Forgetting Subjectivity to Make Normal Subjects
Script of My March 23rd Presentation for the Unmasking Objectivity Conference at the NSSR
As of now, I wrote the paper this talk is based on long enough ago that I have forgotten all the bad parts of it, and, remembering only the good, can proceed with good natured arrogance on the assumption that everyone will be delighted with it and find it very important, whatever that may mean. Suffice to say, I have already forgotten myself, at least enough to perform a short stand-up (or sit-down) routine of a presentation here, but not enough to forget to promise, however inaccurately, that it will not take the full allotted time, so there should be no need for an intermission and we can get to questions on time.
The original essay seemed best to begin with a small transgression. Why not be a little transgressive? I am trying to forget how to be good, after all. Being good is what we do when we forget ourselves, and with all this talk of forgetting I am starting to remember a little too much, to become a little too self-aware. So here is the epigraph, which is not an epigraph, because these are just words that sound nice to start an essay with, and no one else has actually said or written them before:
Frequently in interpreting a work we begin, perhaps unconsciously, with an effort to forget identity, to forget subjectivity, as if the writer and the reader could each encounter the other from a universal position that negates their individuality––despite the fact that such universality is inherently opposed to the possibility of interpretation. Objectivity, in all its pretense to a neutral, universal perspective, is a style of formal language. What we call objective in philosophy is all too often an imposition of one perspective over another––that is, a false universalization of one person’s, or one type of person’s, experience, which is enabled by certain privileges. [1]
This is actually from another essay of mine, my undergrad senior year capstone essay, hence, it’s not a real epigraph. My senior essay committee at the time were strict believers in a specifically narrow kind of objectivity—I was an undergrad at a strange and cultish place far from here—and I can report they were very dismayed to read this. (We spent the rest of that meeting some years ago almost without mentioning that that essay was about being trans.) And my point then, as it more or less remains now, was this: when we forget ourselves in the formalities of a discourse, we are neither negating ourselves and the pesky accoutrements of being, nor becoming ourselves, but desperately trying to be someone else, and we better get to know who they are that we are so busy trying to become that is not ourselves. After all, the more I know them, the less I like them, and the more that I am forced back into my particularity as a trans person that this other that is no other implies.
But to pick up the original train of thought in the essay, which should exonerate me of the nonsense I have been saying:
I am called out of the universal in the moment of my encounter with my own particularity. Perhaps it is because I am reading Beauvoir and the sequence of events that constitute the chain of her becoming womanhood meet an incongruity in my personal history so that where I attempt to draw a parallel line between her history and mine, I find instead a certain intersection that transgresses the boundary of the intended geometric figure. Or perhaps it is in reading Levinas, where his structure of gendered alterity breaks down through a self-encounter that forever ruptures the supposedly untraversable distance which ought to produce a limit against becoming the supposedly absolute other. Or it could even be when my senior essay committee read my paper on Levinas and where unable to ask me about it for nearly the duration of our meeting because we had first to understand the alterity defining our encounter—and they were not prepared for that encounter. Whenever and wherever the moment finds me, it demands I remember myself by producing a break from my submergence within the universal structures that enabled my self forgetting, which produced my disappearance from all consideration of subjectivity so as to emerge wholly objective. It is the irony of this break that reveals such ‘objectivity’ as emerges from the forgetting of the subjective to be a con. It is not true transcendence to the universal but the elevation of a specific genre of experience to the height of universality, which through its hegemonic discursive power sustains itself as taken for granted so that the distinction between it and true universality—if true universality is possible, and that possibility is always more in question than we acknowledge—becomes camouflaged. The effect is a norm that parasitizes knowledge production to the end of reproducing a set of hierarchical power relations that elevate a few to the status of objectivity through appearing to erase the subjectivity of their experience, while producing another class of subjects whose subjectivity is hyper visible. Whose experience disappears and whose becomes hyper visible depends upon their relation to what subjective experiences are normalized, and these disappearances and appearances are always qualified by their interaction with the norm, or even a set of norms, so that there is not one way of being visible and being visible in one aspect may not imply visibility in another. A complete analysis in this direction, however, is beyond the scope of this presentation. The question at hand is why and how ex-nomination makes the subjectivity of the ex-nominated appear as if it were objective, and the relationship of this forgetting of subjectivity with the subjective experience it renders unforgettable or incapable of ex-nomination.
