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Critical Subjectivity: Towards a Gnomonic Model of Subject Constitution

Tom Boland Online Publication Date: 01 October 2007 To cite this Article: Boland, Tom (2007) 'Critical Subjectivity: Towards a Gnomonic Model of Subject Constitution', Culture, Theory and Critique, 48:2, 123 - 138 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/14735780701723058 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735780701723058

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Critical Subjectivity: Towards a Gnomonic Model of Subject Constitution

Tom Boland
tom_boland@yahoo.com TomBoland 0 200000October 48 Taylor and Francis 2007 & Francis Original Article and 1473-5784 (print)/1473-5776 Culture, Theory 2007Critique (online) 10.1080/14735780701723058 RCTC_A_272217.sgm

Abstract This article attempts to theorise critical subjectivity by combining the emergent sociology of critique with the reflexive historical sociology of subjectivity. In order to integrate insights into how subjectivity and critique are mutually constitutive a Gnomonic model is outlined. Key insights of Foucault, Butler and Nietzsche into critical subjectivity are the basis for the model. The Gnomonic model is a geometric diagram which expresses subjective transformation as a rupture within identity, wherein an aspect of experience is critiqued and excised. This prompts recurrent performances of critique which disavow the constitutive rupture within subjectivity, and thereby diffuse critical modes of thought and subject constitution.

Reflection and criticism are imbedded in myths that human beings cannot be entirely reflective and critical about. (Alexander 2003: 9) This article proposes a Gnomonic model in order to illustrate the constitution of critical subjectivity. Our concern is not theoretical paradigms of critique per se (Kemp 2003), but a theoreticisation of critique and subjectivity as mutually constitutive. Rather than assuming that subjects can deploy critique, reflexivity and their corollaries, our focus is on how subjects are (re)constituted through critique, in a manner that is far from voluntary. As such, it is not axiomatic here that critique should be privileged or validated by theory; critiques may be deployed in the service of any political interest, it is hubristic and naive to imagine that ones own position has a monopoly on critique and that the discourse of all others is uncritical. Critique can be circular, leading to an ironic deconstruction of deconstruction and historicization of historicism (Hansen 1997: 26). Critique begets critique the real challenge is to problematise our problems (Sommers 1996: 73).1 Critique as continuous unmasking has been identified with Modernity generally: To unmask, that was our sacred task, the task of us moderns (Latour 1993: 44) and with Enlightened thought, the ceaseless unmasking of others led the unmasker
Sommers (1996: 69) advocates deconstructing and historicising our conceptual frameworks, categories and vocabularies our thinking about our way of being.
Culture, Theory & Critique ISSN 1473-5784 Print/ISSN 1473-5776 online 2007 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14735780701723058
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124 Tom Boland into self-delusion (Koselleck 1988: 119) and this contradiction is by no means resolved in Romantic philosophies (Bowie 2003). Therefore, critique is a social phenomenon subject to investigation like any other, as demonstrated by the recent emergence of the sociology of critique (Latour 1993; Hansen 1997; Boltanski and Thvenont 1999; Lynch 2000; Harpham 2004; Boltanski and Chiapello 2005; Boland 2007). The perspective on subjectivity followed here is that of reflexive historical sociology (Szakolczai 1998; 2000), which historicises the supposedly self-evident modern subjectivity. Only the subjective dimension of critique is at issue here: issues around critical theory, the efficacy and ontological status of political and social critique are deferred and bracketed for the present purpose. Our concern is the cultural history of critique rather than the intellectual history of critique (Kelley 2002), and makes no claims about competing conceptions of critique. Rather our concern is how critiques are generated at the level of subjectivity. In our Gnomonic model, the generation of critique is related to the generation of self and other. While a theoretical other (Hansen 1997) may lack empirical focus, content or specificity, the other may nevertheless be grounded in the selfexperience of the critic. Individuals articulate their criticism in a myriad of ways, but our concern is to model the foundation of their critical subjectivity, with Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Friedrich Nietzsche as our guides. The sociology of critique is not an internal academic affair, nor a matter of mere theoretical clarification, and neither is the sociology of critical subjectivity.2 Critical subjectivity is no narrow category when considered inversely: How many modern subjects avow themselves as the dupes of tradition, or the pawns of ideology or the unreflective subjects of conventionality? And could such avowal be anything but the incipience of a critical re-constitution of subjectivity? Indeed, modern subjects are generally constructed as asserting mastery and sovereignty over their own actions, intentions, beliefs and being (Sommers 1996; Meyer and Jepperson 2000). According to the Gnomonic model of modern subjectivity, the image of the modern subject is a continuous and always incomplete performance of autonomy and detachment from cultural predicates. For the time being, the efficacy, value and ontological status of these performances, and their consequences are passed over in order to concentrate on the enactment of critique at the level of the subject and the generation of personal identity through performance and recognition. By no means can these processes be described without using a concept, metaphor or trope of some kind: the Gnomonic model reflects Simmels (1971) analogy of sociology as the geometry of social forms. The reflexive conundrum of the critique of critique is an issue here, but for the while it is best to bracket such aporias and assess extant insights into critical subjectivity.3
2 Eric Voegelin identies critique with Gnosticism And if the truth represented by the theorist should be different from the truth represented by society, how can one be developed out of the other by something that looks as innocuous as a critical clarication? (1969: 53). 3 Boltanski and Thvenont suggest that sociologies of critique must give up (if only temporarily) the critical stance (1999: 364). Whether or not this is theoretically or methodologically tenable is unclear: our model suggests that this giving up is itself a self-constitutive critical practice.

