Charles Taylor’s ‘Sexuated’ Subjects
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Responsibility for Evaluations: Articulation
Certainly headed in the right direction by highlighting the effects the use of language has on speaking beings, Taylor hinges much of his remaining argument for self-constitution (via self-evaluation) on the fact that we are responsible for our evaluations not because they are chosen, but rather because ‘they are articulations of our sense of what is worthy or higher.’ (Taylor 1976: 294, emphasis added) He immediately notes the failure that occurs whenever we articulate our selves. We never seem to achieve full satisfaction through such articulation, which results in ‘self-deception’ and ‘distortion,’ giving rise to uncertainty and the injunction to try again. Taylor here notes an experience common to many of us, of how words fail to completely articulate the full meaning we intend to convey. He rightly notes that our articulated evaluations are never simple descriptions of fully independent objects, but rather how our desired intent is an inchoate object that undergoes change by the fact that it is articulated in words. (Taylor 1976: 295) This is most clearly felt when evaluation is of those matters deemed most important to us. Fair enough. But the opposite case is not considered by Taylor: how we often say much more than we intend to say. This is what Freudian slips of the tongue are all about. At it is these two effects together – how our words fail us, saying too little of our ‘true’ selves, but at the very same time, how they end up saying too much of our selves – which expresses another way in which the subject is fundamentally split. Here, we see that the signifier is precisely that which rips a hole in the Real, that is then retroactively filled in with a sense that one in fact did have a message to convey about the deep self, which no matter how hard one tries – as Taylor stresses – always fails to be fully articulated.
Here lies the key to the proper reading of Taylor’s lament over the loss of warrior/honor ethicality. It has to do primarily with the effect of signifiers, and not because of a Utilitarian function that is ‘actually’ being wielded by the mysterious forces of modernity, compelling us to turn away from our ‘deep ethical roots’. The symbolically castrating function is found in the very fact that we use language. The nostalgic loss itself for the ancient times actually functions as a fantasmatic support for Taylor’s subjective position within his very own philosophy. If one removed the notion of the theoretical effort designed to re-address a historical loss of values held to have actually occurred, his philosophy disintegrates. The insight needed to be reached here is that such a loss is only a retroactive positing due to the fact that such a strong philosophical reflection on those deep, ethical times can never be complete. There is a homology at the individual level: there is an impossibility of full articulation of a deep self. In each case – whether at the philosophical level or at the level of the individual self – the threat here is always the experience of how one never actually had what one had believed lost. The potential traumatic experience is that loss in a way precedes what is being lost, a pure ‘loss of the loss.’ This is the very real effect of the fact that articulation involves signifiers. (For They, 168)
While Taylor does miss the ‘too much’ of articulation, he does a fine job in indicating the ‘too little.’ This partial grasping of the effects of the signifier on the subject apparently is enough for his insight of the fact that we are unable to occupy a god’s eye position that would allow us a panoramic, full view of our selves. This is truly the key question that his argument has been leading toward. If there ‘is certainly no metalanguage available in which I can assess rival self-interpretation,’ how can radical re-evaluations (those that call fundamental formulations of the deep self into question) be carried on? (Taylor 1976: 297) Before turning to his proposed solution, we should note at once the form in which this ‘no metalanguage’ statement is expressed in Taylor’s text. Consider how he writes on the previous page, ‘in principle no formulations are considered unrevisable.’ This is in the exact format of the feminine lack of exception formula, meaning that each formulation can always be revised because of the lack of an exceptional position from which we can formulate (some aspect of the) self once and for all. Taylor quite rightly realizes that the self is inherently limited.
