On the Theoretical Practice of <i>Politics of Piety</i>

POLITICS OF PIETY: THE ISLAMIC REVIVAL AND THE FEMINIST SUBJECT. By Saba Mahmood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. This commentary looks to determine the theoretical practice of Politics of Piety as it is outlined in the book’s initial chapter, “The Subject of Freedom.” The chapter opens by initiating a symptomatic reading of what we might call a regional theory, “liberal feminist thought” or “feminist theory,” as it belongs to a general theoretical apparatus (“liberal thinking”) and as it encounters an obstacle in “historical and cultural specificity” (1). The concreteness of this specificity is given both conceptually, in the knot of “women” and “religion,” and is brought into paroxysmic relief by the Islamic practices of women in the (post)colony. The opening of the chapter thus stages the conjuncture of two concomitant formations—the development of feminist theory and the emergence of the Islamic Revival—as a problem of this specificity, which, as the text shows, constitutes an impasse for the Euro-Atlantic activist and theorist alike. Thesis: Women are seen to assert their presence in previously male-defined spheres. Antithesis: The very idioms that they use to enter these arenas are grounded in discourses that have historically secured their subordination to male authority. The obstacle presents in this thinking as a contradiction in the proper sense: that one must necessarily be true, and that the truth of one affirms the falsity of the other. Chapter 1 adumbrates this either/or, which is determinative of this entire apparatus of thinking, in its most economical form: “resistance/subordination.” Thesis: Causality in accordance with laws of nature is not the only causality from which the appearances of the world can one and all be derived. To explain these appearances it is necessary to assume that there is also another causality, that of freedom. Antithesis: There is no freedom; everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature.1 The correspondence between the two versions of the thesis is thus as follows: there is not only the “natural” order of causality (“male-defined spheres” of social life) but there must be a supplementary causality of spontaneity (“women assert themselves …”). As for the antitheses, they correspond in this manner: there is no freedom (what appears as women asserting themselves is, in fact, the entrenchment of their subordination), and everything takes place according to natural laws (the social, here patriarchal, order recuperates itself and remains well-ordered). The initial thesis, in the name of a humanism, works toward the analytic excavation of women’s “own interests and agendas” as concrete evidence of “human agency”— the deduction of freedom as the “something intrinsic” that supplements the “natural” causality of the social order. It thus compels a search for what the chapter describes as “moments of resistance” (8). This is exemplified, the text avers, by Subaltern Studies in general, and evinced in the text particularly by Janice Boddy’s ethnographic work on zar cults. Boddy situates zar as a “counter-hegemonic” space in which feminine resistance to domination is realized: even “when an explicit feminist agency is difficult to locate” (8), that agency is analytically presupposed as a “substrate” whose absence is explained by its repression. Freedom, the individual and intrinsic drive for autonomy, can thus be deduced not only from moments of resistance but from an absence of constraint. These two aspects of freedom’s analytic deduction—“moment” and “restraint qua absence”—we recognize as the two forms of liberty treated by Isaiah Berlin and cited in Mahmood’s text. Positive freedom we can associate with the excavation of “moments of resistance” that signify the existence of an autonomous and self-interested will, while negative freedom speaks to, in the absence of obstacles, “self-guided choice and action” (11) that freely flow along their natural course. These two forms, moreover, ramify into two types of scholarship. The historiography of “her story” locates instances of expressed resistance (positive freedom), while the studies of “space in women’s lives independent of men’s influence” (12) bear the possibilities of this space afforded by a lack of external force (negative freedom). The fact that freedom, what Mahmood lucidly calls “the concept of individual autonomy” (11, my emphasis), is derived doubly is a consequence of the notion of the transcendental will. Because the desire for freedom is supposed to be intrinsic, nothing can constrain its actualization except something external. This is clearest where Mahmood cites John Christman’s example of the slave choosing to remain a slave “even when external obstacles and constraints are removed” (11); this “procedural principle” squares the circle insofar as this philosophical thought-experiment derives the desire to be a slave from a transcendental will. We hasten to recall the conclusion of Kant’s thesis: to explain these appearances, it is necessary to assume that there is also another causality, that of freedom. So much for the thesis (that there is a supplementary causality to natural causality, that there is a spontaneous individual freedom supplementing the causality of the dominant social order). What of the antithesis? Importantly (and this is Kant’s entire argument), the antithesis emerges within reason’s deduction of transcendental