The Power of Forgetting
But to understand the significance of this ex-nomination, we must not forget the good to all of us that forgetting is. As Nietzsche writes:
Imagine the extremest [sic] possible example of a man who did not possess the power of forgetting at all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state of becoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowing asunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream of becoming: like a true pupil of Heraclitus, he would in the end hardly dare to raise his finger. Forgetting is essential to action of any kind, just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of everything organic. […] Thus: it is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting. Or, to express my theme even more simply: there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture.[2] (Emphasis Original)
And here we can see both the good and the bad, because in this praise of forgetting that we all need, there is a curious choice of translation. The word “mensch,” in the final sentence of the quotation, is rendered as “man.” It’s German meaning is decidedly more gender neutral, at least, this is what some German speakers tell me. That “man” is a stand in for any person tells us something about what is ex-nominate-able. There is a gender to this universal and objective person who can be a stand in for anyone. He is not my gender. And therefore I am reminded that my gender is the gender of particularity. But I have to try and forget that to read this and make sense of it in the way intended. Just as it is important to forget the reality of translation that these are not Nietzsche’s words, or that, when typing, I must forget about my fingers if I want to type so fast. Most of all, I must forget this ‘I’ and stop mentioning it to death. Forgetting produces the seamlessness of the world in which one can get up in the morning and not be overwhelmed by yesterday, but also by which one can reach out and grasp an object without becoming preoccupied with one’s arm or hand doing the action and, in fact, be barely aware of them. Likewise, it keeps us from sinking (upward) into a Laputan existence preoccupied with the nearness of events hundreds of millions of years in the future. It maintains the innocuousness of all the thoughtless moments essential to life that if remembered would risk total paralysis. Would it not be already gratuitous to name an example? (If the reader so wishes, they may trouble themselves with whatever comes to mind.) Perhaps best of all, forgetting keeps close what is close and holds at a distance the far off so that the individual does not begin to see their self from that cosmic perspective from which, by pure scale, they disappear and seem now to die of insignificance. At least, it achieves this most of the time.
Nietzsche is quite clear that the need to remember less than too much extends into the collective realm of history: the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people and of a culture.[3] Though we are so situated that to comment upon critical history is tempting—and who cannot but poke fun at antiquarians?—the monumental, of Nietzsche’s three historical modes, need only concern us here, for where the critical history is concerned with unseating norms and the antiquarian so indifferent as to be like bones ploughed over by whatever discourse holds hegemonic power, the monumental is the maker of myths. Or rather, it is the history that has been made into a myth for the use of those who have the greatest desire for forgetting all the unpleasant details and warnings against the quest for egocentric glory. Monumental history is history distilled into only that content which is conducive to action: it is history for the purposes of a stimulating intoxicant. Such history must evoke a certain seamlessness by which every obstacle to action is overcome and every complication of outcome smoothed over. The remove of historical agency is such that the forgetting of the arm or hand that gasps, so as to enable the ease of action on an object, is already taken for granted, but the ease with which the individual subject of monumental history acts as an historical agent must now be assured, primarily, for the sake of their would-be imitators.