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Critical Subjectivity 125

Theorising critical subjectivity

Sociology has long challenged the naturalness and self-evidence of the modern subject, and argued that its psychological inwardness, essential personality and such aspects are distinctly modern phenomena (Giddens 1991; Porter 1997). Several theorists, Bourkenau, Elias, Foucault, Mumford, Nietzsche, Voegelin and Weber, collectively regarded as reflexive historical sociologists (Szakolczai 1998; 2000) suggest historical transformations of the modern subject, and each has some validity. Each provides an empirical vision through which sociologists and others can envisage and imagine the modern subject, and thereby probe the multifarious performances of individuality that abound in modern life. One central claim of each theorist is with gross simplification that they have identified the, or at least, a crucial moment in the emergence of the modern subject, and that our perspective is insufficient unless we attend to this historically significant formation. Interestingly, the theoreticisations by which the modern subject is characterised are often remarkably similar, even where theorists concentrate on different historical epochs, say for example, Elias (1994) homo clausus, and Foucaults (1977) disciplined subject (Smith 1999). Rather than enter into the historical debate, this article draws the insights of these thinkers into modern subjectivity together to inform the sociology of critical subjectivity. A moot point in accounts of critique is the difficulty of distinguishing between critique as a reflexive examination of society, culture and experience, and other, supposedly non-reflexive types of action. To dub any aspect of social action non-reflexive has been problematic in sociology since its foundation (Szakolczai 1998), and the privileging of academic reflexivity over lay reflexivity has been increasingly challenged (Lynch 2000): The main problem of critical sociology is its inability to understand the critical operations taken by actors (Boltanski and Thvenont 1999: 364). It has been widely argued that critique is not a constant and diffuse aspect of everyday life, but is performatively enacted only under particular circumstances (Turner 1985; Butler 1999; Alexander 2004). The impetus for critique and therefore the impetus for the formation of a critical subject is a key point. Critique and crisis are etymologically linked, referring to a moment of judgement or decision (Koselleck 1988). Therefore, critique becomes necessary and possible largely in a breach of normal social order, a rupture in the fabric of everyday social life albeit that modernity is a time of constant ruptures and suspensions of everyday life (Giddens 1991; Latour 1993; Szakolczai 2000). Modernity confronts its subjects as an event: a widespread critical moment which traumatically inaugurates the present and breaks with the past, and demands an equally traumatic inauguration of identity (Latour 1993; Sewell 1996; White 1999; Szakolczai 2000). Boltanski and Thvenont (1999) use this dual meaning in their concept of critical moments, which refers both to an unusual temporal moment of crisis and the critical activity of those who experience this unusual moment. Implicitly, the critical moment is transient, and will pass, by the re-establishment of order. Under these conditions, persons involved are subjected to an imperative of justification (Boltanski and Thvenont 1999: 360), but also become endowed with a critical capacity to assess the validity of others justifications and critiques. Such critical
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126 Tom Boland moments often result in the incorporation of critiques into everyday life, such as the incorporation of aesthetic critiques into the work structures of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 25). Interestingly, crisis is an experience, a moment wherein identities are formed and that formation hinges on the performance of critique (Turner 1985; Szakolczai 2004). Critical performances and critical subjectivity go hand in hand: critical capacity may be heightened at critical moments, but as critique constitutes subjectivity, this capacity is performed as part of subjective identity. This focus on the critical moment situates the emergence of critical subjectivity in ruptures, breaches and disjunctures in the texture of everyday life. However, the schema of a relatively situated and localised breach is less appropriate to modernity (Alexander 2004), as critical moments of one sort or another overlap and involve particular persons in various ways, often in a diffuse and mediated fashion. While it may be possible to allow that all modern subjects are continuously part of critical moments, the interminability of the critical moment makes crisis normal, a critical tedium. This throws focus back on the subject, and how critique might form a subject if crisis never abates. May (2000)4 recognises the importance of disruptions to order, but enlarges the incitements towards critique to include modes of reflexivity: The catalysts for this process lie not only in the encountering of conditions that appear intransigent to change, but also with ways of life that, in journeys from the self to the other and back to the self, lead to reflections upon the taken-for-granted constitution of social life (158). As such, even amidst the interminable crises of modernity, subjects may attain critical identities reflexively: and our gnomonic model illustrates the forms of self-reflection that are catalysts for critique. It may be possible, following the methods of reflexive historical sociologists (Szakolczai 2000), to investigate historical events which may have given critical forms of self-reflection their decisive stamp (Weber 1991; Elias 1994; Sewell 1996), although this is outside our current focus. What is clear is that both events and the spread of certain modes of reflexivity prompt critique: critique, like speech about sexuality and the self, is incited (Foucault 1976). Critique for May (2000) comprises both social belonging and the possibility of reflexivity upon ones position. This correlates with Bruno Latours (1993) conception of the modern constitution, wherein society (and similarly nature) is viewed at one and the same time as an intransigent force with eternal laws and mechanisms of its own, and as a product of conscious human making. Therefore, the catalyst for critique is any social event or subjective reflection and the two are interconnected which brings about the application of Latours modern constitution. The modern constitution enacts a rupture, between past and present, society and self: Why do we get so much pleasure out of being different not only from others but from our own past? (Latour 1993: 114). Such differences are performed by critique, and are pleasurable in that they constitute a meaningful identity. However, these putative ruptures must be treated with caution: even the most radical
4