freedom itself; as Mahmood’s text tracks, this is where the social order (the “everything” in Kant’s formulation) appears as such. Such is the case in Lila Abu-Lughod’s reflections on Bedouin women’s lives, the thought of which, in a moment of self-criticism, immanentizes resistance to “fields of power” as a means of grappling with her own doubt over the existence of a (transcendental) “consciousness” of freedom: “misattributing to them forms of consciousness or politics that are not part of their experience” (Abu-Lughod 1990, 47 cited in Mahmood 8, my emphasis). Troubled by the stipulation of a transcendental freedom (that to which Kant’s thesis pertains), this thinking thus shifts toward its antithesis: transcendental freedom, it turns out, not only “stands opposed to the law of causality” but “the kind of connection which it assumes as holding between the successive states of the active causes renders all unity of experience impossible” (Kant 2007, B474, my emphasis). Freedom is an “empty-thought entity” (ibid). Abu-Lughod’s analytic maneuver, to abandon the thought of a transcendental, spontaneous subject that precedes its social effectuation, anticipates the theoretical gesture of “poststructuralist feminist theory” to which the chapter later turns, and which is treated mainly through the work of Judith Butler. The poststructuralist solution, Mahmood demonstrates, is to argue that “the set of capacities inhering in a subject—that is, the abilities that define her modes of agency—are not the residue of an undominated self that existed prior to the operations of power but are themselves the products of those operations” (17). “Capacity for action” and “subordination” are hence to be thought together: “agency resides, therefore, within this productive reiterability” (20). The poststructuralist critique thus offers a solution to the antinomy that emerges because of the contradiction impelled by the concept of individual autonomy or the attempt to reasonably deduce the existence of transcendental freedom. One, either “resistance” or “subordination,” must be true and the other false—either freedom exists or it doesn’t, so says the liberal theorist. But the poststructuralist theorist, intuiting that this choice is itself false, rather picks up Kant’s solution to the antinomy—namely, that both thesis and antithesis may be true. But the mutual admittance of the two comes at a price. In Kant’s language, it is noumena that can be said to be attributed “freedom,” while phenomena (“experience”) are characterized by “natural causality.” Kant thus splits the predication of spontaneity and natural causality and proposes a weaker claim than one might suppose: he only stipulates that freedom is conceptually possible, not, as one commentator writes, “that is it ontologically possible … that it could exist” (Naticchia 1994, 394).2 Treating the same antinomy, Joan Copjec writes: “the surplus declarations of existence that caused the conflict on the female side [the mathematical antinomy] are silenced on the male side [the dynamical antinomy, the third antinomy] because it is precisely existence—or being—that is subtracted from the universe that forms there” (2015, 231). In this, one can understand the relationship of Politics of Piety to (as well as its demarcation from) poststructuralist thought in general and the theoretical work of Butler in particular. While Mahmood’s text lauds the poststructuralist departure from the (liberal) stipulation of a transcendental will and the development of a concept of the subject as an effect of discourse, it is what is missing from the deduction of freedom—the “subversion or resignification of social norms” (Mahmood 14)—where the text marks its point of departure. The “agency” of the poststructuralist subject, Mahmood writes, “is conceptualized on the binary model of subordination and subversion”; this conceptualization itself “elides dimensions of human action whose ethical and political status does not map onto the logic of repression and resistance” (14). Poststructuralism’s neo-Kantian gamble indeed safeguards the concept of freedom (it successfully demonstrates that social norms can be resignified), but this comes at the cost of eliding existence. The successful conceptual recuperation of freedom, then, “possibilities for redirecting and recoding” (6, my emphasis), bears what we might call, following Althusser, a “formalism of possibility”3—the production of representative maneuvers (i.e., pertaining to reason) within the delineation of the concept of a historically determined cultural frame in which “being as such escapes the formation of the concept of world” (Copjec 2015, 231). Stipulating that the subject is immanent to the effect of discourse accomplishes very little so long as one holds to a formalism of possibility—“models of performativity” that enable “possibilities of resistance.” And there is no way, as much as this thought may claim the contrary, to move definitively from the conceptual to the existential. It remains unable to think what we might call the being of the subject’s point of insertion in an apparatus, or the fact that, as Mahmood writes, “norms are not only consolidated and/or subverted … but performed, inhabited, and experienced in a variety of ways” (20). It is for this reason that Politics of Piety does not contest the poststructuralist solution to the antinomy, but neither does it then proceed to formalize the possibilities of agency for the lives of the women with whom Mahmood