In giving a full explication of monumental history, and its necessary looseness with regards to any (antiquarian) notion of truth, Nietzsche writes:
As long as the soul of historiography lies in the great stimuli that a man of power derives from it, as long as the past has to be described as worthy of imitation, as imitable and possible for a second time, it of course incurs the danger of becoming somewhat distorted, beautified and coming close to free poetic invention; there have been ages, indeed, which were quite incapable of distinguishing between a monumentalized past and a mythical fiction, because precisely the same stimuli can be derived from the one world as from the other. If, therefore, the monumental mode of regarding history rules over the other modes […] the past itself suffers harm […] Monumental history deceives by analogies: with seductive similarities it inspires [its adherents.][4]
In adhering to monumental history we must forget difference. I am George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, the whole cast of “founding fathers,” Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Socrates and all Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, at least potentially through the possibility of my repeating their greatness. Their achievements—and it’s almost always the achievements of white, cis, Christian men—are presented as my possibility (assuming, I can think I am like them) and thus a smorgasbord to my (greatly delusional) desire. The adherents of monumental history propose its devouring in the assurance that all greatness must recur and yet, in being truly great, stand utterly unique for all time. This is history for the ex-nominated. Its logic hinges upon the possibility of forgetting one’s self so that one can be anyone else, can make anyone else into one’s self, and can be decontextualized and recontextualized without ever seeming alien to the setting. Such an ex-nominated subject is thus produced as capable of substituting themselves for the hero within the biography provided by monumental history. But this capacity for substitution is not at all opposed to the individuality of the ex-nominated. Rather, the capacity for substitution is built upon the absence of any un-universalizable remainder, which is not in fact a feature of individuality, but a distraction from it. That is, any peculiarity that breaks with the norm is seen as determining whereas conformity with the norm is seen as freeing. As this idea is somewhat counter intuitive, it is important to remember the contradiction inherent in the example of rationality: there is only one way to exercise free will, which is through rationality, and the path of rationality is singular—only the irrational person is unfree and liable to do anything.
The Forgetful Power of Myth
It is now time to give one or two examples of mythical speech. I shall borrow the first from an observation by Valéry. I am a pupil in the second form in a French Lycée. I open my Latin grammar, and I read a sentence, borrowed from Aesop or Phaedrus: quia ego nomitor leo.[5]
Our grammatical example is indicative and therefore already presented in the observant tone of factuality. Could one say no to it? It is only a sentence fragment, one which taken literally means almost nothing, and yet the noun, indicating not a lion but lions abstractly, is laden with significance that extends amorphously beyond any specific history. It signifies all the qualities, all the associations, one has with the lion: a creature of regal power, though the attachment of regality to its power is wholly human. Do we begin to see the deceptive analogies yet? There is another, much more biting, example that follows, closely paraphrased with a slight update to language:
I am at the barber’s, and a copy of the Paris-Match is offered to me. On the cover, a young [Black man] in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture […] I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this [Black man] in serving his so-called oppressors. I am therefore again faced with a greater semiological system: there is a signifier, itself already formed with a previous system (a [B]lack soldier is giving the French salute); there is a signified (it is here a purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militariness); finally, there is a presence of the signified through the signifier.[6] (Emphasis original)
Where in the encounter with monumental history one forgets that one is not and cannot become George Washington, here one forgets that the man saluting is an individual. He is a trope, a stand in, a deindividualized representation of a whole class of persons: a deceptive analogy not for my identification but my identification of others. He does not appear as the celebrity or the historical hero who I desire to repeat and in whose repeating to become—both are speaking roles—but as a symbol nonetheless. He is silent because his speech would break the illusion and return him from the general to the particular. That is, if the signifier should regain its particularity, its meaning, then the signified will disappear from view just as the signifier has had to disappear in order to bring into focus the signified. Were the example a pen, then it would have been of necessity that the pen not be individuated, that it not have any particular features to draw it out of universal pen-ness. Since the example is a person, his personality, his personal history, his break with trope, must be silenced. His significance as a nationalistic colonial subject is all that matters to the myth. He is a stand in for all French colonial subjects who are implied through him to be French patriots. But even as he is de-individualized, he is not ex-nominated. As a figure, he is hyper visible. He is more than himself. The trope attached to him modifies the signification of his action so that he could not be just any man saluting: he is the colonized saluting the flag of the colonizer assuring them that he too is identified with their project. An ex-nominated white man saluting a flag would either be a particular man saluting a flag, in which case the emphasis would be utterly on his personality, or an action without an agent: that is to say, a signification of an action by no one in particular. The difference is that the ex-nominated figure either represents their self or everyone, whereas the nominated figure is first trope, and only if they overcome trope then potentially themselves.