But the theoretical ramifications of this realization are not worked out, though the anxiety that underscores such awareness is textually evident. We speak here, of course, of the psychoanalytic account of anxiety as the only affect that does not deceive the subject and that signals to the subject that a traumatic object is too close for comfort. This is exactly the ‘loss of the loss’ spoken of above, where a fantasy object which previously gave support to Being is removed. And this is how we should account for the language Taylor uses in the long quote cited above, when he speaks of a ‘terrifying experience of disaggregation and loss’ and ‘an “identity-crisis” when we have lost our grip on who we are.’ We could really find no better (Lacanian) description of that ‘most terrible mental alienation’ that a subject faces when he is compelled to confront the possibility that the subject itself is the effect of the fact that there is no firm meta-position attainable from which he could make fully informed judgments about himself.16 What is troubling Taylor here is a suspicion that the true status of the subject is a mere empty, logical construct ‘utterly without identity,’ along the lines of a Kantian transcendental subject.
Accordingly, Taylor provides strong measures to combat such disintegrating forces. Just two sentences later after his ‘no metalanguage’ statement, he presents his solution to this dilemma, which he characterizes in the following language: one must carry on radical re-evaluation with a ‘stance of attention... to what these formulae are meant to articulate and with a readiness to receive any gestalt shift in our view of the situation.’ He continues in this vein for some time, noting ‘this stance of openness’ is a strategy that has many inherent difficulties and obstacles, and must be subject to disciplined practice. (Taylor 1976: 298) After our discussion above of how the masculine formulae of sexuation ‘domesticate’ the feminine formulae, we can see the movement Taylor accomplishes here in this passage. To bring this out, our critique must be formulated to expose the hidden subjective position underlying this ‘stance of attention.’ That is, from where does Taylor believe it is possible to re-evaluate with an eye toward ‘openness?’ The answer is precisely from that impossible place of ‘no formulation’ that must itself be considered unrevisable in order to function as a privileged place from which he could judge his evaluations as (ultimately failed) articulations of his deep self. This is a masculine gesture par excellence: what is forgotten is that this openness is toward an Otherness that is experienced as such only within its own horizon and can never encompass that horizon. On the one hand, there is a theoretical nod to the fact of the impossible occupation of a meta-position, an explicit recognition that there is an inherent imbalance at the heart of language itself, but, one the other hand, this is done from a safe masculine distance that precisely forgets to include its own position of articulation. If we re-phrase things in other (Taylor’s) words, while he would acknowledge that ‘there is no part of the Self which is not already articulated’, what he accomplishes – precisely by his occupation of that ‘no part’ that somehow escapes the castrating effects of signifiers – is the illusion of being in that very exceptional position of a god’s eye view which he denied was possible two sentences previously, from where he is now able to cast ‘neutral’ judgments on the self (which is now totalized into the universalized notion of a ‘strong evaluator’). He conveniently overlooks the fact that his own activity of articulation is precisely that which caused the imbalance in the first place. But this is not without its rewards: by occupying such an illusory position, the previously experienced anxiety is thereby mitigated, although it continues to haunt the subject and provides a strong impulse toward ever ‘deeper’ self-reflective activity, an activity which, as such, covers over the logical, a priori void that causes this anxiety.
Is not the image Taylor leaves us with that of an intellectually honest subject who heroically engages in an eternal, existential project of asymptotically approaching the deep self, a project that will, of course, always lead to a failure, but a failure which provides the very impulse to try yet again? And is it not this self-articulating activity the very activity itself which generates the illusion of the deep self in the first place? Against Taylor’s conclusion that ‘strong self-resolution’ is possible because ‘radical evaluation’ questions the ‘the very nature’ of subjectivity (Taylor 1976: 299), we argue that it is not only from this activity of self-articulation that this ‘nature’ is first constituted and supported, it can also equally be seen to provide the support for the Being of an agent engaged in such a project of articulating the truth surrounding this nature. Concerned as he is in providing a coherent model of ‘radical self-evaluation’ to counter the ready-made utilitarian set of ‘fixed yardsticks’ with which, he tells us, modernity tempts us to conveniently put to use (Taylor 1976: 298), Taylor misses the tautological gesture surrounding the constitution of subjectivity, a gesture which has everything to do with ethicality, as he rightly suspects throughout his work.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
