The Poststructuralist ‘Choosing’ Subject

Post-structuralist conceptions of the subject have appealed to many because they seem to offer a way through an apparent tension in notions of ‘social construction’: how do we speak about people as constructions of the social order on the one hand, and as con­structing agents or actors on the other, without erring on either side? Those ‘social constructionist’ accounts of schooling and socialisation which accentuated the determining effects of the social structure and ideology had been unattractive not only due to their inherent pessimism, but also for the ways in which they seemed to obliterate the ‘real’ thinking person who can choose to resist, change, and ‘make a difference’. On the other hand, accounts which emphasised ‘agency’ and change were too often voluntarist, in danger of assuming an individual able to act and think inde­pendently of the social structure and its ideologies.

(Jones, 1997: 262)

We have seen that a major critique of rational choice theory is that it privileges a voluntarist account of human agency. It suggests that individuals are relatively free to choose with no account taken of power relations or the structuring of advantage and disadvantage. Feminist critiques of rational choice theory certainly highlight issues of structure as entirely salient to understanding how choices are made. Yet structural accounts can be critiqued because they privilege a certain determinism. In this way they can appear to suggest that one has ‘no choice’. In addition, the agency-structure dichotomy remains firmly in place as social theorists simply place themselves at varying points between its two polarizations.

Poststructuralist conceptions are offered as a way of going beyond such binary opposition. Jones comments on how poststructuralism has facilitated a questioning of simplistic accounts of socialization that would suggest that we are born into the world as ‘blank slates on which an appropriate and uniform gender is more or less successfully inscribed’ (ibid.: 262). A poststructuralist explanation would encourage us to recognize that we do not all turn out to be the same. It would enable us to know that when we invoke the terms girl or woman we know this in terms of aspects of difference. It would also encourage us to understand that, as much as we might take up particular discursive positions, we can also resist them. This is because one of the main features of poststructuralism is that it stresses: ‘The doubled sense of ‘‘subject’’ (subject/ed to and subject of action) . . . [which] allows for an individual who is socially produced, and ‘‘multiply positioned’’ — neither determined nor free, but both simultaneously’ (Jones, 1997: 263). This analysis of being both subject/ed to and subject of action can be seen in Walkerdine’s (1990: 28) description of a school staffroom: ‘The staffroom is full of women eating cottage cheese or grapefruit. Each of them knows about diet and eating and sexuality. They are willing and happy to talk about these, caught inside what they are: the unique combination of worker and woman, dependent and independent, free and trapped’ (Walkerdine, 1990: 28).

In particular, poststructuralist accounts of agency draw on a critique of humanism. Davies (1991: 43) compares choice within a humanist framework and within a poststructuralist framework (see Figure 4.2). As Davies makes clear within humanist theorizing, strong connections are made between the ways that individuals make choices and our assumptions about them as people. Making choices in the prescribed rationality of weighing up the options and making an informed choice is seen to confirm that the individual is a coherent, orderly, rational and, indeed, sane person. Not to make choices in this way is to be regarded as faulty or lacking in this respect. Whereas within humanist theorizing choice is seen to be an act of consciousness and deliberateness in comparison conceptualizations of choice within poststructural

Figure 4.2 A comparison between humanistic and poststructural frameworks of conceptualizations of choice

perspectives view it as an aspect of subjectivity. The consciousness and deliberateness of ‘rationality’ might be subverted by both conscious and unconscious desire.

Desire is constituted through discourses through which one is subject of and subject to. Not all subject positions are equally available. Indi­viduals have differential access to particular discursive positions. Dis­courses therefore have different gendered, ‘raced’ and class implications and we can only ‘pick up the tools that are lying there’. In this way choices are understood as contextualized within the specific regulatory discourses to which we have access. As Davies notes, the subject position of the humanist subject, that is as experiencing oneself as ‘continuous, unified, rational and coherent’ (1991: 43) is mainly available to White middle-class males. Therefore the subjectivity of the rational humanist subject is more likely and more achievable for such individuals. For example, Walkerdine (1990) notes how modern conceptions of child development configure children as enquiring and active. These qualities are, moreover, strongly associated with the masculine side of the female/ masculine binary. Thus, ‘By definition, active childhood and passive femininity exist at the intersection of competing discourses. For girls, therefore their position as children must remain shaky and partial, continually played across by their position as feminine. Conversely, for boys masculinity and childhood work to prohibit passivity. And in both cases passion and irrationality are constantly displaced’ (Walkerdine, 1990: 34). This means, as Davies (1991) notes, that men have greater
access to discourses of autonomy. For women the achievement of autonomy is both tenuous and ambivalent. Walkerdine (1994) notes from her research into the achievement levels of children at school that no matter how poorly boys were doing, they were always judged as ‘having potential’. This possibility was never claimed for girls.

