Charles Taylor’s ‘Sexuated’ Subjects
WILLIAM J. URBAN
...and Two Subjects
What we will do here in this section is indicate the underlying logic of Taylor’s two notions of self using Lacan’s formulae of sexuation.10 Let us begin our discussion by taking the right, ‘masculine,’ side of Lacan’s matrix table, which articulates the establishment of an ‘All’ set by a constitutive exception with two logical statements. This masculine logic is that which establishes the universal function ‘All 
are submitted to the (phallic) function 
' through the implicit existence of an exception ‘There is at least one which is exempted from the (phallic) function .' Lacan’s concepts are notoriously difficult, and the ‘phallic function’ is certainly no exception. But fortunately we do not need to completely conceptualize the meaning it takes on with Lacan, since here we are only interested in its logical functioning. So by simply noting that the phallic function is a function of ‘symbolic castration’ we gain an important clue in how we can begin to apply the sexuated formulae to Taylor’s text, especially when we recall his discussion of the differences between modernity and traditional civilizations. Does not Taylor’s notion of today’s utilitarian challenge to abandon our capacity for contrastive language used to express ‘deep’ issues concerning our selfhood function exactly like a threat of castration? Do we not get a sense that Taylor sees a danger that modernity ‘cuts us short,’ leaving us at the mere surface of our selves? It seems legitimate to substitute into Taylor’s terms a ‘utilitarian function’ for the phallic, since it also conveys a similar symbolic operation. Accordingly, we arrive at the following universal statement for the strong evaluator of our modern times: ‘All Selfs are submitted to the Utilitarian function’ which implies that ‘There is at least one Self which is exempted from the Utilitarian function.’ We note here with Žižek that Lacan’s masculine ‘All’ is not at the level of a general, empirical set, but rather is at the level of the Notion, which arrives as such, ‘for itself,’ only through an exception. This exception is not an addition to, but rather a subtraction from, the general set, which totalizes the general set and makes out of it a universality. (Žižek 2002: 123) In terms of Taylor’s text, what this means is that we are dealing with the notion that the modern self must work very hard to express its deep sense of self in today’s utilitarian times. And further, such a notion of selfhood arises only on condition that there is a least one (primordial) self that does not need to define itself as against these utilitarian times. This primordial self appears as the embodiment of selfhood in general and what is already, by its nature, what it is without any such hard work.11
Expressing this logic in terms of a single self, we argue that this perfectly captures Taylor’s notion of the selfhood of a strong evaluator. That is to say, ‘All of the Self is submitted to the Utilitarian function’ implies ‘There is at least one of the Self which is exempted from the Utilitarian function.’ The statement of exception tells us that this ‘at least one ’ of the self – which is precisely that ‘deep’ part of the self that Taylor’s notion of strong evaluation endeavors to express – forever escapes today’s castrating tendency to reduce our potentially deep evaluations to mere quantitative weighings of alternatives. Behind Taylor’s account of the strong evaluator, there is the sense that no matter how much the utilitarian function ‘wins out’ today in expressing only the shallow, calculating self, there remains a deeper quality of life that remains safely out-of-reach of its castrating tendency. Moreover, for this very notion (of the strong evaluator who must strive to combat today’s imperative to evaluate quantitatively, like a simple weigher) to arrive as such, it must again be embodied in some of the self that needs to do no such striving, because it is what it is. This exceptional, deep provides a ‘guarantee’ of sorts that our striving is not in vain, providing a support for our Being qua strivers for deep self-reflection. We will return to this idea below when we examine Taylor’s recommended strategy to tap this ‘beyond.’ For now, let us briefly note the similarity of this masculine logic with Kant’s dynamical antinomies,12 which will give us additional terminology to express the underlying topological structure of Taylor’s project. As is well known, Kant resolved this type of antinomy by positing the Beyond of the noumenal realm as that which stands ‘outside’ the phenomenal, suspending the phenomenal causal chain. In the same way, Taylor’s strong evaluator is conceived of as externally split between its deep, noumenal self and its shallow, phenomenal expressions of its deep, noumenal self. The critical question to answer now is, can this conception of the modern, strong evaluating self stand on its own? The answer is no, but to see why this is so, we need to work through the ‘feminine’ sexuated logic of Taylor’s simple weigher.