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Mays title A Future for Critique? is not addressed directly but is left hanging: the conclusion separates critique from emancipation in the subject (2000: 170).

Critical Subjectivity 127 ruptures tend to guarantee an ironic continuity, an indelible trace made by the very disavowal of continuity (Butler 1997a).5 Critique and subjectivity are both impossible to define without reference to something else, something criticised, something to which one is subjected (Butler 2004). For Foucault, Butler and Nietzsche, this something is the prior range of judgements, ontologies and truths.

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Foucault, Butler and Nietzsche

Foucaults earlier work on subjectivity (1967, 1976, 1977) may be read as the near-eclipse of the self amidst disciplinary matrices, but the focus is always on the production of subjectivity as the effect, and limit of power (Szakolczai 2000). The later work on practices of the self (Foucault 1988), has been taken up as a means of developing critical subjectivity: Practices of the self must not only bring about change, but in doing so must call into question the necessity of current modes of thought and action (Taylor 2003: 264). Of Foucaults many theoreticisations of critique, I will focus here on The Masked Philosopher, a radio interview in which he did not reveal his name. This text thereby exemplifies the enactment of identity, because in the absence of social context, the identity of the speaker is defined entirely by the text (Barker 1993). The critic is defined by their critique. In the interview Foucault affirms the movement by which, not without uncertainty, dreams and illusions, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and seeks other rules that is philosophy (1997: 327). However, on the other hand Foucault affirms a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to lifeIt would multiply not judgements but signs of existence (1997: 323). As such, Foucaults ideal critique is therefore far from unmasking of tradition but is an attention to other possibilities of affirmation. This has a correlate in subjective formation: In Christianity asceticism always refers to a certain renunciation of the self and of reality, because most of the time your self is a part of that reality you have to renounce in order to get access to another level of reality (Foucault 1988: 35). Paradoxically, passing a judgement on part of the self seems a prerequisite to attaining subjectivity, and this is hardly exclusive to early Christianity, but is replicated in discourses of sexuality (Foucault 1976), and in disciplinary institutions (Foucault 1977). Against the widespread urge to judgement, Foucault distinguishes those who, for once in their lives have found a new tone, a new way of looking, a new way of doing, those people I believe, will never feel the need to lament that the world is error, that history is filled with people of no consequence, and that it is time for others to keep quiet so the sound of their disapproval may be heard (1977: 32728). Ideally, philosophy, as outlined by Foucault would not be nihilist (Nietzsche 1994 [1887]), Gnostic (Voegelin 1969), or world-rejecting (Weber 1991). However, how can a new tone, a new

5 For Butler, disavowal constitutes subjectivity by a rupture with power; a radical refusal to identify suggests that on some level an identication has already taken place, an identication has been made and disavowed (1997a: 149).

