So Butler here is striving to pull together a, a politics and a way of thinking that is not limited by either a telos where we're all striving for one specific goal, or by a foundation. but on, on, that's on the one hand. On the other hand, she doesn't want a politics and a way of thinking that is just completely open to anything. There has to be some definition, has to be some definition of the political goals. And here she talks about opening possibilities for living and loving, for desiring. Sometimes she talks about it in, in terms of reducing vulnerability, reducing vulnerability. all of those things truth be told, could be seen as part of the enlightenment project. we, we, we in the enlightenment have talked about making the world more a home for human beings after all. you could say, well, making the world more a home for human beings is to give people the ability to breathe, to desire, to love, but Butler doesn't really want to be just part of The Enlightenment Project, because she realizes that The Enlightenment Project has also resulted in the, in the marginalization of, of, of some, the oppression of some and the, degradation, of th-, of the of, of the planet, of the the ecosystem. So she wants a politics that will create these possibilities without falling into the dynamic of exclusion and marginalization and domination, that has characterized the enlightenment. She she is trying to do this balance. Between, the, notion of a subject who can make the world a home and everybody's happy. You know, radical home makeover. The planet is great for everybody. She doesn't believe that's possible, because every time we try to make something over, we have to exclude someone else. She has written along with Fluco and others. But on the other hand, she doesn't want to say that there is the only alternative to the enlightenment is an anti enlightenment of politics. that has no room for reasonable attention to either reducing vulnerability or increasing the possibilities for desire and freedom. She talks about this in the text that we've assigned on, on doing gender as the limits of universalizability. This is from page eight. What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives, she writes. What is most liveable only for some and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives that is unlivable for some. The difference in position and desire set the limits to universalizability as an ethical reflex. And we'll come back to that. The critique of gender norms must be guided by the question of what maximizes the posibilities for a livable life. The critique of gender norms must be guided by the question of what maximizes the possibilities for a livable life. now, notice that sentence. The differences in position and desire set the limits to universalizability as an ethical reflex. In my class I would turn now to the students and say, okay, what is she evoking here? Universalizability as an ethical reflex what is that hearken back to? And the answer you are all probably thinking out there watching the video is Kant right? The categorical imperative. Act as if the maxim of your actions was in principal universalizable. That is that the principle of your action could be applicable to all people. That's the Kantian, Ethical Test called the, one version of the categorical imperative. What Butler is saying is that the differences in who we are and what we desire set the limits of universalizability, you can't universalize everything without homogenizing the differences among people, and that very homogenization of the differences among people is anti-ethical, it is unethical, it is oppressive. And so, she wants to have limits to universalizability without giving up the project. of a search for a reasonable basis, for, enhanced possibilities, for leaving together. So she turns to, what I've called, the powers and norms and how those powers and norms are related to, what it means for us to be human. Page 13. If there are norms of recognition by which the human is constituted, and these norms encode operations of power, then it follows that the contest over the future of the human will be a contest over the power that works in and through such norms. She's interested in other words in how the, the values that we use to legislate proper behavior actually are infused with operations of power to make people become certain kinds of human beings. And that we have to be able to pay attention to what look, that to what looks like an ethical norm is really an operation of power. What looks like a righteous thing to do, is really an operation of the dominant class. what looks like a a liberatory act is really a operation that increases the power of those who rule over others and what Butler wants is not an absence of norms. She doesn't I don't think we she believes that we could exist with an absence of norms but she wants us to be able to pay attention to how norms when they operate create patterns of exclusion and oppression that violate other norms that we have. And if we pay it, learn to pay attention to those things. We won't strive, then, for perfect universalizability. We will strive in each instance to increase the likelihood that our actions will preserve a possibility for people to live with the desires, with the hopes, with the with the possibilities that they say they want to have. In other words, to limit universalizability by paying attention to difference, to paying a different attention to the multitude of possibilities that different kinds of people bring to their lives. This goes back in a way to the Butler's talk about improvisation. You see this on, on page 15 in the text that we have for this week. we, we, we don't always know what it means to inhabit a certain subject position. That is we don't always know what it means to, to behave like a man. or to behave like a strong person. Or to behave like a heterosexual or behave like a gay person. We don't know exactly what those terms mean. But we are expected by our society today to somehow conform to patterns of identity. That have been set down for us. How can we acknowledge these patterns of identity while still leaving room for improvisation? >> We are, we're being informed through institutions. We're being called names. We're being we're having norms imposed on us. So who, who are we such that we. We receive or we're, we're vulnerable to being called certain names. >> Right. >> Or we're vulnerable to certain kinds of social expectations or norms or whatever. So you know, I felt like I actually needed to understand. Mm, the domain of impressionability >> Mm-hm Or receptivity. >> Right. >> To, to understand how it is we might be at once socially constructed but also self-constituting. >> Mm-hm So I had to link those two things Right Because they, you know, there were some people who said, oh, Butler, it's all social construction or, oh, Butler, it's all volunteerism. >> Right, right. >> I thought, oh, I better I better put these things together. >> This is the improvisation being a way of acting freely when you're when you're not just going according to a script. This is what Butler wants right. You know when you feel your life is just moving according to a script there's a sense of constraint and control that can be extraordinarily oppressive. And when you feel that you are operating in relation to a script, where there's a margin for improvisation, for invention, for self invention, for self fashioning others have called it, that gives you sense of, of, freedom, and pleasure. On page fifteen she writes, there is always a dimension of ourselves and our, relation to others that we cannot know and this not knowing, this not knowing persists with us as a condition of existence. And indeed, of survivability. It's important. Butler doesn't want us to think that it's all about absolute knowledge, that we have to get we have to grasp everything, philosophically or scientifically. No. this condition of not knowing, Freud called it the unconscious, is actually a part of our survivability. We are, she goes on to say, we are to an extent driven by what we do not know, and cannot know, and this drive, Freud called it instinct or trieb, is precisely what is neither exclusively biological or cultural. It's the sigh of their dense convergence. In other words, we are impelled, we are pushed, we are driven to do things, we're not sure exactly why. But what we're driving to do isn't just a product of our of our biology, of our anatomy, it's a product of the dense conversions of the biological and the culture. and sexuality, she says on page 15, emerges precisely as an improvisational possibility within this field of constraints. I think it's very interesting. An improvisational possibility within a field of constraints. That's important for Butler because she acknowledges the constraints. And actually the constraints are productive and she acknowledges possibility and that sexuality is a possibility, not just a biology. This is so important because, we, we don't want us to think that improvisation is just making stuff up without any background. No. The great improvisations, say in jazz, are often on the basis of what we call standards, right? We call a, a great jazz song as standard. And so when we improvise, when we improvise, what we are doing is that, acknowledging the background. Acknowledging the standard, but using the standard as a, as a, springboard for possibility. And so when Brad Meldower I don't know, take your favorite. Jazz pianist McCoy Tyner or whoever it is. Tommy Flanagan when when they, they start playing a great standard. But then that standard gives rise to the possibility of invention, and then coming back to the standard and then going out again. That that possibility is a kind of freedom and pleasure. That butler wants to see more of in society.