studied. Rather, Mahmood recurrently invokes specificity—“the specificity of a bodily practice” (26)—and its effect is a certain halting of the theoretical reach of language (the sublation of being to the concept); it points to the fact that, as Copjec writes, the subject is “more than language … a case for which no signifier can account” (209) because the subject inhabits the signifier “as a limit” (ibid). While this characterization of the subject, as marking the constitutive failure or incompleteness of language, is diagonal to Mahmood’s theorization, the theoretical tendency of the text, on the whole, eventuates in this very lesson. What the chapter refers to at times as the “density of ties” or the inhabitation of norms points to something in excess of the function of signification. For the Mosque Movement participants, their practical work in establishing a “coordination” “between inner states … and outer conduct” (31) never entirely resolves; the being of gesture “does not simply stand in a relationship of meaning to self and society” (27). In other words, there is something other than the indexical and conceptual function of “the body”—something lacking in the subject’s synonymization with language.4 This lack is not the “something” that nominated the intrinsic drive to realize freedom; it is not a “prediscursive” and transcendental subject that sits “above” or “prior” to signification. But then if this specificity of form, “the substance from which the world is acted upon” (27)—upon which the entire theoretical intervention of the text turns—neither precedes language but is also not equatable with the realization of language (the distinction between Mahmood’s argument and the poststructuralist theory), what else can it demarcate but that which is subtracted from the conceptual deduction of freedom? This—an ultimately materialist position within this philosophical field—determines the theoretical practice of the text as a whole. Mahmood often insists that her readers attend to the fact that she is not developing a “theory of agency” or a “blueprint for the study of ethics” (30). “Ethics,” Mahmood writes, is “always local and particular, pertaining to a specific set of procedures, techniques, and discourses” (28), “an analysis of the particular form the body takes” (27). It is, of course, easy enough for the insistence on those spheres called “the practical” and “the actual” to become once more watchwords of an idealism. Such is the case, the chapter shows, in Pierre Bourdieu’s theoreticism of practice: “practical mnemonics,” it turns out, are only significant insofar as they “embody and symbolize the doxa and ethos of the group” (26). The problem of the gap that straddles the subject (approximation)—between form (“the modalities through which”) and life (“the body”)—is effaced where “practice” speaks the accomplished realization of language tout court; the poststructuralist critique (that the body can resist signification qua resignification) shows only that other subjects (language-body signifiers) are possible. It does not show, as Mahmood endeavors to do, that “worlds” (language-effects, practices of “coordination” that specify the body), by necessity, exist. This is why the chapter asks, near its close: if one is “a feminist concerned with relations of gender inequality … how are we to think about the possibility of subverting and challenging those patriarchal norms that the mosque movement upholds?” (36, my emphasis). The conceptual problem of freedom bars a theoretical recognition of the fact that the question of how these existing relations should be “practically transformed” is both “impossible to answer” and “not ours to ask” (36). Being cannot be deduced from the concept, Mahmood insists, but this very fact is repressed in the deduction of reason; it moreover abandons the work of transformation and self-criticism in one’s own thinking, where one might “come to learn things that we did not already know before we undertook the engagement” (36–37). Contending with the necessity of existence, the specificity of forms of life, is a problem of politics. This specificity, to which we have now come full circle, is no longer a matter of deciding upon the subversive or subordinate signification of, say, “the veil” (deducing its bearing on the conceptual possibility of freedom) but of confronting what is subtracted from that very practice of deduction. The theoretical practice of Politics of Piety is thus borne out in its traversal of the symptom of “cultural specificity,” one that, we are obliged to recall, Mahmood identified with her own feelings of “repugnance” (38). The endeavor of the text is nothing less than thinking this instance of repression. these variations (of kinship structure) are merely the variations of a purely formal mode of combination—which is simply tautological and explains nothing. When you grant yourself a mode of combination that allows for an infinity of possible forms in its combinatory matrix, the relevant question is not whether the possibility of such-and-such a real phenomenon (such-and-such an observable kinship structure) is from the outset already included among the variations of the combinatory (for that is tautological, and consists in establishing that what is real was possible). The pertinent question is, rather, the following: why is it this possibility and not another which has come about, and is therefore real? (2003, 26)

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.