128 Tom Boland way of looking, a new way of doing be developed, except through subjective practices and an interrogation of the existing matrices of power/knowledge? While new things and philosophies are not created entirely by lamenting the world, history, people and so forth, part of philosophy is a detachment from what is accepted as true. Critique then, is a subjective process involving a transition from subjection to what is accepted as true to the generation of ones own rule. To have ones own rule is to be autonomous, a key characteristic of the modern subject. Butlers (1997a) critique of subject formation focuses on a paradox: how can the self pre-exist itself in order to pass judgement on itself? Butler points to how subjectivity is performatively inaugurated by a trope, a turn which constitutes the self by turning it against itself: As a result the unhappy consciousness berates itself constantly, setting up one part of itself as a pure judge aloof from contradiction and disparaging its changeable part as inessential, though ineluctably tied to it (1997a: 46). Butler (2004) posits critique as a practice that cannot be voluntarily adopted but occurs only where a subject runs up against a crisis in epistemological status. She suggests that those subject positions that are made increasingly unliveable come to subvert reiterative performances and expose their contingency. Where this occurs critique exposes the epistemological horizon, but in so doing, risks subjectivity because subjectivity was a possibility only within that horizon. Thereafter, subjectivity is transformed, but dependent upon a fiction of self-inauguration: self-inauguration is a fiction because subjectivity like critique, is itself a performance (Boland 2007). One telling remark by Butler shows how judgement gives an impetus to critique: As a young person, I suffered for a long time, and I suspect many people have, from being told, explicitly or implicitly, that what I am is a copy, an imitation, a derivative example, a shadow of the real (1997b: 306). Butler eschews volunteristic language in accounting for how subjects deal with this suffering, preferring formulations such as reiteration of discourse to another purpose, or rethinking the possible as such or reversal of the direction of power (1997a). Nevertheless, there is a direct link to be made between subjectivity and critique; It isimpossible to perform a convincing parody of an intellectual position without having a prior affiliation with what one parodies, without having and wanting an intimacy with the position one takes in or on as the object of parody (1998: 36). As such, the subject comes to articulate parody a very close relation to critique by turning against what used to be their subject position. Critique is always relational, as is subjectivity No subject is its own point of departure and the fantasy that it is one can only disavow its constitutive relations by recreating them as the domain of a countervailing externality (Butler 1995: 42). Of course, Butlers judgement of modern subjectivity as a fantasy might also lead subjects into critique. Both Foucault and Butler distinguish between judgement and critique, positing judgement as the application of extant normative standards, and critique as the suspension of regimes of judgement (Butler 2004). As such, critique entails self-transformation, it suspends the epistemic field under which subjectivity was previously constituted: To be critical of an authority

