Narrating Trauma: Judith Butler on Narrative Coherence and the Politics of Self-Narration

ABSTRACT

Narrative coherence is considered as paramount within various dominant discourses, and is seen as empowering traumatised individuals by giving them more control over their lives. However, when subjected to closer scrutiny, the possibility of narrative coherence in life writing becomes open to critique on multiple levels. The article turns to the work of Judith Butler to show how her account of vulnerable subjectivity and relationality problematises the possibility of the subject’s giving a coherent narrative account of itself. Butler’s ideas can be seen as incompatible with or unable to explain the need for narrative coherence expressed by various trauma survivors. Rather than undermine any notion of narrative coherence, this article argues that Butler’s account of self-narration challenges the over-emphasis placed on a conception of self-narration based on mastery, unity and coherence. The article turns to the narratives of sexual trauma by Alice Sebold and Susan Brison to show how narrative coherence functions in legal and political contexts of testifying as a possibly hegemonic norm that circumscribes how trauma is narrated by facilitating certain forms of self-narration while silencing other forms of narrating oneself. The article concludes by arguing that a reading of Butler’s work on self-narration in relation to insights derived from trauma theory on the difficulties of narrating life after trauma enables a critical ethico-political analysis of hegemonic norms and practices that are currently operating on the activity of traumatic life writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Critique
• Judith Butler
• narrative coherence
• relationality
• self-narration
• trauma

Acknowledgments

A shorter version of this article was presented at the Critical Theory in the Humanities: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler conference in Amsterdam in April 2017. I would like to thank Aaron Aquilina, Keith Pisani, David Webb and the issue editors for generous and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks also to Tara Roeder for encouraging remarks while finalising the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kurt Borg is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Staffordshire University, UK. His current research draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to analyse the ethics and politics of narrating trauma in institutional contexts. He graduated with a BA and MA from the University of Malta, the latter with a dissertation on the relation between Foucault’s work on power and ethics. He lectures at the University of Malta on Foucault, Butler, ethics, feminist theory, medical sociology, and narratives of illness, disability and trauma. He has co-conducted an interview with Judith Butler, which was published in the journal CounterText.

Notes

1. Dori Laub, a psychiatrist and child survivor of the Holocaust, observes how in the extensive studies which he conducted as co-founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, he came to realise that ‘survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their stories; they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive. There is, in each survivor, an imperative need to tell’ (1995, 63).

2. In philosophy, various works have considered the extent to which the self is constituted narratively, along with the implications of this (MacIntyre 1981; Ricoeur [1983] 1984; Schectman 1996; Benhabib 1999; Strawson 2004; Poltera 2010; Hutto 2011; Meyers 2014). In the field of the psychological sciences, the role of narratives in the formation of subjectivity, as well as the role of story-telling in therapy, have been broadly discussed (Schafer 1980; Spence 1982; Epston and White 1990; McLeod 1997; Schiff 2013). Research in the social sciences has shifted the attention to the social character of narratives, and how narratives are differentially treated in a society (Frank 1995; Plummer 1995; Raoul et al. 2007).

3. The use of notions such as ‘power relations,’ ‘norms’ and ‘resistance’ throughout this article is inspired by Foucault’s ‘method,’ which he outlines in the first volume of The History of Sexuality ([1976] 1978, 92–96):

It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization. … Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. … Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter. … Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations. … Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. … [T]here is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations.

4. See Butler (1997, 1–6, 24–28) for her discussion of Louis Althusser’s account of ‘interpellation’ and for her account of linguistic vulnerability.

5. Corporeal existence further marks vulnerability. The body is both the site of agency as well as that which exposes the individual to others and to potential injury. Bodily existence is a continual reminder of how vulnerable life is: ‘Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident’ (Butler 2009, 25). The body is the site of illness, violence and debilitation. The body is also a social site – it marks the subject as ‘attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, [and] at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure’ (Butler 2004a, 20). Thus, although typically associated with one’s private realm, the body as a social phenomenon has a public dimension: ‘my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life’ (26).

6. For more on Butler’s meaning of ‘ethics’ and the ethical import of her thought, particularly since Giving an Account of Oneself, see Lloyd (2015), particularly the chapters by Moya Lloyd, Catherine Mills, Sara Rushing, and Birgit Schippers.

7. See Schiff (2013) for an extended discussion of the so-called ‘narrative turn’ that began in literary criticism and spread to other disciplines, including psychology in the 1980s. For a discussion of the pre-1980s interest in narrative in psychology, see Polkinghorne (1988, 101–124).

8. The idea of narrative coherence is often traced to Aristotle, who regarded good tragedy as characterised by a beginning, middle and end (Hyvärinen et al. 2010, 2). It is not the point to discuss Aristotle’s poetics here. What is open to critique, however, is the transposition of aesthetic categories that were intended for drama to the sphere of judging life narratives, especially traumatic self-narration. Theorists such as MacIntyre (1981) sustain Aristotle’s emphasis on the normative aspect of narrative coherence. In response to modern individualism and its resulting moral fragmentation, he suggests that regarding life as an evolving and coherent narrative will help in overcoming the modernist dilemma. His notion of narrative identity centres on unity and coherence, disavowing any trace of complexity, contradiction and undecidability which life entails (Hyvärinen et al. 2010, 4). My counter-position to views such as MacIntyre’s is that the exaggerated focus on narrative coherence itself and the lack of acknowledgement of the complexity of human experience and the corresponding self-narratives, including their resistance to coherence, fuels the emphasis on individualism that, in turn, further impoverishes moral language and restricts one’s ability to respond ethically. A more suitable conception of narrative identity, such as Butler’s, takes heed of narrative incoherence and its possible virtues in order to seriously consider the role that narrative interdependence and relationality has in one’s life.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ENDEAVOUR Scholarships Scheme (Group B) 2016 [grant number MEDE 544/2016/64].