One of the issues that poststructuralist theorizing has explored in relation to choice is its illusory nature. One may feel autonomous and free to choose. But the power of regulatory discourses means that such choice is both ‘forced’ and of false appearance. This is because ‘the subject’s positioning within particular discourses make the ‘‘chosen’’ line of action the only possible action, not because there are no other lines of action but because one has been subjectively constituted through one’s placement within that discourse to want that line of action’ (Davies, 1991: 46, emphasis in original). Two examples illustrate the illusory nature of choice. Walkerdine (1990) discusses the illusion of choice in relation to psychological perspectives of ‘good’ child rearing. She reflects on how discourses of child rearing urge parents to avoid humiliating a ‘naughty’ child through overt threats and sanctions as this will damage the child’s growing sense of being an autonomous being. Rather, parents are encouraged to offer a child a ‘choice’ of different behavioural options whilst conveying to the child that there are, of course, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ choices that can be made.

Laws and Davies (2000) explore how schooling regulates the possible choices that children have about their behaviour. Children at school are similarly encouraged to make the ‘right’ choices. For example, to be recognized as a good or competent student the child has to know how to learn, when to speak and when to be silent, when to work and when to be creative. These forms of regulation of children’s behaviour are understood as central to creating the appropriate conditions for teachers to teach. The child who refuses to make these ‘right’ choices or does not recognize their import risks being viewed as unintelligent or difficult and so forth. In this respect Laws and Davies draw attention to the connections between ‘choice’ and ‘consequences’ and the agency of the individual:

Both ‘choice’ and the closely related concept ‘consequences’ are central to the ‘good school behaviour’ discourse. They are used by teachers and students to ‘manage’ classroom order. But this management of order cannot be achieved by teachers’ efforts alone. Students must take up as their own a desire for the sort of order the teacher wants. (ibid.: 209)

Within poststructuralist accounts agency is perceived to be the simul­taneous act of free will and submitting to the regulatory order. In the act of ‘choosing’ and experiencing this choice as an individual act of will we are submitting to the requirements of particular regulatory discourses. This can be contrasted with humanism where an opposition is set up between autonomy and submission. Within humanism, one is either autonomous or submissive. Thus, one is either acting freely or one is forced to do something one would choose not to do.

One of the ways that poststructuralism seeks to demonstrate the paradoxical point that issues of agency and structure inhabit the same act can be seen through the attention that has been given to the twinning of mastery and submission. Butler (1995: 45-6) notes in this regard:

The more a practice is mastered, the more fully subjection is achieved. Submission and mastery take place simultaneously, and it is this paradoxical simultaneity that constitutes the ambivalence of subjection. Where one might expect submission to consist in a yielding to an externally imposed dominant order, and to be marked by a loss of control and mastery, it is paradoxically marked by mastery itself . . . the simultaneity of submission as mastery, and mastery as submission, is the condition of possibility for the subject itself.

These processes of regulation that one submits to become internalized in terms of self-regulation. For example, the desire to be good means that one must master (sic) the subject position of the ‘good’ child or student. This is achieved through repetition. The more we repeat a practice or an action, the greater our mastery of it. Mastery, itself experienced as the achievement of the humanist self, is the ultimate self-regulation of our actions and behaviours. Thus, we take up our pen and form our hand­writing in uniform shapes. Or, as a child we might think ‘my mother needs me to be quiet’ and so we are quiet. We have in these moments accomplished key aspects of humanist discourses — individuality, choice, a recognition of the consequences of one’s actions, autonomy and responsibility (Davies et al., 2001). Davies et al. explore this in relation to their experiences as pupils who had been ‘successful in ‘‘getting the goodies’’ of formal schooling’ (ibid.: 180-1). They describe how learning to be successful was experienced ambivalently but included acquiring the signifiers that would evidence that they were competent and good. This included subordinating the body to the mind, to love what it is the teacher teaches and producing the clean script. Their collective biography illustrates how:

We have been able to show the hard work of becoming appropriate(d) — both its necessity and its risky fragility. There is no guarantee that even the most conscientious schoolgirl will be able, repeatedly, to produce herself as that which she has come to desire for herself. Her knowledge of herself as acceptable depends on both a tight disciplining of the body, and a capacity to disattend the body and its needs. It depends on a capacity to read what the teacher wants and to produce it, but more than that, to want it for herself. At the same time, it depends on a capacity to distance herself from the Others, on whose approving gaze she is dependent, and to know herself in contrast to them. She must, paradoxically, find these points of contrast at the same time as she takes herself up as recognisable through the very same discourses through which she and they are constituted. (ibid.)

Finally, it should be noted that the point of a poststructuralist political project is not to set up a new binary of humanist subject and anti-humanist subject. To do so would simply reinforce the binary oppositions that poststructuralism seeks to move beyond. The point of poststructuralism is to ‘show how the humanist self is so convincingly achieved’ (Davies, 1997b: 272). As Davies et al. state:

The idea and the ideal of autonomy, which our theorising recognises as fictional, is nevertheless the conceptual and practical lynchpin of the appropriate(d) subject. The subject submits to the fictions of the self and gains mastery through them. And that mastery — of language, of the body — provides the conditions of possibility for investing something new, of seeing afresh, of creatively moving beyond the already known. (2001: 181)