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Critical Subjectivity 129 that poses as absolute requires a critical practice that has self-transformation at its core (Butler 2004: 311). Critique suspends the existing limits, thereby challenging existing justifications, or orders of worth (Boltanski and Thevenont 1999). This allows for the emergence of new practices and values and also demands a new fiction about the subject, as it is re-constituted by its own critique. While the catalyst for this change may be modes of reflection, for Butler, critique becomes possible and necessary when social life becomes unliveable, where identities are legislated out of existence (1997a; 2004). If one accepts this distinction between judgement and critique, it must be with the caveat that even affirmative critiques may cast negating judgements over some aspects of social life. While any performance attempts to make meaning by re-fusing horizons, a critical performance, by suspending existing judgements, is inherently an effort to de-fuse social meanings (Alexander 2004). Nietzsches The Gay Science (2001 [1882]) envisions critique through a metaphor: In favour of criticism Something you formerly loved as a truth or a probability now strikes you as an error; you cast it off and believe your reason has made a victory. But maybe that error was as necessary for you then, when you were still another person you are always another person as are all your present truths like a skin that concealed and covered many things you werent allowed to see yet. (Nietzsche 2001: 174) This vivid metaphor portrays criticism as the judgement of a skin, or an identity, as something based on errors and the shedding of that skin as the overcoming of that one-time identity. Nietzsche affirms criticism in this sense as the will to power as it is the expression of living active forces within us shedding skin (175). However, the metaphor also undermines transcendent truth and stable subjectivity, as any truth established by criticism becomes merely another skin which may in time be shed. Nietzsche favours criticism only as an expression of the will to power, which should eventually show the will to truth as a source of eternal recurrence, which generates a succession of shed skins, numerous, but undifferentiated. Moreover, his metaphor of critique as a self-constituting practice reflects both the closed self and fragmented self, that is, respectively, the living active forces and the shed skin. There is no gradual progress towards the realisation of the authentic self here, but an image of criticism as a constitutive practice of subjectivity. Nietzsche presents the possibility of continuous shedding of skin, which suggests that the foundation of subjectivity through critique entails interminable revision, re-iterations, re-constitutions of a critical subject position. As such his metaphor resonates with Foucault and Butler: The Foucauldian subject is never fully constituted in subjectionit is repeatedly constituted in subjection, and it is in the possibility of a repetition that repeats against its origin that subjection might be understood to draw its inadvertently enabling power (Butler 1997a: 94). Critique suspends the existing matrices of power/knowledge, but in constituting subjectivity

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130 Tom Boland takes on and re-deploys, power/knowledge, perhaps differently, but so that critical subjects discipline themselves. In terms of Nietzsches central concern with Nihilism, the shedding of skin could be affirmed by an ubermensch, but the Nihilist can only view their former self, or one-time-truths with resentment or pity. If critique entails the resentment of old errors, then it would be termed Nihilism by Nietzsche a very severe judgement indeed. Is it possible to perform a critique without resenting existing judgements? What status can critique accord to that time when you were still another person?

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The Gnomonic model

Figure 1 comprises a parallelogram defg and a Gnomon abcgfe, that is, a shape which adds in size to the smaller parallelogram without altering its proportions. Angle efg is equal to angle abc. The gnomon on its own sketches the shape of the parallelogram, both along its outer corner, abc, and its inner corner efg. The proportion in size between the figures is unimportant, as the equiangular relationship may be maintained in any proportion. Before reading into the figure, it may be said that the gnomon always points towards the constitutive shape of the parallelogram. The Gnomon is a shape that displays its own constitution through the absence of a constitutive shape. That is, if the lines dg and de are removed, leaving only the Gnomon, the point d is still implied, as is the parallelogram defg. Conceptually, the diagram represents by its large parallelogram abcd the entirety of an individuals experience and by the smaller parallelogram that aspect of self-experience already singled out and eliminated by critique thereby constituting the Gnomonic subject. The line efg is a rupture within the self. The remaining figure, the Gnomon [abcgfe], represents subjectivity wherein self-experience is considered as constituting identity, perhaps conceived as personality or essence.
Figure 1. Gnomon, abcgfe; Parallelogram, defg.

Figure 1. Gnomon, abcgfe; Parallelogram, defg.

Critical Subjectivity 131 Geometric Shape Parallelogram abcd Parallelogram defg Line efg Gnomon abcgfe Subjective Dimension entire self-experience excised aspect(s) rupture within the self subjectivity after excision/rupture in experience

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The rupture between the gnomon and the excised aspect may be constantly revised under the impetus of critical moments, or from the catalyst of critical self-reflections. While the model is geometrically static, it by no means represents a stable state of affairs. The diagram is set up in such a way so as to model that aspect which is eliminated as present by its absence, that is, the rupture retains implicitly that which is excised. The subject is forced to constantly revise and police this rupture within themselves, by a species of critical discipline. Although the diagram indicates a sharp rupture, the subject may understand their identity in a more graduated fashion, with the line of elimination demarking strata of more or less meaningful dimensions of personal identity. The Gnomonic model illustrates the constitution of modern critical subjectivity, wherein some self-experiences are excluded from an individuals ideal self-image: these aspects are excised as though they could have nothing to do with the individual, yet personal identity is constituted by their absence. This excised aspect cannot be discarded and forgotten, but maintains the subject in critical tension and contra-distinction to aspects of their own selfexperience. It is crucial to this model that the parallelogram rather than the Gnomon is excised, as otherwise, the Gnomon would be a shape as easily forgotten and ignored as a shed skin. Of course, there is no real relation between a parallelogram and any individuals self-understanding. However, the metaphor of the constitutive absence of the parallelogram brings into relief how subjectivity is constituted by the critical elimination and excision of some aspect: the shape and tension explicated herein is a model of subjectivity which interrogates any modern self-conception.

