On the Futures of the Subject

On the Futures of the Subject

ABSTRACT: This paper is intended as an inquiry regarding contemporary critical assays of subjectivity. In response to the contemporary politics of representation, both in expressions of essentialist identity politics and in versions of social constructivism, and their implication of all pedagogical practices in transfers of power, I wish to project the question of the subject’s futures. I choose to discuss the limits of the interior, monadic subject for consideration not only its historical and contemporary effects in the politics of representation, but also for the possibility of thinking beyond it. In the spirit of Foucault’s ethical project only a special kind of curiosity and a thinking ‘otherwise’ could, if luck and wit permit, allow us as individual subjects to go beyond ourselves. Thinking otherwise, when possible, could also suggest going beyond ourselves collectively in the creation of provisional critical pedagogical and ethical community.

The notion of a decentered subject, now affixed to postmodern thought and practice, remains elusive. As a sometimes notorious, sometimes vogue tenet of cultural politics, the multiple, positioned subject breaks from traditional anchorages, whether theological, philosophical and political and their cultivation of experience. Most difficult for public critical reception are accounts of fragmentation and centerless identity, fueling charges that a moral vacuum has been excavated. The risk of losing any guarantee to permanence, order and a planned purpose to life is too great a secular leap into the void for most modern individuals to accept. While the specters of social fragmentation have been recognized as modes of experience under reifying modern social relations, the split subject, from Descartes to Freud and, on into postmodernism's displacements, a nostalgia for a substantial, core self persists.

This paper is intended as an inquiry regarding contemporary critical assays of subjectivity. In response to the contemporary politics of representation, both in expressions of essentialist identity politics and in versions of social constructivism, and their implication of all pedagogical practices in transfers of power, I wish to project the question of the subject's futures.

I choose to discuss the limits of the interior, monadic subject for consideration not only its historical and contemporary effects in the politics of representation, but also for the possibility of thinking beyond it. In the spirit of Foucault's ethical project only a special kind of curiosity and a thinking `otherwise' could, if luck and wit permit, allow us as individual subjects to go beyond ourselves.