, the topic of subject and subjectivity has driven the production of philosophical tomes by Descartes, the English Empiricists, German Idealists, and Psychoanalytical, Marxist, Continental, and Analytic philosophers and thinkers, among them Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Lacan, De Beauvoir, Foucault, Althusser, Badiou, Habermas, Arendt, Kristeva. Their books provide deep dives into particular aspects and traditions of theorizing the subject, along with glosses of the debates at stake,; as do the recent interpretations of these works, such as Lorenzo Chiesao’s engagement with the development of Lacan’s theory over time in Subjectivity and Otherness and Butler’s in her various engagements with Foucault and Nietzsche. Theorists of color (academic and activist) and Marxist, feminist, queer, postcolonial, transnational, posthumanist, and disability theorists continue the critique of certain theories of the subject as they ponder intersecting issues of relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment. Nick Mansfield’s Subjectivity: Theory of the Self from Freud to Haraway, provides a handy overview of this exploration of subjectivity to the year 2000. Theorists often elaborate some aspect of their take on subject and subjectivity with reference to deep readings of particular literary texts, as do Butler in her reading of Antigone, Cavarero in her reading of The Odyssey, and Hortense Spillers in readings of Linda Brent’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave, Written by Himself. Contemporary literary and cultural studies theorists often draw upon particular theories of the subject to energize their deep readings of modernist, postcolonial, and postmodernist novels, lyric poetry, film, life writing, and performance. There are studies of expressive representations of the subjectivity in, for instance, stream of consciousness techniques in modernist literature and modes of representing the felt experience of internal consciousness in lyric poetry or in soliloquy. Genres of particular interest in exploring questions of subject and subjectivity are various forms of life writing, capaciously defined: traditional autobiography, memoir, testimony, trauma narrative, autosomatography, online life writing, confession, to name only a few. Many essays and books offer deep readings of particular texts as a way to accumulate examples of various kinds of subjectivity, as in studies of black subjectivity, feminist subjectivity, transgender subjectivity, or subjectivity in the expressive cultures of nationally-based literatures. Many scholars take up questions of traumatic remembering in literatures of witness, including studies of Holocaust narratives and the human rights testimony across the globe. Illuminations of agentic subjectivity as telling “other”-wise drive the engagements with black women’s subjectivity theorized by Mae Gwendolyn Henderson and the articulations of indigenous subjectivity (“subjectivity in community” Hertha D. Sweet Wong, “First-Person Plural: Subjectivity and Community in Native American Women’s Autobiography,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, eds. Sidonie S. Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 168-178.) theorized by Hertha D. Sweet Wong. Explorations such as Weheliye’s elaborate how subordinated subjects imagine and represent alternative ways of being human in the world. And recently, studies of comics and graphic narratives explore the grammar of this hybrid form and its visual/textual interface to assay how multi-mediated narrative and visualized avatars of the subject operate in the invitation to interpretive exchange of intersubjectivity between text and readers. Finally, exciting studies now in the early 21stTwentuy-Ffirste Century track the effects of the migration of subjects and subjectivity to digital ecologies and the transformations to algorithmic subjectivity, as in the work of Katherine Hayles. Links to Digital Materials Critical Posthumanism Network. Genealogy of the Posthuman. An online, independently published resource based in the UK. General editors: Ivan Callus, Stefan Herbrechter, and Manuela Rossini. The Feminist Theory Website. https://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/enin.html. A resource created by Dr. Kristin Switala and hosted by the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, Virginia Tech University. Illuminations: The Critical Theory Website. http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/ Created by Douglas Brown and Douglas Kellner of the University of Texas, a resource focused on the Frankfurt School. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. An open access enclyclopedia founded in 1995 and sustained by volunteer work of editors, authors, and technical advisers. It provides detailed, scholarly, peer-reviewed information on key topics and philosophers in all areas of academic philosophy. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Edited by Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szema, and compiled by 275 specialists from around the world, the Guide presents a comprehensive historical survey of the field's most important figures, schools, and movements and is updated annually.  Marxists Internet Archive. A volunteer, non-profit public library, run by a collective of volunteers, MIA is a resource for works across a broad array of political, philosophical, and scientific thought. PhilPapers. A comprehensive index and bibliography of philosophy maintained by the community of philosophers, under the general editorship of David Bourget and David Chalmers. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html. Sponsored by the Metaphysics Research Lab and under the general editorship of Edward N. Zalta, this resource organizes scholars from around the world in philosophy and related disciplines to create and maintain an up-to-date reference work. Voice of the Shuttle http://vos.ucsb.edu/index.asp, under the guidance of Alan Liu and a support team at the University of California, Santa Barbara English Department, provides extensive links to humanities and humanities-related resources on the Internet. Further Reading Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2014. Alaimo, Stacy. “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 237–64. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. Beauvoir, Simone de. Ethics of Ambiguity, translated by B. Frechtman, New York: Citadel Press, 1976 (1947). ———. The Second Sex. Translated by C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010 (1949). The second sex The ambiguity of Ethics Braidotti, Rosi. “Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology.” Theory, Culture & Society 23.7-8 (2006): 197–208. Brodsky, Claudia, and Eloy LaBrada, eds. Inventing Agency: Essays on the Literary and Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. ———. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997.. _______. “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex.” Yale French Studies 72, Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century (1986): 35-49. Cavarero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. London: Routledge, 2000. Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. Edited by Stockholm Institute of Transition. Boca Raton: The MIT Press, 2007. De Beauvoir, Simone. Grosz, Elizabeth. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2011. Hacking, Ian. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton University Press, 1995. Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–82. New York: Routledge, 1990. ———. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016. ———. “When Species Meet: Introductions.” In When Species Meet, 3–44. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Henderson, Gwendolyn Mae. “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition.” In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Professor Cheryl Wall, 16–37. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Kroker, Arthur. Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Lionnet, Françoise. “Consciousness and Relationality: Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Beauvoir, and Glissant.” Yale French Studies 123, Rethinking Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) (2013): 100-117.essay on beauvoir Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. New York: NYU Press, 2000. Oforlea, Aaron Ngozi. James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and the Rhetorics of Black Male Subjectivity. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017. Oliver, Kelly. Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998. Puar, Jasbir K. “‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory.” PhiloSOPHIA 2.1 (2012): 49–66. Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17.4 (1991): 773–97. Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Visweswaran, Kamala. “Betrayal: An Analysis in Three Acts.” In Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 40–59. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2014. Notes PAGE 34