The forgetting power of myth, however, extends even further beyond the capacity for emptying signifiers to produce abstract significations, or transforming individuals into deindividualized tropes. It structures the de-historicized space of the natural, that is, it is the function that enables historical forgetting and thus sustains monumental history:
It is again this duplicity of the signifier which determines the characters of the signification. We know that myth is a type of speech defined by its intention (I am a grammatical example) much more than by its literal sense (my name is lion); and that in spite of this, its intention is somehow frozen, purified, eternalized, made absent by this literal sense (The French Empire? It’s just a fact: look at this good [representative of the colonized] who salutes like one of our own boys). This constituent ambiguity of mythical speech has two consequences for the signification, which henceforth appears both like a notification and like a statement of fact.[7] (Emphasis original)
The myth effects the forgetting of the historicity of the French Empire in much the same manner as the Nietzschean subject must enclose the memory of their history within a sufficiently small horizon as to permit their living. This forgetting renders the French Empire an eternal fact of life and therefore absolves it of the atrocities of its becoming both regarding how France became an empire and also how it has maintained itself as one in the face of anticolonial opposition. In effect, the function of the myth is the normalization of French imperialism through the forgetting of its historical contingency. The eternal present of the myth enters the room in such dramatic fashion as to make itself the focal point and, to extend the visual art metaphor further, in declaring itself the positive space defines what constitutes the negative. The mythologized nationalistic fervor of colonial subjects supersedes the questions of imperialism and the desire for decolonization, the myth supersedes even their biographies, their personalities. It is this forgetting of the superfluously unmythical that produces the mythical as natural fact. The fact is, like nature. It is a present unchanging so as to always already be past, this is unalterable, and yet to collapse the distance between now and the future through its surety. The French Empire is eternal. It is eternal because it is a present fact. It is a present fact because I have forgotten the historical contingencies of its becoming. This is all forgotten through the hyper visibility of the Black man as a Black man—that is, not indivisible like a white man’s being a white man—saluting. Myth is a disappearing act that relies upon visibility.
Ex-Nomination as the Mythical Forgetting of Subjectivity
Our society is still a bourgeois society. […] Now a remarkable phenomenon occurs in the matter of naming this regime: as an economic fact, the bourgeoisie is named without any difficulty: capitalism is openly professed. As a political fact, the bourgeoisie has some difficulty in acknowledging itself: there are no ‘bourgeois’ parties in the Chamber. As an ideological fact, it completely disappears: the bourgeoisie has obliterated its name in passing from reality to representation, from economic man to mental man. It comes to an agreement with the facts, but does not compromise about values, it makes its status undergo a real ex-nominating operation: the bourgeoisie is defined as the social class that does not want to be named.[8] (Emphasis Original)
The bourgeois have disappeared. Really, there is a further disappearing act here as well, which is that the bourgeois were always already the white bourgeois, not the Black bourgeois, or the colonized bourgeois, and so on. That the whiteness of the bourgeois—which is always inseparable from their not being colonized but colonizer, even if at a distance from the colony—also disappears and is, in fact, even more invisible than their status as bourgeois, if degrees of invisibility are possible, is by no means insignificant. If anything, the inattention indicates that their whiteness is even more essential to their ex-nomination than their status as bourgeois. Ex-nomination produces them as the invisible norm of society—as the perspective from which society operates so that even if to look back upon them, as if in a mirror, were possible, what is not possible is to exit their view while retaining the societal perspective. It is this feature of perspective, that what one sees least clearly if at all is its source while everything exterior to it is rendered immediately visible, that produces ex-nomination. Neither ex-nomination nor myth are phenomena that can be abolished or overcome. Perspective is necessary for seeing, forgetting is necessary for living—the critical history always seeks to become the monumental. There will always be an ex-nominated position as there will always be myth, but what perspective is ex-nominated and what is mythologized are always contingent questions, and these are questions of imminent ethical concern. Only the current myths would have us believe in their inevitability now.
