subjectivation. It engages extensively with Butler’s theorisation of the performatively
constituted subject, and builds on her rearticularion of Althusser’s understanding of
interpellation and Bourdieu’s notions of habitus. In particular, this paper explores
Butler’s suggestion of a politics of performative resignification.
Foucault’s understanding of productive power effected in and through discourse (1990 &
1991) offers an important departure from analyses which foreground oppression
embedded in social structures. The multiple, discontinuous, unstable, and tactical nature
of discourse and discursive practices insists that relations of power are contextually
specific, mobile and potentially fragile. This suggests a subject who is Subjectivated -
formed and constrained, but not determined - through the productive power of discursive
practices that render the ‘world’ and the ‘self’ knowable and known (Foucault 1990 &
1991).
These Foucauldian notions underpin Butler’s theorisation of ‘discursive performativity’
(Butler 1993:13) in which the ‘performative functions to produce that which it declares’
(Butler 1993:107). Understood in this way, discursive practices that appear to describe
(pre-existing) subjects are shown to be productive. According to Butler such
performatives are citational, they cite prior discursive practices. They are steeped in
historicity, their meanings become sedimented. They are equivocal, their meanings are
‘non-necessary’ (Butler 1997a:39). And they are subject to ‘misfire’ (Derrida 1988:72),
they can have unexpected, or unwanted effects.