Characterising critical subjectivity

The Gnomonic model will be elaborated herein to illustrate how the subject comes to excise part of their self-experience, how that constitutive absence sets up a continuous tension with the closed self, how this identity is performed through articulations of critique and always incompletely recognised, and how critique diffuses the critical modes of reflection, the catalysts for more critical subjectivities. When self-experience is problematised by critical moments or the catalysts of critical reflections, critique becomes imperative. Just as the unexpected real world failures of modernity can be attributed to negative forces within (Voegelin 1969; Furet 1981; Koselleck 1988; Eisenstadt 1999), the subject itself can become suspect in times of crisis. If existing judgements and justifications are in question, then the identity of the subject is destabilised. Any self-image that could be drawn together from experience and collective identity which was meaningful under the previous order can be suspect, anything can be demarked critically as being merely a copy or an imitation. Critique tends to disfigure anything to which it is applied, recasting tradition as ingrained habituation, or common knowledge as the taken for

132 Tom Boland granted, or belief as ideology.6 Critique is a trope, a metaphor that recasts experience according to judgements made in times of crisis. The I that writes deletes from its own text the body of the unacceptable (Barker 1993: 54). Yet critique may also affirm and enacts a meaningful subjective identity. However, such judgements tend especially in times of crisis to enact a dualistic or binary opposition, a new sacred and profane (Alexander 2003; Szakolczai 2004). Generally, there is at least one aspect of individual self-experience that stands out, whose elimination can bring the crisis to a close. It is worth noting that the first moment any part of experience can be conceived in this isolated and objectified way as an aspect is probably close to the moment that it is eliminated. That is, there are no neutrally existing aspects of identity, rather they may only be recognised within specific modes of reflection, particularly critical ones. This aspect might be a memory or a personal characteristic the diversity of possible aspects cannot be enumerated here. One well-known example is the Romantic critique of enlightenment: in the 1790s, reason itself was often eliminated from subjective identity, transforming it in the process into excessive calculative, speculative, unnatural and arrogant rationality (Hansen 1997). It is in the process of being excised that parts of culture become re-imagined as countervailing externality. The basis upon which any such aspect is selected and eliminated is that it can be cast as evidencing the tie between the subject and the arena of the social world that is in crisis. Whatever its content, this aspect selected for elimination becomes dualistically imagined as the point of influx, conformity and ideology, and counterpoised against individual identity. Critique eliminates the aspect, by excising it from identity, by removing it from self-image, by parodying it, by formulating it in critical matrices of interpretation, by unmasking it as something external and thus nothing to do with the self. Critique is that which exposes a fundamental illegitimacy (Butler 2004: 312), but this exposure is a culturally encoded performative strategy for the constitution of subjectivity. Building up an identity based on such an excision may take time, and may require repeated ontological separations of the individual and their shedskin. Performing such an identity before others is also extremely complicated, and rather than proceeding by avowing the excision, the individual must criticise what they have repudiated as though they had always been essentially separate from it. What constitutes the self is passed off as the shedding of something essentially other than the self. Critical subjects evidence this traumatic inauguration both by their endless speech about the self, the ineffable depth of personality, and by silence about its constitution.7 Investing the smaller, excised parallelogram with specific content can be a long, fraught, complex process. This aspect must somewhat resemble the entire individual identity, as is hinted in our model by the similarity in shape.
Girards (1965) triangular model of desire demonstrates how desire transgures objects and makes them appear as the origins of desire; critique tends by contrast to disgure self-experience. 7 After Hayden Whites (1999) formulation of the modern event as a trauma that cannot be adequately spoken about or dened, engendering silence or interminable speech.
6