Before concluding, we should take a moment to step back and examine an experience—there is not inherently only one—of breaking with the ex-nominated norm from the individual’s perspective (in this case, Sara Ahmed’s):
Another scene from another time: away from home my partner and I are on holiday on a resort on an island. Mealtimes bring everyone together. We enter the dining room […] I face what seems like a shocking image. In front of me, on the tables, couples are seated. Table after table, couple after couple, taking the same form: one man sitting by one woman around a “round table,” facing each other “over” the table. […] Rather than just seeing the familiar, which of course means that it passes from view, I felt wonder and surprise at the regularity of its form, as the form of what arrived at the table, as forms that get repeated, again and again, until they are “forgotten” and simply become forms of life.[9]
Forgetting the repetitious hyper-presence of heterosexuality produces the queer subject as hyper visible for breaking with the repetition of forms. Ahmed is, of course, present with her partner, and together they mark a break in the gendered rhythm of the space: a missed beat, or a note repeated in place of the anticipated interval. Heterosexuality is negative space, against which queerness becomes a focal point. The focus on queerness produces heterosexuality as negative. Ahmed, through her inhabitation of her own perspective, reverses the special polarization. The extreme presence of heterosexuality calls it to attention so that it is no longer naturalized in its milieu and shifts from negative to positive. In making the hyper presence of heterosexuality the focal point queerness becomes negative space: because of our inhabitation of Ahmed’s perspective it is now the taken for granted background of life. Here we illustrate the inevitability of the norm: to call to attention is necessarily also to forget, and what is forgotten becomes the perspective that produces the image. In overturning the previous norm, in calling attention to the last myth, we form one anew. The norm is always behind me. It is wherever I am not looking. If I spin around fast enough I will still not catch it because it will spin with me. We cannot look in every direction at once. My horizon cannot expand to infinity without being trapped in endless becoming, without suffering a perfect memory, without losing the possibility of forgiveness not because others fail to extend it to me but because I could not extend it to myself, without becoming imperceptive of myth.
The queer break with the norm that is ex-nominated is not analogous to the break experienced by Black people or other people of color, or even, when a distinction is made between queer and trans—though the two are often conjoined—with the trans break with ex-nomination. At the same time, however, none of these categories are mutually exclusive. Each way of being made visible against the norm is unique. Moreover, the experience of being named against the ex-nominated norm and being used as a signifier based upon that break are not necessarily correlated. That is to say, the perception of myth and the experience of the mythologized are not the same. This necessarily follows from the essential fact that other people’s experience of us does not correspond to self-experience. But there is not space or time to continue this discussion further here, and the topic will have to be left for later.
Concluding Parable
Why am I a fascinating object of the study of gender and not others? For weeks a cisgender man bothers me by email seeking the certification of his theory of gender based upon my experience. My every refusal to certify his theory produces greater determination on his part until I decline to answer any more emails. Before I stop replying, however, I suggest he turn his study towards a concern with the conditions of cisgender experience. Yet this suggestion, evidently, does not correspond with a possible theoretical occupation on his part, for he adamantly refuses to take it up, stating bluntly that he does not wish to question his own experience. His own experience of cis gender is utterly inaccessible to him in a way that my experience of trans gender, apparently, is not. How could such an absurdity be? The answer is simple: the cis experience of gender is precisely one of inattention, that is, it is the experience of its own ex-nomination. It is so utterly taken for granted that the attempt to sustain a focus upon it is like pouring water on a duck—it slips right off. The very content of cis gender is the negation of anything that could call attention to itself and therefore constitute a subject of study.
In visual art, negative space defines the focal point: what my vision slips off defines the space of my attention. Simultaneously, what form, what value, what color calls out to my gaze to land and stay fixed upon it defines the negative space of my inattention. Surveying the gendered landscape, transness erupts from the lawful regularity of universal order as a break in the sequence of events that constitute the easy flow of becoming. An abrupt redirection and refraction of its current renders womanhood from boyhood, manhood from girlhood, and a cacophony—or is it a polyphony?—of forms where before there were two in simple counterpoint. But the disruption is not disruptive. Rather, it anchors the landscape so that the flatness all around it appears truly flat. My mind—ever inseparable from what I see, that is, from the object of my eye—does not search for some subtle irregularity as on the boarders of a Rothko where the fault lines between brushstrokes produce contrasting textures. My view is taken up by the eruption against which the flatness refuses all attention. The break with order produces order. The transgender focal point, when it is so arraigned to anchor this landscape, produces the cisgender norm. To name the deviant is to ex-nominate the ‘normal’ subject.
[1] Rose Pelham, “Foundations of a Transgender Phenomenology: On the Incompleteness of Totality and Infinity” page 7.
[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 62.
[3] Nietzsche, Unitmely Meditations, 63.
[4] Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 70-1.
[5] Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 115.
[6] Barthes, Mythologies, 116.
[7] Barthes, Mythologies, 124.
[8] Barthes, Mythologies, 137-8.
[9] Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 82.