On Subjection

One night, I had two dreams. In the first, my mother is telling me that I'm not as exceptionally beautiful as someone else's daughter. In the second, which is a recurring dream, I'm in Hawaii, where I've apparently been before. On an earlier trip, with the parents of a friend of mine, we went to an exceptionally beautiful beach. The recurring dream is that I'm in Hawaii, I keep going to an all right looking beach, and toward the end of the trip I realize I haven't gone to the really beautiful one. It seems that it's a bit harder to get to, and something seems to keep me from ever getting there or even telling the others with me that I really want to go. On this evening of two dreams, I awaken feeling that the first dream somehow explains the recurring one. The repetition of “exceptionally beautiful” suggests to me that the thing that blocks my desire has something to do with my mother not finding me exceptionally beautiful, not finding me as worthy as the friend's daughter. My mother's comment in the dream is not unlike one made in real life, when I was about 10 or 12. I begin to wonder why she would have said something like that to me.

I want to use this dream sequence and the questions it poses to think about an alternative way of understanding the nature of what Althusser, Butler, and others speak of as subjection. The question I want to pose is the following: is it useful to assume, as so much poststructuralist theory does, that subjection is inextricably linked to subject formation? The notion that subjection occurs at the same moment as subject formation suggests that subjection is the universal price paid for being a subject. Some argue that subjection is the price we pay for accession to language; Silverman, for example, speaks of the move from being into meaning. Often this move is described in terms that suggest we all suffer some kind of fall from grace, some irretrievable loss that we vainly try to make good. In so trying, the theory goes, we become hurtf