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Critical Subjectivity 133 A critical moment can only be abated by the excision of an image which closely resembles the individuals self-image. Clearly, subjectivity in crisis cannot be resolved by externalist critiques which decry beliefs which have always been alien to identity. Rather, identity must be purified by the sacrifice of some aspect which was once part of themselves.8 Although the excision line remaining will always mark a troubling constitutive absence, it also establishes the ideal of late modernity; the self-evident subject, the true, ineffable and authentic personality (Foucault 1977; Elias 1994; Szakolczai 1998). This subject position is the ideal of critique, underpinning the unfettered, indomitable will to truth of the self-cognitive, autonomous critical faculty. Once again in the long history of modern individualism, the subject is constituted by the articulation of a rupture. In a world regarded as extremely uncertain and fluctuating, the self is the only element worth the effort of identifying and developing, since it is the only thing that presents itself as even minimally enduring (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 359). Ironically, the self which the individual turns towards in the critical moment is not an enduring site, rather it is something (re)constituted by critique. Critical ruptures between, say, true and false, authentic and derivative, essential and contingent animate the individual thereafter. What content these ruptures have varies from case to case, but there are distinctive contours which recur because of the distinctive way in which identity is constituted by the excision of self-experience. This engenders modern subjectivity which patterns relationships to the world, society and others.9 Behind much identity work and self-discovery lies a permanently anxious and uncertain relationship of the individual to excised aspects: what remains unspeakably absent inhabits the psychic voice of one who remains (Butler 1997a: 196). Initially, the critical excision seems to be unshakeable, natural and self-evident. Yet, over time catalysts in the form of events and especially the critical articulations of others may assail the individual. The constitutive absence may return to haunt the individual, in the return of the repressed or perhaps by the continuous presence of absence. From the critical moment constituting the subject emerges a continuous incitement towards re-inscriptions and revisions of the excision line in the self. That is, the event within the individual becomes a practice of identity formation, a technique of self which joins and reconfigures the constellation of modern practices which go towards forming the self-evident modern individual. After a time, this technique of self becomes a prerequisite for individuals to gain full recognition as being a modern individual: critique becomes ubiquitous.

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This process bears a resemblance to Girards (1977) sacricial crisis. The sacricial crisis founds a religion and culture through the unavowable murder of an innocent, and the critical moment founds a subjective identity through the unavowable critical excision of an element of self-experience. 9 Such tendencies are described as narcissism and the tyranny of intimacy by Richard Sennett (1976) or as the blas attitude and neurasthenia by Simmel (1971). Both theorists attribute these tendencies to urban forms of life: despite a heightened prevalence within the city these tendencies can be found in other modern contexts wherever subjects are confronted with modernity as an event.

134 Tom Boland Although the modern subject experiences themselves as fundamentally autonomous (Elias 1994), identity must be performed (Turner 1985; Butler 1999; Alexander 2004). Performing critical identity in social context appears problematic, as any social context can be interpreted as being conventional, habituating or even suffocating; especially given the modern dichotomy of private and public whereby personality and sociabilitybecome mutually hostile forces (Sennett 1976: 196). Critical subjects must recast these social repertoires to perform their identities. If some attempt is made to put across the truth of this ineffable self, it can only be incomplete, as there is always something more (Taylor 1989), or something secret (Foucault 1976). Yet, this fundamental autonomy and ineffable subjectivity can be hinted at by critique, by taking a stance against some dimension of society as being illusory, inauthentic or uncritical. The self is articulated by critiquing society as inimical to subjectivity. While subjectivity is not easily put into discourse, language or art because it might be misrepresented and corrupted, the excised aspects are ideal matter for representation. They correspond to critical visions of the social as something threatening and overwhelming, against which the individual must be preserved. Experience must be linked to performance for there to be transformation (Turner 1985: 206), and therefore critical subjectivity is inextricable from social performances of criticism. Yet, this does not necessarily undermine the self-evident modern subject: self-representations may evoke how the individual has cleaved to the authentic, genuine and critical against the pretentious, disingenuous and orthodox. While performances are generally successful where they re-fuse horizons of meaning (Alexander 2004), a critical performance de-fuses the meanings of social life, or perhaps the meaning which critique performs is the meaninglessness of certain social meanings, where these social meanings are in crisis. Like all performances, critique needs recognition in order to be meaningful (Lovell 2003), albeit that no other critical subject is likely to accord the critic the high recognition they demand; each assumes they are primus inter pares.10 Until inter-subjective recognition is attained the subject cannot be at ease in their identity, and draws assiduously upon the cultural repertoire of modernity for articulating ruptures. Eventually recognition is attained by the effective communication of a critique, but oftentimes, the consequence of this is to draw those who recognise the subject into the critical moment. If a subject recognises the critical stance of another subject, they acquire a reflective trope with which their own cultural predicates and social relations can be criticised. Members of a holistic culture confronted by an individualistic culture find themselves under challenge and feel the need to defend themselves, justify themselves in the face of what seems to them like a critique and
10 Of academic critiques, Lynch argues: In brief, there is no particular advantage to being reexive or doing reexive analysis, unless something provocative, interesting or revealing comes from it. An author might try to achieve such outcomes, but as many of us know all too well, an authors personal conviction is not a criterion of success. [] Depending on the case, it may come across as insightful, witty, convincing, unconvincing, boring or silly (2000: 42). Of course, the same applies to this article.