The left side of Lacan’s matrix table articulates a particular negation, a ‘not-All’ set, again with two logical statements. This feminine logic is one that undermines the universality of the phallic function by the very fact that there is no exception to its function and, in this sense, must be conceived as logically a priori to masculine logic. To understand this, let us examine the two feminine statements. ‘Not-all are submitted to the (phallic) function ' implies that there is no exception: ‘There is no which is exempted from the (phallic) function .' Following the procedure we used above for the masculine equations of the strong evaluator, we can do likewise here and express the simple weigher in feminine logical terms. ‘Not-all of the Self are submitted to the Utilitarian function’ would imply the lack of an exception: ‘There is no of the Self which is exempted from the Utilitarian function.’ To help us understand this difficult logic, let us imagine that for the simple weigher, all of the self is shallow, as seems to be the case. Certainly the second statement above seems to indicate this, and this is exactly how Taylor himself describes such a subject, as lacking any depth and thus able to self-reflect in only in a minimal sense. (Recall how Figure 2 has a hollowed-out center). But a closer look reveals that the claim ‘all of the self is shallow’ is already in the universal, masculine form which would need a constitutive exception to bring it to its full notion. Rather, what we have here with the feminine expression ‘not-all of the self is shallow’ is something quite different. It indicates that there is a lack of an exception to the self with regards to its ‘shallowness’, that by taking each evaluation that expresses the ’s of the self one by one, they could always be conceived as the mere effects of the Utilitarian function and thus be considered yet another expression of the shallow self.
In Kantian terms, we still have a split, but it is no longer external between the phenomenal and noumenal domains. Rather, what is expressed is an inherent inconsistency within the phenomenal domain. But saying ‘no longer’ is misleading, because it is this outcome of the Kantian ‘mathematical’ antinomy that has priority over the dynamical. We read with Žižek that the masculine logic of Kant’s dynamical is already a ‘domestication’ of the feminine logic of the mathematical. That is, the former is an attempt to resolve the inherent deadlock of the latter by transposing it into the coexistence of two distinct orders of the phenomenal and the noumenal. (Žižek 1999:38) A simple example should suffice to demonstrate how an external boundary is reflected into an inherent limit. If we ask, who is ‘German?’ we could easily say ‘Germans’ are those that do not reside in Poland, France, etc… That is, within the borders of Germany reside ‘Germans’ and external to this border are ‘non-Germans.’ However, once inside the border, the question then arises, who are the ‘real Germans’, who are those who correspond to the full notion of being ‘German?’ Are we to include only those born and raised within the borders? Or can we also include those that immigrated to Germany at an early age? But what would be the cutoff age of such an immigrant? And what of those who exit Germany for extended periods of time? Or of convicted criminals, do they still have full citizenship status? What of the insane or Jews or women or...? It seems that a masculine exceptional position is not firmly grounded, but rather taken up within the feminine not-all; perhaps we can say that the masculine logic of the exception itself is an ‘exception’ within the larger logic of the feminine not-all. However we conceive it, it soon becomes clear that ‘German-ness’ is an inherent limit at the very level of its Notion, an unattainable point preventing the achievement of a full German identity-with-itself. And our point here is that the relation between the masculine and feminine logic in this example functions exactly the same in the case of Taylor’s notion of ‘deep self.’ He avoids the inherent deadlock to be had at the level of the logic of the simple weigher by transposing it into the logic underlying the strong evaluator self who is defined precisely as harboring the coexistence of a shallow/phenomenal self and some deeper/noumenal self, the former being the mere appearance of the latter. This is a domesticating, secondary gesture performed by Taylor at a logical level, designed to save the self (and Taylor’s theory) from the anxiety provoked by the lack of exception inherent in the notion of the simple weigher.
This certainly gives us an indication as to why Taylor’s discussion, meant to illustrate the differences between the shallow, simple weigher and the ‘deeper’ strong evaluator, is never all that satisfying and always (at least potentially) contentious: if the inherent limitation of the self is a priori, there is an inherent difficulty – more, impossibility – to draw a final, definitive line or convincing boundary between the two. For instance, if a subject considers himself to be courageous such that he would not consummate a desire because it is ‘cowardly’ regardless of otherwise agreeable contingent circumstances, must we not posit that at some time this subject had no such courageous ‘mode of life’ so that he must have chosen as a simple weigher among articulated choices that represented courageous and cowardly values that he now ‘deeply’ possesses? Moreover, does not each and every set of desires re-new the subject’s mode of life so that its articulation in one time is never the same as another – precisely because of a new, contingent field of desires? At the textual level, the problem here is that whenever Taylor does attempt to delimit a field of ‘deep selfhood,’ his very articulation by definition implies a partial position of enunciation, and thus is always vulnerable to critique on the grounds that it is precisely his position of enunciation – the ‘place from which he speaks’ – that, unbeknownst to him, informs the very presupposed ‘deep self’ he is attempting to articulate. This place shifts, being constituted in the very process of establishing the field of desires, but Taylor implicitly believes he can ‘hold down the fort’ by taking on a particular subjective stance. We will come back to this.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