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Critical Subjectivity 135 a challenge to their identity (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 21). So, if one subject becomes critical, they will not rest until they have their critique recognised by at least one other, and this subject then in turn cannot rest until they in turn have their critique recognised. This relationship strongly resembles Ren Girards triangular model of desire, with all subjects imitating each others critiques and the proliferation of desires for special subjective recognition. Indeed, Romantic revulsion, hatred of society, nostalgia for the desertusually conceals a morbid concern for the other (Girard 1965: 15). Girard (1965) describes desire as incapable of recognising a mediator, and correspondingly, the critical subject can scarcely recognise the excision that constitutes the self. Critique is contagious, spreading out constantly, although a subject cannot simply adopt anothers critique, instead they must remake critique in their own image. Critical modes of reflexivity stem from a subjective reconstitution which itself emerged from a critical moment. When critiques are articulated, they contain within themselves modes of reflexivity which make it possible for other subjects to transfer this critical indictment onto an aspect that is not or no longer part of the self. Critique diffuses swiftly, so that modern individuals are increasingly incited to constitute their own critical subjectivity: Slowly, deconstructivist critique has invaded the camps of even its most ardent opponents (Giesen 2004: 147). More and more subjects enter a critical moment where they reflect upon their own self-experience as problematic. Social relations are increasingly reflected upon with a critical gaze, misrecognised as countervailing externality to the self rather than the only source of meaning and identity.

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Conclusion
Investigating critique is a paradoxical business, as it is hard to sociologically problematise critique without critiquing it, that is, disfiguring it, without describing critique as though one had overcome it somehow, part of a wider theoretical and cultural problem; the present-day inability to conceive of the act of belief as real in itself (Sennett 1976: 150). Moreover, modern critique manages to misrecognise the belief of others as an unreal delusion and misrecognise its own beliefs as indisputable, that is, as things which are not beliefs at all (Latour 1993). At any rate, critique cannot be a way out of critique, a contagion of overcoming cannot be escaped by more thorough acts of overcoming. Of course, critique is hardly always wrong or misplaced, but our attempt here is not to overcome critique, but to understand it as a social phenomenon. If our reflections on critique here are critical, that does not make them inadmissible. Nietzsche could scarcely discuss Nihilism without practicing it: Even when he exults I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse the accusers (2001: 157), he has accused the accusers by nominating them as accusers, something he would prefer not to be. The link between critique and subjectivity is insidious; perhaps it returns especially when it is supposed to have been overcome. Nevertheless, our main attempt is to problematise critique, in the sense of posing the question of critique in a certain way (Foucault 1988; Szakolczai 2000). Foucaults argument (1970; 1976; 1977) is that disciplines of medicine,

136 Tom Boland psychology and law produce the disciplined and docile subject by defining them against the sick, insane and criminal. Our argument is that critical disciplines produce disciplined subjects by defining them against the unreflective subjects of ideology, orthodoxy, structure or whatever else.11 Critical subjects and their negative correlates are only ever a deployment of power even if no person ever claims uncritical identity. Our Gnomonic model illustrates both the disciplined subject contrasted against the margins the sick, the insane, the criminal, and the opposites of critical subjectivity; the automaton, the dupe, the pawn and the technique of self whereby this contrast is performed (Foucault 1988). Discipline and subject formation entails constant anxiety about the margins, and the constant re-iteration of techniques of self. The attempt here has been to foreground critique as part of subjectivity generally: critique even founds identities that academics may consider docile, inchoate and ideological. Our argument is that, critique is less inherently potent and destructive (Lynch 2000: 46) than it is productive and constitutive. It is probably a little premature to hope for the emergence of an acritical sociology, like Latours (1993) amodernism. Our present contribution points out that modern subjectivity is as critical as it is rationalised, individuated and disciplined, and calls for attention to the mutual constitution of critique and subjectivity hitherto neglected by sociological analysis.

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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Arpd Szakolczai and Kieran Keohane (UCC) and David Frisby (LSE) for their comments on an earlier version of this work.

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